So You Wanna De-Bog Yourself

During the Trump administration, I took on a part time job: keeping up with all the outrages. Every twenty minutes or so I would have to check my phone in case any new outrages had occurred, so that I could...collect them? Make them into a scrapbook? I'm not sure.

I now think of this as super surveillance , tracking every problem in the world as if... See more

A good word for this is puppeteering : trying to solve your problems by controlling the actions of other humans. Puppeteering often looks attractive because other people's actions seem silly and therefore easily changeable. Funnily enough, it doesn't feel that way to them. They have lifetimes of backstory that lead them to act the way that they do,... See more

Here’s one of my favorite bad escape plans: I’ll just be a different person in the future. Like, “I know I hate working out, but in the future I will overcome this by not being such a baby about it.” Or, “I find quantum physics boring, so I’ll just learn about it later, when I find it more interesting.”

These are fantastical metamorphoses . I have n... See more

Some problems are like getting a diploma: you work at it for a while, and then you're done forever. Learning how to ride a bike is a classic diploma problem .

But most problems aren’t like that. They’re more like toothbrushing problems : you have to work at them forever until you die. You can’t, as far as I know, just brush your teeth really really... See more

a little eddy in the spacetime continuum where I can hide out while I cross a few more things off my to-do list

the pleasure of courage

every moment I dither is a moment I suffer

The mediocrity trap

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity t... See more

It's scary to admit that you can't control the future; it's a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant.