There is not some distant future where it will be easier to be serious, and no one is ever going to give you permission to start. You don’t have to be 100% serious right now, nor do you have to be 100% serious about everything—these are just excuses not to be serious about anything. But the goal is to be 100% serious about at least one thing , and... See more

So seriousness isn’t some kind of final reward, a golden watch you earn for a lifetime of operating in bad faith. It is, instead, one of those basic practices you gotta do to prevent your life from disintegrating, like getting out of bed and taking a shower and talking to people. That’s because seriousness is the great Orderer of Priorities, and... See more

Before that, I believed what everybody else seems to believe: if you play the game well enough and long enough, eventually you get to stop playing and go do whatever you want. I played the game pretty well for a long time, and now it’s obvious to me that the reward for playing the game is more game . You just keep unlocking levels forever, and the... See more

I had plotted and schemed and sweated to build the world’s best resume, hoping that someone would eventually give me permission to be serious, to start doing things that are good instead of things that look good. Instead, I got permission to go work for the company that does personal branding for dictators.

Serious”—what a perfect word. Not in the sense of grim or unfunny. More in the sense that visakan veerasamymeans it: something like, “actually caring about stuff, and for the right reasons.”

Some people don’t feel like journals require them to lie, and good for them, but some people seem to excuse their dishonesty by saying, “Well, it’s fine to lie sometimes because you only ever get, like, 72% of what you want in life, maximum.” No, when you’re serious about something, you get 100% of it, even if it means getting less of something... See more

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could... See more

For me, I felt like publishing in scientific journals required me to be dishonest. So I stopped publishing in scientific journals. I was willing to make all the other tradeoffs that academia required: uncertain job prospects, low income for a long time, little control over where you end up living, years wasted applying for grants, etc. But I was... See more

Yes, of course! But the whole point of tradeoffs is to trade something you value less for something you value more . The thing you care about the most—that’s the thing you don’t compromise on!