Joe Vasicek

3am thoughts, or why everyone says to be an accountant (Blast from the Past: October 2013)

A lot of my blog posts this week had to do with money, wealth, and politics, so when I was searching for an old post to bring back, this one made me stop and reflect for a while.

My opinions and perspective have changed a bit since I wrote it, but the fundamental message is still one that I agree with. I’ve trimmed out some of the parts where I think I was wrong, and left the stuff that still resonates. Hopefully it resonates with you as well. Either way, feel free to let me know.

I’ve been reading in bed on my smart phone recently, which is probably a bad idea because it makes it harder to go asleep. At the same time, it tends to get my mind rolling, and at 3am my thoughts tend to go some really interesting places. Sharing those thoughts is probably going to get me into trouble, but hey, you might find them interesting, so why not?

When I was eight years old, I knew I was going to be a writer. There was never any question about that. I spent all my free time making up stories. However, I knew I never wanted writing to be my job, because 1) everyone hates their jobs, and 2) everyone knows that writers can’t make a decent living. Even at eight years old, I had bought into some of society’s most pervasive myths about jobs, careers, and how to make money.

Americans are generally horrible with money. We struggle to keep budgets and put all sorts of things on credit, and pay more than twice what our houses are worth by signing mortgages we barely even read. Because we’re so horrible with money, we tend to see it as a magical force, something that can solve all our problems and make us happy. Rich people are like wizards or sorcerers, so far above the rest of us that we can hardly fathom their ways.

Nowhere is this stupidity more apparent than in the fact that most of us spend our lives working for some sort of hourly or salaried wage. Wages and salaries are basically the same, in that they convert time into money. That’s why we all measure income in terms of dollars per hour, or salary per year. But for anyone who understands how money works, that is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. Money comes and goes, but time? Time is one of the most finite and precious resources known to man.

All of us are going to die someday. Most people are scared shitless by that fact, so we try to ignore it or put off thinking about it until we have to. But not all of us get the opportunity to put our affairs in order before we die. And even if we do all live to be centenarians, our time on this Earth is still finite. It’s non-renewable, too—you can’t go back and relive that day or that hour or that minute once it’s passed.

Converting time into money is basically trading gold for lead, or wine for water. Yet that’s exactly what we do, because money is this strange, magical force that so few of us understand.

Questions like “where do you work?” “what is your job?” and “what do you make?” are much more common than “what do you do for a living?” That’s because most of us have bought into this idea that money comes from working for someone else. While we’re on the clock, the company owns us and anything we produce. That’s the pact we make in exchange for this magical substance we call money.

It wasn’t until college that I started to become disabused of my childhood notions about writing for a living. First, I came to realize that lots of people love their work—that just because you do something as a job doesn’t mean that you’ll come to hate it. But it wasn’t until I graduated unemployed in the middle of a recession that I was disabused of the notion that writers can’t make a living.

People say that about every career—that is, every career except accounting. That’s because accountants are the ones who count the magical money. They’re the ones who know where it comes from. Their jobs are the ones that the people with the magical money will always need.

But there are other ways to make money—thousands of ways. Millions, even. It’s not about time it’s about producing something that people want and need. But when you’re working for yourself, that’s hard. You have to own up to your work—the failures as well as the successes.

When you work for a corporation, it’s easy to shift the blame. It’s a rare case where one person is solely responsible for bringing down the whole collective enterprise. But when you work for yourself, you can’t blame anyone else when things go wrong. You’ve got to take the risk.

That’s why everyone says that you can’t make a living as a writer. They say the same thing about any career where you strike out on your own.

In the end, though, it’s all just silly. Money isn’t a vague magical force—it comes from the value you create. It comes from producing something that people are willing to pay you for. And you don’t need to sell your time at $11 an hour or $44,000 a year to do that. You just need hard work, a great idea, and the ability to learn from your mistakes.

So can you make a living pursuing your dreams? The answer to that question depends entirely on you.

So it’s the middle of June, and I really should have finished Patriots in Retreat by now, but it’s been difficult to stick to any kind of writing routine, and the story is at that place where everything seems broken and writing through it is like slogging through a swamp.

Call me crazy, but I’m starting to think that’s not healthy. In Brandon Sanderson’s English 318R class at BYU, he always said the most important thing was to power through and just finish the damn thing–that you can always go back and “fix it in post”–but while that’s good advice for a new writer who hasn’t ever finished anything, I don’t think it works very well for my own writing process.

I think that what I need to do is take every weekend to cycle through the entire story from the beginning, not necessarily to rewrite it all, but to bring it into line with the stuff that unfolds later. Invariably, when I get to the three quarters mark of my WIP, it feels like the whole thing is barely holding together and that I’m writing myself into a train wreck.

For the last several years, I’ve tried to just write through that, only for one of two things to happen: either something else catches my interest and I decide to put the WIP on the back burner for a while, or it actually does turn into a train wreck and I have to set it on the back burner for a while in order to approach it with a new set of eyes.

Needless to say, neither of those outcomes is very productive.

Now, I don’t think Patriots in Retreat is broken. I think there’s actually a really good story in there, but it needs a little more excavation in certain parts before I can pull the whole thing out in one piece. This was my first time in years experimenting with the cycling process, and I don’t think I did it enough. Next WIP will be another experiment.

Long story short, I will probably have to push this one back another two weeks, which is going to push the release schedule for Sons of the Starfarers back another month. I’ve got another short story I can use to fill in the gap, but it is a bit of a personal disappointment.

Why is it so difficult to keep my own self-imposed deadlines? Am I really that flaky and unreliable? Not in other aspects of my life. Maybe my writing process really does need a complete and fundamental overhaul. Should make for some interesting future posts.

In any case, that’s what I’ve been up to. I really really really want to write a couple of short stories in a universe that may turn into a recurring one, but those will have to wait until Patriots is finished (hopefully early next week). On the publishing side of things, I’ve got a new short story and short story bundle out—more on that tomorrow! Lots of other stuff too, but it’s mostly behind the scenes, so not worth talking much about atm.

Patriots in Retreat will be finished soon, it’s just in the “this sucks and I’m a horrible writer!” phase. Which, hopefully, I’ll find a way to remove from my writing process altogether, because it isn’t healthy. When I figure out how to do that, I’ll let you know.

The end of politics in America, part 2

How did Trump become the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth?

A lot of people are asking that question, while a lot of other people already know (hint: it wasn’t the Russians). But I want to get beyond the circus that is Washington DC, and answer that question by asking another:

Can politics solve our nation’s greatest problems?

I think there is a dawning realization among Americans that it doesn’t really matter who lives on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Republican or Democrat, the outcome is pretty much the same.

Never at any point in living memory have we been so politically divided, but the party distinctions have become increasingly meaningless. Trump campaigned on providing universal healthcare. Clinton campaigned on escalating our military involvement in Syria. Which one was the Republican, and which one was the Democrat?

In the previous post, I said:

I am convinced that the grand key to understanding United States history in the 20th century—and by extension, current events in the 21st—is a deep knowledge of monetary policy and the financial system.

What is that system?

It is a system of debt. Pure and simple. We have turned our debt into money, and made every other form of money illegal. And the rest of the world has followed us gleefully off the cliff.

Washington is bankrupt. Literally bankrupt. Every year, the Treasury runs an internal audit, and every year, that audit fails. The government’s single biggest asset on their balance sheets is… $1 trillion in student loan debt. Social Security is insolvent and, according to the government’s own reports, will completely run out of money in less than twenty years.

So if Washington is bankrupt, why haven’t they declared bankruptcy? Because they can just keep printing money through the Federal Reserve.

Because of this, the US dollar has lost about 97% of its value since the Federal Reserve system was established in 1913. A time traveler from the new Wonder Woman movie couldn’t buy $5 worth of stuff with $100 of our dollars today. And to keep up this Ponzi scheme we call “money,” Washington has gone nearly $20 trillion in debt.

How much longer can we keep that up?

If we could grow our economy fast enough, and never stop growing, we could keep up the Ponzi scheme for a very long time. But growth is no longer a solution, because the debt is bigger than the economy. The debt is the reason we can’t grow.

If we could innovate fast enough, we could lower the cost of living so much that the poor don’t realize that they’re poor. To some extent, we’ve already done that. But the effects are too uneven: startphones and computers are super cheap, but houses and health care are practically unaffordable.

Which brings us to serfdom.

Let’s go back in time a couple thousand years. Before the days of the empire, the Roman dream was that every family would have their own plot of land, making them independently wealthy, and the head of every family would take up arms in defense of his country whenever called upon by the state. This was not all that different from the Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman farmer.

Then the Punic wars happened, which, for the Mediterranean world, was basically the ancient WWI and WWII. As Rome became a major world power, the military-industrial complex made a few select elites fabulously wealthy, who kept the masses pacified with welfare handouts.

But the endless cycle of foreign wars came at a heavy cost. Decades of budget deficits and an unsustainable national debt forced the Romans to debase their currency, which completely collapsed. Trade halted, the middle class lost everything, and the 1% became fantastically wealthy, buying up all the real estate and forcing everyone else out. The Roman dream was dead, replaced by a form of bondage called serfdom.

Serfdom came in a number of different flavors:

Slaves, who had always existed in the Roman world and continued for some time in the Medieval. Landlords got tax benefits for holding slaves.
Villeins, who were bound to the land and worked for the landlords. In exchange, they enjoyed protection and tax relief. Theoretically.
Coloni, or sharecroppers, who leased land in exchange for labor and a portion of their harvest. They were eventually taxed out of existence.
Freemen, who technically weren’t serfs, but were only a raid or a bad harvest away from becoming one. They were basically renters.

The corvée was a tax, paid in labor, that non-landowners owed by law. Basically, for every XX days out of the year, you worked for the state. It continued even after the abolition of serfdom, until the revolutions of 1848. My Czech ancestors paid the corvée, which is probably one of the reasons they and their children emmigrated to the United States.

But wait—we pay the corvée too! It’s called the federal income tax: for XX days out of the year, you work for the state. The taxes are even higher if you’re self-employed or a small business owner.

Except… not everyone pays the income tax. In fact, nearly half of Americans pay no income tax. Why? Because the politicans know that they can use the welfare system to buy votes. If you’re on welfare, who are you going to vote for: the guy who plans to cut your handouts, or the guy who says that the wealthy should pay their “fair share”?

And sitting at the top of it all are the central bankers.

The medieval serfs were bound to the land and worked for the landlords. In contrast, modern debt-serfs are bound to their debt—national debt, student loan debt, mortgages, consumer debt—and work for the banks.

So I ask again: can politics solve this problem? Can we find a political solution to our national debt?

Unfortunately, there is only one political solution: default on the debt. If we default on entitlements like social security, there would be chaos, riots, and anarchy… and we still wouldn’t pay down hardly any of the debt. If we defaulted on our treasury bonds, it would send a ripple of financial panics across the world, destabilizing the flashpoints in Europe and Asia before returning to our shores. Stocks, mutual funds, and pensions would all be wiped out. Almost the entire savings of the Baby Boomer generation, gone.

But there is another option, though it’s hardly a “solution”: kick the can a little further down the road. Print the money, devalue the debt, and inflate the currency to oblivion.

This is the path we’ve been on since 1913. This is the reason why our dollars buy a little less each year. And this is the reason why we, as a nation, are backsliding into serfdom.

We’ve seen this happen before. Rome fell because of it. Europe came under the yoke of serfdom as a result of it. Our ancestors fled to this country to escape it. And now, we are repeating it.

This isn’t a political problem: it’s a math problem. The numbers just do not add up. The next financial crisis could very well be the “extinction level event” that puts the final nail in the coffin of the US dollar, throws the world into a global war, and sends the United States into its greatest existential crisis since the Civil War. The Republicans don’t have the solution, and neither do the Democrats, because the problem is not political.

This is what the end of politics in America looks like. We’re watching it happen in real-time. Our politicians have become the clowns in the bread-and-circuses routine. Meanwhile, the central bankers are shackling us in chains with every dollar that passes through their hands.

What are you going to do about it?

Thoughts on the #Alexandria shooting

This attack was a warning.

It could have been much worse. There could be more than a dozen dead congressmen right now. We could be in a national crisis as severe as 9/11, or more.

This was a premeditated and carefully planned act of domestic terrorism. It is clear that the attacker was politically motivated. Millions of Americans share his extreme views. Thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, believe that his actions were justified.

It is only by the grace of God that the attack was thwarted. As Congressman Loudermilk said, “God was there.”

I believe in a God who is intimately concerned with the details of our individual lives. I believe that His hand guides the events that shape us, and that He takes a particular interest in the course of the United States.

He has given us our individual agency, the freedom to choose between good and evil. That is a gift that He will never take away. No matter how violent we are toward one another, no matter how much anger and hatred fills our hearts, He will not violate our agency nor revoke that Liberty wherewith He has made us free, but will leave us to our devices until we return on our knees to Him.

This attack was a warning. We would do well to heed it.

Several months ago, I came to the conclusion that the United States is between three and fifteen years away from an existential crisis as great as the Civil War. Will this crisis turn into a second civil war? I believe there’s a significant chance that it will. Certainly we are on that path right now.

Wake up, America! You talk of wars in far off countries, but you know not the hearts of men in your own land. Even now, the voices of evil speak louder in your ears than that which will shake the Earth. Treasure up wisdom, and remember: if you are prepared, you shall not fear.

What I would do if I were starting out now

In a word, short stories.

Write a bunch of short stories. One or two a week if possible. Keep that up for a year or two, tapering off at the end to transition into novels. But keep writing short stories even after novels have become the main focus.

Make a serious effort while writing short stories to master both the craft and the art of storytelling. View it as an apprenticeship period. Experiment. Try out new things. Join a writing group, preferably of experienced professional writers, and have them rip your stories apart. Soak up as much constructive feedback as possible, and apply it to the next story.

At the same time, don’t spend so much time reworking old stories that you aren’t producing new ones. Learn how to keep a rigorous production schedule. If a story is totally broken, toss it out! Get to the point where you can hit 2k words consistently every day, and knock out a story at least every couple of weeks or so.

In a word, learn how to be prolific.

Experiment with standalones, but also build a couple of universes with recurring characters. Write a few series, both sequential and non-sequential. Focus especially on the non-sequential series, though—the ones where any story can be an entry point. Learn how to find the sweet spot between writing a satisfying ending and leaving a hook for the next one. That sweet spot is different for every genre.

Submit every story you write to the traditional short story markets. Start with the highest paying markets and work your way down. Pay close attention to average response times on sites like the Grinder and don’t submit to any market with an average response time of more than 30 days, no matter how high the pay rate. The goal is to get each story through all of the pro- and semi-pro markets in about a year. If a market can’t get back to you in a timely fashion, it’s not worth your time. Ideally, you want to be receiving multiple rejections every day.

Once you’ve got about twenty or so stories that have come off of submission, start self-publishing.

Use the first couple of stories to learn how the process works. Figure out how to format, do cover work, and write up all the metadata on your own, then do all you can to streamline that process until it becomes automatic. You can outsource some of the more difficult stuff, but learn to do as much as you can on your own. Don’t spend more than about $50 per story to publish it, preferably more like $30.

Once you’ve got a process down, set a rigorous release schedule of 2 stories per month. Keep to that schedule religiously. Don’t worry too much how the stories are selling: they probably won’t sell well until you’ve got a couple dozen or so out. Just focus on getting them out.

Keep an email list, with links to subscribe in the front and back of all your books. Build that list as much as you can. Most of your early marketing efforts should go to building that list, and cultivating a relationship with the people on it. Don’t rely on Facebook, because you don’t own that site and can’t control it. Same with any other social media. Do all you can to bring your readers to a place you control.

Start blogging. Build relationships with other bloggers. Strive to post something new every day. Make it the kind of site that your readers will want to come to. Be sure to have pages for all of your books, as well as a series page that lists every story in every series, in chronological and written order (side note: I really need to write up a series page).

Experiment with free pulsing and price pulsing. Experiment with price points. Experiment with bundles. Experiment with everything.

ORGANIZE YOUR DATA. Ohmygosh. You’re going to be drowning in data after just a few months. Keep all of your sales reports, and compile all that into spreadsheets showing how many sales you got of each title each month, how much you earned from each title each month, etc. Data, data, data! Learn how to thrive with data!

Write a formal business plan, and update it constantly as you go. Write down all the strategies that work, as well as the ones that don’t. Write down all the strategies you want to try out. In case it wasn’t obvious, write down your release schedule. Write down your to do list, organized by urgent / not urgent and important / not important quadrants. Write down everything. WRITE IT DOWN.

Eventually, you’ll get to the point where you’re releasing bundles alongside or even in place of your short stories. Don’t unpublish anything. Maybe update the covers, if you decide your early ones are really really bad. But don’t worry about it too much. Just focus on being as prolific as possible.

As long as you keep moving, you’re going to get somewhere. So always keep moving. Even when you have a disappointing sales month, or a spat of bad reviews, or whatever, just keep moving. Even if you’re moving in the wrong direction, that’s better than not moving at all.

At some point, you’re going to start to see some success. You may even have a breakthrough. At that point, you can start moving on to novels. Hopefully you’ve written a couple of them by now. Your first one is probably utter crap, so toss it out and focus on the good ones.

Hopefully, you’ve written it in the same universe as a bunch of your short stories. That will make the marketing easier, but its not strictly necessary so don’t worry about it too much if you haven’t. Also don’t worry too much if the novel isn’t in a series of its own. It’s better if it is, but standalones have their place too.

Try to write in trilogies, or to write standalones that can easily be turned into trilogies. The first book should stand on its own, the second should end on a low note and hook into the third book, and the third book should blow the reader’s mind away. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series is a great example of this.

If your career hasn’t taken off by now, you aren’t experimenting enough. That, or you’re cutting too many corners. One way or another, you’re going to have to put in the work.

That’s pretty much it. Have fun!

LOLOLOL DC got trolled!

Thoughts on Wonder Woman

This isn’t going to be a review so much as a reaction post, though I’ll do my best to make it spoiler-free for those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet. Can’t guarantee that, though.

Short version: I liked it! Longer version: I liked it, with some caveats.

Marvel seems to do plot and characters better, especially over multiple movies. DC, on the other hand, specializes in explosions and emotional… stuff. Lots of emotional stuff.

This cartoon sums it up quite well:

By far, the weakest part of Wonder Woman was the plot. Whenever there was something that strained credulity, it invariably had to do with a missing beat or plot point, or something that wasn’t foreshadowed properly, etc.

That said, the universe itself was actually pretty coherent. And there were some interesting twists. And the plot, for all its holes, was still strong enough to hold the movie together. And the explosions were pretty cool.

By far, though, the best part of the movie was Gal Gadot.

Have you ever seen someone who was so incredibly gorgeous that they made you rethink everything you thought you knew about beauty? Normally when that happens, it takes a couple of minutes for your mind to recalibrate and for everything to return to normal. With Gal Gadot, my mind failed to recalibrate. The whole movie, I couldn’t stop thinking how gorgeous she is.

It was pretty cool. And when I say “gorgeous,” I don’t just mean sex appeal. True beauty is about so much more than that: poise, elegance, confidence, etc. She’s not a bad actress either. No wonder the feminists over at Slate hate her—she’s basically their Harrison Bergeron.

The movie also had a really good message: that people are capable of both good and evil, therefore it’s not about what we deserve, it’s about what we believe. Very empowering, and very different from all the sturm und drang we usually hear: identity politics, collective guilt, the original sin of “privilege,” and virtue signalling of the perpetually offended.

There was absolutely none of that in this movie. Just a strong female character trying to save the world while very much being a woman at the same time.

Things I Learned from Working in a Call Center (Blast from the Past: September 2010)

While poking around in the archives, I came across this interesting post from my first year out of college. At the time, I was just getting started in the labor force and wanted to learn as much from my jobs as I could—even the mundane ones. The result was this.

Over the summer I worked part time at a local call center. At the time, it was just what I needed: a flexible job that helped me pay the bills while figuring out where I wanted to go next. That said, I learned very quickly that call center work is not the sort of thing I want to do for large portions of my life.

I’m glad to say I quit my job on good terms with the management, and was one of their more productive interviewers. I don’t harbor any hard feelings against the company I worked for or any of the particular employees.

However, I do want to reflect a bit on the nature of the work itself, which was less than awesome, as well as some of the things I learned about myself in the process. Since this has nothing to do with the company I worked for, I’m not going to mention it by name. Also keep in mind that the things I have to say are heavily influenced by my own opinions, so they may not apply to you.

That said, here are some of the things I learned from working in a call center:

1) In the long run, jerks only punish themselves.

I spoke with a lot of incredibly rude people in this job. I also spoke with a lot of people who were courteous and well-meaning. Without exception, the jerks seemed overstressed and miserable, while only the courteous people ever seemed genuinely happy and content with their lives.

I think the way we treat others says more about ourselves than anything else. People who are mean and nasty to each other are never truly happy.

2) A small amount of patience makes most things go faster and smoother.

I hated it when people told me “just put ten for everything.” As an interviewer, I couldn’t do that—I was required to ask every question verbatim. Those who were patient enough to let me do that got through the survey quickly and painlessly, while the impatient people who tried to rush things almost always got upset.

I think it’s safe to say that this has a general application as well. When we’re patient enough to let things happen the way they’re supposed to, things happen faster and more smoothly. When we try to rush things that shouldn’t be rushed, we screw up.

3) The ability to genuinely listen is a rare skill.

I can’t tell you how many times I asked a simple question on a survey, only to find the person on the other line answering something completely different. I didn’t expect anyone to drop everything and devote their full attention to me, but how much effort does it take to answer a simple question?

I’ve known for a long time that listening is a skill that requires work to cultivate, but apparently, it’s also one that few people have truly mastered. If you can’t understand a straightforward question well enough to give a yes or no answer, how can you understand something as complex as another person’s feelings?

4) Political campaigns are evil.

This is a little tongue in cheek, but I stand by it one hundred percent. Every survey we conducted for a political campaign asked questions that were clearly geared toward developing negative campaign ads and manipulating public perception. None of them asked how the government could best serve the people.

5) Having a flexible work schedule makes writing both easier and harder.

It makes it easier because you can plan your time around other things that are going on; it makes it harder because your days generally have less structure.

I think I hit a pretty good balance by working in the morning and writing in the afternoon, then going in to work again in the evenings if I needed the hours. Call centers are always looking for people to work in the evenings.

6) Reducing everything to numbers makes human interactions meaningless.

This was, by far, the thing I found most frustrating about my work. I talked with hundreds of people from all over the country and didn’t connect with hardly any of them on a personally significant level. It was all about checking off boxes, where each completed survey was just another number in the system.

This tended to be more true of the short surveys, less true of the longer ones. For that reason, I loved it when I got a survey that took twenty or thirty minutes to complete. It’s very hard to talk with someone for thirty minutes without making some kind of a connection with them, however fleeting.

7) If you have a love of learning, find a job that lets you use your mind.

To be perfectly honest, I never felt completely satisfied at my work. A robot with sufficiently advanced voice recognition software could probably have done my job as well as I could (at least for the ninety second surveys). Over time, I felt like my work was turning me into a robot.

That’s ultimately why I felt I had to get out. Maybe I have a problem with authority, but I can’t stand being just another cog in the corporate machine. There’s got to be a way to pay the bills and still live life meaningfully.

Image courtesy W. Lowe

WIP excerpt: The Sword Keeper

At first, Tamuna felt as if she were falling through an abyss. Darkness surrounded her, so thick she could almost taste it.

Before she could panic, her fall slowed until she was floating in midair. Her feet touched water, and a deep sense of peace swept over her, the peace that one only feels in a dream. As the darkness cleared, she found herself swimming in a clear pool fed by a mountain spring. Rugged cliffs rose behind her, while a small stone chapel stood a short distance from the shore. An eagle cried out in the cloudless blue sky, momentarily breaking the solitary silence of the wilderness.

Where am I? Tamuna wondered. How did I come to this place? If this was a dream, it felt more real than any she’d ever experienced. The water was cool and refreshing, with a bed of fine gravel under her feet. There was no danger of drowning, though the pool was deep enough that she had to swim instead of walk. She was naked, of course, but that didn’t bother her. It would be silly to swim in her clothes.

She reached the edge of the pool and climbed onto a large rock. Snow-capped peaks lined the horizon in every direction, while virgin forests stretched out in the valleys below. The view was so stunning, it completely took her breath away. She’d heard of places like this, where the cattle herders took their cows in the summer and the hunters roamed in the winter. However, when she scanned the mountains on the horizon, none of them were familiar.

“Hello?” she shouted. “Can anyone hear me?” The echo came back a few seconds later, but only the wind answered her.

She shivered and rubbed her arms with her hands. The breeze was uncomfortably cool on her bare, wet skin, but fortunately the sun was rapidly drying her. She sat down on the rock and began to wring out her hair.

She noticed a small footpath nearby, leading to the stone chapel. A set of woolen clothes lay neatly folded at the head of the path, clearly meant for her. As soon as she was dry enough to dress herself, she climbed down from the rock and slipped the clothes over her body. They were thick and warm, perfectly suited for the mountains. The embroidery was red and gold on black in the style of the Khevsurans, with a recurring cross and circle motif. She took a few moments to admire her reflection in the lake before setting off down the path.

Like most mountain churches, this one was built in the shape of a cross, with tall, narrow windows and intricate patterns carved onto the exterior. The stones were crumbling, and a long crack ran down the wall through the highest window. From the outside, it seemed to be empty.

I’m alone, she thought silently. And yet somehow, she knew that wasn’t true. Ever since the darkness had lifted, she’d felt a presence nearby, waiting for her. It felt as if she were part of a story that she was living through instead of merely hearing about.

When she reached the front doors, they swung open of their own accord, revealing a vaulted chapel that was dark and empty. Aging marble tiles covered the floor, while the walls and pillars were hewn from rough-cut stone. A ray of light shone down from the cupola, illuminating the apse at the center.

And there, embedded in a slab of pure white marble, stood the sword.

Her breath caught in her throat. Once again, she felt the call of destiny compelling her forward. She covered her head with one of the shawls by the entrance and quietly stepped inside.

“Hello?” she said aloud. Though her voice was barely louder than a whisper, it carried throughout the sanctuary.

Tamuna, a voice spoke in her mind. She froze, her blood turning to ice. Was someone behind her? She glanced over her shoulder, but saw only shadows. Perhaps the wind was playing tricks with—

Tamuna, the voice spoke again, this time as clear as if she had heard it with her ears. She spun around, but again, she was alone.

As she turned back to the apse, the air immediately in front of her began to ripple like a mirage on a hot day. The sword seemed to morph and change, until she saw two images before her: the sword in the slab of marble, exactly as before, and a tall young man with golden hair and a carefully trimmed beard, wearing a silver coat of mail and the tunic of a warrior.

“Wh-who are you?” she asked, taking a step back. Something about his gaze held her, telling her there was no need to be afraid.

“Tamuna Leladze,” he said softly, looking at her with the barest hint of a smile. “Over a thousand years have passed since mortal eyes have seen this place, now in ruins in the world of men. Many have desired to wield me, but I have refused them all. I am Imeris, the twelfth and final sword, and this is my sanctuary.”

Tamuna frowned. “The twelfth sword?”

“Yes,” said the young man. His image faded until he was almost invisible, so that Tamuna found herself staring at the hilt of the sword in the marble slab. It called out to her the way it had in the tavern, and she realized that the man and the sword were the same.

“How did you know my name?”

“I know a lot about you, Tamuna,” said Imeris, coming back into view. “Our minds made contact the moment you laid eyes on me. I know how your heart longs for adventure, how you dream of faraway lands. And yet, your unshakeable loyalty to the few close and lasting friends in your life keeps you rooted to your home.”

“You can read my mind, then?”

“Only because you are too innocent to know how to shut me out. What I read in your mind, others can easily read in your countenance.”

Tamuna gazed into Imeris’s eyes and felt as if she were staring into a mirror back through centuries of time. And yet, he looked like a man only a few years older than her.

“Why have you brought me here?” she asked.

“Do you see the inscription written on the floor beneath your feet?”

Tamuna looked down and saw an inscription, written in old, faded letters in the marble floor. She squinted and tried to make them out, but the writing was too ancient for her to read.

“What is it?”

“It is an ancient prophecy, pronounced on the day when I was forged.”

“What does it say?”

“It says: This sword IMERIS, though last to be forged, certainly shall not be the least. For in the days when the order is broken and darkness sweeps across the face of the land, it shall await the one who will wield it in truth and wisdom to free the world of men.” He paused, looking her in the eye. “You are the one of whom the prophecy speaks, Tamuna. You are the one whom I have chosen.”

A crack of thunder sounded in the distance, sending chills down Tamuna’s spine. For a brief moment, a cloud overshadowed the sun, throwing the chapel into shadow. Imeris looked up and frowned.

“There isn’t much time,” he said. “The enemy is nearly here. They will seek to destroy us.”

“D-destroy us?” said Tamuna, her knees going weak. “There must be some mistake. I can’t possibly be the one you’re looking for. I’m just a tavern girl!”

Imeris looked at her long and hard, making her flinch. “There is no mistake, Tamuna. I recognized you the moment your mind reached out to my own.”

Her cheeks paled. “But…”

“Of course, you must take me up of your own free will if you take me up at all. If you so choose, you may leave this place by returning to the pool. Once you are submerged, you will return to your home.”

Tamuna nodded in relief. So there is a way out, she thought to herself. This doesn’t have to be my destiny. But even though the realization eased her somewhat, she couldn’t shake the feeling that to do so would be a mistake.

“What about the prophecy?” she asked. “If I reject you, will you find someone else?”

Imeris shrugged sadly and looked off into the distance. “Perhaps,” he said as he faded from her view. “Perhaps not.”

She hesitated a moment, alone now with just the sword. Once again, she felt it calling out to her, though this time, her thoughts were much clearer. You must take me up of your own free will, Imeris’s words came back to her. Another crack of thunder sounded in the distance, breaking the silence that had fallen with his departure.

I can’t do this, she told herself. This isn’t for me—I shouldn’t get involved.

As she walked back outside, her feet felt strangely heavy. A part of her longed to run back to the church and draw the sword out of the marble, just for the chance to experience an adventure. But of course, that wouldn’t be right. She couldn’t just leave Sopiko like that, after all that her aunt had done for her.

She reached the water’s edge, but hesitated before climbing in. A cool wind whistled over her skin, making the reeds dance and tossing back her long black hair. The surface of the water rippled, while a mass of giant thunderheads towered in the sky. She shivered, and not just from the cold. Lightning flashed in the valley, and a shadow darker than any she’d ever seen raced across the forests toward the mountaintops. There was a presence in that shadow, something primal and dangerous that made chills shoot down her spine.

Thunder rolled across the land, giving her pause. What if Imeris was right—what if she was the one from the prophecy? And if she was, then what would happen if she didn’t follow through?

The thunderheads towered high above her now, blocking the sun, and a stiff wind blasted the lake and flattened the golden-brown grass. Something evil was in that storm. Her heart raced, and she knew that she had to turn back.

She ran to the mountain church as fast as her feet would take her. Her breath came in short bursts, and her heart pounded furiously in her chest. She sprinted through the open doorway and ran to the sword in the marble slab.

“Imeris!” she shouted, gasping for breath. “Imeris, where are you?”

The sword called out to her, just as it had in the tavern. This time, she didn’t hesitate. As the sunlight turned to darkness, she gripped the handle and pulled with as much strength as she could muster. Thunder cracked directly overhead, and the sword came free with a metallic hum.

And then she was falling again through the abyss, tumbling as if a crack in the earth had swallowed her.

Happiness is always a choice, take 2

CGP Grey made an awesome video last week, which should come as a surprise to nobody, but this one is exceptional even by CGP Grey’s standards. In it, he borrows some of Doctor Randy J. Paterson’s work in How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use and gives us a seven step program on how to be miserable. Those steps are:

Stay still.
Screw with your sleep.
Maximize your screen time.
Use your screen to stoke your negative emotions.
Set vapid goals.
Pursue happiness directly.
Follow your instincts.

Since this basically describes 80% of people on the internet at any given time, it comes as no surprise that the video soon went mega-viral.

Generally, I think most of CGP Grey’s anti-advice is spot on. However, there is one part that I disagree with rather strongly. It’s the part where he says:

True happiness is like a bird that might land on your ship, but never if you constantly stand guard to catch him. Instead, improve your ship and sail into warmer waters. The bird will land when you aren’t looking.

Happiness is not a bird that comes and goes as it pleases, without any input from you. Instead, it is a decision you make on how you will respond to things outside of your control.

In other words, happiness is always a choice.

A while ago, I wrote a blog post on the subject. In it, I said:

There are only two classes of things in this world: things that act, and things that are acted upon. Empowerment is when you give somebody the ability to act for themselves, independent of outside forces. Disempowerment is when you take that ability away.

There is nothing more empowering than to realize that no matter where you are in life—no matter how shitty your circumstances—you can always still choose to be happy.

Happiness is a feeling that only exists inside of you. It is not something external that is forced or bestowed upon you by outside forces. It is wholly internal to your heart and mind. It is a reaction to outside forces—a reaction that you choose to make.

If happiness is not a choice—if it is something over which we have no control—then we cannot have any control over any of our feelings. Our passions are external forces that act upon us, and we are powerless to stop them because our emotional development ended at age two.

Is there anything empowering or liberating about this philosophy? No. Quite the opposite. It debases mankind and makes us no better than the animals. It destroys our agency and makes us slaves to our passions.

Happiness is always a choice.

That said, I do think there’s some truth to CGP Grey’s bird analogy as well. Happiness is not like a bird, but joy, or enduring happiness, is.

Joy is a deeper form of happiness that comes as a result of hard work and accomplishment. We can’t decide to have joy without first putting in the effort. And even when we do put in the effort, there’s no guarantee that joy will be the result. There may be pain, or failure, or even tragedy.

But even as we seek to do the things that will bring us joy, we can choose to be happy along the way. Indeed, we must. If we don’t, we risk losing the hope that enables and empowers us to keep striving. Choosing to be happy, no matter the circumstances, is the first step toward finding joy.

However, it’s important to point out that this is not a cure for depression or mental illness, which are medical conditions and must be treated as such. Choosing to be happy will not cure your mental illness any more than smiling will cure diabetes.

So, perhaps not a major disagreement, but definitely a legitimate quibble. What are your thoughts?