Table of Contents
The latest
This newsletter is going to be a little bit different. I’m going to try and keep it more themed, as I’ve had a lot happen on one specific situation with the passing of my grandfather recently (RIP Gramps). This event has me thinking and feeling a lot of recent, so this is going to be heavily focused on all the ideas I’m thinking about — and there’s a lot I want to get off my chest.
This experience has been a real eye opener and it’s made me rethink some key things, learn critical lessons and brought me closer to people as a whole.
P.S. I’m not sharing this for your sympathy or your condolences — I don’t need it. Death is a part of life. I’m sharing this so that others may learn from the insights and clarity I’ve recently had from this event.
Ideas
Memento mori. Remember death. I do my best to live by this all the time, knowing that death is impending and that we all have a short time here. But experiencing it first hand (this was the closest death that’s happened to me, which is a testament to how fortunate I’ve been with family and friends thus far).
Work is amazing, but life isn’t about just working. It’s about the life you share with others. It’s less quantifiable and you can’t capture it as easy. It’s more fleeting than anything, but there’s beauty in that. You can’t keep it forever. Time fades, memory fades and everything you experience will eventually be gone. But that’s living. And the best you can do is to live, lead by example and share your lessons and first hand experience to the best of your capabilities, so that others may learn from it too.
Be aware of the whispers from the universe. Sometimes these thoughts are your ego trying to sabotage you, but other times they are the universe guiding you in the exact direction you’ve been visualizing, asking and praying for. The better you can get at evolving your intuition, the more you’ll be able to decipher the difference. One is more of a thought, the other is more of a full body, energetic experience and this area is critical to work on. I unfortunately ignored the whispers and now the man I knew is gone forever, and I was never able to capture something I wanted to with him that gave him a degree of immortality, and I can never get this back. The potential for it is gone forever.
Stop waiting once you’re clear on what your next steps are. When you get a green light, go. There’s value in acting strategically — not acting too fast to the point where you’re operating on emotions and being rash, the clarity that comes from sleeping on key decisions, and taking time to really listen to your intuition instead of your cracked out brain. But there’s also downside in waiting too long. If I’m being honest, I’ve found myself in a pattern for much of my life of waiting just a little too long for things and it’s something I need to work on, because I can think of a whole list of these things and putting things off too long has seriously capped my potential.
We don’t have forever with people. I put off social events so much, honestly, partially because of insecurity that I’m not far enough on my projects and I want to update with better news — which I need to heal on because no matter I do, it never feels like enough and I always feel like I’m behind and not far enough on my journey, though it lessens as time goes on. But I just need to clear it all together. And the silliest part is usually people don’t care, they just want to see me and I only have so many more of these events left, yet I cap them because I’d rather be farther ahead with work, but there’s no finish line. There’s always more to do, more to create, more to make. Now, for your life, ask yourself — What trips or vacations are you pushing off? What hangouts are you procrastinating on for a better time? What things, if you were on your death bed, would you have wished you’d done with the people you love the most? You don’t have forever. Take action.
Does death make us liars? For some reason, when someone dies it’s as if everything they created for their legacy, even if it was shit, just goes away and we only focus on the good. It’s so strange to me. To be transparent, my grandfather used to be a very vibrant, happy dude. He was an old school, lone wolf, creative, living a very different but fascinating life out in the country, in a house he built with his own hands, constantly working on new things but struggling to finish very few. I have so many awesome memories with him growing up — he was an awesome grandpa. But over the past 5 years, he became insanely bitter (partially due to thinking the family around him who aren’t religious (almost all of us) are going to hell, and partially due to some unresolved energy inside of him) and while his relationships with his Christian friends apparently flourished, outside of that, his relationships with his blood suffered. Such is life. We still emailed for birthdays and holidays, but I hadn’t seen him in 2 and a half years, because well, I didn’t really want to. I only have so much time and energy in the day, and being in building mode, I try to limit my socializing as much as possible, especially with someone who became so uphill to talk to because he was so stubborn, rigid and his ego had consumed him. So when he passed, I had to wonder to myself, why is it that when people cross the line from living to dead, do we change the narrative that we tell ourselves about them? I can say to myself that I wish I got to see him one last time, but how much did I really? If I wanted to see him bad enough, wouldn’t I have just done it? Also, why do we forget all the person’s faults and track record when they’re gone, seeing them as such a “great” person, when almost everyone’s life on planet earth was a mediocre, uninspiring legacy, made up of mostly untapped potential? In this specific case, all I remember from him over the last 5 years was how unhappy he was. Talking to my Dad, he told me that I’ll remember him better as time passes , but why do we do this? I don’t want to remember just the good, I just want to remember reality. Not a version of it that my mind conjures up, though I understand that’s a very challenging thing to achieve. All this to say, this behaviour is so strange to me and I don’t understand why we treat the dead so differently than we treat the living, and pretend like it’s completely okay. Humans are truly full of it sometimes. That being said, I’m also working on trying not to not remember him by his downfalls over the last 5 years and instead remember him by who he was in the rest of his life, and more importantly, who he was in his heart and what he is now at a soul level. And so far, that’s been really useful.
People care more than you think. I vanished off of discord where I used to be very fucking active, but needed to pull back because it became a huge waste of time. I needed to go insular and focus on advancing my businesses, which I very much did. But some key people who I spoke to enough reached out and checked in on me, which really meant a lot. Then, with the passing of my grandfather, I really appreciated how many people in my family reached out. And I know my friends would be too if I went around sharing this kind of thing, but I don’t. I just deal with it. And I only bring it up if there’s another reason to. It sometimes can feel like people don’t care, but there is a part of them that does — everyone is just equally wrapped in their own stuff. These little moments and gestures however, can go a long way in reminding us that the people around us love and care about us.
Let yourself feel whatever you feel. Usually, I don’t think much of death. It is what it is. Birth is signing up for death, that’s how this life works. We are here for a short time, and then we leave. I also don’t view it as an end, but rather a transition point where we leave our physical bodies and enter a different realm. So the time when death affects me most is in movies because once they’re dead, they actually die within that story. There’s actual, permanent death. Plus the soundtrack amplifies everything and the emotions of the actors affect me. But in real life, I’m usually a total rock 🗿 because it’s not the end, just a change, where they leave the physical body we’re here for briefly in, then their soul continues into a different dimension where they see clearly again and feel peace again — they’re done partaking in the simulation for a bit. But this time, because it ended very questionably, I had lot of emotions come up and it also reminded me of how impermanent life is. I’ve cried more in this one experience than any other death combined. In public, I treat things differently. But in private, I’m not suppressing it, I’m just letting myself feel whatever is coming up. I’m welcoming it, and letting myself process it so that the emotions may clear and I can use this experience for my evolution.
You can’t keep everything forever. Things just keep dying on me, and I believe it’s the universe trying to teach me that I can’t own everything in this life. I wish to keep conversations forever — I lose critical ones on discord. I wish I could keep footage forever — hard drive dies last year and I lose some key videos. I want to film a conversation with my family so that future generations can meet my Grandfather — he dies before I get around to it. Life is fleeting. It’s on rent. Though my mind will try its best to take things with me to the grave and create immortality through media, I can’t take anything with me to the grave. I can however, do my best to leave an amazing legacy behind, while knowing that even that that will eventually expire some day, too.
I’m tired of living my life “behind”. I found some footage of our final family visit with Gramps in late 2020, that was never released and a photo that was never shared, because there was a mix up and I thought Mom had shared it with him, but it turns out that I didn’t send it to her. I have so much fucking footage that I’ve filmed and photos that I’ve taken that have never seen the light of day. I’m so tired of living from this place of “being behind” and I want to just share my work. That includes getting these main channel videos out, the second channel videos out and just creating for myself again. We’re getting closer all the time — I am working on these things — and I also need to clear the energy around it so it doesn’t pop back up in another format, because anytime you try to fix something without addressing the root cause, the root cause always finds another way to force itself back into your reality with different people and situations. It’s the way of this energetic world. For that reason, it’s critical for us to focus on the cause and resolve the underlying energy (a huge focus of my consulting program). Overall, living from this place of “behind” has cost me more than I could ever quantify and I’m ready to just live from a different place of expression in its proper time (that is fucking beautiful, god damn. This is the first time I’ve ever put it like that).
On the same type of train as the last thought, are you spending your time doing what’s essential? Death clarifies this. If I died today, my life would have been wasted in comparison to what I could have done. I’ve created some very cool things in my life, but it’s a very, very, very, very, very small percentage of what I will create throughout the rest of my life. I’ve further clarified that I’m super done with freelance creative/marketing. I’ve loved working with the people I’ve worked with, but I can’t be asked anymore to do the labour portion of this. I am limiting my potential impact on this planet by continuing to do this. I’m so fucking over building other people’s businesses. I want to build my own. I want to be spending ALL of my time and energy creating my business, having a grand impact on the world, solving key challenges, and making a fuck ton of money. But every time I’m continuing to do something that I don’t want to do, I’m taking away from the potential impact I can have on this world. I’ve been doing a good job building out the program of recent, but it’s time to turn it into overdrive, get a couple more clients in consulting, then completely stop creating and marketing for others. This isn’t my calling in life.
Resources
Annihilate from Across the Spider-Verse. The one day, I decided to drink a lot of coffee and I looped this song around 40 times. I’m usually against listening to music with lyrics while I’m working, but this was an interesting experiment because I became numb to the words in the song because I heard it so many times due to repetition. It became a pattern. Be cautious of the lyrics you choose because the words are absolutely programming your mind, but it can also work. ie. right now, looping Alive by Kx5 (deadmau5 and Kaskade)
Theon Von on Full Send. I laughed so fucking hard watching this episode. I watched most of it while high and the way Theo’s brain works is just incredible lol. One of my favourite comedians.
Andy Frisella x Kyle Creek. Awesome episode. Great episode on going against AI, creativity, writing, world events, and how the people in politics and Hollywood are leveraged to do things they don’t want to be doing.
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Much love guys. Remember, this life is short. Love the people around you and do the things you know you should be doing, knowing it’s all going to expire some day.
—Josh
P.S. Love you, Gramps.
