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All my decisions, be it professional or personal, come from annoyance.
I practice annoyance-driven work, annoyance-driven decision-making, annoyance-driven life.
It’s a very negative perspective and I wonder if I could practice something else.
On the positive side, it has worked pretty nicely for me thus far.
Reminder to myself that physical work is not physical training.
Digging out a trench is tiring, but it’s not a calisthenics session.
Hauling wood from one end of the property to another is tiring, but it’s not a deadlift session.
Having a bunch of physical work in the backlog, doing some of it, and thinking “oh, I’ve trained today” is not actually training.
You got tired, you did some useful work, but you did NOT train.
Cynicism is cowardice, but cynicism is also a powerful tool to help you not accept things at face value.
If you’re cynical about a company selling you their mission, this allows you to peer through and see the actual dynamics; who’s calling the shots, and why.
If you’re cynical about anything and anybody, that makes it much more difficult to deceive you.
As with most things, it’s the dose that makes the poison. If you hide behind cynicism and use it to be cool: then yes, cynicism is cowardice. But if you are cynical, but still truth-seeking, committed to a moral framework, mostly earnest, then that’s good.
If I didn’t have to work for a living, I would do politics and activism.
Politics: most likely local politics, improving the urban planning, making my city not shitty. And then likely some country-wide politics.
Activism: I would, somehow, participate in the effort to fight against authoritarianism and state overreach. I like the idea of creating independent ISPs for the public good. Or tunnels for everyone! The internet should be free - as in, free movement.
I actually enjoy some chores, some physical labor, some maintenance tasks. There’s an overlap between:
This overlap is under-appreciated.
You shouldn’t really do “radical honesty” in the sense of actually telling people exactly what you’re feeling all the time. I think you should probably avoid lying, even white lies, but you should be very selective, very secretive, about what you are sharing and who you are sharing it with. Even people you care about shouldn’t know everything there is to know about you. You never want to be a completely open book. You want to have some obscure paragraphs, things that require some thought, things that require some wrestling with the material. To propose complete and radical openness is naive at best, and deceptive at worst.
Two people, A and B, may have apparently different levels of “work ethic”, but will in fact have the exact same absolute amount, but only allocate it differently. Person A will put near a 100% towards a job and will be perceived as a “hardcore” worker. Person B will limit the allocation to a much smaller fraction, and will be perceived as normal. Bosses will want A more than B, but doing A only makes sense if your upside is not limited (which it is in most cases). If you are an entrepreneur, your upside is almost unlimited, but if you’re an employee, your upside is almost by definition limited, therefore it makes sense to limit the allocation.
Claude is getting a little bit stupid with probabilities. I think I’ve started believing the LLM a little too much, and have started forgetting how dumb they actually are. It’s not exactly an autocomplete, but it’s not a reasoning machine. To be fair, most people aren’t either. But at least you can have some reasoning episodes, and the LLM cannot (at least still cannot).
Discipline equals freedom. Except for those things where you should actually stop doing the thing because you obviously don’t want to be doing the thing.
And except for those things where there’s a systemic pressure which you cannot overcome through sheer force of discipline.
And except for those things where luck is the most dominant factor.
And except for those things where you can only invest discipline in a small subset of things, none of which will perform the macro changes necessary for your desired change in life.
But yeah, discipline equals freedom in all other situations.
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First entry. I want to have a short-form journal in addition to my main posts.