Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.
Raptitude.com
Expectations Versus Forecasts
Expectations are healthier than forecasts because they provide a vision of the future stripped of all false precision. If you know a recession will occur at some point, you won’t be that surprised whenever it arrives – which is a huge benefit. But if you assume you know exactly when it will occur you’ll be tempted into all kinds of dangerous behavior, leveraged with overconfidence. And you’ll be shocked when time passes and what you thought would occur hasn’t happened (yet).
Collaborative Fund – When You Have No Idea What Happens Next
Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking
Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
Bad habits generally evolve to serve an unfulfilled need: connection, comfort, distraction, take your pick.
Attempting to remove the habit and leave everything else untouched does not eliminate the need and can simply lead to a replacement habit that might be just as harmful or even worse. Because of this, more successful approaches often involve replacing a bad habit with a good, benign, or less harmful one—or dealing with the underlying need.
Travel without social praise
“Do we really want to do this thing, for its own sake? Or do we just want the praise?”
Realistic Personal Finance Hacks
People with enduring personal finance success – not necessarily those with high incomes – tend to have a propensity to not give a damn what others think about them. It’s the most underrated finance skill.
Morgan Housel – Collaborative Fund
Why people prefer bad news
Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do.
Natural Born Heroes
A selection of quotes from Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance by Christopher McDougall.
Empathy, the Greeks believed, was the source of strength, not softness; the more you recognized yourself in others and connected with their distress, the more endurance, wisdom, cunning, and determination you could tap into.
Heroism isn’t some mysterious inner virtue, the Greeks believed; it’s a collection of skills that every man and woman can muster so that in a pinch , they can become a Protector.
You are fit if you can adapt to the demands of your environment with ease and imagination.
The primary story is about resistance fighters on Crete battling the Germans during World War II, but McDougall weaves in the stories about Greek mythology, parkour, paleo diets, British historians, and his own experience visiting Crete.
The main story is really interesting, but overall the book is kind of a mess because it jumps around so much. And as you can glean from the subtitle, the stories seem a bit exaggerated.
Risk
Those are the three types of risk mindsets in the world:
• Those who know stuff breaks and attempt to survive the breaks long enough to experience the eventual growth that occurs when people learn and improve from the breaks.
• Those who think stuff doesn’t break and are broken when it does.
• Those whose experience being broken leads them to believe there’s no such thing as eventual growth.
Optimist, complacentist, pessimist.
Morgan Housel – Collaborative Fund
Getting Too Comfortable
One of my biggest fears in life is getting too comfortable and having every day be the same. And I think I sometimes go to unhealthy extremes to keep that from coming to pass.
Travel is No Cure for the Mind
We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones.
Gratitude is what allows you to feel that same sense of wonderment about your day-to-day life as you would if you were walking the streets of a faraway city.
While travel does expand and stretch the horizons of what we know about the world, it is not the answer we’re looking for in times of unrest. To strengthen the health of the mind, the venue to do that in is the one we are in now.
A Blog About Nothing 