The compulsion to check the midterm results has been strong. But I see it clearly. The compulsion is not a desire to understand the world better or to appreciate the complexity of governing and lawmaking. No. It is simply a desire to check the score, to be entertained and, possibly, validated. I’m not craving deep knowledge; knowledge is hard, and few crave that which is hard. I crave what is easy. By not giving in, though, cravings subside and I can more easily allocate my time in ways my future-self will celebrate.

The answer is always 2-5 years younger than the person actually thinks: nobody is trying to get this answer precisely correct.

But why would you want to when help will make you better?

You don’t need others to survive or even to thrive; you need them to maximally thrive.

Why not take every edge you can? Especially considering that those edges were created by you: nobody would be there to help if you had not done something right such that they want to help.

Be honest AF.

Go hard AF.

All the sexually aggressive content – from ads to songs – allow us to pretend that the whole enterprise isn’t rather quite daunting. In a similar way that celebrity depictions play on our wishes that life could be free from suffering (but just make us feel worse about our actual lives), sex ubiquitousness permits belief that there’s a state where sexual nervousness and fears and inadequacies don’t exist (but just make us dislike ourselves more for not being in said state).

The answer, as always, is to speak honestly. The result, as usually, is discovering that you’re less unique than you think.

Give yourself permission to not compete.

of boredom, of quiet: don’t ever check your phone on an elevator.

generally do not.

Something close to 100% of romantic comedies would be DOA without a protagonist telling a dumb lie. By dumb, I mean a lie that will clearly, obviously, certainly be revealed in time. A lie that people may bizarrely utter, but which they can quickly undo: Don’t know why I said that. Sorry. I am in a relationship. 

I can appreciate not revealing secrets under the belief that with more time together you’ll be insulated from the downside that’s present on date one – get a partner to the “sunk cost” phase for increased safety. But this doesn’t work with outright lies. Quite the opposite, actually. The more time that goes on, the more appalling the lie. So that whole year you were actually… is far more damning than So that whole week you were actually…

Stress and anxiety can be mighty tough opponents with no clear answers. That’s not the case in romantic comedy lies: as quickly as possible, tell the truth to both increase the chance of relationship success and of your own tranquility.

Congratulations! Not an easy thing to do. But if you are simply jumping from one “certain” view to another, I fear you haven’t learned the most important point: your certainty was clearly misguided before, not solely because the idea was wrong but because you are flawed and susceptible to a type of black/white thinking that places you and your ilk (you never truly have a unique thought) as wise carriers of truth in a world where such a thing doesn’t actually exist.

And yet you think you’ve done it again! Somehow admitting being so terribly wrong did so very little to deflate the confidence in your own thinking. Which, ok, I buy that your thinking can get better over time, that you are more likely to, say, fall for a sending-money-from-Africa-please-oh-please-help-me-out scam as a teen, but you didn’t fall for a scam or a dumb idea merely because you were young or naive or poorly read; no, you fell for it because there is something within you that craves knowing the “secret” truth, to having it all figured out, to being in on something big or cool or smart or whatever. Until you realize this and are actually humbled in way where you absorb some real complicity, you’ll bounce around always sure you are better than people who, deep down, aren’t thinking all that differently from you, despite wildly different conclusions.