A few years ago I gathered the scraps of quotes, poems and inspirational bits and bobs I had floating about in various notebooks and cubby holes and decided to plonk them all in one place for easy reference, create my own Bible, something I could go to for inspiration and guidance and succour. There are poems, quotes from spiritual leaders like Thich Nhat Hann, things I heard on podcasts or movies, excerpts from novels, and even a few Tweets.
Whenever I read or hear something that makes me sit up, open my eyes a little wider, slow down and think, “this is important, I need to remember this”, I pop it in my green-covered notebook, knowing future me would want to feel that same tingle and joy again and again.
Consider writing your own holy book, or unholy book, your choice.

90s Japan had an increase in people living alone or with their parents, not having interpersonal relationships, etc... a lot of what is being seen in the USA right now.

Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard was a Christian, ‘albeit a maverick Christian’, as the philosopher Gary Cox put it, because Kierkegaard emboldened people to develop a personal relationship with God instead of unreflectively assuming what the clergy sermonised. For Kierkegaard, living the truth is infinitely more important than objectively knowing it. At Kierkegaard’s funeral, the archdeacon who gave the eulogy told the huge crowd not to misunderstand or accept what Kierkegaard had written because he went too far and didn’t know it.

career and life advice

The foundational texts of Western civilization are on the reading list for St. John's College, where all students study the Great Books curriculum.

Nietzsche

• Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged was appealing, in part, because it gave the message that it was okay to be, not just good, but better than others
  • but it also said that the reason for one's own failure is the "looters" who don't approve of that excellence, and that there is a conspiracy of mediocrity
• Rationality can be seen through a reasonableness-based view or a winning-based view
  • the reasonableness-based view silently blames the rest of the world's unreasonableness for failures
• Rationality should adapt to others' strategies and not depend on them
• when faced with a probable failure, some people will start to impose handicaps on themselves to give an excuse for failure
• this does not mean that there aren't legitimate barriers to success, but it can also mean that failure is partially self-created
• "...what good does a sense of *violated entitlement do? At all? Ever? What good does it do to tell ourselves that we did everything right and deserved better, and that someone or something else is to blame? Is that the key thing we need to change, to do better next time?
  Immediate adaptation to the realities of the situation! Followed by winning!"

One thing I like about rationality is that it is flexible. It does not prescribe any particular object-level belief or action.

When I ask them about their blogging adventures, they readily admit that they only write when they’re out of work to promote their freelance work. That’s not a blog. That’s corporate sales. Things like Blogging For Devs make my stomach turn. I’m glad it helps people get into blogging, but please, stop thinking about SEO and how to “build a resume”. Again, that’s not blogging. That’s corporate sales. Sure, nothing wrong with a bit of self-promotion, but if it ain’t nothing but that, to me, it’s not worth reading it.

Not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician. In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.

Trying to envision magicians feels less clear, at least for me. My vision is likely to stem from a combination of a bunch of people or concepts I’ve encountered, so the same strategy applies as for finding magicians (giving my brain a lot of examples to work with). Questions I like to ask myself include:

• ‘What is the most capable version of me that I can imagine?’
• ‘What would I be like/spend my time doing if all my current major problems had been solved?’
• ‘What are the things I say I value but don’t act as if I value, and what would my life feel like on inside if I actually acted as if I valued those things?’
• ‘What am I afraid of doing, and what would my life be like if I wasn’t afraid of doing those things?’.

You can’t keep your gaze tightly fixed on the outcome you want because it will lock your mind onto the strategies you currently have for meeting them, which by definition probably don’t work (otherwise you would have succeeded already and you wouldn’t need to use the strategy).

In Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker, a series of Culinarian quests calls to mind Silicon Valley meal substitute tech like Soylent and MealSquares.

Turns out My Immortal is actually really, really good...

Interesting experiments in the self

The analysis of shame, understood as a basic emotion that articulates social relationships, affords insight into the embodied experience of social processes. This paper presents the preliminary results of a research study focusing on how this emotion operates in the relationships and experiences of middle-aged (34–45 years) heterosexual men living alone in Madrid (Spain). We are particularly interested in exploring how shame intercedes when these men challenge or fail to fully adapt to the norms of adult romantic relationships and social expectations regarding having a stable partner. Our analysis aims to characterize this population group and describe how they use instant messaging groups and online dating apps. We focus on how shame is articulated in these interactions and the effects this has on men’s subjectivity and self-image, in order to explore the different ways in which they activate and modulate expressions of modern-day masculinity. In short, we suggest that circuits of shame trigger certain forms of subjection which clearly emerge in mediated communications, an arena in which, in the case of men who live alone, the rupture with the social norm is defensively re-worked, inverting the sense of self and embodying a set of tensions and ambivalences.

A chicken may cross a road, but it does not decide to do so for a reason. The chicken may even be caused to cross the road by some desire that it has; and the chicken may exhibit intelligence in whether or not it crosses the road. But the chicken makes no decision to follow its desires, and it makes no reasoned decision about whether or not it is a good idea to cross the road. We can ask: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ but the chicken cannot ask itself: ‘Why should I cross the road?’ We can. That’s why we can eat it.

Adverse selection in clowns