Anyway, can't recommend Adam's writing enough. Subscribed after his second post and have never regretted it. If you liked this, you should also read "You can't reach the brain through the ears", an excellent piece about failing to communicate.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/you-cant-reach-the-br...
With diploma problems, if you blow it, you really blow it, with often irrevocable long-term consequences. All of your effort is building to a high stakes climax and if you miss your shot, that effort can all end up wasted. It's videogame permadeath mode for life.
But with toothbrushing problems, you can have an off day and usually make it up today. Of course, every day's effort does matter. You can't make every day an off day. But I find something very comforting about problems where some random variance in my output does smooth out to the mean over time.
I think I feel like I can’t let myself excuse any slack, because I’m worried I’ll just start excusing everything — one day off at the gym becomes a week off, becomes a month off.
But I guess the point is that no matter how much you have failed, the toothbrush problem is always best served by you starting again tomorrow, no matter how many tomorrows it takes.
That is to say, if all your problems are Toothbrushing Problems then you're doing pretty good! That means you're living. At that point you can do one or all of these things:
* Complain about your Toothbrushing Problems (<- you are here, haha)
* Bring NEW problems into your life
* Work to make your Toothbrushing Problems a bit less troublesome
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/its-very-weird-to-hav...
Most of the time I get so bored reading such long articles, like the New Yorker ugh. But this is the first time I've enjoyed such a lengthy read! I hope I can decrypt what the author is doing to make reading such fun.
These two are more life-advice-y, but he also does some fairly deep dives on various problems he sees with scientific research (and psychology in particular), and his writing is no less entertaining.
In fact, one of his posts is actually about how he thinks scientists should make more effort to make their papers fun to read!
It’s fantastic, and I also hope to emulate it.
I must be boring AF; I usually like the New Yorker's articles.