• Concrete Life Upgrades
• Brené Brown
• Marie Kondo
• Finances
• Make reasonable contingency plans
• Figure out what you're trying to do
• Be careful how you identify yourself
• Plans and Blindspots
• Facing the Truth
• Finding Things & Solving Problems
• Learning
• Connecting with People
• Don’t forget that other people may not want the same things
• Choose Your Peer Group with Intention (and creativity!)
• Language affects how you (and others) think about things
• Accept that your beliefs are not something you can change at will, and act accordingly
• Find a balance, given what you care about — and maybe look to other cultures for proof that there’s more than one “right” way
• Figure out what changes your quality of thinking
• Know How to Interact with the Police in the US
• Things to consider:
• Human civilization is unbelievably new:
• Life is quite short, and you should pay attention to what you care about and make time for it.
• Tim Urban's three takeaways:
• When trying to do something that’s truly novel, be prepared for surprising challenges
• See also: @Hobbies and @Women's Health & Wellness and @Health & Wellness and @Experiences/Opportunities/Travel

Concrete Life Upgrades

Brené Brown

I'm not sure what will best entice you here... That her nerdy talk on vulnerability in 2010 struck such a chord that she instantly acquired a cult following of millions (it's still the 4th most viewed TED talk of all time with 50million+ views)? That she's a Type A qualitative researcher who discovered so many things in the data that conflicted with her life plans that she had to pause and work through her stuff with a therapist before being able to continue? That she has spent the last 10 years working with special forces in the US military, Fortune 50 companies (including Pixar)? Or maybe just that she's been a guiding light for me in the darkest times?

Listen to all her stuff on hoopla if you can, starting with The Power of Vulnerability lecture series - 6 1hr sessions (or just go read her books, but know that she’s a talker, not a writer); if you can't absorb it all on the first pass, go through it again in 6 months.

Marie Kondo

Finances

Essentially: Get to a point where you spend less than you earn (this is basically what being able to retire means, but it doesn’t have to happen in your 60s). Remember that you can get there by spending less, as well as earning more. Try to have your money work for you; understand compound interest (and the way it can apply to other investments)—10% per year doubles your money every 7.2 years, so start as early as you can (though inflation and tax can eat into that value), and other ways of getting passive income. Pay off your high-interest debt for the same reason. Max out your ROTH each year if you can (and try to put things in it that might 100x and then do it again — in the meantime, try a low-fee target date retirement fund like one from Vanguard and automate a deposit/purchase every month for dollar cost averaging). Take full advantage of employer matching. If you know how much you spend a year, you can maybe get some comfort from how much time you could live on your savings + passive income if you weren’t working (6-months is a good initial target).

Consider risk and what you can do about it: diversify your assets and investments, get at least catastrophic insurance coverage for your health and your home; if you can, avoid significant financial obligations that will require payments even if you don’t have a job, etc.

Don't neglect your future self, but find a way of understanding and making tradeoffs between money and things or experiences that actually reflect the things that bring you joy. E.g. “I could buy this thing, or go to the movies 5 times.” or “I could buy this thing or spend a summer living in Europe learning a new language.” or "I could buy this thing or stop being stressed about my credit card debt." Another important consideration is how much use you'll get out of a thing e.g. "These pants may seem expensive, but I'll probably wear them a few times a week for the next 3 years." — I spend a lot of money on my laptop & workstation & phone because I typically spend 10 hours a day interfacing with them. Also, if you’re going to eventually get a high-quality thing, consider whether you can just do that upfront (it’s always sad to see someone upgrade their kitchen before selling their house when they could’ve enjoyed that kitchen for years themselves), and repurchasing low-quality stuff can actually be more expensive cumulatively than a high-quality purchase that lasts.

Make reasonable contingency plans

(whether from age or injury, you will not always have the body or mind you have today, and like the rest of us, sooner or later (hopefully later 🤗), you and your loved ones will die; fortunately, there are things you can do in advance to make those tragic facts easier to cope with)

Figure out what you're trying to do

In the unpleasant way that deciding not to make a decision is actually making a decision, whether you like it or not, you have goals and you're pursing them. But if you haven't gotten in touch with them and made your own plans, you're probably running on autopilot with the instructions that society has been inundating you with since you were just a twinkle in your father's eye. Unfortunately, those pre-packaged plans are probably not serving you very well.

Bonus hint: it turns out that a lot of your plans are in stored in your body(!), so it probably makes sense to invest in learning to understand the way your body is a partner in your pursuits.

When seeking out a therapist (which I highly encourage), it might make sense to filter for those who have realized this and practice somatic therapy (there are many types and approaches worth exploring, including EMDR).

Be careful how you identify yourself

Instead of defining yourself by your circumstance: your profession, your roles, the “what,” try the why. If you’re a doctor or a mother, your identity and self-worth can be tied up in that. If you suffer an injury and can no longer practice medicine, or when your kids grow up, adjusting is much easier if you instead have an identity tied to why you became a doctor or why you decided to have kids. There are many more paths that are available if you’re more focused on the why than the what, and the what is likely less important to other people than you might think.

Plans and Blindspots

If you have backup plans that you think will work, you'll be less deluded about what it is that you're doing and how likely it is that there's a major flaw in it that you're blind to (because you don't have another way that things are going to work out but you sort of need to believe that your plans are going to work).

Facing the Truth

1. It's true whether or not you're facing it. Facing it at least gives you a chance to address it.
1. Note: somewhat counterintuitively, it can sometimes be easier to face a hard truth with a trusted buddy (if that’s too scary, maybe try a therapist—they’re often decent at sanity checking both truths and plans).
2. Note: there’s a difference between privacy and secrecy. Be careful about holding secrets for yourself or anyone else.
2. I've been really stunned by how many wise people are trying to tell individuals and society some version of "If you own your story, you can decide how it ends, but if you deny your story, your story owns you."

Finding Things & Solving Problems

You are a zillion times more likely to find something if you believe it's there. This is true in the fridge and in your basement and in video games, but also when trying to solve problems — your intent when tackling something is totally different if you don't underlyingly believe that a solution exists.

(Update: I’ve actually seen this with seasoned practitioners: they will very frequently try to have you experience their intended goal state for even a moment even if it may take months or years for them to help you get there on your own, and I think it’s largely because they want your system to know that it’s possible.)

Learning

Connecting with People

I think it might matter a lot who you can find and whether you can make a connection with them.

Consider where to look for/find people e.g. 👩‍🏫Experiences/Opportunities/Travel

I think people spend most of their lives on autopilot; which puts their shields up. Take advantage of the times when people are naturally disrupted (e.g. a crisis, big or small) or haven’t gotten into a groove yet (e.g. freshman orientation) or are intentionally popping out of their pattern (e.g. dance camp or a wedding) and make the most of those opportunities to connect with people.

I think there’s a lot of value from being recognized (even just as a fellow human) by other people—maybe it’s in a small interaction about your or their adorable puppy, or while recommending your favorite snack in a grocery aisle, maybe it’s someone who knows you because of shared experiences (school, work, etc.). You can create more of this by 1. interacting with people even if it’s a little uncomfortable and 2. doing things that put you in repeat contact with overlapping groups of people. Volunteer, become a member, get season tickets, walk your dog at the same park at the same time, etc.

But also: Pay attention to what relationships actually matter to you, and invest in them.

Don’t forget that other people may not want the same things

We all know the Golden Rule: basically, treat others as you would like to be treated. That’s a fine place to start, and an important exercise in empathy, but not only are there many different cultures swimming around together, there are many different individuals with their own set of needs and wants — some people love surprises and some people hate surprises. Some people want to be won over and some people need their refusals to be taken seriously the first time. And many people are bad at noticing how their circumstance differs from others (e.g. a rich white man might feel quite differently about a police encounter than a homeless black woman, even if neither has broken the law). It’s hard work trying to navigate this (especially as we absorb narratives from movies and the like), so maybe try investing first in your inner circle (e.g. by figuring out their love languages) and take more of a “do no harm” approach further out.

I have a related axe to grind.

Consent matters: If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to hear this, but: if you decide that you know best, and you decide to act against (or without consideration for) the wishes or interests of another individual or group, you are in dangerous territory. We generally only talk about the importance of consent in terms of intimacy in romantic contexts or maybe now more generally in terms of someone’s (including children’s) bodily autonomy, but in many ways, trust, consent, and communication are important across all domains (especially where there isn’t clear consensus). I think it’s worth taking great care in respecting people’s lives and efforts when there are inevitable conflicts of opinion about what makes sense to do. One side might think they’re just exercising free speech, or providing potential useful information (even if unvetted or out of context), or they’ve looked at the landscape and believe that the harms from this outcome are inevitable or even asked for (e.g. by living in America or engaging with their project or community); in all of these cases, they then excuse the negative effects they or their peers cause via reputational harm from careless speculation or gossip, online harassment or bullying, covert actions that erode trust, or overt “cancellation” campaigns that cast people out of society without a free and fair trial.

Violence comes in many forms, but society has been slower to recognize or provide clear punishments or recourse for the damage that’s treated in a therapist’s office rather than a hospital.

Choose Your Peer Group with Intention (and creativity!)

The main thing here is that, consciously or subconsciously, you’re going to seek the acceptance of your tribe, and this will govern a lot of your behaviors as well as your own sense of how your life is going—but the world is big and it’s more possible than ever to be intentional about whose approval you’re seeking. It doesn’t have to just be “the people who happen to be around” whether at school or work or even at home (though these things can be deeply ingrained and hard to ever completely shake off).

Maybe this has shifted somewhat with the advent of social media, but I think people underestimate how powerful it can be to have even your own impression of certain individuals be part of the group of people whose opinions matter to you, rather than just circumstantially available warm bodies — authors and public figures (and memories of your grandmother’s disdain for dishonesty) can support you in navigating life’s many decisions.

We’re social creatures, so by default, the people/media you’re exposed to will shape your underlying ideas of what’s acceptable or cool or lame or whatever (I don’t have a better explanation for fashion trends), so I think it’s worth putting some care into cultivating your Twitter feed and your fb feed (you can “unfollow” without unfriending) as well as what books you read and what tv shows you watch as well as how much time you spend with various friends and family.

It can also be hard to remember the voices that you value when the voices that are nearby are so much louder. I suggest finding ways to anchor yourself, e.g. having a photo wall in your house of the people who understand you and believe in your potential (while loving you as you are) and maybe quotes that ground you (even if it might feel cheesy). I also find it useful to write letters to old friends I’ve collected but who aren’t really part of my day-to-day; it shores up that relationship as a line of defense against broader society and also causes me to spend time steeped in the narrative that I have with that person.

I also highly recommend adding 👫Brené Brown to your inner circle. 👩‍🏫Masterclass might also be worth a look; a reminder that there are good, accomplished, and articulate people out there who care about things you care about and are actively trying to reach out and share what they’ve learned.

As a strange but concrete example of how this can work: I had a friend who was able to think really clearly about esoteric topics and I’m pretty sure he had a big advantage because fairly early on, he added Descartes to his chosen peer group; my guess is that this helped him to stay the course when his real life peers would’ve encouraged him to give up and gloss over those hard-to-think-about topics.

In some ways it’s like a more subtle (and more important) version of the way that you play your best tennis when the people you’re playing with are better than you. And in the case of culture, it can shift your energy towards the future and fruitful things instead of trying to fight against or drag along unwilling people who don’t share your values.

Language affects how you (and others) think about things

Analogies and metaphor are cool because, if you pick a good one, you're able to talk to someone who started off knowing nothing about your thing and quickly import a lot of content that they'd already built out about the thing you're comparing to. In some ways, I think this is what storytelling is about, and is one reason that 👫Brené Brown's work resonates so well with so many people.

Accept that your beliefs are not something you can change at will, and act accordingly

Given this, acting in the world as a whole unified person is actually a delicate dance and it requires compassion and accommodation for the parts of yourself and others that you can’t easily change.

Certain things have been woven into the fabric of your development: “proper” gender roles (sexism), what trustworthy people look and sound like (racism/classism), how much education you need in order to competently engage with intellectual issues (elitism), how old you have to be before you can make important decisions (ageism), what animals are or aren’t ok to eat (carnism?), etc.

You can also form your own independent views, but if they aren’t strong enough to combat the beliefs that were instilled in you and that you have integrated in a densely interconnected way, there will be a natural tension in the way you live your life.

My advice: make peace with the fact that you don’t underlyingly believe all the things that you intellectually endorse. Distrust of black people does not mean you’re a bad person; it probably means that you grew up in the United States. By accepting that you have these beliefs (and maybe much weirder ones that are harder to explain, like a disgust of old people or a worry that if you aren’t the best at [esoteric hobby X] no one will like you), you can make plans that accommodate them better than sweeping them under the rug, and you can take that knowledge and explain your behavior to others and apologize and/or pivot when your behavior doesn’t match up with your endorsed beliefs.

But be careful not to take those underlying beliefs and blanketly give them power in your life. Maybe you have a fear of bicycling because a friend was killed in a traffic accident—it makes sense to recognize that fear and the source of the fear and communicate that to the people in your life. But if someone invites you to bike in a park without car traffic, while you can be too afraid to accept, it can be good for you and your friends to have you recognize and acknowledge that the fear is misplaced (even if it feels very real). As someone with a lot of trauma and triggers, it has been so so helpful when I’m able to communicate in a nuanced way about what’s happening for me — not asserting that my anxieties are justified, but still accommodating them by making efforts to find a way for me to do the activities in a way that doesn’t force me to ignore my feelings and just push through.

Another problem with giving those underlying beliefs power is that when they don’t actually map onto reality, you may have painted yourself into a corner. In the biking example, if you treat your feeling of fear as justified, your friends may do things to ensure it’s safe, but that may not actually address whatever is causing those feelings, which can leave your friends feeling frustrated and you feeling defensive and maybe worried that you’ll need to do the “safe” biking to save face.

So recognizing those underlying (often unappealing) beliefs and also having an intellectual belief about what’s real/what’s true, and then communicating and making decisions based on both, puts you in a much better position than trying to treat your beliefs as a coherent whole.

Find a balance, given what you care about — and maybe look to other cultures for proof that there’s more than one “right” way

(Where it’s possible you care about things you wish you didn’t or that you don’t care about things you wish you did)

This will help you to see reality more clearly: what you’re actually doing, what effects you are (or aren’t) having, etc.

e.g. If eating meat/eggs/dairy in your social group is sinful, but you love it, maybe check in on what you care about and what your friends care about and find a compromise. For me, it turns out that I care about the suffering of animals and the quality of the food I put in my body and I care about the people around me also factoring that in (without that causing them to dig their heels in). So when I shop or when someone asks if they could pick something up for me at the grocery store, I optimize (and ask them to optimize) for how happy the animals might’ve been: no specific labels or restrictions, no heavy-handed judgement, just a nudge in the direction of what I value.

Something else that helped me was discovering that Americans spend a much smaller percentage of their budgets on food compared to other countries. So even though those foods seem expensive, it’s maybe not crazy to invest more in what I’m consuming.

Figure out what changes your quality of thinking

Know How to Interact with the Police in the US

e.g. Practice saying "I don't consent to a search" when they ask to look in your bag or your car. Know that you can always say "Am I free to leave?" or "Am I being detained?" to end the interaction. Remember anything you say can/will be used against you — you have the right to remain silent.

Things to consider:

Human civilization is unbelievably new:

(we haven't figured everything out, your parents didn't figure everything out, the form of government in your country is just one of dozens of options being actively tested, our culture is changing crazy-fast, technology is being developed crazy-fast — all of this is just an insane experiment)

Population Boom: Charting how we got to nearly 8 billion people

Top stories: WHO tells Asia-Pacific to brace for Omicron as variant spreads; Germany imposes restrictions on unvaccinated people; US steps up travel restrictions and brings in free COVID-...

www.weforum.org

Life is quite short, and you should pay attention to what you care about and make time for it.

The Tail End - Wait But Why

In a post last year, we laid out the human lifespan visually. By years: By months: And by weeks: While working on that post, I also made a days chart, but it seemed a bit much, so I left it out. But fuck it. The days chart blows my mind as much as the weeks chart.

waitbutwhy.com

Tim Urban's three takeaways:

1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.

2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.

3) Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.

P.S. [though maybe this belongs in 👩‍🏫Experiences/Opportunities/Travel?] I regret not making time to attend a few weddings that I missed while my life/work was too overwhelming—I don’t think I realized that it might be one of vanishing remaining opportunities to connect with friends who were transitioning to a life path that would keep us all more permanently separated. If I had it to do again, I would’ve just showed up in my state of overwhelm and made the best of it 🙃

When trying to do something that’s truly novel, be prepared for surprising challenges

See also: 🧶Hobbies and 🚺Women's Health & Wellness and 🏥Health & Wellness and 👩‍🏫Experiences/Opportunities/Travel