Coffee, protein, fascism, and laundry – a day in the life, samsara edition

Hey hey!

It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these “day in the life” posts.

But the news this week sucks, and I’m not feeling any particular urge to write about the top 10 rooftop bars or anything. So let’s talk about samsara.

Samsara, or (more specifically) saṃsāra, is a Sanskrit word that refers to the universe, but also to the cycle of birth and rebirth. It could be the “cycle of aimless drifting, wandering or mundane existence”.

When Buddhists attempt to reach nirvana, they’re escaping from suffering and the cycle of reincarnation in samsara.

And Sanskrit is difficult. Let’s just say that samsara is “life” – it’s the stuff that’s happening while your mind clings to identification with its experience.

In my case, life (and stuff) starts pretty early in the morning.

Iced coffee and the brothers Franco

6:25 – I get up and pour yesterday’s coffee over ice, adding some heavy cream.

Spanish civilization has reached a point where not only can guys like me afford to have air conditioning installed in our houses, but we can also afford to use it on hot nights.

Long story short, I’m waking up fresh as a daisy, rather than (like last summer) in a pool of sweat.

Coffee in hand, I sit down on the living room rug to read. It’s the 50th anniversary of Franco’s death this year, and I’m preparing to write an article by reading Paul Preston’s 1000-page biography.

So far, I’m on Chapter II, and I learn that Francisco Franco and his younger brother Ramón were both national heroes by 1926.

Francisco (known to his family as Paquito, to differentiate him from his older cousin Pacón) was famous for his heroism in the Spanish colonial war in Morocco, and for being named the youngest general in Europe at age 33.

Ramón was a famous aviator, and completed (in early 1926) a transatlantic flight in a winged boat that had the press comparing him to a modern-day Christopher Columbus.

7:20 – My wife Morena is staring to show some signs of life in the bedroom.

I stand in the sun out on the balcony. The two orange cats on the roof of the garage downstairs squint up at me, knowing I’m not the one who throws them food in the mornings. That’s our next-door neighbor.

Expectations and Reality

7:50 – Morena’s up, with some sort of white cream all over her face, and making chai.

This is a process she brought from India, which involves boiling ginger, milk and spices while your husband becomes more and more agitated at the inefficiency of your morning routine, and finally decides to go out.

8:05 – Morena’s chai is still a work in progress. I’m dressed and heading down the stairs.

I sit in the sun a couple of blocks from the house.

Not wanting to walk around the neighborhood with a book about Franco in my hand, I’ve picked up Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. The essay “Expectations and Reality” has a quote from Charlie Munger that really gets my attention: “The world isn’t driven by greed, it’s driven by envy.”

People are incapable, says Housel, of keeping track of how well we’re all doing compared to previous generations. But we’re perfectly capable of resenting people around us who have more.

So in the end, everybody has a better life, but a lot of people feel poorer, because of social comparison.

Makes sense. And it also explains (for example) why people still complain about gentrification, when almost everyone in Spain is living incredibly rich lives by the standards of someone in the 1970s.

(There’s an online version of the Morgan Housel essay, but it’s not nearly as good as the version in the book. Just buy the book, or – if you prefer – check out his mega bestseller The Psychology of Money.)

Procrastination and (mostly) lean protein

9:15 – Morena’s out. We walk down to her office.

This is a family tradition of sorts, and prevents me from spending all morning looking at my laptop with a rounded spine. It’s about a 20-minute walk door to door.

We get coffee at a place called Caffeine on Carrer de Bilbao, and she goes up to start her work day.

9:40 – So now I’m drinking my coffee from a paper cup and on my way to get some ground beef. The butcher I go to at the Mercado de Clot is closed on Mondays, but the supermarket is right here. I get a kilo of ternera picada and carry it home in the paper bag, holding it in the crook of my arm like a football.

10:10 – I’m home and ready to start work, almost.

Honestly, I’m sort of avoiding work. Instead, I’m making a 4-egg breakfast and chopping some onion for the ground beef for later. I sauté the onion with a few cloves of garlic, then add the beef and some spices. At the end I throw in a few cubes of frozen spinach and sit down to eat my eggs.

10:15 – Briefly checking the news. Last week there was a new corruption scandal that will probably amount to nothing and I’m not going to waste a whole day looking into the details.

Today there’s a survey saying that more than 25% of people in Spain don’t think any of the party leaders would make a particularly good Prime Minister. 24% approve of the current PM, Pedro Sánchez.

And another significant percentage just don’t know who should be running things.

That mostly sums up my feelings.

Deep work and shallow symbolism

10:27 – Doing some SEO work.

Being a human with a website that gives information may be quaintly out of fashion by next Friday, with how fast AI is changing. Why get the answer to your question from someone who knows things, when you can get a computer at a data center to generate a plausible-sounding string of words instead?

I should start looking into new career options.

12:10 – Posting on LinkedIn for some reason. I’ve successfully gotten off Twitter, and I’m spending much less time on the other social networks. It’s totally worth it. But still. LinkedIn, for some reason.

12:23 – Dressed again, and heading to the gym. It’s two metro stops away.

On the train, I’m listening to the song Meth Lab Zoso Sticker by 7Horse.

In my brief attempt to get a university education, back in the early part of this century, I took a literature course in which we read James Joyce’s Ulysses. The professor suggested that when Leopold Bloom has forgotten his house key and spends the day wandering around Dublin keyless, the key represents his penis.

It’s called symbolism, and it’s quite sophisticated.

This sort of knowledge has served me well in life. Today, I can affirm that Meth Lab Zoso Sticker also makes several symbolic allusions to the singer’s penis.

Dope drum part, though.

Sweating on the mats of justice

12:51 – I’m at the gym early because some of the sweaty old guys have invited me to roll with them during open mat. We practice crushing each other in various positions while the other person tries to escape. Then we switch.

After a while I’m red-faced and looking a bit like a sweaty old guy myself.

The regular teacher shows up at two, and gives a full jiu jitsu lesson, so I practice elaborate techniques with a guy named David, then fight a few people. Nobody I have a chance of beating has come out today, so I lose a few fights, but the guys congratulate me on my progress.

15:27 – Showered and out of the gym. Still sweating, though, and my heart rate is about 120. Did I really just spend two and a half hours at the gym? I guess I did.

Oh well. I didn’t choose the Bro Life, the Bro Life chose me.

Its breezy outside, which is a relief.

And I’ve got an email from my lawyer. We’re appealing my case for Spanish nationality, which was rejected a few months ago. The lawyer wants to know if I’m happy to wait for a result, or if I’d like to take them to court.

Suing the government sounds kind of fun, actually. Still, I tell him that for now, I’m fine with waiting.

I eat a bit of ground beef and rice out of a tupper while sitting on a bench, then get a coffee to go, walking down Carrer de Pere IV past Glòries.

Transcending saṃsāra, for seven minutes

16:30 – Out in Poblenou, there’s a Tibetan Buddhist Center called Nagarjuna that I’ve started going to a couple of times a week. On Mondays, the meditation is led by a woman who’s all business.

She sits down, looks at the clock, and gets right into it.

We count three cycles of 21 breaths, and then go into a meditation on fear.

Since I stopped drinking a couple of years ago, my brain just wants to do spiritual things.

Halfway through the meditation, I realize that if I am pure awareness, I’m not actually affected by the things I’m afraid of. Because awareness can’t gain or lose anything – it’s just the space where things happen.

The mind is a thing that happens in awareness, and so is the body. So is the feeling of fear. So is the whole illusion which is this limited human identity – it’s just a series of sensations and repetitive thought loops.

I won’t bore you with the details. But it’s transcendent.

Sell out, bro down

17:45 – Anyway, back to being a middle-aged gym bro.

Morena’s finishing up at the office as I’m leaving the Buddhist center, so I wait for her and we walk home. She’s on her way to the osteopath, to get her back readjusted from sitting at a desk all day.

18:25 – I sit on the sofa back at home, doing more SEO.

With around 1500 articles that I’ve written over the years, this is a lot of work.

Some of what I’ve published is pretty bad. But that was my hustle. And I’ve been doing it for a long time. Around 15 years, I guess.

18:55 – God I’m bored. Back to Franco.

Franco’s father, Nicolás, was something of a leftist and a bohemian. Young Francisco rebelled through strict self-discipline and pious Catholicism, eventually becoming El Caudillo.

His younger brother went the other way. In 1930, Ramón Franco was apparently seconds away from bombing the Royal Palace in Madrid in an attempt to start a revolution against the monarchy.

At the last moment, he decided against dropping his bombs, and dropped some leaflets calling for a general strike instead. In 1931, the King was forced into exile anyway, and the rest is Spanish Civil War history.

19:08 – Oh crap, the laundry.

I stuff my sweaty jiu jitsu clothes and half the laundry hamper into the washer, add one of those little detergent pods, and turn some knobs.

Washing machines: once a luxury, now a necessity. That’s another point that Morgan Housel makes in his book.

Local color on the streets of Barcelona

19:30 – I’ve finished Chapter II of Franco, and it’s still broad daylight.

The wind is flapping the shutters, which are partially broken. We should probably get those replaced.

Home ownership is a never ending expense. Just like renting, I guess. But if the place is yours, you’re more likely to fix things when they break.

Morena gets home from the osteopath, talking about how the elevator is making strange noises.

19:55 – We have an early dinner.

More ground beef and more eggs. Greek yogurt for dessert. 

I don’t think we eat better than kings in the old days, but we certainly eat better than 99% of people in history.

20:32 – By now, you’ve surely heard that it’s best to take a walk after meals to lower your insulin.

I suggest as much to Morena, and she agrees. We’re walking around the corner and one of the local okupas comes out of his improvised living space behind a steel gate. I’m looking at the filth and clutter inside the place, but Morena says “Did you see his hand? It’s covered in blood!”

He strides off, presumably to get medical advice from his friends sitting outside the bar.

There’s a lot of local color on our street. The people mostly seem harmless, but Beverly Hills it is not.

We walk out to look at the progress of a new park they’re putting in next to the Calatrava bridge – a bridge which was installed in preparation for the ’92 Olympics. Gentrification!

There are now a few skeleton trees planted in the dirt around the park. At some point, they may bloom into living acacias.

Death, taxes and laundry

20:56 – Back home, I drink water. Then more water.

Oops! I’ve forgotten about the laundry. Morena sighs, then goes out to the balcony to hang it. Marriage is a lot of laundry. Or maybe it’s just that life is a lot of laundry.

Death, taxes and laundry. That’s samsara.

21:54 – In Chapter III, Francisco Franco is begrudgingly defending the Second Republic.

As a soldier, and as a man, he’s doing his duty to the social order – even though he may disagree with parts of that order. It’s 1931. By 1936, he will have decided that his duty to the social order lies in overthrowing the Republic.

We all know how that went.

Ramón Franco, apparently, ended up fighting on the National (right wing) side during the Civil War. He died in an air accident in 1938. His straight-laced older brother became dictator, and survived until 1975.

That’ll be a story for another article.

For now it’s time for bed. Mañana más.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I talked about expectations vs reality in my recent article Is Spain overrated? Charlie Munger, later on in the essay I referenced, is quoted as saying “The first rule of a happy life is low expectations. If you have unrealistic expectations you’re going to be miserable your whole life. You want to have reasonable expectations and take life’s results … with a certain amount of stoicism.” And whaddya know… I agree. I’ve written about self-discipline and stoicism on here quite a bit, actually.

P.P.S. I would imagine that Munger had a more elaborate philosophy as well – he certainly didn’t become a billionaire by having low expectations. Probably, as Buddha would say, it’s a middle path: try your best, expect little in return. And karma may work things out. Or not. What do you think? Hit me up, right here in the comments…