The thing about hitting the bottom is that outsiders view it much differently than insiders. You are convinced your friend will finally change her ways because of a terrible episode last weekend. How could she not? This was so clearly the nadir. But your friend doesn’t see it that way because, of course, if she was seeing the world clearly she never would have been so close to a nadir in the first place. 

Still, your friend isn’t happy about last weekend, isn’t so confused to think apologies are unnecessary. This is the frustrating disconnect: both parties agree the weekend was bad, but only you think it obviously proves radical change is required. While you grant that your friend hasn’t been a model of responsibility and accountability for some time, you can’t help but think this episode would trigger such traits. And that’s the mistake: projecting your high-functioning self onto someone who is running different software is all but guaranteed to create that frustrating disconnect. 

Software upgrades are indeed always possible for your friend, but don’t count on them being downloaded per your expectation timeline – you truly can’t comprehend what it’s like to be operating from your friend’s base.

The best you can do is not care about what your friend is losing so long as it doesn’t directly affect you. How could she throw away her job, her boyfriend, her whatever? It’s beyond frustrating to witness for any halfway compassionate human, but it is frustration you must learn to dissipate. Step one: make sure you have honestly and kindly expressed your concerns. Step two: help where you can. Step three: stop caring. 

Step three sounds brutal and perhaps impossible. Achieving it begins by never initiating. Instead of calling to check, inviting to events you hope will help her psyche, or comforting when you feel she needs it, you act to help if, and only if, she requests it. There will be times when you feel like you should do more; you must remind yourself you did what you could – it’s on her now.

Lastly, don’t ignore your own selfishness. With a look of utter exasperation, you retell the entire episode to another friend painting yourself as some Mother Teresaesque altruist. You are not. While you truly may want to help, a notable part of you craves recognition for these efforts. And the fact that your friend isn’t singing a paean for your intervention is a contributing factor to your general irritation.

Oh, and one more thing. You may well be perversely enjoying your friend’s struggles because they make you feel better about your own life. Given this undercurrent, your I hope she gets better claims are outright false or deeply conflicted. And if you don’t actually want your alleged friends to be well, maybe you shouldn’t be so worried about others hitting bottoms, maybe you should instead focus on how to improve yourself.

That I actually do have a nice, long list of interests. That there may be more to discover, but only in the way that there is more to discover in a city you’ve resided in your entire life. Which is to say, harvesting is now preferable to searching. The shift to harvesting remains true regardless of the weather: it’s the understanding and commitment to this fruit as the best you will do that makes the fruit the best it can be.

try living with someone who lacks a memory. The rhythm of do something nice = credibility gain is immediately snapped and you’ll be forced to witness how much of your own esteem was a product of that tried and true formula.

This reckoning is all the more severe if nobody else knows that you live with someone lacking a memory. It’s just you, all alone, doing yeoman’s work for the direct benefit of someone who won’t actually really know what you are doing. Except, of course, outside of the in-the-moment appreciation that may never be properly communicated, but must be felt, if only for an instant.

it’s our smartphones.

This may seem like a semantic difference, but I contend it’s more meaningful than just that. The big problem is constant access to information, however it’s delivered. Just think of all the dead time 20 years ago: on the toilet, smoke breaks, walking anywhere, waiting for a friend to arrive, etc. That time was reserved for you and your thoughts. You still read and watched the news, yes, but these activities were necessarily limited because you had to be near a TV, computer, or a newspaper. Those limits were destroyed by the smartphone combined with unlimited, cheap cellular plans.

This is not about how we’re all lacking attention now; this is about how ever more of our attention is devoted to the news. Yes, the maximum-outrage bent of social media plays a role. Still, if the news was only delivered in prosaic terms, the problem of thinking wayyyyy too much about politics would exist so long as looking at a phone was more interesting than doing nothing. And just about anything can surpass doing nothing.

your life doesn’t revolve around Twitter. But for many of the people “capitulating” to the “Twitter mob,” their life is significantly lived on Twitter.

Now, you may say this is stupid, that they should invest in the physical world. You may be right. Your initial point, though, wasn’t a normative one. Instead, it was a claim that the millennial in question was overreacting to something that didn’t matter … except that what happens on Twitter does truly matter to them.

This dynamic is similar to most times when you downplay another’s anguish. You shouldn’t care so much about your 16-year-old boyfriend; Who cares about that stupid stuffed animal – it’s just a toy; Stop crying over something so minor. Incidents of this variety are mere projections of how you would feel if you were the person in question. But of course you aren’t that person, and you don’t have his experiences and preferences. So, if anything, you should be attempting to understand why the thing you view as trivial is far from trivial for someone else. You still may up being correct that the person should reprioritize, but rarely will you find irrationality in the suffering.

that have enabled so many elder athletes to continue excelling past their expected primes. Perhaps, instead, it’s the coddling of younger generations that’s produced a bevy of mentally weak challengers. It’s not like health improvements have made 35-year-old athletes more physically fit than their 20-year-old counterparts. And it’s not like experience was irrelevant in previous generations. Which leaves the way kids used to be mentally cultivated versus how they are today (and there is absolutely a difference – we once widely beat our kids) as the explanatory factor.

If you can sharpen your media criticism from “untrustworthy” to “untrustworthy for x,y,z reasons and on a,b,c topics,” you’ll be in a powerful position to sort the news appropriately while also enhancing your critical thinking skills.

1. You should hear the best one-sided argument for the untrustworthy matters
2. You should be able to spot the angles intentionally not being pursued
3. You can think of the questions that should have been asked
4. You can try to form on-the-fly counter-arguments
5. You can assume information based on omission

Your truth is true but not necessarily TRUE.

Let’s accept that this one number from this one study is accurate: 6.25% of e-commerce transactions are attempted (or successful) fraud.

Now imagine we have three internet consumers:

• Buyer #1 has completed 100 transactions and 6 of them were fraudulent.
• Buyer #2 has completed 25 transactions and 3 of them were fraudulent.
• Buyer #3 has never completed 500 transactions and 0 of them were fraudulent.

Each buyer has a truth about e-commerce. Each of those truths is based on real experiences and real feelings. But only Buyer #1 is likely to have his truth correctly map onto TRUTH. Buyer #2, on the other hand, is likely to have overlearned the lesson that fraud is possible due to his unlucky set of outcomes; if he transacted 1000 more times we would confidently expect his 12% fraud rate to drop by 50%. Sadly, those 1000 transactions may never occur since Buyer #2’s truth blinds him from TRUTH. We can dub him too skeptical, which protects his downside at the expense of his upside. Buyer #3 suffers the opposite fate. After a remarkable string of good luck, Buyer #3 is too trusting, which exposes him to all upside and downside.

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Your truth is true but not necessarily TRUE.

If you had a particularly unlucky run of events, you “overlearned” about risk and probably hold a personal truth that limits downside at the expense of upside. Think of an online shopper who bought five straight fraudulent products and declares he’ll never shop online again.

On the other hand, if you had an extremely lucky run, you have “underleaned” about risk and probably hold a personal truth that maximizes upside by being completely exposed to downside. Think of a person who has never been ripped off or robbed and so stops locking his doors.

One should want his truth to correctly map onto TRUTH. Determining if you are remotely close to the meeting this standard is the challenge of a lifetime.

You think Bob is terrible. This is so incandescently obvious that you can’t help but view disagreers as delusional.

What is most confusing are people who agree with your reasons for hating Bob – he never shows up on time, he fails to pay off debts, he cheated on five girlfriends – and yet who still support Bob. That is, they aren’t so far gone to deny the reality of Bob’s transgressions, but rather they reach a different conclusion from the same set of facts.

The notion of a “same set of facts” can still be true when we consider the matter of Bob’s positives. Everyone – yes, everyone – has positives. The same goes for news sources, politicians, public intellectuals, corporations, etc. To be disqualified, the bad has to so outweigh the good. And in the case of Bob, you’ve run the numbers and there should be no debate. Yet there is. How?

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