Collecting open secrets

I think people are endlessly fascinating. Sometimes you meet a person and they have such an interesting or strange life that you wonder how it could be possible. But then you spend more time with them and then you figure out exactly why things are the way they are.

I am not interested in actual secrets, as in things they don't tell anyone. I'm more interested in truths that are self-evident if you really get to know them, the ones that are out in the open but never stated and all their friends and lovers would agree. I love collecting these secrets about people—the ones that make them so uniquely them. I don't mean that they have any enduring, permanent qualities, like they have a *core*. But there are beliefs and behaviors that are invisible to the person like water is to a fish. These open secrets are essential for reinforcing the life they currently have, but they also constrain (or enable) the possibilities in their life.

For example, the charming person whom everyone wants as a dinner party guest but who somehow can't maintain close friendships or relationships. And then you find out they are restless and anxious and never know what they want, and this repels people who care about stability. Their charisma is like Cinderella's gown, only beautiful for a night.

The inspiring lone genius who wants to change the world but somehow can't find anyone to do it with them. And then you learn that no one is ever good enough for them, and they make unreasonable demands because they cannot stand not having the upper hand.

The incredibly timid person you meet at a party who is, you discover later, known for their opinionated and grandiose writing online. And then you realize they yearn for a delusion, a time of war and epics and romance, and this matters more to them than attending to reality in front of them.

There are good ones too! Some unassuming people are like helpful stage hands, funding projects and connecting talented people to each other in the shadows. These, however, are less secret because it's more socially acceptable to share good things about someone.

I could go on and on. Sometimes they're sad, but not always, because often a person's greatest strengths are directly related to their weaknesses and you realize you can't have one without the other, or they'd be someone else entirely.

I believe that if you were subject to the same forces as another (born with their genes, their upbringing, and the sum of all the experiences they've had), you would end up living identically. You would act the same. If you can't imagine yourself acting like them, it's because there's something you aren't seeing. We are no better than the pockets of consciousness we have been privileged or cursed to see.

Point is, we all have them. They rule our lives. They're not necessarily bad, unless you're not living the life you want and you have no way of figuring out what's in the way, in which case the ability to spot them in yourself and in others can help.

Open secrets are not stated, and they operate implicitly. But once you know them, they explain a lot about how you prioritize certain values or outcomes. They are the things people notice about you that either draw them in or repel them, and they rarely tell you.

Most of the time, they're revealed in an ordinary fashion. We are constantly training the people around us how to treat us. If you get visibly annoyed when your friend talks about politics, they will not talk about politics around you in the future unless they're *trying* to annoy you, which they now know how to do. If you have a fight with your partner and give honest feedback about how they make you feel but they get mad and defensive and invalidate your feelings, then you are unlikely to open up in the future, because they just signaled they care more about protecting the idea of who they are in their heads (their ego narrative), than communication and the health of your relationship. You realize they are not someone who can receive honest feedback, and their previous partners would probably agree with you.

This is also why when you get a weird vibe from someone and then ask around, you usually get a bunch of similar sentiments and anecdotes. The whisper network works because that's where open secrets are exchanged. When you aggregate opinions from independent sources, you can more confidently attribute behaviors to the person in question rather than to distortions by the perceivers.

A while ago, I tweeted, "you get the life you tense around". What I meant was there are certain things that your attention and body contract around, and you spend time and energy towards making sure they "go right" (whatever that means for you). If you really hate being late or losing your belongings, you will spend a lot of time "holding" time, social conventions, and locations of objects in your head. This comes at the cost of other things, because that's how prioritization works. If you're running late, you'll now spend the whole car ride checking the time and thinking about how late you are instead of enjoying the sunny weather or the radio.

In this case, it's not that bad. But if you tense around things like "I always have to be right" or "I never want to feel ashamed" you will do a bunch of acrobatics in an attempt to get those outcomes, and it could get in the way of growth or self-expression.

Over a lifetime, it could be the difference between finding love, reaching your full potential, or having a good relationship with your kids, and not having those things. What you call fate lies in the knowledge people already have about you. btw don't haphazardly share their open secrets to people, it can end really badly unless you're close, have a lot of context about each other's lives, and they're open to receiving feedback

https://x.com/zencephalon/status/1858386781575495962

Nutrient Levels in Retail Grocery Stores, or Why You Should Be Buying Your Groceries from Walmart

I've done some digging into nutrient levels in retail grocery stores (specifically where I should shop if I want nutritious food) and learned some insane things. Longest post I’ve done yet, so for readability this is also linked in my bio.

1) It's a well-documented phenomenon that nutrient levels in produce have been declining for decades. The average mineral content of calcium, magnesium, and iron in cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has dropped 80-90% between 1914 and 2018. (Image by Workinger et al., 2018)

There are several reasons for this, but most of them are due to modern agricultural practices. These reasons include: selective breeding, soil depletion, synthetic fertilizers that provide basic nutrients necessary for plant growth but not others that would make them nutrient-dense, higher CO2 levels in atmosphere diluting nutrient content in plants, over-irrigation washing away nutrients from soil, and long storage times.

2) If all you care about is nutrient content, SPEED is the only factor that matters. That means time between being picked and ending up in your mouth. Price doesn't matter, organic doesn't matter, marketing hoo-ha about how fancy the produce is doesn't matter. Literally just speed. Fresh spinach loses almost ALL of its vitamin C within 7 days of harvest when stored at 68°F (20°C). When stored at 39°F (4°C) which is about fridge temp, it loses 75%. The apples you buy at the grocery store can be up to a *year* old since they've been harvested, especially if you are not buying them in season.

Taste, texture, and smell are not good indicators of nutrient content, because you can't tell how long it has been since it's been harvested. Modern shipping and storage methods can be deceptive, combined with practices like spraying strawberry fragrance on otherwise bland strawberries so you think you're buying the good stuff (yes some places actually do this).

In general, it can help to eat in season, but due to the globalized supply chain...it's always in season *somewhere*. But how long did it take to get to you? You don't know. Even if it's in season where you are, how do you know if that's not from *last* season? Again, you have no idea.

3) Think for a moment: what store do you think sells the most nutritious produce? Your local farmers’ market? Whole Foods? Trader Joe’s must be decent, right? Nope, it’s Walmart. Because of their scale and insanely efficient supply chain, they can get things from the farm (wherever it is in the world it's growing in season) to the store where you can buy it, really really fast. Oh, and for the lowest cost.

I wanted to believe every time I splurged on fancier produce, I was actually getting something better. But this is what the data comparing 18 major US retailers showed – Walmart consistently outperformed.

I learned this from talking to Brent Overcash, co-founder of a startup called TeakOrigin, which specialized in testing nutrient content in groceries from retail grocery stores. For years, every week, his team would walk into grocery stores, buy thousands of produce items the way normal consumers would, and bring them back to the lab to assess nutrient content. They’d go to Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Costco, Wegmans, Sprouts, Waitrose, farmers’ markets, and many more retailers. The “winner” varied depending on the specific type of produce/brands/exactly what week it was, but Walmart tended to come out on top. The more important point is that price and taste and organic certifications had no impact on the actual nutrient density.

They raised ~$5M and did a decade of research with labs full of analytical chemists where they used a combination of molecular spectrometry, HPLC, GC/MS, TGA, and wet chemistry methods. With 800+ million data points, the USDA and FDA at one point told them they had the world’s largest dataset of dynamic nutrition data. They’re no longer around, but had branches in California, Boston, and the UK just a couple years ago.

It went out of business because no major grocery store wanted to partner with them, because the transparency would hold these retailers accountable for *so many things* the consumers aren't even currently aware of. Things like how Whole Foods centers their entire branding around fresher, higher quality produce that's better for you, but when he actually tested some expensive apples they were selling from a local orchard advertised with handwritten chalkboard signs, it had so little nutrient content it was barely detectable on their lab-grade machines. He called the orchard because he was curious, under the guise that he was interested in picking some apples for the season. They said, "Oh sure, you can do that, but our first harvest isn't for another 6 weeks." That means it had been a year since the apples he bought were actually picked. This is actually industry standard, made possible by storing them at low temperatures and spraying a gas called 1-MCP which blocks ethylene (a gas naturally produced by the apples that makes them ripen) by binding to the same receptors.

I asked him: Are farmers’ markets any better, since we're getting the produce directly from local farmers? And he said basically there's huge variance. If you walk into a booth and that vendor is selling over 5 types of produce, there's no way they all ripened at the same time. They may not even all be grown by them. Once, he actually saw a vendor at Boston farmers’ market selling carrots from Target! He could tell from the packaging because he used to work for them. Turns out when a produce delivery is refused by the grocery store, the truck owner is then responsible for getting rid of that produce, and they usually drive to a “food hub” where bulk produce is bought and sold just to recoup some of the costs. That is one possible source of the mysterious farmers’ market carrots they were pawning off as homegrown.

Now, I'm not saying you should *stop* shopping at non-Walmart places. There are a lot of factors other than nutrient density that influence a purchasing decision. The fancy, expensive produce might taste better, smell better, and be better for cooking. It may come from farms where there are better wages and working conditions. There might be fewer pesticides. But again, for nutrient content, speed is the only thing that matters.

I want to do something about this, but it’s an issue way bigger than I can tackle alone. From the way we do modern farming, to the complete lack of transparency on the retailer's end (and vested interests in keeping it that way), to the government's lack of interest in enforcing this transparency for the sake of consumers...the problem runs deep and I'm tired man. And so is Brent, who’s retired and doing woodworking in his studio these days, living the good life. Side note on frozen produce: The post above is about fresh produce only. A potentially appealing alternative may be buying frozen produce, which on average has equal or higher nutritional content than fresh. This is because frozen produce is picked at peak ripeness then frozen shortly after, locking in most of the nutrients at the expense of appearance/texture/flavor. If it’s been blanched (i.e. exposed briefly to hot water or steam to preserve quality of produce by killing enzymes that cause loss of flavor, color, and texture) before freezing, some nutrients like Vitamin C, B1, and folate are definitely lower because of heat sensitivity and being water soluble so they leach out into the blanching water. Pretty much all frozen veggies are blanched first, and stuff like berries/fruit aren’t. The rest of the nutrients are quite stable, and knowing which ones are lost means you can supplement in other ways. Fresh produce is picked before peak ripeness to accommodate for ripening during storage and transport, and the nutrients degrade as it sits on shelves and in refrigerators before it is eventually prepared.

It’s also great that it’s more convenient, and I think frozen produce unfairly gets a bad rap. The only thing I would change is the plastic packaging because I don’t like microplastics in my food. I would avoid heating or microwaving produce in its original plastic packaging.

One thing to be aware of is frozen berries (or produce that isn’t blanched before freezing) that have been imported. In 2022-2023, New Zealand had a hepatitis A outbreak from frozen berries imported from Serbia so they advised people to boil/cook their berries before refreezing or eating. Some countries have more lax sanitation standards and contamination can happen in processing facilities. Furthermore, freezing doesn’t kill viruses! For stuff like berries which aren’t cooked before they’re eaten, you can more easily get sick. It’s less of a concern for berries sourced from within the US, Canada, Australia, most of the EU – but Australia has had 2 of the same hep A outbreaks so I’d just keep it in mind.

I wish this was a conspiracy but unfortunately endocrine disruptors are EVERYWHERE. BPS/BPA can cause diabetes, infertility, obesity, cancer, birth defects, and more. They're on receipts, in water bottles, plastic takeout containers, coffee cup and food can linings 😭 I learned about this while researching how to fix my PMS, if your hormones are already out of whack xenoestrogens are not going to help, especially if your PMS is caused by estrogen dominance (too much estrogen relative to progesterone). BPA/BPS just gets stored in fatty tissue, and you need a healthy liver to process it.

In 15 studies independently of BMI, women with PCOS had higher BPA levels
and in men, it reduces testosteroneobgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ij…

asian parents don't believe in mental health because they come from a culture that doesn't actually regard the mind as separate from the body. many mental issues are caused by low level deficiencies (common one is magnesium -> depression). food is medicine you can only get so far with talk therapy that only dwells on one level of abstraction. if you're ready to dive 80 layers deep into deconstructing narratives, you'll probably have better luck shoving some leafy greens or tcm herbs down your throat first

OHHH I GET IT NOW OK I think I figured out how triggers affect the attentional field and how to undo triggers. Or not undo exactly, but rather witness it and do a specific mental move such that when the trigger arises it gets rid of almost all the pain First by attentional field I am referring to something I visualize as a mesh field with interconnected nodes, the field extending infinitely in all directions, occupying the same 3D space as the world around me. When stimuli enter my awareness they crumple a local part of the field, bending it out of shape, causing an unpleasant sensation, and then as the stimulus passes eventually that part of the field uncrumples itself.

It’s almost impossible to witness this field if you haven’t had the experience of your sense of self as a dot located roughly around the back of your head/neck, disappearing via untensing, and for the first time in your life instead of feeling like you’re playing a game in first person as the character, you’re like a camera watching your surroundings unfold. You witness stuff but there is no mental bandwidth devoted to maintaining that there is a PERSON doing the experiencing, you’re just experiencing.

It is truly a mindfuck and it’s what some people I’ve heard refer to as stream entry (sorry I haven’t read almost any meditation books or know the proper terms for stuff)

I do NOT mean the high level feeling of “being one with the universe” which a lot of people get on psychedelics or ecstatic peak experiences. What I’m referring to is a very precise thing, that you can repeatedly induce if it undoes itself and you feel like you have a sense of self again. There is no content/story to it, it’s so oddly specific it’s almost boring, like relaxing your left pinky except you never knew you had a left pinky or something.

You get to this point by honing concentration ability via samatha practices.

I’ve personally experienced two paths but I am sure there are more: 1) TMI-style, focus on your breath, one-pointed concentration such that my concentration is so sharp I can’t not have this experience

2) proceeding through the jhanas until I hit the immaterial jhanas, specifically at least 6th jhana — have found TWIM method to be easier, more pleasant, and faster than Brasington method. 6th jhana gets me to the same headspace I was in right after stream entry

The reason why you can’t see the field before stream entry is because there is too much bandwidth/processing power being taken up by maintaining your sense of self at all times such that you can’t investigate the rest of experience with much clarity. It enables you to switch from feeling like attention/awareness is centralized (always passing through the central self) vs decentralized (things are happening all around me in space, I am not *doing* anything to make them happen)

don't know how to explain this but objects in your internal landscape have distances between/around them and depending on what those distances are, life can feel very different, and you can play with this for example take an object of your anxiety, when it feels close it's like looming over you, suffocating you, subsuming your body, actively triggering you. but if you expand your awareness so it's just you and the object in a room but the room is infinitely wide in every direction

ok ok hear me out: you should all be making your own personal sigils to defend against your worst fears. it’s simple to do and works well because they’re made by *you*. here’s how start by closing your eyes and calling up the emotion of fear. just general fear, no specific scenario. try to get comfortable with it, if you feel yourself flinching and retracting, stay there like a meatball trying to marinate.

I have a theory that you can only therapize/meditate/work on yourself full-time for about 1-2 years after which you have to re-enter the world or you get stuck there unable to take any real action You can spend more time trying to get to the bottom of all your trauma (80% -> 100%) or take what you have done so far (0% -> 80% assuming you've put in considerable effort for some time already) and go bump around in the world. Basically you need more information, diff inputs

I basically think you become an embodied expression of the states of consciousness you spend the most time in, so you should choose them wisely, and that this is a much more effective way of guiding yourself to grow than considering your strengths/charms/weaknesses/flaws A state of consciousness can be pretty much anything: being drunk, daydreaming, extreme pain, jhana, flow states—just a bundle of sensory experience that you can recognize as distinct from other bundles. Some people might call it a vibe

I remember this @paulg essay that said that “young people care about prestige because the people they’re trying to impress aren’t very discerning” and it just makes me reflect hard on who in this world I’d actually care about the opinions of in regards to my creative work Caveat of yeah ideally you’re “not trying to impress anyone” but realistically we’re social creatures and having one of your heroes in the specific field/area you’ve devoted years to acknowledge your effort and nod to you as an equal is an *amazing* feeling

Your dreams aren’t random, neither are the thoughts that come up when you’re meditating, or the feelings and memories that come up when you massage and stretch certain parts of your body: there is a knowing beyond words Getting to know yourself is seeing the connections between what you used to find random, figuring out how it’s wired

I don’t use much willpower anymore, I think the more unintegrated your parts are (how much you fight with yourself internally) the more willpower or self-coercion is necessary to get yourself to act IFS and journaling has made me good at being some kind of counselor that my parts/desires go to when they’re upset, and the counseling thing gently tells them what options are available, how the other parts feel, and figuring out a way to make them all happy

This is why I got bubblier after working through most of my social anxiety! I’m more present and transparent in how I show up. Sometimes I worry it’s too much energy, esp. for some introverted friends. But it feels like an effortless expression, feels right

https://twitter.com/impartialpim/status/1559438801835114496

I had a terrible fear of public speaking for most of my life, my whole body would shake/sweat and heart would race. I got good enough with the help of prep (slides and rehearsing) that spectators thought I had it together even if I was internally freaking out

I never had a morning or daily routine, so I wanted to explore making one since I don't work currently (nor am I looking for a job). Turns out the way is to ask my body what it wants at any given time, which I was never taught to do My best efforts up until now were 1) do the bare minimum to rush out the door to school/work after my alarm drags my sleep-deprived self awake and oh god I'm running late, or

What I love about art is it makes madness permissible. Context is optional. Confronted with art people can drop their usual ways and well-tread daily lives. It’s chaotic and generative. Not all art is at the fringe but the stuff that ends up shifting culture always starts there More on what I mean by “context being optional”: there’s something going on with how it feels unacceptable to drop an anguished poem or gory illustration in a group chat with friends with zero context. They’d be pretty confused.

When you realize there are folks out there full-time honing skills for psychological control, akin to parasites looking for hosts, your strategy changes. You need a really good memetic (and emotional) immune system, similar to the one we already have for fighting off disease. Quiet and undetectable until a real threat (bad actor) shows up, then pulls all the stops for defense or damage control. But if you build up defenses too strong and you get memetic allergies (overreactions to benign things) because it vaguely resembles a thing that could kill you

Another recreation with DALL-E, this time with my old watercolor painting. Left is original, and right is DALL-E's using a verbal description. It has better contrast, but again I run into some issues with fine details (my brushstrokes are more discernible). Texture is incredible This was my first recreation attempt

https://twitter.com/carmenleelau/status/1512325399560306690?s=20&t=5Z5CcOGBl3sawPImcgHBew

I tried using DALL-E to recreate one of my own digital illustrations by inputting a verbal description of it. Left is my original, painted in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. Right is the generated one. I actually think I like it more, esp. colors! But it does worse on fine details Conceptually it grasped the birthday party idea better (e.g. confetti) + better colors. But I struggled to get the animals *inside* the balloons, so complicated details are hard to do. If you take what DALL-E made and edited/painted over it though, that would be better than both

DALL-E's art is incredible. Here we have "illustration of independent researchers walking above ground out of mycelium" and "pastel hopeful and dreamy illustration of a girl blooming out of a lotus flower" this one's for the mushroom fans – the second one is a photorealistic sculpture of the Vietnamese mountains in the style of Ruth Asawa, and they ended up looking like mushrooms so I was like 🤷‍♀️ close enough

A lot of bad habits are due to faulty sensors. This happens when you’re cut off from your own body’s sensations, and over time you don’t even know how to look for them, they’re just not there. e.g. if you don’t feel thirsty you stop drinking water Breaking out of unhealthy habits naturally occurs when you are in touch with the harm or undesired effect it is doing to your bodymind. If the stove is hot of course you’d retract your hand…unless you can’t feel the heat.

Your patterns don’t want to be seen, their persistence depends on being able to pull off psychological sleights of hand. And when you figure out how the magic trick is done, it’s like “oh.” The magic and mystery’s gone, and it controls your life a bit less If something’s bothering me, I like to start w/ the version of it that has strong negative valence and keep breaking it down until everything is neutral valence. Kinda the opposite direction of a magic trick (positive valence w/ awe, enchantment —> oh you move your hand this way)