The Life-Stacking Game 2

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“How can I increase life-density [<link; medium read]?“

“I’ve come to realize life-stacking [<link; medium read] is key.

Life-stacking is a mental model.”

“You’re now finding models everywhere.”

“I’ve fallen in love with them. This is a kind of priming, which acts as a perceptual filter.

I’m playing with models all day long: learning, collecting, creating, deconstructing, classifying.

As concerns life-stacking, it has two main uses: selective and creative.

Selective-stacking is a filtering process.
Creative-stacking is a creative process.”

“Can you give an example of each?”

“As concerns selective-sacking, let’s say you want to pursue an activity to amplify your growth and enrich your life. Which one might you choose?”

“There are so many to choose from.”

“Precisely. It’s important to explore, but as a general strategy, choose the one that is most meaningful. Using selective-stacking, choose the one which satisfies the most values. I call this value-stacking.

For instance, Parkour is deeply meaningful to me because it satisfies so many of my values: Playfulness, Movement, Beauty, Creativity, Discipline, Freedom, Self-expression, Community, among others.

Another use of selective-stacking is in prioritizing.

For instance, habits are the essential building blocks of your life. If you want to turn your life around, which ones might you start with? Using selective-stacking, focus on those which impact multiple systems of your life.

As concerns creative-stacking, let’s take meditation. 

You can do it at home, and it works. This is the default for most of us.

You can do it in the park. You thus get the additional benefit of a walk to the park, a movement snack – which can be a meditation in itself –, and a little nature bathing. Life-stacking.

You can do it in a tree in the park. You thus get the additional benefit of a climb, another movement snack  – which can be a meditation in itself –, and if you do it very high up in the tree, you get some fear-training as well. Creative-stacking.”

“How long are your meditation sessions?”

“The longest one is in the morning, right after I get up. Up to 20 minutes.”

“‘Up to?'”

“It varies based on the available time. 20 minutes is the ceiling. The floor is 5 minutes.

Then I do multiple 5-minute meditations throughout the day. You could call them meditation-snacks.”

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