This is the most personal article I've ever written. It's about love, and it's not meant to make you feel fuzzy inside. My goal isn't to inspire or impress you, it's to be completely honest. Four years ago, I experienced true love, and it changed my life. Anybody who has experienced it will tell you the same. It's the most profound experience that a human can have. But it isn't easy to describe. It's not simply a feeling. It's something like a state of mind. It changes how you think and how you see the world. And for me, the depth of love that I experienced was so intense, it forced me to accept the existence of God. Obviously, I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill kind of love, the kind we have towards our favorite foods. I mean, I do love bacon, and I also love my wife. Now, why we use the same word in both circumstances I don't quite understand. While my affection for bacon runs deep, it's in an entirely different category than the love that I feel for my wife. So my wife Julia and I agreed we needed a different term to reference the profound feeling we shared for each other. When we're extremely close, we don't say I love you, we say I verb you, and it means something completely different. To verb somebody doesn't mean to like them a lot. It doesn't mean to really enjoy their company. I'm talking about a feeling so strong that it is necessarily met with a desire for commitment. It is literally impossible to verb somebody and not want to be partnered for the rest of eternity. Now, I realize this will upset people, but if you think you really, really love somebody, but don't immediately want to be committed to them for life, without even a shred of doubt, then you've not experienced true love. True love does not include even a split second of reservation, about 100% commitment to your spouse. In fact, nothing could be desired more. Now surely what I've said sounds fanciful and dramatic, incomprehensible even, and neither me nor my wife could have understood what I've just said before experiencing it directly. Neither of us thought that we would ever get married, but it happened. Don't be mistaken, all is not roses. True love is not just a fluffy feel good thing, it's utterly terrifying and painful. The life-changing beauty is coupled with extreme distress. Getting to that mental state with your partner is difficult, and maintaining it might be impossible. My wife and I undoubtedly experienced true love, but the state of mind doesn't appear to be permanent. I wouldn't say we've fallen out of love, but it does occasionally get covered up, as if we forget that we're madly in love with one another. Sometimes it gets covered for too long, and it can be hard to get back. So the purpose of this article is manyfold. I want to explain a necessary condition for experiencing true love, and how to get it back if it's lost. I also want to caution, love changes you as a person. All of your personal values immediately get upended and reordered. It's a conversion experience to such a degree that you might not even feel in control of the situation. And it's not a guaranteed thing, your love might be unrequited. Opening yourself up to true love means opening yourself up to absolute devastation, as I will explain shortly. Here is the absolutely necessary condition. Honesty. Now it's not a sufficient condition, but it is necessary. And I'm not talking about your conventional honesty.  Not 99.9% whole a little back honest. And that might sound easy, but it's probably one of the most difficult things a human being can do. Every single one of your secrets must be exposed to your partner, all of them. The darkest thoughts, feelings, stories, hatreds, jealousies, insecurities, lies, pettiness, desires, every last one. It's a degree of honesty that most people don't have with themselves. The experience is of complete naked vulnerability. The purpose is to answer this question. Who are you? Really. Humans have this incredible ability to wear masks. At best, we present a sort of true version of ourselves to the world, but behind all the walls and artificial rubato, there's a real person. There's an extremely sensitive human being. For most of our lives, I think everybody, and myself included, forgets this. We suppress it and start to believe our masks. In my case, before falling in love, I was extremely detached for the reality of my emotions.  I simply overlooked them in the midst of my philosophic journey and I doubt I would have ever rediscovered them without Julia. If you can't be completely honest with yourself, much less with your partner, then you cannot experience true love. If you aren't real, then your partner won't be able to love you because they won't know who you actually are. Any affection that they have towards your masks will never reach you because their feelings are based on an illusion. Rather than expose yourself, the desire is to shield parts of you, to wear at least a fig leaf or some kind of makeup. But to the extent that you do hide parts of yourself, if you have one single wall, you have necessarily shielded yourself from true love. So if you do manage to get to this degree of honesty, you'll discover that humans have some shitty qualities and some really shameful stories. This is true about all of us. If you've lived long enough, you've done or at least thought some very terrible things. And chances are you've buried truths about yourself. I've done some awful things in my life and they were coupled with lies and manipulation and extreme selfishness.  We were fortunate enough to share these truths before we got married, but the opportunity still exists for any couple, regardless of their marital status. So what can you expect upon revealing yourself?  You feel pain for several reasons. First, the simple facts of the situation. Maybe you've done something behind their back or vice versa, which can feel devastating. Maybe you realize that you've been lying to yourself, perhaps for years, which might cause pain, shame, confusion, maybe embarrassment. You also feel pain because you've hurt your partner, perhaps deeply. You feel more pain because you've been keeping secrets from them. Your internal life has known the truth, but you've lied about it and for whatever reason. It causes even more pain because if you're in this fragile state, you don't have any walls to protect you. If you're being real, then you see the reality of the circumstance. You've lied and hurt somebody and you've probably been lied too. When you are in such a vulnerable state, your partner can completely crush you. You've given them a direct route to your heart. And I don't mean crush you a little. I mean they can take your heart and smash you into smithereens.  When you're deeply honest about somebody and they lie to you in return, either about themselves, about you, about what they've done, thought, felt, etc. It's devastating.  You must really trust somebody to share yourself with them. And when it's not reciprocated, it's like throwing yourself in front of an oncoming train. And there's no way to tell how your partner will react. Perhaps they've never felt so much pain before. Perhaps they feel crushed by the truth. They might be angry at you. They may ball up in the corner and cry for a week. They could want to spend time away from you or vice versa. I don't know and neither do you. That's part of the difficulty. Will you be able to trust each other in the future, given the truth about who you are and what you've done? You can't know until you have the conversation. If it works out, if you both can share the truth with each other, then you have an opportunity to build a relationship based on real trust and serious vulnerability. I trust my wife and it's possible that I could be horribly taken advantage of. I'm always running the risk of looking like and feeling like a complete fool. I am aware of this and so is my wife. She bears a huge responsibility for not taking advantage of my trust. And knowing that somebody else trusts you is terrifying.  Either you immediately confessed to that person and it hurt them in the process, or you suppress the truth which will end up hurting them more in the future. The longer you go without getting back to a clean slate, the longer you've essentially lied to each other. This is why the mental state of true love seems temporary. It's extremely fragile, like an egg which breaks at the first scratch. To maintain it, it takes a lot of conversation and honesty and you must be prepared for pain.  You must get real with yourself. Have you wondered if you made a mistake getting together?  Have you been unfaithful either explicitly or in your thoughts?  Have you lied to yourself so much that you don't even know who's under the mask?  There is not one inch of wiggle room to say, well I'll hold just a little back just in case.  Now I should imagine the prospect of true love sounds a bit scarier, especially if you have a tendency to be dishonest.  I don't know, I imagine it would be a shattering experience on a very deep level. It is a massive risk, but the reward in my mind is nothing short of discovering the meaning of life and experiencing literal perfection on earth. Mutually shared love is the highest state of human existence. There is no deeper feeling, there's no deeper meaning. It is 100% complete, satisfying, and consuming. It leaves absolutely nothing additional to be desired. It is so perfect if you can get there that it will terrify you to think about losing it. Even if you don't reach that state, by being truthful you'll be left with a clearer picture of reality and the people in your life. If you are partnered with somebody because of illusion, then in the long run it's better to go your own ways. Living a dishonest life might be easy, but it will eat at your soul. As far as we can tell, you get one shot at life, so you might as well be truthful with yourself about it. Don't wake up when you're 80 and realize that your entire life was an act. Now I'm not making the case for love. I'm trying to show what's required to get there. Lots of honesty and lots of pain. This entire idea can be summarized in a sentence. Truth and love are inseparable. You literally cannot experience true love without completely exposing yourself. And by doing so you could end up devastated. Or you might join the small group of people who fully understand the final line of Les Miserables. When they sing, to love is to see the face of God.


We're going to say edit this one. And we're going to say that this is going to be. So then I also often will abbreviate this, which is kind of ugly. But accumulated depreciation is so long that it's easier to just say, like, a Q, ACC, D, pre, and then fixed assets. Now, some would argue you don't even need to say accumulated depreciation if you make it a sub-account of the other fixed asset account. But I like to have it in there because it's easier for me to do the journal entries. Otherwise, you've got multiple accounts with the same name that just are called accumulated depreciation, which isn't helpful. And you're just going to have to change the name anyways, because QuickBooks won't let you have two accounts with the same name. But we're going to put it under furniture and fixture. So there it is. And let's check that out. So let's save that. And changing the type, OK, that's OK. Boom, and see if I can find it now. It took me back to the right place this time. That's good. So now it's a sub-account. Let's take a look at it on the balance sheet. So if I run it, so now we can see, it works out pretty nice this way, because then the parent account also noticed that if I made a separate sub-account called furniture and fixture, and then I made two, if I made a separate parent account called furniture and fixture, and then two accounts underneath it called accumulated depreciation and cost, then the accumulated depreciation ends up being on top of the cost due to the fact of alphabetical order. So this way actually works pretty nice, because now the furniture and fixture is on top, even though the accumulated depreciation starts with an A. So we have this, and you also eliminate one extra line. Otherwise, there would be one extra line. So you're also making your financials a little bit shorter doing that. So this is the cost. This is the accumulated depreciation for it. And this is the book value, which is great. So I'm going to do the same format for the machinery and equipment, although there is no accumulated depreciation yet posted, but we will have it when we do the adjusting entries in a future course or section. So let's get ready for that now. So I'm going to do the same thing for the machinery and equipment. Dough and day for the deals for crying out loud meals. This is my Spanish. It's half Spanish, half English. Deals, meals, deals for crying out loud meals. OK, I'm going to make another. So what I'll do here is I'm going to make another one. And I'm going to say this is going to be a fixed asset type of account. So it's an asset. And then we're going to make it under the fixed assets, under machinery and equipment. And so I'm going to call it machinery and equipment. And then we're going to say here, I'm just going to say ACCDPRE machinery and equipment. I just think it sounds cool too. ACCDPRE sounds better than accumulated depreciation. It's the ACCDPRE. That's what we're talking about here. Let's run it. And so there we have it. And so if I scroll down, we've got the furniture and equipment and then these subcategories there as well. So that's going to be the general idea. If I go back to the balance sheet, we run it again. Then we've got these nice subcategories. Nothing new happened here because there's nothing in the subcategory yet. But when I post to it as we will do in a future course or section in the adjusting entries, then we'll have this dropdown for each of them. So now I'll be able to show total fixed assets and then each fixed asset category in terms of the cost as well as the accumulated depreciation and the book value per category. Or I can collapse each category showing just the book value per category. So pretty fancy on that. So that looks good. All right, and also when we do that, we'll do our adjusting entry with this form over here. OK, let's see where we stand in our trial balance. Let's go to the trustee TB, run it. We haven't done much new except for that one recategorization of the fixed assets. If your numbers tie up to these numbers, great. If not, try doing a date range, and see if that is the issue. We've got the balance sheet on top of the income statement starting with the assets. These are all assets, cash, accounts receivable, inventory, investment, payments to deposit, prepaid insurance, the fixed assets, the accumulated depreciation, contra asset tied intimately to the fixed asset. We basically took the fixed asset account and broke it into two halves. So that's why we get a contra account because it's part of another account. Doesn't really stand on its own leg. It's just one leg or the other. Anyway, machinery and then we have, those are what the company has in terms of dollars, not in terms of units. Then we have the other side of the coin who has claimed to the value of the assets. We have then the liabilities and the equity, first liabilities like the accounts payable, the visa, the state with the sales tax, the government with, I mean, sorry, the bank with the loans and then the government again with the payroll taxes and then unearned revenue. If we got some kind of deposit that we have not yet earned and then our portion as owners, owner's equity such as the investment similar to the capital or I'm sorry, common stock if we were a corporation and then the owner's equity similar to retained earnings and then the whole income statement given us detail about one year of information typically for QuickBooks. And if we take the credits, which are income minus the debit, which are expenses, we should get a net credit balance, net income that could be thought of as part of the owner's equity or retained earnings if a corporation, QuickBooks doing that closing process for us on a yearly basis. We can see if we bring it up one more year, 0101.25, 0101.25, run it. The whole income statement gets smushed together in owner's equity. The odometer of the income statement being reset at zero for the next trip, starting in the next year, all income accounts, the temporary accounts of income accounts, then resetting starting over owner's equity similar to the retained earnings representing the odometer that's not being reset because it is the total distance that has been tracked in terms of one lump sum number over the life of the corporation, net income over the life of the corporation less the amount that has been distributed out in the form of draws if a sole proprietorship dividends if it was a corporation.


But that's all kind of crazy small really small Let's see if we can go a little bit bigger if I could set you some homework This is what I'd ask you to do. What I'll ask you to do is to go home Wait for the Sun to go down go outside Look up to the sky and count the stars. That's it. It's as easy as that. It's not very difficult homework It's not a very short homework because if you could count them all You would manage to count a hundred billion stars No, what does that mean? That's another just a crazy big number hundred billion stars six billion people that's 16 each So actually your homework tonight could be to go and count 16 stars They're yours There's enough to go around those 16 stars are only from our galaxy. It's called the Milky Way If you start to use telescopes to be powerful telescopes down in Hawaii even the Hubble Space Telescope What happens is that you start to see other galaxies In fact, there's another hundred billion of them each containing a hundred billion stars So in fact for each one of you, there's not 16 stars But for each one of you there is about a trillion stars out in the universe if I could take you on An amazing journey what I would do is I would take you to the very edges of the observable universe We'd go out there and we'd sort of turn and we'd look back and we'd see all of the galaxies and the stars out in the Universe, but then we'd start to zoom back in and we'd find our solar system We'd find our planet we keep zooming zooming zooming in until in the end We could see those same little tiny particles that you're made of