.SOMETIMES RAW.

If you were to die tomorrow, what one thing (or few things) would you be most disappointed that you weren’t able to complete, change, or achieve? Here is some of my wisdom: I don’t need praise or attention to have value.

• Cultivate twelve people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.
• When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
• If winning becomes too important in a game, change the rules to make it more fun. Changing rules can become the new game.
• The best way to get a correct answer on the internet is to post an obviously wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you.
• Don’t wait for the storm to pass; dance in the rain.
• We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years. A long game will compound small gains to overcome even big mistakes.
• A wise man said, “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, “Is it true?” At the second gate ask, “Is it necessary?” At the third gate ask, “Is it kind?”
• To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met, move them onto a slow internet connection. Observe.
• Take note if you find yourself wondering “Where is my good knife? Or, where is my good pen?” That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
• About 99% of the time, the right time is right now.
• No one is as impressed with your possessions as you are.
• Don’t ever work for someone you dont want to become.
• Don’t keep making the same mistakes; try to make new mistakes.
• If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them money.
• Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
• When you lead, your real job is to create more leaders, not more followers.
• Criticize in private, praise in public!
• Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson, you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive, that means you still have lessons to learn.
• Productivity is often a distraction. Don’t aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible, rather aim for better tasks that you never want to stop doing.
• Immediately pay what you owe to vendors, workers, and contractors. They will go out of their way to work with you first next time. Also, always be friendly to vendors, workers, and contractors.
• The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.”
• Speak confidently as if you are right, but listen carefully as if you are wrong.
• Never ask a woman if she is pregnant. Let her tell you if she is.
• Three things you need: The ability to not give up something till it works, the ability to give up something that does not work, and the trust in other people to help you distinguish between the two.
• You’ll get 10x better results by elevating good behaviour rather than punishing bad behaviour, especially in children, colleagues, and animals.
• Spend as much time crafting the subject line of an email as the message itself because the subject line is often the only thing people read.
• Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
• A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
• Make stuff that is good for people to have.
• 90% of everything is crap. If you think you don’t like opera, romance novels, TikTok, country music, or vegan food, keep trying to see if you can find the 10% that is not crap. Real love is not.
• Thank the teacher who changed your life.
• You can’t reason someone out of a notion that they didn’t reason themselves into.
• Buy used books. They have the same words as the new ones. Also libraries.
• You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.
• Take the stairs. Always take the stairs.
• When you arrive at your room in a hotel, locate the emergency exits. It only takes a minute.
• The only productive way to answer “what should I do now?” is to first tackle the question of “who should I become?”
• It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.
• Art is whatever you can get away with.
• For the best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.
• Don’t wait in line to eat something famous. It is rarely worth the wait.
• To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met, move them to a slow internet connection. Observe.
• Do something strange. Make a habit of your weird.
• Don’t believe everything you think you believe.
• When introduced to someone make eye contact and count to 4. You’ll both remember each other.
• Take note if you find yourself wondering “Where is my good knife? Or, where is my good pen?” That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
• When you are stuck, explain your problem to others. Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution. Make “explaining the problem” part of your troubleshooting process.
• Your group can achieve great things way beyond your means simply by showing people that they are appreciated.
• Spend time in nature. Especially with kids.
• You are as big as the things that make you angry.
• Time and space are limited. Remove, give away, throw out things in your life that dont spark joy any longer in order to make room for those that do.
• Focus on directions rather than destinations. Who knows their destiny? But maintain the right direction and you’ll arrive at where you want to go.
• Aim to die broke. Give to your beneficiaries before you die; it’s more fun and useful. Spend it all. Your last check should go to the funeral home and it should bounce.
• You can do something now to live the life you want to live.
• I don’t have to live like everybody else. In fact, I am happier if I don’t.

*an article I dedicate to my brother Thomas Weiss, who I dearly love and look up to when it comes to anything numbers. And a lot more, too.

Sometimes it feels like the things we learned in school are useless and nothing drives that point home more than the countless math rules that do not apply to our real adult lives. In fact, when you graph the number of mathematical principles that disappoint us over time, it is a monotonically increasing line. Like all other things in life. My brother helped me with my maths and statistics endeavours when I worked on my Bachelor- and Master’s degrees and I most certainly caused his hair to turn grey a bit faster. I have a couple of ideas where maths comes in handy, though.

1. Thanks to COVID, everyone now understands that describing yourself as postive on a dating app is a negative, but to be honest, it’s always been annoying.
2. A pizza can be evenly divided into eight slices, but it is only meant to serve two. Or one. Your target weight is just a number, and some numbers aren’t even real. Or rational!
3. There are no perfect numbers. They are all annoying, especially when you are the one who got stuck dividing up the check at a group dinner again.
4. You may have been taught that the average is the mean when, in fact, it is usually the really hot or rich ones that are mean.
5. Subtracting things doesn’t always make them smaller. For example, when I subtracted shaving from my schedule, that gnawing feeling that I will die alone got exponentially bigger.
6. To find out if a number is divisible by three, you don’t have to add up all the digits in the number. You can just use Google.
7. On the subject of angels, Acute angles can be more than 90 degrees. The things is, I look cute from all angles. Obtuse doesn’t mean more than 90 degrees; it means you don’t believe in wearing masks. Straight angles are exactly 180 degrees. But is anyone truly exactly 180 degrees?
8. The sum of the interior of a triangle isn’t 180 degrees; it’s 20 degrees below zero when you’re the one being shut out of the throuple. (FYI: A throuple is a relationship between three people who have all unanimously agreed to be in a romantic, loving, relationship together with the consent of all people involved)
9. You can’t just multiply by zero to cancel everything out. Covid, for example, you have to subtract.
10. The butterfly method isn’t to compare fractions. It’s a sex thing. I won’t explain.
11. Cubing things doesn’t increase their volume — there isn’t enough cheese. There is never enough cheese.
12. And when you get to the root of it, being a square doesn’t mean you have more to offer. It just makes you very, very boring.
13. Items contained within parenthesis are afterthoughts and do not come first (no matter how much your boyfriend wants to make a big deal of that micropenis comment you MEANT AS A JOKE).
14. Don’t solve for your X. They need to figure it out on their own.
15. The Pythagorean theorem… actually, I have no idea what this is. But Pythagoras sounds hot. Call me, you Greek God, you.
16. A negative times a negative does not equal a positive. It equals an ugly divorce.
17. A positive times a positive also isn’t positive. It equals a couple with a joint Instagram account that posts inspirational quotes. And no, you don’t think their kid is cute, especially after the baby content started replacing the dog content.
18. But who can afford kids? Unless the absolute value is the only relevant measure of net worth, in which case the government owes people money for student loan debt. And don’t even get me started on the cost of healthcare, which could not be more relevant right now. Because the probability of getting COVID is not the frequency of COVID divided by the total population. But it’s worth noting that percentages can be higher than 100. For example, I’m 700% sure the government is not transparant, follows their own agenda which might be unethical, only looks out for the 1% and does not care about the cost and collateral damage of anybody else. As I was saying, who can afford kids?

NOTE: There are some exceptions where math rules do apply. For example, in division, the top does go into the bottom, pending the bottom’s consent, of course. Actually, that’s the only one.

Everyone’s still so scared of COVID. But come on, people. It’s going to be endemic soon enough. And that has to mean, uh, something. Endemic means freedom, more or less. For some time. Sometimes more, but occasionally less. They say less is more, and that will be the case here. Except when more is less. It means hopefully no more putting on a mask. Also, no more taking it off. You will never have to remember to bring one because you will never be able to forget. Endemic means no more shots and no more boosters. Okay, well, not no more. But like on a regular schedule, when your doctor tells you. It won’t be every few months; it will be, at most, three or four times a year.

It means regular school. With, of course, restrictions regularly in place. But they won’t be that strict. Just regular old strict, applied regularly. And strictly.

It means dining indoors. If you thought all this time that the virus couldn’t get you as long as you were sitting and eating, then you are in luck. Once things are endemic, you will be proven to be just as right and as wrong as you were all along. Masks, of course, need to be worn only when entering the restaurant but at the table, you can cough and sneeze all over your friends.

Endemic means “completely and utterly gone” – is what I might say if I didn’t know what endemic meant and you just didn’t give me that weird look. Which I do and you did, so, um, yeah – we are good to move on, both of us totally knowing what the word means. It means less blurring of the line between work and home. Your house will go back to being a place that just happens to have a desk and computer and a spouse who nags you for typing too loudly. Your office will be the place that happens to have a bed and dresser and a named partner who nags you for chewing too loudly.

Endemic means no more testing. Or it means a lot more testing. Do you know the answer? I, of course, know. I am just testing you.

Endemic means getting together with friends. Wait, sorry, forgot my punctuation – it means getting together with Friends. Or Seinfeld. But not Sex and the City, which doesn’t seem to be streaming. And also not your friend Samantha in your own city, as Samantha’s immunocompromised and even endemic cities are COVID clusters.

It means travelling the world again. But just to Sweden. In any other country, you will need fifteen boosters.

Endemic means a return to crowded places. Like theaters. And then hospitals. Plus stadiums. And then hospitals. And arenas. Followed by hospitals. Very crowded hospitals.

It means no more supply chain issues. And no more inflation. And no more having to pretend your mask makes you unable to talk so you don’t intimidate others with just how much you absolutely know what all of those terms mean too.

It means seeing grandma. At her memorial service, sure. But, you know, also other places. Because endemic means “I see you.” And also ICU.

It means not quarantining for ten days. As for the other three hundred fifty-five days, who’s to say? But for ten days, you should be good. Except if you’re not because you have COVID. Which will be endemic, so be careful.

It means not only putting a period on COVID, but also an asterisk.*

It means the dawn of a new day, in that you’ll be groggy and in your pyjamas and likely hungover.

Sure, we won’t be able to do everything because endemic doesn’t mean freedom. Yes, I know I said it did, but endemic means the freedom to change my mind—if that’s okay with you. If not, I’m not sorry since endemic means never having to say you’re sorry.

The bottom line is we’re all going to die.

The real bottom line is that far fewer of us will die as quickly once things are endemic. Though far more of us will die even more slowly. On the inside.