Roll Em Up.
Do the right thing with your lights - for your future self.
Now that Christmas is over, you have the opportunity to do yourself a favour. Roll up your Christmas lights carefully before you put them away. It’s tempting to forget about your future self. You are busy; you just want to relax and enjoy your holidays. It feels good to get things packed up as quickly as possible. It would be so easy to rip the lights off the tree and hiff them in a box in a big ball with all the tinsel and other crap. Don’t do it to yourself. Wrap those lights around a piece of card with some slits in for the ends or around a cardboard tube or a coathanger. Tape them up and slide them into a bag. However you do it, put them away nicely, and you will love yourself when December 2025 rolls around.
Entropy is defined as the measurement of the degree of randomness, or in other words, it is the increase in the disorganisation within a system. Your lights will tend to tangle if energy isn’t applied to stop them from doing so. Professor of Engineering Dynamics and Vibration at Cambridge University, Hugh Hunt, put it this way.
There’s one organised way to have your lights, and there are many, many ways to have them disorganised. The odds are that they won’t stay organised for very long unless you take enormous steps to ensure that they do.
The time for those steps is now. The universe doesn’t care if your lights end up in a horrible, screwed-up, frustrating, unsolvable mess. The one with an emotional investment in the state of your lights is your future self—the one who has to untangle them. Unravelling them is a horrible, painful process that can take hours. It’s a shit start to the festive season. Faced with a ball of lights, you can’t help but look back in anger.
Your Christmas tree pack down is an opportunity to show your tomorrow self some self-love.
Our past selves are often good to us. We should give them more credit. Maybe they did the shopping so there is something in the fridge to eat. They may have gone out and bought socks last week, so you can put something comfortable and hole-free on your feet. They may have worked hard, saved up a deposit, and put a roof over your head. They may have done the hard yards in terrible traffic yesterday, driving you to the beach that you are enjoying today. When you are 65, you might look back and thank yourself for paying extra into your Kiwi saver. ‘That was nice of me’, you might think, as you have the money you need to live. You could have blown that cash on yourself, but instead, you did something nice for your future self.
Sometimes, however, our past selves do terrible things to our current selves. Abusing our shared bodies with slothfulness, bad food and too much drink.
There is a famous story of a guy called Steve who tried to communicate with his soon-to-be drunk self by writing a note and leaving it on his bed. Sober Steve’s plan was to work with drunk Steve to make their shared future as hungover Steve a bit better. The note he left to himself read.
‘To drunk Steve, Please drink this bottle of water before bed. Hungover Steve will thank you. Love from Sober Steve’.
The plan failed. Hungover, Steve woke to find Sober Steve’s water bottle emptied on the floor and some additional yellow liquid dribbling down the side of his chest of drawers. The following message was written under sober Steve’s kind words.
‘Fuck You, Sober Steve. Don’t tell me what to do. I do what I fucking want. And fuck you, hungover Steve, suffer hard, you dehydrated loser.’
Drunk Steve had no interest in making the world a better place for anyone, not even himself. As Alfred Pennyworth told Bruce Wayne,
Some men aren't looking for anything logical. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Drunk Steve was such a man, and hungover Steve paid the price. Whole nations can do similar things to their futures. Our grandkids will likely wave the bird back at us through time over a bunch of stuff we are doing right now.
IN CONCLUSION
Let’s roll up our Christmas lights and put them away nicely. It’s the least we can do for ourselves.
Anyway you seem busy, I’ll let you go.
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Give em a taste of Kiwi.
Happy New Year.
Love Matt