By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2
This is the third of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the first, second, fourth, and fifth parts (though the links won’t work until those other essays are released).
Sometimes, people take an important value - maybe their most important value - and decide to prioritize it above all other things. They neglect or ignore their other values in the process. In ...
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self-care
How can you help friends or family members who are struggling with a mental health challenge?
I've noticed that it's quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it's also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations.
With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here's a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is ...
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Why “nature plus nurture” is sometimes the wrong way to think
It's common to try to explain things as either due to nature OR nurture.
Or, at best, we say: some percentage of the variation in outcome is due to genes, and some percentage is due to the environment. It's important to remember, though, that outcomes can be a complex interaction between the two.
Consider this:
Our genetically-influenced traits impact what environments we seek out and find ourselves in.
For instance, risk-taking seems to have moderate heritability, and it in...
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Intersecting advice from highly successful people
It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...
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The Fourier transform of happiness
H/T to Robert Paul Chase for the title. (For those who don't know, this is a reference to Fourier analysis.)
Your happiness, like the level of the ocean, is caused by a superposition of waves of different frequencies. Each operates on a distinct scale - they sum up to determine your well-being at any given point in life. Each wave tends to oscillate around its mean or neutral point (except for the slowest waves, which take your whole life to unfold). One useful way to think about becoming ha...
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Dealing with damage before it wrecks you
Written: July 5, 2020 | Released: August 6, 2020
Many of the hard-to-replace things in life accumulate damage as time passes. It's critical to learn to detect and improve damage before these things fall apart. This requires a combination of vigilance (noticing the damage before it is really bad or even irreversible) and continually using effective strategies to repair what's broken. A car will accumulate damage over time, but even if you don't take good care of it, you can get a new one even...
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