The sun is just now rising over the trees to the east of my garden window. I am using my iPad to create this post instead of consuming content with my iPhone. Actually, strike that because I’m now using my Mac Book Pro while my iPad updates it’s software. I must mention a synchronistic experience I had before upgrading my iPad software. When I tried to surf to google.com, my Safari web browser told me it could not form a secure connection to the website. The same thing happened when I tried to surf to the web domain yahoo.com. I was able to surf to other websites, including wordpress.com. This was both unexpected and meaningful to me. The meaning I gave to it was a confirmation that the closing of the wormhole of consumption was at least partially successful! It will be interesting to see if these consumption domains are still blocked after I upgrade my iPad operating software.
I like that Apple is now showing me my screen time. Yesterday, I used this information to make note of the 90 minutes of consumption of financial content I was performing each day. I decided to use this as the center of the consumption side of the wormhole that I want to use to travel to the creation side of the wormhole. I’m noticing now that my future self already recognized this as a successful wormhole center and my past self was able to subconsciously feel this and post about financial content, providing the initial openings of this wormhole. Words are limiting to describe all of this and so please forgive my use of a wormhole metaphor. Please also don’t focus too much analysis on the mechanisms of how one’s future self can communicate to one’s past self. The point of this post is for me to describe my synchronicities and how I’m visualizing the anchoring of the wormhole between two sets of different universes, consumption universes and creation universes, between which I’m attempting to travel. There are other ways in which one could describe “replacing old bad habits with new good habits”. I’m using the wormhole analogy here because it fits in well with other universe surfing metaphors.
So for my wormhole, I have it anchored with consumption of financial content on one side and creation of financial content on the other side. Other anchors I wish to add to keep this wormhole open are around news, Facebook, and youTube. I think converting each of these from consumer to creator will help surround me with my more preferred set of universes.
For my own anchoring, it feels important for me to put a bit of financial content creation into this post. I manage my own retirement accounts and primarily invest in individual stocks. For 2019, I was blessed to have AAPL and AMD as my top two investments. I hedged these growth stocks with some value stocks (IBM, WETF, DS, SFM, and NOK) which also provided a bit of diversification. I sold some AAPL and AMD to rebalance my portfolio for 2020 and plan to now only check my portfolio monthly. Because I view reality through a multi-dimensional lens, my stock buy/sell decisions are also made with this same lens. I don’t consciously use any universe surfing “tricks” to make the stocks I buy go up or to select the stocks I buy or sell. If I do anything magical, I attempt to channel Warren Buffet and imagine what stocks he would purchase based on the company’s market and share of that market, the company’s leadership and trustworthiness of that leadership, and the company’s financial fundamentals. Actually, I do use one analysis process that is related to universe surfing – I sometimes consider the probability of different outcomes and weight these as I would if I were gambling. As a simple example, I may estimate that worst case a stock will drop half over the next year and that best case it will double in price. I may then give a 30% chance it will drop in half, a 50% chance it will stay roughly the same, and a 20% chance it will double. Using these estimates, and assuming a current price of $100, I predict a future price over the next year of 30%($50) + 50%($100)+ 20%($200), which is $15 + $50 + $40 = $105, or a 5% return. If my choice is to invest in this stock or pay off some of my car loan that has a 6% annual interest rate, then I choose to pay off my car loan. If instead I estimated that there was only a 20% chance it would drop in half and a 30% chance it would double, then using the same analysis I would get a future predicted price of $10 + $50 + $60 = $115, or a 15% return. In this case, I may choose to buy the stock depending on the faith I had in my estimates (which would be another level of probability analysis).
I feel complete now for today. I’ve spent about an hour on the post and have spent less than 30 minutes consuming financial content. I had to check my visa statement for southwest airline ticket charges because I had been in a universe where I was sure I bought a ticket and now there was no evidence of such a ticket being purchased. While Amazon’s “one-click” purchase may not seem like a patentable idea, from a universe surfing perspective, adding an additional confirmation click to the process does result in two sets of universes, and unfortunately in one of those sets your intended purchase does not happen. Maybe southwest airlines should license Amazon’s patent to sell more tickets. I’m wondering now if there’s a patent for “one-click purchase with second-click undo”.
surfing the universe 
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