Movies

• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Tenet
• Band Aid
• She’s in Portland

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Books

• Humans by Brandon Stanton
• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• High Output Management by Andrew Grove
• Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
• Blood Work by Michael Connelly
• Into the Magic Shop by James Doty

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New Music

• 1000 Gecs // 100 Gecs
• Animated Violence Mild // Blanck Mass
• Heard it in a Past Life // Maggie Rogers
• Norman Fucking Rockwell! // Lana Del Rey
• Last King of Scotland // Will Atkinson

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Old Music

• Absolution // Muse
• Sing the Sorrow // AFI
• Smash // The Offspring
• Whatever People Say I Am That’s What I’m Not // Arctic Monkeys

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New Songs

• End of Days // Bullet for my Valentine
• My Friend // Dan Deacon
• Numb the Pain // Will Atkinson
• Death Drop // Blanck Mass
• Never Come Back // Caribou
• Bonfire // Knife Party
• Hand Crushed by a Mallet // 100 Gecs
• Last Great American Dynasty // Taylor Swift
• California // Lana Del Rey
• Ctrl + Alt + Delete // Cult Drugs
• Napalm Girls // Creeper
• Heart Demolition // Dragonforce
• You Should See Me in a Crown // Billie Eilish
• Never Let You Go // Georgia
• Feel Good Hit of the Summer // Queens of the Stone Age
• Still Getting It // Foreign Beggars
• Light On // Maggie Rogers

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Old Songs

• Crawlspace // Caspian
• Ultimate Devotion // Strung Out
• Summit // Skrillex
• Under a Killing Moon // Thrice
• Stockholm Syndrome // Muse
• Fillip // Muse
• Bad Habit // The Offspring
• Holy Wars … The Punishment Due // Megadeth

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Ideas

• Yes, it’s true that there are always people worse off, but it’s just as true that there are always people better off. In moments of challenge, it’s easier to default to the latter perspective – I’m not as smart as person x, I’m not as healthy as person y, I’m not as charismatic as person z, etc. – so failure can be excused.
• Growth is not linear. There is learning and unlearning, and then relearning some of what you unlearned. You’ll have it figured out one day only to face an existential crisis the next. This should all make us not only respectful of the future, but also the past.
• And like so many insights, its beauty lies in seeming both obvious and profound. Sometimes these two forces contradict each other: what is obvious can’t be profound, and because of perceived lack of profundity, we are less likely to adhere to the suggested principle. This illusory contradiction is exacerbated as the principle becomes cliché; when everyone says “LIVE FOR OTHER PEOPLE,” the advice trends toward irrelevance.
• If you can, even for an instant, not want to be somewhere else doing something else, you have IT.
• There are three types of people.
• When someone reacts differently than you, the easiest, most natural assumption is that something is off in that someone – even if that someone exhibits a preferable response.
• If your weakness provides you identity, you don’t want others to share it since greater universality would ruin your specialness. If your weakness is unlinked to your identity, you want others to share it so you aren’t alone.
• Weakness is the inner voice urging you to be less than. To varying degrees, everyone will give in from time to time. But make no mistake, this act is never one to be encouraged since surrender increases the voice’s potency. If you capitulate too often, weakness’ power climaxes through silence; the once associated shame, guilt, and negotiations are no longer there to remind you that another way exists. That other way is strength. It rarely offers superior hedonistic rewards, but in matters people claim to value most in life, strength is undefeated. Omnipotent it is not, though, for weakness never completely disappears. The best one can do is repeatedly win the daily battles by charging into challenge (a.k.a. the stuff weakness tells you not to do) and away from guilt (a.k.a. the stuff weakness tells you to do).
• Unlearning seems quite a bit more challenging than learning.
• Gratitude is easy through deprivation.
• While I may not want to let people know I was, say, molested (a “serious” truth), I definitely want people to know my preferences on things I care about, on things where I’m “different.” These choices may appear entirely trivial, yet it’s the very accumulation of countless “votes” that makes me ME. Beyond converting anyone to my modus operandi, beyond being cool or uncool, it’s powerfully self-confirming to express likes/dislikes … and to have those predilections heard. This process can occur from a distance, but it is heightened when shared in-person (i.e., I tell you to go to a concert vs. I go to the concert with you).
• “I just don’t understand it,” almost always means, “I do understand it: I am right, they are wrong.”
• “With all due respect,” is the smuggest way to say, “You have no way to understand what you are talking about.”
• Or that while, yes, it could have been better, it could have been far worse: one pleasant date instead of two, three great years instead of five, no love instead of finite climaxes of love. Reckless disregard for these truths amounts to a wholesale admission that final results are all that matter, which dumbs the human experience down to one where in-the-moment flourishing is irrelevant.
• Harder than fasting is not telling people you are fasting. 
• PBED tends to ignore the non-linear nature of progress. When detached from the tidy narrative society tells itself about a neat work-in-work-out process of progress, a reality is revealed where seemingly no progress, despite great practice, is made for long stretches. Then, as if by magic, massive gains are suddenly achieved. Of course, we will still fight to cram this genre of progress into a narrative … and this will be a mistake. The lesson: randomness plays a larger role in progress than any of us feel comfortable admitting.
  • Part of knowing thyself is understanding your own biases. Are you someone who will use NTL to give false comfort? Are you someone who will have unreasonable expectations and grow frustrated when PBED becomes unsustainable? You cannot completely eliminate these biases; you can compensate for them through more honest self-accounting and progress frameworks.
• A significant part of “knowing thyself,” is knowing what you will regret.
• There must be an official name for the propensity to remain disciplined until you aren’t, and then upon that slight discipline slip throw away ALL discipline, as if degrees don’t matter.
• Divorce is sadder than death.
• In non-CW, nobody “accidentally” loses 100lbs; in CW, people routinely “accidentally” fall in love. Hence the courageousness of wanting love: you are throwing your well-being into a grinder of luck that can’t be conquered by self-will.
• Your body is stronger than your mind. So whenever you think I’m totally spent, I can’t do any more, you are almost certainly incorrect.
• Trust in experts has been lost because the real experts aren’t in power.
• While we are selfish creatures, we also strangely lack motivation and discipline to truly push ourselves to selfish extremes in isolation. Like, true selfishness dictates that you’d want to learn everything about what food to eat because you want to be healthy. Of course this doesn’t happen in practice. One may say it’s laziness or complexity or busyness or whatever. This makes sense … for a brief moment. That moment passes upon seeing the same person, with the same frailties, poring over medical texts in the face of responsibility that demands nutritional knowledge.
• Don’t be absurd. Lower your expectations. A lot. When you replay the conversation and long to have said something different, remember that you aren’t Eddie, that you couldn’t have practiced, that your total reps in such conversations are staggeringly small, and that even if none of that is true, that you are, indeed, Eddie Van Halen, errors would still find you.
• You don’t really understand someone unless you can feel compelled to act the same as him. 
• You so badly want to help. Plus, you have very real knowledge that can assist those you care about. But, you know that advice is so rarely followed. What to do? Suggest measurement.

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Changed Mind About