Unstimulated boredom causes motivation (veritasium). We are unnaturally unmotivated because we are unnaturally starved of the more pure forms of boredom.

The days are long but the half-decades are short.

Write down your insights; You will forget a lot of them.

Seemingly bad oral hygiene can surprisingly be entirely due to having too dry a mouth. Endurance exercise is a risk factor. Brushing your tongue a few times a day helps a lot. Chewing sugar free gum like Pur to induce salivation helps, especially after eating. hyperbiotics PRO-Dental tablets seem to work great at helping the right bacteria.

People born with high natural curiosity see their intelligence snowball around that fact. Can we increase intelligence indirectly by amping curiosity somehow?

We think we're trying to achieve objectives in the outside world, but we're really mostly trying to achieve certain inner states.

Greed isn’t wanting lots of money - it’s going negative-sum to get it.

Teeth naturally drift straighter or less straight depending on how tense the body is.

A lot of mild facial asymmetry is caused by physical and mental tension, which are caused by noema (inexplicit beliefs and such).

Meditation improves posture in general.

Don’t try to consciously improve your posture; It’s not just ineffective but counterproductive because it causes you to Self more aggressively.

Augment your toilet with a bidet.

Some foods/“chemicals” affect mood and mental clarity for some people, often by causing inflammation. Dairy, PUFA overload, and salicylates for me. Noema seem to matter a lot here, so the effects are in principle mutable.

The earlier I first eat carbs in the day the earlier I get tired that night. If I’m keto I can’t sleep.

Fat makes you skinny. Avocados, pure olive oil, and fatty fish are maybe the healthiest foods. Maybe - PUFA concerns with the fish.

Sleep timing affects sleep phase ratios and thus sleep quality. Sleeping 10-6 is probably better than 1-9.

No-fap is well worth trying.

There are sex differences in mental traits in humans (statistical, obviously) especially in attitudes towards sex and romance. These are well explained and predicted by differential parental investment theory. Being aware that males and females come programmed (mutably, in the limit) with different noema especially about sex increases cross-sex understanding and empathy.

Love needs to be disambiguated. There’s companionate love and there’s romantic love . I suspect in the future there will be increasing openness to treating these as separate relationship roles. Type 1 vs type 2 love.

Rich people need to think about money less so they’re happier bc to the unenlightened person self-referential thoughts entail suffering. Rich people aren’t that much happier though bc there’s plenty of other stuff to think about.

When you’ve always been poor you can maintain the false hope you’ll be a dramatically more satisfied once you have money.

Compare and despair.

Relish the adequacy and functionality of things you already have.

Your body wants ideal posture, but it’s confused by modernity.

Vitamin supplements can deplete complementary vitamins explaining why they can sometimes be net harmful.

Artists’ block means your standards are too high.

Capablanca on chess: Begin by studying the endgame.

Monotask.

Don’t self-coerce too much: You might be wrong in wanting to do less/more of something.

Burning out on a vice helps you internalize its harm and futility.

Rule #1 of Longevity: Don’t get hurt. (Peter Attia)

Unconscious incompetence -> conscious incompetence -> conscious competence -> unconscious competence

Major in the major; Minor in the minor.

Check your teeth after you eat.

Check for lip hair and nose hair. Also there can be long hairs on the edges of your ears. Also check your tongue for white stuff - brush it.

Wakefulness evolved from a sleepy world. Wakefulness is such an intense, unsustainable state it entails low-level brain damage. Sleep is important.

Ugly is closer to beauty than boring, maybe.

Lots of task-switching is probably bad.

Alcohol causes inflammation and reduces sleep quality; Only partake when worth it.

To better align incentives turn single interactions into a sequence of interactions.

Focus on raising your baseline level of happiness not on increasing the frequency of spikes in happiness.

Distraction is suffering.

Your obsession is your advantage.

Know a little about everything and a lot about something. But really, don’t worry about it too much: Learn what you want to learn at that moment.

Don’t eat dry cake.

The world is perfect in that it could not be any better (or any worse).

Don’t skate to where the puck is.

Distraction is a fleeting reprieve.

It’s okay to be mediocre at stuff.

Blue light blocking glasses do seem to reduce eye strain when reading from a screen.

Dreams sneak up on you.