Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
awesomekling.github.io
awesomekling.github.io
Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely.
That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
I'm fun at parties by the way.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act
rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these
because we have acted rightly;
'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions';
we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:
'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in
a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that
makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man
blessed and happy'
-- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of
the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926), Ch. II: Aristotle and
Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
“Sow an act, reap a habit
Sow a habit, reap a character
Sow a character, reap a destiny”
"Watch your thoughts, they become your words;
watch your words, they become your actions;
watch your actions, they become your habits;
watch your habits, they become your character;
watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
Your words are so often careless attempts at thought. First approximations of ideas. All too often, however, they are spoken to oneself and heard by oneself as truth. Be very careful about your words, they will go on to constrain oh so much.
Now, strictly speaking thought may come first. But, it’s that thinking about words which becomes so trapping, not the initial conditions that give rise to the words. Interrogate your language, distrust it, scrutinise it.
[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709649
(edit: replaced [1] with a better link.)
The idea of Karma only "works" when embedded in a spiritual belief system that adheres to some form of iterative life cycle, e.g., reincarnation.
Karma is not there to get you. Is the law of cause and effect. If you seed rage, you will get rage. No other result can become from rage than rage.
It is the terrible reality that you find yourself in, full of demonic people and meager circumstance, as a consequence of your bad choices. Not a literal dimension of pain and suffering, but a manifestation of all the rejection and shunning by others that your terrible behavior warrants.
Unworthy of love, or forgiveness, or pity. Untrusted and unhelped by others because of your untrustworthy reputation.
I consider the independence of self to be an illusion. Instead, our self is composed by our influences. In that sense, “reincarnation” happens all the time as we influence each other and upload our selves. From this view, karmic influences are even more pronounced, as we create heaven and hell for our extended selves.
Karma isn't about guaranteeing consequences/rewards. It's about actions increasing the odds of one or the other.
While it certainly has been used as a part of cosmological frameworks involving reincarnation, it can also be used in a secular framework within the context of a single life without relying on notions of a metaphysical force.
It actually only works in a religion with a proper afterlife. Not one in which everyone is saved regardless and go to heaven no matter what. One in which punishment is one-to-one to the sins in this life, like Islam.
What you go on to describe does not match up to “karma” as found- using that term- in religions.
No yacht, but no enemies either.
Never have to worry about novichok or a drone hitting me.
It’s not bad at all.
Such behaviour is not sustainable and even if your network of nasties shields you from consequences, you’re making a giant gamble relying on that forever without some meaner network coming along and pop! with no moral issue.
[1] "mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
[2] 2023, Michael Levin, Bioelectric networks. The cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3
[3] Michael Levin and Wayne Frasch (2023) From molecular physiology to anatomical form, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w, at 27:32 the hybrid agent frog cells + scientists + AI exploring morphospace.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-history-o...).
Essentially some bone apple teas
His interlocutor said something like: “your etymology is like pulling a heavy boat up a steep ramp.” Ha! Yay for the playful side of Plato.
Virtue & vice are kind of an arbitrary way to device up those "grooves", and what constitutes virtue or vice varies by context/perspective.
I would argue there are a LOT more dimensions to character, and some are arguably more important than that one, but I otherwise agree with your metaphor.
I wear a platinum wedding ring for much the same reason. While it's really hard to break a platinum ring, they accumulate scratches quite easily. A ring that endures but carries with it scratches and grooves from the life you've lived seems like a pretty good metaphor for marriage.
Would you care to provide a few examples?
Examples: compassion, loyalty, endurance/perseverance, social/independence, love/hate, trusting, cynicism/optimism, etc.
-- Henry David Thoreau
Poet Jane Hirshfield, reflecting on her time at a monastery that ritualized waking up at ~0300 by splashing freezing water on one's face, said that her training was reducible to being more mindful when doing the dishes.
Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day.
Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in.
IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold.
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it.
Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it.
For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication.
According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.
99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.
Habits explain neatly concepts like addiction, while the choice story applied to concepts like addiction or self-destructive acts is reductive at best, and catastrophic on a societal level. Yet the majority of people, those that have been lucky not to have yet felt the grip of addiction, tend to have this opinion that addicts are just weak-willed idiots. This is not referred to you in particular, I am generalising based on common and frustrating opinions about addiction and recovery by well-meaning, but ignorant people.
Functionally and neurologically, there is no difference between a heroin addict and someone that has been going on a run every day for a decade. It's just that their autopilots have been trained to prefer a different action in response to similar stimuli, and brains respond and adapt much more readily to super-stimuli found in drugs and other destructive habits, than with natural and healthy "highs".
I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
However, anecdotally I’ve found that whether you think you can do something or whether you think you cannot—you are correct. That is to say, I feel like admitting to the biological truth actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which causes me to fall to my biological default.
However, if I reject that biological “truth”, I will more often find myself empowered by the notion that I can do anything I set my mind to, whether it be drugs or going for a run.
It’s the classic “mind over matter” phenomenon. Your fundamental beliefs can override your biological defaults, so I think it’s very important to regulate and review your beliefs.
Here's an example from my life: I used to go the gym every Wednesday night after work. Several times over the course of this habit, I realized at the end of a long day that I would be better off going home and getting some rest, and decided to go home instead. In nearly every single instance I still drove to the gym, even though I had decided to go home. Because I was on auto-pilot. If we're talking about willpower, I would have say that it was my lack of willpower that led me to going to the gym and working out that day.
This is such a critical insight, and over the years it was eye opening to realize gradually how much I judged myself for factors that I clearly cannot control. Which is not to say that I’m helpless, but more interested now in focusing on systemic factors that directly influence automatic behaviors.
Judgement is such a major cultural response to addiction, and also happens to be one of the primary impulses that feeds it. Addicts often turn to their drug of choice to feel relief from the shame…of their addiction to their drug of choice.
> I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
Adding this to my reading list. In a similar category, Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and addiction specialist who wrote a book titled “Dopamine Nation” that I found worth reading.
My point is: your distinction is meaningless.
Our brain is not defined as "that which makes decisions". Brains do many things, in many different ways, and the vast majority does not involve anything that could be meaningfully described as "deciding".
For the particular distinction here, the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman gives a pretty detailed exposition.
Explicit decision making is slow, energy intensive, and unnecessary the vast majority of the time. And including all the implicit decision making in your definition would be like saying a leaf decides every way it tilts as it falls through the air off a tree.
If we’re talking about the small, unimportant decisions then sure, I agree. But I don’t think the bigger decisions happen on autopilot — precisely because it would be very dangerous.
The first few days, the hardest ones, every single thing that happens to you (had a bad day, stranger frowned at me, stubbed my toe) is weighed and a decision is made. For a seasoned addict, many of these events have the automated response of ingesting your drug of choice.
Anecdote: I've quit smoking and any form of nicotine 3.5 years ago. I don't miss it. I have not relapsed once. Yet to this day, there are moments where I catch myself feeling that something is missing. That I have forgotten something important I had to do. A little soul searching later, and it's apparent I am just feeling that a cigarette right now be really nice. It completely sneaks up on me, but the first few months this happened dozens of times a day, the first few days even more. If your autopilot makes the wrong choice just once, you're back to square zero.
Most of our life, we're in the passenger seat.
For example, the choice to open that one app leads to 30 minutes of scrolling leads to poor night's sleep leads leads to being on a later sleep schedule that week leads to not cognitively showing up to an important meeting that Saturday and missing an opportunity.
What we perceive of as 'big decisions' exist only within the conditions visible to our consciousness. Behind the scenes though those conditions are continuously shaped by small decisions amplified by the lever of the subconscious and our environment.
In other words, we're good at assessing the gravity of immediate conditions available to us, but we're bad at assessing internal and external processes and their effects. One reason why "know thyself" is such important advice.
Thus we'd be wise to make shaping conditions part of what we consider a 'big decision', perhaps even the big decision. This is another way of saying "we make our own luck".
If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake would likely be the excessive intake of food. Time spent with friends and family would not be the mistake. This might have come off a bit harsh.
- When at a dinner with family or friends, I never _have_ to finish something. Most of the time the host will be happy to package my leftovers to take back home when asked. That last part makes it clear that I like and appreciate the food even through I didn't finish it in the moment.
- If I buy food at a restaurant, I don't have an obligation to finish it to get my moneys worth. And again, I can just save it for another meal if I want.
- I don't have to eat snacks just because the host put them on a table at a party.
For some reason our brains think that just because food is _there_ we need to eat it, but that's generally not true.
You have to lose 10 at some point. The way you're putting it, it looks like losing weight would be some kind of drastic sprint with a finish line. I don't think it can happen that way. You have to lose weight and continuing changing your habit to lose 10 more, and the others 10 after, until it stabilises at healthy weight, then you start your healthy life, but it's not a finish line, the effort continues by fighting unhealthy habit for the rest of your life.
However I do know that it moved the needle significantly in _my_ life by changing my relationship with food so it's valuable to me. Losing the extra ~10 to 20 lbs of weight people gain in adulthood is something that people do struggle with even if it's not as dramatic as someone fighting obesity.
They said that when you're really big, the first 10 lbs is the easiest to lose, and can come from taking stairs and changing snack habits. It's the last 10 lbs that requires the diligent workouts and very strict diets.
Don't get yourself into a state where you need to lose 40kg. If you do, and lose the weight, you will have excess skin.
I like my new healthy self but actions have consequences.
I turn 50 this year and have committed to doing 50,000 pushups before 2024. It sounds like a lot, but after the first month, doing 200-300 a day isn't really that difficult (when broken up into smaller sets). Honestly, it's a LOT more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge.
It's all about showing up every day.
How so?
It could be as simple as you are less likely to indulge in a treat after a walk?
Climbing up the stairs directly burns 2 calories, and not eating the Oreo because you're climbing the stairs avoids 53.
Sounds about right to me. Even if it does require living in one of those places where it is not customary to store your Oreos on staircases.
I could think about it as: “I spent $30 on this meal, I ate 75% of it, would I spend $7.5 to not feel like shit the rest of the evening?”
In almost all cases I think yes, and it’s fine to stop eating. It’s much harder when the food is great though.
(This assumes you aren't deriving any pleasure or utility from eating that last 25%. If you are, then that's one side of the cost/benefit analysis. But the initial cost of the food is irrelevant not matter what.)
Indeed. I doubt anyone ever got fat by eating food they didn't like.
The issue becomes all the worse when food is designed to make you want to keep on eating. Bonus points for it giving you that sort of hunger-like feeling 2 hours after your meal.
I've found if I stop early, it turns out it was only my brain that wanted more food. Physically, I've had enough and am satisfied. I just need to give my brain time to catch up to my body.
Additionally, I drink a lot of water with my meals. This helps prevent overeating.
Lastly, it's always great to get two meals (dinner and tomorrow's lunch) from one restaurant dinner.
- counting calories for 2 weeks can help you understand how much food you really need.
- sometimes you eat out of boredom
We get so inculcated with comparing, contrasting, thinking about "better", "not as good as", "worse" ... it's THE recipe for all manner of negative psychological states, emotions, etc. There are basic biological drives, of course, but both implicitly and explicitly we are taught minute-by-minute, starting from not long after birth, to JUDGE EVERYTHING. Parents - "good/bad boy / girl", school - grades / social status / toys, work - "star employee / slacker" ... It's a set up for every imaginary "treadmill" that exists - consumer, achievement, etc.
All illusory.
It takes some conscious work / effort, to undo. But, I found, ultimately, that I was able to undo a hell of a lot of that crap in a shorter time than I expected. Several weeks worth of work with Jon Kabat-Zinn's 7 pillars of mindfulness, etc... can make a big difference, in my experience.
Getting out of the habit of having to have "an opinion" / "judgment" about every single F'ing thing that IS ... That just IS, until we have to categorize, compare, pick apart, judge, ... let the moronic inner critic - amalgamated, in part, through years of inculcation via others, intentional and not - dissect every molecule of existence until the minutest shred of simple BEING, JOY, etc. in any MOMENT is reduced to ash ... getting out of that habit is the greatest gift I've ever been given.
I still judge, I still fall into traps / stupidity ... I'm still human - hell, this comment has enough judging in it itself, even more simply implied / denotational ... but, I'm so much further out of the mire of crap our heads tend to get filled up with than so many people. It's both tremendously more comfortable, and yet also saddening to see so many still so trapped - by the same kinds of shitty thinking I was trapped by for years.
My path to something better has been Sam Harris’ Waking Up app, as well as exploring the Dzogchen analytical framework for exploring the ways we constantly engage in this labeling/judging was mind bending and eye opening (a guy named James Low does a talk titled “Everything as it is” that unlocked some things in my brain).
I feel the same way about this - it’s a gift. Nearing 40 and experiencing relief from lifelong struggles with painful patterns of thought for the first time. These are ideas worth exploring, and are all solidly grounded in rational thought, which was something I mistakenly thought I’d have to leave behind to explore this kind of contemplative path.
For those of us who have had to make drastic life changes in order to make “making the wrong choice” difficult or impossible, there’s definitely an amount of life planning (and before that, honesty with self and others) that has to happen in order to balance the scale and turn those forks in the road into ones we can look at and say, “Today, I’ll make a good choice.” For some there are ways to reset and never look back, and I’ve seen it happen. One good choice can be the difference. For others, as you mention, there are daily choices, and it continues to take effort to make the right one every single time.
Think of the addict in relapse more as saying “yeahhhh gonna let loose and party hard and have a lot of fun and go wild and crazy.” The overindulgence is the point, the feeling of freedom and abandon.
I liked the way Craig Ferguson put it in American on Purpose, he said that if he could drink alcohol “socially” the limited way other people do, it wouldn't be interesting to him in the first place.
This is also why people get addicted to casinos, it's a similar “woooo, party!!” desire. People who are addicted to junk food also have this, they call it a “cheat day,” the idea is not that I slipped myself an extra Oreo, but that I decided to slip myself the extra Oreo and then declared it a cheat day and then ate puddings and cakes and pizza and guzzled soft drinks and “wooo, party day, calories don't count”...
One typically doesn't “change that want,” one buries it. It still keeps coming up as an “I am overwhelmed with the boring tedium of adulthood can't I go back to being a reckless kid and partying all night?” and you say “Look, having fun is why we have playing that guitar in the backyard or lifting or jamming out to music or planning a week off in Colorado, we have to do the less intense adulty fun things that build us up now, because we know what happens when we do the reckless childish fun things that tear down (and have torn us down, over and over and over and over again)... and we have to grow up so that we don't lose everything and die alone in a ditch.” So you bury the want, not allowed to want “woooo party time!!”, because you have hit rock bottom several times now and you know that you don't have an ability to have a healthy relationship with that internal party-fiend, because he will react to the stress of money being tight by wanting to gamble more, will react to the weight gain by having more cheat days, will react to the hangover by looking for a cider in the fridge. Can't give him a foothold in your life again.
But on the other hand, even the most minor enjoyment (especially the kind that will make you guilty later) is still somehow a form of enjoyment.
Perhaps the bigger lessons is that small pleasures can be expensive in the long term. More than we think.
Plato puts it well in Gorgias; where he makes an analogy of two men tasked with keeping jars filled with wine, honey and milk.
The first man has jars of good quality, and is able to fill them up and they stay full and then he can go on about his life and be happy, the task of keeping them full causes him no grief. The second man has cracks and holes in his jars, so the pleasure always leaks out and he needs to spend every day topping them up in order to avoid misery. He's completely enslaved by the task and it's causing him daily grief to keep them full.
It's more useful to view resolve, moral continence, self-control as things that you do rather than things you have been granted.
Food for thought.
Our biology enjoys those dopamine hits
My experience is that the enjoyment one feels with the first few bites quickly transforms from seeking the pleasure of continuing, into avoiding the pain of stopping.
I don't think many people really enjoy it. It's just less painful than other things, or they don't have the resources to do what they actually want to do, or their choice requires something that's not possible right now... Chips and TikTok is the fallback, not the first choice.
I for one gain weight pretty easily when I start eating carbs such as pasta and bread without restraint - even on holidays when I am pretty physical.
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future.
I think it's important to forgive ourselves when we don't choose the right path. Shame isn't good for anyone. But to take pride in it? I don't believe that's helpful at all.
Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends
This really sounds like a rationalization. You could enjoy a healthful meal with family and friends. But you're likely addicted to sugar, fat and salt like most people are. So you need a bunch of sugar, fat and salt to be satisfied by a meal.
A decade ago I had slightly high triglycerides. I stopped all obvious sugar cold turkey for a year. It was brutal for two weeks - craving soda and all kinds of other sugar. Then an amazing thing happened... I stopped craving sugar. Fruit and other food started to taste amazing! Imagine getting as excited about eating a clementine as you used to get eating chocolate cheesecake.
I reframed the topic in my mind to, "I just don't eat those things." which was successful. Thoughts of, "I won't eat those things for the next two weeks and then I'll do what I want" just exhausts your will power and leads to a roller coaster of weight gain and loss.
I don't really know anything about physiology or nutrition, but when you learn physics you do have to learn about the difference between simple linear systems and complex feedback networks, and then you see the Metabolic Pathways chart[1] and that proves that we are the latter, a complex feedback network.
One lesson about complex systems is that you don't change them by finding something “wrong” and “fixing it”, in the traditional sense. The problem is that there was a feedback loop keeping it that way and whatever you did just enabled that feedback loop to work harder at fighting your change. The weight-loss interpretation of this would be the failure of fad diets, I guess?
What you do instead is that you find a way to pin the output out of its range and then work backwards, or disconnect an input or so. “I need to live a life without sweets,” sounds like it was your disconnected input.
A second lesson about the complex system is that for the one thing to change, everything must change. All of the feedback loops that kept the system in state 1 need to reconfigure and reorganize themselves to accept state 2. Which means there's a period of breakage, one could even call “mourning,” where the system has not yet managed to reconfigure itself and limps along trying to get the new thing going. You just wanted a cleaner house, but in order to get it done it turned out to not require haphazard two hours cleaning sessions, no. Instead you needed to start waking up at 7 AM to have the time to empty the dishwasher before you go to work so that your spouse, who will forget about the dishwasher if it is not left open and inviting, can put the kids’ dishes in it, this causes a chain reaction where the kitchen countertops are not covered with dirty dishes so that becomes the natural room for the kids to draw in when they come home from school, which leads to them choosing to do their own homework, which leads to them having time at the end of the day to clean up, which allows everybody to go to bed early in a clean house... which is the ONLY reason you can, night owl though you are, get up at 7AM to empty the damn dishwasher. Everything had to reorganize to accomplish the goal and that took chaos and difficulty.
1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Metabolism_-_P...
50 years ago general public was not aware that smoking is that bad as we know today.
For a lot of things we don’t know the real consequences or full price.
My parents were smokers - can I blame them for their smoking habit that had negative effect on me, on their health?
Well not really because they never had a bad intent.
When they got smoking induced health issues were they able to make a new decision? - Not, it was too late.
Every decision boils down to one of four types of decisions (philosophy 101):
1. inconsequential and routine (what color shirt to wear)
2. inconsequential and once-in-a-lifetime (what color shirt to wear _today_)
3. consequential and routine (which route to take to work)
4. consequential and once-in-a-lifetime (who to marry)
The thing is, 1 & 2 can be and usually are consequential; it's just that you lack the ability to detect the consequences. Usually. I met my wife, on the beach, with some friends. The decision that led there, I thought, was inconsequential at the time.
But yes, your information will always be imperfect. I have scars all over my body from doing things that should have been fine. I've nearly died and somehow escaped (or been rescued from) the situation too many times to count. You have to live with consequences and not all consequences are knowable in advance; and for that matter, not all consequences are bad.
This is also the boiled down version though, so I'm kinda curious what you see in it and how it could influence the bigger picture.
That dichotomy is not always true. There is a percentage of people that can enjoy their youth (travel, parties, ...) and still get a plentiful future. Other people needs to renounce to everything now just to survive to tomorrow. So, not always a choice there.
100% this. It's not as black or white as people make it.
That being said, there is some level of diminishing returns for how much enjoyment you can get from something (e.g. eating), and how much of a tradeoff (e.g. gaining weight). You can maximize it (be selective in which foods you really like - and the people you want to be around) and minimize the tradeoffs (eating in a day 2 meals instead of 3). That's if you want to take a sabbatical and maximize the enjoyment out of life. If you want to grind, focus on yourself, etc and push yourself to the limits - you need to be outside that comfort zone. You spend more time putting yourself in uncomfortable situations at the cost of spending less time with friends and family.
Life is all about balance.
Sometimes you take high risks and push yourself further
Sometimes you take low risks and enjoy the benefits from the work you put in
With every high comes lows
All good things come to an end
But you won't get anywhere in life without taking risks
Is that a happy life? For every decision you take, every thought that crosses your mind, making a concious cost-benefit analysis?
> According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
Perhaps it wasn't the meals that were the failure, but the lack of compensating physical activity? Discussions of body weight issues seem over-emphasize blame of too much on food and diet and neglect sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity. In other words, barring serious medical conditions (many of which are treatable once diagnosed properly), you can have it both, enjoy good times with friends that includes eating really tasty food as well as not into health-affecting weight issues.
It's easy to say "just balance it", but all of it has been attempting to balance things, and some people, including myself, repeatedly chose the side that had risks and consequences later so that they could enjoy the moment.
That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework.
So I've been thinking: This must be something worse than what I imagine. I read about perfectionism, fear of shame and judgment... bingo. I can tell that the root of the problem isn't that I can't work on a personal project, because I do have them. But the moment it's a portfolio project the question isn't "what would help me learn?" but "what would help me demonstrate to my future employer that I deserve a chance?"
This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially career-ending or at least progression-ending. And it may have started with me trying my best not meet external expectations or minimize my footprint to avoid being exposed to bullying, trolling, nickname calling, ever since I was a little kid. And that seed didn't happen overnight, it took a lot of daily conditioning to turn a child from risk-taker to risk-avoider.
That's why I'm wary of giving the advice to beginners "just start building projects". It's not that the advice is bad, but there's just too many factors at play and failure to do so is not always about one's intelligence.
Side-note... How old are you? What frameworks? What personal projects? I'm 40 and just REALLY beginning this journey into coding and as much as I love it it is also insanely overwhelming because of reasons you started and also my terrible ADHD. So hard to stay focused on learning a piece at a time. My brain wants to open all the links, check out all the courses and YouTube videos... And it becomes too much.
FWIW, programming and ADHD tend to go well together once you can get past the basics. Especially when you're in the flow of things, it's just a constant loop of small change -> visible progress -> dopamine hit. Combine that with hyperfocus on the occasional deep bug and it can feel like a superpower.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of other times where it doesn't work like that, and this assumes you can actually get started, but when you do it can be magical.
In part, it's good that you're trying out new things. That part should always be something we do. But the issue is when you don't have developed taste and principles to discriminate between things that just sound interesting and things you actually want to explore.
For me the solution has been to develop a small set of important values by asking fundamental questions. Why do I program? What does emotionally satisfy me (fun/pride/learning)? What is valuable for my users? What are computers for? What makes a good program?
Ask questions like that and you get a list of important things that you focus on.
Whenever I see something new, it first has to get through my value filter.
My reading, learning and tinkering list is still growing slightly faster than it shrinks. But I'm much more content and happy with what I actually end up doing or reading.
When you feel this way, that you "want to" do something but it keeps not happening, then there's evidently something inconsistent in your mental state: you seem to think you want to do one thing, but (it would be fair to say) since you're not doing it, maybe you don't 'actually want' to do it. The idea being that 'true wanting' compels actions. So when you fantasize about doing one thing, which you think you want, you're actually in the process of fulfilling a different want about something else (such as: "to feel like you are making progress on demonstrating value").
To disentangle this you have to figure out what you "actually want", resolving the inconsistency, usually by asking yourself: "what do my actual behaviors reveal of my actual desires?" Recognizing the revealed desire seems, empirically, to help move past it, while not recognizing it leaves you/me/whoever in this seemingly infinite loop of feeling incapable of action.
Sometimes just revealing the loop you're in unkinks it immediately and leaves you free to do something new. Sometimes, strangely, it makes you instantly uninterested in the whole topic, and then, in the space left by the now-uninteresting topic, new interests float in --- real interests, which come packaged with 'real' wanting that you can actually act on.
It reminds me of a common refrain/warning among aspiring writers: it's not enough to want to be a writer, you have to actually want to write. Both for a host of psychological reasons and for the simple fact that you'll never be A Writer unless you're putting pen to paper on a regular basis.
My favorite part is once I'm done I feel comfortable enough with reading through repos and some books over how to be more efficient/idiomatic and then going back through my little project and refactoring it.
With all that said I have a graveyard of projects in languages and technology that is probably not used anywhere commercially and the project itself is languishing if it was completed at all - but for example, I have a half working todo app in racket and despite being a junk app in a non-commercial language, I had to learn lisp and it at least subtly has influenced how I approach problems. Same thing with Rust which I actually use quite a bit personally and commercially, but when I originally learned it I was 100% golang professionally and I noticed my golang functions would resemble rust functions if I squinted and I think the complexity in my golang went way down.
I guess my advice is Just Start Building Projects (that you may never even show anyone or post on github, much less go marketing it.) and you will benefit from it massively. If you are able to learn and benefit from it _and_ it becomes popular or a commercial success than great! But who cares, on the internet no one knows you aren't a dog.
Some of it helped me a little ( that is partially how I learned basics of R ), but I fear that it also held me back as I never really finished any of the more amusing projects and did not experience that feeling of finishing something.
And as you get older, it is harder to expose yourself to that scrutiny.
This is a classic trap that young programmers fall into, to fetishize tools and condition doing useful work on learning a bunch of tools. Just say no!
(This isn't anti-intellectualism - you'll eventually learn a bunch more tools as you go.)
Don't worry about how pretty or impressive the code is. The point is the function. Save everything in a projects folder, no matter how shit.
At some point you'll hit a point where a project hits the right intersection of elegance/function/polish, and then you can throw that on a portfolio page. Then another one, and another one.
The important thing is the end goal. As long as that goal is to impress other people you will be paralyzed by fear of rejection. If the goal is to fix a problem for yourself that's much more achievable, as the only bar you need to meet is "did it fix my problem?".
Random sampling of my own "frustration" projects: - automatic version control in SQL Server for object/table definitions - cron script that scrapes + downloads the latest driver from Nvidia from their website, installs it, then deletes the file - command line tool that formats text in the clipboard various ways (mostly I use this for transforming csv/excel files into SQL lists or table inserts) - a small utility for printing notes on a receipt thermal printer - a Lemmy scraper that combines different communities into a single coherent image board (I hated their default media presentation)
We think we can just learn to succeed, but in fact we need to learn in the right direction, which requires to first attempt it and gather feedback of where to learn.
From an interviewers perspective, it can be nice to see someone with varied experience across an array of tech. But just one or two demonstratable projects can seal the deal.
At this point I'd be happy with three person listing one language/framework and one good project.
Or it's just that reality lurks somewhere and that hidden complexity will arise making the effort unsatisfying with roadblock happening too early.
Most people that achieve their pet project scope it into a narrow solution that don't address general problems. If your interest is the general problem, your solution is likely to be hard and complex, and narrowing it make it uninteresting.
Each experience is different, but since I stopped caring about half baked solution to general hard problems (New Web UI Framework ! Implementation automation !) and stopped daydreaming about building a solution, but merely thinking of the problem itself, I stopped plateauing and resumed a steady progress in my relationship with tech.
So you do need to just build once or twice to experience the hardship of it to see if this is for you
Why not build a framework? At this point, you might be a subject-matter expert of frameworks!
You know what you like and how you want to use it.
Addiction can come with a LOT of shame baggage. To embrace vulnerability over it is quite substantial. Thank you Andreas for being a positive example for the world! Keep up the great work!
In a way it's a form of holding yourself accountable.
I'm not sure how rehab works but I guess the first thing you need to do is to admit that you have a problem. And then you need to find ways to prevent yourself from giving in.
I wonder about this. Sometimes I think that is the job of a CEO: to put on a good face and keep and maintain “The Plan Is Gonna Work” vibes.
Every CEO I’ve worked under—no matter how compassionate they were on a personal level—has had a policy of absolutely crushing voices of dissent. Maybe not immediately, but within a couple quarters. At least when the dissent was regarding things that the CEO felt were not something they could address on the current roadmap.
I’ve come to appreciate that this attitude may be necessary… that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500 range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And that people who will do that must be excised.
But your comment makes me wonder… is that the only way? I think maybe a company like Valve lets their employees pull in different directions, and also then just allows them to be starved of resources. Which maybe is effectively the same? Or maybe is an innovation on the standard CEO model?
There's a big difference between differing opinions and outright insubordination though, and one should not mistake one for the other.
IMHO, a good leader should encourage his underlings to express their opinions and giving him feedback and advice, but when the boss has made a decision then that decision should be followed. A leader who does not allow the former is a weak leader.
But it is difficult sometimes, because being able to give and take criticism in a constructive way is a skill that not everyone has, but it can be learned.
I think there's a really interesting confluence of factors here.
(A) CEOs tend to be psychopaths and/or narcissists -- people who care about others, or who don't have a bottomless need to prove their own self-importance simply don't become CEOs (or don't succeed at it). So of course they crush dissent: it is antithetical to their whole psyche. That comes from their weak, fragile egos, not any real "leadership" traits. That being said ...
(B) Luckily, having a singular, narrow-minded focus is sometimes good for a company. And the times when it's really needed, this narcissistic ego-fragility of the CEO happens to be beneficial ("wartime CEO"), at least for those companies that survive.
(C) Survivorship bias eliminates the cases where the singular, narrow-minded focus driven by the CEO's narcissism actually completely destroys the company. You haven't worked under them because they destroyed the company before you applied. Darwinism does the rest: good companies survive long enough for you to work for them because the narrow-minded idea the narcissistic CEO focused on happened to be the right one at that time. The company looks strong, the CEO looks smart, and then they exit to another CEO job and completely fuck it up, because they've never actually been smart, never been a good leader, never had all the answers -- they just got lucky, and the lucky ones are the ones who are around to be seen and worked for.
(D) When it's "peacetime", not "wartime", the narcissism of CEOs is slowly eating away at the company, corrupting it from the inside out, but it doesn't matter so much, because the company is generally doing well. They can hire and fire whoever they want; their "singular focus" is just ignored by the people who are actually doing the work, and the company plods along, being productive despite the cancer slowly growing inside of it.
We forget the bad CEOs, misattribute random success to good leadership, and ignore their parasitism when the company is doing well. We praise them when they save a struggling company, even if the company is only struggling due to their past ineptitude. And so we perpetuate the cycle of CEOs generally looking like strong, visionary leaders, when they are nothing more than narcissistic parasites who occasionally force a struggling company to randomly do exactly what it needed to survive.
Of course letting your employees pull in different directions is a better strategy for the long-term health of the company. But long-term health of the company is not what CEOs, nor shareholders, nor board members, nor anyone pulling any strings actually cares about. Of course this entire treatment mostly applies to publicly traded companies, or companies with an "exit strategy".
> Valve lets their employees pull in different directions
Valve is not a publicly traded company, and therefore its CEO is actually invested in its long-term health.
> Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity. This is why habits are crucial.
https://www.sebastianmellen.com/post/2020/how-are-you-really...
Many bad things happened because of good intentions and vice versa
I remember a story about a neo nazi who travelled to Africa to buy weapons and felt in live with a black woman.
Like obviously there are edge cases, but for the most part consequences aren't a surprise. Eat too much, you get fat. Fail to work out, your body goes to hell. Fail to sleep and your mind goes.
Eat healthy and you become obsessed with it and get a eating disorder.
Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted.
In hindsight it's easy to spot your mistakes. Should have turned left instead of right.
Except that's the exception, not the rule - the vast majority of people who eat healthy are not disordered eaters.
> Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted.
Again, this is the exception, not the rule. The majority of people exercise without sustaining an injury.
And often it's not as simple as counting calories.
Do you work too hard or not hard enough? Should you learn something or let it be?
Also, it's not easy, but is as simple as counting calories. Conservation of mass and all that.
Loosely that means that every time I took a drink, there was a reason, like maybe I was lonely because I was rejected by someone. Maybe I was fat because I was too broke to take care of myself. Maybe I was mean to my partners because I was projecting my own frustrations.
Now I look at life more like a game. I'm drawn to fringe ideas and projects with an overwhelming likelihood of failure. I've been through the ringer so many times that I'm more of a loosely held together hodgepodge of components than a coherent identity. But I keep showing up. I'm hardened from adversity but I've alchemized that into softness and an infinite well of empathy for others struggling with the human condition. I cheer inside when the meekest among us speak truth to power. I live in service to others now, who are an aspect of myself.
Perspective to recognize the lack of any such way to measure outcomes so booleanly is probably more valuable than choosing to adopt failure as your default state.
ICYMI: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-a...
Anecdotally, they really work. It’s not just your food cravings that are mostly stopped in their tracks. But in some miraculous fashion it seems all your “bad” cravings are squashed, while your good ones (side projects, chores, work) stay intact. The only good one I can see slightly down is sex, but as well with that it does also feel like you have a lot more control in that area.
I think we’ll eventually see them as first line prescriptions for all types of addicts. It’s part of the reason I sort of want to throw some money into their stock, but then again it’s hard to know how that all turns out as multiple manufacturers have these drugs and there are many more analogues in the pipelines.
But I find it so interesting, as it really upsets my notion of morality. Yes, resisting your temptations without drugs seems like the obvious better world. But our modern world is simply overflowing with temptation. Fast food, advertisements, sugar in everything, caffeine in everything, drugs everywhere. It was far easier to be ascetic when there just wasn’t that much around. But suddenly on one of these drugs you feel… powerful, in a way. Like you’ve gained a superpower. It’s a really weird experience, and I don’t hate it.
Avoidance rarely works i think. I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a better long term strategy.
Can recommend the App Habitica for this, free and open source. There are Android and iOS clients for it. Makes habits dailies and todos more fun.
Not affiliated, only fixed an accessibility issue once.
If the reason for forming the bad habit was that what you're susposed to do is dreadful i.e. not positive, yes, a positive one must be found.
But a positive activity doesn't feel good from the start, that's why you need avoidance. You need to get over the hump. When you're forming a new habit, the natural tendency is to cheat when you're susposed to do the new to-be habit, and do the old thing instead. Instead of working, browsing HN or youtube. Instead of going out for a run, eating cookies. Tell yourself to not do that -- avoid it -- and force yourself to do the new activity until it becomes self-sustaining.
Replacement on the other hand... That seems to genuinely work. You just have to pick a replacement that isn't dreadful.
---
My experience: I gained ~90lbs over 12 years. I didn't over eat horribly, but I also didn't exercise much, and my job keeps me stationary.
Instead of trying to not eat (dieting - which I have tried several times over those 12 years, never with long term success) this last time I took a different approach: I picked the easiest, most enjoyable, exercise I could think of and added that.
That exercise turned out to be biking - but not even just biking, because biking is still pretty hard when you're 90lbs overweight and I'd had other exercise attempts fail because they were unpleasant (ex: jogging). E-biking, though... that's pretty easy and nice.
So an e-bike it was. It's totally cheating with a bike: it makes biking feel relaxing, tackles the hills with ease, always gives you a cooling breeze - basically: it's just enjoyable and refreshing.
12.5 months later and I'm down 50 lbs. It turns out that I didn't need some dreadful, healthy, righteous activity to replace the bad ones. I just needed something small and enjoyable I could do as an alternative. Something that wouldn't dig the hole deeper.
I set absolutely zero rules around dieting/eating. I didn't actively avoid anything at all. I just added a small enjoyable activity with very low activation cost.
Essentially: It's hard to avoid a bad (but pleasurable) activity if the alternative is boredom or chores (ex: jogging). It's easy to avoid it by giving yourself a different pleasurable activity to pick.
In this thread, for example, wccrawford gave an interesting perspective on choices in life. While they used the linked article as a reference point, the contents of their comment stand entirely on their own. The information value in the linked article is not that important, the value of the discussion is much more important. To me, that is.
I personally find Andreas's efforts comforting.
Whereas I eschew the majority of our culture's prescriptive self-help BS. Just one sincere, yet still excretable, example is Mark Manson's middle brow rehash of philosophy; I get more from reading the OCs like Zeno and Epicurus.
Andreas' audience includes a lot of young people for which this is valuable.
I'm reminded of people who ignored "clean your room" every time their parents told them until Jordan Peterson said it.
When I was in the peak shape of my life (178 and stacked), it was following being in the worst condition in my life (315), after more than 7 years of constant careful attention to my calorie intake, every other day exercise, and meticulously recording it all so I could keep myself honest. It didn't evaporate overnight either, I was able to maintain a good state of health without being so controlled while I was traveling, but once the pandemic happened and I became sedentary my loss of control over my eating caught up to me over the next 14 months and I gained nearly 40 pounds back prior to getting myself back under control. Now I'm on that journey again back to a healthier weight.
The things we do every day, the small choices we consistently make, these form the habits of our lives. I have good habits and I have bad habits, and it's a consistent struggle for me (and likely everyone) to overcome our bad habits and turn them into good habits. Some of these habits, including my relationship with food, came from my environment as a child, so the work of a lifetime forming them is often difficult to overcome, but it's never impossible.
It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21 that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit.
There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5 lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle despite being in a deficit.
But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous, dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience, I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in October/November.
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people
like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not
stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
Sinning, in fact, corrupts the intellect and so it quite literally dulls your mind to reality over time. Why? Because in order to choose against what you know is the good decision, you have to turn your mind away from reality, from the truth. Do this often enough and it becomes a habit of blinding the mind to enable doing what you shouldn't. A blinded mind is degraded, worse at grasping reality, and this makes it even easier to commit still greater evil as it has become worse at determining what is objectively good. A downward spiral.
This is why a habit of self-discipline is important. What we call "self-denial" is really the practice of depriving yourself of what you desire that you know you should not desire inappropriately. The obvious example here is food, but it applies generally. Food, as such, is good. However, if I know that I've eaten enough, but an unruly desire for food surfaces, perhaps for food I know is bad for me, denying or repressing that desire is good. One of the purposes of fasting is actually the disciplining of the appetite for food. Consistent practice of self-denial has the effect of regulating the appetite and strengthening the dominion of reason over it, which develops one's integrity. Over time, that unruly desire, ruled over and purified by reasoned discipline, will better conform to the rational order, i.e., what is objectively good. Note how people who indulge their hunger against their own good only become more voracious eaters. They may even become disordered eaters (e.g., bulimia). Rewarding an inordinate (or disordered) desire only reinforces it.
Now consider how vicious, destructive, and irrational our consumerist culture is. It thrives on mindless and degrading indulgence of any and all desires. This is not the way.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Everyone knows that.
It took hundreds of years for Rome to reach its peak.
But Rome also didn't fall in a day.
It also took time, hundreds of years, for Rome to decay and fall apart.
Edit - Or this one: https://jamesclear.com/inversion
Particularly other people who aren't living right. Past 25 and doesn't have or trying to get a stable job. Carefully evaluate if you want that person in your life.
Misery loves company, the wrong type of people will bring you down and laugh when they do so.
Likewise, people with stable lives can and often will lift you up.
“The Handbook of Self-Regulation”, Baumeister and Vohs
http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28342/1/162.p...
When people talk about excellence, productivity, and performance, they often draw conclusions based on the final outcomes. However, these conclusions cannot be reached without encountering mistakes along the way.
As the Greeks said, the golden mean is the desirable point.
Clickbait is a habit, I suppose.
It can be as basic as forming the habit of asking whether you’ll be thankful you did XYZ when you’re at the end of your life. Sometimes that’s going to be a “yes”, even for “unwise” choices, but most people who actually engage with this will find that most of the honest answers are “no”.
It’s not new or revolutionary or particularly insightful or easily productized so it keeps having to be rediscovered.
I hide behind perfection. Learning maths, programming, sports, health.
Of course I need a perfect OS, perfect programming paradigm, perfect book, the best music learning method, greatest body improvement program.
Perfect is the enemy of good. It's something I grapple with on a daily basis.
A journey of 10,000 miles starts with a single step.
You can only cross a chasm with a mighty leap.
YMMV.
And I think its better to embrace Samuel Beckett's mantra: "Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.”
It's arguably the core tenet of agile/lean anyway. Measure, learn, improve. If you're taking those single steps backwards and using them to make two steps forward, that's the opposite of failure.
Anyone has any pointer? Bonus if it's RuneScape-style gamification (exponential XP curve, rewarding yourself every level up, build on the assumption that growth in life is a very long grind like maxing a RS character, made of small steps)
Failure is literally a key ingredient to success.
Via negativa is a useful tool. Instead of thinking about what to add, via negativa is about what to remove.
in those moments you’re seeking relief, and viewing it as failure can just perpetuate shame and creates a vicious cycle.
No one becomes obese eating natural food. But no one resorts to natural food if they use food as a coping mechanism either. Then when your body is out of whack, it is really hard to get back to a healthy metabolism, if not healthy weight. The idea that your gut flora triggers particular food cravings, for example, is still not common knowledge, so we hear dietary and nutritional nonsense spread by misinformed GPs and online articles.
Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work, or rather they work temporarily. There seems to be a set-point for weight and you just won’t eat enough to go over it and have a very hard time to go under it. That set point seems to have gone up.
Here are some reviews
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-pharmtox-0...
This is explained directly in the video I linked. Cane sugar is more expensive and less consistent commodity while corn syrup is cheap and consistent. Fat became demonized from bad science and sugar was added to almost everything.
Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work
They absolutely work individually. If someone changes their diet to cut out sugar they lose weight very consistently. Expecting that of people is not a systemic solution however. Watch the video I linked instead of trying to explain everything with looser correlations.
If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
Your comment has to be made in bad faith and it's not even worth engaging with.
>If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
Yes, reducing the number of calories you eat is how you lose weight.
We are not calorimeters, nor furnaces. There is a reason people get obese on 10,000 kcal of junk food and virtually no one ever on 10,000 kcal of sugar cane. Focusing only on the caloric figure is completely missing the point.
Yet the immensely reductive CICO bullshit is perpetuated, because "laws of thermodynamics." Simplify a model too much and you get nonsense.
Oh, but they do, even right here in this very thread!
I admit it's hard losing weight - I've been there. But there are some people who will compound the difficulty of following through by denying the reality of the conservation of mass.
"Eat less food" is technically true, but as useful dietary advice as "become less obese".
Those reasons still add up to Calories in - Calories Out. You need Out to be > than In or you will not lose weight. Eat all the kale and celery you want if you aren't burning more than you eat you won't lose weight.
and forcing people to exercise just gives them ravenous insatiable hunger. if they're not aware of this they'll reach for the carbs, ruining all their work.
This applies to all aspects of life. Its the reason so many new years resolutions die after a few weeks. Why diets fail. Why the gym is packed in January and back to normal in March. If you need to be motivated to succeed, you will likely fail, only discipline will get you through both the good and bad times.
Discipline is what separates the great from the average or even good.