Retreat
Another notebook dump, of sorts.
I’m going on a two-day solo retreat in a couple hours. I got an AirBNB in the middle of nowhere South Carolina. The place seems to be not much more than a couple hundred square feet. There’s a kitchen, a desk, a couch, a TV, a bathroom, and two beds.
The TV won’t be turned on during my stay. I’ll have my laptop, but it won’t be connected to the internet. My phone will stay in my backpack aside from sending a couple texts to let people know I’m still alive. I’m bringing my own food, which I’ll cook in the house. Otherwise, I’m bringing a music player (more on this later), a meditation cushion, a couple books, and not much else.
The plan is to do nothing for two days. There’s two kinds of “doing nothing.” One is to sit around and watch TV all day and revel in the fact that you’ve cleared your schedule of responsibilities. I like doing this. But that’s not what I’m doing this weekend. I’m legitimately going to try to do nothing.
I guess this isn’t quite true, so I’ll be more specific. I was inspired by Neil Schuster of NLU doing something similar a while back, where he brought a non-internet-connected laptop and his dog into a secluded AirBNB and spent two days thinking about the big stuff. He spend 2-3 hours writing, then a couple hours on long walks, and repeated the cycle for two days. I remember him coming up with such goals as “don’t get fat” and “don’t get divorced,” two items which almost read as sarcastic as I write them, but they’re undeniably important, and it’s worth some thought as to exactly how to make sure neither happens.
The whole thing reminded me of Buddhist solo retreats, where monks will go off into the wilderness or up into a cave for a year. Similar retreats exist for people who don’t have a year to give, usually a couple days or a week, usually under the guidance of a meditation teacher in a group setting. I’m interested in these, but I’m a bit to cynical to pick one teacher based on information I find on the internet, so I’m going at it solo.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a while. So, on the back of the tournament I just played, I booked this AirBNB two hours from St Simons and I’m headed up there today, pretty much whenever I hit send on this newsletter. I have a list of big questions that I’ve been keeping in the notes app of my phone for a bit, and I’m going to see which ones feel important enough to answer.
I’m also going to be sitting and meditating a lot. Meditation was once described to me as a glass of water with a bunch of sediment in it, and it’s all stirred up and cloudy; your mind is the water, and your thoughts are the sediment. Meditation involves focus on something (in my case, the breath — a popular choice) such that the mind is still enough for the sediment to start to settle to the bottom. Thoughts still arise (they always still arise), but you return to the breath before you get lost in them and they shake stuff up. At the end, you’re left with clarity, and clarity is cool. I intend to sit around and do nothing such that contemporary life’s sediment settles to the bottom, and then we’ll see what clarity I find.
I mentioned I played a tournament this week. I missed another cut. This time, however, I’m pretty clear on what my next steps are, which is a great feeling. I know exactly what I want to see more of from my body, and I’m going to work in the gym to support those movement patterns, and I’m going to make some simply swing tweaks, and everything’s going to work out. I’m already striking the ball pretty damn good, so I’m confident in where this is heading.
(For anyone curious: The gym/body stuff is to push more laterally off my right foot instead of getting up onto my right toes too early. So pushing more out of the arch of my foot than the ball. This will give me more room to keep the club in front of me and swing it out along the plane line vs. pulling it inside. I’m also going to work on my right hand staying more square rather than turning the club down in the downswing, which will keep the clubface squarer. I’ll also present more loft this way, which means I’ll finally have to schedule that iron fitting and find a lower launching shaft to hit my windows better. As for the swing stuff, I’m once again getting quick in transition when I’m under tournament pressure, so I’m going to get more stable at the top — maybe even just do the Cam Young pause move, which he does to solve the exact problem I face right now.)
But I missed the cut by a bunch, and you might be wondering how that happened, if I’m hitting it so good. I’m here to declare an Official State of Emergency with regard to my putting. The greens at Colonial CC (the NC one, not TX) were running 13+ with a ton of slope and some nasty pins, which explains some of the troubles, but not nearly enough. I had 35 putts in the first round, including a chip-in— so 35 putts in 17 holes. Round two I had 38 putts. I lost something like 8-9 strokes on the greens alone. There’s a mental toll when you putt this poorly, and that resonates back through the bag — so I’m confident that, if I was putting Tour average, I make the cut this week.
I hit a shitload of putts in the two weeks leading up to this event. I changed some stuff with my setup, I weighted my putter differently, I did a whole bunch of stuff to set myself up for success. I did not succeed. So it’s back to the drawing board.
We’ll see what I come up with, but I think there’s one solution and one solution only to this problem: hit a billion putts. I don’t think there’s much left to do besides that. I like the shape of my stroke right now; I’ve started getting the ball to start on line with some setup tweaks. Green reading is bad and distance control is abysmal. I don’t think either of these gets fixed without hitting a billion putts. I’m probably going to learn AimPoint for the sake of understanding the system better, and I’ll keep messing with the weight of my putter, and maybe I throw in some distance control drills. But I think the main thing is just playing a shitload of drawbacks and hitting a billion putts until I start rolling it better. I don’t think there’s any alpha to find that’s not simply dug out of the dirt.
I have a theory about money. It’s completely dead obvious, but for some reason it feels significant right now, especially on the back of some stuff I said last week.
Money is what we use as a store of value to exchange for goods and services. Everyone knows this. I don’t hear many people asking “what sorts of goods and services?” mostly because this is so obvious it’s not worth answering. Economists will say something about “utility.” Really, I think the answer is simpler and two-fold:
Things that you want.
Things that you wouldn’t have if you didn’t buy them.
This is dumb, but bear with me. You don’t buy things you don’t want. You also don’t buy things that you don’t need to buy. Both of these are obvious. You want running water in your house, so you pay the utility company for it. You don’t pay a utility company for breathing air, because it’s already there. You don’t have the Balenciaga sock-sneakers, but you don’t want them, so you don’t buy them.
Really, money is a store of value such that you can make your life go subtly in a direction that it wouldn’t have gone on its own.
In the 2010s, when I was in middle and high school, I was super invested in following the latest tech releases, specifically Android phones. I was an Android kid, because I was a geek, and I liked doing weird shit like building custom homescreens and stuff. But Android was also an exciting space, because a whole bunch of phone manufacturers were trying to out-do each other to win your business. I had a phone with a retinal scanner as a passcode in like 2015. Us Android people would laugh about which features had finally made their way to the iPhone after nearly a decade in the Android ecosystem, and how these features were touted as “innovative.” It was legitimately fun wondering what everyone would come up with next.
I don’t feel any of that today. My smartphone is a 6”x4”x1/2” box in my pocket that I fucking hate. I also don’t think my life would function without it. It fucking sucks. I think about this tweet basically every day:
I don’t remember where I saw this idea, so I can’t give proper credit where it’s due, but someone was talking about the above recently. Tech used to be cool, and we used to follow it because it was cool and we thought it’d make our lives better. Now we all understand that our phones are how big tech mines our attention for money, and we’re not all that interested in what comes next, because we don’t think it’ll be good.
I just spent a whole bunch of money on in-ear monitor headphones, a souped-up iPod, and a bunch of really high quality digital downloads of my favorite albums. I loaded these albums onto a micro-SD card, put that micro-SD into the audio player, and plugged in the IEMs. It’s an iPod. It’s a really nice iPod with amazing sound quality.
The device theoretically connects to the internet for a couple functions: streaming music (but only on Tidal or Qobuz), wireless file transfer, bluetooth. I will not be connecting it to the internet. After this first batch of file downloads, if I want a new album, I’ll order the CD, and I’ll rip the CD onto the SD card and keep the disk as physical media. And then I’ll throw the SD card back into the player. That’s how it’ll work.
My phone gives me access to any music I could ever want for a monthly subscription that’s basically the price of one album. It can play this music at basically the same quality as the stuff I have downloaded. It does everything that this device I just bought does, except better.
But it also does a whole lot of other stuff, like ping me with advertising emails and giving me access to a bunch of bullshit I’m too dumb not to look at instead of focusing on my mission. And I hate it for that. And I want to carry it less so it has less power over me.
For this reason, I spent real money on a system that does the exact same thing but worse. Because that’s the direction I want my life to go right now.
This sounds dumb, but, the more I think about it, the saner it feels. A decade ago, we wanted more cool tech, so we paid for it. Now, cool tech is all around us, and we’re the products. I want to use my phone less, but the tech market is so big and makes so much money off our phone use that they’ve made it really hard to stop. Now I’m spending money to use my phone less — but I can’t think of many better things to spend it on.
I’m going into this retreat with a list of big questions. One of these is to reexamine what role meditation has in my life. I haven’t been meditating much. I know I feel better when I do, but I haven’t been. This is tough to square, and I’d like to square it one way or another.
I know that retreats like this, especially in a Buddhist context, usually have a pretty rigid schedule. That’s not really how I want to do this, but I figured it can’t help to check some stuff out and see if I get any ideas. I looked around online, found a lot of stuff from “wellness experts,” and generally stopped looking. Instead, I asked Claude.
My interpretation of AI is that it remains a data-aggregation and -interpretation tool. There’s no magic entity in the box that gives us wisdom, nor is it plotting to end the world as we know it. Humanity still bears total responsibility for our utilization of this tool, as it does not have entity status to have responsibility itself.
In this case, I figured, screw it, I’ll write up a little blurb about what I’m looking to do, and I’ll mention a specific Buddhist slant, and Claude will comb through a bunch of Buddhist texts and essays and advice and aggregate all of that into some advice, and I can either take that advice or leave it.
Probably 90 minutes later, I found myself with a far more insightful approach to this retreat than I expected to have. I went back and forth with the thing about my approach and how I was thinking about things, and it told me how this would be interpreted in various Buddhist traditions. Along the way, it flagged when my intentions conflicted with teachings, or when I contradicted myself when talking about my intentions. In the end, I got to the bottom of some stuff I had questions about, and I had a clear direction for how I was going to approach meditation for the weekend (of course, with the requisite willingness to experience whatever arose).
I wrote the previous section in a pretty tech-doomerist way. AI is the dominant force in today’s tech, and you might expect me to feel similarly doomerist about it.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty about AI that makes me nervous or uneasy. I think there’s plenty of potential to use it for ill, and the job displacement stuff is going to stink real bad for people my age, and AI slop sucks. I’m sure there’s plenty of ways that this can all go horribly wrong.
But I was pretty surprised with my experience talking to Claude about my meditation practice. To be clear, I don’t think Claude is going to replace monks, or that Claude should be everyone’s therapist/priest/guru. There were multiple instances where I told Claude it was dead wrong on something, or that I wasn’t going to do something and here’s why. But I think there’s still plenty of opportunity to recognize that these systems can be powerful tools, and that a thoughtful back-and-forth with an LLM can bear fruit.
As with all things, I think it has everything to do with the “how” of it all. Meditation is an intensely personal thing, as are plenty of things that people use LLMs for. It doesn’t know you, and it isn’t an entity, and nobody should confuse the system that picks the next word over and over for any sort of authority on anything personally/spiritually important. But that doesn’t eliminate the possibility for a person to engage with the tool and use it for something useful.
All of this is to say, I was surprised by the quality of my experience, and maybe tech isn’t all bad.
Until next time.