I’ve just returned from my first trip worthy of the label for over a year. For someone who’s accustomed to movement, all this holding still has been moderately stressful but also very educational. In the past, I’ve intentionally stayed put…
When I was younger—in my teens and early-20s—I always saw 35 as being the ideal age, because it was young enough not to be socially considered “old,” but old enough that people would take you seriously as a legitimate adult.…
I’m a big fan of personal experimentation. I find that regularly tweaking the variables that inform my thinking, shape my day, and feed my productive output helps me stay excited about all the things I do (and might do), while…
I’m aware, as I make loose plans for my post-pandemic lifestyle, that I’m making these plans as a pandemic-immersed version of myself. This is both exceedingly obvious and deceptively easy to forget as I make these plans. The me of…
Ideally, the tools we use amplify our capabilities. I often visualize my tools as a sort of exoskeleton: an Iron Man suit, or the kind used for lifting heavy things and fighting multi-mouthed xenos in Alien. For better and for worse, it’s possible…
Whatever our professions and however our lives are structured, our days are filled with inputs. These inputs are sensory by definition—sights, sounds, tactile sensations, tastes, smells—but they contain a boggling assortment of information, ranging from the aesthetic to survival-related data,…
A heuristic is a mental shortcut, and one of my most commonly used heuristics is to imagine the most boring, conventional, mundane version of something before making any decisions about it. When deciding on a new home base—a rental apartment,…
It’s prudent to semi-regularly ask ourselves why we do various things, and why we do them the way we do them. This isn’t a complicated concept but it can be tricky to implement productively: we humans tend to be skilled…
I don’t find regret to be particularly useful, though it’s sometimes difficult to avoid. Regret can play a role in productive reassessment, triggering the reflex to look back and consider. I find that its knee-jerk utility often stops there, however,…
The stock market, if you learn about it and look very closely, makes little sense. There are good intentions behind it, and in the abstract it’s a decent means of getting resources where they need to be while incentivizing economic…