Do the weirdest thing that feels right
charliebecker.substack.com
charliebecker.substack.com
That said, I have mixed feelings about the article. On the one hand, yes, there are very few, if any, objectively correct answers on how to live life and so pursuing your own, unique truth is empowering. On the other, humans are notoriously poor at accurately weighting long-term vs short-term benefits. Plenty of things feel right in the moment, YOLO and all that, but dwindle as more information becomes available and doors close.
Maybe I'm just projecting my own insecurities onto what I see others doing, though? As an example, a friend of mine was recently laid off. We both live in SF and they work in Customer Satisfaction for tech companies. They had recently switched jobs and, when they were laid off, they received four months of severance after having only worked for their employer for two months. They felt like they had just received a gift, didn't care about the macro-economic environment, and decided it was time to travel to Costa Rica and participate in an Ayahuasca retreat. They were so moved by their experiences that they skipped their original flight home and extended their stay in paradise a week. As they shared their story with me and my friends, I felt uneasy for them and their situation. They seemed intentionally oblivious to the changing labor landscape and I became worried for their financial well-being, but, to them, the decisions all felt right, the layoff was a blessing, and jobs always work out - right?
Who knows! Everyone has to live their truth and it's entirely possible their view plays out well and I'm just a worrywart, but, from my perspective, they were overvaluing the pursuit of doing weird things that feel right. Similarly, I'm sure plenty of my friends find my actions to be reckless. Quitting a job without another lined up is something society speaks openly against.
It will always be tough to make objective counter-arguments against living one's truth since luck plays a non-trivial role in all of our lives.
This sounds like a very reasonable thing to do when you receive a 4 month severance package. There's still time to look for work. I assume your friend who works in tech also has some amount of savings.
Life isn't a single track of work that you mustn't ever get off or you will utterly fail. There's room for some amount of leeway in moments like these.
Quitting my job to pursue a creative project is basically a direct response to having come into some money and having reduced my dependents. It's a nice place to be, but is also quite a foreign mindset to try and embody. Hopefully it feels more natural in time. :)
What are you working on?
Symbiant is a real-time, sci-fi ant colony simulation for modern browsers. It draws inspiration from RimWorld, SimAnt, Progress Quest, and Tamagotchi. You awaken to find your consciousness trapped inside a satellite's computer, sharing space with a damaged AI bent on terraforming an alien world that you both now orbit. Withered from eons of isolation, a chance encounter with an ant colony provides you with hope, companionship, a distraction, and, potentially, a way to help the AI complete their directive.
Symbiant is a digital aquarium. Slow, calm, and a 24/7 source of simple entertainment. A respite primarily meant for observation and reflection, you briefly command the satellite just once per day and must use this time to make prescient decisions which ensure your ants thrive until your next check-in. The rest of your day is spent simply observing the side-effects of your actions and taking notes for tomorrow.
Symbiant is tactful mental health software. Its goal is to help you be more consistent in your personal growth and more aware of your mental health. Over the course of real-world months, you help the protagonist grow their pet ants, themselves, and yourself. A quick routine involving breathwork, meditation, and self-reflective journaling is gently woven into your daily self-care habits all while the software masquerades as a colony sim.
Either way, my impression of the article is that by "weird", the author doesn't mean "risky" or "impulsive" like you're inferring. I interpreted it to mean more along the lines of "wouldn't be appealing or resonating to many other folks." Something that appeals strongly to your own particular quirks and felicities.
Lots of people would want to take a few weeks in Costa Rica if they got laid off. And after Pollan's "How to Change Your Mind" there are a hell of a lot of people taking psychedelic trips. That's not particularly weird.
Weird would be more like getting laid off and deciding to make a go at becoming a full time poet.
I agree. I think the author was pretty forthcoming about what he meant: he meant that we often write off possible things we want to do on the basis that they're "weird" -- in the sense that we think others will reject those things.
But doing that is a trap and we shouldn't avoid options purely based on what we think others will think about them.
Sorry about your anxiety. But, thanks at least for helping remind me (and likely others) that we who feel similarly are not alone!
During the pandemic, I took almost a year off from work of any sort. I had eliminated all of the expenses I had that I wasn't deriving real value from, and estimated how much I'd need to have in the bank to afford the time of no income. Then I saved up that amount.
At the end, I'd overestimated by about 4x and learned a great lesson about how much money I actually need to live in the manner that I prefer.
If I had spent a few months really tracking my spending at a granular level, I think my estimate would have been much closer to correct.
A gift indeed.
It’s probably useful to be relentlessly experimental with your writing if you’re an experienced writer who wants to break out of their rut, and has a fine sense of what is good and what is bad.
I don’t think it should mean “go nuts.”
- "weirdness" means what others will think is weird
- many options feel right
Therefore, following the advice in the title leads to the selection of the path that works personally, and which is most likely to be true to one's inner compass.
But I do wonder about the "feels right" part. The thing that feels right often only does so in hindsight. In the moment, it may feel very, very wrong.
This reminds me of something a speaker at a corporate "Innovation" symposium during a summer internship once said many years ago. There was talk after talk about how you have to "take risk" and "push the envelope" and "think outside the box."
Then this guy stands up and gives the best heuristic I've ever heard for identifying innovation in your actions. He said You'll know you're innovating because you'll feel deeply uncomfortable.
Nothing makes you stand out like actually innovating. Nothing makes you hated more than actually innovating. Nothing raises the stakes of what you're doing like actually innovating. And usually, nothing feels more wrong than actually innovating.
I think you should occasionally be more experimental in your creative work, but upend your life.
And your 20s are for taking dumb risks. As a guy in my 30s I’m not going to drop everything and start an improv career.
For one, I have a much better sense of what I’m good at (thanks to my 20s), and secondly, society is less generous about my screw ups.
- David Bowie
I’ve been working on a side project and there are so many little problems that creep up that it really feels like you’re running an ultramarathon or climbing Everest.
If you don’t have that very strong and deep calling from within I don’t think many will make it through that, and so you’ll just end up burning a lot of mental/physical/emotional energy on something that doesn’t pan out.
I prefer another version of the same idea: "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."
Cuts through any perfectionism, analysis paralysis and overthinking. Go be shit at whatever you love. It'll feel better than trying your best at something you don't really believe in.
I thought of a couple of alternatives, but can you think of a sentence that captures the sense better, or a metaphor[1], or an existing concept (perhaps in another language)?
[1] e.g. the road less travelled - although that particular phrase has always bothered me because it doesn’t imply roaming over fields or bush bashing through jungles, but instead just following the routes of others which is kind of self-defeating. A road is definitely not what I am looking for here (alternatively, some metaphorical popular roads are fabulous).
[2] a good blogpost on a personal discovery is hard to write - how do you reproduce that epiphany in someone else through writing? Couple of good topics there for a blogpost!
(Edited for clarity)
Fairly sure one of my friends in high school had an essay trashed for taking that stance. Then again, he was a minimalist with anything homework related, so it could have been justified for other reasons.
Here is a nice image that expounds on the same idea - https://www.zenpencils.com/comic/60-robert-frost-the-road-no...
In my mid 50s now and I find no solace in reconsidering past decisions. I awake to a new world every day, thankful for the fond memories, blessed that today holds new opportunities for a future I cannot imagine.
Beautiful comic (with bonus nearly-localised references!) Definitely shows two very popular life choices in New Zealand.
> Do the weirdest things that feel right.
What's weird? Why should it feel right? Maybe the phrase just means one to choose an adventurous yet fun path while having the confidence that things will go right. Nice mindset, but less actionable.
When I'm unsure, I complete the sentence in my head "I should do _thing_ but I want to do _other_thing_"
If I'm still unsure, I try swapping the blanks in the sentence around a few times and I see which one feels more true, which one resonates more.
That normally helps me see which thing was something that I felt like I should do, and which thing I actually want to do.
The separate questions here are how to learn to access more of your inner intuition about what you want, and I think it mostly comes from practice of seeing if you can notice and using the method I mentioned above, and then seeing how you felt about the result. There's also a separate question about how to make sure your intuition is well informed, which I think comes from a combination of: trying a lot of things in life so you have many data points, being well rested and generally treating your body well (good food, some exercise), and being mentally healthy (calm, composed, peaceful).
Our sense of what feels right is kind of like what our subconscious mind thinks would be best for us. And our subconscious mind is exceptionally powerful, it's fantastic at making predictions about short term emotional outcomes, it's seen everything that's ever happened to us and how it turned out, and so on. It'll serve you well to have a better relationship to your subconscious and vice versa!
Some side notes that I could expand on:
* "You" are not you, I think we are mostly our subconscious but our thoughts and words are the tool it uses to communicate and interact with the world, and to plan
* Subconscious mind : conscious mind :: Pre-training : RLHF
* The conscious mind, the part of us that has thoughts, is more like a limb, or a sense. It's more of a tool to interact with the world, and to receive input from the world, and the actual 'us' is something deeper, it's the part that has the 'wants'
* RLHF messes with the ability for GPT-4 to be well calibrated. I suspect that's because of the "should" vs "want" / perception of other people's perceptions introduced during RLHF.
* I wonder if psychedelics help access the subconscious mind / "base model without RLHF" and I wonder if this is why certain similar patterns seem to be noticed across different people who do psychedelics - because they're accessing the things that their subconscious mind has concluded, and many people's subconscious minds reach similar conclusions because we're using similar data.
* A person who reads a ton of books is kind of like doing a "pre-training" phase.
* Aligning a language model can borrow lots of methods from effective parenting (by effective, I mean where both the child and the parent end up happy), clicker training of animals, and effective delegation and management of employees.
* Good advice is advice that helps people "want something they feel like they should do but don't currently want to do" or something that helps people "feel like they should do something that they already want to do but feel like they shouldn't do"
* If you follow your "shoulds" you end up living surrounded by things you felt like you should do
* Giving advice to other people is often your subconscious mind telling you what it wishes you would do (and so whatever you say to the other person is really either something you feel like you should do, or something you feel like you want to do)
No, doesn’t sound quite right…
“I should move to Europe, but I want to move back to South Africa.”
There it is
Lots of people are smart but lack the sheer magnitude of weird random ideas to choose from that true creatives think of. Perhaps this is a useful way to get more of that.
Most people are about average and those 'alright, not weird' decisions are on average the best decision not just for the individual but also for society. That's why they're not weird.
It's more like a way to counteract lots of social conditioning.
"Why I don't actually like greenfield projects."
"What I learned when I stopped writing clickbait."
"When it's actually a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket."
"When is it the time to make a mountain out of a molehill?"
"What I learned on my journey to stop turning the other cheek."Do you not see the contradiction in what you wrote?
A good chunk of my audience has left already, plenty planning to etc. And just because there's a few tens of thousands of followers doesn't meant it gets reach or engagement like it used to. Seen that for most people.
This is not the flex you think it is. If you've been on for 15 years that's 18 tweets, constantly, every single day. That's an absurd number.
The whole point is illustrating that an audience doesn't come out of nowhere and the company is now under new management. History will not repeat itself, the world has changed, what value I perceived in Twitter has now gone because my audience there is in decline post-acquisition.
My investment of time is now worthless other than what I took away from the platform in the long-term in terms of biz and friends.
Back in the day, we used to use TweetDeck columns like IRC channels in terms of hashtags, and new tweets on x from y would appear in the relevant column. If you don't know what is, imagine a group chat, but people come and go. Of an evening, I could probably rattle off a couple hundred tweets discussing and debating. Keep in mind the original character count, and a simple response could be a dozen tweets.
Unless Medium is printing money from their terrible UX, I cant imagine a company would want to replicate it.
2. Neither platform is VC funded with the expectation of hyper growth (which will eventually result in paywalls). One of them is owned by Google (and is more likely to get cancelled outright), and the other has grown naturally and organically over two decades.
EDIT: Which is surprising; surely a fellow traveller of the EA/LW crowd would understanding optimising for the maximal update to your prior?
I also would refer to Eternal September when we reference any kind of online community
There are quite a lot good articles posted in each of the blog sites you mentioned.
Compare it to people saying, it's sold at Walmart (just an example) so it must be bad.
If you actually democratize writing/publishing/blogging (as their product tries to; as many others have tried to), you're not going to end up with a higher quality outcome than Substack. It's practically impossible. That's what we have the NY Times, Washington Post, Wired, The Economist, et al. for.