Category: Psychology

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People Dig In Once they’ve Stated an Opinion, and the Internet Makes this a Terrible Thing

I had the realization that people tend to commit to a thing once they’ve actually said it aloud or typed it. It’s as if they trust themselves that they’ve fully thought through something by the time they are willing to actually state it.

This is helpful to realize, but also demonstrates some areas in which this is absolutely a terrible thing.

First, I want to point out that, in general, people tend to be a lot more careful with what they say in person. People are likely to react immediately if someone says something stupid or totally out-of-line. And in-person, if you get scolded or called-out, you tend to care more.

But online, people will say whatever comes to their mind. They don’t fear the consequences. They don’t care if someone calls them out. They have anonymity to shield them if what they said is stupid.

Not to mention the fact that they are likely to post in places where everyone is bound to agree with them anyway. It would seem that the method of choice by social media networks to avoid hostility and toxicity is to separate everyone into silos of people that already agree.

In person, people are far more likely to listen, to think, to gather information. Only after they’ve done those things are they comfortable giving an opinion.

And that’s a great thing!

They’re also more likely to change their opinion. If someone they respect and value is explaining something to them, they will be way more likely to listen with an open mind and work to find common ground.

Online, people just dig in. And when they inevitably fail to change any minds, they just go back to their silo and say the same things with people they know already agree.

As a result, people are more divided than ever, but just don’t talk about anything in person. They come to conclusions quickly and never have their ideas questioned. They then seek information that confirms their existing beliefs, and things just get worse.

I really hope that the newer generations that were raised on the internet can see through these things clearly, and that they are able to develop strategies to combat these things. Otherwise, I’m not exactly sure how humanity is supposed to recover.

It does seem like there is hope though. The boomers – who obviously had no experience with the internet and social media until they were already middle-aged, seem to be the least equipped to deal with this, and it shows.

Younger people do seem to be inherently tuned-in to these problems and as a result, might be able to avoid the worst of it.

It’s hard to say. I just hope things improve, because I don’t think the world is in a good place right now.

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A Missing Factor: When Outcomes Aren’t Determined by Inputs

This post is pointless, in the sense that I don’t know that it will have a firm conclusion.

Instead, I just want to bring-to-light a concept I’ve been thinking about lately.

Essentially, that sometimes the outcome is not at all determined by the inputs that go into it.

Some obvious insights from this are more or less extensions of the post I wrote about being careful what lessons you learn from failures.

First, let me explain exactly what I mean with some examples.

What made me think of this is disc golf. There are tons of examples of this.

The most obvious ones are where your throw your disc and it ends up with a fluke roll that ends up far from where it landed.

Now, at the elite level, you are always considering the possibility of these types of outcomes and doing what you can to prevent them. But even then, they will happen sometimes.

So let’s say, as is often the case, that you’re playing a hole in which most of it is blind. You only see the early portion of the flight path.

You throw the disc, and you think it’s looking good. However, once you get down there, you realize that the disc actually ended up a good 100 feet beyond the pin.

“I guess I’ll just throw it way less hard next time,” you say to yourself. You’ve come to the conclusion that you threw it way too hard this time, and you need to compensate for this next time.

The problem is, you didn’t. You actually got a fluke roll, where the disc landed, popped and perfectly on to its side, and then proceeded another 100+ feet beyond.

But since you couldn’t see this happen, you only know your inputs (how you threw it) and the outcome (where it landed). You don’t have the full story of what happened in the middle.

This result is essentially noise. Using it as a learning experience will be actively detrimental to you. As you play more, you may start to sense better when things are flukes, and not learn from them. But in the short-term, they may actively hurt your ability to progress, as you test out different inputs and seemingly get random results.

As another example, I was playing with my friend Zac and, a couple times, he let loose what was actually a perfect throw. Form was great, release was great, and the disc was launched perfectly.

And it went terribly.

The disc just barely clipped a tree and bounced deep into the woods.

Now this case is actually a bit different, because he had far more control over the inputs and actually could fix this.

The problem in this case is that he’s likely to learn the wrong lesson. Despite throwing with perfect form, the feedback that he got is that he did a bad job. He is likely to change his throw going forward.

Now, there is probably a correct lesson to be learned in this case, and it’s that he should aim ever-so-slightly more to one side to avoid that tree. But instead, he may very well blame the other aspects of the throw.

So really these are two different – but related – concepts.

In the first example, the input really was almost completely disconnected from the output. In the second, they were connected but the wrong input was likely to be blamed.

In other areas in life and business, this is likely to happen almost constantly. It’s extremely difficult to identify exactly what makes you successful in most areas. And in both successes and failures, you are quite likely to blame the wrong input for them and proceed accordingly.

It’s like when a lottery winner outlines their “strategies” for success, when they obviously were totally irrelevant. The only factor that mattered was actually dumb luck.

If I had to come up with some kind of conclusion, I would just say that it’s incredibly important to:

  1. Recognize when the results of something are caused primarily by factors outside your control
  2. Be sure not incorrectly identify which of your efforts actually caused a success or failure

I think part of what makes experience so incredibly valuable is that these things start to come naturally to you. You’ve had enough data points that you know when something is a fluke, you know what should work, and you can start to pick up what you did wrong if it really was your fault.

I think about my own business and the work we do, and how I can approach almost any situation – including ones that I haven’t directly worked on before – with way more confidence. I have an intuitive sense of what will work and what won’t, and know that I can figure most things out without messing anything up too badly.

And that comes from experience. I’ve done it all before. I’ve done a new thing for the first time thousands of times, and so I know what the process is like.

I remember when I was first starting and I would often be forced to just try things blindly without having any sense of how they would go. But that’s how I learned and gained experience. And with that experience comes wisdom.

In disc golf, I’ve noticed the more I play (especially when replaying certain courses), that I am able to sense when things are a fluke. Sometimes my disc will end somewhere and I’ll conclude, “okay that definitely rolled there, because there’s no way it went that far on the fly”. And that helps me learn going forward.

Again, I don’t have a firm conclusion for this, it’s just a concept I wanted to formally write about because it may have big consequences in many areas of life and business.

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Why am I More Emotional about Imagined Situations than Real Ones?

I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon, and it is that I tend to get more emotional about imagined scenarios than real ones.

So, for example, maybe I imagine ahead of time what it’s going to feel like to see a friend for the first time after being apart for a really long time. I may actually tear up imagining the situation.

But then, when it actually happens, I don’t feel that emotional.

What gives? Shouldn’t a real situation be more moving that an imagined scenario?

I think one obvious explanation is that almost as nothing is as enjoyable or moving as we think it’s going to be. It has been well-documented in studies that most experiences don’t live up to people’s expectations for them.

Funny enough, though, I believe their recollection of those events may actually be more consistent with their original expectations, even though their experience in the moment didn’t live up to them.

I don’t think that’s the full explanation, though. For one thing, just because you have high expectations for something, doesn’t really mean that you’ll feel the full effect simply imagining it.

I think a major component is probably that I’m a lot more inhibited when I’m with people. That may very well be everyone.

I’m realizing more and more, though, that specific people may also make you particularly inhibited. Especially if they have some negative influence on you. For example, I suspect that most of my experiences spent during bad stretches of failing relationships were probably not nearly as enjoyable as I had hoped, because I was emotionally numb as a result of the tension with that other person.

But like most people, I suspect I am more inhibited with anyone than I would be alone. I think that’s mostly normal.

It would be nice to be a lot less inhibited with people I trust, though. So that might be an area I can explore a bit more.

I don’t think that I’m necessarily all that inhibited in my words or actions, but I do think there’s a strong emotional inhibition. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but I think it’s something I will definitely explore in a future post.

I’ll think more about that and write about it!

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Why I Get Anxious when I’m Alone

So this blog premise was marked down a while back – I suspect earlier this year. I don’t even feel like it’s that relevant anymore, but I thought it would be interesting to write about it in hindsight.

As established elsewhere, I have since determined that I’ve been depressed much of the time over the last handful of years. I’ve also determined that the primary cause of this depression was a deep-seated insecurity and feeling of inadequacy.

Increasingly, this had manifested as a sinking feeling in my stomach along with anxiety and other depressive symptoms.

I think it’s very common for these types of insecurities to be dealt with by simply repressing them. The more successfully you can repress them, the better you feel. Its temporary impact is lessened and you can more readily enjoy whatever you’re doing.

Clearly, this is not permanently sustainable and eventually results in things like full-blown depression and anhedonia.

In my case I think that when I was alone I was forced to confront it. I wasn’t able to repress it any longer and the feelings came up and manifested as anxiety, among other things.

This seems pretty obvious to me now. It definitely wasn’t then. It’s actually pretty amazing how effective it has been for me to just methodically work through all these things on my own. With the insights I’ve made, I feel like most of my behavior and feelings in the past can be easily explained.

I’m also excited to realize that most of this insecurity has pretty much gone away. I rarely feel like I used to.

It’s as if simply shining a light on the problem made it go away. It used to thrive in the shadows but now that I’m aware of it and can rationally determine that it doesn’t even make sense, it’s a lot easier to make it go away.

So I really just wanted to address this particular blog prompt because I think it’s just quite interesting how things have changed in a relatively short amount of time. It’s nice to feel like progress has been made.

It’s also just fun to realize that something that seemed super mysterious and perplexing just a few short months ago is now so obvious to me.

 

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I Think I Need to Eliminate the Consumption of All Short-Form Content

Over the last few years, I’ve tried optimizing a number of things. I’ve identified tons of things that are “bad” and done everything I can to maximize productivity, happiness, and enjoyment.

I’ve had mixed results, and have often been left with things that just don’t quite line up with my understanding of how everything should work.

I’ve now come to the conclusion that short-form content of just about any kind is absolutely destroying my motivation, my energy, my focus, and even my enjoyment of, well, literally everything else.

I’m not going to claim to fully understand the interaction of dopamine and other neurotransmitters here. But I believe that whether you’re binge-watching YouTube videos, scrolling through any social media feed, or even clicking through news headlines, you are using up something that is difficult to replace.

After I’ve done any of that, I feel unmotivated, and it takes a ton of work to get anything done. I also seem to have a spike in anhedonia and don’t appreciate or enjoy most things all that much.

I like to think that I’ve pretty much avoided all of these things and shouldn’t be suffering from them. But YouTube has really been the last holdout.

Since I got rid of YouTube shorts, I figured that I could just watch the “longer” videos and I’d be fine.

But I find myself jonesing for more videos. And then it becomes hard to just sit and do nothing without constantly reaching for my phone to watch more. And by then it’s too late.

The last few days, I’ve avoided even watching YouTube, and I think I’m starting to feel a lot better. I’m feeling more motivated and starting to enjoy things more.

Granted, I just got back home to Minnesota and there are lots of additional factors. But I really think this one contributes greatly.

I’m going to continue strictly avoiding all short-form content and might even start avoiding really any shows or movies for a while (other than when I’m with a friend) just to see how I feel. I think it might make a huge difference.

If it goes well, I’ll implement these things long-term. I’m pretty hopeful it will.

And even if it doesn’t: what will I have lost? Nothing. Even if these things didn’t have longer-term impacts, I feel that they have negative value just in wasting your time.

I do not need more entertainment.

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I’ve Internalized such a Radical Sense of Personal Responsibility that I See Everything as My Fault

I’ve always been attracted to schools of thought that say you should consider everything in your control and take responsibility for everything around you because, in the end, you can only truly control yourself. So if you want different results, you need to change yourself.

And it’s an enticing message and also seems totally reasonable.

I do want to note that I think “personal responsibility” as a personal strategy can be helpful (to the extent I’m going to outline), but “personal responsibility” as public policy is disastrous at best and deeply malicious at worst. I think it’s basically just used to justify the status quo, blame the less fortunate for their problems, and codify a tiered society while freeing the ruling class from any semblance of guilt (or – ironically – responsibility).

With that out of the way, I want to highlight the primary ways in which using “personal responsibility” as a personal strategy is limited or can be actively harmful:

  1. Many things are completely out of your control and if you believe otherwise you will waste your time
  2. You’ll worry about the outcome of everything around you, feeling that those outcomes are a reflection of your own efforts and abilities
  3. You’ll blame yourself and feel a tremendous sense of guilt every time something goes wrong
  4. You might feel inadequate with your abilities or accomplishments because you are downplaying or outright denying the importance of external advantages others might have had (wealthy parents, connections, etc.)

This is honestly something I never really considered before today. While I knew there were potential pitfalls to blindly believing in “personal responsibility,” I guess I never really considered how such an ideology was hurting me.

And now I have, and I’m realizing that it’s been harmful in quite a few ways.

I think it has made me a lot more anxious. Historically I’ve always considered myself an easy-going, go-with-the-flow type of person, but I’ve felt my anxiety creeping up over the years and I think this is partly to blame.

I feel responsible for everything bad that happens around me. I always think of things I should have done to prevent it, and I treat the possibility of future bad things like a puzzle to be solved. If I just work hard enough or do things perfectly, I can avoid it.

Some of the happiest people I know are the types to not take responsibility for much of anything. They see most problems as someone else’s fault, and so aren’t bothered by them.

And that’s probably what is the most harmful to me: it’s the feeling that these bad things happen because of my own inadequacies. It’s my fault they happened, and I should have been better.

Since obviously it’s impossible to prevent bad things from happening, and many of these things are completely out of your control, this leads to a rather pointless and constant barrage against your self-esteem.

And if our only goal was productivity, you could make the case that with a crippled self-esteem, you’re going to be way less capable and get much less done in the end, defeating the purpose of “personal responsibility”.

Productivity is, of course, not our only goal. And so the damage to self-esteem matters far more than just how it affects productivity.

I think that this mindset has also hurt me in that it’s hard for me to let go of things. For every failed project, relationship, goal, or performance, I can’t help but analyze what I did wrong and ultimately blame myself.

Which: of course! That’s the whole idea.

But you can’t spend all your time thinking about your failures. In reality, they may not even be your failures. Sometimes things just happen. Some things weren’t meant to be.

While looking at everything like it’s your fault may provide useful insight so you can improve in the future, it also might not.

And more importantly: it may severely cripple your own self-image to the point where you no longer see yourself as talented or capable at all. And besides making you unhappy, it may also ruin your future chances at success.

I can’t help but still keep thinking this way, but I think it’s important to seek balance. I need to learn when to dig for insight in failures, and when to simply accept them and move on. Some failures have no lessons.

I’ve spoken before about how I think we need to be careful about the lessons we learn from our failures, but I’m just now starting to realize that one of the reasons I prefer to learn lessons from successes is because it’s just a lot better for your self-esteem. And if we want to approach things from a pragmatic perspective, we need to also consider these things because they affect future performance, too.

I’m not saying that focusing on “personal responsibility” doesn’t have benefits. What I’m saying is that it absolutely has limits. It doesn’t apply to every situation.

If, in a given situation, it’s a useful paradigm: use it! But if it doesn’t serve you then you shouldn’t.

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To Know is to Love

As documented in earlier posts, every time I move to a new city there is a period where I’m really anxious and uneasy and just struggling to enjoy my time there.

And then over time, as I explore the city more, learn what’s around and where I should go, and establish a route, I eventually relax and even grow to love the city I’m staying in.

The thought came to me on this trip that “to know is to love”.

It came to me in the context of cities, of course. Every restaurant I try, every street I go down, and every person I meet contribute to an increasing knowledge of a place and, with it: an increasing affection.

Upon further reflection, I feel that while the unknown may be enticing, you don’t love the unknown. You can only really love what you know.

So if something is new, you must learn everything you can about it and get to know it well in order to love it.

Nobody really loves anything or anyone they know nothing about.

But when you get to know someone or something, the love seems nearly perfectly correlated with your knowledge and familiarity with them.

This is somewhat related to a portion of dialogue from the movie Lady Bird:

Sister Sarah Joan : You clearly love Sacramento.

Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson : I do?

Sister Sarah Joan : You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.

Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson : I was just describing it.

Sister Sarah Joan : Well, it comes across as love.

Christine ‘Lady Bird’ McPherson : Sure, I guess I pay attention.

Sister Sarah Joan : Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?

 

Besides being a brilliant piece of writing and possibly the most important and moving scene in the whole film, it’s a similar point to what I’m making.

When you pay attention to things – when you get to know them – you come to love them.

So assuming that these things are all true, I feel like there are a few key insights to be considered:

  1. You can’t really love something you don’t know
  2. If you want to love (or even like) something, you have to take the time to really get to know it
  3. The depth of your love for something (or someone) may be limited by the depth of your understanding or knowledge of them

So in the context of visiting new cities, I think that it’s important that I put a lot of effort into understand how it works and exploring everything.

Perhaps I’ve always understood this on some level, and that’s why I’ve always prioritized meeting people and building those relationships over doing touristy stuff when I travel, which I perceive as being superficial and not great for really getting to know a place.

But I think it certainly applies to relationships as well.

You can’t truly love someone you just met. You have to really get to know them first.

And then to really get to know them, you have to pay close attention and really see them.

I have a friend that is incredible at just noticing what makes people special. I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before. But if you ask him about any of his friends, he’s always ready with, “What I love about this friend” and then will follow up with the perfect story demonstrating what he means.

I’ve had him tell stories like that about me, and oftentimes it’s not even something I remember. To me it wasn’t important. But he noticed.

And that comes off as love.

You should always be looking for these things in other people. I’m sure I’ll never reach the level that he is able to do it, but I strive to really pay attention to others and notice what makes them special.

I’m sure these general concepts apply to a lot of things. This is really just the underlying concept.

But I want to keep this in mind and look for more examples of it in the world.

 

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People Who are Struggling at Least Have a Clear Sense of Purpose

This is sort of a weird thought with possibly no discernable value, but still interesting to think through.

People who are really, truly struggling just to live – like people who can’t even afford to buy food or shelter or those in war – have a very clear sense of purpose: survival.

Coming from a first-world country and a middle-class family, I’ve never had to worry about whether or not I’d have food to eat or proper shelter (although much of my childhood was spent in a home that would aggressively leak water from the ceiling when it rained).

When you come from that, the possibilities are endless. I’m guaranteed to have food and shelter, so then… What exactly is my purpose?

Obviously I’m not the first person to question this. Watch any movie from pre-9/11 America and the themes always involve a lack of purpose and rebellion against consumerism since, seemingly, those were the biggest problems facing all Americans at the time.

It’s incredibly silly, but a part of me envies that level of clarity in purpose. You don’t have to question your motivations for anything, you may not have to think long-term because you’re only focusing on surviving another day.

Now obviously, I’m romanticizing a terrible situation and I absolutely do not want any of that. And while I’m describing it as “freedom from the burden of unclear purpose,” it could more accurately described as “not having the privilege of choosing a purpose.”

I’m not a psychologist, but I assume that this envy of that component of things just comes from a more general unease. With unlimited options, I don’t feel like my environment pushes me towards anything.

I think many of us are now faced with the timeless question of, “what do I do with my life?”

I’m not sure we evolved to be equipped to answer that question. And it causes problems.

Part of me thinks that’s the real reason people still have kids. When you care for another life, you feel like you have purpose.

And from what I’ve read, parents are actually less happy than childless individuals, but they do feel more fulfilled. Maybe that purposeless void gets filled for them.

Maybe just having someone that needs you quiets that unsettled part of your mind that’s overwhelmed with a level of opportunity it isn’t equipped to comprehend.

I feel like I know people who are totally content to just be, and I envy them, too (to an extent). They just enjoy what they have and don’t seem to be bothered by any perceived lack of purpose in their life.

I think I’m someone who needs to have some kind of purpose. I need to be working towards something. But as my stretch goals and dreams have slowly become reality, I guess I find myself feeling a little aimless.

I was under no illusions that meeting goals would solve all my problems or suddenly make me fulfilled.

But perhaps I wasn’t fully prepared for what it would feel like to not have a lot of tangible goals left.

Sure, I have financial goals and some personal goals, but whereas in the past I felt like I was seeking an entire “life” that I didn’t know, I now sort of feel like… I have that life.

And like… It’s cool. But what now?

Where do I go from here?

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I’m Constantly Judging Experiences Which Lessens my Enjoyment

This an extension of a thought I had recently which was that I am way too focused on my own enjoyment of things instead of just enjoying them for what they are.

This new thought is related and very similar but distinct.

When I watch a show or read a book or experience just about anything, I feel like I’m still judging it. If I think something is corny, I’ll think about that and judge it. If I think it’s unoriginal or just bad, that’s what I’m thinking about.

And I think the underlying problem is that I’m not allowing myself to be fully invested in it. How can I get lost in an experience if I’m too caught up in my own experience to really enjoy it?

I’ve really been enjoying reading fiction books in Spanish for a while, and to a lesser extent, TV shows as well. And it took me this long to realize that I think it’s because I’m not judging anything.

I’m not asking it to be anything for me. It doesn’t have to be deep, or meaningful, or exciting, or thought-provoking. I only need it to be in Spanish.

And as such, I become much more immersed because I’m not judging it at all. I don’t care how “good” it is or any of the rest. Even if it’s terrible, I’ll still get my Spanish practice in.

As I’m writing this, I realize that this concept is extremely similar to one I noted years ago when I switched from dating with the intention of finding “the one” to dating more casually without any preconceived notions of where it would go.

I found myself enjoying it a lot more and able to just enjoy the other person.

In a regular relationship, I feel like there are all these expectations and you’re always searching for things you don’t like about the other person so you can ask the terrible question, “could I live with this forever?”

Now, I fully acknowledge that this mindset is problematic even if marriage is what you’re after. But I think it’s what pretty much everyone does. I would hope they’d realize this about themselves or, at the very least, stop asking questions like that and at some point simply accept their partner fully along with all their flaws.

But when I wasn’t dating with marriage as the “purpose”, things got a lot simpler.

I became far more patient of things that I didn’t like or would have deemed “incompatible” in the past. Because in the end, what does it matter? Nobody is perfect. And I probably wouldn’t have to deal with that problem forever since we won’t be getting married.

Once again, there is probably more to dig into there and my general attitude could certainly have been improved, but the important thing is the mindset shift.

Instead of focusing either on how the other person made ME feel or some nebulous concept of the future, I became someone who was able to just enjoy the company of another person without judgement.

To finally take the focus off of myself, and focus on someone else.

In my experience, it generally solves or even prevents almost all petty fights or even times where you’re just kind of annoyed at the other person. I learned that many (most?) of those are really just a judgement about the way the other person is. And that the thing they are doing, in isolation, isn’t even the problem.

It’s that the thing represents how they are, and the belief that this thing will keep happening over and over again.

Bringing it back to the original discussion at hand: it involves a shift from focusing on myself to focusing on external things.

I think that, as long as you maintain some level of focus on yourself and how you are feeling, you can never be truly invested in anything around you.

This means movies won’t be as exciting or moving, books won’t transport you to another world, and you’ll never fully enjoy the company of those around you.

Perhaps this is part of the appeal of some drugs; in particular: alcohol. Probably by way of simply decreasing the bandwidth of your brain (i.e. making you too stupid to focus on more than one thing at a time), you can stop focusing on yourself and instead focus entirely on something (or someone) external.

This could allow you to invest in and enjoy things much more.

I’m not entirely sure this is actually true but it seems plausible, at the very least.

I have heard that psychedelics completely dissolve the ego. This may allow you to completely immerse yourself in external things. I know this sounds counter-intuitive since they are usually used to go deeply inward and rework how your brain works.

But if you think about it, they seem to do it from a sort of third-party state. Like you’re looking in as a neutral party.

I’ve heard anecdotally that watching movies or playing video games, for example, is a pretty wild experience because it’s like you are in them. You become so invested that you truly experience everything as if it were real.

Which seems to lend credence to the idea that if you can just turn off the self-focus, you can become much more invested in everything around you and, hopefully, enjoy it a lot more.

And I think that I have increasingly lost the ability to do that and need to put in active work to get it back.

In general, I think I just sort of need to focus less on myself.

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What if my Waning Enjoyment of Most Things Exists to Force Me to do More Important Things?

I’m not sure how much I’ve documented this here, but I feel like, in general, my enjoyment of most of the things I used to love has decreased considerably. In particular, simple entertainment type activities like watching TV or movies or even listening to music is not nearly as enjoyable as it once was.

It could be that there’s something wrong, it could be it’s just part of getting older, or it could be something else entirely.

It’s possible that I have no ability to control it. And if that’s the case, then it doesn’t make much sense to dwell on it.

But there are some things that give me a sort of quiet satisfaction that I enjoy and keeps me coming back.

As it just so happens, most of those things are also good for me.

Things like studying or learning new skill or activities continue to be enjoyable to me and, over time, seem to be what I crave more than anything else.

Reading in general, but more specifically reading in Spanish is something I really like doing and appreciate more and more over time.

I still love all kinds of physical activity like disc golf, working out, and even just walking around my neighborhood. These leave me feeling good and productive.

And it’s satisfying in work when I accomplish things that progress my long-term goals. I maybe don’t enjoy all the day-to-day at every moment (and nobody does), but when I’m working on things that could lead to exponential growth and outsized results, I feel pretty good about that.

In general, it’s really just passive consumption of entertainment that I don’t enjoy as much.

And now that I’m taking a step back and thinking about it… I think that might be a good thing.

Why am I lamenting so much the loss of enjoyment of things that don’t bring a particularly high degree of value?

Maybe I’m not enjoying them as much because I know I have better things to be doing. Maybe I should lean into it and just only do these better things.

After all, they are better for me anyway.

So rather than fight it, I should probably just double-down on the productive and healthy things that make me feel good.