🔥 🤗 embracing your season, 📱Romulus au Raa on screen time, 😵‍💫 a fancy phrase to say modern life is f#@%ing complicated, 🎭 a question from Nietzsche

#66: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.

Welcome to the 66th edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.

We’re all over the place this week. I love where it ended up.

We start with a thought on embracing your season.

Then pop between the wisdom of Red Rising’s Romulus au Raa, Charles Taylor & finally our old buddy Fred Nietzsche.

You think he’d mind me calling him Fred?

With love,
Chris

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Here’s this week’s antifragile 4 🔥:

1. a thought 💭 🤗 on embracing whatever season you’re in

2. Romulus au Raa 📱 on screen time

3. Charles Taylor 😵‍💫 uses a fancy phrase to say modern life is f#@%ing complicated

4. a question 🎭 from Nietzsche on doing it again

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1.) a thought 💭 🤗 on embracing whatever season you’re in

I’ve been working a lot lately. By my standards anyway.

Late nights after full days. Slack and emails at all hours. Tinkering with ads and systems while the boys are eating dinner. Checking sales before going to sleep.

Doing all the things I know full well are not sustainable for my mental (or relational) well-being.

But you know what? I’m good with it.

Our busiest time of year (BFCM/Holidays) is just around the corner and our business that I’ve worked on for fifteen years (!) is at an interesting inflection point.

So I’m putting the pedal down. Consciously.

Not because I feel like I should. But because I want to.

And I know it’s not going to last forever. At some point I’ll feel the need to step back. And I will.

But I’m finding there’s immense fulfillment (and peace) in embracing your season—be it with kids, work, relationships, fitness.

I also happen to find myself smack in the middle of a season of chasing around two very often temperamental little whipper-snappers.

And this often leads to missed workouts, stupid fights with my wife, slow text replies to my friends, a ballooning monthly budget, late nights panic-writing newsletters and Fridays where I wondered where the f@&$ the week just went!

But to resist this is misery. To rage against it—to shout why me!?—is to forgo its gifts.

To embrace a season is to open yourself up to what it’s trying to teach you. Because these lessons don’t repeat themselves—only the resistance does.

So stay open.

(And this doesn’t mean you can’t work to change. It just means: don’t be miserable doing it.)

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2.) Romulus au Raa 📱 on screen time

I love fan art—Romulus au Raa.

No child in my family watches holos before the age of twelve. We all have nature and nurture to shape us. She can watch other people’s opinions when she has opinions of her own, and no sooner. We’re not digital creatures. We’re flesh and blood. Better she learns that before the world finds her.

Romulus au Raa, Morning Star (Book 5 of Red Rising Series) by Pierce Brown

Romulus must have read The Anxious Generation.

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3.) Charles Taylor 🤷‍♂️ uses a fancy phrase to say modern life is f#@%ing complicated

Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor described modern human life as “irreconcilably multileveled”.

I literally laughed out loud when I heard it.

Because it’s such a hilariously academic was of saying modern life is f#@%ing complicated 😂

What he’s referring to puts words to a tension many of us feel on a regular basis. He describes this shift as from an old society where:

• There was moral unity: All beliefs/customs/rules stemmed from just a few places—often God (and whoever had the biggest army).

• Everyone was morally on the same page: For the most part, people operated from the same assumptions about what was right, good, and true.

• The “inner self” wasn’t a thing: There wasn’t time—or even language—for exploring one’s inner life, meaning, or purpose. Life was lived outward, within the roles and traditions given.

…to a modern society where:

• The old unity is gone: The once-shared theistic worldview — where meaning, morality, and purpose all flowed from God — has fractured.

• Multiple sources of the self: We now draw identity and purpose from many frontiers — our reason, emotions, nature, creativity, spirituality, community — instead of one unified source.

• Different moral timelines: Not everyone lives by the same moral or spiritual assumptions; modern life layers centuries of belief systems on top of one another. We’re all far from on the same page.

• Inwardness as a modern invention: Our sense of “the inner self” is a modern development, tied up with how we define morality and authenticity.

• Permanent tension: Because of all this, modern moral life is defined by ongoing friction — a standing tension between competing visions of what it means to live well or be good.

I offer this simply to say, I see you modern human. Life is f#@%ing complicated.

You may have running water, Chipotle, penicillin and Gopuff, but you also have to sort out some heavy stuff.

And for that, I salute you 🫡.

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4.) a question 🎭 from Nietzsche on doing it again

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you… and say: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more…’

Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth? Or would you answer: ‘You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine.’

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

How would you answer?

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Two last things for you this week:

1. Find something to embrace rather than resist. What gifts could you be forgoing?

2. Be fire and wish for the wind 🔥

With love,
Chris

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