Eat your words but don't go hungry

Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he's going out to buy an envelope:

“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than…

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely...If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence."

The rise of social media as the primary form is social interaction changed the way that we judge people. We once used to judge people mostly based on their deeds, but in the age of social media we judge people mostly based on their words and opinions because that’s really all we see of them. Since we’re defined by our opinions, there is a pressure to have an opinion on everything. Problem is, people generally don’t have the time or the will to research everything they are expected to have an opinion on, so they copy the opinions of others. And the result of this is that there are precious few original thinkers. In this way, the culture war is largely two armies of NPCs being ventriloquised by a handful of actual thinkers.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

In sum, teaching psychoanalysis is a paradoxical affair: someone who is supposed to know teaches someone who wants to know what it means not to know.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

There are only so many times that you can disprove your own imposter syndrome in the real world and that imposter syndrome continue to persist before you admit that it’s got nothing to do with your capabilities and everything to do with an addiction to not feeling like you’re enough. You’ve crushed all of the challenges you’ve faced so far. You’re continuing to grow and improve and get better. And you STILL don’t feel confident in what you can do? It’s no longer about your competence, it’s about your own self-image. Some strategies to help this: Take 2-3 minutes to reflect on successful events shortly after they happen, take deep breaths, allow yourself to think about the emotions and hard work and good feelings you’re getting (taken from Rick Hanson’s Hardwiring Happiness). Organise celebrations for things you do well in - subscriber milestones, sales targets, kids going off to primary school, anniversaries with partners. Find a community of likeminded, supportive, positive people within whatever domain you’re trying to become confident in and speak to them regularly to get external validation, feedback and reassurance. Proof eats belief for breakfast. You don’t need faith in your abilities, you have evidence. Outwork your self doubt.

The goal of propaganda is to control what you think other people think.

When intelligent people affiliate themselves to ideology, their intellect ceases to guard against wishful thinking, and instead begins to fortify it, causing them to inadvertently mastermind their own delusion, and to very cleverly become stupid.

Flashback It’s like this. Something kicks it off — a sharp word, a noise, the soughing of the wind, an unexpected, complex animal smell — a thing that is not exactly of the event but close enough to make the leap,   to confound the present and loop back to the past,   to make of a breeze, or the lemon scent of polish, a trigger that re-enacts the moment. Not a drama, with its little lies and embellishments, its opportunities for creating a bit of mileage,   but the real thing, complete and inescapable, total immersion in the event itself;   exactly as it happened, in every fibre of your body: the skin becoming clammy, the chill, the rigidity, the shutting down of your stomach and liver, the bile in your throat that is really adrenaline, the bitter taste that comes with survival. What you see without seeing, what you hear without hearing, are the crystals of memory dissolving in your blood. Suddenly you are acting from another, older place, living in two times simultaneously: your mind alerted, with its calculating edge, your subtle heart banished to unreachable safety;   the old reptile part of you hanging on,   ready to do anything to get back to the dark, to peace, to the cool embrace of silence;   and if that means lashing out or hurting, if that means wounding with tooth, or tongue, or blade, so be it. Afterwards the shame, the shaky hands, the staring, the reinventions of history, the never-ever-agains. I have hurt the people that I have loved most dearly, and try as I may, the truth is, I could hurt them again. My hope, as the spiral winds down to its centre, is that they might come to look at me without an edge of fear.

People are attracted to authenticity but it’s hard to define for me. Here’s my best attempt: True alignment of what you think, what you say, and what you do. The hardest part is realising that our thoughts are fucked and that we have to fix them instead of faking the next two.

The Feynman Razor