Posts

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.

There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Few have mastered the art of walking it, and fewer still have the wisdom to know when to step back. People with enough self awareness to recognize their infallibility are–in my experience–a rare breed. I think a lot of the self-help advice about how we should love ourselves and be confident and yadda yadda tends to be correct on the surface, but in practice it gets deployed incorrectly. Confidence is great, but ignorance combined with too much confidence leads to arrogance.

At some point in recent history it became very trendy to travel. I think, however, most of the traveling people do this days is of the performative nature. The point of travel to most people is to take photos for Instagram and be able to boast to their friends about it, so far as I can tell. I suppose there are some folks who enjoy the thrill of airports, airplanes, and hotels. For me however, spending unnecessary time in an airport, airplane, or hotel is the last thing I want to do.

You’ve heard of the mind-body connection, and maybe also the brain-gut connection, but have you heard of the mind-body-gut connection? I just made it up for this blog post, but I think it’s something interesting to noodle on. I think the term “mind-body connection” has existed in the minds of health and wellness folks for quite some time, but the gut-brain connection is a somewhat newer concept. Only in the past few decades have we began to scratch the surface of how the gut and brain communicate with each other.

I think most people are artists, in one sense or another. We don’t generally do much to cultivate artists as a society, aside from the occasional optional art class in school. I like to cosplay as an artist, but I don’t think of myself as particularly talented or skilled when it comes to making art.

I have a saying, or perhaps a mantra, that I like to repeat to myself: “High hopes, low expectations”. I think I could do a whole stand up comedy routine about this subject. Some people, I suspect, go through life feeling disappointed for the simple reason that they expect too much. Whether in their relationships, careers, or personal lives, they set themselves up for constant disappointment by setting their expectations far too high.