November 10 2026

JAMES: Growing old is not for the faint of heart. While working to maintain and improve my deteriorating physical condition some other things are showing up mentally. For example, I have a complete loss of smell which can be an early sign of Alzheimer’s.

The best thing I know to do is to keep using the af method which helps me to deal with these things as they arise.

A famous American comedian, Joan Rivers, once famously joked about the declining milestones of aging, humorously breaking down what happens (via exaggeration) decade by decade:

• At 40: Your eyesight begins to go.

• At 50: Your mind starts to decline.

• At 60: Flatulence (farting) becomes a regular issue.

• At 70: You finally lose your sense of smell (which she joked was a mercy).

• At 72 / 77: She joked that when her birthday cake was brought out, it took her a full year to blow out the candles because she had no breath left.

She died in September 2014 age 81, so knew herself well what she was talking about. As such losing one’s sense of smell seems a regular occurrence of senectitude and not necessarily “an early sign of Alzheimer’s”. It’s for the “faint of heart” to anticipate all sorts of additional complexities when you can instead take the challenges of growing old – the natural progressing of senescence – as they actually occur with a good dose of humour and appreciative wonder about life and the amazing universe we live in.

To be friend to yourself in your own ageing process (apart from applying the Actualism method) I can recommend some of her outpourings of dark humour in the Michael Parkinson Shows, for instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5toSnCvK4A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGjWzmlNnSs

Remember, Illegitimi Non Carborandum.

Cheers Vineeto

November 14 2026

JAMES: It has become apparent to me that I have to do it (self-immolate) for ‘everybody’. I can’t just do it for this body. I have always given lip service to ‘this body, that body and everybody’ but I didn’t really mean it. I only wanted it for ‘me’. My time is running short. All I have to do is look at the real world to see it.

I need to start by being more ‘happy and harmless’.

VINEETO: Hi James,

The way you wrote it sounds like a programme which you “have to do” and therefore you “need to start by being more ‘happy and harmless’”.

The question is – do you want to be more happy and harmless, i.e. do you want to feel good because it feels good? Being happy feels better than feeling sad and fearful and being harmless feels way better than feeling resentful and angry. If that make imminent sense to you then that is what you choose to be.

If it doesn’t make sense to propel you into action, then telling yourself that you “need to” or “have to do” will only be a burdensome task how you should live, in other words one part of you is telling the other part what to do, which is a dissociative and ultimately futile enterprise.

Something I recently wrote to Kuba might be applicable for you as well –

Vineeto: It’s useful to fully understand that dissociating from one’s feelings – with psychosomatic consequences, i.e. experiencing those repressed emotions as, generally negative, sensations – is what spiritualism is all about, whereas in actualism you break the habit of dissociation, or disassociation, by recognizing, each time they occur, that ‘I’ am my feelings and my feeling are ‘me’. (Actualism, Actualvineeto, Kuba15, 11 November 2026).

If you find out that you actually want to feel good – happy and harmless – you can start by taking notice of whichever feeling is in the way of feeling good right now, then acknowledge it … then embrace it in the sense of ‘it is happening to me’ … and then, slowly, bring your feeling from the position of ‘arm’s length’ closer and closer, by neither suppressing nor expressing it – so intimately close until you experience that at this moment you are the feeling you experience instead of thinking you are having the feeling. That’s where you have the choice to feel good.

Cheers Vineeto