Claudia is a little upset at me. She doesn't like when I give out my phone number.
"You're going to get too many calls," she said.
Ok, but I want people to text me with questions for our "Ask Altucher" podcasts. But sometimes I pick up the call.
Last night I got a call from someone going through a divorce and his family and his friends were taking her side. He was miserable about it. He loved his family but they were always angry.
"I'd rather be a janitor in another state," he said, "then have the job I have now here and have them all arguing with me all the time."
You know what job he had? He was the mayor of his small town. But he was miserable.
"You have to take a break from them," I said. "What would you rather do: get your life together or let your friends and family slowly strangle you to death."
When the plane is going down, the instinct is to put the oxygen mask on your baby. But you have to put the mask on yourself first.
"I would put the mask on my baby," he told me.
"Then you both will die."
If everyone is dragging you down, then you have to take a break from them.
"But they supported me for years," he said, "how can I take a break from them now?"
"You're going through something painful. A divorce. Why let people stick the knife in even further? You need to wait until the knife is out of your body first."
I'm not sure I convinced him.
One time someone wrote me and said, "I'm practicing everything you say. Physical health, emotional, writing down ideas every day, feeling gratitude. But then I go out Friday night drinking with my friends and they laugh at me and trash all my ideas."
I had one suggestion: "Stay at home on Friday night." But I never heard from him again.
One time I was pretending to be a respiratory therapist in a hospital in Cleveland. Long story but a doctor got me in there and got me credentials. I was actually walking old people around the hallways until they were so out of breath I had to return them to their beds. They smelled.
I didn't do any tracheotomies but it didn't look that hard. I would've done one if asked.
I've watched doctors do it. You find the Adam's apple. Go about a half inch lower, use a pocket knife to cut the skin open, and stick in a straw very quickly before they suffocate. If you put it in the wrong spot they die. Don't try this at home. You're not a professional like me.
At some point in our lives we have to start preparing for a good death. Just like for most of our lives we prepare for a good life.
For a long time I had a bad life and I was preparing for a bad death. Even the day seemed like a nightmare. And the nights were long. Me sitting. Me walking all night trying to make eye contact with strange women. Me starving for affection.
I saw what a bad death looked like. Nobody could breathe. They would suffocate in their beds, alone, nobody to care for them. One by one they're all going to stop breathing. You too.
How do you prepare for a good death?
I think we live in four dimensions at the same time.
The physical world, where we can get stabbed in the heart and bleed. The emotional world, where we can get stabbed in the heart and cry.
The mental world, where we can get stabbed in the head and get demented. And the spiritual world where we get stuck living in the past, filled with regret and anxiety.
Stress is the knife of the emotional world. Stress leads to inflammation of the cells (again, I'm a doctor).
The major causes of death in the US: heart attacks, cancer, strokes, Alzheimers - all caused by inflammation. And then diseases caused by smoking. Don't smoke.
If all you do is work on ways to reduce stress, avoid time travel (obsessing on past and future), and of course, don't smoke, then you will start preparing for a good death.
Everyone wraps themselves in their dramas: their friends, their family, their divorces, their failures. We build up a mythology of our misery. The pantheon of people who "did this to us".
Can you take a break from that for today? Just today please. And then maybe tomorrow. If you can't, then text me why.
Because the truth is:
Nobody did anything to you.
Except your mother.
