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
Category: nothing
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
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.
Map of California State Parks
We live a couple miles from a state park with two lakes. We visit the park a couple days each month and there are a number of other state parks nearby, so it made sense to buy an annual pass (California Poppy Pass).
The pass came with a list of all the state parks that are included1 but a random list of parks isn’t very useful, so I added each park to a Google Map (I’m also slightly obsessed with maps, but that’s a different story):
- popular state parks, like the beaches in southern California, are excluded from the pass. I didn’t include those state parks on this map. ↩
Goodbye Twitter
I stopped using Twitter about three months ago. For a few years I was an active consumer of Twitter content, but never tweeted much. I would religiously log into Tweetbot (both macOS and iOS) and view all the new tweets in my timeline.
Over the last year or so, it became more like a chore. It was sort of like another inbox. And the U.S. presidential campaign was exhausting, so I started muting a lot of keywords.
Now that I’ve been away, I don’t miss it. I sort of miss seeing links to interesting articles, but not enough to lure me back.
Possibly the biggest benefit of mostly avoiding Twitter is that I no longer need to endure inane April Fool’s Day jokes and pranks.
The second biggest benefit is that I no longer need to be involved in the Twitter outrage machine. It’s easy to get caught up with one side or the other, but on Twitter there’s no nuance, so everything is polarizing.
And lastly, it’s nice to have an extra 30+ minutes per day to devote to other activities. Like writing a short blog post…
Goodbye Twitter.
A Blog About Nothing 