Brenden's Blog

A lot of effort goes into avoiding bad feelings. Bad feelings are generally bad, but rather than focusing on avoiding them, it might make sense to focus on resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from bad feelings, and get through the tough times just as well as the good times.

There’s a subreddit called r/amiugly (as in, “Am I Ugly?”) where people post pictures of themselves and ask the community to rate their appearance. It’s a place where people seek validation, to be told that they are beautiful, or at least not ugly. It’s a place where people seek reassurance, to be told that they are not alone in their insecurities.

When it comes to people who are insanely successful, in the vast majority of cases their success comes from a combination of 2 things: rich parents and luck. When I say “rich parents”, I generally mean relatively rich parents. It doesn’t matter how genius you are if you grow up poor with no opportunities, you won’t get far in life because the world is not a meritocracy.

Take a walk on any given day these days, and instead of staring at your phone, try looking around. If you want to do this on hard mode, leave the phone at home if you can manage. You may notice that many people are engrossed in whatever is going on on their own devices, as opposed to existing in the reality around them.

Yoga is a good example of exercise that is meditative. Or rather, it’s the other way around: yoga is more like meditation that is also good exercise. Or at the very least, when we talk about yoga as exercise, we’re usually referring to the āsanas (i.e., poses) and vinyāsa style yoga (i.e., sequences of poses) that are part of the practice. But yoga is much more than that. It’s a philosophy, a way of life, a spiritual practice. And it’s all of these things at once.