You may often get stuck in cycles of temporarily upgrading some part of your life, only to watch that area decline when you stop giving it as much attention. People especially do this with their finances and their health. When the pressure to take action is strong enough, they’ll make some improvements, but once the immediacy subsides, they return to old habits –and the old results.

Partly this is a framing issue. If you really want to upgrade a certain area of your life and have the upgrade stick, it helps to frame your efforts as creating permanent changes. Adopt the mindset that you can never go back to the old way of doing things. Do your best to mentally and emotionally accept that the old path must permanently end, and you can never return to it again.

You might have a temporary upgrade phase and a long-term maintenance phase for certain changes, but the maintenance phase can’t be the same as the pre-upgrade phase if you want to lock in some permanent gains. Whatever you’re doing now that isn’t getting you the results you want – that particular collection of habits – has to die off and never see the light of day again.

For instance, if you’re considering a dietary change to improve your health, frame it as a permanent change. This framing makes it clear that you can never go back to the way you’re eating now. If you do, you’ll undo any results you gain. Look at your current eating habits and know you must leave them in the past and that they can never be part of your future.

That’s a hard realization to accept sometimes. The notion of making a permanent change may seem daunting enough, but you also have to accept that this means the absolute end of your current practices.

If you want to upgrade your health, your current health practices must end forever. If you want to upgrade your finances, your current financial practices must end forever. If you want to upgrade your social life, your current social practices must end forever. To usher in the new and make it stick, you must be willing to accept the death of the old.

Eating animal products is dead to me. It was part of my past, but I don’t expect to ever have it be part of my life again. When I went vegan in 1997, I began with a 30-day experiment, but I also leaned into the expectation that if those 30 days went well, there would be no going back. That helped the change stick.

Even if you frame something as a permanent change, you still retain the option to undo or modify that change later on. You’re still free to make fresh choices. But if you frame it as permanent from the beginning, it can help you invest more deeply in making the change stick. You can still begin with a 30-day challenge mindset to get started, while also using those 30 days to say goodbye to your old habits.

If you quit smoking, it would be best if you never ever touch a cigarette again in your entire life. The love affair with the old addiction has to die for a new life – and a new identity – to emerge.

There’s a certain sadness when we do this. I suggest that you accept the sadness and let yourself feel it. Go ahead and grieve if you feel some genuine loss. Let those feelings flow through you as you say goodbye to the old.

Say “thank you” to the old habits as well. Take stock of what you learned and how the old experiences helped you mature. Consider what you discovered about your character. At the very least, you may have learned to feel some compassion for those dealing with similar challenges. Being able to feel gratitude (instead of resentment) for the old life can make it easier to flow into permanent changes.

Framing your lifestyle and habit changes as permanent can help you bypass the yoyo phase, so you can make a change stick once you’ve gone through the effort to transition. And remember that a key part of this is to say a real goodbye to the old path and then to require that henceforth the old path may exist only in your memories.

In the later years of Walt Disney’s life, he actively worked on his vision for EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). His intention was to build a complete city of the future – a place for people to live and work in harmony. His designs included a central downtown hub with skyscrapers, Monorails and People Movers for transportation, houses for people to live in, entertainment centers, parks, waste management, and more. It was a big picture vision that he’d been working on for many years, including a deep study of urban planning.

When Walt died his EPCOT vision unfortunately died with him. No one else was willing and able to carry it forward. The real Epcot Center that was built in Orlando after Walt’s death would barely qualify as a shadow of what Walt actually wanted to build. His vision was much grander than another theme park.

What killed this dream? The answer is smoking.

Walt was a heavy smoker and had some serious health issues because of it, including lung cancer. Even as his health and energy were declining, he kept trying to work on this project, but his long-term habit of smoking got the better of him and cut his vision to shreds. He passed away in 1966 at the age of 65, not long after having a lung removed. At least he was able to say goodbye to the people he cared about.

Walt largely hid his smoking habit from the public, not allowing himself to be filmed or photographed smoking. He tried to quit of course but didn’t succeed, and in the end this nasty habit took him down.

Imagine what he could have done with an extra 10 or 20 years. The utopian city of tomorrow might actually have been built, at least the 1960s version of it. That could have created many interesting ripples.

Some forms of baggage can not only slow you down but can kill your dreams. It’s better to release this baggage while you can instead of dragging it into you future, year after year and decade after decade.

What’s your current baggage? Is there some nasty habit or inner demon that’s been burdening you? What happens if you carry it forward for the rest of your life? Even if it doesn’t damage your health, does it have the potential to crush your dreams?

We often hate to slow down and deal with our baggage, but sometimes that’s the intelligent choice. Imagine if Walt took a couple of years to put other aspects of life on pause and to do whatever it took to quit smoking when he was younger. Perhaps he could have retained two healthy lungs and spent an extra decade or more working on his biggest dreams.

With the current virus situation, there’s been a chance to slow down many aspects of life. For many people this is a good time to process and clear out old baggage, so we can release what no longer serves us.

Your baggage might be bad habit, but it could just as well be something else – a misaligned job, a misaligned relationship, a misaligned social circle, etc. What’s creating the most drag in your life when you try to advance towards your goals? What do you think would happen if you finally released it?

Processing your baggage won’t be easy, but admitting the truth that you absolutely must deal with it is a good step. Embracing and accepting the truth puts you on a path to greater freedom. Even when that’s difficult, don’t revert to denial. Just keep facing the daunting challenge.

Walt could have quit smoking. Many other people have done so. He didn’t make that enough of a priority in his life though. He didn’t do what was necessary to process that baggage.

Whatever is dragging you down is most likely a solvable problem, especially if many other people have already overcome similar burdens. It’s good to remind yourself of that often. Your problems have solutions. Your baggage doesn’t have to be permanent. Other people have processed and released similar baggage. And so can you.

On Sunday Rachelle and I went for an early morning walk along the Vegas Strip, mostly outside. I wanted to go mainly for curiosity’s sake. Normally the Strip is very uncrowded in the morning and then gets busier as lunchtime approaches, so I wasn’t expecting much activity till 10am or so. I figured the risk would be relatively low relative to what I might learn and share.

Some casinos are still open while others are still shuttered. What we saw, however, were varying degrees of safety measures – definitely inconsistent among different properties.

Every place had abundant hand sanitizer stations and limited seating at slots and table games (like only 3 chairs per blackjack table), so that at least enforces some social distancing.

Casino employees wore masks everywhere, including the dealers.

A few places had plexiglass dividers around the tables, providing some separation between dealers and patrons. Other places had no dividers at all.

A few places had free mask dispensers. Most open places didn’t seem to have these, however.

At first the area seemed like a ghost town. When we started our walk, it was the most deserted I’d even seen the Strip, even at this time of day. On some stretches it seemed like we were the only two people on the whole block. Occasionally I wondered if we were in a zombie apocalypse movie.

For the most part, it was relatively easy to practice social distancing at this time of day, but we also saw plenty that concerned us, especially as more people woke up and crowds started to form in some places.

First, wearing masks inside the casinos is optional for guests. While we saw many people wearing masks, a lot were mask-free. While masks don’t provide perfect protection, they do provide some, and seeing maskless people walking around inside the casinos gave me the impression that some people don’t care as much.

The most concerning sign though is that many people clearly aren’t practicing social distancing, and the casinos aren’t enforcing that within their walls. It looks like they’re playing lip service to social distancing with the chairs and many signs spelling out safety rules, but it’s clear that plenty of guests aren’t following even the most basic rules.

The places we saw that looked the most unsafe to me were the Venetian and the Flamingo. They were the most crowded places during our walk, and I saw a real lack of social distancing inside. I wouldn’t feel safe hanging out in those casinos.

Crowds of people were bunching up in various places, and in some areas that get a lot of traffic, proper social distancing isn’t realistically possible.

The casinos have clearly made changes, but when I looked with my own eyes, I got the distinct impression that a lot of it was more for show than substance. If mask-free people are going to bunch up a lot in high traffic areas, including standing in clusters behind the table games, I don’t see the Strip as being a safe place for visitors while the virus is still around.

I’m glad we went early in the day when it wasn’t crowded (relatively speaking), and we could spot problem areas and avoid them. But based on what I saw, it’s no stretch to expect that these problems will surely be worse later in the day, especially in the evenings. If we’re seeing issues in the early morning hours, they’re only going to amplify as the day goes on.

Normally the Strip has a certain kind of playful, excited, and fun vibe that I’m very familiar with. The vibe this time felt different – more somber and less fun. The feeling inside the casinos felt almost desperate to me.

When we first started walking, it was eerily quiet and looked abandoned. There was a lot of trash on the sidewalks in front of places that hadn’t yet reopened, like Planet Hollywood. At one point Rachelle spotted what looked like a glass of urine… at another point a condom on the ground – and those were inside open casinos. At least the condom was still in the wrapper. Normally the Strip has high standards of cleanliness, so it may be that they’re having some issues ramping back up to previous standards. That doesn’t bode well if they’re trying to raise their standards during this time though.

Unfortunately I think the tourists who are starting to come back to Vegas right now include too many ignorant and reckless folks. I’d recommend against visiting Vegas for tourism during this time. Remember that it’s not just about your own health but about the lives of others you could infect. I don’t intend to go back there anytime soon.

I contrast this experience with another recent morning walk we took yesterday in our neighborhood, through a long winding trail in a park. Locally we saw lots of good social distancing, including people going out of their way and walking on the grass to avoid others. But in the tourist areas, it was mostly the opposite.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of evidence of herd stupidity recently. One recent example is that when Wisconsin’s Supreme Court abruptly overturned their state’s lockdown, people began flocking to bars and snuggling up nice and close to each other with no protection. Such behavior will just make the virus hornier.

Similar behavior has been happening in Vegas too, now that restaurants and most retail businesses are cleared to reopen. While some stores are strict about maintaining decent precautions like requiring all patrons to don masks and limiting store capacity, other places seem to let people do whatever they want. So unfortunately herd stupidity is abundant. If this continues I think we’ll see the infections and deaths ramping up again, as many experts are predicting.

This isn’t a situation where you should look to the masses for guidance. When you see idiotic behavior, don’t let the fact that everyone else seems fine with it persuade you that it’s probably okay. Stupid behavior that’s popular is still stupid. A bar full of idiots taking reassuring cues from each other is still a bar full of idiots.

People are strongly influenced by social cues. Sometimes those cues are good. When I go running in my neighborhood early in the morning, I most often see people practicing good social distancing. When people approach each other on the sidewalk, one will step into the street to avoid getting too close to the other person. People in the neighborhood wave at me as I pass by them. Oddly even with the social distancing practices in place, the neighborhood feels friendlier because of all the waving. So in this case the social cues are working in our favor.

When the most common behaviors are intelligent, we can trust social cues. Those cues nudge us to behave appropriately and steer us away from problematic behaviors.

But when behaviors are unintelligent, we have to resist social cues that could lead us astray. That isn’t easy because we’re social creatures. But taking cues from other people isn’t always rational.

Leaving behind a goofy religion is another example. When your intellect wakes up and realizes that what you’ve been taught is nonsense, it’s still tough to transition out if you’re surrounded by social cues telling you that everything is fine. You have to shun the social cues and think for yourself, which isn’t easy when you’re under social pressure to turn your back on your own intellect.

In the next several months, I caution you to keep your guard up for incidents of herd stupidity. There’s likely to be a lot of it. Be careful not to fall into the trap of over-relying on social cues when they run contrary to your own best judgment. Don’t participate in the irrational herd behavior that will only cause people more pain and suffering.

More broadly, you could see this situation as an invitation to deepen your ability to trust your own rational thinking, regardless of social cues. Where else in your life could you apply this idea? Where else have you felt pressured by herd stupidity?

You’re smarter than the herd. Stand up to it.