psychology
August 21 2023
Instabrams are back baby! Thanks to Alfred, Obsidian, Ghost, and GPT that is!
The Danger of Journaling IS Introspection
I was having an off-day a few months ago. To try and lift my spirits, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I have the ability to time travel. Not literally, of course, but figuratively in the one direction of the past (which is almost as good as
Pop Science Shouldn't Quote Real Science
This is one of the most important things I can share with you. Why is it so hard to be happy? Because life was mostly short, brutal, and highly competitive over the two hundred thousand years our species has existed on this planet. And our brains are trained for this
Consumerism in a 250 Year Old Country
There’s a quip from the historian Will Durant, that a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean. (Location 538) What hard work is there to be done in 2023? Has rampant consumerism subsumed our desire to struggle to create a more perfect Union? …over time, this dynamic leads to
The Subjectivity Vortex
The Focus of a Furnace Without a Chimney Of all the advice in the world that you do not want to listen to, it is the advice of a disturbed mind. (Location 1317) Telling myself the worst case scenario can happen non-intuitively allows me to pass the block. It seems
The Anthropomorphic Urge to Otherize
Govinda said: “But what you call thing, is it something real, something intrinsic? Is it not only the illusion of Maya, only image and appearance? Your stone, your tree, are they real?” “This also does not trouble me much,” said Siddhartha. “If they are illusion, then I also am illusion,
Relaxition for Me is Focusing Elsewhere
When our beliefs are hopeful and optimistic, the mind releases chemicals that put the body in a state of physiological rest, controlled primarily by the parasympathetic nervous system, and in this state of rest, the body’s natural self-repair mechanisms are free to get to work fixing what’s broken
Confirmation Bias and How to Avoid It
We have the need to be right and to make others wrong. We trust what we believe, and our beliefs set us up for suffering. (Location 197) Being firm about a goal to achieve and having an open mind are not mutually exclusive. I’ve often noticed that many of
Limited Budget of Attention
you dispose of a limited budget of attention that you can allocate to activities, and if you try to go beyond your budget, you will fail. (Location 317) Boredom is required for anyone who wants to get some level of serious work done: ^8c361b Or, akin to the Congressional Budget
Asking the Hard Questions
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. (Location 204) Its difficult to ask the right question, since the hard questions are usually uncomfortable. We lob conversational softballs out of fear that a