Your polymathic curriculum is staring you in the face

(How I'm surviving the most stressful period of my life)

I fulfilled one of my biggest dreams this year:

Living in LA.

Not only that, but a nice part of West LA where I have:

• Muay Thai

• Coffeeshops

• Salsa classes

• Grocery stores

• Popular attractions

• UCLA (one of the top public uni’s in the US)

Everything is a 5-15 minute walk or a 30 minute bus ride. I pay 0 in gas and my rent is (relatively) cheap. Shit, I even have a rooftop pool with a sick view.

Yet I’m in the most difficult period of my life.

I assumed I would be scheduled at my day job at least 3-4 days/week with the occasional 5 day week. I’d have enough for expenses, travel, saving up for a move to Southeast Asia, and gallons (liters for my metric homies) of espressos.

What I didn’t foresee was getting my hours cut.

I’m down to 2x-3x days a week. I’m not screwed, but I can’t do most of the things I wanted to, and my move to Southeast Asia may have to be postponed.

On top of all that, I’m balancing:

• A new relationship that’s long distance (15 hour time difference)

• Writing on Threads & Substack

• Spiritual practice

• Fitness goals

I could spend multiple newsletters yapping about just one of these.

But this isn’t about personal finance, fitness, or writing. It’s not even about how I’m balancing these pursuits while dealing with financial trouble.

It’s about how this current conundrum I’m in is the pursuit...

Your polymathic curriculum is staring you in the face.

I will start with a Greek word fundamental to polymathy:

Areté.

It’s about excellence, mastery, virtue, and reaching your highest potential. My favorite part about it is its holistic nature. You develop strength, moral character, and spirit along with the intellect.

In the modern world this idea has been lost. We prize specialists and venerate the people known for one thing.

Me? I’m just a guy. I don’t want to spend my life mastering one thing.

I want master life itself. And frankly, I don’t care to be known for one thing. If you’re reading this newsletter, I’m assuming you feel the same.

But I’ve had many problems along the way. The three biggest being:

• Obesity

• Depression

• Porn addiction

I struggled with these for 10-15 years, at the same time. I thought they kept me from “reaching” this ideal. That once I solved all of these, I could finally focus on my mission of mastering myself.

Looking back, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

These problems were the path to mastery.

• Obesity forced me to take my health seriously.

• Porn addiction showed me what I truly wanted was soul level intimacy.

• Depression pushed me to seek answers about existence and reality no one could provide.

I was led through books, people, YouTube binges, multiple countries, in fields spanning neuroscience, technology, psychology, spirituality, philosophy, therapy, meditation, all to realize it wasn’t solving obesity, depression, or porn addiction. It was about becoming a fuller human being.

Your problems are not distractions from your polymathic pursuits. They’re not something to balance with other interests.

They are the pursuit.

The calling of areté.

Your problems may not look like mine. Whatever those are...

A problem becomes your polymathic curriculum the moment you stop asking “How do I get rid of this?” and start asking “What must I learn to solve this problem?”

Nowadays words like “learn” and “solve” have a heady connotation.

It makes your problems sound like a math equation. What solving your problem means you’ve understood it at every level that it demands. It’s not about having more information or thinking. (For the math nerds, it’s more like a gigantic system of equations spanning multiple levels of reality)

“To know and not do, is not to know.”

Goethe

Let me give you an example.

In the early days of trying to lose weight, I thought that reading more articles about weight loss would finally help me lose weight.

But even with the action I took, I continually fell to vicious cycles of restriction and binging. Many times I gave up because I thought I was fated to be fat forever. Over a decade, I uncovered the deeper layers of problems (that literally nobody in the fitness industry talks about): the behavioral patterns, traumas, emotions, and spiritual blocks around identity and my relationship with food.

You can see how this problem of losing fat seemed physical at first (and it was), but it also existed on a psychological, emotional, and spiritual level.

By uncovering, understanding, and solving each sub-problem, I became a more fully realized human being. Losing weight, getting out of depression, and quitting porn were simply the byproduct.

Bringing it back to my LA woes...

I’ll be honest.

I don’t like being in this situation. It’s stressful as hell, sucks major ass, and on the surface, seems like a painful distraction from my goals.

But through the lens I’ve detailed, it’s the next class in my polymathic curriculum.

Here’s the syllabus so far:

• Staying present even under stress

• Use facts & logic to combat financial anxiety

• Building & maintaining a loving relationship

• Closely tracking every dollar going in and out of my bank account

• Deprioritizing fitness progress in favor of maintenance (and being okay with it)

If you’re waiting to fix your life before you start your ‘real pursuit’… this is your sign.

The pursuit has already begun.

I will end this with a quote from Michael Meade:

Genius hides behind the wound and one of the greatest wounds in life is to not know who we are intended to be or what we are supposed to serve in life.

See ya soon,

Aaron