On my left ribs, I have a too-big tattoo of text from my favorite book, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: “busy, busy, busy.” In the book, the quote continues: “... is what … we whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.” The lesson is: Don’t be so sure you know how any of this works.

At the auspicious age of 42, life keeps surprising me by revealing that my most basic beliefs are wrong. Like: distance = rate x time. It turns out that more time doing does not necessarily lead to better results.

I’ve slowly gotten better at recognizing this faulty logic in certain domains, but the pattern repeats across time scales and activities. More isn’t more. More is actually less.

When I went on sabbatical toward the end of last year, I was excited by the prospect of finally getting time to “work on myself.” Writing a lot alongside an intense job had left little time for anything else in 2025, and as a result I had a sense that I was failing to progress in some critical dimension. At long last, I would have the chance to catch up to the person I wanted to be!

I’d been running a longform reading debt all year, so I set about attacking it. Audiobooks on 2x speed. Two books a week. Podcasts crammed into the gaps. I downloaded one of those speed-reading apps that shows you a blur of individual words to plow through my Substack backlog.

It sort of worked, in the sense that the pile got shorter, and the scratchy strain of looking at certain folders on my computer diminished. But behind it I had a nagging sense that I wasn’t actually getting anywhere. There are always more books. The list refills twice as fast as I can empty it. And I wasn’t absorbing a whole lot of what I was reading — I’d finish a book and, a week later, struggle to articulate what it was about beyond a sentence or two. I was processing so many words per week — how could it be that I was hardly learning anything at all?

Slowly, I realized I was working with the wrong mental metaphor. I’d been treating my brain like a hard drive: Transfer the file, and it’s there. But that’s not how it works at all, not even close. Learning is more like digestion. You don’t absorb more nutrition by eating faster. Past a certain rate, you just stop digesting, and the food you’re cramming in isn’t feeding you, it’s just passing through. The real nutritive work — the part that actually makes you stronger — happens after you stop eating, over hours, invisibly. And you can’t speed it up by eating more.

Ideas work the same way. They have to be broken down, recombined with things you already know, connected to something you’ve experienced. That process runs on downtime — walks, showers, sleep, staring out windows. Cramming more in doesn’t help. It’s eating another meal before you’ve digested the last one.

I think I can count on two hands the number of important ideas I’ve discovered via podcasts, spread across hundreds of hours of listening. The ROI is terrible. Meanwhile, when I’m short on ideas for posts, the thing that always works is a hot yoga class. Ninety minutes in a room with no phone. I can’t stop myself from having ideas in that environment, and not being able to write them down means I’m automatically selecting for the two or three good enough to remember afterward. The rest evaporate, which is fine — distance gives you perspective on which ideas are worth keeping.

The bottleneck, it turns out, was never how fast I could take in information. It was always how much time I gave myself to do something with it.

But, the pattern repeats: Discovering this doesn’t mean I’ve internalized it. I keep finding new areas of my life where the pressure to optimize is sabotaging the thing I'm attempting to improve.

I recently did a week-long meditation retreat with Jhourney, which teaches meditation novices how to reach the jhanas — eight states of meditative absorption that range in quality from rapture and bliss to increasingly refined and subtle states of equanimity and pure awareness. The Jhourney method, in a nutshell: Bring an openhearted feeling — love, serenity, joy — into awareness, then progressively expand and relax into your enjoyment until the experience loops on itself (enjoyment becomes enjoying the enjoyment becomes …) and you experience an emotional phase change, the “opposite of a panic attack.”

Part of Jhourney’s pedagogy is the idea that “you don’t know how to relax,” but I was pretty sure I did. I’d lie down, carefully scan my body-mind for any instance of tension, and release it. Welcome errant thoughts, let them go. Run a little shutdown sequence in my brain until everything was quiet.

I did this for six days and, while I had a wonderful and transformative time for other reasons, I didn’t achieve jhana on the retreat.

Jhourney advises you to choose a “scaffold” — a reliably pleasant experience that invokes the openhearted feeling you’re trying to use as a flint for the first jhana. I chose giving my cat, Nixie, a belly rub, because it so consistently makes me happy. At the retreat, I’d sink into that feeling, and sometimes it would throw off sparks, but no fire.

I properly gave up for the last 24 hours of the retreat and stayed in my room binge-reading a book (Ra by QNTM, I recommend). I was happy, when we finally came home, to flop on my bed with the real Nixie as she, purring, practically turned herself inside out looking for the position of maximum belly-exposure. After 10 minutes of that, my attention started to turn back toward finishing my book, but I thought, no, this is nice just the way it is — and slipped into the first jhana.

In retrospect, what went wrong at the retreat was the same thing that went wrong with my reading binge, it was just the pattern repeating at a deeper level. The part of me doing the scanning and releasing — the monitoring layer, the internal project manager — was the thing that actually needed to go offline. Rather than relaxing in the relevant sense, I was using my optimization machinery to simulate relaxation at a very convincing level of fidelity while the machinery itself hummed along at full speed.

When I did finally relax, it was less like “going in the same direction, but farther,” the way I’d been imagining it, and more like moving along a different axis entirely, perpendicular to the one I knew about. Like discovering a new spatial dimension by executing some incomprehensible maneuver that you can only describe as a “turn, but different.” From an optimizer’s lens, the benefits of shutting off the optimization machine are literally inconceivable.

And if your optimizing machine is still humming along, even if you are doing rest-like activities, you are not truly resting. Reading The Power Broker in your spare time, not because you are genuinely interested, but because you can’t bear to be the only person at your SF dinner party who hasn’t? Still optimizing. Cooking the most impressive dinner possible for your friends, so you can convince them that you’re worthy of love, rather than making something you enjoy producing? Still optimizing.

Restful activities are atelic: not primarily directed towards a telos, an end goal. That is a fundamentally different relationship with experience. It affects your perception of time (less accurately tracked) and space (broader, more inclusive). If you are trying to make rest happen, then you ruin all of its benefits: sanity, inspiration, wholeness.

If you’re crazy like me, it’s easy to fall into a cycle: notice that rest has positive outputs. Attempt to increase the positive yield. Then, without noticing, fuck up the rest by trying to optimize it, and wonder why life feels so bad, even though you’re taking care of yourself so well.

This is why my 2026 motto is “Do Less.” This is an odd resolution for someone who wrote You Can Just Do Things, a book that is more or less a 54,000-word argument for doing more. But, to be fair to myself, the book does contain the following passage:

There is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, that contains the wonderful concept of an anti-book — the idea that every book has a mirror-image volume, with the opposite contents of the original.

What would be the anti-book of this book?

This book is a very yang book, in the Daoist framework of yin/yang. The strategies generally involve doing more — taking on problems yourself, relentlessly trialing solutions, and finding shortcuts to achieve your goals faster. Throughout this book, there is a sense of pushing past constraints and breaking through conventions. This is a product of how being action-oriented has personally helped me.

One could imagine a yin book about agency, called Don’t Just Do Things. It would include topics like: how to attend to the system you’re a part of rather than pursuing your individual agenda, how to be patient until an intuitive solution arises naturally, and how to submit gracefully to the existing forces of change in your life rather than pushing, pushing, pushing. The book’s message would be that the search for an optimal choice, for better, sometimes causes us to foolishly overlook the possibility of skilfully, gently flowing with the momentum of what is already going to happen, of being receptive to our current character rather than trying to change it.

If you’re reading this book because it flatters the way you already are — action-driven, hyper-ambitious, hell-bent on optimizing — perhaps Don’t Just Do Things is the book that would actually help you most. If you’re a high-achieving person, as you proceed, ask yourself, would it actually be more revolutionary for me to flip this advice the other way around? See if that is what really provokes the existential cringe. If so, that’s probably where freedom lies.

Time for me to take my own advice.

Thank you to my handsome husband Sasha for the “atelic” framing. Sign up to be notified when our book, You Can Just Do Things, is available for purchase.

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

When I was 31, my husband of four years, who I loved more than my own life, left me completely out of the blue. We’d had an incredible, epic romance — drawn together like magnets, we married on our third date and spent the years that followed burrowing ever closer together. Maybe that was the problem — I can’t say for sure, because I never got a satisfying explanation out of him. One day I was the protagonist of a Princess Bride-worthy love story; 48 hours later, he moved out.

From the time we met, I had never contemplated the possibility of living without him, and I didn’t want to. I wanted to die for a long time — at least a couple of years. But as I slowly learned to sequester away thoughts of him and the emotions they brought up, I became convinced of a silver lining: The experience would make me impenetrable. If I survived it, I would know I could survive anything, and nothing would be able to hurt me again.

It took the better part of a decade and another deeply identity-shifting relationship, with the man who became my second husband, for me to see that I had it all wrong: Impenetrability means avoiding the parts of life that are most life-like. There’s a reason the visual metaphor for love is an arrow.

The near-fatal catastrophes of our lives don’t always make us stronger. Surviving one hard thing does provide evidence that you can survive other hard things, which is easy to mistake for getting stronger. But in reality they often just make us brittle, make us dissociate and flee from the situations that remind us we can be broken.

2. When you know, you know.

Mario Gabriele of the Generalist had a great “50 Things” style post a few months ago that I found myself nodding along to almost the whole way through. The glaring exception was Number 33: “Love is easy. The difference between bad relationships and meeting your spouse is not a matter of degree, but category. Compatibility is unignorable and effortless.”

I believed this completely, once. I’ve since come to believe that what’s unignorable and effortless is chemistry. Chemistry can be powerful enough to turn your life sideways, but it’s not the same thing as compatibility. Compatibility is litigated on the timescale of years and decades; it’s not a momentary feeling but a description of what happens during an extended course of change. Do you grow toward one another, or do you grow apart? Does the relationship help you move closer to the person you aspire to be?

I “just knew” with my first husband. I wasn’t sure with my second. Four years in, the signs have flipped.

3. If it were a good idea, someone would be doing it already.

There’s a belief, especially common among wonky types, that you don’t find $20 bills on the sidewalk — if an opportunity were real, someone would have seized it already. This sounds worldly and wise, but it’s actually a form of defensive thinking. It assumes the current way is best, that everything worth doing is being done.

In my experience, this is just false. When I started playing poker, I discovered that physical tells were basically a wide-open field — despite the fact that most pros believed the topic was played out. If you think you see an opportunity others have missed, you should have a story for why they’re missing it, and you should ask around to stress-test that story. But if no one can give you a satisfying reason, don’t assume one exists. Sometimes the answer really is just inertia or fear.

4. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

Almost nothing is worth doing “well.” Many things can and should be done to a minimal standard of quality, because anything more is a waste of effort that can be better allocated. The exceptions aren’t things that should be done “well,” but things that should be done to an exceptionally high standard, probably a much higher one than you see modeled by the people around you.

This is not semantics; most people really “do everything the way they do anything” — whether that’s in a low-effort or high-effort way. But the point of phoning it in on a lot of stuff is to save your energy to expend on the 1 in 1000 things that really matter … and then to actually spend it.

A recent example: I decided that I want to narrate my own audiobook for You Can Just Do Things. When I told a friend in the industry this and asked whether they knew any good coaches to work with, they said that hiring a coach wasn’t normal or necessary, because my publisher would decide based on a sample whether I was good enough at reading to do it, and if so give me a producer to work with day-of. But it “1 in 1000” matters to me whether the audiobook is so good no one would ever think of returning it on account of the narration, so I’m not interested in the normal-shaped solution that constitutes doing it “well,” I’m interested in the one that causes me to come to mind when someone asks this question. In this case, that means hiring multiple coaches and practicing for months.

5. If you like your job, you’re doing something wrong.

Back when I was more alienated from my emotions, I thought about work like this: You have a budget of energy to spend, and the goal is to efficiently convert that energy into impact. You identify the activity that generates the highest impact per unit of energy, and then you spam that button for as many waking hours as you can stomach. Is it any wonder I was always burning out?

What I failed to understand is that energy is not fixed. It’s dramatically affected by what you choose to do — some activities increase your energy over time, others deplete it. This feels so obvious to me now that I feel kind of stupid including it here, but I know many people (they are endemic to the Bay Area) who still labor under the false belief. Whether you enjoy what you’re doing affects your ability to do it year in and year out, and dismissing this as “selfish” doesn’t make it untrue. As my husband puts it, the best use of effortful motivation is to engineer your life to require less of it.

6. “All people are insane. They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

This line, from Kurt Vonnegut, used to neatly encapsulate the way I understood other people — which is to say, not at all. Trying to figure out why people did what they did, or imagine what they’d do next, seemed like a fool’s errand. I was judgmental about it, too: I assumed this was a problem, not with me, but with everyone else.

I didn’t fundamentally move beyond this belief until recent years, when I came into contact with the Enneagram. I imagine there are other personality typing systems that can do something similar, but the Enneagram was magical for me because it clued me into the fact that people can have very different motivational systems from my own that are still internally coherent and produce good things in the world.

People’s behavior was previously incomprehensible to me because I was imputing my own motivational system to them, trying to figure out what would cause me to act the way they did — essentially, concluding that their actions made no sense in light of my goals. But people have wildly diverse emotional hardware, which determines what’s rational for them. And my particular personality — independent, moralistic, systematic, challenge-seeking, competitive — is unusual, so I was especially poorly placed to measure others by the yardstick of myself.

This shift in perspective was dramatically good for me and for my relationships with other people. It let me see the ecosystem of psychologies as a kind of miracle — wow, it really does take all kinds — rather than a prompt for cosmic horror. And it gave me confidence that, if I invested in understanding people more deeply, they would eventually cease to be total mysteries, prone to bizarre and unreasonable behavior. As far as I can tell, this is the better part of emotional intelligence.

7. Money can’t buy happiness.

The good version of this advice is: You’ll still have to work at being happy, even if you’re rich. Money in your bank account won’t do it for you, and wealth comes with its own pathologies, like endless status-chasing. But the common gloss — that money stops mattering past some modest threshold — is basically false.

You may have heard there’s research showing money doesn’t buy happiness. That research was explosively popular precisely because it was counterintuitive — it betrayed the commonsense intuition that more money means more freedom, more options, more ability to help people you care about. Turns out it was also riddled with methodological problems. More recent work by Matthew Killingsworth (nominative determinism FTW), using large-scale studies that pinged participants about their happiness at random moments, found steady returns to well-being with rising income, no plateau in sight. The myth persists because it serves a psychological function: It helps people without money feel better about their situation, and helps the wealthy downplay their advantages. But it’s not true.

8. Intuition is fake and rationality solves everything.

I used to be horribly judgmental of people who made decisions based on intuition, as in, “I just do what feels right.” And then I noticed that whenever I overrode my intuitions, I made terrible decisions. I hired the wrong people, started projects with the wrong people, dated the wrong people, ate food that made me feel bad, did forms of exercise I found unfun and injurious. I don’t have a satisfying theory for why this is, but I know what happens: When I shift from emotional intuition to a logical story about a decision, it’s much easier for my reasoning to get hijacked by plausible-sounding directives that turn out to be nonsense.

It took me a long time to learn this, and that might have something to do with my training in law and poker. Overriding intuition in favor of explicit reasoning makes sense in contexts that reward systematic rationality, where you will get separated from your money if you count on gut feelings. But most of life isn’t a closed system with enumerated rules and clear outcomes. If you try to explicitly name all the factors that make someone a good friend or co-founder, you might come up with some good indicators, but your crude map will also mislead you about the territory.

This is why “wisdom is knowledge that can’t be transmitted.” Wise people have navigational skill, not a long list of rules.

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The Lord will take control of you. You will dance and shout and become a different person. 1 Samuel 10:6

In the weeks after Sasha and I sent the final manuscript for our book to the publisher, I found myself crying a lot. In some cases, it made sense: Reading Aella’s writing on her mother’s death, for instance, or Bess Stillman on her husband’s, or Tatiana Schlossberg on her own. But other cases were more perplexing: A great plate of risotto. A warm breeze on a late December evening. A competitor on Physical: Asia holding an uncomfortable position for a really long time.

It took a while for me to connect the weepiness to finishing the book. But once I did, something clicked into place and I knew it was true: Writing the book had fixed something inside of me that I’d stopped noticing was broken.

This requires some backstory.

I’ve mentioned the fact that I’m a recovering drug addict a couple of times on this blog. I’ve said a little more about it in my TED talk and on various podcasts. The short version is that I spent more than 3 years, from 2017 to 2020, devastatingly addicted to nitrous oxide — an addiction that utterly wrecked my life, and that I’m lucky to have come back from.

What I’ve never said much about, even to many of the people who know me well, is: Why? Why did I get addicted, and why wasn’t I able to stop, despite being smart and agentic and all the other things people know me to be?

To the extent I do talk about it, I usually abbreviate the story to “I had a spiritual experience on drugs and chased it.” That’s not wrong, but by design it’s the least complete true thing I can say about it. It’s meant to move the conversation along.

To understand the why, you need to understand some of what the experience was like from the inside — so I’m going to try to explain it. I will preempt it by saying, I know what it looks like from the outside, though you are welcome to point it out to me anyway.

From the outside, I went insane, and thus encountered God. From the inside, I encountered God, and thus went insane.

For three months before it happened, I felt it coming, though I had no idea what “it” was. I’d already been experimenting heavily with psychedelics of all kinds when, in June 2017, I got really interested in nitrous oxide. The first time I sustained a nitrous high for a long time, with a friend feeding me balloons in the backyard of our Vegas rental after we busted out of some poker tournament, I felt myself shatter into multiple shards, like a mirror breaking. “I” dissolved and a swarm of simpler things appeared in my place.

Pretty neat trick! And an exciting new psychonautical vista for someone whose identity was already largely built around that sort of thing. I quickly started experimenting with it — on its own at first, then in combination with other drugs. I discovered nitrous did two things (beyond the brief, intense body high it’s known for): First, it was an all-purpose intensifier, a multiplier on the effects of other drugs. Second, it turned “me” — the narrator in my mind, maybe you’d call it my left brain — off. And when that happened, I felt a signal coming through from somewhere else. Like hearing a song through static.

I spent three months trying to tune into that signal by tweaking the combination of drugs, and felt it getting stronger. Occasionally, I wondered if I was just imagining it, but the feedback felt so clear, it was like a children’s game of hot and cold. The signal grew until I felt myself unambiguously on a precipice.

The day it finally happened, I was playing in a poker tournament, the opener for a hometown WPT that I’d final-tabled twice. Normally, I’d have been strutting around the card room feeling like a homecoming queen, but that day I couldn’t concentrate — I knew the hour had come round at last. I busted, possibly on purpose, and high-tailed it an hour back to my house. I was so eager that I backed my car over the very obvious, very stationary spikes in the parking lot of my apartment complex, blowing out the tires.

When I got up to my apartment, I laid everything out, and then stopped. Something life-changing was about to happen, I was sure, but I had no idea what. I double-checked the setup, wrote down my experimental conditions, even took photos of everything for posterity.

Then, I took the cocktail. And the seam through the center of things ripped open and the machinery of the universe spilled out.

I most definitely did not believe in God prior to that moment. I was, moreover, a humanist in the Kurt Vonnegut sense: I always thought that it should not matter if God existed, that you should strive to be good regardless of whether there was someone there to judge you for it and mete out rewards or punishment.

So it was much to my chagrin that I shortly came to realize that it did, in fact, matter very much that God existed.

Life is littered with irritants that you don’t notice until they go away. The noise of your city environment, until you spend a night in the country. Blurred vision, until you try on glasses for the first time. My husband talks about meditation, and in the extreme, awakening, this way — as finally noticing something that has always been true but that you were prevented from seeing by some tragic error in perception.

Less obvious is the fact that the absence of something can be like this, too, can exert a constant toll on you without you realizing it’s happening. Have you seen those videos of kids trying on colorblindness-correcting glasses, or hearing their mothers’ voices for the first time after getting cochlear implants? There are hungers you don’t feel until they are sated.

I believe that thinkers from St. Augustine to Blaise Pascal to C.S. Lewis have had something like this in mind when they’ve spoken about the “god-shaped hole” at the center of existence. Because the first time I really consciously noticed that hole was the moment it was filled.

Against the sudden solidity of an orderly universe with complete love at its center and a purpose toward which it inexorably turned, I felt the agony of the world I’d been living in — one devoid of justice, purpose, or logic. And I knew that even though I should and would try to be good in either world, it mattered very much which one was real.

It’s going to drive some of you crazy that I’m not going to try to literally describe what happened, but if I waited until I could do that justice, I’d never say anything about it. Besides, if I learned anything from the months and years that followed, it’s that nothing I could say about it really matters. That’s the hair-pulling truth of gnosis: It cannot be transmitted from one person to another. The proof is only ever private. It’s a real pain in the ass.

Of course, you could not have possibly convinced me of that at the time. The original meaning of “gospel” was “good news,” and boy oh boy was I on fire to tell it. One of my first thoughts, when I returned to the realm of earthly existence, was of a friend whose depression had often circled mine. I thought of the comfort it would bring him if I could somehow convey the truth to him, in a way he would hear: Everything counts, our choices matter. There is a purpose to pain.

I was ecstatic, wild with grace — but not stupid. I knew people had been claiming contact with God for several millennia, and that such claims were completely uninteresting to people like the one I’d been the day before. I would need evidence, and getting it would become my life’s purpose.

This reordering of priorities was so obvious that it didn’t even feel like a decision. Clearly, whatever had occurred was the most important thing that had ever happened to me, or could ever happen. It was all that would matter, from then on. At the time, I was the top-ranked female poker player in the world; I basically stopped playing overnight.

The next morning, I went out and bought a camcorder and set it up to record everything, since nitrous makes it hard to think and hard to remember, and I didn’t want to risk missing something. In that first year, I documented everything obsessively — I probably ended up with hundreds of hours of footage, tens or hundreds of thousands of words of notes.

The plan? I was going to win an argument with God, and He was going to give me evidence of His existence, proof of the secret order behind things.

For a while, I was sure I would succeed — it was inevitable. Why else would He have bothered with me at all? And He kept coming, kept speaking to me. On an almost daily basis for three months, I stepped out of time and talked to Him. The proof I was looking for felt so tantalizingly close. It was always just a frame out of reach. Sometimes it felt like I had it, but by the time I came back, it was gone again.

And then, He stopped showing up. It wasn’t subtle. He gave me lots of warning. He said, you’re not really getting anything new out of this, and I have other stuff going on. He said, you should really cut it out with all the drugs. He said, you’re not going to see me again after this — and then I didn’t.

I really did not take this rejection gracefully. Alan Watts famously said of psychedelics, “once you get the message, hang up the phone.” I took the opposite approach. I fucking haunted God. I called a hundred times a day, and when He didn’t answer I’d show up pounding on the door of His house in the middle of the night. I went around and around the cycle of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression. At one point, I may or may not have tried to blackmail Him.

It’s not just that I felt like a jilted lover, though the comparison is more apt than you might think. It was worse than that, because I believed what I was doing was both right and cosmically important. I brought every tool at my disposal to bear on the problem, including my rationality and intelligence.

It’s commonly believed that reason is a kind of talisman against religiosity — that you can think your way out of religious experience. I certainly believed that. But let me tell you: Reason is never more dangerous than when it’s conscripted by your soul.

You can probably imagine, for instance, how easy it gets to interpret everything as a test. Is there any bigger theme in the Bible? More consistently than God loves or instructs or creates, He tests. It stands to reason that, whatever shit you seem to be going through with Him, you should approach it like it’s your one chance to impress God. Could I really, truly say that I’d already left everything on the field?

This meme, hazardous in its own right, became even more dangerous when combined with my best thinking. If you run in certain communities, you may be familiar with Pascal’s mugging, a thought experiment designed to show why you shouldn’t take Pascal’s wager seriously. Basically, if you allow yourself to be moved by a tiny probability of an astronomically good or bad outcome, you can get talked into all sorts of stuff you don’t want to do.

It turns out, Pascal’s mugging is just a straightforward description of what happens when spiritual revelation collides with expected-value thinking. Even when I was able to step outside of the situation and acknowledge that I was probably just insane, that wasn’t enough to make me seek help, on account of the stakes being so high. Several times, I even had the thought, hey, this is just like the thought experiment! And then paid the mugger again.

Reasoning kept me isolated, too. I imagine it would have been a great comfort during this time to have had someone to talk to, to be able to rely on the experience and insight and camaraderie of spiritual elders. But, you see, that would have tainted the experiment. All those traditions, all those believers — and we’re still here suffering. Clearly, I figured, everyone else had missed something, and I couldn’t afford to snap to their grid.

But beyond all of the thinking and rationalization, there was a more basic sense of wrongness I felt whenever I thought about walking away. I don’t know if everything happens for a reason, but it sure felt like this should have happened for a reason. And if that reason wasn’t still ahead of me, it was behind me, and in the haze of drugs, despite all my notes and recordings, I’d failed to notice it.

Many times, I would get a sober month under my belt, then relapse because I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be a bigger purpose to it all, something I’d missed. But for the last 30 months of it, no matter how many times I tried, God was silent.

At the end, I was in worse shape than you can probably imagine. I’d exhausted my life savings and was deep in debt, unemployed and unemployable. I’d torched pretty much every relationship I had. Nitrous had wrecked my body — I had partial paralysis from severe B12 deficiency, and frostbite had taken chunks out of my legs.

The hardest part, though, was what it did to my brain. I had no memory: I had to leave a note for myself on my phone when I left the house or I’d find myself on a train or bus with no idea where I was going. The simplest tasks became incomprehensible. It’s not an exaggeration to say I think I lost 50 IQ points — to be clear, when I wasn’t high. I think most of them came back eventually, but I was noticeably diminished for more than 2 years.

Getting sober meant accepting that all of these costs really had been for nothing. No big surprise debit from God was going to show up and balance the ledger. I would never get resolution, or closure; it would never feel okay.

Addiction and recovery are discussed only briefly in the book (“too hard to relate to,” according to an editor who didn’t know the half of it), but the book is very much a product of the time that followed, of my road back from being barely a person. I think of it, half-jokingly, as the map I drew on my way out of hell.

And although I didn’t notice as it was happening, and this wasn’t my motive for writing it, the book allowed me to transmute some of the devastation of those years into a gift, something I can offer. Something that lets me say, for the first time, well, at least something good came out of it.

I don’t know exactly how it works, but I know it’s true, that somehow this is why I can’t stop crying. Do you remember the very last scene of Kill Bill, where we see Beatrix balled up on the bathroom floor, sobbing under the sound of B.B.’s cartoons the next room over? That’s where my head goes, when I encounter a great plate of risotto or a warm breeze on a winter evening. Overflowing gratitude, for this best-not-hoped-for gift from the universe.

There are certain feelings you don’t notice until they stop. I didn’t notice that I’d been tensing for five years, averting my eyes from the seam through the center of things, until a month ago I looked up and realized it was closed.

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I am a connoisseur of burnout. In my four decades on this earth, I’ve tasted many of its varieties — some subtle, some gross. There are Emmett Shear’s core three — permanent on-call, broken steering, and mission doubt — but many others too: burnout from constantly shifting goals, burnout from ruinous empathy that pulls you in a dozen directions at once, burnout from fake emergencies generated by leaders who don’t manage time well.

My first major episode occurred at the end of college. I’d worked myself to the bone for four years, earning two degrees while often working two jobs. In my last final, I basically just needed to finish the exam to get an A in the class, but a few pages from the end my brain simply refused to continue. My pen stopped moving and the questions became a jumble. I handed in the test, took the B, and deferred law school for a year to play World of Warcraft and drink.

As a law firm associate, I burned out again — partly from the hours, which were as bad as people say, but more so from the feeling that what I was doing didn’t matter: I was mostly engaged in a battle to move a few digits from one corporation’s balance sheet to another’s, and if I didn’t do it, there were a million people in line who could do it about as well. This time I “recovered” by becoming a professional gambler.

By the time I got to my mid-30s, I thought I was wise to burnout and could avoid it simply by working on things I really cared about. If only! It would be great if burnout could only strike when you’re making stupid mistakes. But at Alvea, the pandemic medicine startup I cofounded in 2021, I felt pride, a sense of purpose, and camaraderie with my team. So it was confusing and distressing when I felt myself being stalked by burnout once again.

Maybe I needed more control over my work? I diagnosed myself with broken-steering burnout and, after we wound down Alvea, spent a long time picking my next project. I ended up as CEO at Astera, where I helped design the mission, built a team I adored, and was given wide latitude by the board. Surely, it should be impossible to burn out in circumstances like these? Well.

The last couple episodes I caught early enough that, without my long and costly prior education, I might not have identified them as burnout at all, just “having a stressful time at work.” But as a connoisseur of burnout, I know better. With repeated exposures, you learn to recognize the warning signs earlier and earlier, which makes the required intervention less disruptive, and the costs you incur in the meantime less severe.

This is important, because unaddressed burnout can be catastrophic. People who experience it for the first time are often surprised by how bad it is, by how much of your life it can eat.

They may know burnout as a close cousin of stress or exhaustion, and therefore expect it to be similar, if maybe more intense. But burnout is importantly different from ordinary stress or fatigue. Stress and fatigue are temporary — remove the stressor, rest, and they pass. Moreover, they aren’t always bad; the optimal amount of stress isn’t zero. Hard workouts might leave you wrecked, but they lead to a pleasant rest, and a natural process of recovery that will leave you stronger. Burnout, by contrast, is like a tendon tear: It doesn’t heal on its own, and it only leaves you weaker.

If burnout isn’t stress, what the hell is it?

One of my favorite lenses for thinking about motivation is the “elephant and rider” framework developed by Jonathan Haidt. The elephant is the part of us that is instinctive and emotional. It lurches powerfully in the direction of everything that makes life pleasant — novelty, belonging, calories, pleasure. The elephant controls what we crave, what we fear, what we find ourselves doing without effort.

Meanwhile, the rider is the rational voice that engages in long-term planning and explains our behavior to others; it thinks in “shoulds” and “oughts.” It’s the part that’s responsible for restraint, the part that makes what we think of as “conscious choices,” and the part that offers rational justifications for our behavior when we’re questioned (whether or not the behavior is rational at all). Sometimes, the rider is our PR department.

Quite obviously, both parts of the human psyche are necessary. The elephant charges into battle; the rider brokers complicated peace agreements. The elephant savors and delights; the rider, ideally, steers a wise course through the world that will allow us both meaning and pleasure.

It’s easy to extend this framework to explain burnout. You can think of the rider and the elephant as having agreed to a sacred pact: In exchange for doing what the rider asks, the elephant is promised certain rewards. When things are going well, the needs of both rider and elephant are satisfied, even if the balance isn’t exactly even day-to-day.

Burnout results when the rider asks the elephant, over and over again, to commit a tremendous amount of energy to a task, but then fails to provide the reward the elephant is expecting. As a result, the link between effort and reward breaks for the elephant, with catastrophic consequences for the rider.

The rider might think, “If we grind away at this startup, we’ll get rich and change the world and be loved forever.” But if some elephant-understandable reward isn’t experienced after a certain amount of time, the elephant gets pissed off, and then despondent.

How long it takes varies by person: Some can focus on unrewarding work for years, totally disconnecting from their emotions in service of their “rational” agenda — an ability that’s both a blessing and a curse. But everyone has a limit, and when they hit it, the elephant goes on strike. The rider can scream at the burned-out elephant: “DO SOMETHING!” and the elephant will just lie there.

This is not purely metaphorical. Part of the startling experience of burnout is a split in personality: The voice in your head can yell and yell about what’s supposed to be happening, while the body lies passive, without generating any propulsive energy whatsoever.

The elephant-rider relationship has several important features:

First, the elephant is the boss. As anyone who has struggled with addiction, lust, or hatred will tell you, the elephant has more control over motivation. The rider can influence the elephant, sure — otherwise, human beings would never eat kale or serve jury duty. But the rider has limited sway when their desires conflict with the elephant’s. The strength, skill, and energy of the rider might matter at the margin, might coax a little more performance out of a reluctant pachyderm, but in the end they just aren’t all that important.

Second, the elephant wants what it wants. Different elephants may want different things — some like fruit, or tree bark, or peanuts. But unlike a human, you can’t convince an elephant it’s motivated by something it isn’t. You can try to tell yourself that making enough money makes up for losing the self-determination you cherish, or that recognition isn’t important to you as long as the work gets done, but your elephant will keep you honest. More generally, the elephant is immune to reason — you cannot approach the elephant in good faith and attempt to negotiate with it or persuade it to feel or behave differently.

Finally, the elephant never forgets. If the rider habitually demands performance out of the elephant but fails to reward it appropriately, the elephant will learn that doing what the rider wants doesn’t get it what it wants. Once that lesson has been learned, it’s very difficult to unlearn, even if the rider begins earnestly trying to repair the relationship.

In extreme cases, people sometimes develop an instinctive repulsion to any work that looks even halfway like what burned them out. After I burned out from my law firm, I rejected out of hand any suggestion that I might enjoy a different kind of law — government work or immigration or an in-house gig. Only a decade later did I get enough contact with the law again to remember that I had actually enjoyed the puzzle of it at one point.

If you happen to catch yourself on the way to burnout, what should you do?

First, make sure you have internalized that, even if it feels like a slow burn, it’s actually an emergency. It will always get worse if not addressed, and the cost compounds; the level of intervention required to address it grows steeply over time. Twice, I’ve lost over a year to neglected burnout, and I’ve known people who never recovered from it. If you’re burning out, whatever else you have going on isn’t as important as dealing with it.

This is scary, but should also be empowering: If your whole productive life is potentially at stake, it should really free you up to take radical action. You might not want to ask for help or embarrassing concessions — but would you rather do something a little bit cringe, or roll the dice on a permanently muted life?

In fact, I’d go further: Radical action to address burnout isn’t just allowed, it’s important. Really try to take the logic of the metaphor seriously. You’re dealing with an animal you’ve misled with false promises, and trust between you has deteriorated as a result. To arrest this process, an immediate and costly signal of loyalty is most effective. You are trying to say, in a way that will actually ring true, “I’m sorry I wasn’t listening before, but I really am now!”

The critical move is to figure out what kind of food (rest, credit, autonomy, money) your elephant wants more than anything, and drop everything to give that to it — right away. That might mean taking time off, perhaps abruptly. It might mean asking for more money, or a change in responsibilities. It might mean explicitly seeking credit where you didn’t before.

Remember: You can’t lie to your elephant about what food it likes — so this may require a higher level of honesty with yourself than you are accustomed to. If, say, your elephant runs on getting credit but you treat it like it runs on relaxation, you’ll find it’s consistently unsatisfied by your well-meaning solutions. You’ll always feel like mental health is just on the other side of a great vacation, but no matter how much time you take off, the unease won’t go away.

When I started burning out in the fall, it was because I was trying to write a book and weekly posts on top of my full-time job leading Astera. I was trying to feed my elephant something it ultimately can’t live on (public recognition) when what it needed was rest. So, as soon as I started feeling all my yeses turn into nos, I knew what I had to do: Stop. Right away.

I took a few days off from work, a month off from the book, and what ultimately turned into four months off from Substack. I told everyone, from coworkers to friends, that I was burned out, and turned down projects, professional appearances, and parties, with few exceptions. The cost of doing all this felt high in the moment — how will I ever have a successful book launch, if I don’t energetically cannibalize myself for it? — but the rest that I claimed has restored my sense of proportion.

Ultimately, you can’t go anywhere without your elephant. Sure, the rider can imagine it controls everything — that it’s capable of endless achievement, that it will never rest again, that it doesn’t possess humiliatingly normal needs. The rider, gifted with imagination, can pretend it is an infinite being, right up until the moment the elephant stops playing along.

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I recently did a “50 things I know” post, and asked which ones people wanted to hear more about. This was number 22 on that list.

We just wrapped up our first quarterly reviews for Astera’s spring residency cohort, and one of my favorite things to come out of it was this statement by resident Edwin Kite: “Based on past completed projects of comparable ambition, it is near certain that our initial scientific assumptions are wrong.”

This is the reality of science. It’s also the reality of life more generally. It’s actually really, really hard to be right about all but the most basic things. Sometimes we start with the right facts and assumptions, but draw the wrong conclusion. Sometimes we stumble across a correct conclusion, but for all the wrong reasons. More often we’re inept carpenters, trying to build with the wrong tools, perched atop a crumbling scaffold. It’s a wonder we’re able to build anything at all that lasts.

I, for one, am wrong constantly. I’ve been wrong about big things, like thinking the point of life is to accrue money and status and the kind of furniture that has a name. Like thinking I don’t need to smile at people, or give them affirmation, in order to make them feel safe around me. Like thinking that there are no biological differences between men and women that might be relevant to skill in poker.

I’ve been wrong about smaller things, like — just today — the cost of a replication experiment someone wanted to run, whether to use the express line at the grocery store, the prospect that a candidate was ghosting me, whether to binge on Mexican food and TNG instead of working on my book manuscript (no regrets), and whether I’d feel perfectly comfortable if I showed up to the office in leggings (regrets).

Given that perpetual wrongness is the natural condition of human beings, it’s funny that we try so hard to avoid acknowledging that we’re wrong, either to others or to ourselves.

Trying to avoid being wrong would look completely different. It would look like cultivating the mental habits Philip Tetlock identified in Superforecasting as central to great forecasters’ ability to predict the future with far greater accuracy than normal folk. People who are good at forecasting update their views frequently, actively seek disconfirming evidence, and try to take the outside view. They try to break their big beliefs down into more granular ones, to expose more surface area to contact with the real world. (For real-life examples of these habits in action, see Matt Yglesias, Scott Alexander, Alexey Guzey, GiveWell, and, just yesterday, Kelsey Piper.)

None of these things are very hard to do; they’re certainly within the capacity of most medium-smart people. So what stops most of us from seeing the world more clearly? Mere speculation on my part, but I think most of this is downstream of one core superpower of superforecasters: They’re not strongly psychologically committed to being right about any particular fact or in any particular instance.

This is one of life’s delicious ironies: The way to be right more often is to care less about being wrong.

This matters a lot, even if you don’t aspire to be a superforecaster. You may not need to be able to predict commodity prices, or guess how the solar build-out in China is going to go. But choices that really do matter to us are often circumscribed by a need to defend our past decisions. We might stay in a bad relationship we know we need to leave, cling to a house that’s a bad investment, or hold onto an ideology that doesn't fit the facts, all because we confuse changing our minds with losing our dignity.

When you learn to admit that you’re wrong, you also learn to course-correct much faster. You’re not committed to the decisions of the you who existed yesterday, who had much less information than the you of today.

Only one little problem: Being wrong hurts.

Or does it?

Rightness is a prison

There are some kinds of deep wrongness that are so bound up with our identities that addressing them might actually require some spiritual and social excavation. Let’s leave the advanced stuff for the advanced course, and start with run-of-the-mill wrongness, you-had-bad-facts-on-the-internet wrongness.

I think it’s actually a mistake, or even a delusion, to think that this kind of wrongness hurts — and that it’s possible to experience it in a completely different way. I think this because I’ve experienced firsthand the feeling of the delusion being broken.

For most of my life, until well into my 30s, I was totally under the thrall of seeming-rightness. I put an astonishing amount of energy into keeping up a pretense, internally and externally, that I was always right. I can’t for the life of me remember why I felt this way — probably because I didn’t have reasons for it, per se — but I remember feeling existentially threatened by the possibility that I might be wrong or just not know something. I got so good at coming up with plausible arguments for my beliefs that I often didn’t even realize I was full of shit.

The full story of how this changed will have to be an IOU for the book, but the short version is that I fell in with some rationalists and got convinced that I should be more dedicated to following and acknowledging the truth, and upon doing it came to realize that the pain that threatened to overwhelm me was just an illusion, a trick of the ego.

What actually hurt was the feeling of resistance to being wrong, the cognitive dissonance between who I was at my outermost and innermost layers — a feeling that would build and build for as long as the dissonance was maintained.

Being wrong, and saying so, is by contrast liberating — like your mind is tangled up in a very complicated knot of stories and anxieties, but by pulling out just the right thread, the whole thing falls apart. Acknowledging what is true is so much cleaner, psychologically, than maintaining everything necessary to avoid acknowledging it. Feynman famously said, “you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,” but I think I disagree. Fooling yourself takes work.

The judo of agreeing

Maybe you object that it’s not self-punishment that makes admitting you’re wrong so painful, but the ridicule of others. I’m sympathetic, but think this fear is also misplaced.

We tend to feel vulnerable when we admit that we’re wrong — we feel weak and undefended, and we assume that others will see us this way too. But, in fact, admitting fault typically has the exact opposite effect. Acknowledging that you’re wrong displays a willingness to be vulnerable that we intuitively understand only the confident can afford.

My husband calls this the “judo of agreeing.” Just like a skilled judo player uses an opponent’s momentum to throw them, a well-timed admission of fallibility shows a disarming level of self-confidence that, paradoxically, throws off those who are tempted to attack us.

This is a great example of the paradoxical nature of many agency-increasing moves: Social acts that seem weak from the inside, when undertaken without defensiveness, actually read as very strong. For this to work, however, the “without defensiveness” part is really important: You don’t earn any status points when litigating technicalities.

“I was wrong about hiring a crooked contractor, but his website looked really nice, and I wanted to get us a good deal, and you kept pushing me to hire somebody!” This is clearly an attempt to soothe the feeling of being wrong, rather than reckoning with the fact that you were. The high-status move is instead to simply acknowledge the error and keep moving.

Admitting that you’re wrong about something during a contentious discussion is also a quick way to show that you’re an honest dealer in the truth, not just a person hell-bent on winning. This can instantly make people trust you more and interrupt the mutual cycle of defensiveness that gridlocks so many heated debates. You immediately have the “mortal enemy” label removed and replaced with a “friend?” tag; people’s tone shifts instantly. Research shows that people who admit wrongness in online interactions are viewed as more likable and competent, and people are more willing to interact with them in future scenarios.

It’s okay to start small

You might want to get some practice with admitting wrongness before plunging into it in high-stakes situations. A great way is to start practicing with family and friends.

If you reflect for even an instant, you should be able to remember one time that you were wrong about something in one of your immediate relationships. Perhaps you gave a friend a piece of advice that wasn’t so sensible, or boldly aired a prediction about the world that turned out to be incorrect. Try this: send them a text or a voice memo, saying, “I’m practicing being wrong. I’d like to admit that I was wrong about [x]. Thank you for listening.”

Beginning with small things is fine. You can admit that you were wrong about which New York pizza is the best, or about the best route for driving to you and your partner’s favorite restaurant. If the admission is uncomfortable, even a tiny bit, you’re making progress.

But you do want this process of training to lead before long to making larger admissions, to yourself or others. The irony is that we have a tendency to put the least effort into questioning our most consequential beliefs — like what our priorities are — even though, logically, we should spend the most time trying to disconfirm them. The more you practice, the quicker you’ll develop the facility of holding your opinions lightly, and eventually you’ll do it by default. This sounds like a small thing, but it’s a genuine transformation.

To the dogmatic person, beliefs function like blinders, narrowing your field of vision so you can only see what confirms them. They feel like rigid frames bolted to your vision, or armor defending you from attack. But once you get used to loosening your grip, the same beliefs can transform into lenses you can slip on and off, experimenting with how the world looks in each tint. You can try on these rose-colored glasses, then these darkly tinted ones, noticing how each alters your perception, without mistaking any single view for the whole of reality. What began as constraint becomes play, and that play is the beginning of real freedom.

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My TED talk is out today, on the topic of personal agency. More specifically: What addiction and recovery taught me about agency, and why I think it’s more accurate to think of it as a learnable sensibility or toolkit than as a fixed character trait.

I wasn’t quite sure what to write to accompany the video, and I’ll be perfectly happy if you skip the cover letter and just watch it. But Sasha thought the story of the talk was itself a nice little vignette about agency, so here it is.

Doing a TED talk was not exactly a lifelong dream for me. Up until about March 13 of this year, my official position was that I never wanted to do one. I don’t find public speaking mortifying in the way some people do, but the idea of giving a rehearsed talk in front of a huge live audience was not one I relished.

March 13, however, was when Sasha and I got the first round of feedback from publishers on the book proposal we’d started shopping around, and the nearly unanimous sentiment was “cool idea, but who are you?” Unless we could find a way to get publicly linked to the topic of agency, publishers didn’t think anyone would read it. On reflection, this seemed pretty fair! What kind of authority on agency could I claim to be, if I couldn’t even build a platform for myself?

I quickly reached out to a bunch of friends for advice, and one of them pointed me in the direction of my old friend Liv Boeree, who was a guest curator for the TED conference starting on April 7. The slate had been set months in advance, but I couldn’t see the harm in asking, so I sent Liv a text to the effect of “heyyyyy any chance you have a blank spot in your lineup I can pitch you for?” Her response was, predictably, absolutely not — but the next day she messaged again, asking what I had in mind. It suddenly looked like one of her talks might fall through, and although she told me not to get my hopes up, she was considering her options for a backup.

I quickly calculated that it was in my interests to get my hopes up, and, after sharing a few thoughts with her, sat down and wrote a talk based on my original blog post on agency, just in case. I had it ready to share by the time Liv heard back from TED that they’d consider adding it to the schedule, if I could produce a draft right away.

Thus began three weeks of insane cramming. One small problem I had to address off the bat: The TED folks didn’t like my talk very much. The straightforward tone I’ve gotten accustomed to using in writing for business audiences, rationalists and tech bros of all genders made me seem, in a word (invoked multiple times), “unlikable.”

No problemo. This simply confirmed my worst suspicions about myself. Not. one. problemo.

I rewrote the talk to focus less on my high-agency successes and more on my escape from the ultimate agency-destroyer, drug addiction. Then I rewrote it a few more times in response to feedback from different audiences. (FWIW, I think the feedback and advice I got from TED was excellent from top to bottom — I ended up with a stronger talk that was much better suited for their audience than the one I started with.) I got the final sign-off on the text on April 3, just before I arrived in Vancouver for the conference.

TED advises you not to memorize your talk, but what they really mean is that you should memorize it so thoroughly that war could break out next to the auditorium and you could finish it while running for cover. It simply should not sound memorized.

This part was actually fun — rarely in adulthood does one have the luxury of an assignment where the win condition is so clearly defined. I isolated myself for three days, pacing around my room while drilling the talk in sing-song, in triple time, in Siri-speak — whatever I could do to avoid the cardinal sin of memorizing inflections along with the words. I muttered it to my menu over nine meals at the hotel restaurant. I put in AirPods to fake a phone call and recited it while strolling along the enormous underground shopping arcades near the waterfront.

After all of that practice, and 30 well-timed milligrams of propranolol, the actual talk wasn’t that scary. When I watch it, of course, all I see are the ways it could have been better if I’d had more time. But I know that kind of haunting is the cost of doing things you’re not fully prepared for — and sometimes the only chance you get is the chance to do it under-prepared.

I’m grateful to Liv and TED for the opportunity to speak, and to my family, Serenity Knolls, and recovery programs for the opportunity to live again.

I hope you like the talk!

If you seek advice from people at the very top of competitive domains, you’ll probably hear a lot about the power of tenacity, grit, and determination. There is obviously wisdom in this: You won’t get very far in life if you’re constantly changing course at the first sign of challenge or boredom. And it’s probably true that you will never be one of the very best in the world at something without developing a singleminded and lifelong obsession with it.

But most of us don’t have a shot at being on one of those podiums, or even aspire to it. For us, there’s little danger in prematurely abandoning our latent potential to be the best gamer, or the best free diver, or the best developer. The far, far greater danger is in devoting our days to something that fundamentally doesn’t matter to us, because we’re too afraid to cut our losses.

For creatures such as ourselves, more should be said in praise of quitting.

As Kenny Rogers said, “you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away,” and wouldn’t you know it, I have a poker analogy for this.

Poker comes in two basic formats: cash games, where you can buy as many chips as you want whenever you want, and tournaments, where you get one stack of chips to start with and you play until you run out of them. With cash games, you can take your money and leave at any point. In tournaments, all of the prize money is allocated according to a payout structure, with the people who last the longest earning the most.

Tournament poker is basically about finding the highest-value uses of a scarce resource, your chips. The fact that losing those chips means getting completely locked out of a shot to win major money means that their opportunity cost is high. This means it can be a big mistake to commit yourself to hands that are somewhat positive-value in expectation, if you have good reason to believe there will be better, higher-value opportunities.

Life is, of course, just like this: You get only one shot, and it’s up to you to make the most of it by rejecting okay or even pretty good ways to allocate your time or other resources — to hunt down the opportunities to make really great bets on yourself. Do not make barely positive-value bets with your life!

I think quitting is one of my primary superpowers. Success in multiple fields is only possible if you’re willing to quit multiple fields.

In 2023, my cofounders and I at Alvea decided to wind down the company when it became clear that our original direction wasn’t going to pan out, and that our alternative line of business was not going to have the impact on the world that our employees or investors had shown up for. Some years before that, I quit corporate law shortly before I would have made partner, because I knew that once I did the money would be too hard to walk away from.

At both points, I realized I was a ways down the road toward a destination I no longer wanted to get to, and rather than keep driving, I took an exit. This was indispensable in getting me to a place where I actually wanted to be.

It can be hard to quit sometimes because it feels like an admission that you made a mistake, that you took the wrong path in getting there. But this isn’t necessarily true.

The interesting thing about steady jobs is that they’re actually not so steady. They are static in a conceptual sense — in the sense that if you say you’re a “lawyer” when you’re 30, and say you’re a “lawyer” when you’re 50, there is the same label for what you do. And that can feel like steadiness, like a reassuring kind of coherence to your life story.

But the truth is that everything is in constant flux. Beneath the labels, life continues evolving all the time. Your interests change, companies change, and industries change. Given that your “steady job” is constantly evolving, even if you picked the highest-leverage option initially, there is a low chance that it will remain your highest-leverage option over time.

The same goes for places to live, relationships, opinions, and hobbies. Over time, these things can degrade in value or resonance — and yet still retain the emotional pull of their initial promise. And when this happens, people often stay too long.

One of the factors that underlies this is loss aversion, the psychological phenomenon by which losing $100 feels about twice as bad as gaining $100 does good. This asymmetry has deep consequences. In real life, it manifests as a reluctance to abandon sunk costs — we keep investing in doomed projects, relationships, or careers because leaving feels like locking in a loss, rather than setting ourselves up for a future potential gain. Retail traders double down on losing stocks rather than closing out their positions. Founders keep going with failing companies even when there’s a good opportunity to bail out.

As a result, quitting often feels emotionally wrong even when it is logically right. So if you want to be smart about it, you’ll have to learn how to see through the illusory weight of loss.

How do you do that?

It’s not an easy task, because research suggests that merely being aware of loss aversion doesn’t significantly reduce its influence on behavior. So you can expect strategic quitting to be difficult. However, making yourself painfully aware of your choices is often the first step in changing them.

By default, we tend to think of “choices” as the kinds of things that take us off the path we’re already on. From this stance, it doesn’t feel like we are “choosing” to go to our job every day, or choosing to remain where we live. The scary thing is that this means we can actually be making the biggest mistake of our lives on a daily basis, despite it feeling like nothing is happening at all. If we want to evaluate whether our current set of choices is really best or whether it’s just inertia keeping us where we are, it can be powerful to upend that frame.

Try it. Go around your day, narrating all of your choices to yourself. With everything you do, consciously say, in your head: “I am choosing to do this, because it’s the best course of action according to all the information I have available.” See if it feels true. It might — perhaps this exercise will reinforce your conviction. But you might also find that entire regions of your life suddenly look strange. The declaration that you’re doing the best thing will sound like hollow propaganda, an attempt to convince yourself of something you know just isn’t so.

Another powerful exercise, of a similar kind: Imagine that you were instantly unsubscribed from everything in your life. All of your choices undone — where you live, who you’re with, what you do with your time. All of a sudden, you’re a completely empty canvas. And then, imagine that you have the power to bring back each element just by hitting a “resubscribe” button, like it’s an email newsletter. Being honest with yourself, which elements would you hit “resubscribe” on? What percentage of your current activities are an unambiguous “yes?” What percentage would you unceremoniously drop, if you were given the opportunity?

Once you realize you’re choosing something, you regain the ability to un-choose it. Note that un-choosing doesn’t always mean quitting in the complete, traditional sense. It might just mean an alteration — working hard to establish a new phase in your relationship, or changing roles at your job, or moving to a different neighborhood rather than a different country. This, too, is strategic quitting: declaring that a given battle is over so that you can win the war.

Leaving can still break your heart even though it’s the right thing to do.

We human beings are adaptive creatures. We have the ability to develop fondness for our current situation, even when we don’t like it overall. When I was a young lawyer, it took me a couple of years to notice that I really didn’t like living in New York — it was too big and loud and indifferent for me to ever feel at home there. But I still found lots of pieces of it to love, and believed that it would feel like something important had been sacrificed once I moved away. In the lead-up to the move, I found myself romanticizing aspects of the city that I’d never really paid attention to before, because I suddenly saw them as pleasures I was about to lose access to.

But something to remember is that there is always some unknown part of the future that you will be equally fond of. Before moving to Washington DC, I couldn’t have imagined all of the attachments I’d have to it. And after every other transition in my life, there were likewise things to love that I couldn’t have previously pictured.

When people think about quitting, it’s hard because they’re comparing the rich web of attachments they have now to some mostly blank slate, or, worse, the possibility of disaster. However, what’s more realistic to imagine, if you’re leaving something you’re no longer aligned with, is a future with more to love than you have now. Those things you will be attached to in the future are currently obscured by the impassable barrier of time, but they’re still out there.

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1. You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.

2. If you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.

3. The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.

4. Lots of things that look like reverse correlation are actually Berkson’s paradox. Or: relationships that look like tradeoffs sometimes arise because of selection effects. It’s not a coincidence that super hot guys are never good in bed; they don’t have to be to keep dating you.

5. You can go through a lot of relationships and experience a lot of flavors of admiration and obsession and limerence — in other words, lots of things that kind of feel like love — without experiencing real love. (This is either terrifying or reassuring, depending on your perspective.)

6. Writing defensively is a loser’s game. It lets people who won’t like your writing anyway win in advance.

7. There’s a reason 12-step programs work, and it’s steps 4 and 8. Everyone should try them.

8. There is no way to adequately correct for the planning fallacy. For any given task, double the amount of time and dollars you think it will take, and you will be partway there.

9. There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.

10. There is, annoyingly, really something to the idea that our childhoods have a massive effect on our later lives, and it’s possible to be totally convinced that you’ve gotten over your past while still laboring under all sorts of mental distortions as a result. At the same time, the point of engaging with all that stuff has to be to become more functional, not to develop an identity as a victim, or to constantly be peeling your skin off.

11. A lot of experiences that you might be inclined to interpret as metaphors when other people describe them are literally real. This will seem extremely funny once you experience them yourself. Related: Enlightenment is real, but it won’t necessarily make you a better person.

12. Revealed preference is a stupid concept, because it treats the self as unified. “If I did it, I must have wanted it” — maybe, or maybe you’re a conflicted parliament of sub-agents with diverging priorities. This is one of the most useful aspects of psychological modalities that point to layers of selfhood, whether psychoanalysis or IFS.

13. In 10 years you will look back and think you were so hot. Can you think it now?

14. Understanding asymmetric consequences — the fact that being mistaken in one direction is sometimes much costlier than being mistaken in another — can radically change what you think good decision-making looks like. Debates over climate change and animal welfare and AI policy are often between people who understand this and people who don’t.

15. Loneliness is not necessarily a feeling that requires a response.

16. There is no such thing as enough dopamine. Whatever tells you that more will satisfy you lies. You will never, ever, ever reach the limit of your longing for it.

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17. Productivity is not effort x time — if you want one quick way to burn out, it’s believing that you just need to crank harder in circumstances where your effort is not efficiently creating results.

18. Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.

19. It’s possible for someone to have a motivational system very different from your own and still be a force for good in the world. I’m turned off when people are motivated primarily by prestige, but many great works have been produced at the altar of social status.

20. People don’t really get to choose who they are; many of the things we call “merit” are actually just another form of luck.

21. Happiness is a ghost, but one we’ve chased to the top of the mountain.

22. Many social dynamics are paradoxical — social acts that seem weak from the inside, when undertaken without apology, actually read as very strong. For example, being willing to say “I’m wrong” or “I don’t know.”

23. Agency is a morally neutral trait, and amoral people have more natural talent at it because they never learned the rules in the first place.

24. If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.

25. You will not necessarily change your mind about wanting kids, or wanting lots of friends, no matter how many people tell you otherwise.

26. The people who make real change in the world are those who live on the knife edge between optimism (everything is really going to be okay) and pessimism (but everything is bad by default).

27. People are their own punishment, which means revenge is rarely worth it.

28. Almost as soon as something crystalizes into a useful handle for a pathology — trauma, autism, ADHD — it will be co-opted by a wide range of people who benefit from pathologizing relatively normal behavior.

29. You can save yourself a lot of grief when dealing with someone who’s upset by leading with: “Are you in venting mode or solutions mode?”

30. The most important thing to hire for is deeply giving a fuck, and no amount of money will get someone who doesn’t care to care. This means you should pay people enough that it’s easy for them to say yes, but not enough that it’s hard for them to say no.

31. Knowing when to quit is one of the most valuable skills in the world. I have managed to achieve success in multiple fields only because I have managed to quit multiple fields.

32. Service is the only thing that makes anything feel better in a real, lasting way. This is because acts of service provide a temporary respite from the inherent cognitive dissonance of living selfishly.

33. If you always let people in in traffic, no one can cut you off.

34. Being able to live in the “world as it is,” rather than getting permanently fixated on the “world as it should be,” is a superpower. My heart is usually with the progressive team, politically, but I am sad to note that the classic aphorism is often true: “A liberal is someone who doesn’t understand the difference between is and ought.”

35. You will always feel bad about being mean to people after the fact, even if they deserved it.

36. “You are ruined by your gifts” — the traits that make you exceptional are the very same traits that show up in your neuroses and limitations. Learning to love the upsides, if undertaken with clarity and gentleness, also creates more space to address the downsides. This is what makes the Enneagram tremendously potent.

37. You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself.

38. There is no grand unifying theory of morality, nothing that doesn’t break down in any edge cases — so avoid totalizing ideologies, or else. If you take anything too seriously, it can make you crazy. Related: Utilitarianism is a perfect program that doesn’t run on human hardware.

39. The freedom to be fully honest with other people is hard to overrate or even describe. It is always available to you.

40. “Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” Source.

41. It’s almost impossible to have an easy life and be interesting. Suffering is what gives people texture.

42. Forgiveness is a thing you do for yourself, not the other person. In fact, the reason to overcome most conflictual feelings is not for the benefit of others but for the benefit of your own soul. That said, every once in a while, someone will do something truly unforgivable, in the sense that — try as you might — you simply can’t forgive it. Accept this and move on, rather than spending years trying to find a way.

43. Much of life, and increasingly so, is a battle against superstimuli encroaching on your mental autonomy.

44. You basically don’t need to worry about being too kind or too chill. If you’re the kind of person who worries that being a little more relaxed or emotionally open will destroy your whole life, you could probably stand to relax and be more emotionally open.

45. If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.

46. When you approach someone on the street and are trying not to run into them, don’t look at them — look at where you want to go, and they will divert around you.

47. Heaven is a set of gradually increasing but attainable challenges.

48. People who are eager to insist that every action is “selfish” because it reflects some kind of preference, or who claim that altruism is just virtue signaling, are telling on themselves — they might be very clever, but they should never be trusted with real power.

49. You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.

50. No matter how hard you try, you will always look back with a certain remove and wonder what the hell you were thinking.

I stole this format from my husband, who stole it from Mari Andrew. It’s a good format sir. I probably have a full post in me for about 1/3 of these, so if you like one of them, let me know.

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This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (and builds on a couple of paragraphs in my original post on agency). I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the coming months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which is a signal about what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think!

One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.

It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s profound: the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky — to find the collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom in.

Conversely, people who move more slowly through life tend to get fewer shots on goal and have longer feedback loops. Perhaps they work privately on creative projects that they don’t show to anybody for months or years, or they stay in a relatively contained peer group for a long time without mixing it up.

If someone is trying to figure out what to do with their life, and they’re meeting with 1-2 interesting strangers per day, then all things being equal, I’m inclined to bet on them; if they’re meeting 1-2 people per week, I’m inclined to think they are going too slowly, and aren’t likely to hit escape velocity.

So, what’s the most efficient and direct way to go about this? How do you figure out who the key people are, and ensure you meet them?

I think this is something you can’t really undertake with that kind of attitude. Some goals have to be approached like gardening. You can’t force plants to grow, you can only engineer the conditions in which they’re likely to flourish, and trust that the results will come.

Making your own luck is like this: As Steve Jobs put it, “you can’t plan to meet the people who will change your life.” However, you can still increase your skill at being lucky. Much like skilled gardeners tend to produce lush gardens, skilled cultivators of luck tend to “randomly” accrue dense interpersonal networks.

What does skilled luck cultivation look like?

Operate from a place of genuine curiosity

Talking to people without an end in mind other than satisfying your own curiosity is the slow way that is the fast way. People love to talk about what they’re interested in, and by extension love to talk to people who are genuinely curious about the things they’re interested in.

After a dozen inquisitive conversations with people in a given field, you will already have the beginnings of a good network, as well as lots of knowledge you could never accrue in a formal learning setting. Talk to a dozen engineers working in AI labs and you’ll know more about what’s happening at the frontier of AI development than you could garner from a million thinkpieces or tweets. Remember that at any time, the latest information in a field won’t be written down.

Of course, not all conversations will be helpful. Some meetings will be a waste of time. There’s really no way to know in advance whether someone will be fun to talk to, or helpful, or informative. When I look back on the meetings that have been the most professionally consequential for me, nearly every one of them was one I almost bailed on because I was busy or feeling shy and there wasn’t an obvious benefit to the chat.

This is an important point, and a recurrent theme throughout these tips: If you are withholding your energy for use only in those situations where you know an interaction will benefit you, you are not increasing your surface area for luck at all. You are already failing the assignment.

Assume you’re always auditioning for a bigger role

Imagine that you were the chef of a Michelin-starred restaurant and, for some reason, you were assigned a shift as a regular brunch cook. You would probably perform unusually well, beyond the level that could be expected of a regular cook. Maybe there wouldn’t be anything categorically different from what an average brunch cook would do — there would just be an increase in caring, because to perform anything less than excellently would be embarrassing.

The winning move here is to start behaving like that chef when you’re just a cook. To assume that you’re aiming for a future that will hold you to a much higher standard, even if you’re not currently held to that standard. People who behave like this — who act as if they are already an admired success in their field — have a funny way of ending up there.

When I got asked to pitch in on some legal research on clinical trials over the holidays in 2021, I didn’t have much reason to believe it would turn into anything special. It was Christmas, I wasn’t being paid for it — I could have easily half-assed it and no one would have blinked. But instead I treated it as important, as if performing less than excellently would be embarrassing, and it led in quick succession to an offer to lead the clinical trial effort, and then to co-found a company.

The lesson here isn’t that every excess outlay of effort pays dividends immediately; it’s that people really notice when you show up despite it not being a matter of duty or obviously in your self-interest. And people remember it.

Give before you take

Another thing I’ve noticed about many people who’ve achieved outlier success: They are surrounded by people who they trust implicitly and who value loyalty and reciprocity. Essentially, their professional lives are one giant positive-sum game, where everyone is eager to do favors for one another.

I would put myself in the category of “partway there.” While I don’t have some huge high-trust mafia, I have built close professional ties over the last few years with some people I trust like family. I’d drop everything for them if they needed something, and I know they’d do the same for me. It’s hard to overstate the value of having connections like this, and a crowded network of such connections will make you practically invincible.

There’s only one way to start building this kind of network, which is to act with generosity towards others before you know whether it will be reciprocated. Generosity can be in the form of attention, e.g. being an unusually responsive conversational partner. It can be in the form of time, e.g. going out of your way to meet somebody where it’s convenient for them, or helping them out with small tasks. Or it can be in the form of resources — it’s really hard to go wrong with buying someone lunch.

Air your weirdness

It’s still under-appreciated how powerful it is to put your thoughts on the internet. Yes, even now, in 2025, when Substack is the hot social network.

In an imaginary world where God dropped me into the life of someone who didn’t have any professional connections, starting a blog is one of the first things I’d do. As it is, my Substack has made it much easier to hire at Astera — I’ve been surprised at how many promising candidates come to us through it, or mention it as a factor in why they took a job. My friend Ben Kuhn (an exceptional blogger) has written about experiencing the same thing in his time at Wave.

But of course, it makes sense: the best candidates are aligned with your values, and those are also the people who are going to enjoy your work the most. The writing doesn’t have to be spectacularly original or particularly literary, it just has to genuinely reflect who you are and what you’re interested in.

Host events

One way to increase serendipity is to throw parties or events, especially a regular series of get-togethers that’s low-pressure to attend. This can be extremely simple, like having acquaintances over for coffee on your stoop, or a casual meeting at a pizza place. You can do this if you know five people in your city, or five hundred.

In my experience, lots of people want more social interaction, but few are willing to initiate events, so it’s powerful to be the person who provides for that unmet need. Even when you have an established network, it’s a great way to densify the connections in your life. This is why I routinely host get-togethers even though I can get socially overloaded and frequently have to retreat to my room to recharge for a few minutes.

Unsure what to host? At the risk of losing my edge, I’m going to let you in on a secret: bagel brunch. My husband and I host them once a month, and they have become the cornerstone of our social life. You can feed dozens of people cheaply, it feels low-stakes to everyone involved, and there’s rarely any competition for people’s time early in the day on weekends. They are the perfect “put everyone on the list, get to know them later” event.

A period of lostness is a part of it

At the beginning of this process, it will feel artificial, like you’re socially flailing and trying too hard. Because you will be socially flailing, and trying too hard. Surely, you might think to yourself, everyone can tell that I don’t belong — sending out a bunch of cold emails, scheduling random meetings, asking a lot of questions. The whole landscape will be obscure to you. Some people who claim to be important will turn out not to be, and some people without any public presence will turn out to be extremely influential behind the scenes.

And then, something will start to change. You’ll make a couple of key contacts who will introduce you to their favorite people. (Some might refer to these key contacts as “friends.”) You’ll start to get a sense of who’s respected, who is a drama factory, who can be counted on and who’s flaky.

And then. And then what? I could give you an “after picture” of what the life of a well-connected person looks like. There are many enticing possible descriptions. But the magic of this whole process is that I have no idea what form your luck will take. I can’t predict what might happen, any more than I could’ve predicted that I’d end up here after emerging from rehab 4.5 years ago, with little more than curiosity and desperation. My imagination couldn’t have conceived of how rich my life could get if I really started making my own luck. The same is likely true of you.

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This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book. I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the next couple months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which tells us what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think!

It’s a funny quirk of the human condition that sometimes simply asking, of a given task, “how would someone much, much better than me approach this?” immediately makes you better at it. Like, right away.

Weird! It shouldn’t be so easy. But sometimes it is.

Let’s say I’m applying effort to keep up in a conversation that’s a little awkward. There is a pregnant silence, and I think, ah, what should go in that silence? Maybe I could ask an open-ended question, or tell a short amusing anecdote about my recent life. After quickly flipping through a few possibilities, I settle on one and utter a few words. They work fine, but there’s not that effortless fluidity of real skill. And as a result, the conversation remains leaden — people don’t feel comfortable responding to me because I don’t sound natural. (This happens to me all the time, by the way.)

Sometimes I fare better by simply telling myself to act like a charismatic person. I know some of those, and I can slip into a passable imitation of one much more easily than I can break their talents down into steps. My personality naturally distorts the imitation, but that’s fine — I tell myself that’s just my own spin on being a charming conversationalist.

Something like this works in lots of other places. I’ve productively pretended to be someone else on fundraising calls, while singing in the shower, or when doing my makeup for a special occasion. I’m convinced I could do a halfway decent restoration job on an old rusted tool, just for all the My Mechanics I’ve osmosed over time.

I.

This is not totally strange. It’s clear that humans are mimicry machines — this is a huge part of how babies learn. We pick up the marvelous talent of native speakers long before we can consciously understand the concept of “grammar.” Same goes with walking, facial expressions, and social scripts.

Only later do we develop explicit reasoning: the ability to break the world down into representations, descriptions and symbols that float above it, in the mental plane of experience. Much of our knowledge acquisition takes place there, in simulated reality. It’s miraculous: we can absorb and combine symbols that tell us how to use our new appliance. We can take a string of language like “push your heels through the floor” and use it to lift weights more capably. But in the process, we let our mimicry muscle atrophy, and we forget its power. When we want to learn to play tennis, for example, we might think to ask questions like, “what makes a good tennis player,” rather than trusting our ability to pick it up via pure observation.

This is roughly what Tim Gallwey discovered when coaching tennis players, as described in The Inner Game of Tennis. Like most coaches, he gave students verbal instructions, which they asked for. But when he tried to break down a perfect swing into a set of explicit steps, the students made awkward and jumbled movements. On the other hand, when he simply showed them what great form looked like and asked them to act like a baby and figure it out, their bodies adjusted on their own.

The improvement came not from explicit reasoning, but from letting a deeper, more intuitive system take over. It’s easier to imitate wholeness than it is to assemble it from parts.

II.

Beginner chess players often know that grandmasters don’t recommend getting their queen out early, because the queen can be threatened by other pieces and chased around the board. It’s one of the first early-game principles that players learn. But beginner players do it anyway because it’s fun to engage in unstrategic aggression, and beginners lose lots of games this way. However, if they simply think, “what would a better player do,” their instincts improve.

I think this should be at least a little bit surprising, the fact that our mimicry abilities can extend to latent space like this. Some combination of largely unconscious mental processes gives us the ability to simulate the thinking of others, even though we have no direct ability to observe it. Think of how quickly you can tell, just from an unusual text message, that a friend is unhappy. Even if we have only a small sample of observations of someone whose instincts we trust deeply, we probably have enough material to ask, “does it seem like they would do this?” Trying to explicitly reason about the basis of ethical action is complicated. But it’s pretty simple to ask, “what would Jesus do?”

III.

Also surprising: I’ve had luck harnessing mimicry for performance gains even when the person I call to mind isn’t an expert in the specific task at hand, but rather just a generally competent person.

Once, when I was staying with friends an hour outside of London, another American came to visit. When she showed up in a rental car, she announced that she’d learned to drive stick on the way over. As in: she landed at the airport, realized all the rentals were manual, and just decided that it couldn’t be that hard. She looked up instructions, grabbed the shifter, and set out driving on the wrong side of the road, on the highway.

Now, it might sound reckless when I say it that way, but you are missing the context that this woman was incredibly cool. She was so self-assured that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to have done. She narrated the story without apparent amazement about her learning. And, I thought: oh, that is what a generally competent person looks like.

For some time after that, whenever I stepped up to a wholly foreign task, like learning archery, rather than asking myself what an archer would do, I would ask myself what that woman would do — how she would approach this totally alien endeavor. And hand to God, much of the time, it made me better at it immediately.

Beginners are often neurotic, alternating between I better not fuck this up and I’m going to fuck this up. Pretending I was that woman allowed me to skip all of that, until I eventually became enough like her that I could stop relying on it.

IV.

What happens when you get good enough at something that there’s no one obvious left to mimic? If you define excellence the way most people do — by reference to the people around you — you might simply declare yourself magnificent and be done with it. But bizarrely, the ability to simulate and mimic higher levels of capability sometimes seems to generalize to higher and higher levels of capacity, even beyond the apparent top of the scale. (Cf. this tweet from Nick Cammarata.)

It’s the most natural thing in the world to define excellence based on what we see around us. We might deem ourselves to have had a productive day if we were focused a little bit longer than our colleagues, or maybe we did well at the gym if we matched the performance of our friend who’s been coming for 6 months longer. However, often, these comparative metrics are completely arbitrary. More likely than not, everyone around you is operating at a lower standard than they’re capable of.

Throughout most of history, it seemed impossible that someone could run a 10-second 100m, climb Everest, or land a 900 on a skateboard. But once someone did, they were followed in relatively quick succession by many others. At a certain point in history, physiologists believed that the human lung would collapse under water pressure at a depth around 30m, making deeper free diving impossible. This was proven false by Jacques Mayol, who in 1968 hit a 70m free dive. Since then, the record has been surpassed many times, and currently stands at 214m — over 7x what was once deemed physically impossible for the human body.

These breakthroughs did not happen because an update to the laws of physics was rolled out by the game developers of Earth. The most straightforward explanation is that once a certain standard was shown to be achievable, many more people successfully aspired to it and then set about to improve on it.

This means that setting the standard of “I’m going to be better than anyone doing it today” is not necessarily unrealistic.

Poker provides an interesting illustration.

Basically every poker pro today is better than every pro 20 years ago — and plenty of people in 2005 believed they were good at poker! But they were actually nowhere near the ceiling of excellence. In hindsight, poker in 2005 was basically pre-competitive — people had no idea how much better they could be.

When I started playing poker, I discovered that physical reads seemed to still be pre-competitive — as far as I can tell, there had not been a genuinely determined effort to figure out just how much information could be extracted from the body language of opponents. This was true despite the fact that most pros believed all the juice had already been wrung out of tells in the early days, that people had figured out how to not leak information while engaged in the “real work” of math and game theory.

I capitalized on this by systematically improving my physical reads, to the point where I was among the best in the world at it for a period of time, along with a few friends who put in the same effort. In my mind, besides luck, this is what explains nearly all of my success in poker — I was never exceptional at the level of the mechanics of the game.

If you asked, about physical reads, “what would someone much better than me do to improve,” you would probably come up with an answer similar to mine: read everything on the topic, then on adjacent topics, then on vaguely related topics; watch hundreds of hours of streams on silent with hole cards covered, trying to find patterns; find other people who were similarly obsessed and trade tips with them; relentlessly make notes of the mannerisms of every person you ever played twice with so you could combine observations from multiple sessions. You know, take it seriously.

Whatever you’re working at today, you might consider the possibility that it’s also pre-competitive, even if it feels “late” to other people. Many, many human beings had engaged in distance running before the four-minute mile was achieved in 1954. So, if a given skill plays a crucial load-bearing function in your life, try to completely ignore the standards others set and assume there’s a much higher standard to which you can aspire. Try to internalize this insane belief: “I’m going to be better at this than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

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Sometimes, I see someone on the internet say something that I think is so completely backwards, so 100% off, that I feel thankful for their help in locating what is actually true. Their statement provides a sort of True South that can be used to locate True North.

In this case, it’s this tweet about willpower — which, without actually using the word willpower, propagates the idea that there are two kinds of people: those who can act according to willed precommitments (“Type 1”), and those who can’t (“Type 2”).

To illuminate my thinking about this tweet, and the subject of willpower generally, I’d like to share the following facts about myself.

• In undergrad, I earned two degrees in four years, while working multiple jobs and serving as editor in chief of the student newspaper. I went on to graduate near the top of my class at Yale Law. For most of those years, I was drinking alone every night to the point of blacking out.

• I once made an extremely stupid weight loss bet that required me to fast five days a week for eight weeks straight. I won. Now, I take Ozempic to make it hard to overeat, and I take testosterone to make it easy to exercise.

• I lost more than 3 years of my life to a drug addiction that cost me my job, savings, most of my friends, and for a time the ability to walk. I got clean dozens of times during that period, but relapsed over and over. I just could not stop. In the 4 years after I got sober, I worked my way up from a friend’s personal assistant to the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar organization.

• Every morning I get up two hours early to work on the book I’m writing or on a Substack post before going off to work. And every evening I waste about an hour on activities that I don’t endorse, that don’t make me happier or better rested or more fulfilled — that probably have the opposite effect, actually.

So: Which kind of person am I, Type 1 or Type 2? How would you rate my ability to “simply decide to do something and then do it”?

How much willpower would you say I have?

Here is what I think: Willpower is an incoherent concept invented by smug people who think they have it in order to denigrate people who they think don’t. People tacitly act as though it’s synonymous with effort or grindy determination. But in most cases where willpower is invoked, the person who is trying and failing to adhere to some commitment is exerting orders of magnitude more effort than the person who is succeeding.

During my time in 12-step programs, I met plenty of people who’d lost their kids to addiction — sometimes to divorce, sometimes to foster care. I can guarantee that, in their efforts to resist that outcome, most of them tried harder, exerted more “willpower,” than the average person has applied to anything in their life. And yet, faced with a slew of cases like this, many people will think “what a damnable lack of willpower,” and not “wow, addiction must have a kind of power I’ve never experienced in my life.”

Not many of us will lose our kids to addiction, but it’s not because we’re out there trying so much harder not to.

The word should be thrown in the garbage. It is a concept that rots our imagination. It obscures the fact that motivation is complex, and that there is massive variation in how hard some things are for different people.

When self-applied positively, e.g. “I did this through willpower, and that other person did not,” the word allows us to convert the good fortune of excess capacity into a type of virtue — twice as lucky, to have the sort of luck that’s mistaken for virtue. Resist the temptation to be confused by this, or it will make you childish, and callous.

When self-applied negatively, e.g., “I wish I had more willpower,” the word is a way to slip into a kind of defensible helplessness, rather than trying to compose intelligent solutions to behavioral issues.

And it’s this last thing that really gets me about the idea of willpower. At first blush it sounds like the kind of idea that should increase agency. I just have to try harder! But, in fact, the idea of willpower reduces agency, by obscuring the real machinery of motivation, and the truth that if your life is well-designed, it should feel easy to live up to your ideals, rather than hard.

Learning this was part of the education addiction gave me. To win against addiction, you have to make the fight as easy as possible by totally remaking your life. On top of all sorts of other work, you have to put as much distance as you can between yourself and the people, places, and situations that trigger you to use. The point is not to valiantly struggle; the point is to minimize the struggle that is necessary.

Having won this fight, I have zero compunction about making my goals as easy as possible to achieve. For example, my body has made it totally clear that I need to do resistance training, or I’ll be rewarded with poor physical health and poorer mental health. But my mind has made it totally clear that I will not go to a gym to do it, regardless. So, I have a personal trainer come to my house twice a week and force me to pick up the weights.

Perhaps I could demand discipline of myself, or at the very least feel bad that it’s worth it for me to exchange money for someone else’s time. But I have more important things to coerce myself about.

The Myth of Willpower is the idea that virtue lies in exerting extreme effort to overcome obstacles, and that any success attained without effort is actually bad, bordering on immoral. The truth is that high-agency people are always looking for shortcuts. They are never thinking, “how can I work hard and demonstrate my willpower,” but rather, “how can I get results faster by maximizing my leverage?”

I almost always try to accomplish the thing I want to accomplish using as little effort as I can, because there are endless good uses of my time and energy, and spending less of them where they’re not needed frees them up to spent somewhere else.

To be clear, I am aware that shortcut-free hard work is sometimes necessary, and can be ennobling. Training for narrowly difficult tasks that require mastery or conditioning — like running a marathon, or playing Bach’s violin partitas — can force you to confront your physical and emotional limits in a way that is both personality-expanding and healthily humbling. I’m not saying you should never work hard, and there is probably something important about the human experience, something vital, that you miss out on if you never experience the application of grinding endurance to an endeavor that can’t be accomplished in any other way.

What I’m saying is that you should choose hard work if hard work is the desired result. If it’s not, and you can take a shortcut, take a fucking shortcut.

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This post is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (and builds on a couple paragraphs in my original post on agency). I’ll be running a few excerpts here in the next couple months, in hopes of getting feedback on the kinds of content people are excited to see in the book (which is a signal about what to expand or scale back). Let me know what you think!

Fear of being temporarily low in social status stops human beings from living richer lives to an unbelievable degree.

It happens on the micro scale, when a dance party doesn’t get started because nobody wants to be the first person on the dance floor. It’s fascinating: When I see someone alone on a dance floor, letting loose, it’s clear that they’re not doing anything wrong. Even if they’re not dancing well, they’re doing a public service by inviting other people to join them. But most of us hesitate to be that person.

It happens on the scale of decades, when somebody dreams of becoming a songwriter but doesn’t ever write a full song, because they’re afraid of confronting their current lack of skill. They would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting — talented in their imaginary world — than actually bad on the way to being actually good.

When you start learning or doing almost anything interesting, you will initially be bad at it, and incur a temporary penalty in the form of looking a little dumb. You will probably sound awful at your first singing lesson. If you publish writing on the internet, your first piece will not be your best work.

My husband calls this the “Moat of Low Status,” and I have gleefully stolen the phrase because it’s so useful. It’s called a moat because it’s an effective bar to getting where you’re trying to go, and operates much like a moat in the business sense — as a barrier to entry that keeps people on the inside (who are already good at something) safe from competition from the horde of people on the outside (who could be).

The Moat is effective because it’s easy to imagine the embarrassment that comes from being in it. It’s so vivid, it looms so large that we forget the novel upsides that come from transcending it. Easy to imagine the embarrassment from your first months of singing lessons, because you’ve faced embarrassment before. Harder to imagine what you’ll sound like as a trained singer, because that’s never happened to you before.

“Learn by doing” is the standard advice for learning something quickly, and it’s what I try to follow. But it’s hard to learn by doing unless you first learn to love the Moat. It’s embarrassing to learn by doing, whether you are trying to learn a language by embedding yourself with native speakers or learning to climb by falling off a wall at the gym over and over again.

As a result, people often engage in theoretical learning even in domains where experiential learning is obviously faster. I encountered this in becoming a professional poker player. In poker, it’s possible to improve via theoretical learning — there’s lots of online content that you can passively absorb, and some of it is useful. But you really can’t become a successful player without playing a lot of hands with and in front of other players, many of whom will be better than you.

How do you get over the aversion, so you can get to the other side of the Moat?

My years of splashing around

I have often found it to be the case that the cruelty of others has done for me what I could not do for myself.

I experienced this in grade school, when the derision of other kids and teachers alike taught me to be self-contained and keep my own counsel, because there was no winning with them. This is how I learned I could be lonely and strange, and people could see it, and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.

I experienced it again in college, when I got doxxed on a pre-law message board and my appearance was picked apart by a bunch of trolls. This is how I learned that other people could notice the things I didn’t like about the way I looked, and gossip among themselves about them, and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.

Poker was the next level for this, because I so desperately wanted to be seen as good and clever — but the thing is, a lot of people hated me in poker. I’d made it a personal mission (in the pre-woke era) to draw attention to the poor way women were sometimes treated in the extremely male environment, which won me plenty of fans (unironically) and plenty of fans (ironically). So every time I played a hand badly, I knew one of the pros at the table might text their group chats about it, or put it on Twitter.

I didn’t exactly emerge unscathed from that environment — truth be told, I went a little crazy from all the attention. But I committed myself to the messy process of learning by doing, nevertheless. I got comfortable asking better players stupid questions, and improved much faster because I could benefit from their experience. I got comfortable misplaying hands on television, and got to benefit from the experience of the whole internet.

And I learned that people whose admiration I actually wanted could see me eat shit, and say so, and the world wouldn’t turn to ash.

One Weird Trick

Okay, but really, short of traumatizing yourself, how can you learn to thrive in the Moat, so you can experience the glorious upside?

The true secret is that getting over it means resolving yourself to not really getting over it. Unless you are truly emotionally strange, being in the Moat will hurt somewhat. You will feel embarrassed. There’s not a shortcut.

I realize this isn’t what self-help advice is supposed to sound like — I’m supposed to be able to offer you One Weird Trick for never feeling the sting of humiliation, a way to override the eons of evolutionary history that tell you it’s very bad to look weak in front of others.

But it’s not like that. I’ve written before about a hand I played so badly that there were news stories about it, but when I think back on it, I don’t actually remember the stories or the tweets or any of that. Instead, I remember the look on Christoph Vogelsang’s face when I flipped over my cards. It was a look that said, very plainly, “I have clearly overestimated you.” Sometimes, no matter how much you reconcile yourself to humiliation, it still pierces you to your core.

The One Weird Trick is … you just do the thing anyway. And the world doesn’t turn to ash.

Blooming, buzzing confusion

I don’t want to sound totally grim here — there are certainly silver linings and mitigations. For instance, it’s my experience that embarrassment and excitement are closely related. As we get older, our lives become increasingly routine, if we let them. We get more constrained and repetitive in our actions, and, as a result, our days get less memorable. We barely see life because we’re so good at walking the path of least embarrassment.

When you step into the Moat of Low Status, you also step away from the grinding of normalcy. On your first day of dance class, you don’t know how to move your body. Isn’t that exciting? You don’t know how to move your body. This thing you’ve been lugging around is now a whole new vehicle — it might move like a frenzied wolverine, or an indifferent spatula.

When you get past the flush of embarrassment in your cheeks, you might notice that you’re in a state of heightened awareness, with brighter colors and sharper lines. You’ve re-entered the state of childlike wonder where you don’t have adult concepts to mediate reality, what William James called “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Shame can be a golden ticket.

However, all this excitement can get overwhelming if you don’t have tools to deal with it. Here are some tactics that I find useful when I’m deep in the Moat:

• Attempt the basic move of mindfulness meditation: get curious about the tingling feeling of embarrassment in the body, rather than your mental stories about it or reactions to it. See if you can welcome it. Curiosity inverts resistance.

• Remind yourself that embarrassment is simply the feeling of breaking the rules, and you want to break your previous rules.

• Visualize the larger purpose. Yes, you have this feeling now. But it’s just one frame of the movie, part of the drama. The rest of the story involves you using your hard-won knowledge to live a fantastically interesting life.

And then there’s the real thing that gets me to do a lot of things I don’t want to do:

• Imagine the advantage you’ll have over all the people who let shame slow them down.

But none of these tactics will banish the feeling. You will still have to move through it.

In recent years, shifting from poker to biotech to philanthropy has meant repeatedly confronting situations in which I am the least-informed person in the room, at least in terms of domain-specific knowledge. Every time, I’ve had to reconcile myself to months of being a relative dumbass in a room full of experts, constantly asking them to explain basic concepts or terminology, exposing myself as not possessing knowledge they all take for granted.

I don’t always adore this. But I know this is what skill acquisition feels like. I know there’s no skipping the hot flush of embarrassment, or the blooming, buzzing confusion of newness. And I know there’s no one moment when those feelings dissolve into the assurance of mastery — but I know they do, gradually, eventually, slowly and then all at once. So, soon I’ll be good at this. I’ll be through the Moat. Then, I’ll find another one, hold my breath for just a moment, and jump in.

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This week’s post is something a little different, in honor of my husband Sasha’s birthday yesterday. Getting together with Sasha was one of the pivotal acts of my life — something that set me on a totally different course than I would have been on otherwise, one with a lot more degrees of mental freedom. Meeting him was like encountering an alien intelligence — someone much smarter than me in a way that I didn’t realize people could be smarter. He had a kind of mastery over his own inner life, and a corresponding ability to model the inner lives of other people, that I hadn’t experienced before.

I know Sasha has this kind of effect on many people, but I don’t know if he really knows it. So I asked 37 of his favorite people what they love most about him, and picked out my favorites among the 100+ they sent back.

1. “That he’s good at looking at people. Like in a way where it feels like he’s looking freshly, not out of habit.”

2. “That if he learns a better way to be, he will actually change his behavior accordingly. I think this is something like extreme openness plus agency, and is very admirable.”

3. “That time he made me the most delicious drink I have ever tasted in my life, and I asked him how to make it, and his earnest explanation started with: ‘Oh, it’s so simple. After you sous vide the mango …’”

4. “That he does the best introductions of anyone I know. A testament to the care he puts into getting to know people is the skill (and humor) he has in describing them to one another.”

5. “The way he listens so effectively that he sometimes seems to understand substantially more than what I’m saying. Speaking with Sasha can be an experience in unusual communication bandwidth.”

6. “The party trick he taught me once where if you see someone you want to talk to (a girl, even), you can walk up to them and say ‘Hi, I’m [your name].’ I didn’t know this! But it turns out that’s kind of what parties are for.”

7. “The way he inspires hope. Maybe it’s the freedom with which he expresses himself or the ways that he has chosen possibility after possibility, the lack of rigidity along his life’s path. I’m always left with the feeling of … it’s not too late. It’s never too late.”

8. “That he is one of the few people I know I can bring to any social setting — a midsummer night’s dinner party, WWE wrestling match, meditation retreat, runway show, chess tournament where no one makes eye contact — and know that he’ll be grand and have a wonderful time.”

9. “The almost-joyful way he reacts when the universe has defeated him with some new, humbling, even unflattering truth; an instant and patient surrender which leaves his soul grinning while his ego shamelessly concedes, ‘good game.’”

10. “That no matter how insane or jumbled the word salad that falls out of my mouth may be, Sasha will immediately and kindly edit it in real time — giving us both something, just, immensely better to work with. I’m grateful.”

11. “The fact that, though perfectly aware of the various status hierarchies he intersects with, he still seems to choose whom to value and spend time with based on a private accounting.”

12. “The way he embodies healthy masculinity. He’s brave, mischievous, protective, kind, and sensitive. He’s also jacked.”

13. “The way he makes mundane things take life when he speaks them. He can write coherently about the ineffable, showing us all it was a skill issue all along.”

14. “The glee, engagement and utter specificity of his description of his favorite scents.”

15. “That he doesn’t need a pretext for hanging out — the purpose is to spend time together. We don’t need to discuss anything in particular, eat, see something, play boardgames or get coffee. We can just be together.”

16. “That I can be a little kid around him. I don’t just mean that I get to display charming child-like delight and curiosity, I mean I get to be bratty, and sad, and aggrieved without logic, and he accepts it and welcomes it like no one else.”

17. “The way he loves to help at a party — matchmaking, running an advice booth, playing bartender or scent-tender. He always has a job.”

18. “His unique ability to gently interrogate and expand his conversation partner’s comfort. He is really skilled at perception, but doesn’t assume. He meets you where you are at, like, ‘Ah, are you cold? Might I offer a blanket?’ But the blanket is made of helpful clever words, and the problem he perceives is not temperature, it’s some niche and extremely specific psychological block you are experiencing.”

19. “The knowing, mischievous smile he will give you that lets you know he noticed the same thing you did and is sharing a moment with you. It’s fun and silly and makes people feel seen.”

20. “The fact that the most distressed I’ve ever seen Sasha was having to play a deception game with his friends.”

21. “That despite being a writer, a notoriously thin-skinned sort, he has never received feedback in anything other than the most charitable light. I never have to pick my words carefully, he always gives me the benefit of the doubt.”

22. “That he’s open and accepting of his flaws and limitations. He’s one of the least pretentious people I know, and when he has a pretension, he shows us ‘look, this is a pretension I have, isn’t that funny?’”

23. “That he’s better at giving advice than anyone I’ve ever met — meaning, giving it in a way that it will actually be heard by the person receiving it, which takes a thousand times more skill than just giving the ‘right’ advice in a way that’s divorced from context. It puts people in the best position possible to actually make progress on their problems.”

24. “That he’s self contained, like he’s his own stable boat and isn’t clinging to you to keep from drowning. Many people have a small amount of this but he has basically none of it.”

25. “The fact that he so obviously wants what’s best for his friends even if it means calling them out on blind spots or other uncomfortable things.”

26. “That he loves weirdos, he brings us together, and somehow through his deep capacity to actually care for us, we all get more weird in the best ways.”

27. “That he is not morally self-serious in the slightest, but seems to tumble into very moral behavior like a deeply lazy Taoist fisherman.”

28. “The way he looks forward to cooking for people so much that he starts planning the menu for dinner parties weeks in advance.”

29. “That one can rest in his presence knowing that, though one’s neuroses are probably being seen with penetrating clarity, they are also being held lovingly and in good humor.”

30. “The way he can get so wrapped up in a conversation that he’ll basically forget to keep driving and will be cruising at 10 mph under the speed limit.”

31. “The way that he writes and sings beautiful music, and how he has so many other notable positive qualities that I’m not even sure his music will make the top 37.”

32. “His exuberance and natural leadership in organizing group activities. It takes vulnerability to ask people to show up, and he is so natural at it I don’t think he realizes it is a difficult thing for some people to do.”

33. “More than anyone else I know, Sasha cares about the internal lives of other people for basically no reason other than that he cares. Nothing ever feels transactional with him. He’s an incredible person to have in your corner.”

34. “That he’s an unusual mix of being an incredibly good listener AND he has an amazing stream of ideas, observations and self reflections to share. I have a large sample of humans and I can’t think of anyone else who’s a ‘10’ on both, most of us are quite lopsided. If you’re talking to Sasha and you’re feeling chatty, he’ll listen deeply. If you’re with him and you’re feeling quiet, you can just listen to him riff and let him handle silence management. It’s a unique pleasure.”

35. “That I’ve never seen him show any inclination towards belittling or sneering. And he has little time for people who try to impress others by being snide, cynical, or cruel. This creates a force field of good vibes around him.”

36. “How generous he is. After meeting me for the first time, he offered to meet up with me just to teach me nondual meditation. Only when I went on my first Jhourney retreat did I realize how influential of a meditation guy Sasha is in the Bay! He’s responsible for a ton of people hitting their first jhana simply by writing about it.”

37. “That I know in my heart that if I ever needed a friend to help me out, in whatever kind of situation, no matter how ridiculous or how much my fault — I could call and count on Sasha. I am so grateful to have him in my life.”

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Have you ever noticed just how much of the drama in movies is generated by an unspoken rule that the characters aren’t allowed to communicate well? Instead of naming the problem, they’re forced to skirt around it until the plot makes it impossible to ignore. It’s the cheapest way to build effective drama, but if you don’t fully dissolve yourself in the movie logic, the whole time you want to scream, “can’t anyone just talk about what’s happening directly?!”

Take La La Land. A huge part of the drama of the movie could have been avoided if the Ryan Gosling character said to the Emma Stone character: “I feel pressure to get a steady gig that includes lots of time on the road because I sense you want me to grow up and get real about my career. Could we talk about whether that’s what you actually want, and get clearer about our priorities?” Instead, they never talk about it, and the relationship explodes as a result of their misaligned expectations.

Or: Good Will Hunting. The entire movie feels like it could’ve been skipped if literally any emotionally intelligent person said to Matt Damon’s character: “I feel like you have a tremendous amount of intellectual potential that you’re wasting here — why are you getting in fights rather than trying to do something interesting?”

Communication failures like these make for good storytelling where we, the audience, get to watch the characters stumble towards understanding. But you shouldn’t live like someone waiting for the screenwriter of your life to arrange a convenient resolution. Functional people don’t let things linger unspoken — they name what’s facing them out loud.

It sounds like such a simple thing. And yet, so many of us don’t do it. It’s my experience that movie logic is endemic in dysfunctional organizations, friendships, and marriages. People walk around in a haze of denial, simply assuming that their concerns will disappear. They wait until the problem can’t possibly be ignored anymore, instead of naming it well before it becomes critical. Maybe they don’t even realize at a conscious level that the dynamic in question is capable of being named; they just take it as a background fact about the universe that they can strain against but not change.

What does it look like when you break out of movie logic? I remember the first time I realized I could do this. I was at a bar during my first year of law school with a bunch of people from my class, including a woman with whom I had an awkward dynamic stemming from an unfortunate misunderstanding about a guy. This awkwardness had calcified in my emotional brain to “we don’t like each other, we have beef.” But on that particular evening I had a moment of clarity, and instead of trying to avoid her I walked up to her and said, “I feel like we got off on the wrong foot because of that stupid thing, and I’m sorry about that — I don’t have anything against you at all.” In an instant, the look of flat wariness she’d put on when she saw me walking over melted into relief, and she said “I’m so glad you said that, I’ve been feeling awful about it.” She went on to be my closest friend in law school.

Outcomes like this are common when you figure out how to break the fourth wall. Whether or not both of you were already conscious of the real, underlying issue, when it is spoken out loud, the result is usually relief, like a spell has been broken. Even if the content is uncomfortable, it feels good in the way cutting through layers of unreality always does.

Some other lines of dialogue that would make for bad movies, but good living:

• “I’ve noticed that lately, every time we have plans to hang out one-on-one, you invite someone else to join us — is that intentional?”

• “I always feel a little awkward around you, and I’m worried it comes across as me not liking you — I just wanted to say that’s not the case.”

• “I’ve been feeling a low-level tension between us, like maybe we’re quietly annoyed at each other but trying to stay polite. Is that just me?”

• “It sometimes seems like when I push back in meetings, it changes the energy in the room — like maybe you’re afraid to engage with me as directly as you do other people. Does that feel true?”

Reading these examples, you might have noticed that it’s rare to hear people talk like this. I think there are a couple of reasons for that.

One is that it’s easy to mistake silence for informed diplomacy. If your manager is stressing you out, and you are putting up with it, it’s easy to think that you’re just being a good employee, and everyone is aware of how good you’re being. But unless your manager is quite emotionally intelligent, they may have no idea that you’re unhappy, especially if you’re engaging in people-pleasing behavior to try and cover it up.

Another reason is that it can feel like by naming an issue, you are making it into a big deal. But problems are real, and exert a toll on you, whether you name them or not. Naming the issue means you can interact with it.

Finally — often, the people who are most eager to name issues kind of suck. They are critical, judgmental people who lob opinions about how others should live without skill. Think of the person you’ve just met who confidently offers unsolicited advice about whatever they imagine your problem is.

But the answer to this is not to maintain the conspiracy of silence. The answer is to get skillful at naming issues.

Tip 1: Take yourself outside the movie

Before you even name an issue, it can help to ask: Actually, is this really the important issue to name? Or is my feeling about the issue a manifestation of something deeper that would be even more powerful to tackle?

For example, let’s say you want to tell a friend that you were bothered by the way they were bragging about how lavish and expensive their wedding was. Is that really the root issue? Or is the real issue an underlying dynamic of competitiveness stoked by both parties, where the relationship is worse off because both of you fill every conversation with social status claims?

To locate the possibility of going deeper, it can be helpful to take the movie metaphor literally — if you were an audience member watching the movie, what would you be screaming at yourself to say? What would a reader of this screenplay say the real, big unnamed issue is?

Tip 2: If you feel you can’t name the problem, say that

Let’s say you want to name a problem in one of your relationships, but you’re worried that presenting the problem would start an argument. Congratulations. You have now found the problem to name. You are allowed to say the following: “There’s an issue I see in our relationship, and I want to address it so our relationship is stronger. But I’m nervous about naming it, because I’m worried that it could start an argument, and I really don’t want you to feel attacked.”

This is advice that is applicable annoyingly often, to any meta-problem that makes a conversation difficult. You can always address the secondary problem. Many relationship advice conversations I have with friends go like this.

Friend: “I want to talk about [issue] with my partner, but when I get into the issue, I get flustered about it and stop making sense.”

Me: “Okay, what if you say that: I want to talk about this issue but it makes me flustered, and I stop making sense.”

Friend: “... Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”

The reason that they don’t think of it, I suspect, is that one way to avoid difficult conversations is to come up with a secondary problem that offers an excuse for avoiding the conflict, and then assume it’s impassable.

Tip 3: Name things before you’re sure of what they are

Sometimes, it’s hard to name a problem because you don’t fully understand it yet. But that’s completely okay — in many settings, you don’t even have to fully understand your feelings, or what is wrong, before you name a conflict. It can be powerful to say: “Something felt off about that meeting, like maybe something important wasn’t being said.” Or: “I think there’s something weird happening in this conversation, but I don’t know what it is.”

Human beings are near-telepathic in our ability to sense when an interpersonal dynamic is off — when someone is emotionally uncomfortable, or engaging in concealment. We all know the itchy feeling when nobody in an interaction is really being sincere. Pretty amazing how psychic we are, right?

Yes, we are psychic, but we are also stupid. Our sense that something is weird is often accurate, but our stories about precisely what the weirdness represents are often way, way off. So, in order to move from an interesting intuition to an accurate story about reality, it helps to enlist other people in the discussion by naming the intuition.

I’ve historically been hesitant to present my intuitions, because it feels sloppy. But having on more than one occasion overcome a “funny feeling” about a good-on-paper candidate to bad results, I’m now eager to make statements like: “It might not mean anything, but I can’t shake a weird feeling about that person. Do you get that same thing?”

This requires a little social discernment, of course. If you are a junior employee in a new workplace, it might not be tactically prudent to approach the CEO with the statement, “hey, couldn’t help but notice that the vibes are off.” But if you work closely with someone, err on the side of transparency.

You might ask — ultimately, what is so wrong with movie logic? Maybe you don’t have to address everything now. Sometimes a solution will present itself. And, I agree. It’s not fatal to, on occasion, engage in a little bit of hopeful silence, to see whether the problem you’re having with someone else is just a mood that might shift.

But over time, hopeful silence has corrosive effects. If you don’t name the real problems in your life, you eventually become alienated from your inner compass. You stop paying attention to your life on an experiential level, because you want to live in a pretend world of self-consolation. You lose the ability to see your life honestly.

Sometimes, I notice this when working with people who have spent time in organizations with poor feedback cultures. They have been taught that it’s so bad to name problems that they focus on resolving acute issues while keeping the peace, all the while navigating an invisible psychological obstacle course. Over time, they become trapped in people-pleasing, and this can blind them to real issues in the substance of their work. When people are like this, it’s difficult to get them to improve, because they see it as psychologically damaging to recognize their own limitations.

This is a skill I’m still working to get better at. It’s truly rare that someone reaches the ceiling — having no resistance to naming issues, and being maximally skillful about doing it. I’m not there yet. But I’m on my way, and it feels good to be moving in that direction. The better I get at it, the less I’m threatened by conflict, and the more it seems like an opportunity to clarify what’s really going on, to grow closer to myself and others. I don’t want to be the character in the movie who’s hopelessly buffeted by intrigue and too scared to investigate it dispassionately. I want to be like the director, who thoroughly understands the drama of each character, and finds the scene all the more interesting as a result.

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Many people have a delusion about commitment. It’s a delusion that’s easy to come by, easy to believe, and, if allowed to linger, capable of sinking your chances of having a satisfying life.

The delusion is that commitment is a matter of feeling something really hard — that you are committed when you have a state of emotional conviction so durable that you won’t waver in the future. You’re committed when you know in your heart that you’ll never cheat on your spouse, or abandon your book, or take money from an investor who’s not really mission-aligned.

It’s a delusion because this simply doesn’t work. Emotions are too variable. If we’re counting on maintaining an emotional state to carry us through some long-term course of action, we’re completely doomed. It’s just not possible to know whether, when you wake up tomorrow, you will be animated by the warrior spirit within, or the neurotic vacillator that hides inside of you. We all have those aspects of self, and we are all at the mercy of their random appearances. No matter how much we optimize our nutrition, sleep, psychological health, or relationships, we are still messy human beings.

So, every time you are counting on the feeling of commitment to sustain an extended effort, you’re rolling the dice. Will your bravest self happen to show up, or your weakest? If your weakest self shows up, all of the work of your previous selves might be thrown away.

An emotionally-centered view of commitment leaves you without good options: If you fail to anticipate the effects of emotional variance, you’ll be prone to adopting long-term goals, then abandoning them when your feelings fluctuate. If, on the other hand, you are wise enough to know your feelings will change, you may never dedicate yourself to anything. And, indeed, you hear people talk this way — some commitment-phobes never get into relationships because they know they will eventually experience feelings of regret and sadness. What they don’t know is that those transient feelings are the price of greater fulfillment.

The delusion is: commitment is a thing that you feel. The truth is: commitment is a thing that you make. It’s a living system of obligations and consequences that cause you to rise above your temporary frailty and work towards a goal you believe in, whether that goal takes a week or a lifetime.

A commitment system is built out of forcing functions: mechanisms that make failure harder than success. An example of a simple forcing function is hosting a dinner party so you’re committed to cleaning up your apartment. A forcing function constricts your options in a way that nudges you towards follow-through. When you set one up correctly, doing the desired thing becomes the path of least resistance.

A few other examples:

• You buy an expensive outfit for a friend’s wedding, one size too small, to commit yourself to losing weight (NB: this is a terrible idea)

• You book a venue for your event so you’ll have to forfeit your deposit if you back out

• You invite people to a live demo of your project before your prototype is finished

I’m a huge believer in implementing forcing functions; I find it extremely powerful to make it intolerably costly for my future self to fall short of my expectations. My future self may resent me a little for doing it, but that’s an acceptable cost of doing business, as far as I’m concerned.

Imposing such a forcing function is, in fact, a vote of confidence in my future self. By contrast, if I’m not willing to implement a forcing function, it’s often a good sign that I actually don’t care that much about a given project. There are so many wonderful things I could do with infinite lifetimes — I’ve often thought it would be fun to try my hand at acting, or pick the violin back up. My willingness to commit is how I distinguish these “it would be nice” options from what I’m really serious about.

Right now, I’m writing a book, and for a long time that was an “it would be nice” hypothetical, a fantasy I considered. In reality, writing a book contains periods of playful inspiration, but it also requires structure and discipline, which are much easier to impose when I have the forcing function of a book deal keeping me accountable.

Commitment has a nearly magical way of creating the possibility of deep focus, resolve, and creativity — “necessity is the mother of invention.” In my experience, if you’re half-committed to some ambitious project, a huge amount of your cognition will be devoted to fantasies of escape, to dreaming of ways out of the discomfort: Wouldn’t it be nice if I could blow this imposing deadline? But when the path to escape is removed, the full force of your ingenuity is brought to the situation.

I could talk about many ways commitment architectures have shaped my life. But the area where this is probably most apparent is my marriage. When I met my husband, it was clear that our relationship had incredible potential. We were highly attracted to each other, and, for both of us, the other had aspirational qualities. He admired my candor and seriousness, and I loved his playfulness and emotional intelligence. We understood that we could grow together into better people.

But we also knew that it would take a lot of work. We started the relationship with severely incompatible communication styles, and very different requirements in terms of personal space. Moreover, we were both shaken from recent breakups.

Had we approached our relationship in the style of “casual dating” that’s popular these days, I don’t think we would’ve made it. Instead, we jumped in with both feet. Our first date was him moving in for a week, and our second date was me bringing him along to a professionally relevant conference abroad. We got engaged within a couple of months, and married within a year of meeting.

Today, we’re one of those annoying couples that glow with love and affection. But we had to dig really deep to get there. I can pinpoint several moments where I’m pretty sure we would’ve broken up if we hadn’t erected the barrier of marriage.

I don’t want to make the journey sound joyless. The process of adapting to each other was enriching, and it unlocked capacities in both of us that weren’t there previously. On my end, I learned to be more emotionally transparent and warm, discovering that some of my preference for solitude came from a discomfort with emotion that I grew out of. I’m now a more open, loving person, more eager to dispense affection to friends and family, and much happier this way. On his end, he learned to be more self-contained, discovering that some of his constant need for contact came from insecurity. He’s now a more self-sufficient person, who has retained his talent for connecting with people but feels less pressure to use it all the time, and he enjoys the liberty that comes from that.

Along the way, we developed lots of little insights into our emotional patterns that were deeply helpful, not just in our marriage but in our lives as a whole. But it’s not like, at every moment, we were thinking, “oh, great, we’re growing our capacity!” At certain points in the relationship, it would be fitting to imagine us like Odysseus, who tied himself to his ship’s mast so he could hear the song of the sirens — writhing against the ropes, tempted by the prospect of breaking free, but held in place by restraints wisely tied by a previous self.

Does this sound unromantic? I can see that; there’s certainly something romantic about an easy relationship that just unfolds naturally. But I think it’s romantic that we both saw a great love on the other side of a lot of difficulty. I see beauty in the way our faith in each other allowed us to transcend our weakness and variability, that we saw something more enduring and charted a course there.

Speculation here: This could be part of why so many people seem to have trouble finding fulfilling relationships today. People wait to feel committed, rather than deciding to make a commitment. But the feeling of commitment doesn’t come easily when both people are exploring other options. If you have an easy off-ramp, you’re less likely to honestly confront your tendencies in the way that grows you into a better partner and creates real intimacy.

Anyway: I am not saying that we succeeded just because we tied ourselves to the mast. What I can say with confidence is that we increased our chances of success dramatically. I can also say with confidence that you live more fully if you force yourself to stretch beyond what you think of as your capacity.

But clearly there are limits here, right? The magic of commitment is not infinite. You probably can’t make a great marriage happen with literally anyone. Similarly, I would be pessimistic about your chances if you set up a forcing function that required you to produce a novel in a week.

This is why commitment architecture is a skill. It requires a deep understanding of just how far you can push yourself, and you can only get that through experimenting over time.

What you’re trying to do here is hurl yourself off progressively higher diving boards. You want to create a forcing function that makes it likelier that you’ll follow through on a project that’s outside of your comfort zone. Then, if it works, you up the stakes. You are looking to find yourself repeatedly in a zone of productive discomfort, where you’re pushed just beyond what you think you’re capable of. Over time, you’ll develop a sense of what your real capacity is.

Forcing functions need to have two things to work: real accountability, and real consequences.

Real accountability means that there needs to be an objective goal to hit, however meager, and someone else to witness that it definitely happened. “Make progress on the novel” does not work, because literally anything could be construed as doing this — you could tell yourself you made progress if you procrastinated, because that means you’re a little closer to being done with procrastination! “Write one sentence” would be better.

Real consequences mean that it actually has to hurt if you don’t do it. Social pressure can be a decent incentive, but it’s not always enough. Many smokers have, at some point, asked their friends to shame them for continuing to smoke, and this typically doesn’t work. The consequences have to match the level of temptation — trying to overcome a strong aversion with a weak commitment mechanism will fail 100% of the time.

One alternative is something financial: bet money that you will do it. The extreme (and especially effective) approach is an anti-charity accountability mechanism: pledging to send, say, $500 to a political candidate you despise if you fail to follow through on your commitment. Note, though, that it’s important not to make it hurt too much. If you cross some threshold of punishment, when it comes time to enforce the penalty, you simply won’t do it — which also makes for a bad commitment mechanism. Pledging to give away 1% of your net worth if you do something you really want to avoid is, for most people, a better commitment mechanism than pledging to give away 100%.

You want to begin with a commitment that gives you a real taste, but doesn’t run the risk of cementing you in a lifestyle you don’t want. Then, if your initial commitment proves satisfying, you want to escalate.

And as your commitment level grows, so too does the degree to which the goal is part of your identity, as reflected in your relationships and responsibilities. At first, you’re just doing something on your own. But eventually — especially if you deliberately set up more forcing functions — your commitments start reshaping the way others see you, and the way you see yourself.

There’s a final shift that happens if you keep going. Eventually, commitment itself stops feeling like a hack, and starts to feel like a calling, the way you can become someone worth being.

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If there’s a universal law of human behavior, I think it’s this: People will believe whatever allows them to be the hero of their own story.

When I say “hero,” I don’t mean someone thoroughly virtuous. Few people walk around with an exalted sense of self, thinking they’re a prophet or Great Man of History. I mean someone whose choices matter to the overall plot, and whose faults are redeemed by their good qualities. A sympathetic character in a struggle of real significance.

What this boils down to is: We all need to maintain a belief that we are fundamentally (if incompletely) good, reasonable, decent people. That we are doing the best we can, given what we have to work with. This belief is so load-bearing that abandoning it is basically never on the table. If we come into contact with evidence that might contradict it, we will instead do one of two things: (1) deny the evidence, or (2) revise our concepts of what it means to be good, reasonable, or decent. (Often, these strategies are sequential: find facts that align with your narrative first if possible, and if that fails, retreat to “those facts are good, actually.”)

This theory is, of course, incomplete; there aren’t really universal laws of human behavior. Depression, moral scrupulosity, and psychopathy are all, to some extent, disorders of this drive. But I think the rule is still often useful for being able to understand why people sometimes do things that are otherwise incomprehensible, or for predicting how they will behave in the future.

Note that at no point do you have to win in order to be the hero of your story. Being a victim is an easy way to stay the hero, especially if you view the game as rigged against you. Maybe things aren’t going so great, but you’re not at fault: You’ve been placed in an impossible position by vast forces that conspire against you — the landed Boomers, the globalist elite, the patriarchy. In a tragic story, the hero can lose, and they are all the more laudable for their suffering.

The basic drive to be a hero is almost certainly good, on the whole. It’s one of the cornerstones of a behavioral system that largely works. The cooperative nature of our species is borderline magical. We share most of our internal machinery with wild animals who are unable to live in peace with rival groups. If you put a bunch of people who dislike each other together on a long flight, you’ll probably land with some grumpy people. Replace those humans with chimpanzees, and you would land with a plane full of dead apes. The need to maintain a self-image of ethical uprightness probably plays a big role here.

But the downsides are significant. One issue is that we keep committing atrocities that are seen as morally defensible until some preference cascade makes us sit up and collectively ask, “Hey, what the fuck?” We frequently look back at things humanity just recently stopped doing with incredulity and horror.

Another downside, which may end up destroying our civilization, is the way this instinct plays out in politics. Maybe it seems like this is a Republican issue in particular — the pattern of “deny the facts, up until you full-throatedly embrace them” is one we see playing out in the news a lot lately. (As an example, if you need one, consider the mental gymnastics some people had to do to defend the tariffs.)

But I think hero stories contribute to hyper-partisanship at a much deeper level, by dividing us into teams that not only disagree with one another but essentially inhabit totally different realities. The more loudly our opponents insist that we’re wrong, bad, deranged — the more intensely they oppose the hero of the story — the more we’re forced to conclude that they’re villains, and must be reflexively resisted at every turn, even on the occasions when what they say aligns with our interests. Belief in our own goodness, and therefore their badness, is the one non-negotiable, the one central pillar around which facts and positions and interests can all bend.

I find this “everyone’s a hero” framing useful for a few reasons.

It makes the world more comprehensible. I think if you really absorb this frame, you don’t find yourself bewildered and alienated by the behavior of others as often. You start to get the core mechanism, even if its manifestations confuse and sometimes repulse you.

For the last few decades, self-styled “environmentalists” have been one of our civilization’s greatest adversaries in the fight against climate change. They have blocked progress on clean, safe sources of energy, including nuclear power, and at times hydroelectric, solar, and wind. They have opposed carbon capture and carbon removal technologies on grounds of moral hazard — the claim that mitigating the downsides of fossil fuels will only prolong our dependence on them. They have opposed research on geoengineering technologies that might be our only hope of avoiding catastrophic climate tipping points.

This is all incomprehensible from the viewpoint that what environmentalists want, fundamentally, is to reduce the catastrophic effects of climate change. But what they actually want is what we all want — to believe their effort matters, that they’re fighting the good fight. That means their team has to win, with its aesthetics, allegiances, and preoccupations. So the oil companies have to lose, and the solution has to be anti-capitalist and non-technological.

Many mysteries can be solved like this. Why do left-leaning activists insist that we need to deal with housing costs via rent control or other anti-market measures, despite every single piece of available evidence showing that the only way is to actually let developers build things? Because “the people” need to prevail, and we can’t let the greedy developers win, or let rich people have more nice things. Why is cutting funding for science and reducing high-skilled immigration a good way to make America great again? Because we are defeating the villainous liberals who own the corrupt institutions. Why is Eliezer Yudkowsky so habitually condescending in public communication, despite claiming that the fate of humanity hinges on his being listened to?

It helps me to be more compassionate. For the first half of the past decade, I felt a lot more anguish and disgust toward other people than I do today. I had a story that I was trying to be a good person in a way that was attuned to the reality of the world, and other people were deliberately deciding to be bad people who rejected reality. I am guessing that this still rings true for many people today.

But I now think this is largely an illusion. I think that most people, like me, are doing the best they can, given what they have to work with, and that most of them just don’t have as much to work with, frankly. It is very easy for me to maintain my belief that I am the hero of the story when the world conspires to help me — when I have a job I take pride in, and enough money in my bank account, and the respect of my peers. But those are all downstream of basic facts about myself that I didn’t choose, that I just lucked into at birth.

I write here often and enthusiastically about developing personal agency, but nothing I say contradicts this core belief that I also hold: People largely don’t get to choose who they are. We are a reaction to our environment the way a form is a reaction to its mold; we expand to fill the narrative spaces available to us. If I was poor, uneducated, and had no job prospects let alone “career options,” but kept hearing the message that I was keeping other people down, would I just accept that? Or would I come to see the people saying that as villains?

This framing also helps me realize that I am almost certainly wrong about some things in my life — that I, too, am seeing things through a lens distorted by my psychological needs. When I say “people will believe whatever allows them to be the hero of their own story,” I am people too.

It exposes a path to (some) progress. Facts are the first thing to go, which is why it’s typically impossible to persuade someone via direct debate. If you’re the protagonist of your story, and you find yourself beset by people who are telling you that what you believe is wrong, who are those people? Antagonists, obviously. They must be bravely opposed, even if you can’t answer their arguments — it takes a real hero to resist the clever, well-rehearsed words of a deceiver!

That facts don’t matter doesn’t mean nothing matters, or that people do things for no reason. It also doesn’t mean changing minds is impossible. It’s just unpleasant, because it requires stepping into their frame in a way the whole psychological immune system we’ve been talking about is designed to avoid.

If your goal is to actually change someone’s mind — not just to feel like you won, or produce a nice YouTube clip, but to actually change their mind — then you should be operating in the conversation as if you’re talking to the hero of the story, who is basically good but has been misled.

Almost no political discourse we see in public is like this. People want to try to persuade other people — or just mock them — on the basis of facts, repeated more and more angrily. If they just hear this airtight case I’ve constructed, they’ll be forced to concede that they’re wrong. Even if we know this isn’t how it works, our brains refuse to accept it, because we operate under the fundamental misperception that we choose our own beliefs because of facts.

I don't think this ever succeeds in convincing people. It’s possible that’s because most people don’t want to convince people — they just want to keep the infinite feud going, because that’s a psychologically comfortable place to be.

But if you do want to persuade, you have to offer people an alternative narrative. A new heroic story they can inhabit. With some emotional intelligence, you can make someone feel as if you’re not a villain mocking them, but rather, a sympathetic helper who can bring them new information. After all, many heroic plots involve the hero breaking free from a false allegiance, with the help of an unlikely sidekick who alerts them to some deception.

In fact, this is maybe the only approach that allows us to make progress. You will never find the bottom of people’s willingness to change their factual views about the world in order to maintain their self-image — the last 10 years have been a lesson in nothing if not this.

Throughout this essay, I’ve been speaking as if there’s no escape from this iron law. But actually, there is one available to each of us. The escape is a state of suspended judgement, in which you don’t believe that you’re either a hero or a villain, a loser or a winner.

You are an animal, trying your best to be good with limited information, in defiance of all of the fear and stupidity that is part of your human heritage — and everyone else is, too. You are trying while being completely unsure of what the ultimate moral balance of your life will be — and everyone else is, too.

We are all in this together, in a state of almost complete ignorance, hurtling through the darkness, occasionally capable of small acts of true nobility — spontaneous gifts of love and charity that are beyond what could be expected.

Entering into this perspective of non-superiority, briefly, is what allows us to actually be better, to temporarily see the ways we could really be kinder, more curious, more humble. It’s what empowers us to think daring thoughts like “maybe this company I’m building isn’t good for the world” or “maybe I’m the problem in this relationship.”

It’s not something one can reside in permanently. This is evidenced by how people try to solidify this state of mind with a status, like “Kegan stage 5,” or “enlightenment,” attempting to assure themselves that they’ve obtained faultless maturity, a permanent vacation from the structures of the human mind. This is hero thinking, once again, and it’s not true.

This is one of the things we face when we step out of the hero mindset: the frightening knowledge that we can only achieve temporary glimpses beyond our moral frame, that our frail human psychology isn’t built for consistent re-examination. The best we can hope for is to demand a few moments of lucidity, a few seconds here and there when we can rise above our automatic trajectory, or maybe even try to set a slightly better one. Come on — it’s what a real hero would do.

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Two things happened for me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I acquired a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who’d started following me when I was playing poker, who came to believe we had a close personal relationship and that my tweets were coded messages to him. When I stopped tweeting for two months, he became convinced something had happened to me, so he tracked down my email and phone number and started spamming me with messages demanding to know where I was.

By the time I realized this was happening, he’d already escalated to the point that I was clearly never going to respond. I started blocking him on different platforms, but he’d just create another account or phone number, or find some other way in. He messaged me dozens of times a day, alternating between threats and pleas. When he reached out to my company six months later to apply for a job, I learned his real name and used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself. I decided that there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world, and resigned myself to waiting him out.

Only he never tired. Years went by and I never responded, and still he messaged me multiple times a day. The messages became more disturbing, more pornographic, more violent. He told me he would come find me in Berkeley and hurt me. Finally, last November, in the span of a few days, he sent me an image of his brand new passport and a visa application, which he said he planned to use to travel here, and successfully extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to have kidnapped me.

Enough! I thought, and snapped into action. Except that I didn’t. Instead, I curled up in a ball and cried, and told friends who suggested contacting the police that there was no point, that no one would be able to help as long as I was here and he was in India.

But my husband was insistent that there had to be a better answer, and asked me to let him intervene on my behalf. In short order, he was in contact with the FBI, the US consulate in India, and, with the help of his friend Govind, who has family there, the local police where the stalker lived. Within months, the situation had resolved, and he will never set foot on American soil.

One of the interesting things about all of this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies my husband deployed. They were more or less exactly the strategies I would have come up with if I’d been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person getting involved for me to realize I wasn’t Actually Trying?

I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity — broke, alone, addled, etc. My approach towards him at that point (ignore, hoping he’d stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem became fixed in time at that point of low agency, and it never occurred to me to revisit it as my capacity for action increased.

I think we are all like this. People are not just high-agency or low-agency in a global sense, across their entire lives. Instead, people are selectively agentic.

Let’s say that life is divided up into three theaters: work, relationships with others (all kinds) and relationship to self (physical health, introspection, emotional development, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck at an earlier stage of development in at least one area. There is one theater of life where they’re not Actually Trying — where they’re approaching serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, though they are now capable adults.

In my particular corner of the world, there are tons of high-achievers in work. These are ingenious people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology, and policy. But many of them haven’t applied the same ingenuity to their interior experience or relationships. These are people who could successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there aren’t any fun people to meet on the dating apps.

It seems like, by default, you are stuck with whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem the first time you encountered it and failed to fix it.

Let’s say you tried therapy when you were 20, and it didn’t help with your high levels of anxiety. When you think about your anxiety, as the years go by, you think, “hard problem, tried the main solution, didn’t work out.” Perhaps you just accept anxiety as a fixed trait, and your friends playfully rib you about it, which is nice but makes it seem even more like a static part of your identity. But you’re not 20 anymore. You’re, say, a 32-year-old CTO, and when a vital project at your startup doesn’t respond to your first approach, you vigorously try another, and another, trying to learn from every failure. That same persistence and curiosity don’t get applied to the anxiety that makes you suffer at work, though.

You don’t think, oh, I could probably:

• Check on my nutrition and sleep, in a serious way

• Look into supplements and medication

• Throw some resources at improving my rest and recovery

• Ask all of my friends about the best anxiety treatments they’ve ever heard of, or the best coaches/therapists they’ve ever worked with

• Research any emerging therapies designed for people like me

Instead of doing those things, you just put up with it. Or, worse, you fight through your anxiety using an earlier solution that required willpower, and the exertion of willpower makes you feel like you’re trying. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean that you’re Actually Trying.

There is a relevant concept from Alexander Technique that I love, “faulty sensory appreciation,” which I learned about from Michael Ashcroft. The concept is that habitual tension distorts your sensory impressions—rigid stillness via bodily tension starts to feel like “good posture,” whereas relaxed uprightness feels strange, to the extent you might feel like your back is at a weird angle when you’re actually standing up tall. The right way feels like the wrong way. Apparently, this is demonstrated by having Alexander students lie in a position where your legs tell you that you shouldn’t be able to stand up — and then the instructor says, “by the way, you can stand up from here,” and you do.

Similarly, people who are being selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. Perhaps relationships feel hard for you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re Actually Trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your genius to bear on the problem. You might even take some pride in the struggle. Like rigid posture, the strain feels like correctness. But struggling is not evidence that you’ve tried everything. To the contrary, the continuous need for willpower may be the sign of a badly-engineered life.

I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel like an issue — it might just feel like sadness or anger, like the sadness of not being seen, or the frustration of not feeling like your work is meaningful. Once you’ve surfaced something, ask yourself: Have I done my best to come up with a set of potential solutions, using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by any friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know I’m Actually Trying?

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As you get older, you learn to detect a certain facial expression, a kind of wild absorption that characterizes a recent infection by an all-consuming worldview. It’s the look of someone utterly taken over by a subject or cause. It doesn’t signal rightness or wrongness, intelligence or stupidity. It just signals being lost in it, a state that precedes both works of genius and complete disasters. Sometimes, it feels like this is the default facial expression in the Bay Area.

The Bay Area is a place of cults. I don’t mean cults in the most literal sense, the kind where people are cut off from friends and family by force, assemble in communes, and believe no one outside understands the truth. I mean cults in the more pedestrian sense: totalizing movements where people are cut off by tacit social pressure, live in group houses, and believe no one outside understands the truth.

These movements are typically organized around the belief that they’ve found the one set of ideas and behaviors that will allow them to triumph in the difficult times ahead and come to own the future. These are people who’ve uncovered the Answer, the point of human life in this era, to which all else should be subordinated.

In the Bay Area today, we find (among others) AI accelerationists, rationalists, and the modern spiritual scene. The Answers proposed by these groups, respectively, are: “scale is all you need,” “rationality is systematized winning,” and “we must awaken and remake civilization.” Do you get the flavor?

It’s interesting that the Bay has a reputation for being a free-thinking place. I suppose it is, in the sense that here you’re welcome to choose among a variety of beliefs that would be considered insane or heretical anywhere else. But in a place that glorifies contrarianism — but is full of ambitious people — the most memetically fit ideas seed groups, and those groups become subcultures. Sooner or later, you end up with a handful of wildly divergent orthodoxies orbiting one another, rather than real pluralism.

If you’d like to talk about how AI is going to destroy the world, you can go to parties with people who might answer “how are you” with, earnestly, statements like “the fight against Moloch continues.” If you’d like to talk about how AI is going to cure every disease and be our machine God, you can go to those parties too. Want to be someone in the middle, someone with layered interests that extend to art and culture? Those parties are in every other city, not here.

I don’t know whether this is ultimately good or bad. The cultural and technological products of the Bay are so wonderful and so terrible that adding up the final ledger is impossible to do in real time. Call no man happy until he is dead, and all that.

What I want to ask instead is: Why are we like this?

Vanguard mentality

If you want to be famous, you move to LA. If you want to make money, you move to New York. If you want to become powerful, you move to DC. Why do people move to the Bay? To live in the future. To participate in the bright tomorrow. To get in early on a movement that’s going to conquer the globe.

Future-orientation, by its very nature, demands some blindness to the present. You have to believe they just don’t get it yet, where “they” are the people occupied with current fashions, forms of work, and cultural expressions. Everything they take for granted will be swept away. Look at them just walking around, as if everything is normal!

This isn’t a new phenomenon: the peace movement, free love, psychedelics, environmentalism, organic food, Westernized Eastern spirituality, the personal computer, software, dot-coms, social media, the gig economy, startup culture, venture capital, crypto, longevity, AI. The Bay is where the future is perpetually being invented. So it makes sense that you would head here if you want to steer it.

But even when it’s right, they just don’t get it yet is an isolating and potentially dangerous sentiment. It places you in a circle of true believers who alone know where it’s all going. Soon, you’ve got in-group jargon, elaborate pecking orders built on arcane, inward-facing criteria, and niche community figures regarded with prophetic reverence. You might sink years into this identity — long enough that it becomes hard to communicate with outsiders, to get feedback from the world, or to leave your in-group status behind.

Cultural loneliness

In New York, where I lived for three years, it’s obvious that there is no one way to “win,” culturally. If you’re out for a walk in any central area, you’ll encounter many people who find your whole set of priorities absurd, who basically do not respect the prizes you’re striving for. Probably there is no single individual who is aware of all the centers of cultural power — all of the scenes and all of their values — or even a significant proportion of them. This can enforce a healthy level of humility, a certain level of ironic distance between you and your values.

The Bay just doesn’t have that same depth, which makes the culture both more malleable and more naive. For better and worse, you really can reshape the culture here, and there are fewer people around to tell you that what you’re doing is corny. Anyone who is really good at hosting parties can quickly gain a reputation as a key cultural figure. Your group house could be regarded as the next exciting incubator of ideas. Your meditation center might, temporarily, feel like it’s the first to perfectly combine the best of Eastern mysticism and Western depth psychology with zero side effects.

This sense of cultural insubstantiality is also baked into the spatial and climatic configuration of the city. It’s harder to feel like you’re among the multilayered throng of humanity here, because the place is just lonelier. The streets are wider, people walk less, the density level is “NIMBYs have ruled for decades.” The chilly night-time winds rule out sidewalk cafe culture or the kind of bustling evening crowds that make many cities feel vital.

In sum, there are just enough people and money here to sustain large populations of oddballs with intense agendas, but it feels sparse enough that it’s easy to imagine you’re a pioneer, alone with a lucky few on the wind-swept plateau, uncovering the ultimate reality.

Weird patronage

The Bay has an abundance of money from tech and crypto without many visible, time-honored ways to spend it. In New York, there’s a well-defined luxury ladder — fashion, fine dining, real estate. Out here, conspicuous consumption is less respected. What is respected is continuing to participate in building the future even after your career has reached maturity — it is a flex to say, for example, that you sponsored someone’s research if it turns out to be important.

The result is a kind of weird patronage — people offering seed funding to charismatic eccentrics and fledgling movements. Dig into the history of any cult out here, and you’ll find surprisingly established names giving money to what, with the luxury of hindsight, are obviously disastrous projects. If you’re a socially enterprising cult-leader type with a bold new idea, there’s no question that the Bay is where you’ll most likely find money, along with sympathetic ears.

This happens at smaller scales, too. “Woo” movements thrive here in part because the most intelligent and entrepreneurial spiritual types become high-end executive coaches, meditation teachers, bodyworkers — there’s a whole class of service employment that’s basically about transferring emotional and spiritual literacy to tech and business elites. Now, there are high-end service workers everywhere — LA has celebrity nutritionists and ayahuasqueros. But here, they are likely to promote new styles of therapy, models of mind, and ideas about the good life, either via their online audiences or through their clients’ startups. If you have enough Bay Area cultural acumen, you can observe which local spiritual figures are currently influential at big AI labs. That sentence alone tells you a lot about the weirdness of this place.

Love of optimization

Elsewhere, the elite seem to want to exhibit conspicuous balance. It’s cool to be physically fit but also indulge in carbs, to have opinions about the Kendrick/Drake beef but also go to the opera, et cetera. Not here. In the Bay, we optimize. Being interested in the casual or the slow reads as unserious. Speedrun enlightenment! Don’t die! See you in the desert!

I think the primary factor is that future-focus again. For decades, “the future is almost here” has been the mantra of the Bay. And if you believe your place in that future depends on being one of the specific people who ushers it in, it’s easy to discount your present comfort, enjoyment, and balance. In this climate, of course speed and scale seem like the ordinary way of things, the mode a human ought to adopt absent hard constraints.

Again, there are pluses and minuses to a culture that constantly asks, why don’t we do the most intense possible version of this? It’s a question that creates a bubbly environment — one where it feels like anything might erupt. Those eruptions include large and small fortunes, some bizarre parties, and cultural revolutions. You also get a few cults in the mix. I don’t think it’s avoidable. The kind of thirsty mind that comes to the Bay thoroughly wants to be captured.

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Agency is having a moment. In the past couple years, it’s become a kind of catch-all buzzword — used to explain everything from startup success to personal reinvention to parenting style. Some of this discourse is genuinely useful. Some of it is insufferable. And there are real criticisms to be made.

But two of the most common ones miss the mark.

One is that agency is simply a rebrand of success — that talking about it is just another way to glorify people who are already getting ahead, a pretend explanation for why some people win and others lose that obscures the real origin in luck. The other is that agency, even if real, isn’t a concept that can be actioned, but rather a fancy label for a fixed trait like intelligence or height.

My life is a testament to the fact that neither is true. Agency is not the same as success, and it’s not innate. It’s something you can learn.

I understand why people feel otherwise. A lot of people talking about agency today are the sorts who dropped out of college to build something, or grew up in a family of prodigious mutants. They’ve always moved through the world differently. It’s easy to assume they were just built that way.

I wasn’t. When I say I learned agency, I mean it. I started with very little of it. It took me decades to change, and I only did because I had to. That’s why I care so much about this topic — and why I believe it’s possible for anyone to learn.

I have a memory, clear enough to be false, of the day in sixth grade when I decided to become a machine. I had always been unpopular, always the weirdest kid in my class — ever since my first day at a new grade school, when I showed up with a buzz cut because of a miscommunication with my parents and a barber. But when everyone was re-sorted into middle schools, there was a moment when social lines blurred and alliances were uncertain, and I made the mistake of briefly forgetting my station in life. For a few weeks I was welcomed into the popular crew, but after I admitted to having a crush on the wrong boy, the reversal was swift and absolute.

This is when I first discovered the sweet release of dissociation. I realized that I could somehow choose to feel — not none of it, exactly, but a whole lot less of it. I could just mechanically take the next step, do the next thing in front of me, and block out everything else. I would be impermeable. I leaned into it, made it a way of life. I became compulsively efficient — if I walked this way across the grounds instead of that way, I’d save 30 steps. If I pivoted 90 degrees at precisely this point, there would be no wasted motion.

As long as I was moving with intention, as quickly as possible, I didn’t have to think about anything else, including how the world responded to me. I finished the 6th grade math curriculum in months, then the 7th and 8th. No one had a plan for me after that, so I just kept repeating them for the next two years. It didn’t matter.

My orchestra teacher announced we’d have a competition, and the student who practiced the most would win a special prize at the end of the semester. I practiced 3 hours a day, determined to win. When I handed in my practice sheet, she told the class the competition was canceled. It didn’t matter.

I kept up this level of ferocious, nonspecific activity through high school and into college. I stayed in-state for school to avoid racking up debt, and was haunted by the fear that the world outside of Arizona was passing me by. I worked twice as hard, slept hardly at all, earned two degrees in four years.

Whatever ladder I found myself near, I climbed it. Departmental honors, publications, editor of the newspaper. But oddly, whenever I found myself at the top of a ladder, I didn’t feel satisfied. I’d keep going until I convinced myself I could decisively win at the thing, then lose interest and quit — because it was the thrill of achievement and nothing more serious that drove me.

This is how I ended up going to law school. I got to the end of the philosophy and biochemistry ladders and discovered I was bored by philosophizing and miserable doing lab work. Law school was there, required nothing of me but ambition, and promised a big, obvious stamp of success, so I went. I didn’t do it because I thought I’d enjoy law — I didn’t even think to ask whether I would.

I fell in love with alcohol around my senior year of college, when I discovered it was a much less effortful way of dissociating from my feelings. Finally, a way to “relax” without actually having to be there! But this meant having to drive the machine that much harder. In law school, I’d go to class during the day, study until 9 or 10, then get blackout drunk alone every night. I was brutally hungover every day, but propelled myself forward with ruthless efficiency, never letting myself slip academically. To this day, this underlies my resentment toward people who say that what drunks are missing is willpower.

As my interior life became more and more intolerable, I desperately sought stability in smaller and smaller cages. In a terrible relationship with a man who convinced me I’d never find anyone else to love me because I was too old at 25. In the jobs he told me to take. In his very expensive, drab condo where I lived but left no trace.

And I think, so help me, that I would have stayed there, had my ambition, alcoholism, and terrible relationship not collided disastrously in a series of events whereby I was forced to walk away from a big shiny prize of a job. It became clear that I needed to pick one of the three, and because I hated the other two, ambition was the easy choice.

I consider the state of addiction to be the opposite of agency. Agency is the ability to recognize all of the degrees of freedom one has. Addiction strips them away, reduces life to one option, and subordinates everything else in service of making sure that option is selected over and over again.

To some extent, you can think of addiction and agency as two sets of labels on the same dial, like hot and cold on a tap. Addiction is automaticity. Agency is its opposite. Success is a completely different dimension, consistent with anywhere the dial might be set.

When I got sober for the first time at 25, the dial turned a little bit. I was no longer so afraid of what I might do that I needed to keep myself in the smallest cage I could find. I left my boyfriend, moved into a roach-infested walkup, and felt happier and more free for the first time in memory. But inertia still kept me moving in the same direction professionally for a long time. I was still destined for a second clerkship and three years at a law firm in DC, which I droned through in a fog of boredom and depression. I found myself at the top of another ladder and realized that, yet again, I didn’t care.

It’s so strange now to look back on that time and realize that it simply didn’t occur to me that I could do something completely different. I was so locked into the narrative of a career path that even when I was miserable, the only “solutions” I considered were other jobs in the same field. I wrote to my parents that I was “the kind of bored that makes caged animals stop eating.” But I was still scanning the perimeter of the cage, looking for a slightly more comfortable corner — not for a way out.

I learned recently that people blind from birth don’t see black. They see nothing. It’s not like closing your eyes — it’s the absence of visual information altogether. That’s what my life was like then. I wasn’t weighing different options and rejecting them. I just didn’t see them.

That was right about when I ran into LSD.

For the first time, I realized there was something wrong with the fact that I didn’t care what I spent most of my waking hours doing. Before taking LSD, I knew I was sad and bored. But I’d never really felt not-sad and not-bored for any significant period of time, so on some level, it felt reasonable to expect that everything would be that way. It had never occurred to me that the quality of my experience was both critically important and significantly malleable.

Sometimes, people are warned off psychedelics because they can totally rip apart your way of life. That’s exactly what they did for me, and I’m extremely thankful. It didn’t need to be psychedelics — a couple dozen hours with a very gifted therapist could’ve helped. But I didn’t have that; I had LSD. It got me to pay attention to my experience for the first time, to turn around and look at my rationale for my career, and go, “what the fuck is this?” Once I asked this question in earnest, quitting the job was inevitable, though it was still hard, still a long time coming. Psychedelics kick-started the process, but they were only the beginning.

This is all a roundabout way of saying: Agency is really, really not the same thing as success. Agency can be helpful for achieving success, but it can be just as helpful for walking away from it. Agency is about freedom, and the ability to see what’s beyond your peripheral vision.

And it’s not something you’re born with, or that you have to develop by the time you’re 18 or you’re toast. I was 30 the first time I woke up. Not to any grand revelation. Just to the dumb, obvious fact that I didn’t want to live the life I had, and that I didn’t have to.

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Say you want to improve your life — to become happier, more helpful to others, more desirable, whatever you want. Given that this is a big world, with many possibilities, there are lots of strategies for self-improvement available to you. Which strategies will you pick first?

Because motivation is tightly linked to emotion, you will first choose the strategies that are emotionally comfortable for you in particular. Perhaps you are an energetic, rugged person, who enjoys autonomy and competence, so you will choose a difficult exercise routine that others would shrink from. It’s effortful, but it’s emotionally satisfying, and that satisfaction will propel you through the difficulties. Or perhaps you are a person who values novelty and adventure, so you choose an abrupt move to a different city, where you can find new work and a new friend group — the thrill of newness will give you fuel to deal with all of the anxiety and uncertainty involved.

Then, once you’ve exhausted the strategies that feel emotionally satisfying, you will choose the strategies that feel emotionally okay — strategies that don’t exactly delight you, but that come recommended by people you’d like to emulate. Perhaps you don’t love filling out a gratitude journal every day, or having a weekly debrief about your relationship with your spouse, but these tactics are like a well-chosen supplement. They’re flavorless, they require nothing of you but a minor expenditure of energy, and they obviously help. So you keep them up, to some degree.

Now what? Maybe you’re in your late twenties or early thirties. You’ve been around the block, and you’ve tried all of the self-improvement strategies that seem viable. But there is still some difficulty in your life that’s really obvious, that you feel you ought to be able to solve. Despite being unusually talented, your career isn’t taking off the way it should. You spend your nights binging on junk food or tv or Twitter. You endlessly put off working on the passion project you keep telling people about. You’re frustrated, and you’ve tried everything to fix it!

But of course, you haven’t actually tried everything. There are other strategies you could try. The only problem is that they will require you to feel the forbidden feeling.

You know, the forbidden feeling. That feeling. That one horrible feeling that your whole adult personality has been devised to avoid.

I.

Each of us has a sensitive spot, a core fear or discomfort that we see as more hurtful than everything else. We relate to it as an existential peril and do everything we can to shove it far away from us. Perhaps on a rational level, we know that it’s not an existential threat — it’s just another feeling. And we’re probably already feeling it: by avoiding it all the time, paradoxically, we keep it ever-present in our consciousness, in a watered-down form. Somehow, ingesting this feeling at low concentration for our entire lives does not kill us.

Nevertheless, we try not to confront the feeling directly. Even considering the feeling creates an existential cringe reaction, an instinctive repulsion. As Bruce Tift says: “Almost all of us have a sense of annihilatory panic associated with our core vulnerabilities. This is an intense sense of threat, impossible to really put into words — ‘If I have to feel this feeling, I will cease to exist.’” Any path in life that involves such a confrontation lies on the other side of a cringe minefield, a barrier created by the promise of that feeling.

This influences, to an astonishing degree, what we do with our lives. Perhaps you fear loneliness and monotony. Cool — you take a highly social job with lots of choice and few long-term restrictions, like being a fine dining waiter or a wedding planner, so you rarely have to be alone, and you can always walk away from a particular workplace. Perhaps you fear being seen as worthless — so you chase prestige, and find yourself coincidentally interested in occupations valued by your society, with friends who also have high-status jobs, and you try to be just a little more impressive than they are.

And that’s all fine. In a sense, this is just working with the gifts you were given, playing the cards you were dealt. But relying too much on your natural gifts, in order to avoid the existential cringe, is hugely limiting. Cringe fields are where our biggest self-improvement gains are likely to come from, because they point to parts of the self we haven't allowed to develop — there's only so much you can continue to squeeze out of your core strengths, but you can get noob gains from focusing on your core fears. This means that existential cringe is actually a signal pointing you to where you can make the most progress quickly.

What does being limited by existential cringe look like?

• The chaotic and adventurous artist, who fears being mundane, would be best-served in their artistic pursuits by some completely standard productivity strategies, and perhaps even a normal day job that would give their life some structure.

• The empathetic therapist who fears letting other people down might be better off firing a difficult client who’s not being served by the therapeutic relationship.

• The prestige-seeking overachiever could do something much more rewarding with their time if they abandoned the glitzy but soulless occupation that brought them approval from parents and peers.

But it seems people in situations like these rarely think “ah, I’m out of the good ideas that will be easy, perhaps I should consider the ideas that are more difficult for me to stomach.” They simply reject the difficult ideas out of hand, slapping them away with pat dismissals. Or they don’t even really see the options that are ruled out by their core fear.

And this can be tragically limiting. The chaotic artist reflexively insists that structure would kill their creativity, and so instead chooses to remain adrift, at the cost of rarely producing the art they believe is their purpose. The empathetic therapist believes the client would suffer irreparable harm via their rejection, and so winces through appointment after pointless appointment, guiltily collecting money for a useless service. The prestige-seeking overachiever believes falsely that everyone would abandon them if they ditched the fancy job, so they continue, feeling more and more trapped in an inauthentic life.

I can’t say that confronting your core fear will ever be comfortable or easy. But I know that you will never be fully free unless you know what your core fear is, and consciously make an effort to see the options on the other side of it. In this way, the deepest levels of agency require accepting the possibility of counter-instinctual behavior.

II.

Do you know where your cringe minefield lies?

For me, it’s extremely clear. As I’ve written about before, I’m perpetually in flight from fear of being evil, corrupt, or imperfect. In the Enneagram system, this type is the One — called the Perfectionist, or the Moralist.

I don’t think this fear is all bad. It’s structurally important in my life — it fuels behaviors I’m proud of, like trying really hard to be helpful when friends are in trouble, and working on things I think will make our collective future better. However, it’s also true that I’d be dramatically worse off if I never disobeyed the feeling.

Here are some examples of how this has played out for me:

1. Giving my husband compliments: I like to believe that I’m scrupulously honest, that I don’t use flattery or deception to achieve my ends. But this can become a little pathological. For a long time in my marriage, I was afraid to give my husband compliments or call him by pet names, because on some level I thought it was manipulative to do things he liked too much. (I’m cringing just writing this — on a conscious level I do know it’s lunacy.) When I realized what was happening and told him, he told me “what I want is to be manipulated.” It took a year of forcing myself to say cute things over an inner reaction that kept insisting “this is wrong” for the cringe to go away.

2. Negotiating for higher pay: Nothing mortifies me quite like the thought of being recognized for the selfish creature I am. Historically, this has made it tremendously difficult to force myself to negotiate for higher pay, even though I know it’s normal to do. I end up bargaining against myself, generating all sorts of counterarguments that would probably never even occur to the other person: “You should be grateful just to have this job, how can you think you’re entitled to more?” “If you were doing this for the right reasons, you wouldn’t be so fixated on what’s in it for you.” Etc. I’ve spent weeks deliberating whether I could justly be fired for making an ask that was then quickly granted.

3. Burning out of EA: For a couple of years, I got pulled into the world of effective altruism, which exerts a gravitational force on people with my particular set of neuroses. In my personal experience, the vibe of EA is essentially: yes, we are all bad, corrupt, and imperfect — but here’s an approach to life that is minimally defective, a kind of decentralized, secular Catholicism. The challenge with EA, and why many people drop out of it, is that there’s no principled stopping point once you’ve decided you’re morally obligated to do “the most good you can do.” I ended up feeling guilty about everything — what I did with my money, what I ate, what I did with my leisure time (if I allowed myself any). Predictably, I burned out, but even after I did I had to overcome a deep fear that it was moral dereliction in order to extract myself from the movement. If I hadn’t confronted that fear, I’m confident I’d be doing something a lot less useful than I am now.

III.

I’m a big believer in the power of human intuition, but also a believer that there are important limits on when and where it can be trusted. It’s a mistake to treat your existential cringes like any other intuition. Being triggered by a core fear or vulnerability is more like being drunk than feeling another emotion. It dilates time and distorts your sense of proportion, leading to thoughts like, “if I do this, everyone will see me as unserious,” or “if I mess this up, no one will ever want me again.” It triggers self-protective instincts, creating a temporary view of the world where people are out to get you, where there’s a thin, perilous walkway between you and emotional safety, with hazards on either side.

Most people who drink successfully avoid drunk driving. They achieve this via metacognition — understanding, in advance, that being tipsy will cause you to overestimate how capable you are behind the wheel. Having a little humility about the fact that their perceptions can be distorted.

Similarly, to cross the cringe minefield, you need to have humility about the fact that your perception is distorted, right now. You simply cannot see the landscape of options in your life objectively. By default, you will ignore a path to your dreams if a personally perilous emotion—worthlessness, loneliness, imperfection—is along the way. If you don’t take this into account, you’re doomed to low-grade, long-term self-sabotage that will feel like simply leaning into your strengths. The default is to choose the misery you’re comfortable with over the agonizing thrill of real change.

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