Tribe of Hackers

Tribe of Hackers, by Marcus J. Carey, collects a wide range of seasoned infosec specialists to discuss the cybersecurity world from an insider’s point of view. My favorite question out of the dozen asked is: What is one of the biggest bang-for-the-buck actions that an organization can take to improve its cybersecurity posture? Studying the 60-plus answers, I broke them down into three categories that resonate with the self-defense instructor in me:

1. Invest in awareness

2. Assume compromise 

3. Application over theory

There are three common aspects of martial arts all around the world. The basic breakdown of martial arts is competitive (sport), performance (entertainment), and self-defense (mortal danger). Competition can teach you how to fight, but you are always learning to fight with rules. There is a ref, a set time, and a chosen place. Performance is about entertaining a crowd and displaying grace, power, and drama.

The portion of the martial art world we are concerned with here is self-defense.  The training one does for surprise attacks. Nothing fancy, first just learn to cover your groin and face. This is a very good reflex around monkeys and big cats. 

Boiled down, martial arts is situational awareness and the more time I spend studying the cybersecurity field the more I think of it as an offshoot of martial the world. Hand-to-hand and weapon-based systems each have their context for when they are useful.  I like thinking of cyber as the martial art of network conflict.

In the walk-around world, awareness often simply means understand your environment and become conscious of how you make yourself vulnerable. Predators rely on distraction and surprise. The more aware you are, the less of a target you are. Don’t make yourself more vulnerable than you have to be. How big is your threat landscape? The bigger it is, the harder it is to secure and whoever has the weakest perimeter gets eaten first.

These rules of conduct coincide with cyber defense rules, like limit employees’ access and privileges. There is no reason to increase the overall threat landscape any more than necessary. When you give someone access, you put them at risk of being exploited. Every admin privilege is a target on someone’s back. They will be hunted for their access. Actually, I’m the only one mentioning the hunting of people. Nowhere in the interviews does anybody recommend hunting people. 

According to the professionals, companies building security-minded cultures should start with the low-hanging fruit: multi-factor authentication, complex password policies, and up-to-date patches go a long way. It’s not full-proof, but covering the basics eats recon time and time is money even for criminals. The longer it takes to get inside the more likely they will move on to an easier target. No one is perfectly secure, but don’t be the only guy without a bulletproof vest in a gunfight. I’m paraphrasing of course. There was no mention of firearms nor discussions about kevlar in the interviews at all.

Investing in awareness also means understanding how your assets are vulnerable. Is it really tech that is vulnerable? Or are people vulnerable? Creating a security culture that captures the attention of employees is essential. All the fancy AI interfaces in the world (which I love) aren’t going to save you from an uninterested or emotionally distracted employee. A narrative (mission) that elicits vigilance (situational awareness) is key. Everyone is seeking a “better way” and people, in general, adopt great standards that lead to personal growth. No one actually said people seek personal growth either. I’m reading between the lines and maybe being a little idealistic, but I stand firm on the idea that people want to be heroes.

The second concept: assume compromise, also illustrates martial principles. As in, you don’t get to pick the fight you want. For companies, it means an attack isn’t an if, it’s a when. And, most likely, you aren’t going to see it coming. Predators like to hit their prey from behind, not head-on. Unfortunately, the first hint of attack is often the sight of your own data leaking out all over the internet.  Assume compromise means: “the phone call is coming from inside the house!”, so it’s best to build impact resilience into the system. A panic room, if you will. Again, I’m being a little hyperbolic, but I’m trying to paint a picture. 

For an organization, assuming compromise means exploring postures that increase opportunities to fight as you roll and recover to your feet. Remember, this is close-quarters combat. You don’t get to hold them off at arm’s length. They are already inside your defenses and a strategic counter is required. But, before you can counter, you must locate. Check the endpoints, scan the logs, find the beacons, and isolate. Get good at finding the intruder. Too much time is spent on playing wack-a-mole rather than setting honeypots and canary sensors. That’s right, I’m talking about tripwires and tiger pits.

If you have followed the basics from invest in awareness, then the pathways into the system are limited and your team is straight-up tracking the interlopers. There are only so many endpoints probable. You must be able to detect if you are to defend. Imagine Sherlock Holmes presented with Star Trek’s Kobayashi test. Model, model, model. Test, test, test. Invest in failure, because failure brings insight.  

Lastly, application over theory. As the great fist-philosopher, Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” Steps 1 & 2 have been followed. Your situational awareness is high and you’ve created not 1 or 2 plans for possible sneak attacks but a dozen. But does your plan work when it’s not your friend throwing the punches? 

Unfortunately, the only way to get comfortable with people trying to hit you is by doing such. It’s not everyone’s favorite pedagogy, but it gets results. Catch a few on the nose, and everybody covers up and starts rolling with the punches. This is another good place to point out, no one discussed punching and kicking people in the interviews.

For organizations, application over theory means regularly attacking their own systems not only internal testing but external testing. It means investing in outside consultants who can give an objective perspective. Test the process and adapt accordingly. Then, test again. This is not a static game of Battleship. The opponent is not waiting for you to come to find them. They don’t have any rules, but they do have limitations. Don’t let experience be your limitation, because experience is the key for both sides. It’s a simple calculation, if you have had more time learning to fight your way out of a corner than your opponent, chances are they make the first mistake when pressured. 

To recap and summarize the guidance from the interviews it goes something like this: 

1) Awareness = What Matters x Why it Matters 

2) Plan for the worse 

3) Test the plan objectively

I really enjoyed reading Tribe of Hackers, and I appreciate Mr. Carey putting it together. There is much more wisdom to parse through in the interviews than I have offered here and I hope my violent paraphrasing and comparison (beat a dead horse) to martial arts doesn’t diminish his efforts or their advice. Carey has other books of interviews specific to Blue Team, Red Team, and Security Leaders.

However, before diving into those, I’m headed to Reno for the Wild West Hack’n Fest. This will be the first in-person conference for me (and possibly a whole bunch of people) since Covid. It’s time for me to meet more of the tribe.

Sandworm

The Solarwind hack is all over the news. How bad is it? Hmmm. Say you’re at the grocery store and some random person walks up to you, hands you an envelope, and then walks away. You open that envelope and inside is a picture of your young child asleep at night taken from inside your child’s room. There is a timestamp at the top of the picture. According to the time and date, this picture was taken last night. Someone snuck into your house and took that picture while you were there. They could still be there. I’m simplifying things of course, but you get the picture.

Sandworm is an excellent history primer for current events. But before we chat about the present, let’s take a stroll back in time. A time just a little while ago that already feels eons past. And answer the question: why did I get into cybersecurity?

End of Summer 2020, Portland, amidst other trials, suffered from the forest fire smoke. On the radio, NPR reported the air was toxic. Those traveling from homes for necessities were specters in an ochre haze. All of us foragers under a road-rash sky. The sun a blood-orange orb dragged across heaven into the howling darkness of night where megaphones and sirens sounded across the river coming from the protests at the Federal Court House. The civil rights activism hadn’t let up for months. The news reported the feds responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and unmarked vans snatching people off the streets.  

Things looked bleak when I started Bootcamp. And it wasn’t just Portland. Much of the world seemed on fire and headed to hell as well. Honestly, the whole planet was feeling a wee bit dystopian. I made a mental apocalyptic checklist: Global pandemic (check), financial crisis (check), social unrest (check), runaway wildfires (check), and expanding authoritarian rule (check, double-check).  

Part of me wanted to believe that things really couldn’t get worse. After a run of bad luck the world was going to get a break, right? Ummm…not likely. In fact, I felt we were actually on a break and things were going to get weirder. But I am biased.

Quick insight about me. I grew up in the South with Christian narratives of many interesting persuasions. The most mentally potent versions blended Pentecostal absolutism, evangelical exaltations, and rapture debates. Yes, there were rapture debates. As a senior In high school, I worked at a Christian radio station. My role was to review and identify possible links between biblical prophecy and international events in the news. These “threat assessments” were for a news report designed to inform those concerned with calibrating their rapture clocks. I was entrenched, mind and soul for a long time. It’s the kinda thing that sticks with you.

So, that End-Time part of my mind had the sneaky suspicion things could easily get tougher, weirder, or just plain worse. If there was anything I learned in the sweet arms of the church it was that there is always enough room to fit the devil.  

My faith was renewed by the patron saint of cyberpunk, Sir Mr. William Gibson. Since starting school, when I slept, Neuromancer danced in my dreams. Why cybersecurity? Because if I’m going to be stuck sitting on my ass in front of a screen watching the world burn and crumble, then I damn well need to figure out a way to interact rather than eating popcorn and binge-watching movies about the end of the world. Look out your window. It’s surreal for real.

How do you handle the end of the world? Get a new job, and I needed something amazing to do. Something that offered a sense of control. Maybe even a little bit of agency, Something that I can do to make my family and friends safer without buying a gun. 

With cybersecurity, I imagined, I could punch people on the other side of the planet with a digital fist. It was/is energizing to be in school again. Juiced! My brain feels like it’s on steroids. The metaphor is literal. When I flip open my laptop it feels like I am going to train at the martial arts school. I mean you are learning how to fight with a keyboard. Dare I say Kung-fu Console training.

Anyway, it felt like the world was getting kicked around and I could hear the ghost of 80’s heroes calling to me. In the back of my head, the opening phrase to the Last Starfighter video game was looping: “Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.” (My wife thinks I should mention this to my therapist). I know I’m not really saving the world. But who knows, their time left yet.

To expand my understanding of the cyber-landscape in which I dream of doing battle I read Sandworm. 

The title is from Frank Herbert’s Dune. Dune is a science fiction novel from the late 1950’s.  I studied the book as part of a focus on messiah narratives in science fiction. Loved it. David Lynch made a movie of Dune in the 80’s and a remake is scheduled next year by Denis Villeneuve (directed Arrival and 2049, the Blade Runner sequel).  

Sandworm references the leviathan worms that rule the desert planet known as Dune. And for our cyber history purposes, it represents a group that is responsible for possibly the most costly cyberattack to date.

Sandworm is riveting. Who are the good guys and bad guys? It’s murky. But one thing is for sure, nerds rule the world now. Maybe they have ever since Oppenheimer, but these nerds aren’t splitting atoms, they are creating code, combining with python, and developing whole new paradigms without making people evaporate inside of nuclear clouds

This first is a story of nations hacking nations. From there it gets complicated fast. A couple of disclaimers about the book. If you are paranoid at all, do not read this book. If you have a hard time getting to sleep because you wonder about government and shadow governments, do not read this book. If you wanna have a whole bunch of reasons why you should learn as much about cybersecurity as possible, do read this book. Your country may need you.

Let’s look at the broad strokes: 

1) In general, it would appear every nation is spying on every other nation as much as they (or we) can get away with. Anyone who has the power to listen is. Some nations are doing more than just listening, they are analyzing and influencing. But honestly (sarcasm),  most of this shouldn’t bother us since we signed away our privacy by using social media. Oops. No judgment, I’m included on that list.

2) Now little guys, countries with tiny little armies, who could never win a toe-to-toe can get digital leverage by hiring or training a few hundred evil nerds to hack. You don’t need all the overhead anymore when you can create an army of a trillion bots made out of people’s smart fridges. A revolution with crushed ice.

3) Arguably the most immediate danger is industrial sabotage, causing catastrophic failure to highly sensitive and critical structures. Like, say, power grids. There has been evidence of intrusion into these systems for some time, well before Solarwind.  No one has made a move but everyone is wondering who is going to push the button first.

4) The US government has a plethora of smart people working for them (probably the smartest people ever assembled in history) and, historically speaking, they/we might have a little “Han Solo shot first” issue as far as technological warfare goes. It all depends on how you look at it. 

5) Spoiler: Russia is Sandworm and has been (and probably still is) digitally terrorizing Ukraine. Ukraine is target practice for destabilizing the EU.

Ukraine is where Sandworm cut its digital teeth, but they were just breadsticks before the buffet. Now with the Solarwind breach, Russia is done looking at the menu and ready to order the all-you-can-eat-data-plan meal.  In this particular case we are really worried they have seen all our secret recipes and now can they make better-fired chicken than we can. That would be my no jargon way of describing it.

Not to worry though, Russia isn’t trying to make better chicken/take over the world. Running a world is way too difficult. They just want to cripple all global authority structures and do backstrokes in a wave-pool of political chaos. 

5) There are many private players who hold the proverbial Firewall. Every day hacker is keeping an eye on the electrical-wire of things and companies with good hearts and good intentions trying to protect us physically and digitally. And then there are mercenaries and institutions that are actively disrupting and disturbing the minds and hearts of citizens around the world with an array of hacking methods.

6) It is very difficult to tell who is doing what.

7) Basically, world war has already broken out and is being fought online. It’s a battle for data that every nation and corporation in the world is playing. Make no mistake, this isn’t a game. It is war, just a new kind. Fewer bullets, but lives are still on the line. When you shut down the electricity to a hospital, people die (particularly in the middle of a pandemic). Unlike past wars fought for territory and material resources, this war is all about controlling information and obscuring perception. 

To win this war, you don’t need to defeat your adversary, you just need to distract and confuse them. Erode trust, destroy certainty, and you nurtures unrest. Why is unrest the goal? It’s a whole lot easier to sneak in and rob a bank (or a government) when the cops are busy dealing with protesters outside.  

Next, enough government nation-states, it’s time for the hacktivist. It’s time for you to discover the Cult of the Dead Cow.

Homo Deus

Notes on Homo Deus

Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future by author Yuval Noah Harari makes you reconsider what you think you know about being human.

Here is my quick review of the book: I loved it! Just like his last two. But instead of just reviewing the book, I want to share my thoughts on some of the things that stand out for me in relationship to pain management.

Real quick though, this book isn’t for everyone. If you’re uncomfortable having your political, religious, philosophical, and general concepts of self challenged, then you will find this book disturbing on more levels than the author intends.

This book is a warning. It is trying to get us to pay attention, Like a passenger in car asking the driver to slow the hell down. You can’t take the turn you need at this speed.

I believe it also is a celebration of how far we have come and how far we can go. So let me throw this out there, if you cling to your belief structures like a life vest in an ocean of myths, this book is going to make you very upset, and it is going to deflate the concepts that keep your ego afloat. However, if you are looking for a better understanding of what are real challenges are right now, then buckle up because the twists and turns of history, science, psychology are going to make your head spin.

For those with short attention spans, below is a glimpse at the highlights of the book. For those who would prefer listening, here is a link (Yuval Noah and Steven Pinker) to a conversation with the author and Steven Pinker. My thoughts on how this applies to pain management follow.

-We’ve conquered- War, Plague, and Famine as the major mortality issues for humanity and next on the agenda for we will conquer death or become God-like in the pursuit.

-Spoilers: There is no soul, self, or free will as far as science is concerned and to believe so is to live in a fantasy world where you will be easily manipulated.

-The brain contains more than one mind and none of them knows what the other is thinking or why; and most of what you believe about the world (which includes yourself) is a confabulation (bullshit rationalizations) of these minds independent operations.

-The religion evolution went kinda like this: from nature to gods to a single god to nationalism to humanism and now data. Long live Data! In algorithms we trust!

-All medical science leads to augmentation science. We will be upgraded. Or at least the rich will be.

-Algorithms are everywhere and will rule us and we will like it because we are blind to the deeper realities of our existence. 

-The AI of the future will know us better than we know ourselves and we will either be their pets (if we are lucky) or their pests (if we are not lucky).

-The next class system will be based on human and super human.

Part 1: 

Why Are We Killing Ourselves?

After reading Homo Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st century, I felt prepared for the author’s diagnosis of the current state of humanity and prognosis for its future. It’s not all doom and gloom by any means, just the end of humanity as we know it. Technically speaking it could be seen more as the continued transformation of humanity.

The book’s opening argument is that humanity has conquered War, Famine, and Plague as the major factors of human mortality. That’s 3 of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse. Who doesn’t think that’s a good thing? To make its point the book presents some disturbing information on mortality that I had to stop and look into myself. 

1. More people die from suicide then violent deaths.

2. More people die from poor eating habits than starving.

3. By 2050, 50% the population of earth will be considered overweight.

Here are some mortality per year (2017) numbers from the CDC.

Heart disease-647,457 

Diabetes-83,564 

Alcohol related deaths- 72,500

Suicide- 47,085  

Overdoses 47,450

Vs

Homicides- 19,510

Firearm Homicides- 14,542

Mass shootings- 335

The top half of these numbers are all self inflicted.  The CDC website reports: childhood obesity has tripled since 1970; alcohol related deaths have doubled since 1999; suicides have increased by 30% since 1999; and overdoses are up 137% (200% in relation to opioids). 

The articles I came across reported that the majority of criminal acts that lead to violent acts involve the sell or pursuit of drugs. That means for the purpose of buying drugs to alleviate pain or making money by selling drugs to people who are in said pain. What about mass shootings? I think the majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by people who are on one level or another mentally ill and suffering from some sort of psychological and emotional pain. 

The common denominator for all these fall on spectrum of pain management. Drugs are used for (I am including alcohol here) reducing some kind of pain. Mental (emotional or psychological) and/or physical pain. Sure, lots of people use drugs and alcohol recreationally, but if drugs and alcohol are the recreation or needed to have any recreation, then odds are high that there is a hidden suffering not being addressed. What we are really doing is self medicating.

It would seem that a large number of people are under a daily burden that is inescapable without chemical assistance. Drugs and alcohol for the most part are our escape. So is sugar, or in general bad eating habits.

Why are we so sad, anxious, and disturbed when we live in the least violent and most prosperous age of human existence?

How many cavemen do you think killed themselves? I’ve asked this question to a few people and the answer I get back is none (note none of those people were anthropologist). While not scientific, the question makes a point. When life and death were a daily concern, people were to busy figuring out how to stay alive to consider killing themselves. When purpose was easily defined as don’t die today, people worked hard at staying alive everyday.  

It can be argued now that we no longer hunt or are being hunted we are haunted by an inner nature that no longer fits our environment.

The natural state of humans is to be concerned about getting killed, about having enough to eat. So, we naturally worry about things. In fact, its a feature of the brain. When the mind isn’t engaged in a particular task, the Default Mode Network kicks in. This is the part of our brain that has a tendency to ruminate and make us anxious. Its the portion of the brain calmed by meditation and attention training (quick self promotion: this is what I teach).

Worrying is a survival feature. Those who didn’t worry, didn’t live long enough to reproduce. Unfortunately, just because the natural threats no longer stalk us, doesn’t mean this feature for survival is no longer working.

The exterior environment may have changed, but our inner environment hasn’t quite caught up. We were born to solve problems. I mena real concrete problems. As in identifying the best tree to climb to sleep in so your a late night snack. We didn’t evolve to solve math problems or philosophical problems. Those are abstractions made possible by leisure and extreme access to resources. Those are fairly recent add-ons to the humanities skill set. We evolved to solve physical issues.

Our emotional and psychological health is tied more to our physical capacity for adaptation than being able to think your way out of an emotional problem.

In a way, life has become too easy and we have lost our resiliency. Our ability to deal with challenge, discomfort and uncertainty has shriveled like an atrophied muscle. Much like cell deteriorating effect of zero gravity on an astronaut’s physiology, the lack of constant physical strain/challenge has made us mentally and emotionally weaker.  

We now suffer from pain that we do not understand how to properly address. We have evolved to solve problems in an environment that no longer exists.

Instead of staying alive as the main function, we now are struggling with staying happy.

Our culture that has provided us a safer world has not prepared us to deal with ourselves. We wrestle and struggle with our thoughts and feelings. This leaves us with deep questions about worth and purpose that need to be addressed.

We are the most resource rich culture in history and we are killing ourselves hand over fist. It would appear that the more prosperous we become, the more likely we are to lose hope. What could possibly save us from ourselves?

This is important to appreciate because Yuval’s argument for humanities next agenda (now that we have conquered war, famine, and plague) is that we are going to conquer Death itself and transform humans into gods. 

Considering how bad we are at handling our feelings now, I wonder what kind of gods we will become.

Part 2

Kill The Gods, Long Live Data (continued in a week or so)

Natural Born Heroes

For those people who like real adventure and a desire to know what it means and takes to be a hero, boy do I have a book for you.

Natural Born Heroes is one part World War II heist and one part history of sport science. While managing to weave a thrilling yarn about how a band of ragtag spies kidnap a Nazi general on the Greek island of Crete, McDougall also investigates the history of fitness on a large scale, covering martial arts, endurance sports, hydration, and nutrition. On one hand introducing true-life swashbuckling heroes who pulled off the impossible; and on the other, a journey from ancient Minoan society to modern day to explore what it takes to be a hero.

First it’s a detective story exploring how a team of misfit British spies and Cretan sheep rustlers could possibly kidnap a Nazi general in the middle of occupied territory and live to tell the tale. The author doesn’t sit back and armchair this adventure, he travels the world finding leading experts on human fitness to prepare for a trip to Crete to try and redo the unimaginable trek of the good guys.   

Much like his last book chronicling ultra-endurance runners, Born to Run, McDougall puts himself in the middle of the action. He wants to cover the same ground as the story's protagonists, so he trains in parkour, natural movement, forging, nutrition, axe-throwing and sharp-shooting to prepare  for a trek through the treacherous Cretan mountains. 

The training covers: fascia vs muscle strength; how learning to throw transformed human capacity for sequential thought, imagination, and language; natural movement and the development of parkour; Pankration and development of Wing Chun; and echolocation.

One of the standout deliveries of the book offers insight into the gender and age gap in sports and performance.  It points out that the difference in men and women’s performance in strength and endurance is very small and that a sport allows for more flaunting or peacocking of the body.  Any skill gap that is so great between genders doesn’t make good evolutionary sense, because if men were that much faster and stronger than women, then they wouldn’t be able to mate very well.  Basically it breaks the gender (and age) gap down to nurture not nature. The reason men appear so much superior is because we don’t raise boys and girls to play together. It also points out that sports specialization has led to an observer culture. Less and less participation, which of course leads to less fitness and cooperation.

Other cool/interesting things examined in the book include: 

-Situational awareness and compassion as a survival strategy.

-Trials of endurance and strength as passage into adulthood.

-Weeds are good for you.

-There is a hydration conspiracy.

-How Churchill used magicians to win the war.

-Just how much of a badass Teddy Roosevelt really was.

-True movement requires risk.

-Fitness should be based on being useful.

-The rise of the gym is equal to the rise of obesity.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger ruined fitness for America.

All-in-all Natural Born Heroes is super informative, absolutely compelling, and downright inspiring.  This one definitely goes into the Kung Fu Science Fiction High School library.

This Naked Mind

Considering I’ve gone the last 50 days without drinking any alcohol, I have to say that Annie Grace’s book, This Naked Mind, is the most influential book I read in 2019.

This book now sits in my martial arts section in between my Taoist meditation collection and various works on how to punch people in the face. That’s because this book is psychic dynamite. If you really like drinking, and are of the impression it’s not that big of a deal to tie one on from time to time, you don’t want to read this book. 

I didn’t begin to abstain immediately after reading the book, but my perspective changed in a single day. It was one of those books that made me so uncomfortable, I had to read it all in one sitting. Something deep down wanted to argue, wanted to put it off. I knew that something would keep me from ever picking it up again. So, knowing when my first impulse is to push back on something, that I’m trying to defend my position without considering it, I instead started taking notes. 

6 hours later my wife came home and I read my notes to her. I couldn’t get through them without crying. So yeah, it packs a punch.

In short, the book tackles social and cultural issues as well as the science of alcohol consumption. Not only does it cover how alcohol is marketed, the never ending campaign of you deserve a beer, it clearly lays out how alcohol changes the chemical makeup of the brain, making it impossible to perceive reality objectively long after you think you are sober.

I’ve read a number of books about addiction and alcoholism. They have each had something important to say but none have swayed me quite like this book to the mental ninjitsu of alcohol.

After each chapter I made notes. Most of which are very personal. Instead of sharing all of them, I’m picking out the one’s that are most straight forward, but it’s hard for me to hide my feelings. Here goes:

-Alcohol reduces the brain's ability to understand what is and isn’t a threat. Once it has affected your system, anything that keeps you from drinking is a threat. Family, friends, job, or hobbies.

-It’s a short term solution that has an exponential long term cost. Like borrowing money from a loan shark that charges 200% interest everyday after the original loan.  

-Alcohol doesn’t make you feel better. Instead your brain’s ability to process sensation overall decreases. 

-You aren’t more charming and you aren’t funnier. At least not in the way you would hope. But your ability to read social cues has lessened so you don’t notice the discomfort of others.

-The pain (often existential) remains, for when you wake up tomorrow, the pain returns often worse than before. But is hard to remember that, because alcohol affects memory. Though the alcohol allows for a short cut, or a short circuit, a quick fix as it were, to dull our social, emotional, and psychological discomfort, it can never make them go away. It actually increases our feeling of powerlessness, because “without alcohol, how else can I handle those situations?”  

-Uncomfortable emotions aren’t washed away, they are suppressed. It doesn’t make us feel more comfortable or confident in social situations. Instead alcohol makes it harder to empathize with people, and so we confuse a growing sense of indifference with comfort. You don’t get better at handling situations, you just care less how they turn out.  

-If it alcohol made you happy you would be filled with happiness by now.

-Claiming alcohol gives you pleasure is like saying it’s enjoyable to create blisters for the relief of taking off your shoes.

I can go on (I have 5 more pages of notes), but why try to rewrite the book? The Naked Mind made me challenge my definition of courage. It made me aware of my unconscious biases and gave me a way to examine my life more closely. It asked me to consider what I needed a break from and what I really deserved. It offered me a way to be more honest with myself and more present for the people I love. 

I have another 50 days to go on my 100 day challenge of no alcohol. Why did I make that choice? I needed to see for myself what life was like without drinking. I needed to discover tools and techniques to deal with the frustrations of life without compounding them. And ultimately I wanted to discover what my best was, without giving myself an excuse for failure. Good enough isn’t my best. And I, along with my family and friends, deserve my best. 

I challenge you to read this book. I understand you might be nervous, but I promise it’s worth your life.