Steve Jobs was orange
To be orange or not to be, that is the question.
Steve Jobs was orange.
Like literally orange because he had gone on a diet eating only carrots for months.
However, it was not so abnormal to his peers at the time; Steve was known to go to extremes when it came to food.
He was a strict vegetarian for most of his life, and frequently fasted and purged (some thought he was bulimic).
Steve Jobs also smelled really bad.
And continued to smell bad even when everyone who worked with him at Atari told him that he stank of B.O.
He believed that his “only fruits and non-starchy vegetables” diet (the diet he had during this particular phase of his life) would stop his body from producing harmful mucus, as well as body odor.
So what does this tell you about Steve Jobs?
I’ve spent the last week in disbelief that it’s already the third week of 2025.
It seems like just yesterday I was looking forward to the holiday festivities, SO READY to take a break from...everything.
Yet like a blip in time, the responsibilities, obligations, and meetings I scheduled in 2024 have all somehow shifted to the present, and I feel… paralyzed.
The past week was spent reminiscing about the new years’, inefficiently working, and procrastinating by reading the Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson.
While many of Steve’s life choices (including leaving his girlfriend after she gave birth to their daughter at 23) makes me wonder how such a human can be capable of such greatness and influence on humanity, there is one trait of his that I respect greatly, and believe accounts for a lot of who he was.
He was obsessed with his own intuition.
For much of his 20s, Steve was searching for self-awareness and chasing enlightenment, even traveling to India (and went from 150 to 120 pounds in a week due to dysentery).
He also frequently experimented with LSD, extreme lifestyles, and meditation.
He was mesmerized by how a lot of life in India was not justified through explanations like it is in the West, but just an ambiguous sense of how it should be.
He saw there was nothing more important than the consciousness within.
And so when his consciousness told him to only eat carrots, he did.
And when his consciousness told him that not eating potatoes would prevent armpit stank, he believed so.
Part of growing up is about becoming a sociable human being and learning how to moderate our intuition for the sake of others.
Like even though yelling in an airport might be harmless as a kid, a fully grown adult yelling in an airport might cause a stampede, as folks might think it’s a bomb.
And while most of these are harmless for us too, there are some that cause a cruel death by a thousand cuts.
And what dies is the prospect of a life that we choose for ourselves.
Being taught what is “right”, and for it to often go against what we want to do (including indulging in an entire pack of double-stuffed Oreos) can be a dangerous concoction, for we become numb to ignoring what our intuition tells us to do.
While as a kid you don’t hesitate to finish the entire pack of Oreos, as an adult you’re thinking,
this is unhealthy
people who see will judge me
I’ll get fat
I seem gluttonous
With external ingrained forces like peer pressure, misguided ambitions, and glorified “goals”, many of us end up leading a life that predicated on others’ objectives.
Intuition seems to be much easier when stranded in winter rural Alaska (think 3m of snow and no humans).
And this is because,
No one would be around you, so no one can judge your call to do jumping jacks or hike further out
More time spent being indecisive will cost you your fingers and toes
Intuition is much harder when the objective is abstract too.
In Alaskan winter, the objective is to survive.
But then, what’s the objective of life as a human, when survival is basically guaranteed in our world of welfare, stable incomes, and modern medicine?
What is everyone living for?
Perhaps this is even more of a reason why we should distrust others’ advice and value our intuition even more.
We experience life driven by unnatural (if natural = survival) objectives that serve as alternatives to “survival”.
Since survival is more or less fulfilled there is no absolute objective to life anymore.
Instead we have to go seek that alternative objective that fulfills each of us while we’re on this planet.
And how do you do that?
By being able to identify things that YOU want, and differentiate it with things that you think you are supposed to want.
So, if you also feel like your 2024 was a Jackson Pollock of other people’s wants and needs, perhaps 2025 ought to also be an inward looking year for you too.
Happy New Year folks.
(Btw highly recommend Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson)