You basically don’t need to worry about being too kind or too chill. If you’re the kind of person who worries that being a little more relaxed or emotionally open will destroy your whole life, you could probably stand to relax and be more emotionally open.

You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.

“Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.”

You can go through a lot of relationships and experience a lot of flavors of admiration and obsession and limerence — in other words, lots of things that kind of feel like love — without experiencing real love. (This is either terrifying or reassuring, depending on your perspective.)

If you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start

You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.

Revealed preference is a stupid concept, because it treats the self as unified. “If I did it, I must have wanted it” — maybe, or maybe you’re a conflicted parliament of sub-agents with diverging priorities.

The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good;... See more