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Simon Sarris Profile picture
Simon Sarris
@simonsarris
🕯 In labouring to be concise, I become obscure. 🕯 Alchemist, sacred things, making things 🕯 The map is mostly water. 🌜 I make GoJS: https://t.co/7yYIMFfAtd
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Dec 18 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
When we first bought the land we had no landscaping budget but our own time. We started cutting down trees and brush all over, planning ideas for everywhere (orchard here, grove here, clear this field, etc)

We found it was unsustainable There's simply too much for two people to do (at least two people who aren't retired)

So we took a step back and decided to work from the house outwards. Make the immediate lawn look nice and pull out all poison ivy. Plant a couple trees we really like (magnolia, sugar maple)
Nov 21 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The simplest conclusion from looking at "seed oils" for ten seconds is that the burden of proof is on them. Never before did we eat this much Linoleic Acid (LA). Never before did we muck with fat composition at this scale.

You don't need "proof" to decide to avoid them. Image
Image if fat composition explosively changes and everyone gets obese you don't need to do a bunch of studies. You can just not eat them and eat saturated animal fats instead and not get fat yourself and feel great.

You don't have to prove anything to anyone. Image
Nov 14 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I avoided answering this one because I wanted to think about it for longer. But I still don't have a great answer that isn't rambling personal philosophy which probably won't translate well.

A few general things though. I did make a thread of advice on finding a wife, which is not exactly finding a husband. But there is some overlap.

Some people asked me to write a husband version, but I found it difficult to say much with confidence

Nov 7 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
I think lots of people are used to the idea that life has a script. School encourages this, many ppl follow script from 3-21. Once the script is finished, people can exist at a sorta end-of-history state without re-examining. Some get depressed by this. It's like navigating a river downstream and then finally you reach the ocean. Now what?

I have some sympathy for men and women stuck here.
Oct 25 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
I think some of the birthrate decline can be attributed to two forces happening everywhere: increasing complexity, and decreasing hardship. Life is too complex and too 'good.' I'll try to explain Image Complexity: There are too many non-life decisions to make and navigate. Whats the right healthcare plan? did I pay my phone bill? My dishwasher broke, I needed an oil change last month. 115 IQ people hardest hit: am I REALLY optimizing my IRA contributions perfectly with my HSA?
Oct 24 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
the idea of a "honeymoon phase" in relationships is the fakest thing I've ever heard in my life. To believe it you would have to be a passive actor in your own life, things just "happen" to you. A television-brained phenomena "oh whoops my desire just magically went away, no doing of my own of course, I was just minding my own business and then it wasn't there anymore. I have no function or part in the making or unmaking of that."

are you an imbecile? are you watching life from the third person?
Sep 5 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
People claim these things (beauty, masculinity) don't matter or are superficial but clearly they do if everyone is looking for them.

Luckily many desirable qualities are also skills. If you are under-developed, you can develop them. Never let people tell you they don't matter! A lot of people want masculinity to be a stance of some kind, but really its a set of hard and soft(!) skills.

As a byproduct of learning/doing, one's personality changes (simplistically think: confidence), and people sometimes want to separate these from skill-building but...
Aug 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
One of the most deeply evil things to happen in my life is that liberals have become reflexively pro-crime.

Unable to address serious problems, they do everything to downplay disorder, and consistently minimize or blame victims. It was an unthinkable position growing up. Before 2010 I can't recall anything like it.

I am told that in the 1990s, many liberals were serious about finding ways to reduce crime. Now that class treats it like a random natural disaster that you're a bad person for mentioning.
Jul 10 • 20 tweets • 6 min read
Veganism is both the moral and nutritional equivalent of being a flat earther. It is a diet of deficiencies that is especially unhealthy for children.

But considering just the moral point for a moment, there are two implicit claims to address... for the record I have a Philosophy degree so according to people like this I am a philosopher. I also have a newsletter so according to normal people I am a philosopher
Jun 22 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
NPR's Ira Glass got a pit and it constantly bit CHILDREN, him & wife & more ppl. So they gave it prozac and exotic meats to "cure" it and it STILL had to be muzzled 24/7. They stopped having guests over. He says the dog is the victim.

Encapsulates an unfortunate liberal mindset

Image
Image This has been a mindset that's been made fun of and commented on since at least the 1800s (The Bostonians, Henry James), its definitely not new. It is an addiction to feeling like you are saving something and protecting it from others.
Jun 6 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
I have viewed maybe 200,000 historical photos from the 1800's to today, across all kinds of archives. The neoteny effect is very real and began probably around the 1920s for some people.

Interestingly historical men resemble modern men more (vs women) in a lot of ways. too many observations to ever state but one funny one is that the zoomer perm was alive and well in the 1930s

1933, us national archive: Image
May 23 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
wait this is just my company. I already live like this ohhhhhhhh
now it makes sense

Mar 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
THIS SCENARIO IS LITERALLY THE MOST COMMON DM I GET

I would just say BEHEAD HIM at this point but the sad fact is that he does not even realize what's going on

It is quite possible to solve in individual cases. If you can solve broadly, you can unlock great human happiness there is a great affliction of people not realizing that life has a point, a plot, and they play a part in it. That it is more than endlessly renewing your streaming subscription services and getting better at rock climbing
Mar 4 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
It's a movie about the forces of evil, boredom, and aimlessness and what they do to an otherwise promising person. It's like a vampire movie without vampires. Also a very tight script, no line of dialogue is wasted.

And it has an accurate depiction... of what it feels like for a bright person when everyone older than you in your life is checked out, unaware, and kind-of an imbecile, especially wrt the future.

No one actually helps Benjamin. They lob "advice" at him, berate him, seduce him. But they don't think about him.
Feb 28 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
yeah after food health shelter family, what is there? I mean beside RESHAPING OF THE WORLD, and ART TO VENERATE THE DIVINE and sure I guess being the HANDMAID OF INVENTION and little other trifles in pursuit of glory and theory and beauty and all that. yeah diminishing returns guys used to get up in the morning and say to each other Lets build a cathedral so beautiful and so grand that all who come after us will think us Mad

now people talk about "diminishing returns"
Jan 30 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A lot of replies say versions of "you need to be telling not asking" or "you need to disallow video games"

I think both these miss the mark widely. The fundamental issue is that we have created a world for kids that is so circumscribed that they feel they can't do much in it. There are two failures here:

One is that children are not allowed to do very many things at all, fewer than ever in some cases.

And the other is a failure of imagination on the parents part, of showing what they *can* do.
Jan 19 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
With knitting, Simi picked it up because having 2 babies gives you many small periods of time where you can semi-consciously work (but no more) and knitting fits perfectly into these.

She knits while reading to Lu, in the car, while baby asleep in lap, etc now hats for the whole family, sweaters and cardigans for both babies, mittens for them too were all made during these periods. It's a great way to make things where before you didn't think you had the time.
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Nov 16, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
This is one of the most terminal business behaviors that I've seen in my life, and it happens even in families. Incredibly stifling. I think it may be part of why the fertility rate is so low. There are 50 year olds living under thumb of their 75 yo father who is unable to relinquish serious control of anything.

Others much younger opt out of the family biz instead. Can't blame them, they see that it means less agency that climbing a random corp ladder.
Nov 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
this is still one of the wildest graphs I've seen in recent times

why women and men go to college and what they expect to get out of college may have very little overlap, which explains (to the first order) a lot of differences in attendance, use, etc Image just why they have such different expectations of college's purpose is harder to pin down
Nov 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
I put it here to heat the house and use with cooking. The whole house is heated by the wood stove, though the north bedrooms are supplemented a bit.

It makes the floorplan more open than I think is ideal, but given our budget constraints I think it was the best choice.
Image We just have the one couch. I'm not crazy about it either. We need a lot more comfy seating but all the armchairs I like are pretty expensive. We're probably going to buy our first this December. And if we really like it get another.


Image
Oct 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Children need and desire to be attached to the world at many points of contact. They want to work and help and make things. They crave it.

Secret fact: many adults are unhappy because they have so few points of attachment with the world. They would be happier with more work. I rt'ed this the other day and didn't comment then, but it's the same thing. Many adults come to see work as a very small and specific set of things. Come to resent it. And this view hurts their relationships, how they use all their time, their whole life