Life Advice
unoptimal and
Life Advice
After years of floundering, I think I'm finally getting it: You get energy by spending it. The fuel tank metaphor is completely misleading. The body supplies energy to meet demand. The tank *expands* if you use a lot of fuel. In other words, biology is fundamentally antifragile
Gormtwitter.comHuman life is not a competition in which everyone places somewhere between one to eight billion. That’s because each person has different capacities, aims, relationships, projects and identities. These are all relevant to deciding what a good life is for them.
- NYT magazine, The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah
You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” ~ Zig Ziglar.
When you ask people for help, most people give you advice. Advice is when someone tells you what they would do. And since you’re not that person, it’s rarely useful to hear what they would do. You want to know what you should do.
Counsel, on the other hand, is when someone helps you figure out what you think. Counsel is invaluable because it helps... See more
Counsel, on the other hand, is when someone helps you figure out what you think. Counsel is invaluable because it helps... See more
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are... See more
Ursula LeGuin (1983)
Generic, uncontextualized advice is a menace- by definition it attracts the lost and the confused and only makes them more lost and more confused. Even the seemingly most universal, failsafe advice of the ‘work hard’, ‘try your best’, and ‘believe in yourself’ ilk, can be disastrous for certain people. It can merely act as a motivator and energy... See more
