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2022


Good Friends, Not Therapists

·3 mins
I’ve been thinking about the relationship between friendship and therapy in our modern world. It’s become increasingly common to suggest therapy as the default solution for nearly every emotional challenge—as if paying a professional to listen will magically transform our circumstances or instantly resolve our deepest struggles. To be clear: therapy can be valuable and even essential for many people, particularly those dealing with clinical conditions or processing trauma. But I wonder if we’ve overlooked something fundamental in our rush to professionalize emotional support—the irreplaceable value of genuine friendship.

The SEX Theorem of Hiring

·5 mins
Software engineers are likely familiar with the CAP theorem, coined by Eric Brewer. In essence, the CAP theorem states that distributed databases can have at most 2 of 3 attributes: consistency, availability, or partition tolerance (fault tolerance). In other words, you can have a database that is consistent and highly available, but not fault tolerant. Or, you can have one that’s fault tolerant and highly available, but isn’t always consistent (especially during network failures).

If You're Not Struggling, Maybe You Should Be

·4 mins
One harmful myth perpetuated by the various cultural medias is the idea that there exists some people in the world who have it easy, and aren’t struggling their way through life. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who has mostly managed to fail upwards, which is probably the best outcome anyone can hope for. Even the billionaires claim to be having a real tough time getting through every day (although my advice to them would be to retire and let someone else get some money, because you guys have enough and at this point you’re just greedy).

Play the Metagame

·5 mins
There are 2 ways to go through life: you can either play the game, or you can play the metagame. The game is 1-dimensional chess, and the metagame is N-dimensional chess. You can apply this idea to just about everything in life. The easiest way to move from playing the game to the metagame is to think about every interaction in terms of incentives. Examining incentives is the easiest way to figure out what people want and how to turn win/lose or lose/lose transactions into win/win.