Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter - Friday Edition.

In this email:

• Why plants are green

• Baseline happiness

• Quote by Stephen Hawking

This is the 100th edition of my newsletter. Thank you all for subscribing and being loyal readers. It feels like a milestone, but really, I want to be writing and growing this newsletter for the rest of my life…100 newsletters is just the start. We will be at #1000 one day. This year, the newsletter has been all about consistency, releasing 2 a week. I have only missed 2 days. Next year, I may keep the same release schedule, but I am going to focus on quality and growth more. I want to grow this email list faster and am exploring ideas to facilitate this. If you enjoy what I write, and you have ideas for how to grow this newsletter, please send them to me. Once again, thank you for reading! I hope you stay on my email list for years to come :)

Your baseline

Your happiness, your finances, your success, your relationships, your social status - everything is relative. Achievement does not exist in a vacuum. We are constantly comparing ourselves to each other, and to our past selves. It can get toxic sometimes, but if we could not compare ourselves with each other, competition would decrease and society would be much less productive. It is this constant comparison that drives innovation, business, and progress. Overall, I think it’s useful, but we must be careful about where our standards lie and where our baseline for happiness is.

Sometimes achieving something new can be a burden. If I worked extremely hard to make a lot more money one year, that becomes my new baseline. Now, the following year, I will probably feel as though I must match or even surpass that level of monetary success to feel as good about myself as before. If I made $1M one year, I would be pretty stoked. But how would I feel if I made $10M the previous year? Or what if all my friends had made $10M and I just made $1M? Now my $1M is looking pretty sad… This is what I mean by being careful about comparison. It is often crucial to step back, remember where we were 1 year ago, or 5 years ago, and use that as out measuring stick.

You can want one thing, but if everybody else agrees that more of that thing is better, you will probably want more, even though before you knew about everyone’s opinions you were satisfied with much less. Money, sex, success, fame, attention, beauty, and intelligence are all subject to this slow creep of what is enough.

Why plants are green

The sun emits the majority of its energy in the green visible spectrum. But plants are green, meaning they reflect this green light. The plants should be purple (a mix of red and blue), the opposite of green, in order to absorb the most energy dense light. How did plants get it so wrong? Surely evolution is smarter than this…

Turns out, early organisms on the earth were using a molecule called retinal to absorb this energy dense green light. Retinal is much simpler than chlorophyll (it evolved much earlier), and absorbs the most potent (green-yellow) light. Plants absorbing energy with retinal therefore emit the opposite of this green light - red/ blue light - which together causes plants to look purple.

Chlorophyll evolved after retinal, and since retinal plants were so abundant, it could not compete by using the most energy dense green light. Chlorophyll based organisms were forced to use the red-blue emissions from retinal plants. However, chlorophyll plants emit oxygen, and as the oxygen level rose in the atmosphere, retinal plants declined since they thrive on low oxygen environments, slowly becoming extinct and paving the way for the green plant dominated earth we see today.

Applying this to life… your initial conditions matter. Perhaps you were not first to the party. Perhaps some early adopters came about and took advantage of the most abundant and obvious resource. No problem. Figure out what they are wasting and capitalize off of their emissions. Co-exist. It can be a symbiotic relationship. Slowly, you may even come to overtake them.

Credits to this article by Paul Sztorc: Long Live Proof-of-Work, Long Live Mining

Quote I Want To Share

What practical and timeless advice by one of the greatest minds of our time. Remember your insignificance, no one is thinking about you as much as you are thinking about yourself. Work on what you are passionate about, for retirement is a myth. And love can transform lives…idk I don’t have much experience with this lol, hopefully one day I will have more to write about love!

Thanks for reading!

Lucas