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A quote by Rainer Maria Rilke
A quote by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
#existential#advice#self improvement#introspection#wellbeing#mindfulness#quotes
·goodreads.com·
A quote by Rainer Maria Rilke
On Nonviolent Communication
On Nonviolent Communication
if you say “my boss makes me crazy”, you will indeed think your boss is “making” you crazy. If you instead say “I am frustrated because I am wanting stability and consistency in this relationship” you may then think you can control your level of frustration and clearly address what it is you want. If someone else is making you crazy, there’s nothing you can do. If you control your feelings, you can take actions to change how you respond to causes. Words can be windows or they can be walls — they can open doors for compassion or they can do the opposite. NVC uses words as windows. Our language today uses them as walls. More on this later.
If I ask you to meet me at 6:00 and you pick me up at 6:30, how do I feel? It depends. I could be frustrated that you are late because I want to spend my time productively, or scared that you may not know where to find me, or hurt because I need reassurance that you care about me — or, conversely, happy that I get more time to myself.
It’s not enough to blame the feeling on the person whose actions triggered the feeling. That very same action might have inspired completely different feelings in someone else — or even in me, under different circumstances!
Incidents like the friend coming late may stimulate or set the stage for feelings, but they do not *cause* the feelings.
There is a gap between stimulus and cause — and our power lies in how we use that gap. If we truly understood this — the separation between stimulus and cause — and the idea that we are responsible for our own emotions, we would speak very differently.
We wouldn’t say things like “It bugs me when …” or “It makes me angry when”. These phrases imply or actually state that responsibility for your feelings lie outside of yourself. A better statement would be “When I saw you come late, I started to feel scared”. Here, one may at least be taking some responsibility for the feeling of anger, and not simply blaming the latecomer for causing such feelings.
the more we use our language to cede responsibility to others, the less agency we have over our circumstances, and the more we victimize ourselves.
NVC believes that, as human beings, there are only two things that we are basically saying: Please and Thank You. Judgments are distorted attempts to say “Please.”
NVC requires learning how to say what your needs are, what needs are alive in you at a given moment, which ones are getting fulfilled, and which ones are not.
You sacrifice your needs to provide for and take care of your family. Needs are not important. What’s important is obedience to authority. That’s what’s important. With that background and history we’ve been taught a language that doesn’t teach us how to say how we are. It teaches us to worry about what we are in the eyes of authority.
When our minds have been pre-occupied that way we have trouble answering what seems to be a simple question, which is asked in all cultures throughout the world, “How are you?” It is a way of asking what’s alive in you. It’s a critical question. Even though it’s asked in many cultures, people don’t know how to answer it because they haven’t been educated in a culture that cares about how you are.
The shift necessary requires being able to say, how do you feel at this moment, and what are the needs behind your feelings? And when we ask those question to highly educated people, they cannot answer it. Ask them how they feel, and they say “I feel that that’s wrong”. Wrong isn’t a feeling. Wrong is a thought.
When your mind has been shaped to worry about what people think about you, you lose connection with what’s alive in you.
The underlying philosophy of punishment and reward is that if people are basically evil or selfish, then the correctional process if they are behaving in a way you don’t like is to make them hate themselves for what they have done. If a parent, for example, doesn’t like what the child is doing, the parent says something like ”Say you’re sorry!! The child says, “I’m sorry.” The parent says “No! You’re not really sorry!” Then the child starts to cry “I’m sorry. . .” The parent says “Okay, I forgive you.”
Note, I think NVC is productive is for friendships and relationships, or anything where connection is the main goal, not for any work or organizations that primarily serve another mission.
NVC involves the following: 1) how we express ourselves to other people, 2) how we interpret what people say to us, and most importantly, 3) how we communicate with ourselves.
Some have suggested alternatives such as Compassionate Communication, Authentic Communication, Connected Communication.
#communication#difficult-convos#mental models#narratives#rhetoric#introspection#existential#themes#writing/characterization#storytelling
·substack.com·
On Nonviolent Communication
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
This doesn’t mean that everything that has happened to you is a result of your actions. It means that you develop an ability to respond to whatever happens to you, even if you don’t control the consequences of your actions. It means exerting maximal agency towards the things you can directly change (your behavior), and maximum acceptance towards things you can influence but not control (external circumstances, other people’s behavior).
Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.
A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.
Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.
loving people and wanting other people to flourish on their own terms, independent of what’s in it for you—even when it’s at your expense.
Write down a list of what you want in your relationships and the types of people you want personal and professional relationships with and then make sure you are bringing those attributes to the table too. e.g. If you want loyal friends, *be* a loyal friend. Focus on “being” rather than “having”, because you can only control the former, and by doing so you can influence the latter.
We want to get that job because we want respect, autonomy, recognition, connection. But there are thousands of ways to meet that need. Acknowledging this makes you more flexible to what life throws at you, and makes it more likely you’ll get what you actually want deep down. A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.
“I’ll be happy once I hit X goal” may be motivating, but it won’t be true—you’ll just move the goalposts. If this is how you’re motivated now, it’s unlikely to last because at some point you’ll figure out that your pattern is unfulfilling and you’ll stop following it. Then you’ll need to find a new way to motivate yourself. A more durable motivation comes from genuinely enjoying the process and the contributions and the relationships that stem from it.
You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain loop is through the body. If you feel feel the feelings it might take a few minutes or hours to pass them, whereas if you repress it it might take months or years.
Keep in touch with old friends more broadly. Call them randomly, even if it’s been years. Keep track of what they care about.
Be able to acknowledge when you are not in a secure place, and be able to reset by working out, taking a walk, listening to music, talking with a friend, etc. Wait until the anger or trigger passes before acting. And never fight over text. And if you ever find yourself in a fight, realize you’re in one and calm down and ask yourself why you’re fighting.
Deposits into your own bank account look like being proud of yourself — contributing to others, gaining competence at something that matters, doing the right thing, keeping promises to yourself and others, and taking good care of yourself.
Track what people and activities and habits make you feel better and which drain you. Track when you get triggered or or when you trigger others and see if you can identify patterns.
Do a weekly audit where you can look backwards and reflect on what brings you closer to yourself or and vice versa and readjust how you spend time accordingly.
Although rewiring is worth doing, it's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment & then let the new cues do the work.
If you’re going to offend someone, do it on something you care about. Not on an off hand remark or action that didn’t mean anting to you. If you’re unsure, wait a couple days to see if you still mean it. Usually you don’t.
Grudges are ankle weights on your soul.
If you have extended anger with someone, even if they’re in the wrong, you’re both losing.
Empathize with what needs they were trying to meet through their actions and then either reconcile with them or move on with the levity of being grudge-free.
Try other tactics to get curious about other people instead of righteous. If you look at their childhood photos it’s hard to be mad at them. If you have your hands on your heart it’s hard to be angry at them. If you’re hugging your partner it’s harder to fight with them.
One self-connection exercise when triggered is: How do you feel? (vent) How does that feel on the inside? (connect with deeper feeling) What do you want? (suggest strategy, get action oriented) What would that give you? (connect with deeper need)
Use language that emphasizes the fact that people can change: Use verbs over adjectives and observations instead of judgments. For example, instead of saying, “X is always late”, say “X has been late the last three times.”
Don’t bring work mode to relationships and vice versa. For work, you want to be efficient, outcome oriented, and prioritize winning above all. With people, you want to be effective, process oriented, and prioritize connection above all. For work you want to be right (accurate), for relationships you want to be happy (connected).
Don’t keep score, your patience will run out. And equality doesn’t matter. On your death bed you won’t wish things were more fair, but you’ll regret that your insistence on fairness prevented you from connecting with an open heart.
everyone has a micro impact on their families, friends, and local communities and we don’t pay enough attention to making it great.
Use things like politics, sports, social media etc as ways to meet or get closer to other people, but don’t use it as something to make you angry or further from others.
Cultivate what makes you unique. The more distinct your path is, the less competition you’ll have, and the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you’re running your own race.
Envision the highest version of your own success and strive to get as close to it as possible while also being happy with wherever you land.
Your past was what you needed to get here (no regrets), and fretting about what will happen in the future bond what you need to prep for it won’t help either
Most ambitious people on their death beds wish they were less hard on themselves. The happiest people are best at focusing on what they can control and not letting past drama or future worries get in their way.
Asymmetric upside opportunities could lead to new relationships or forms of growth. Asymmetric downside opportunities could lead to sacrificing your health or your relationship or your reputation.
#advice#guides#list#opinion#philosophy#lifestyle#careers#work-life#relationships#introspection
·eriktorenberg.substack.com·
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World | Interviews | Roger Ebert
The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World | Interviews | Roger Ebert
One thing we read was a quote that I’ve known for years, and loved, from Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, who said that we can only understand our life backwards, but we’re forced to live it forwards. And I think that’s the confusion we all feel, is that we always learn too late. We go through things that are completely inexplicable and mysterious. And then years later, we realize.
She suddenly starts realizing how she is building an experience of relationships, and how all the paradoxes that you see specifically in the film show how she is trapped in one role in one relationship then takes on a completely different role in the next one—maybe even the role of the other partner in the first one. You’re on different sides of the fence in certain discussions, going forward. And you become a richer person through those sometimes painful experiences, a more whole person and perhaps a more accepting person in terms of accepting others.
There’s a great book by a British writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, which came out a few years ago, called Missing Out, where he says that, in the therapy room, what he experiences with people a lot is that he realizes that people live their whole life with this big, imagined part of themselves. All the what ifs that never happened. That relationship they think they might or should have had or would have in the future, if they only broke away from the relationship they were in. Or that job they’re going to start doing one day. And it actually becomes your self-perception and your feeling of identity. And, suddenly, life has passed. And that whole imagined self was also a part of who you were, but it was unspoken or unlived. And this is life.
I thought that was an interesting notion, the negotiation between the imagined self and the real self that plays out in time. That’s a big theme that I can make several films about, but this one was specifically through the character of Julie.
I don’t really believe that we can see ourselves fully. So much is subconscious. There’s so much history and so much memory that we can’t access.
That’s the feedback we’re getting from people who’ve watched the film, is that it’s okay to be ambivalent and feel that things are not in full order. If we can add a consoling notion around that, I think we’re good.
The idea in psychology of “good enough” can be fine. Maybe there is a life where not everyone becomes that unique snowflake that we are all raised to believe that we have to be to be anything. Maybe there is a place of acceptance in a simpler life, a less turbulent life, without feeling that we’re losing the progressivity of thought or humanity in our own personal life. Maybe the exterior appearance of that success is less interesting than fulfilling it on a more intimate level, in one’s personal life. I don’t know. These are big questions, and I don’t want to come off as pretentious. But I think you’re touching on something that we indirectly have talked about a lot in making this film. Julie is this slightly idealized child from early on. She has good grades. She got into medical school. And she feels this pressure to do something really special. That is complicated for her.
what if COVID allowed people to take that step that they had been yearning for, sometimes, to say that the meritocratic society that we live in—particularly in America but also in Norway, to a large extent—where we are feeling that we are so responsible for fulfilling the utmost potential of ourselves, and we carry that alone, that that is a quite a stifling notion for a lot of people? That’s quite a heavy burden to carry: to feel that if you don’t do the greatest thing you could do, you’re a loser.
#themes#existential#introspection#films#interviews
·rogerebert.com·
The Promise of Life: Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve on The Worst Person in the World | Interviews | Roger Ebert
the essence of love is... annoyance?
the essence of love is... annoyance?
When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy.
some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed.
would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws?
In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.
But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.
Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp!
When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood.
Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value.
Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?
We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying.
Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control.
#relationships#dating#introspection#philosophy#love
·avabear.xyz·
the essence of love is... annoyance?
the best way to please is not to please
the best way to please is not to please
I wanted to take care of everyone’s feelings. If I made them feel good, I would rewarded with their affection. For a long time, socializing involved playing a weird form of Mad-Libs: I wanted to say whatever you wanted to hear. I wanted to be assertive, but also understanding and reasonable and thoughtful.
I really took what I learned and ran with it. I wanted to master what I was bad at and made other people happy. I realized that it was: bad to talk too much about yourself good to show interest in other people’s hobbies, problems, and interests important to pay attention to body language my job to make sure that whatever social situation we were in was a delightful experience for everyone involved
#introspection#self improvement#ethics#communication
·avabear.xyz·
the best way to please is not to please
written in the body
written in the body
I spent so many years of my life trying to live mostly in my head. Intellectualizing everything made me feel like it was manageable. I was always trying to manage my own reactions and the reactions of everyone else around me. Learning how to manage people was the skill that I had been lavishly rewarded for in my childhood and teens. Growing up, you’re being reprimanded in a million different ways all the time, and I learned to modify my behavior so that over time I got more and more positive feedback. People like it when you do X and not Y, say X and not Y. I kept track of all of it in my head and not in my body. Intellectualizing kept me numbed out, and for a long time what I wanted was nothing more than to be numbed out, because when things hurt they hurt less. Whatever I felt like I couldn’t show people or tell people I hid away. I compartmentalized, and what I put in the compartment I never looked at became my shadow.
So much of what I care about can be boiled down to this: when you’re able to really inhabit and pay attention to your body, it becomes obvious what you want and don’t want, and the path towards your desires is clear. If you’re not in your body, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. "I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m so frozen out of my body I can’t feel a deeper certainty.”
It was so incredibly hard when people gave me negative feedback—withdrew, or rejected me, or were just preoccupied with their own problems—because I relied on other people to figure out whether everything was alright.
When I started living in my body I started feeling for the first time that I could trust myself in a way that extended beyond trust of my intelligence, of my ability to pick up on cues in my external environment.
I can keep my attention outwards, I don’t direct it inwards in a self-conscious way. It’s the difference between noticing whether someone seems to having a good time in the moment by watching their face vs agonizing about whether they enjoyed something after the fact. I can tell the difference between when I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well versus tired because I’m bored versus tired because I’m avoiding something. When I’m in my body, I’m aware of myself instead of obsessing over my state, and this allows me to have more room for other people.
#writing#philosophy#introspection#mental health
·avabear.xyz·
written in the body
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
Meaningfulness and the scope of experience
Meaningfulness and the scope of experience

The ideal is to flexibly adjust our scope as needed - drawing it in close when feeling overwhelmed or at risk of neglecting immediate needs, expanding it out when we have the resources to consider the bigger picture. With a larger scope, the challenge is finding ways to emotionally connect and visualize how our current small-scale actions integrate into that vast context to create a sense of meaning.

Related to Alexander Technique

I find that the extent to which I find life meaningful, seems strongly influenced by my scope of experience
our minds will automatically keep looking for actions whose outcomes are discernable and integrated, relative to the current scope of experience. When the scope is close, it is easy to find such actions. Taking a shower, making a cup of tea, going out for a jog; the consequences of these actions will manifest as concrete and enjoyable bodily sensations, clearly discernable both within the temporal and spatial scope. And because the scope is so close, almost everything I do will affect the whole scope, so it will feel tightly integrated.
I imagine getting a taste of tea, and think no farther out in time; thus, getting up from bed, going to the kitchen, preparing the tea, and sitting down to drink it, feels like a tight chain of actions where each step gives rise to the next, culminating in the warmth of the tea cup pressing against my lips, the sensation of taste on my tongue.
When the scope is far, it is much different. What action could one even think of, whose consequences were discernable on a scale spanning entire galaxies? Or whose consequences could be traced out for tens, maybe hundreds of years? It’s hard to imagine anything.
In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define meaningful play in a game as emerging when the relationships between actions and outcomes are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game. In other words:
The consequences of your actions have to be integrated into the larger context of the game: they need to affect the game experience at some later point in the game. If you move a piece in a game of chess, then that move will directly shape the whole rest of the game, making the moves deeply integrated. But if every game of chess included three opening moves after which the board was reset to the initial position, throwing away everything that happened during those three moves, then those moves would not be integrated to the gameplay. People would just make some moves at random as fast as possible, to get on with the actual opening moves of the game.
Draw it closer when you are feeling overwhelmed, or when you are at risk of neglecting yourself or your loved ones; broaden it out when you have the resources to deal with the larger scope, and its demands. When you are operating in a larger scope, see if you can find ways to visualize your impact in a way that makes your current actions feel more integrated to the whole context, so as to experience their meaningfulness.
#spirituality#philosophy#wellbeing#introspection#meditation
·kajsotala.fi·
Meaningfulness and the scope of experience
how are you choosing a partner?
how are you choosing a partner?
Instead of focusing solely on a list of desired characteristics, it's more insightful to examine the internal experiences and feelings those characteristics evoke.
when we say “I want my partner to be ambitious” we’re actually saying something like “I want to feel relaxed around my partner” or “I want to feel safe around my partner”.Their ambition is just a way of accessing that internal experience.
Let’s say you want someone who is really emotionally vulnerable, someone who can and will communicate what they’re feeling. That, in turn, makes you feel relaxed, because you don’t have to guess if they’re mad or upset.The internal experience we’re seeking, what we actually want, is relaxation. Emotional honesty is one way to access that relaxation.
Validating whether the external characteristics you’re seeking exist in another person to the extent that you desire can be confusing.Much less confusing is this question: “do I feel relaxed around this person?”Or: “Is this person helping me access more relaxation in my life?”Instead of playing detective with another person’s personality, we now get to turn our attention inwards, towards how we’re feeling. In return, we get a much clearer answer.
our emotional experience reveals itself through our patterns of behaviour. We can gather evidence on how we’re feeling through how we’re showing up around that person.If I’m clear that I want to feel warmth when I’m around my future partner, then I can look at how I acted on a date. Did I show up as the warmest version of myself? Did the other person’s presence make embodying that warmth easier or harder?The ultimate version of this question is “do I show up as my favourite version of myself around this person?”
This question incorporates everything we’ve been discussing: it centers our attention on our internal experience, using the lens of our patterns of behaviour.It also avoids us having to do extensive analysis of whether this person is a “match” based on a list of characteristics we think we should be seeking.
consider these journal prompts:When I think of my favourite version of myself, what is that person like? What feelings do they have abundant access to? How do they show up on a date?When do I have the easiest time being that version of me? Around which people? What qualities do those people have?What feelings are most important for me to experience with a potential partner? Have I been prioritizing those feelings?⚡️ insights into cultivating your most confident self; delivered once a weekSubscribe
#relationships#dating#introspection
·read.scottdomes.com·
how are you choosing a partner?
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
In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023 - Andy Matuschak
In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023 - Andy Matuschak
in 2023, I switched gears to emphasize intimacy. Instead of statistical analysis and summative interviews, I sat next to individuals for hours, as they used one-off prototypes which I’d made just for them. And I got more insight in the first few weeks of this than I had in all of 2022
I’d been building systems and running big experiments, and I could tell you plenty about forgetting curves and usage patterns—but very little about how those things connected to anything anyone cared about.
I could see, in great detail, the texture of the interaction between my designs and the broader learning context—my real purpose, not some proxy.
Single-user experiments like this emphasize problem-finding and discovery, not precise evaluation.
a good heuristic for evaluating my work seems to be: try designs 1-on-1 until they seem to be working well, and only then run more quantitative experiments to understand how well the effect generalizes.
My aim is to invent augmented reading environments that apply to any kind of informational text—spanning subjects, formats, and audiences. The temptation, then, is to consider every design element in the most systematic, general form. But this again confuses aims with methods. So many of my best insights have come from hoarding and fermenting vivid observations about the particular—a specific design, in a specific situation. That one student’s frustration with that one specific exercise.
It’s often hard to find “misfits” when I’m thinking about general forms. My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.
I experience an enormous difference between “trying to design an augmented reading environment” and “trying to design an augmented version of this specific linear algebra book”. When I think about the former, I mostly focus on primitives, abstractions, and processes. When I think about the latter, I focus on the needs of specific ideas, on specific pages. And then, once it’s in use, I think about specific problems, that specific students had, in specific places. These are the “misfits” I need to remove as a designer.
Of course, I do want my designs to generalize. That’s not just a practical consideration. It’s also spiritual: when I design a system well, it feels like I’ve limned hidden seams of reality; I’ve touched a kind of personal God. On most days, I actually care about this more than my designs’ utilitarian impact. The systems I want to build really do require abstraction and generalization. Transformative systems really do often depend on powerful new primitives. But more and more, my experience has been that the best creative fuel for these systematic solutions often comes from a process which focuses on particulars, at least for long periods at a time.
Also? The particular is often a lot more emotionally engaging, day-to-day. That makes the work easier and more fun.
Throughout my career, I’ve struggled with a paradox in the feeling of my work. When I’ve found my work quite gratifying in the moment, day-to-day, I’ve found it hollow and unsatisfying retrospectively, over the long term. For example, when I was working at Apple, there was so much energy; I was surrounded by brilliant people; I felt very competent, it was clear what to do next; it was easy to see my progress each day. That all felt great. But then, looking back on my work at the end of each year, I felt deeply dissatisfied: I wasn’t making a personal creative contribution. If someone else had done the projects I’d done, the results would have been different, but not in a way that mattered. The work wasn’t reflective of ideas or values that mattered to me. I felt numbed, creatively and intellectually.
Progress often doesn’t look like progressIt often feels like I’m not making any progress at all in my work. I’ll feel awfully frustrated. And then, suddenly, a tremendous insight will drive months of work. This last happened in the fall. Looking back at those journals now, I’m amused to read page after page of me getting so close to that central insight in the weeks leading up to it. I approach it again and again from different directions, getting nearer and nearer, but still one leap away—so it looks to me, at the time, like I’ve got nothing. Then, finally, when I had the idea, it felt like a bolt from the blue.
#research#career#introspection#design/systems#ux#tools/knowledge-tools
·andymatuschak.org·
In praise of the particular, and other lessons from 2023 - Andy Matuschak
Stadium of selves
Stadium of selves
Yesterday I found out that I have been alive for 12,431 days. If each day I split off into a new person those 12,430 previous selves would fill a stadium. If I live to 90 years old, there will be 32,850 selves in that stadium. That’s 20,420 more of us than there are now. Today, I am the one on stage.
The things I do today can change the lives of those 20,420 future selves
#introspection#future#self improvement
·stephango.com·
Stadium of selves
Real life
Real life
Summary: "Real life happens now, in everyday tasks and interactions, rather than being something that starts in the future. The author urges the reader to be fully present in each moment and see what it has to teach, rather than always deferring true engagement with life to some later time."
Real life doesn't start tomorrow, or on the weekend. It doesn't start when you graduate, or when you land a job, or when you quit your job. It doesn’t start once you get a handle on your anxiety, or fix your sleep schedule, or finish all the tasks in your to-do list.
Real life is made of moments like this. It’s waking up with dread and clutching at your phone for relief. It’s being mildly frustrated at all your friends for the various ways in which they don’t understand you. Real life is wiping the lint from your dryer, it’s scrubbing the same pan clean for the hundredth time, it’s being surprised that even with all the fun of a friday night, you’re just as sad to say goodbye, just as sad as when you were a child.
We spend most of our time waiting, and very few precious moments feeling like we’ve finally arrived. We defer our willingness to bask in reality to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next, until we forget we ever deferred anything.
But what if you don’t need to wait until you’ve meditated for decades, what if you’re closer to that than you think? What if you were more often baffled by the fact that you’re still alive, if you began to ask of this moment, of every moment: what do you have to teach me?
You know that feeling you get when you hear the good news you’ve been waiting for, or when you’re so enthralled in conversation you forget that you haven’t checked your phone for hours, or when the rain has settled and you step into the forest and the freshness of the air wrests your lungs open and everything feels perfectly in place?
You’re inflight, you’re falling through the sky, everything feels half-complete, there is so much more you meant to do, there are so many things you’re behind on, so many things you haven’t said. I’m right there with you. This is it, the madness we were born into and have no choice but to face. Real life is more and more of this and then it’s over.
#introspection#ambition#philosophy#meditation#themes
·bitsofwonder.substack.com·
Real life
Don't Worry, You'll be Fine
Don't Worry, You'll be Fine
When you observe a human life from a far enough distance, all the trials and tribulations just become rounding errors.
Dostoyevsky said that to love someone means to see them as God intended, so why on earth shouldn’t you also be a ‘someone’? This makes me think that sometimes you have to try to look at yourself through the eyes of God: how tiny and lacking, yet how precious and important; how flawed and powerless, yet unique and loved.
There’s something very calming about believing that nobody cares about what you do, that you could just be whatever you want to be. It grants you a kind of unlimited confidence, like flooring the gas pedal on your free will. It’s liberating to think that you’re not special — not because you aren’t valuable, but because you aren’t as offensively powerful as you might think. Humility, or the simple act of focusing less on yourself without reducing your sense of self-worth, can be the ultimate source of peace.
I want to see, in hindsight, that misfortunes haven’t hardened my heart — I want to look back and see a survivor. I want to see that heartaches have not smothered my passion and that sadness was not able to keep me down for long.
You may be existentially “trapped” in the present, but your perspective doesn’t have to be. With enough distance from your own timeline, every mistake blurs into a minor miscalculation, and every letdown diminishes to insignificance. Even a bad memory, with enough time, will appear trivial — it might transform you but its colors will fade into a wistful sepia.
#religion#identities#self improvement#introspection
·theplurisociety.com·
Don't Worry, You'll be Fine
David Hoang - Designer, investor, and writer
David Hoang - Designer, investor, and writer
You will meet some people in your life who are your soulmate in an alternate universe. Don’t cause an incursion. Appreciate how they are doing in the other reality.
A top indicator of relationship success will be if you can successfully share a bathroom together.
The quarter life crisis is overrated. If you’re worried about your life at 25…stop. Whatever you experience between age 25 to 32 probably does not matter at all.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."— Antoine de Saint Exupéry
#future#life#introspection#self improvement
·davidhoang.com·
David Hoang - Designer, investor, and writer
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
Tastes of magic
Tastes of magic
Psychedelics turns adults into kids
There’s a flipside to the wonder of childhood, though: things can be as terrifying as they are mesmerizing. In fact, when I think about childhood the feeling that usually comes up is not wonder, but terror. I was afraid of everything as a kid: of my parents dying, of burglars breaking into our apartment, of the dark and dirty hallways of my elementary school. Even the shows I loved would scare me: there was a character in dragonball z, his name was broly, and even to this day thinking about the image of his face sends the faintest shiver down my spine.1 This is why I always say I’m happy to have grown up: life is less scary now that I’m older, now that the world is more predictable.
These two things seem to come as a package deal: life as a child is both mesmerizing and terrifying. I think there is something fundamental here. It’s the same reason why when people take LSD, they will either describe it as the most blissful experience of their life, or the most harrowing—and often both. Someone asked recently whether babies are tripping all the time. I’m sure they are.
a child’s experience is an endless explosion of vividness. Slowly we start to make sense of the world, we start to notice repeating patterns, we start to establish boundaries between “me” and “you” and “this” and “that”, and we get better at predicting what will happen next. Life becomes a little more manageable, but a little more dull. Our ideas about experience harden into rigid stories we can’t shake.
There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving.
#inner child#introspection
·bitsofwonder.substack.com·
Tastes of magic
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt
There's a DFW quote that goes something like, sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt, and my mind wanders to it whenever I think about what I went through this year. When I suffered from excruciating pain, I desperately wanted something to take it away: a friend, a therapist, a new city, at times even the very person who caused the pain in the first place. But there's nothing that will really make you feel better. Nobody can bear the pain for you; you just have to sit with it until it subsides. And it might take a long time, but it will get better eventually.
we both commiserated over how rare it is to find someone that really clicks, "vibes", or is "on the same wavelength" with us, however you put it. In my experience, it rarely has anything to do with shared interests (which is how people typically try to look for friends), and I can't judge whether I'll click with someone until I talk to them and spend time with them in person. I've tried for years to dissect the components of this compatibility, or what makes my conversations with some people light up where others sputter out, but it's incredibly difficult for me to distill any useful insights.
#introspection#relationships#pain#dating
·tiramisu.bearblog.dev·
sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt
getting out of a funk
getting out of a funk
I have come to see funks as an entirely internal phenomenon: a persistent psychological block that gets darker and denser each moment you stay in it.
From Swami Vivekananda’s “Inspired Talks”:“We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care of what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live, they travel far. Each thought is [like] a little hammer blow on the lump of iron which our bodies are, manufacturing out of it what we want to be.”
#introspection#mental health#wellbeing#cognition
·mindmine.substack.com·
getting out of a funk
on being ready
on being ready
As the “am I ready?” question continues to ricochet off myself and others, I’m finally viewing it for what it is: a clever, creative way to procrastinate self-actualization. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re ready, or finding reasons why you aren’t, it’s a sign you have let the gap grow too wide between idea and action. Your mind is probably convincing you that there is some existential reason for that buffer, when in reality, you’re just scared to do a new thing wrong or to look weird doing it. That’s okay. Now that you’ve noticed your inaction, you can act. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, because ready-ness is not measured by thinking, it’s measured by starting.
If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now.
are you ready? to be in the relationship? to start the business? to say i love you to your partner? to forgive the person you resent? to have the hard conversation? to tell the truth? to publish the piece? to admit you were wrong? to create the life you imagine? to do what scares you?
what I’ve leapt at before I felt ready has consistently lead to the most expansive journeys of my life. Pursuing jobs I was too young for. Applying for scholarships that seemed impossible to get. Reaching out to people that I had no business knowing.
The whole notion of needing to be ready is highly corrosive to action. Because how can we really measure ready-ness? What if the only measure of “being ready” is just… starting? Trying? Doing the thing. What if ready is something you prove to yourself you are while you’re making the attempt, instead of trying to prove it before you start? What if being ready is not something you can cognitively analyze, but something that can be only demonstrated through action.
The reframe I am now internalizing is that ready is a felt state you can consciously bring yourself to.
You can imagine what the version of you that is ready would feel like and fill yourself up with those feelings. Or to make it even simpler: you can just start. If it doesn’t work, you can ask why, integrate your learnings, and try a different way. Or move on. Or whatever. But action—action!—is the path to ready-ness, not more thinking.
limiting beliefs. Poor attempts at protecting me from some imagined danger. Blocks created by my mind, designed to keep my ideas inside me and keep my creativity away from the world—away from reaching you. I’m now weeding out this ready-ness block and seeding the belief that the ability to imagine is the only sign of ready-ness you need.
You can go back later to refine what you’ve done. But by then, you’re already in the act. You’ve done it instead of remaining stuck in thought. So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you’re ready: don’t. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking. Because ready-ness is a question of boldness, and as Bradbury so eloquently reminds us: intellect doesn’t help you very much there.
#self improvement#introspection#existential#ideals#advice
·mindmine.substack.com·
on being ready