There was s a line I heard from an instructor during my time firefighting that’s stuck with me for the last year:

"Forget easy or hard. Everything is either familiar or unfamiliar."

Every day in training, I was thrown into something uncomfortable. Learning CPR. Connecting a hose to a hydrant. Searching an apartment blindfolded on my hands and knees. Each exercise activated a huge knot in my stomach and a voice in my head whispering you don't know what the f*ck you're doing.

The older I get, the more adult life feels the same way. New responsibilities land on my doorstep with no warning and no instruction manual. The natural response is anxiety. But I've started to notice that the anxiety isn't really about the thing itself. It's the friction of not knowing; my unwillingness to be uncertain.

I have to remind myself, “It’s not hard. It’s unfamiliar. You’re just new at this.”

Think about the things that terrified you as a kid. Your first flu shot at the doctor's office. Your first roller coaster ride. Or your first haircut! Pure horror. Now, would you tell that child those things were hard? Of course not. They were just new. Do them a few times, and bing-bang-boop, you're falling asleep in the barber's chair.

Most of what we label as "hard" or "scary" or "impossible" is just a word we slap on something we haven't done before. And words are surprisingly easy to change.

There’s an old Buddhist parable that drives this home:

“The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ you neightbor; act as if you did.”

For most of my adult life, I squirmed at superficial religious tropes. After fifteen years of stodgy Catholic education, church felt opaque. Out-of-touch priests and nuns force-fed prayer, frustrated that we didn’t just get it. Faith became synonymous with archaic language, guilt, and rituals I didn’t understand.

So I drifted.

My 20s became a decade of optimization. Lift heavier, read more, earn more, build discipline. If something was broken, I could fix it with effort. But sometime in my mid-30s (marriage, fatherhood, loss, responsibility), the problems stopped responding to willpower. The big questions got louder. Meaning. Suffering. Morality. Love. I could no longer brute-force my way through them.

Something I can only describe as a pull began drawing me back toward faith, which was, frankly, embarrassing. I certainly didn’t go looking for God. As cliché as it sounds, it felt more like something was quietly looking for me.

I didn't know where to start. I tried reading older Biblical texts. I listened to Jordan Peterson and Wes Huff. But those felt like advanced calculus. I needed a 101. Thankfully, a friend pointed me toward Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

The first fifty pages took some patience, but by page 150, something had cracked open.

What C.S. Lewis does (and what fifteen years of Catholic education never managed) is explain the why. Not the rituals. Not the doctrine. The underlying logic of it all: why Christianity offers such a precise and surprisingly coherent map for navigating morality, love, and the aching complexity of being human. He uses plain language, concrete metaphors, and a refreshing intellectual honesty. He admits what he hasn't figured out. He doesn't try to convert you. He simply lays out why so many people don't just choose faith, but find they need it.

For years, I’d written off the whole enterprise as theater for the credulous. Lewis dismantles that caricature. He shows that Christianity isn’t intellectual surrender, it’s intellectual humility. It’s the recognition that our moral instincts, our longing for meaning, and our ache for transcendence point somewhere beyond us. He translates what felt like suffocating Catholic jargon into something breathable.

There were moments I had to put the book down and just smile. Not because I was overwhelmed, but because, for the first time, someone had articulated what the priests and nuns of my childhood never could. The clichés I used to cringe at (“surrender,” “grace,” “letting Christ work through you”) started to actually make sense.

If you went to Catholic school and left feeling hollow, this book is what you were owed and never given. I feel like it’s a massive missed opportunity that Mere Christianity is not THE starting point for all young Christians — not the sacraments, not the Latin, not the guilt. THIS.

You may not finish Mere Christianity as a full-fledged believer. But if you grew up religious and walked away, I suspect you’ll at least understand what you walked away from.

That’s what happened to me. I went from not getting it… to getting it.

Man, I feel like I wrote this article myself. ‘Optimization’ has gotten me far. But after a decade of focusing on ‘I, I, I, me, me, me’, I eventually had to turn my attention elsewhere — seeking connection with something greater: service to others, nature, art, the divine. True self-transcendence.

Is it a wonder that my current arc has been going from reading books like Atomic Habits to suddenly shifting toward Mere Christianity?

One of my favorite things about the modern age is seeing people in their 50s, 60s, and beyond who are more fit and mobile than ever. When I was a kid, my grandpa was shuffling around with a cane at 65. A few weeks ago, my 63-year-old jiu-jitsu instructor folded me into a pretzel. I’d call that progress.

The resources available to us now (nutrition science, strength training, cardiovascular research) have made it genuinely possible to be in your best shape at 70. There are no more excuses.

Nothing makes me feel lazier than watching a 73-year-old outlift me at 5:30 in the morning. These people have made fitness so non-negotiable that asking how they do it is almost insulting. It's like asking someone, "How do you manage to brush your teeth every day?" They just... do it. Every day. They treat it more like a daily vitamin than a practice in willpower.

That's the secret, honestly. Once you cross over from sedentary to consistent, you stop asking whether to work out and start asking why you'd ever stop. It sharpens your mind, stabilizes your energy, builds discipline, and maybe most importantly, makes it a lot harder to justify eating like a raccoon or drinking your evenings away. Fitness doesn't stay in the gym. It bleeds into everything.

I love dreaming about imaginary bookshelves and at-home ‘studies’ that I can add to my house once I win the lottery. Ideally, I’d have books scattered across every room of the house, but the “classic” library in this list is my absolute dream 🤤

Hell of an episode. I stumbled on this one at the right time. Charlie Houpert, the entrepreneur behind the massively popular YouTube channel Charisma on Command, sits down with Chris to unpack something a lot of people feel but struggle to articulate: why achieving your goals can still leave you feeling empty. There seems to be a theme in this week’s newsletter…

What I love most is Charlie's honesty about being mid-process, not someone who has it all figured out, but someone genuinely working through it in real time. There's something refreshing about that.

This feels like one of those conversations that should happen more often, and the fact that it's reaching a mainstream audience makes me genuinely optimistic. Topics like identity, mythology, and spiritual fulfillment used to just live in dusty philosophy books. Now they're in your podcast feed on the way to the gym.

I grew up glued to survival shows like Man vs. Wild, Survivorman, and Dual Survival. I knew nothing about camping, hunting, or fishing then, and honestly, I still don't. But something about the idea of raw, stripped-down survival has always fascinated me.

Maybe because it's how we got here. Our ancestors didn't have DoorDash. They had to read the land, track animals, build fire from scratch, and sleep under the stars. That's the whole reason you and I exist. Kind of hard not to respect it.

I won't pretend I'm fully prepared for the apocalypse, but I'd like to think I could keep my family alive for more than 48 hours if the grid went down. Call me a prepper. I'd call you naive for not at least thinking about it.

Which brings me to Alone, which Lauren and I have been watching religiously. And look, I'll be honest with you: this show is slow. Painfully, gloriously slow. No manufactured drama. Just people alone in the wilderness, trying not to starve or get eaten by a grizzly bear. It’s the perfect comfort show.

The format is simple. Ten contestants, all legitimate survival experts, get dropped in a remote location with nothing but 10 tools of their choosing. No camera crew. No producers in their ear. Just them, the elements, and whatever apex predators happen to be nearby. The goal is to outlast everyone else for 100 days. That's it. It's the most real thing on television and I love it.

Thanks for reading!