Jason DeFillippo

“Reject the basic assumption of civilization, especially the importance of material possession.”

Over the past several years I’ve made a metric shit-ton of financial mistakes that have been taking a serious toll on me which has led me to some revelations in the past few days that I just need to get out. Mentally, physically and spiritually I’ve been beaten down so hard it’s almost impossible to get out of bed or the house some days let alone ply my trade. And it was all my fault. I was in a sweet spot where my huge paychecks put me in the butter zone of ‘Let’s get into a lot of trouble with the IRS’ and I took that bull by the horns. I was a damn good consumer.

My daunting IRS bill, credit card debt, shitty relationship and an utterly unsatisfying job has worn me down to the breaking point. So many people are going through this right now but there’s no end in sight for me and that’s the hardest thing to deal with. The biggest problem is how heavy a weight it can be on your shoulders. Always pressing down on you and wearing away at your sanity. The interest and penalty alone from the IRS and credit cards have basically made me an indentured servant to them for the next several years.

I’m sporadically employed at the moment and can’t come close to paying back this debt in anything like the foreseeable future. I can go back to the corporate world with it’s commuting and mind numbing work to pay it back of course but I’m certain of one thing. If that was my only option I’d be dead in a month. I’m just not wired for it and I’d drink myself to death in very short order. As a result I put that one in the “Not very likely” column.

I’ve spent the past few years getting rid of all the crap I’ve accumulated in my life to the point where everything I own fits in my bedroom I rent from a friend. The only real assets I have are the computer I’m writing this on and my camera gear. If I sold it all I might make about $3,000 which is about 6% of my total debt and then I couldn’t earn ANYTHING so that’s not really going to solve anything.

So what to do? What to do?

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

It’s clear to me now that I can’t go to jail for owing back taxes. I’m current with my filings and have no assets or money. But as my dear friend Andy Prieboy once told me “You can’t get blood from a tomato but you sure can fuck up the tomato trying.” Which is where I’m at and I’m the tomato. From my previous blog post it’s clear that I can make money with my clever little brain when it’s working but it hasn’t and that’s a problem. When I first got to my current place I was jazzed. I was juiced to kick some ass and take some names. I even launched a new site with my biz partner Sean Bonner but that site had other unintended side effects which I’ll talk about in another post. I’ll just sum it up by saying that delving into hardcore research on survival topics can really depress the hell out of a person and it put me a lot farther down the rabbit hole. All my drive has been leeched from me by the debt and looming end of the world scenarios where I have to bury my neighbors in the backyard in garbage bags after I shoot them for trying to loot my food. Not a happy place to be.

Then came the answer. Passion. I’ve lost all my passion for everything. I don’t have anything driving me to get out of this hole I’ve dug for myself and that’s making it all the worse. Worrying about every little thing has effectively killed me inside. I’m getting old, fat and soulless day by day. As Tyler Durden would say, “This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.” The two things I’m working through are worry and passion. It’s the hardest habit to break but I can’t let this shit get to me anymore. It is what it is and worrying about it only hurts me. In fact it’s killing me. It saps all my ability to deal with life and enjoy it. Which brings me to passion. I used to have a passion for travel, photography and a myriad other things. I can tell when there’s something wrong in my life because I never want to pick up my camera. This year I’ve barely picked it up at all. Compare that to last year when I shot almost every single day. I miss having passion and a reason to get up in the morning. It’s going to take a while to get it back but I’m on the path. Asking yourself ‘why am I doing this thing I’m doing’ and ‘does this get me to where I want to be’ go a long way in keeping you on the path. And I’m trying to remember what I want out of life because I’ve completely forgotten it. I do know though that I want to be me again. I can’t really remember the last time when I was truly and completely happy but I am sitting on the opposite side of that continent and I’m saying no fucking more. I’m getting up off my ass and taking that road one step at a time. I’m staying the fuck away from negative people and getting my head screwed back on right side up. I’ve got an amazing friend and roommate that has been a solid rock for me and I don’t know where I’d be without her. Much love there I tell ya.

“Get busy living or get busy dying”

As a wrap up I’d just like to say that in the slew of recent celebrity deaths the death of Billy Mays has touched me the most. He was born not far from where I was and I just really really liked him a lot. Watching him on Pitchmen was thoroughly enjoyable and he will be missed. And he was only 50! I turn 38 in August and I can feel the creeping bitch of time on my heels and I’ve got a lot left to do so I’m going to get busy with the living.

A few weeks ago the internet was waking up to the news that there was a possible pandemic sweeping the world. Twitter was abuzz with people going a bit loony about what was then known as Swine Flu. In a rather uncharacteristic fit of ambition I whipped up a quick site to take the piss out of the doom and gloom sayers. Thus Do I Have Pig Flu was born. The site took me 10 minutes to make and a $15.95 domain registration fee investment. I thought I’d try and make the registration fee back by linking to my Amazon associate account. What happened next was just pure awesomesauce. I posted the link on Twitter to my approx. 1100 followers and that was the extent of my self-promotion. You can see the traffic history from the graph below.

So after the first day I checked my Amazon account and I made $25. Jackpot! I was up $10 so as far as I was concerned the site was a total success. But that was just the beginning… As the hysteria grew about the swine flu so did my traffic. On April 30th the site peaked with 163,471 unique visitors. The drop off after that was pretty dramatic as people moved onto the next big thing. But the net result of this little 10 minute project was stunning even to me. You can see the final result below.

The site is dead now but I’m still learning my lessons from the experience. I have these little ideas all the time but almost never act on them. It always seems that it’s not worth the time or effort but this has opened my eyes. Act on everything. You never know which ones will work but the ones that never get made are guaranteed to fail.

Last weekend I made my first trip up to the Great White North to the fine city of Toronto. I’ve been to Europe a few times and even Mexico but I’ve never visitied our neighbors to the north. Sean and I took the opportunity of WordCamp to make the trip and it was incredibly worth it. The city reminds me of a mash-up of rural Pittsburgh and Chicago with a little San Francisco thrown in for good measure. But what I really liked were the people. Everyone we met was amazingly cool and chill. Our rockin hosts Jay & his wife Bianca showed us an awesome time and let us crash at their pad which made it a breeze to get around. I will say this one thing about Toronto. Their cab drivers are complete morons. You’d think that driving a car for a living you’d at least learn some streets and how to get around but I guess that’s too hard. But all in all it was great and I can’t wait to go back and spend some more time.

On April 1st, 2007 I started an experiment. I started using Amazon’s S3 service to back up all my archives. It wasn’t anything stellar in the way of technology since damn near nothing worked properly in regards to FTP Clients with S3 support. There were a few really poorly done GUI’s that I used along the way before full blown S3 support became standard in clients like Interarchy and Fetch. But that’s neither here nor there. I started this experiment at a time when 1 TB drives were still well over $600. My original LaCie 1 TB drive was about $1200 and according to a LOT of people tends to die a horrible death the day after the warranty runs out. The pricing for S3 back then was cheaper than it is now (I unfortunately don’t have numbers on that) and figuring a ramp up of putting data on S3 to fill my archives it was going to cost me less a year to store my crap on S3 than it was to buy a new 1 TB drive. So my stuff has been there ever since gradually accumulating by a few GB here and a few GB there. I’m still only have 515 GB up there but now it’s costing me over $80 a month. If I finished putting my archives on S3 it would cost me well over $200 a month. I’m not even going to get into much deep math here because all I gotta tell you is that there are 1 TB USB 2 External drives on Amazon for under $150. So I can buy a new TB every MONTH, copy a backup to it and ship it offsite and let it sit and it’s cheaper than S3. So unfortunately, and I really do mean that, S3 is no longer a viable means for me to store large sets of data personally. That by no means means I’m goign to stop using it for business tasks because it’s still way cheaper than keeping your own servers and platters spinning 24/7. But for mass personal storage it’s dead until it gets down to at least .05¢ a GB which is still even a lot when you look at a TB spread out across the year. BTW, I’m suffering from a MASSIVE cold and am on 7 kinds of cold meds which means I spun this out with absolutely zero regard for grammar, spelling of even coherence. Comments welcome.