One life hack to end all life hacks

As a recovering biohacker, I’ve come to believe that there is no such thing as a true life hack.

I think the mindset that you can somehow hack yourself into a future state when your biology isn’t ready is a mistake, as we learned in last week’s letter.

It’s a lazy way of thinking really. It’s avoiding the work it takes to create change.

And it often causes more chaos.

Here’s what I do instead.

Stop thinking I can hack life.

Life isn’t meant to be hacked. I’ve tried, really hard.

The only thing that got me close was psychedelics, but even those experiences taught me this one core lesson:

Life is filled with challenge and the only way to have the opposite of challenge (happiness, peace, ease; whatever that is for you) is to go all the way through the challenge.

Not around it, because it can’t be escaped.

The discomfort is the window.

The friction you feel is the teacher and the experience is the way out.

It’s not as sexy as a shortcut, I get it. But it’s real.

We live in a confused world trying to speed up our progress, but slow down our aging.

We’re obsessed with growth yet we’re terrified of dying.

And that’s where we all end up.

Dead. Buried. 6 feet under. Composed into the earth.

But maybe that’s the real hack.

Not avoiding death, or failure, or breakdown, or suffering.

But letting it remind us how to really live.

To stop rushing. To feel the full weight of every experience.

To build lives we don’t need to escape from or optimize out of.

That’s it this week.

Just a reminder to slow down. Take it all in and be with it all.

No mental model, no framework, no tool, no exercise, no hack.

There’s something so underrated about fully feeling everything. The good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.

Not judging it, or running away from it. Just feeling it.

I hope you have a wonderful week full of it all.

Much Love,

Cory Firth
Creator of One Minute Weekend

Let’s work together!