#149: How to Live in The Moment

Hey folks, Tim here. My bestselling card game, Coyote, which I made with the amazing team at Exploding Kittens, just won the Pop Insider Best geeky game of 2025 and also best Stocking Filler in the Made for Moms Toy Awards 2025. It is on sale everywhere. It's cheap, it's fast to learn, has 4.8 stars out of five. People are loving it. CoyoteGame.com will take you to all the retailers, but you can find it everywhere. It is a game of thinking fast and laughing faster. Think char meets hot potato meets a bunch of brain fun. It's good for your head. It's perfect for families with kids age 10 plus or adults who are kids at heart or don't take themselves too seriously. A lot of adults love this game and as I said, it's available everywhere. Amazon, Walmart, Target 8,000 plus retail locations, you name it.

So please check it out.

I loved making it. People are really enjoying it. It has 300 or 400 million plus social views of gameplay online and try it. Enjoy it this holiday season. Check it out coyotegame.com one more time. That's coyote game.com or anywhere you buy your games. Now back to the episode Optimal Minimal.

At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Can I answer your personal question?

Now it is what if I did the opposite?

I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

Ferris Show.

Greetings ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. This is a shorter episode instead of a long format interview with an expert of some type. And we're going to focus on Seneca, my favorite stoic thinker and author, Seneca the Younger. His writing that I'm going to highlight an Excerpt is roughly 2,000 years old, yet it is timeless and we are going to listen to on the Shortness of Life. This is an essay that I revisit at least once a quarter, along with all of his other letters that you can listen to if you would like, through the Tao of seneca@audible.com timsbooks and this particular letter I will highlight my favorite portion, which begins with why do you torment yourself and lose weight over some problem? And on it goes. This is a fantastic reminder to mind the critical few, to ignore the trivial many, and much, much more. I hope you enjoy it.

Letter 49 on the shortness of Life A man is indeed lazy and careless, my dear Lucilius. If he is Reminded of a friend only by seeing some landscape which stirs the memory. And yet there are times when the old familiar haunts stir up a sense of loss that has been stored away in the soul, not bringing back dead memories, but rousing them from their dormant state, just as the sight of a lost friend's favourite slave, or his cloak or his house renews the mourner's grief, even though it has been softened by time. Now, lo and behold Campania, and especially Naples and your beloved Pompeii struck me when I viewed them with a wonderfully fresh sense of longing for you. You stand in full view before my eyes. I am on the point of parting from you. I see you choking down your tears and resisting without success the emotions that well up at the very moment when you try to check them. I seem to have lost you but a moment ago for what is not but a moment ago when one begins to use the memory. It was but a moment ago that I sat as a lad in the school of the philosopher Soutyon. But a moment ago that I began to plead in the courts. But a moment ago that I lost the desire to plead. But a moment ago that I lost the ability. Infinitely swift is the flight of time, as those see more clearly who are looking backwards. For when we are intent on the present, we do not notice it. So gentle is the passage of time's headlong flight. Do you ask the reason for this? All past time is in the same place. It all presents the same aspect to us. It lies together. Everything slips into the same abyss. Besides, an event which in its entirety is of brief compass cannot contain long intervals. The time which we spend in living is but a point, nay, even less than a point. But this point of time, infinitesimal as it is, Nature has mocked, by making it seem outwardly of longer duration, she has taken one portion thereof and made it infancy. Another childhood, another youth, another. The gradual slope, so to speak, from youth to old age. And old age itself is still another. How many steps? For how short a climb? It was but a moment ago that I saw you off on your journey. And yet this moment ago makes up a goodly share of our existence, which is so brief we should reflect that it will soon come to an end. Altogether, in other years, time did not seem to me to go so swiftly. Now it seems fast beyond belief. Perhaps because I feel that the finish line is moving closer to me. Or it may be that I have begun to take heed and reckon up my losses. For this reason I am all the more Angry that some men claim the major portion of this time for superfluous things. Time which, no matter how carefully it is guarded, cannot suffice even for necessary things. Cicero declared that if the number of his days were doubled, he should not have the time to read the lyric poets. And you may rate the dialecticians in the same class, but they are foolish in a more melancholy way. The lyric poets are avowedly frivolous, but the dialecticians believe that they are themselves engaged upon serious business. I do not deny that one must cast a glance at dialectic, but it ought to be a mere glance, a sort of greeting from the threshold. Merely that one may not be deceived or judge these pursuits to contain any hidden matters of great worth. Why do you torment yourself and lose weight over some problem which it is more clever to have scorned than to solve? When a soldier is undisturbed and traveling at his ease, he can hunt for trifles along his way. But when the enemy is closing in on the rear and a command is given to quicken the pace, necessity makes him throw away everything which he picked up in moments of peace and leisure. I have no time to investigate disputed inflections of words or to try my cunning upon them. Behold the gathering clans, the fast shut gates and weapons whetted, ready for the war. I need a stout heart to hear without flinching this din of battle which sounds round about. And all would rightly think me mad if, when greybeards and women were heaping up rocks for the fortifications, when the armour clad youths inside the gates were awaiting or even demanding the order for a sally, when the spears of the foemen were quivering in our gates and the very ground was rocking with mines in subterranean passages. I say they would rightly think me mad if I were to sit idle putting such pretty posers as this. What you have not lost, you have. But you have not lost any horns. Therefore you have horns or other tricks constructed after the model of this piece of sheer silliness. And yet I may well seem, in your eyes, no less mad if I spend my energies on that sort of thing. For even now I am in a state of siege. And yet in the former case it would be merely a peril from the outside that threatened me and a wall that sundered me from the foe. As it is now, death dealing perils are in my very presence. I have no time for such nonsense. A mighty undertaking is on my hands. What am I to do? Death is on my trail and life is fleeting away. Teach me something with which to face these troubles. Bring it to pass that I shall cease trying to escape from death, and that life may cease to escape from me. Give me courage to meet hardships. Make me calm in the face of the unavoidable. Relax the straitened limits of the time which has allotted me. Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life's length, but upon the use we make of it. Also that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little. Say to me, when I lie down to sleep, you may not wake again, and when I return, you may never go forth again. You are mistaken if you think that only on an ocean voyage there is a very slight space between life and death. No, the distance between is just as narrow everywhere. It is not everywhere that death shows himself so near at hand, yet everywhere he is as near at hand. Rid me of these shadowy terrors, then you will more easily deliver to me the instruction for which I have prepared myself. At our birth, Nature made us teachable and gave us reason not perfect, but capable of being perfected. Discuss for me justice, duty, thrift, and that twofold purity, both the purity which abstains from another's person and that which takes care of one's own self. If you will only refuse to lead me along by paths, I shall more easily reach the goal at which I am aiming for. As the tragic poet, the language of truth is simple. We should not, therefore make that language intricate, since there is nothing less fitting for a soul of great endeavor than such crafty cleverness. Farewell.

Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.