SUNDAY, 28 MARCH 2021
Some things you need to do are like taking off your clothes and jumping naked into an icy lake. You scrape together the courage, take off your clothes, take a deep breath, run, and jump.
Other things are like when someone says to you, “If we start walking now, we should be there by Thursday – five days from now.” It doesn’t matter if you’re excited about this project, and there’s no big moment where you take off your clothes, start running and jumping. You just have to start walking. And keep walking. And when you get tired, you rest. And the next day you keep going.
SATURDAY, 3 APRIL 2021
What does it mean to swallow a White Pill? According to UrbanDictionary.com, it refers to a moment, or a series of events, in which a person abandons his despair for an increasingly hopeful outlook on life. This is done not out of optimism, but by confronting difficult circumstances and even nihilism with the use of reason and inquiry.
The White Pill is the opposite of the Black Pill. With the latter, you have an increasingly pessimistic outlook on life that you see as meaningless, with a belief that life always amounts to suffering and misery. In the Black Pill view, morality is seen as merely a construct or a mechanism that enables people to live together in relative harmony.
MONDAY, 5 APRIL 2021
Again: an idea does not necessarily have to be new. Maybe it just reminds you of something you already know. Or it confirms something you’ve already accepted for yourself. Or it expresses in other words something that is important to hear again.
Says Scott Adams in Episode 1334 of his daily talk on YouTube (he was talking about traumatic experiences and the best ways to deal with them, as part of a larger effort to be the author of your own experience of reality): “The weird thing about reality is that sometimes an inaccurate view of reality is more functional. Sometimes an accurate view of reality is exactly what you need, but there are lots of situations where an inaccurate view of reality is better. Now I won’t give you examples. I’m just going to make that claim for now so don’t worry if this seems like too much of a simplification and you say to yourself but you’re leaving something out. It doesn’t matter for a reframing. You’re trying to keep it simple so that people can hold it in their minds. [If] I get this about eighty percent right, that’s all you need. [Forget] about, you know, being pedantic. The twenty percent where you’re saying, ‘But is it really just genes and traumas? Isn’t it also some positive …’ Forget about that. Just keep it simple. Your brain is your genes; your traumas the bad things that have happened to you; and the things that you do intentionally to make it better [are the hacks]. […] One example of a brain hack is education. So you get some education – it physically changes your brain to be more productive. And you did it intentionally, all right. [We] all agree that’s a simple thing to do. And another hack is intelligent skill stacking – putting skills together in an intelligent way that they become greater than the value of the individual skills. […] Here’s some more [examples]: associating self-rewards with habits you want to deepen is a hack. You’re literally programming your brain by rewarding yourself for this thing you want to do more often. Learning to put things in context is a hack. Practicing optimism is a hack. If you make your system – your habit – to routinely learn and test new hacks, you become the author of your own mind. And because your experience of reality is subjective, you become the author of your own experience. Your experience of life is subjective, right? Life itself might be objective, probably … there’s probably something there. But the way you experience life is purely subjective. And you can change that. And so I summarize by saying, be the hack not the trauma. Now when I say that your brain is formed by traumas in part what I’m talking about is … let’s say there was a bully who always teased you about your looks. Well, that could scar you so that you would always be concerned about your looks. [That] trauma of the bully just becomes part of your permanent personality because it actually rewires your brain. A hack does the same thing but you’re doing it intentionally to create a good outcome, all right? [If] you learn to sort of continually scour your environment for little psychology tricks, hypnosis tricks … affirmations is an optimism hack basically and a focus hack … If you make it your lifetime practice to look for ways to hack your mind and then test them out, you will be the author of your own experience. Otherwise you’re just going to be the recipient of the experience. Otherwise the world will program you. The world is going to program you if you don’t do it yourself. [You] will become just your traumas. Be the hack not the trauma. Now there’s … that’s the whole message right there.”
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