💌 Why we take things for granted (and how to stop)

On fallacy of permanence, building a category, and monetizing your passion

I wanted to welcome 13 new people that I had to manually subscribe to this newsletter because I didn’t know people were subscribing to my Revue newsletter in the last four months. (So sorry if you weren’t getting any emails from me). I’m in the process of combining all subscribers that are coming from Substack, Revue and Gumroad to ConvertKit, so I appreciate your patience.

Helloo from Toronto,

I’m writing this at a downtown Toronto local coffee shop.

I didn’t know what to write about this week because my husband and I were so busy attending to his family.

My father-in-law recently had a knee replacement surgery, and we offered our home to his parents to keep a close eye on him while he recovered.

In the last two days that he’s been at our place, he reminded me of the patients I used to care for back when I worked at a hospital—sick and vulnerable.

He was so different from two weeks ago when we were traveling to the west coast. He was happy and relatively healthy while making dad jokes, etc.

Times like this remind me that we should never take things for granted.

But thinking about this made me curious, why do we even take things for granted?

Hubby and I with his dad accidentally photobombing us.

According to Psychology Today, taking something for granted means that you’re assuming that you won’t lose the thing or someone anytime soon.

This type of thinking is healthy because it helps us feel secure, which leads to happier and healthier relationships.

Although that’s a good thing, it’s not necessarily true.

Sure, it will help you feel secure in the short-term, but it can also lead to fallacy of permanence or the belief that things are permanent.

And as we know, nothing is permanent.

As a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said, “change is the only constant in life.”

So believing something will last forever leads us to take things for granted.

It’s easy to believe that your health, finances, or even your relationships will stay the same forever.

But in reality, it can change in less than a week.

So, how do you overcome the fallacy of permanence?

Without telling you how to live your precious life, here are 3 simple reminders of cliché advice in case you’ve forgotten about them ;)

🧘🏻‍♀️ Become more present. 

The more you are present with your life, the more you can appreciate what you have today. And if you do end up losing things or people around you, you feel less regret.

💛 Feel grateful. 

There are tons of research about gratitude leading to better well-being. The more you’re grateful for the things around you, the less you take things for granted.

🖼 See the big picture.

Remember the big picture whenever you’re caught up in your work, and start sacrificing quality time with your loved ones. Most of us use work as an excuse to provide for our families.

But in reality, our loved ones care more about spending quality time with us than what we can provide for them.

Taken with a 35 mm film camera during our visit to San Diego, California

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🧚 3 Fairy Tips for Multipassionate Creators

👩🏻‍💻 Your goal as a creator is to build your own category.

Your category is “the thing” that people will describe you as on the Internet.

If you were selling a finance book, you’d probably call your product a “personal finance” book, “business finance” book, or a “finance book for creators/freelancers”. If you didn’t know, I built an audience around the “multipassionate creator” category.

There were tons of creators online, but none of them were talking about how to niche down as someone with multiple passions/interests. So I started talking about it.

This category creation resulted from a simple 30-day writing challenge by Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush.

It’s crazy how a simple online writing challenge led to a brand.

📝Build a budget that makes you comfortable and happy in the short term.

Most of us grew up believing that we need to sacrifice comfort today for comfort tomorrow.

At least, that’s what most top-seller finance books recommend. But Derek Thompson begs to differ. He believes that there’s nothing wrong with saving less than 10% of your income in your 20s (which is the typical advice) and maybe increasing your saving rate to 20% or 30% when you’re in your 40s.

Life is way too unpredictable to follow the rules of people who know nothing about your situation.

🎙Your reality is made up by your brain, so you might as well create a reality that you love.

The reality that you have right now is a perception of your brain. This is why when two people watch the same movies or eat the same food, they can have differing opinions.

Because your reality is made up by your brain. (This is an oversimplification, there’s more to this.)

In this Unf*ck Your Brain podcast episode, the host teaches us how to make the most of our ability to create a reality that we would love.

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✨ Latest Work On The Internet

No articles, but I made a video on my experiences as I turned my passion for my writing into a monetizable passion. Hope you enjoy!

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🤔 A question for you this week:

What are the things you’ve been recently taking for granted?

With online love 💌 ,

Jerine