de-atomization

Type 1 fun is fun in the moment. Watching a movie, playing a video game, scrolling TikTok, reading a book. You want to have fun, you do the fun thing, and voilá, it is fun.

Type 2 fun is fun in retrospect. Running a marathon is mostly un-fun from moment to moment; you’re often either zoned out or in some form of pain. But in retrospect, it was fun.

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continuing down nat eliason rabbit hole:

Beware of shadow careers. This idea comes from Steven Pressfield: “Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.” See also: When The Money’s Just Too Damn Good.

fascinating. are my hobbies a shadow career i spend self improvement energy on, when i could focus that energy on my main career?

Many of the best changes in life are unknown until you make them. Feeling “fine” is a dangerous attitude. You might have no idea how much better you could feel, how much happier you could be, how much fuller your life could be. Changes like exercising regularly, cleaning up your diet, doing psychedelic therapy, it is impossible to convey the change in perspective to someone who has not experienced it. Sometimes you just need to trust the zealots.

you really do gotta trust the zealots. i know the effects meditation had on me, there's a lot of zealots, but people are like bah. there are probs some unlocks here are for me i can't quite think of.

Trust your negative gut, not your positive gut. If you have a great feeling about something, you might just be excited or gullible or not thinking it through, so take your time. But if you have a bad feeling about something, you’re almost certainly right about it.

hmm i don't know where the evidence for this to be true. like i don't get the why of it being true. tim ferriss reported a similar thing about looking back on decisions around working with people in the past. it might be true but not sure.

negative feelings can also be

The time will pass anyway. Maybe it’ll take you five or ten years to succeed at whatever you want to do. Well, those ten years will pass anyway. In ten years you can either have made progress on your goals, or still be whining about how long things take.

patience patience patience patience patience. think on a long enough term horizon. remember rishi

You have more time to build a career than a family. You can complete great work well into your 80s and 90s. If you want to know your grandkids as adults, you only have until your mid 30s to start a family. Every year you spend waiting is another year you lose with your future family.

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