Good morning, John.

About your video yesterday: when you are hiking up a mountain, there's this thing called a false summit,  where you look ahead and you see what looks like the top of the mountain.  But then when you get there, you realize that, in fact, it was the whole time,  like, a slight rise that was occluding the actual summit from your view.  You thought you were about to get to the summit, but you still have a ways to go.  It may be that you're the kind of person who gets to a summit and thinks, I did it,  but what was the point, exactly? Whereas I might be more the kind of guy  who gets to a summit and thinks, this wasn't the real summit, it's further on.  To illustrate, here's the story of one of the weirdest days of my life.

I was in New York City. It was 2008, and I had just attended my first Nerdfighter gathering.  I was wearing a fan-made Nerdfighteria T-shirt under my business suit, and I was in an office  in a building on Madison Avenue making a deal to sell my blog, Ecogeek, to Scientific American.  In exchange, I would get both money and a job at Scientific American. It was a real, like,  dream come true, I did it, kind of day for me.

Additionally, walking down Madison Avenue  with a million people in  every direction, I ran into  my high school ex-girlfriend from Orlando. It was a weird day.  But then, somewhat quickly, August 2008 became September 2008 and Lehman Brothers  just stopped existing and the entire economy crashed. And the company that owned  Scientific American said, indefinitely pause all deals.

And that deal is still on pause, John. But in the meantime, I'd been like, look, what's that over there? Is that another summit?  You and I were doing a lot of climbing on YouTube.

I'll say, neither of us ever got to the peak of  that summit, but we've got plenty high to get a nice view. By 2009, vlogbrothers was starting  to be my full time job anyway. So I didn't really have a reason to mourn losing that opportunity.  I was doing a very cool  thing, it was very fulfilling.  Honestly, I don't feel like  I ever thought to myself,  man, that was a false summit, I think I thought, that one looks real!

I think it's worth asking,  what makes something look like a summit? Is it social status? Money?

The stories of  our heroes, the expectations of our families? Freedom from worry? A broader set of  abilities and opportunities?

And it's worth asking, because I think there's  something that sets some of those things apart from others, which you really hit on in the end  of your video yesterday, something that answers the question, what exactly is the point? Another thing that happened to me in 2008, our downstairs neighbor moved out, and we  promptly asked our landlord if we could move into that apartment because it had a washer  and dryer in the basement. Going to the laundry every week or two, despite the fact that our  laundromat was called Sparkle Temptations and had soft-serve and hot dogs, it was a  problem in my life.

Having the money and opportunity to move downstairs solved a  problem for me. I didn't dream of having a washer and dryer. I wasn't thinking, the point  of life is to get up there!

I just didn’t want to have to go to the laundromat anymore.  I wasn't dreaming, I was problem solving. And I think getting stuck wanting to fulfill  your dreams can actually be harmful. Number one, you probably won't get there,  and that will leave you unsatisfied.

And number two, if you do, you may find that once  you're there, you aren't sure what the point was. I don't know if this is gonna make me some  enemies, but I think that dreams are a tool that should be abandoned the moment  they start to cause problems. I have no loyalty to my dreams anymore.

To anybody who needs  to hear this, you have no obligations to your former selves. They know less than you,  and they also don't exist. But, of course, we need things to push us forward, so if it isn't dreams, what is it?  What is success if not accomplishing your dreams?

I think I have an answer to this question.  I think that life is filled  with a string of summits,  and they are simply solutions to problems,  solving problems for myself and solving problems for other people. And in that situation,  there's always an answer to “what is the point?” The point is that I don't have to go to the  laundromat anymore. But also, the people at the laundromat were solving a problem for me:  hot dogs and soft serve so that laundry sucked a little less.

Now, importantly, if I took that  extra time that I got not going to the laundromat, and I just wasted it scrolling on TikTok,  then that wouldn't actually be solving much of a problem for myself. And so, John, I do worry sometimes that the work I do here on the Internet maybe solves  problems for some people, but also creates problems for some people. I think the amount  of time that we spend at the mercy of brain-hijacking algorithms collaborating with  talented, ambitious humans, is actually a pretty huge problem.

So, having identified that,  I'm spending more time these days imagining solutions to that problem to help myself  and others get out of that loop. And that's one reason why I got excited about working  on The Book of Good

Times: it's a simple, low barrier way to engage a little bit more  with yourself. And there are so many things that are trying to keep me from engaging  with myself these days, and I think it's important to create tools that do the opposite of that. Also, lots and lots of people said they wanted to buy multiple copies. The way that Kickstarters  work is a little weird, so it can't just, like, have you pick however many you want,  but I did make it so that you can get five of either the paperback or the hardcover  or a bundle that has one of both.

But I don't think we're gonna be able to have any of those  guaranteed for Christmas. Sorry. The world has plenty of problems, huge and tiny.

A dream is just one tool that you can use to  drive yourself into a situation where you start having the tools to apply to those problems.  But there are other ways to develop tools that help you solve problems too, and one of them  is just to be focused on solving problems. Either way, if you end up using those tools  differently than you thought you would, or even not using them at all, who cares?  As long as you are helping solve problems for yourself and for others,   you never have to ask, what's the point? Because that's the point.

John, I'll see you tomorrow.