I Know Exactly How Far Down It Goes

Most people have never been to the bottom.

That is not an insult. It is good news for them.

But it means they are carrying around a fear they have never actually checked.

They think the bottom is infinite. They think if they lose the job, or the house, or the income, or the standing they spent twenty years building, they just keep falling forever.

I can tell them it is not infinite.

I have been down there. It has a floor. I stood on it.

What the floor is made of

Here is what I found when I got there.

You are still you. That was the strange part. I expected to turn into somebody else and I did not. The same man who went down is the same man who came back up. Slower. Quieter. Beat up in places. Same man.

You still get hungry. You still get tired. The sun still comes up whether you were ready for it or not.

Some people stay. Not many. But some. And you learn exactly which ones with a certainty you will never get any other way, because there is no test for a friend like having absolutely nothing to offer one.

And God was still there. I did not feel it at the time and I would not have told you that at the time. I am telling you now, looking back, with the honest note attached that it did not feel like anything while it was happening.

Why that is worth something now

People think I am reckless. I am not reckless.

I am calibrated.

Before, I made decisions the way most people do, which is by protecting against a disaster I had never actually priced. I said no to things I should have said yes to. I hedged. I kept a foot in the door of situations I should have walked straight out of, because leaving felt like falling and I had no idea how far the fall went.

Now I know how far it goes.

So when I look at a risk, I do not ask whether it could go badly. Of course it could. Everything can.

I ask a different question.

If this goes all the way wrong, where do I land?

And almost every single time, the answer is: somewhere well above a floor I have already stood on and walked off of.

What it does not mean

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that is just bravado, and bravado is how a lot of men end up down there in the first place.

It does not mean nothing can hurt me. Plenty can, and some of it would.

It does not mean the floor was cheap. It cost years I am not getting back, and I have already written about the column of things that never came back at all.

It does not mean your floor sits where mine does. Some people have less cushion than I had. Some have people depending on them in ways that change the math completely. I am not going to stand here and tell a man with three kids and no savings that the bottom is fine.

And it absolutely does not mean go find out.

Nobody should go looking for the floor. I did not go looking. I got put there.

What I build differently because of it

Every system I build now assumes the worst version of the day.

The list lives somewhere I control. The site runs in a room I am not standing in. The record gets written down before anybody asks to see it.

That is not paranoia. That is a man who has watched the floor come up fast, building for the version of himself who is having a very bad year.

If you are the one who is afraid of it

You are probably not afraid of the actual bottom.

You are afraid of an imagined one, and the imagined one is always worse, because you never bothered to put a floor in it.

So put one in.

Write down what literally happens if the thing you are dreading happens. Not the feeling. The facts. Where do you sleep. Who do you call. What do you do on Monday morning.

You will find that it ends somewhere. Most fears do, the second you force them to be specific.

And then the decision sitting in front of you gets a whole lot easier to make.

I did not want this education.

I would not sign up for it again.

But I have it, and I am not going to stand here and pretend it is worth nothing.