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# Blood & Ink: Sunday
- URL: https://www.zenmedicine.co/21/
- Published: 2024-10-20T12:35:37.000Z
- Updated: 2025-02-09T15:58:27.000Z
- Description: direct path / shortcut consciousness / faustian bargains
- Author: Eric Brown
- Tags: Blood x Ink

- Everyone wants the supplement, no one wants to walk ten thousand steps every day.
- Everyone wants the surgery, but no one wants a consistent bedtime.
- Everyone wants the excuse of ADD, no one wants to meditate.

**The ‘shortcut’—over the long run—is always longer than the direct path.**

Shortcuts spawn a hydra of second-order implications. 

Side-effects to be mitigated, finding new shortcuts to resolve the side-effects, constant distraction, and a fragmenting of attention hunting for ever greater shortcuts.

**The core problem is reinforcing the Way of Being that is always searching for shortcuts.**

- Always distracted, searching for the sneaky route.
- Always questioning, wondering where the free lunch is.
- Always opportunistic, where the ends always justify the means.
- Always incomplete, because there must be something better, out beyond the horizon of awareness.

**Seeking the shortcut is finding the Faustian bargain.** 

In the pursuit of the shortcuts, you sell your serenity. You snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. 

**In hunting for short-term simplification, you sacrifice long-term satisfaction.**

- Instead of spending 3 hours researching the latest app or technological hack to help you write better, faster, and longer – sit down and write the piece in an hour.
- Instead of taking a fat loss pill and then having to find solutions and shortcuts to the sleep disorder, bone mineral density loss, and acne side effects – walk 10k steps every day.
- Instead of using black hat, morally dubious techniques to hijack the attention of pre-teens on social media while eroding your integrity — create authentic and genuine artistic expressions that draw people toward you.
- Instead of wasting hours in the black hole of hyper-niche biohacking techniques and edge-case esoteric interventions, focus on getting your sleep, nutrition, and exercise dialled in.

**Do what is required. Put in the work. Do the reps. Stay lucid, present, and on the path.**

The direct path is the shortcut,  
Eric Brown.