Preventing IT burnout

I have a lot of friends who work in IT, and I've noticed that more and more of them are wanting to pull the plug and get away from working with computers. I can't blame them. It's a bit of a drab existence staring at the screen all day in a cell, I mean cubicle, and if I had to do that in a traditional eight-hour shift, I'd go nuts myself -- and I love computers! The good news is that those suffering from tech burnout have an out, without shunning the grid. Make tech work for you!

Strategy One: Become a moofer. Mobile technology has dramatically matured to where you really don't need an office anymore. Laptops working off Wi-Fi and 3GG Smartphones allow the would-be tech burnout to go out and get some *shudder to think* sunlight! And I mean real out-door computing, not some office-surrogate like Starbucks. When the weather gets warmer, I'll probably spend just as much time in the courtyard across the street as I do in my actual office. Wired Magazine this month published a map of free municipal wi-fi, not just in large cities, but in small towns across America you've probably never heard of. Check out the interactive online version, pick a city, move there, and moof! The sun burn will eventually go away as you adapt to your new environment.

Strategy Two: Launch a startup. Sure, it's sooo Y2K to launch an tech startup, but today's startups are made smarter because the technology is finally in place to, you know, actually make some money. Maybe you won't become the next dot com billionaire, but that's not really your goal, is it? You're just looking for supplemental income so you can maybe see some sunlight (see Strategy One). If that's your goal all you need is a couple of thousand dedicated users, and the passive income earned through syndicated ads will likely earn you a living. But how do you get those thousands of users you need and still not, like, work and stuff?

Here's my formula:

1) Imitate - Find something that works well on a macro-scale and adapt it to a micro-scale. If you find yourself drooling over the ungodly amount eBay takes in, brainstorm how you can duplicate that on a smaller scale. eBay is a worldwide marketplace for everything you can think of, but there's likely a market in your own little corner of the world for items too large to ship easily. A local site that auctions large items like antique beds and dressers, items best delivered locally, if marketed well locally, may just allow you to escape that 9-5 unhealthy relationship you have with your computer.

2) Innovate - Don't just rip off something someone else did. Find ways of adding your own contribution. Make it your own. If you're adapting a macro-scale model to a micro-scale model, like in the example above, there's likely to be hundreds of features the big guys left out because they just don't work on a macro-scale. eBay couldn't incorporate a local delivery service that picks up items at one location and delivers them to another location -- that's just not going to happen. It could happen for you if you partner with a local delivery company, and take a little off the top. Adding your own novel ideas to the mix will make your micro-site more attractive to users who need features that the macro-models simply can't provide.

3) Automate - One of my favorite lines from Fox's King of the Hill is in the episode where Kahn shows up at Strickland Propane and asks Hank, "Haven't they replaced you with a coin operated machine yet?" To prevent tech burnout, especially if you're running a tech biz, you want to be replaced by a machine. Put tech to work for you by automating everything you possibly can. That's what software is supposed to do. When the machine just won't do the job because it requires human intervention, still automate. Crowd-source it.

In short: The smarter you use tech, the less time you'll actually have to spend hands-on with tech.

Past midnight

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

I wanted to post some New Year's resolutions on New Year's Day. Since today is the 8th, obviously my first one is to avoid procrastination.

Actually many of my resolutions involve better managing my time and avoiding participating in what Kurt Vonnegut called "granfalloons" (communities whose shared identity or purpose is ultimately meaningless). That's easy. I'm already a few steps ahead. I am no longer a member of the "TV Watchers" community – the writer's strike killed half a season of Heroes and what else is there to watch? I am also no longer a member of the "Mumbling Political Debaters" community. That sounds counterintuitive in 2008 since it's an election year, but it's hard to be interested in politics when you really don't support any of the candidates. That saves me countless hours of blogging, mumbling in forums about politics, watching YouTube videos, etc. Heck, I've probably saved a collective month of my life right there.

Side note: The writer's strike isn't all bad. Apparently a lack of freshly written movie scripts pushed through the as-yet untitled X-Files sequel set to be released in July. Hollywood was digging around in their bin of already finished scripts to push into production, and up floated this one (you can't see me, but I'm foaming at the mouth). This will be one incredible year for movies.

Back to resolutions. I've actually got hundreds in my head that deal with a general betterment of the only contribution I have to the human race – myself – but there's two that supercede all the others and make for master resolutions. These place all the others in context. They are...

• Surround myself with positive people who feel that life is an adventure, full of mystery, and worth pursuing, people who are as motivated and engaging as I am (or as I would like to be).
• Continue to care about the people who occasionally float through my life that are either miserable by design or circumstance, but remain detached enough that their reality does not become my own (while realizing that this is harder than it sounds).

The parenthetical statements above are natural corollaries to their previous statements and though they sound like "outs", which aren't very resolute, they are simply acknowledgments that no one is perfect and everyone gets wrapped up in negativity at times.

And that's all there is to it. If anyone – hopefully myself – can maintain these master resolutions and whatever sub-resolutions stem from them, it's bound to be a great 2008. If I remember to, I'll come back in Jan. 2009 and tell you how I did.

Kerouac on the Steve Allen Show

One of my all-time favorite writers, Jack Kerouac, on the Steve Allen Show in 1959:



Kerouac was such a great influence to me because I read him during my own years of wandering aimlessly about, looking for some sort of revelation. My experience wasn't the excited utterance of On the Road — Kerouac criss-crossed the country as a vagabond several times before pounding the whole experience out on his typewriter in three weeks, single-spaced with no paragraphs, filling a one hundred twenty-foot scroll of papers taped together. No, it wasn't anything like that. But the spirit was there, and apparently it was always there I came to find out. It was there when I used to skip school at thirteen and hop the Metro bus from the suburbs of Colerain to downtown Cincinnati, hanging out in Over-the-Rhine and Washington Park, finding myself immersed in the hum and Tao of the ordinary people made extraordinary through powerful, real experiences. I didn't know it then, until I read Kerouac, but I was Beat a few generations late.

Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything;
somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

A more expanded example:

I'm thinking in code, apparently

I'm looking to buy a new car. What I'm looking for is another Sebring Convertible. Yes, I know Michael Scott drives one, but there's so few non-sporty convertibles to choose from. It's not like I worship Michael in a Schrutian way. I used to own a Sebring, but traded it in for something that I can haul stuff around in. I miss it.

Fall and Spring are really the best times to own a convertible. You really do become a part of the environment, and a long time ago I learned how dense glass really is. It sounds weird, I know, but everything is filtered through glass. Might as well be a brick wall. Maybe I'll come back to that thought another time.

So anyway, I was trying to explain to someone what color car I was looking for. I like the "classic" colors: black, silver, gold maybe, but the other day I saw a car that didn't totally suck and was trying to explain what color it was.

"I don't know the name of it. It's sort of blue, but sort of green," I said.

"No, not teal. Well, sort of teal, but darker and less green."

"Hell, I don't know."

"Maybe."

"I don't know."

"Well... it's sort of... #006699."

I had rattled off the HTML hex equivalent without even realizing how geeky it sounded or comprehending the lack of comprehension on the other end. I didn't realize until then how much coderspeak has seeped into my vocabulary.

Utopian work environment

Dude, I want to work in that office!

They filmed this video one night after work. The company is called Connected Ventures. They do work for Vimeo, CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, and Defunker.

In search of a spiritual consensus

I've been editing some fringe science articles on Wikipedia lately and it's been an interesting experience. Fringe sciences get a bit of a hard time on Wikipedia. I would say it's an appropriate hard time because as a mainstream encyclopedia, Wikipedia gives more weight to prevailing scientific models. Often fringe science hypotheses are contradictory to accepted models. The sliding scale goes something like this: mainstream science, fringe science, pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is a term introduced by philosopher Karl Popper to describe ideas that appear to be scientific, but actually aren't. They often use scientific jargon, but aren't backed by science. Think diet pill commercials.

In any case, this post isn't about science. It's about spirituality. I'm only mentioning the above because I want to steal the terms and replace the word science in them with spirituality. I want to explain the difference between mainstream spirituality, fringe spirituality, and pseudospirituality. Also, just as the prevailing scientific model is based on a consensus in the scientific community, I wanted to show that there may be a prevailing spiritual model, based on a consensus of the spiritual community.

Let's look at the terms I've introduced. To do that, we need a working definition of spirituality. Broadly speaking, spirituality is concerned with one's ultimate nature, typically marked by a connection to something greater than oneself. Note that this is very different from religiosity which also includes specific practices. Spirituality is a broader term and could include religion, but religion doesn't necessarily include spirituality. Religious fanatics showing complete disconnect (9/11) is not an example of spirituality.

In fact, it brings us to our first term: pseudospirituality. Pseudospirituality is something that poses as spirituality but actually isn't. It may use spiritual jargon, claim to have spiritual goals, or incorporate spiritual practices. It is not spirituality, however, if its defining characteristic is a profound disconnect. The example of religious fanatics above is an example of this, but also cults which disconnect from the world or serve some non-spiritual agenda, religious intolerance of other religions or lifestyles, religious notions of dominion over anything else, anything that severely disconnects for supposedly spiritual reasons. Some of these examples are actually properly labeled as religious, but they're not spiritual.

The next term is fringe spirituality. These are actual spiritual models, but I would characterize them as immature ones. By immature I don't mean "look I made a doody in my pants", or immature on a timeline (some of these philosophies go back thousands of years), but rather they don't comprehensively or universally answer the questions spirituality sets out to answer. These are reductive spiritual models that define spirituality in terms of a small set of universal truths and leave everything else up to subjective interpretation. Existentialism, for example, is a spiritual model that reduces everything to the universal truth that we do obviously exist, everything else is largely subjective. Atheism is a spiritual model as well. It starts with the assumption that there is no God, and often that there is no afterlife, and asks how do we remain connected to each other in spite of this? Each of these models are mature unto themselves, but immature in forming something resembling what they have over in science, a comprehensive model that answers most basic questions that someone might ask.

So is there a mainstream spirituality, something that isn't just subjective and has the consensus of the spiritual community as a whole? It's hard to say. The nature of spirituality is that it's hard to confirm. A spiritual idea is largely opinion and it's hard to pin down any real facts. Nevertheless, comparative religion researchers and philosophers have noticed some cross-culture overlaps between the various religious traditions. If, they argue, you jettison the specific mythologies (Moses parting the Red Sea, Buddha beneath the tree) and examine the actual spiritual values, an almost universal blueprint does seem to emerge. Aldous Huxley described this blueprint as The Perennial Philosophy (a term coined by Leibniz) because it shows up time and again regardless of the age or culture examined.

According to Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy is:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions (The Perennial Philosophy, p. vii).

Confirmation may be a stretch, but if various cultures arrived at the same spiritual conclusions, based on their own observations, independently of one another, that certainly sounds like consensus.

39 ways to live, and not merely exist

I stopped reading forwarded emails a long time ago, about the time when they started threatening me with the plague or death if I didn't participate in forwarding them along -- which was pretty early. Still, I have to repost this list as it's spot on with my own personal philosophies on how to get the most out of life, even if I forget from time to time. Plus it's originally from a blog I know and love, zen habits. The only thing I'd add to the list is that you should make it a habit of repeating the following mantra as your first reaction to anything: "I never did mind about the little things." It's sort of like saying don't sweat the small stuff, but this wording comes from hottie Bridget Fonda in Point of No Return, which makes the idea a little sexier. That statement should be the first thought. The second thought should be whether it's a "little thing". It usually is. If you can train yourself to react that way every time, everything else falls into place. If you can train yourself to react that way every time, please tell me how.

In any case, the following are 39 ways to a life less zombie-like:

1. Love. Perhaps the most important. Fall in love, if you aren't already. If you have, fall in love with your partner all over again. Abandon caution and let your heart be broken. Or love family members, friends, anyone -- it doesn't have to be romantic love. Love all of humanity, one person at a time.


2. Get outside. Don't let yourself be shut indoors. Go out when it's raining. Walk on the beach. Hike through the woods. Swim in a freezing lake. Bask in the sun. Play sports, or walk barefoot through grass. Pay close attention to nature.


3. Savor food. Don't just eat your food, but really enjoy it. Feel the texture, the bursts of flavors. Savor every bite. If you limit your intake of sweets, it will make the small treats you give yourself (berries or dark chocolate are my favorites) even more enjoyable. And when you do have them, really, really savor them. Slowly.


4. Create a morning ritual. Wake early and greet the day. Watch the sun rise. Out loud, tell yourself that you will not waste this day, which is a gift. You will be compassionate to your fellow human beings, and live every moment to its fullest. Stretch or meditate or exercise as part of your ritual. Enjoy some coffee.


5. Take chances. We often live our lives too cautiously, worried about what might go wrong. Be bold, risk it all. Quit your job and go to business for yourself (plan it out first!), or go up to that girl you've liked for a long time and ask her out. What do you have to lose?


6. Follow excitement. Try to find the things in life that excite you, and then go after them. Make life one exciting adventure after another (with perhaps some quiet times in between).


7. Find your passion. Similar to the above tip, this one asks you to find your calling. Make your living by doing the thing you love to do. First, think about what you really love to do. There may be many things. Find out how you can make a living doing it. It may be difficult, but you only live once.


8. Get out of your cubicle. Do you sit all day in front of computer, shuffling papers and taking phone calls and chatting on the Internet? Don't waste your days like this. Break free from the cubicle environment, and do your work on a laptop, in a coffee shop, or on a boat, or in a log cabin. This may require a change of jobs, or becoming a freelancer. It's worth it.


9. Turn off the TV. How many hours will we waste away in front of the boob tube? How many hours do we have to live? Do the math, then unplug the TV. Only plug it back in when you have a DVD of a movie you love. Otherwise, keep it off and find other stuff to do. Don't know what to do? Read further.


10. Pull away from Internet. You're reading something on the Internet right now. And, with the exception of this article, it is just more wasting away of your precious time. You cannot get these minutes back. Unplug the Internet, then get out of your office or house. Right now! And go and do something.


11. Travel. Sure, you want to travel some day. When you have vacation time, or when you're older. Well, what are you waiting for? Find a way to take a trip, if not this month, then sometime soon. You may need to sell your car or stop your cable bill and stop eating out to do it, but make it happen. You are too young to not see the world. If need be, find a way to make a living by freelancing, then work while you travel. Only work an hour or two a day. Don't check email but once a week. Then use the rest of the time to see the world.


12. Rediscover what's important. Take an hour and make a list of everything that's important to you. Add to it everything that you want to do in life. Now cut that list down to 4-5 things. Just the most important things in your life. This is your core list. This is what matters. Focus your life on these things. Make time for them.


13. Eliminate everything else. What's going on in your life that's not on that short list? All that stuff is wasting your time, pulling your attention from what's important. As much as possible, simplify your life by eliminating the stuff that's not on your short list, or minimizing it.


14. Exercise. Get off the couch and go for a walk. Eventually try running. Or do some push ups and crunches. Or swim or bike or row. Or go for a hike. Whatever you do, get active, and you'll love it. And life will be more alive.


15. Be positive. Learn to recognize the negative thoughts you have. These are the self-doubts, the criticisms of others, the complaints, the reasons you can't do something. Then stop yourself when you have these thoughts, and replace them with positive thoughts. Solutions. You can do this!


16. Open your heart. Is your heart a closed bundle of scar tissue? Learn to open it, have it ready to receive love, to give love unconditionally. If you have a problem with this, talk to someone about it. And practice makes perfect.


17. Kiss in the rain. Seize the moment and be romantic. Raining outside? Grab your lover and give her a passionate kiss. Driving home? Stop the car and pick some wildflowers. Send her a love note. Dress sexy for him.


18. Face your fears. What are you most afraid of? What is holding you back? Whatever it is, recognize it, and face it. Do what you are most afraid of. Afraid of heights? Go to the tallest building, and look down over the edge. Only by facing our fears can we be free of them.


19. When you suffer, suffer. Life isn't all about fun and games. Suffering is an inevitable part of life. We lose our jobs. We lose our lovers. We lose our pets. We get physically injured or sick. A loved one becomes sick. A parent dies. Learn to feel the pain intensely, and really grieve. This is a part of life -- really feel the pain. And when you're done, move on, and find joy.


20. Slow down. Life moves along at such a rapid pace these days. It's not healthy, and it's not conducive to living. Practice doing everything slowly -- everything, from eating to walking to driving to working to reading. Enjoy what you do. Learn to move at a snail's pace.


21. Touch humanity. Get out of your house and manicured neighborhoods, and find those who live in worse conditions. Meet them, talk to them, understand them. Live among them. Be one of them. Give up your materialistic lifestyle.


22. Volunteer. Help at homeless soup kitchens. Learn compassion, and learn to help ease the suffering of others. Help the sick, those with disabilities, those who are dying.


23. Play with children. Children, more than anyone else, know how to live. They experience everything in the moment, fully. When they get hurt, they really cry. When they play, they really have fun. Learn from them, instead of thinking you know so much more than them. Play with them, and learn to be joyful like them.


24. Talk to old people. There is no one wiser, more experienced, more learned, than those who have lived through life. They can tell you amazing stories. Give you advice on making a marriage last or staying out of debt. Tell you about their regrets, so you can learn from them and avoid the same mistakes. They are the wisdom of our society -- take advantage of their existence while they're still around.


25. Learn new skills. Constantly improve yourself instead of standing still -- not because you're so imperfect now, but because it is gratifying and satisfying. You should accept yourself as you are, and learn to love who you are, but still try to improve -- if only because the process of improvement is life itself.


26. Find spirituality. For some, this means finding God or Jesus or Allah or Buddha. For others, this means becoming in tune with the spirits of our ancestors, or with nature. For still others, this just means an inner energy. Whatever spirituality means for you, rediscover it, and its power.


27. Take mini-retirements. Don't leave the joy of retirement until you are too old to enjoy it. Do it now, while you're young. It makes working that much more worth it. Find ways to take a year off every few years. Save up, sell your home, your possessions, and travel. Live simply, but live, without having to work. Enjoy life, then go back to work and save up enough money to do it again in a couple of years.


28. Do nothing. Despite the tip above that we should find excitement, there is value in doing nothing as well. Not doing nothing as in reading, or taking a nap, or watching TV, or meditating. Doing nothing as in sitting there, doing nothing. Just learning to be still, in silence, to hear our inner voice, to be in tune with life. Do this daily if possible.


29. Stop playing video games. They might be fun, but they can take up way too much time. If you spend a lot of time playing online games, or computer solitaire, or Wii or Gameboy or whatever, consider going a week without it. Then find something else to do, outside.


30. Watch sunsets, daily. One of the most beautiful times of day. Make it a daily ritual to find a good spot to watch the sunset, perhaps having a light dinner while you do so.


31. Stop reading magazines. They're basically crap. And they waste your time and money. Cancel your subscriptions and walk past them at the news stands. If you have to read something, read a trashy novel or even better, read Dumb Little Man once a day and be done.


32. Break out from ruts. Do you do things the same way every day? Change it up. Try something new. Take a different route to work. Start your day out differently. Approach work from a new angle. Look at things from new perspectives.


33. Stop watching the news. It's depressing and useless. If you're a news junky, this may be difficult. I haven't watch TV news or read a newspaper regularly in about two years. It hasn't hurt me a bit. Anything important, my mom tells me about.


34. Laugh till you cry. Laughing is one of the best ways to live. Tell jokes and laugh your head off. Watch an awesome comedy. Learn to laugh at anything. Roll on the ground laughing. You'll love it.


35. Lose control. Not only control over yourself, but control over others. It's a bad habit to try to control others -- it will only lead to stress and unhappiness for yourself and those you try to control. Let others live, and live for yourself. And lose control of yourself now and then too.


36. Cry. Men, especially, tend to hold in our tears, but crying is an amazing release. Cry at sad movies. Cry at a funeral. Cry when you are hurt, or when somebody you love is hurt. It releases these emotions and allows us to cleanse ourselves.


37. Make an awesome dessert. I like to make warm, soft chocolate cake. But even berries dipped in chocolate, or crepes with ice cream and fruit, or fresh apple pie, or homemade chocolate chip cookies or brownies, are great. This isn't an every day thing, but an occasional treat thing. But it's wonderful.


38. Try something new, every week. Ask yourself: "What new thing shall I try this week?" Then be sure to do it. You don't have to learn a new language in one week, but seek new experiences. Give it a try. You might decide you want to keep it in your life.


39. Be in the moment. Instead of thinking about things you need to do, or things that have happened to you, or worrying or planning or regretting, think about what you are doing, right now. What is around you? What smells and sounds and sights and feelings are you experiencing? Learn to do this as much as possible through meditation, but also through bringing your focus back to the present as much as you can in everything you do.

- Leo Babuata

Ephipanies come in small packages

So I took my dog to the park so she could run around and burn off the cookies I'm not supposed to feed her. I take her to the park because they have fenced in area where she can play without me worrying about her running off. She's a bad dog sometimes. Anyway, I'm walking around this field and look down and laying there in the grass, for God knows what reason, is a hammer.

I'm not speaking metaphorically. It was an actual hammer. Just laying there.

I start wondering why a hammer is just laying there in the grass for no reason, imagining all sorts of scenarios that might have caused it to be there. Eventually I get around to having that folk song "If I had a hammer" stuck in my head.

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening ... all over this land

Basically, if I had a hammer I would piss off the neighbors by hammering all the time.

That's not actually what the song is about, of course. It's a what if I had what I needed to accomplish something, then I'd actually do it. I start wondering what I'd do if I had a hammer. But then, now I actually do have a hammer. It's laying there in the grass right before me, for God knows what reason. I start to pick it up, but stop.

I realized that if I did have a hammer, I'd do nothing. There's nothing I want to do. I actually want to do — nothing. Not nothing as in the absence of something, but rather nothing in that it doesn't look anything like what could be misinterpreted as something. This doesn't make sense. Here, this is what I mean:

Winnebago + Laptop + WiFi + War Driving = That's me.

I want what Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau described as "a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence". I mean, come on, why not? For the first time in history all the tech is there to make that happen, to be connected to the world without, you know, being connected to the world. Mobile phones give you a number that you can take with you. Email handles the correspondence. WiFi and ripping off people's broadband connections (commercial services are fine too) means that you never have to literally be plugged in anywhere. Decentralized business models aren't tied to any particular location. Your reading this wherever you are. The server's in San Antonio, I think. I'm writing from the boon docks of Kentucky. Most everything's outsourced to India anyway. The world's become nonlocal, why shouldn't I?

Winnebago and a laptop and I'm gone, a geeky nomad skipping from hotspot to hotspot, doing nothing in particular. Nothing, as in no-thing. Why? Well, for no other reason than I want to do everything and don't want to be tied down to any particular one thing.

So, I thought, if I had a hammer... I'd leave it right where I found it. And that's what I did.

Physical fitness can be fun

I was joking awhile back that I'm somehow a sportsman because I sometimes play video games (rarely, but whatever). Part of my reasoning was that it involved competition even if it doesn't involve physical activity. Boy was I wrong. Apparently you do get fit the more you play. Check out these numbers from the May 2007 issue of Wired:

If you spend 1.5 hours weightlifting, you burn 842 calories.
If you spend 1 hour doing Dance Dance Revolution, you burn 900 calories.

If you spend 30 minutes doing aerobics, you burn 242 calories.
If you spend 30 minutes on Wii Boxing, you burn 250 calories.

If you spend 20 minutes jogging, you burn 198 calories.
If you just sit on the couch and play PS3/Xbox for 1 hour, you burn 204 calories.

If you spend 15 minutes having sex, you burn 33 calories.
If you spend 7 minutes playing Wii Tennis, you burn 46 calories.

These calories that you lose playing video games are probably dependent on you not swigging beer and overdosing on nachos. Still, it's friggin' physical fitness through video games! What's to complain about?

In fact, I think I'll change my personal daily exercise routine to one hour playing Xbox and five hours having sex, then pretend like I lifted weights for 1.5 hours.

What? You don't even think that's possible? Hey, I'm Mr. Stamina. I can play Xbox for at least two- three hours, no problem.

To burn out or fade in

I like subversive expression.
I'm compiling a list of writers, musicians, and artists that I admire.
It's a short list.
Most of the people on it are dead.
Half by their own hand, most recently Thompson.
The others took to drink by the age of 40 or died by syphilis.
All of them beautiful minds.
All of them killed by their own fictions.
And these are my heroes?

One still lives.
He advocates a four-part core lifestyle of
Body (diet, exercise)
Mind (reading, study)
Spirit (meditation, zen)
Shadow (art & music)
/ augmented by auxiliary modules
Ethics (social activism, honesty)
Sex (tantra, kundalini yoga)
Work (transformative, service)
Emotions (expression, art)
Relationships (commitment, sharing)

He calls it an integral lifestyle. I think I'll read more of his books.