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Nick Cammarata Profile picture
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15 Feb, 5 tweets, 1 min read
cool psych / meditation idea by @warrenkrettek Image
(he gave me permission to share this)
I think ruminating on "what weird brain stuff could I try optimizing for" is surprisingly high impact. Most practices are pretty simple, so the space isn't thaaaat big
eg metta -> up love, concentration -> small focus, Alexander Technique -> big awareness, core transformation -> recursive "what do you need", vipassana -> high bandwidth perception, tantra -> big awareness + transform energy into passion, etc
it's also fun to mix and match. Eg recently tried Alexander Technique to make awareness big, then metta to fill the awareness with love, then sort-of tantra to convert the love to passion without collapsing awareness. It's very non-subtle

Your mind is a playground. Play!

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More from @nickcammarata

Nick Cammarata Profile picture
18 Feb
Every time I tell someone this it helps them a lot, and I do honestly believe it so I’ll just blanket say it for each of you

I think you’re likely radically underestimating the ceiling of what you’re capable of in basically every way, and I’d bet on it at a large multiple
It doesn’t mean you’re totally wrong about the exact path you’re on now. But if you made the right interventions and think long term and just keep doing the right things for a decade you’ll prob find the ceiling is orders of magnitude higher than you think it is in most areas
I think this is certainly true for your baseline moment-to-moment happiness, self-worth, finances, career aspirations, romantic relationship potential, humanitarian impact, and it’s probably true in a lot of other areas I haven’t spent any time trying to quantify or understand
Read 9 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
17 Feb
As far as I can tell self-love requires experientially loosening your grasp on self, because you can’t love something without distance from it. But the gap can be small

This is why saying self-love is narcissism or being full-of-yourself isn’t just false it’s the wrong direction
This is why the paths to lasting self-love usually require meditation or psychedelics. It’s not (only) the love these tools give you but the prerequisite of being less egocentric

It’s common to find self-love weeks after a trip-induced ego-death. You’ve finished the pre-req
Although it’ll take two steps I do think it can be done in one sitting, because it’s not about time it’s a process of using the distance to see from a new perspective and fall into a new equilibrium

You can do it in five minutes, or fifty years
Read 7 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
17 Feb
If you were to perfectly perceive a random 10 minute slice of my waking sober life (emotions, perceptions, thoughts, etc) how different do you expect it to be from your normal experience
I’m more interested in what you expect the difference is between people in general, not me specifically

But I think “random person” is so varied it spoils the data, so for now we’ll normalize to my perceptions
I don’t know what it’s like to be you but switching to me at minimum there’d be 1. No inner voice 2. Pretty short 3. Muscular, which might be somatically weird if you’ve never been before 4. A man
Read 4 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
15 Feb
I think this is more general. When I get close to people who seem to be doing acts of god, with incredible willpower or pushing through doubt and fear, I usually find they're not thinking of themselves much at all. They're in low-self flow where the concept of willpower dissolves
I actually hinted at this earlier today, and I also think @QiaochuYuan's thread is good. I think a lot of people are saying roughly the same thing in this area

Another one pop culture gets wrong is how often people doing acts-of-god don't even know it. When I was pivoting to AI I interviewed a lot of researchers and when I asked how often they read papers they'd say things like "idk a normal amount? Like 10-15 deep read-throughs a day"
Read 5 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
15 Feb
I’m quite proud of the psychological progress I’ve made in the last five years

That Nick was quite hurt and it would have been understandable if he ended up making no progress at all
I guess it updated me towards thinking a lot is possible with little resources. Even if you can only spend 15m going inside yourself doing psychological work until it’s too scary, progress compounds and that time grows until you can do it most of the day without losing energy
I remember I booked a therapy appointment and walked in and said things are hard then just cried the whole appointment and left. That was pretty rough (that level of rough was only a couple days)

It’s all totally foreign now, and I wouldn’t have guessed that was possible
Read 5 tweets
Nick Cammarata Profile picture
15 Feb
my happiest friends are all impressed by everything all the time
there's a very strong correlation between "I'm proud I did X, I should show it to Y they'll be like wowowow" and Y being outlier happy

(they're often wowowow walking around all day in their life already, just impressed by everything around them)
I think the reason is that being impressed is a combination of being perceptive in the moment -- literally the senses "impressing" into you -- and gratitude, two keys to life satisfaction
Read 5 tweets

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