hoorayimhelping
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
How is that a good thing?
Humans have limited attention and time, so most of us don't like to waste them on bad things. Human artistic history is suvivorship in practice. The best things rise to the top and are kept, and the worst fall away. This is a natural mechanism that produces a shared culture of good things. When everything is good, nothing is, which is exactly the place we find ourselves now.
Not everybody gets to be an astronaut when they grow up. Our culture celebrates mediocrity because we're afraid of the implications that certain people are naturally better than others. The result is we have no more heroes or aspirations, and computers can fix lack of talent and lack of effort at improvement.
This is a silly and short-sighted blanket statement. People used to love getting catalogs, which are just big books full of ads. In the right context, people appreciate being informed of products that can help improve their lives.
Example: Valve in the early 2000s before or as they were building Steam to challenge the video game publisher model. 20 years on and Valve is still printing money, while Sierra Online doesn't exist.
This is a poor justification for making something illegal. Chocolate and cocaine operate on the same neural pathways, but one is clearly more detrimental than the other. Following this reasoning, we should ban chocolate, and being able to see comment scores on hacker news, and like counts on Instagram photos, and reach on Twitter, and retirement account balances because they produce the same effects in the brain as illegal drugs do.
This is a self-defeating statement. It's false on its face. If there is no such thing as truth, then this statement can't be true because it would mean there is at least one truth.
What worked for me instead of medication:
- Get on a sleep and wake schedule that follows natural sunlight. Try to wake up soon before or right around the time the sun comes up. Plan backwards on when to go to sleep to get the proper amount of sleep you need (I almost always wake up six and a half hours after falling asleep with no alarm, whether I want to sleep in or not), so I usually go to sleep around 11:30 to wake up at 6:00 AM.
- Get on a meal schedule. Whether it's 3 meals or 5 or 6 meals, eat them around the same time, every day. No more skipping lunch, or working through lunch then eating it at 3:00 PM.
- Eat some kind of protein and fat for breakfast. Don't eat breakfast made of sugary carbs (like bread or cereal). Eggs and a breakfast meat are really good. Steel-cut oatmeal cooked in a rice cooker and eaten with peanut butter and fresh fruit is also very good.
- Workout regularly. I lift weights in the moring 4x a week, and I'm on a program that uses progressive overload, meaning I'm making continuous (but slow at this point) progress. Having a goal that improves yourself is the key here.
- Spend time away from your phone and computer outside. Hiking, birding, fishing, surfing, hunting, etc. Do something that takes you out of your four walls and puts you into a place with plants and animals, and do it regularly.
- Pay attention to your behavior. Be wary of getting into a hyper focused flow for hours where you ignore everything else (like lunch). Similarly, pay attention when you find yourself bouncing around. Becoming aware of when you're doing this is a big step to breaking the habit and forcing yourself to focus or take a break. I'm not saying getting into a state of flow is bad, I'm saying staying in a state of flow for hours on end where you ignore everything else isn't healthy or sustainable.
The concept that time is relative to the observer is where the theory of relativity gets its name from.
Orbit is when an object is traveling so fast that it reaches the horizon of a body before the body's gravity can pull it down to the surface, but perpetually. It's basically perpetually falling around the body. Imagine one of those guys in a wingsuit skimming along the surface of a mountain, never actually touching the surface. It's similar to that, but at a much higher scale.