Editorial source note
OMAD Homework - Week 1 | Find Anicca!
Joe uses the Buddhist idea of impermanence as a week-long observation exercise. He argues that seeing cravings arise and pass can make their discomfort feel finite and train attention during a fast.
Related principles
An editorial summary of views Joe expresses in the linked video. The original recording remains the primary source for his full words and context.
Detailed notes
A closer look at the ideas, examples, and reasoning Joe presents in this recording.
Seeing change in places too ordinary to notice
Joe introduces this recording as the first in a series of weekly assignments. The exercise is not a new meal rule. It is a way of directing attention: for seven days, he asks viewers to look for anicca, the Buddhist concept of impermanence, in whatever they encounter.
Maintenance as evidence
His first examples are deliberately mundane. A meal ends hunger for a while, but eating will be necessary again. Bathing makes the body clean without making cleanliness permanent. Dishes return to the sink after they have been washed. Joe treats these repetitions not as failures but as small, readily available demonstrations that every condition depends on continued causes and upkeep.
That perspective also changes the meaning of a completed task. Completion is real, in his account, but it does not freeze the result. Fullness, cleanliness, and order each have a lifespan. Their ordinary recurrence makes them useful material for observation precisely because no special setting or belief is required to notice them.
Widening the field of view
Joe then moves outward from household routines. A boss once assumed to be permanent leaves. A business changes owners. The shops and gathering places of childhood are renamed, sold, or demolished. Political reputations and public moods alternate, while scientific enthusiasms, end-times predictions, and excitement around diet drugs rise and recede.
These examples vary greatly in seriousness, but Joe uses all of them for the same purpose: to expose the temporary character of arrangements that can feel settled while they are present. He extends the thought beyond a human lifetime as well, arguing that stars, planets, and black holes belong to the same world of changing forms even when their timescales are difficult to imagine.
Why a passing craving matters
The eventual connection to fasting is direct. Joe says a craving belongs inside the pattern rather than outside it. It emerges, becomes vivid, and passes. For him, recognizing that movement makes discomfort less authoritative: the feeling may be intense, but intensity does not make it permanent.
He applies the same test to discouragement. When a bad period seems as though it will never alter, Joe regards that appearance of permanence as a prompt to examine the situation more closely. The week-long assignment is meant to train that examination until change becomes easier to see.
Joe’s stated payoff is greater clarity and focus during a fast. The practice does not promise that an urge will disappear on command. Instead, it places the urge among all the other conditions already observed to be temporary, giving determination a wider frame than the immediate moment.