A useful way of seeing, is framing things not as a struggle, but as a dance ‘I’m learning to dance with my emotion’ I’m learning to dance with joy/gratitude I’m learning to dance with sadness and grief You can’t hold onto joy, and expect it to last. To truly appreciate joy, one must experience it fully in the moment, and then let go. Similarly for any arising of anger, jealously, grief. Read more...

TLDR : A compendium of current thoughts on freedom Political and ideological freedom is up-stream of financial freedom You want to have ‘f’ u money, and then think about ideologies and politics. Money is the engine of change (a reality) - and fuels innovation (science, spreading of memes, technologies). You can’t worry about politics when your own house is not in order. Pay your bills first. Locally fix, before thinking about global issues. Read more...

Before you commit, trial the experience/item Before you make a major financial purchase e.g. moving location, buying a large/expensive item, see if you can ‘rent’ or ‘trial’ it. I think I’ve made this mistake a lot. Often buying items that didn’t really improve my quality of life or contentment (or of others around me) but instead became a burden What you own ends up owning you Examples Read more...

TLDR: Generalist vs Specialist I sometimes like to think of life as an RPG. You have an avatar - a blank slate. You start of at level 1 at most skills, and then the more time and deliberate practice you put into skills, the better you become. You ‘level up’. Obviously the analogy isn’t entirely accurate. Video games are bounded, and life is unbounded. There is no end point. There is no ‘victory’. Read more...

TLDR : minimalism in a min. (no need to read a book on it now, thank me later) Marie Kondo is a savage. But there is a reason she has become so popular. People often don’t have stopping points, or definitions for what is enough. Especially in the realm of money and objects, the default tendency is for more. Desire is subtly an unpleasant feeling because the implicit message is ‘I am discontent until I get whatever it is I want’. Read more...

TLDR : A primer for dealing with negative states If you were to ask me what my baseline level of ‘happiness’ is : I would say it is around 9/10. But this doesn’t mean that negative states do not appear. I’ve been told I’m always calm too. This is definitely through intentional practice and ways of relating to experiences, not just a default state. I have dealt with the arising of a fair amount of negative emotion, especially in the last few years. Read more...

Work should never be your first and only priority. Maybe you have this vision that once you ‘accomplish X’ then you will be content, or deserving of admiration/love/respect. That is a delusion. We prioritise the wrong things for contentment. This is going back to the post on Maslow’s boat One analogy I found useful is metaphorically dividing your life into various aspects : health, friendship, family, and work. It’s as if you are juggling all these various aspects of your life - health, relationships, work. Read more...

TLDR : Shower thoughts and too much time on psychiatry I stumbled on a vlog on social media, recorded in 2012 by Nerdwriter1. One line caught my attention : “Whatever medium of shared expression you choose will be the medium by which you’re asking to be judged…” Facebook/Instagram/Twitter are not private journals and they are posted with the knowledge that others will see it, and react to it. Read more...

TLDR : I don’t think I can summarise this one. Feel free to skip to the section that seems most interesting. Everyone has heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is typically shown as below as a pyramid that one ascends through. Transcend is a book exploring Maslow’s hierarchy of needs written by the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman. I would say it is an expansion of Maslow’s theory, and one of those books that has improved my understanding of the area significantly. Read more...

TLDR: I love caffeine. : Notes on Michael Pollan’s book - specifically the Caffeine chapter I recently listened to Michael Pollan talking about his new book ‘Your Mind on Plants’. In it, he discusses three main plant substances : Opium, Caffeine and Mescaline. This is a summary of the ‘Caffeine’ section - a drug 90% of the human population consumes daily, including me. We think we are in ‘vanilla’ consciousness, but our default is actually caffeine infused consciousness. Read more...