Editorial source note
OMAD - Living Lives of Delusion... (Three Characteristics)
Joe uses the Buddhist three characteristics—impermanence, dissatisfaction, and not-self—to explain why perfect fixes keep failing. He argues that exception-seeking sustains delusion and that the available work must be faced directly.
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.
The exception that keeps the lesson away
Joe describes a recurring bargain with reality: the next purchase, diet, or device will be the exception that finally produces lasting satisfaction. When the promised result fades, the bargain is not abandoned. Another exception takes its place.
The pile of discarded solutions
His examples begin with childhood overeating and continue through exercise equipment, supplements, and pandemic-era online shopping. Each object arrives with a complete future attached to it, then moves into what Joe imagines as a pile of things whose owners have already lost interest. More choice produces finer distinctions to dislike—color, texture, fit—rather than an end to dissatisfaction.
Joe also places metformin and Ozempic inside this critique. He argues that medication cannot perform the underlying work of confronting an established eating problem. That is Joe’s claim in the recording: he treats the hope for a pharmaceutical exception as another attempt to avoid the difficult terrain that remains personally one’s own.
Three characteristics beneath every fix
The framework comes from three Buddhist characteristics of existence. Joe defines anicca as impermanence: objects, bodies, and conditions do not remain fixed. He presents dukkha as pervasive unsatisfactoriness, using a house full of pictures that are always slightly off center. Straightening one frame seems to disturb the next, yet the room remains balanced enough to inhabit.
The third characteristic, anatta, is not-self. Joe says that looking for an indivisible person reveals only relationships, experience, and changing physical processes. He rejects a permanent soul or core in favor of patterns formed through prior conditions and present interactions. In his Buddhist account, no independent unit stands outside those relationships.
In Joe’s account, the three characteristics explain why the perfect fix cannot stay perfect. It changes, leaves something unresolved, and never belongs to the stable self imagined at the moment of purchase.
Delusion as exception hunting
Joe places delusion alongside greed and hatred as consequences of ignorance. Its practical signature is improbable hope: perhaps one diet pill will avoid every tradeoff, one lottery ticket will repair years of losses, or one stranger promising a transfer of money will be genuine. The same mind that expects a painless food solution, he argues, is made vulnerable to other scams by its appetite for extraordinary odds.
This is why disappointment does not correct the pattern automatically. In Joe’s description, delusion preserves itself by treating each failure as evidence that the real exception has not yet been found. The search can continue indefinitely while the available work remains untouched.
The bridge already present
Joe ends with a bridge rather than another product. He argues that the required discipline can be crossed only through the conditions already in front of the person; a hypothetical easier route does not move anyone across it.
For someone who has stopped following OMAD, Joe identifies the present as the only meaningful point of return. The conclusion follows from his three-part frame: a perfect future is impermanent, unsatisfactory, and not owned by a fixed future self. The current act cannot be replaced by an exception that exists only in anticipation.