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My favorite thing about getting older
My favorite thing about getting older
But here’s a constant: each year you learn more about yourself. You see yourself in different environments, different styles of living, different communities and friend circles which reward slightly different things. You get to see yourself bend to the world around you as you evolve from one stage of life to another.
I’m convinced each of us has certain fundamental dispositions, whether they’re contained in our genes or attachment styles or Enneagram types. But we’re also prone to making up stories about ourselves, stories that we wish were true. Time is the best antidote to all our attempts at self-deception: it’s easy to lie to yourself for a day, but a lot harder to lie to yourself for a decade.
#philosophy#self improvement#introspection#existential
·bitsofwonder.co·
My favorite thing about getting older
thinking - @visakanv's blog
thinking - @visakanv's blog

Summary: > Thinking is a crucial tool for processing information, making sense of reality, and determining how to act on that information. However, there is often a disconnect between abstract thinking and the practical realities of daily life. Finding a balance and building bridges between the two is key. Over the years, the author's own thinking has evolved from being very abstract and focused on big picture questions in his early 20s, to becoming more grounded and focused on navigating the challenges and responsibilities of adult life, while still retaining a sense of curiosity and desire to contribute positively to the world. Ultimately, examining one's life through thinking is valuable, but it's equally important to live life and not get stuck in one's head.

I don’t believe in the separation between thinking and feeling. I think so, I think of thinking as as an instrument. It’s it’s a it’s like, you know, it’s the intellectual psychological equivalent of like weighing scales and barometers and and rulers. It’s it’s a way of processing information. But most information is actually, like, I mean, emotional information, you know.
what makes a pro a pro and what makes a con a con? If you really dig into it all the way down, it boils down to your feelings about those respective things. And, you know, you might say things that, oh, this is objective because I wanna take that job instead of this job because it pays more. But embedded in that is the fact that you feel that that getting more money is a good thing and you’re you’re choosing to weight(?).
there’s this more abstract kind of big picture, philosophical grand thinking, which is interesting and fun, and there is there’s instrumental thinking, which is very, very functional, very, very, it’s about doing something it’s about getting stuff done basically.
the act of confronting a fear is an act. It’s something that you do. It’s something that, you know, you do with your body effectively. Even if it’s, you know, I’m gonna text my boss, right, and ask for a raise. Like, that’s still an act. It’s something you choose to do. It’s something you have an emotional response to. You feel nervous or you feel scared or, you know, you feel angry. Whatever it is, it is about your feelings and and you think to process your feelings but my cat is here. You think to process your feelings but ultimately you act.
there are quotes like the unexamined life is not worth living and then people flip it and say the unlived life is not worth examining. I think both statements are kinda true
I want the world to have more good thinkers and the way to do that is to, you know, like is to be like Richard Feynman, Feynman, I feel, which is to to enjoy thinking, to show the to show, you know, he described it as I think the the pleasure of finding things out. Right? And the pleasure of really understanding how things work. Because when you really understand how things work, you can manipulate it and how things work.
I am trying to demonstrate my own love for thinking and for processing information and for making sense of reality. And while that’s the case, there’s also a subset of people who may be overrepresented on Twitter and YouTube who kind of take that to to, almost dysfunctional degree where, you know, you decide that thinking is a good thing and then you become obsessive about it and you become kind of it it becomes like your drug. Like, and you think too much about everything.
it doesn’t make sense for me to study everything there is about audio before I start making videos. It’s I should just make a video, keep doing it until and when something goes bad, I will learn by trying to fix it. Right? That’s that’s that is a sort of practical approach to thinking. And it means, you know, being okay not knowing some things so that you can focus on knowing the things that are most consequential, most effective, most powerful.
if you spend all your time thinking, you probably should cut that shit out a little bit. You should you can probably afford to think less. You can probably afford to, you know, do like a weekly review or something and and, you know, like, live your life a little bit.
#philosophy#advice#introspection#knowledge-work#existential#lifestyle#self improvement
·visakanv.com·
thinking - @visakanv's blog
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
I think a lot of folks feel like you should be doing these certain things like writing the great American novel or reading the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time when in actuality these are achievements that have no real guarantee of happiness. Unless you are truly enjoying those journeys, there is no reason to set upon them.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having hopes and dreams, but I do feel that maybe we allow those things to be excuses for not living a content life. I also think at times we hold onto old dreams that no longer serve us, instead of focusing on something new and more applicable to your current situation.
adulthood wasn't full of Ferraris and mansions, and I found out rather quickly that I wasn't going to save anyone, because I was struggling to save myself.
#introspection#career#ambition#self improvement#mindfulness#philosophy#mental health#advice#work/productivity
·brandonwrites.xyz·
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
You can't will yourself into okayness
You can't will yourself into okayness
Non-okayness is the opposite. I’ve described it elsewhere as being “mildly disgruntled all the time.” You’re frustrated with life and with yourself. You feel like there is something wrong with you, although it’s a different problem in each moment: you’re too soft, you’re too rough, you’re too social, you’re too alone. You constantly feel like you’re in the wrong place and you “should have” done something else to avoid this situation.
I distinctly remember one of my first days back in New York after my retreat. I was on PTO so I had the day to myself, and I didn’t have much of an agenda. Usually this is enough to put me on edge: I like maximizing productive use of my time, so I make detailed schedules and todo lists. If I spend an entire day off doing “nothing”, I’ll feel really bad and frustrated with myself at the end of it.
This day, post-retreat, was not like any day I had experienced before. It felt like literally anything could happen and things would be perfectly fine. I do some work? Great. I don’t do any work? Great. I felt like I could just sit there and stare at the brick walls of my apartment all day. I felt such unbridled affection for my roommates and friends. I started reading Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, and felt moved by every paragraph. I could read for a whole hour without the slightest urge to use my phone. And even when bad things happened—one night I was hurt by something my friend did, another night someone at a bar yelled at me—I would feel upset, and then I’d move on, and it wouldn’t spiral into an endless internal echo of “I should’ve done this, I should be that, I should do that.”
One of the things about okayness is that it entails a lot of presence, and the more your sense of presence deteriorates, the less aware you are of the fact that it’s deteriorating.
entering stable okayness is a non-voluntary inner movement. There are many outer, voluntary moves you can do to make it more likely that the inner, non-voluntary move occurs, but none of them will reliably trigger the inner move. Being in a state of non-okayness is like having an internal knot in your mind, and the harder you try to untie the knot—the more you clench and tug on it—the tighter the knot becomes.
The things that tend to nudge me towards okayness are: retreats, quiet time to myself, long walks, reading, and looking at beautiful things. The things that nudge me away from okayness are: consuming a lot of social media, socializing a ton, having a lot of deadlines. This doesn’t mean that those things are strictly bad and to be avoided at all costs. It’s just about working through your own relationship to these things — trying to figure out what it is about these things that uproots yourself sense of okayness, and address that.
One of the trickiest aspects of the inner knot is this: each time it gets tied again, it’s in an ever-so-slightly different shape, requiring a different move to untie it.
The shift that has been working for me most recently is to recognize that okayness just isn’t something I can reliably produce. And repeatedly asking myself, what is the truth of this moment, rather than trying to figure out how I can get to some other state, or some past memory or object of blame, that has nothing to do with what is going on right now.All these things are little nudges to help make it more likely that you get to okayness.
Okayness is when you feel fundamentally at ease with reality and with yourself. You feel like you are enough: there is nothing fundamentally deficient about you. You move through life with grace and fluidity. When bad things happen, negative emotions arise, and you just feel them, and then they pass, and none of that detracts from the fundamental beauty of your experience. Life feels inherently meaningful, you’re perfectly content with how things are, while also naturally gliding towards the things you want
#self improvement#introspection#philosophy
·bitsofwonder.substack.com·
You can't will yourself into okayness
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.
At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game.
Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances.
To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others.
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
#identities#self improvement#philosophy#themes#introspection
·vogue.com·
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
Kill Your Identity
Kill Your Identity
Robert Pirsig’s definition of Static and Dynamic Quality:Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It’s an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.
Words can only approximate Quality, but never fully encompass it. A static thing can never fully capture a dynamic thing.
We create problems for ourselves by using static language (e.g. judgements) to capture a reality that is dynamic & ever changing — by mixing observations and evaluations.
The caveat to keeping your identity small is when you want to identify as a positive trait – “I’m a kind person” – so that you’re forced to live up to it, especially when this is an unchanging desire.
#philosophy#self improvement#job-titles#names#introspection
·eriktorenberg.substack.com·
Kill Your Identity
Remaining Ambitious
Remaining Ambitious
Gatekeepers could see themselves not only as talent hunters for their own organization, but also as managers of society’s collective supply of ambition. We could demand that they consider it a responsibility to waste as little of their applicants’ ambition as possible. That they strive to redirect and allocate that ambition wherever it is most needed.
In practice, there isn’t any single solution. Rejection is a facet of life, and everybody needs to figure out their own strategies to cope with it. The most I can offer is that it’s better when you’re aware of how it works. It isn’t enough to know, on an abstract level, that rejection is typically random and impersonal — but it helps.
#philosophy#advice#career#lifestyle#self improvement#introspection#ambition
·etiennefd.substack.com·
Remaining Ambitious