It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end.
It’s a similar story with my two sisters. After living in a house with them for 10 and 13 years respectively, I now live across the country from both of them and spend maybe 15 days with each of them a year. Hopefully, that leaves us with about 15% of our total hangout time left.
The same often goes for old friends. In high school, I sat around playing hearts with the same four guys about five days a week. In four years, we probably racked up 700 group hangouts. Now, scattered around the country with totally different lives and schedules, the five of us are in the same room at the same time probably 10 days each decade. The group is in its final 7%.
So what do we do with this information?
Setting aside my secret hope that technological advances will let me live to 700, I see three takeaways here:
Living in the same place as the people you love matters. I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by you—not by unconscious inertia.
Quality time matters. If you’re in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when you’re with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
Clipping
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web > The tail end of time with loved ones
[https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html]
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web > Art careers are overhyped to children
[https://juliawise.net/some-careers-are-overhyped-to-children/]
This isn’t to say the arts aren’t valuable! But I think much of their value is in doing them for fun, not trying to make a paying career out of them. When I first met Jeff it seemed possible he’d want to be a professional musician. When I look at his friends who have gone that route — on the road a lot, stressed about money — I’m glad that he’s done it as a part-time thing.
I expect to give our kids a message like: Follow your dreams to some degree, but be realistic about the student debt on your modern dance studies and what kind of life the typical dance major has at age 30. I’ll give you a hint, it does not involve full-time work as a dancer. If you end up with a job that doesn’t make you tear your hair out, and that pays enough for you to do other things you want to do, that’s a good outcome! Even better if you can do something that’s especially valuable for the world, too.
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web > Ketamine as a lubricant for stuck priors
[https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2023-08-01-ketamine.html]
The Bayesian brain is constantly working to update its priors in order to make better predictions, thus minimising prediction errors – but sometimes priors get stuck. For instance, someone who was raised in a high-conflict environment might remain paralysed by social anxiety in adult life, even if their life is now conflict-free. So, how does ketamine help with this kind of thing? Ketamine may be regarded as an all-purpose lubricant for stuck priors.
When I first began experimenting with ketamine, I did not intend use it for therapeutic purposes – it just sort of happened spontaneously. During recreational use, I found myself able to step out of a wide array of reflexive, maladaptive behavioural patterns. I also found that uncomfortable or emotional topics were much easier to think about and openly discuss – because I wasn’t reflexively cringing at myself, or clenching upon fixations – and I eventually carried this over into more deliberately constructed but still fairly informal one-on-one counseling sessions with a trusted friend.
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web > Anxiety and weed
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36948697]
Yes it’s similar for me. It’s strange because before I used to get very anxious when stoned and it was a generally unpleasant time.
But then I spent one year at home getting stoned and playing competitive video game Dota 2. And doing that seemed to melt my anxiety away. I learned how to be confident in my thoughts and perceptions under an alternate state of mind. The proof was winning a a match or seeing some strategy of mine pan out. And I learned when to ignore others and not let their thoughts influence me. I learned how to live in the present.
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web > Protect your kids from irreparable harm
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36911091]
The way I explain this is, “my job is not to protect my kids from harm, it’s to protect them from irreparable harm.”
I’ve had this instinct whenever my kids are on the jungle gym to say, “slow down!” “That’s too high!” etc. but I usually catch myself and think, “if they fall is it a cry or a hospital visit?”
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web > Independently wealth musicians
[https://klangmag.co/lifers-dayjobbers-and-the-independently-wealthy-a-letter-to-a-former-student/]
Look at your favorite artists, alive or dead, the ones who you have always aspired to be as a professional. Chances are they have had one of three types of musical careers. Every professional musician I’ve met has fallen into one of these macro categories. I know it seems like an overgeneralization, but it continues to prove itself to be tried and true in my experience, so just hear me out.
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Independently Wealthy Artists: These artists come from affluent backgrounds, allowing them to focus on their craft without worrying about financial pressures. They have time to practice, create, and perform because their financial stability is often supported by family wealth. This privilege gives them a significant advantage, but Max acknowledges that while they may produce excellent work, their experience isn’t representative of the average artist.
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Lifers: Lifers are artists who dedicate their entire lives to making a living from their art, often struggling financially and working tirelessly. They perform, tour, and release music constantly to survive, but this lifestyle is particularly difficult in the modern world of streaming platforms, which pay little. Lifers face ongoing challenges, especially in big cities where living costs are high, but they are driven by their passion for their art.
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Dayjobbers: These artists balance their artistic pursuits with a steady job outside of the arts, providing financial stability. Max encourages Billy, who is considering this path, not to view it as a failure. Instead, he sees it as a practical approach that allows artists to sustain their creative practices while ensuring peace of mind. Many famous artists, like Philip Glass and John Cage, had day jobs to support themselves while they created.
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web > A religion of one
[https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2023-06-20-17:00.html]
One of the subjects that always comes out flat is that I practice a sort of religion. We’re a congregation of one person (me) and not that interested in converts.
Whenever I try to explain it, it comes out sounding like either a joke or some very dry philosophy. Honestly it started out that way. But this matters to me, at quite a personal level, even if I don’t know how to show it.
The joke version goes thus: I believe in a supreme being, in that I think beinghood is closed under union, thus the set of all beings has a superema (a maximal element).
I didn’t say it was a funny joke.
(Technical nitpick: Beings are actually closed under interaction, not union. As a result this gets tricky when you bring relativity into the picture. Don’t worry about this.)
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web > Adult stage theory
[https://meaningness.com/misunderstanding-stage-theory]
Lagging emotional and interpersonal development is common among the STEM-educated. STEM education teaches you systematic cognition, i.e. rationality. Unfortunately, it doesn’t teach you how to systematize your emotions and relationships. It’s common for the STEM-educated to explicitly denigrate and ignore those domains as inherently irrational. Those who say “I skipped stage 3,” meaning actually “I am emotionally and interpersonally underdeveloped,” are often smug or defiant about it. STEM education may produce a quasi-religious identification of the self with rationality: rationalism.
https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
Stage/Mode 3: Communal 4: Systematic 5: Fluid Objects Egocentric desires Relationships Systems Subject Relationships System of principles and projects Meaning-making Relationships Symmetrical, unstructured Asymmetrical, formal roles Meta-systematic Ethics Compassion, consensus Procedural justice, responsibility, principles Nebulous yet patterned; collaborative improvisation Epistemology Can put oneself in other’s shoes Can take perspective of structured social system Can relate systems to each other -
web > Warriors and scholars
“The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” — Thucydides
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web > Post-rationalism (rational magic)
[https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic]
You might call it the postrationalist turn: a cultural shift in both relatively ‘normie’ and hyper-weird online spaces. Whether you call it spiritual hunger, reactionary atavism, or postliberal epistemology, more and more young, intellectually inclined, and politically heterodox thinkers (and would-be thinkers) are showing disillusionment with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy. They see this combination as having contributed to the fundamentally alienating character of modern Western life. The chipper, distinctly liberal optimism of rationalist culture that defines so much of Silicon Valley ideology — that intelligent people, using the right epistemic tools, can think better, and save the world by doing so — is giving way, not to pessimism, exactly, but to a kind of techno-apocalypticism. We’ve run up against the limits — political, cultural, and social alike — of our civilizational progression; and something newer, weirder, maybe even a little more exciting, has to take its place. Some of what we’ve lost — a sense of wonder, say, or the transcendent — must be restored.