I think you deserve to feel good even when you’re not good at stuff
I get a lot of messages now from people who are feeling self-hate because they’re not good at a thing
And it’s not clear to me why being good or bad at things means you deserve more or less love, whether from yourself or others
It’s definitely functionally useful to be good at things, but that’s orthogonal to your value as a conscious thing
You can tie them together if you want, but it makes all of life way harder, including becoming good at things
Feeling this every moment once you believe it can be tough, but that’s not really where these people are stuck — they don’t even intellectually believe it. But luckily you can change that in a second
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I think it’s okay if you’re selfish. If you spend all your money on a fancy car or whatever instead of helping people with it, I don’t think you have to feel bad about it
Giving to philanthropy or working on good causes is good too, but only if you want to
I do think taking interventions that will make you want to more is underrated though. Generally I think the path is healing your own wounds such that you need the car less
For me one example of this was becoming really curious about why I felt a strong compulsion to wear my openai hoodie everywhere I went in 2018 even when it wasn’t cold at all
A few hundred hours of therapy later I lost the hoodie and didn’t notice for a month
Not a parent so idk for sure but I think it might help to tell your kids how loveable they are like an order of magnitude more than after you feel like you’ve hit diminishing returns (because I don’t think you have)
and also maybe experiment with telling yourself the same at least an order of magnitude more than you think is reasonable. In my experience it keeps changing you
I’d love to see an RCT where one parent gets the kid piano lessons, helps them get good grades, soccer etc and the other just basically tells them they’re lovable in different ways for that time
Then compare grades, life satisfaction, income of kid later. I’d bet on the latter
Like why doesn’t every kid learn about 5-MeO-DMT in class. Even if the take-away is “don’t do it”, everyone deserves to know how non-boring the world actually is
Some day I’ll teach a course called Life is Magic where each lecture is a different thing like this. There’s so many
Did you know that in addition to fixing all your life’s problems, Alexander Technique can improve your posture??
Walking around this river with expanded awareness feels just like low-dose psilocybin. Googled this and apparently I’m very not the first person to think it
Technically speaking, Alexander Technique is a fungus
I set an intent to cross the river and expanded my awareness so hard this magic bridge popped into existence
honestly hard to imagine how anyone thinks any idea is out there when general relativity, the delayed-choice quantum eraser, black holes, evolution somehow discovering consciousness, and 5-MeO-DMT all uncontroversially exist
if we set the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment at 10 on the out-there scale, your agi timeline, quirky theory of mind, or prediction of a strange political outcome is like max a 2/10 to me
you think leaving facebook to join a startup is sooo crazy yet you've been literally BENDING TIME every second of your life and have never even thought about it