I thought it strange - my parents never really gave me advice growing up. Nothing about career, finance, romance, even small things like what to read or how to dress. It was as if they felt it was not their place. What I learned since is that this is absurdly common

Tried and true way to turn your life around is to just do the opposite of what your anxieties tell you to do. Great place to start is by pretending you already made it. Imagine you had the money, the relationships, the ideal reality you see in your head How would this version of yourself be moving? Doesn't have to be some huge thing. Could literally be adding guac to the order or covering the tab for a friend when the mind would usually look at your current circumstances and make you believe that you need to hold onto your limited resources for dear life Could be getting out more, striking up conversations with strangers, showing your true personality without the usual mask of "I don't have enough status" because that's exactly how light and relaxed you'd be if you were loved by those around you and had nothing to prove Pursuing a project out of pure curiosity, choosing to make a business decision out of excitement over neuroticism, letting an idea play out over months instead of scrapping it after a few days, etc. Why wouldn't you if you knew your level of internal abundance gave you permission to build your life in the most self respecting way Embody that energy for a month and see what happens. Perhaps you'll come to find that instead of needing to "get there" first before you can be here, "being there" now is what actually gets you here

BREAKING PROOF!! Continuity we perceive in consciousness is an illusion! We flip between conscious and unconscious states every 60 milliseconds and we recognize backward speech when played every 20 milliseconds. Listen to this!

The mystical “goonstate” can b felt w/o wacking off. Just let yourself *almost* get something you really want & just stay there for a while, sensing the intensity of your craving. Let yourself enjoy that intensity Dont give up until you’ve passed the point where it feels unbearable. I guarantee you that if you stay there long enough w/o distraction, something angelic will happen I’m doing it right now outside of a coffee shop while craving coffee. You can do this when you get the urge to scroll: pick up your phone. Don’t scroll yet, but know that maybe you will soon. Enjoy the space *between* the craving and the scrolling mmmmmm 👅 Report back when you’ve felt it

Major insight today while working out about me & my mind Many of us can’t hear an inner voice in our head. Whether or not we have one and can't hear it, or are just filtering it out the way we all filter out our noses from our line of sight is irrelevant. I figured out that I don't need to hear my mind. I can just read it. And reading it becomes hearing it. Here's what I mean. We all know that actions speak louder than words. If you want to know the truth, observe a person's actions and infer their intent. You may be off, but directionally correct, whereas often times what a person says isn't. Over time, you get better and better, in the sense that you develop better explanations for their behavior. You become less wrong. Whether or not the person agrees with your explanation is irrelevant because words and actions can often be orthogonal. The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says. So when I was working out on the elliptical I noticed my eyes darting around. I wasn't doing that. So I asked myself, "why did I just look down?" And realized it was probably to distract myself from the discomfort through novelty. But I didn't consciously decide that aim or strategy. I realized my mind acted on my behalf and I conflated its action as my own by default. Then I realized what just happened. I did something without it coming from me, realized that, and inferred the best explanation for why. It's as if my mind was saying: this sucks. do something else. it will be over soon. this sucks. do something else. it will be over soon. this sucks. do something else. it will be over soon. this sucks. do something else. it will be over soon. this sucks. do something else. it will be over soon. When I imagined my mind saying that to itself as it directed me, I realized there's effectively no difference between what I had just intoned and what my "inner voice" would be saying if I could hear it. I can't actually hear it, but I strongly suspect that this is directionally correct. Maybe as I do this more, I'll be less wrong about what it might be saying, and my theory of my mind and my actual mind will converge into the same thing. Maybe at that point I will be so good at doing this that I'll just begin to spontaneously experience the audible intonations themselves and... acquire an inner voice? If I'm right, then maybe those of us who can't "hear" our minds in real time simply never modeled or stopped modeling our minds at some point. And... lack a (process for developing a) theory of mind for our own minds. Thoughts?

I can't stand a man who's tit for tat. If your role is to lead and think logically, why are you copying my emotional reactions?

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

It’s funny as a 90 second video, but it’s really debilitating when this is your life 24/7