This is the ninth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. life is a pen, not a pencil you can scrape over the words, obscure them or embellish them but you can’t take them back there are so many things I want to tell you but I hold back, hoping to leave the page unscathed...
This is the eighth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. Managing social media use is ultimately about managing emotions. I’ve written about emotions before, so for this post I’ll just be sharing the specific tools and strategies I use to manage my social media consumption. Custom CSS is your friend I usually go to a given social media app for one of two reasons: to accomplish a certain action (e....
This is the seventh post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. Sometimes I catch up with friends I haven’t talked to in a few years and they go woah, since when were you into psychology? And the answer is: forever, kinda. When I was in middle school my teacher asked the class to write an essay to answer the question “what is your favorite subject?...
This is the sixth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. I am once again confused about existential risk to humanity due to AGI. My position on this has shifted back and forth many times, although for the most part I’ve resisted becoming a full-on doomer. In this post I’ll outline how I currently think about the issue, and why I’m not panicking about it (yet)....
This is the fifth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. Not enough people appreciate the art of skillful listening. This is unfortunate because we would all have a much easier time dealing with our problems if we were surrounded with good listeners. The advice below is what I’ve learned from my experience coaching and just helping my friends with their problems....
This is the fourth post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, subscribe to my Substack. I wrote a few days ago that to write well, I’ll have to be brutally honest with you. So here’s some honesty: I spent two hours writing two different drafts for today’s piece, and then I decided that today’s not the day for either of them....
This is the third post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox and support my writing, subscribe to my Substack. Everyone with ambition has a life that they dream of. Maybe you dream of being an artist in New York, or a serial entrepreneur, or the member of a niche internet social club. I have many such dreams, and for the first time in a while I’m wholeheartedly pursuing them....
This is the second post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, you can subscribe to my Substack. It’s quite late in the night, but I feel excited about the fact that I’m actually writing and publishing something for the second day in a row. I have a feeling that many of these posts will be about writing itself, which I’m always hesitant to talk about, because I have an implicit belief that writing about writing is boring and self-indulgent....
I’m trying out an experiment where I write and publish every day for the month of April. This is the first post. I’m doing this for a few reasons. First, I want to get back to enjoying writing more, and I can only do that if I overcome some of my fears around it. Fears of writing? you might ask, what fears do you have if you’ve already been writing for two years?...
Below I’ve copied over rough notes on my psychology research as of mid-March. I’ve written it to be fairly readable, so I’ve avoided use of jargon wherever I can. therapy is this interesting profession where, in the course of merely having a conversation with somebody, you change things in their brain, in an occasionally dramatic fashion. Bruce Ecker and others propose the idea that memory reconsolidation is the common mechanism that underlies all the various mechanisms of therapy that exists....