Tag Archives: advice

May 30, 2026 · 1:20 pm

Who Am I Really?

I do my best to be self-aware, but it’s kind of hard to tell whether it’s working.

Self-improvement has always felt important to me. Growth mindset and all; if there’s something I can do to make myself a better person, why wouldn’t I do it? Maybe there are some improvements that wouldn’t be worth the difficulty, or that I’d have to put off for later, but I’d at least want to know about them.

So I try to self-assess regularly. But how does one judge their own judgements? I can’t rely on self-assessment to tell how effective my self-assessments are–that’s just pointing a mirror at itself. I need some evidence that comes from outside my own head.

I can (and do) ask my friends and family, of course, but although I can certainly count on them to be honest, I can’t count on them to be unbiased. Who else could I ask?

People who don’t know me very well? Less likely to be biased, but also less likely to have deep insights. Their opinions may be useful for ensuring I make a good first impression, but they’re not much help for deeper self-improvement.

Enemies? I’m sure I have at least a couple, but I don’t know who most of them are, and they probably wouldn’t want to give me any useful advice anyway.

What about former friends? This seems more promising. They liked me and knew me well at some point, but as time passes and we grow further apart, they’re less likely to feel the emotional attachment that leads to strong bias. On the other hand, that also means their insights might be out of date.

I think the best people to ask would be my exes.

In my case, I’m no longer close to any of my exes, so I wouldn’t be too worried about strong positive biases. In most cases, we parted on more-or-less good terms too, so I wouldn’t be that concerned about negative bias, either–but even if I were, criticisms from an ex have an interesting feature that makes them more valuable than feedback from a close friend or even an enemy.

In most cases, your ex isn’t likely to have known you for as long as your closest friends, and that means that whatever criticisms they may have are more likely to be based on things you actually did. This doesn’t guarantee they’ll be fair criticisms, of course! You don’t have to tell me that exes can harbor irrational grudges. But those grudges–especially if you were together for only a short while–are more likely to at least stem from things that actually happened, as opposed to the positive or negative traits people who’ve known you longer have inferred.

And there’d be other advantages, too: when you’re romantically involved with someone, they often see parts of yourself that no one else gets to see, not even your closest friends. (This can be especially true if you lived together.) My exes might have insights into parts of my character that nobody else has had a chance to judge.

There’s just one problem with this idea:¹ it would be really awkward to re-contact an ex just to ask for self-improvement advice. Maybe we could make exit surveys for relationships a thing? If any of y’all want to try becoming my ex, let’s test it out.

Oh, and if any of my actual exes happen to be reading this–what do you think?

Okay, there are a lot of problems with this idea. ↩︎

“Wrong Idea” Idea

If you’ve been reading regularly (love you, mom) you might have noticed I was dealing with some relationship problems last month. Very, very abridged version: I told someone I loved them, they didn’t love me back (oh well), later on they decided I was a manipulative creep (for understandable but mistaken reasons), and among other things said “You don’t love me, you love the idea of me.”

(Side note: I get what people mean when they say this–that you’re in love with an imaginary person that you think or wish they were, instead of loving the real person the way they actually are–but I kind of hate that phrasing? Like, love happens up here–*points to head*–and there’s nothing in there except ideas. What am I supposed to base my feelings on instead? You gonna open up a hatch and climb inside? I wish there were some nice, snappy ways to say specifically “I’m not the person you think you’re in love with, they don’t exist” or “you think I’m going to change into someone else, but you don’t love the person I truly am” or “the fantasy you have of us being together is completely unrealistic, actually it would be a disaster” so we could just say those things instead. Which of them is it?? My un-shutuppable inner pedant demands precision!)

It…well, it hurt. It hurt a lot. I feel like a whiny, privileged baby saying that because it was the first time I’ve ever had my heart broken and there are people who’ve had to deal with that feeling, like, dozens of times, and also there are way worse problems that other people (including the one I love) have had to overcome and I worry that if I had to face one of those truly awful problems I would just fold in half like a piece of damp paperboard and–

*deep breath*

Um, anyway, I recently figured out a trick that helps a lot. Maybe it can help you, too! Whenever I start feeling down about how “they hate me” or “they think I’m a creep,” I just say to myself instead: “they don’t hate me, they hate the idea of me” or “they don’t think I’m a creep, they think the idea of me is a creep.” Because it’s the same logic, isn’t it? If someone has feelings toward you, but their idea of who you are is mistaken, then whether the feeling is positive or negative the result is the same: they think their feelings are directed at you, but they’re actually pointed somewhere else. If they had the right idea about who you are, they probably wouldn’t hate you–so it isn’t really you they hate!

Of course, you’ve got to be careful using logic like this, since you can also be mistaken about somebody else being mistaken. Maybe you’re the one who has the wrong idea about who you are, or maybe their feelings wouldn’t change even if they did get to know you better, or maybe they’re wrong about some things but right about others that are still important–and if you dismiss those possibilities you might lose a valuable opportunity for growth. (For example, I’ve since noticed myself doing a few things that, while not on the same scale as the misunderstanding, actually might be a bit creepy, and I’ve been grateful for the chance to catch and address them.) But if you have good reason to believe someone has completely the wrong idea about you, explicitly making it less personal goes a long way toward being able to let those hurt feelings go.

Okay, that’s everything. I love you all, and thanks for reading!

Remembering the Basics

A few weeks ago I was feeling pretty down. Now, there were definitely other reasons for my low mood, but after a little while I realized that part of the problem was I’d been neglecting things like eating food, drinking water, and sleeping.

Remembering to do those things didn’t make my problems disappear. But it definitely made it easier to handle them!

Here’s the thing: food, water, and sleep are the fundamentals of self-care. They’re the very first things you should try when there’s a problem, like making sure an appliance that’s not working is plugged in, or checking to see if caps lock is on when your password isn’t working. So why did I neglect them for so long when I needed them so badly?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a coincidence.

There’s a common type of advice in nearly every field that boils down to something like “don’t neglect the basics.” In sports, it’s “keep your eye on the ball;” in business, there’s “make something people want;” in art, “practice makes perfect;” science has “test your hypotheses;” and in the rationality community we have “read the sequences.”¹

Why is it so common to hear advice that basically boils down to “Hey, remember the very first things you learned? Y’know, all the easiest stuff that you’ve practiced a million times? Be sure not to forget it!” It seems like telling a Math Olympian not to forget that 2+2=4.

There are two reasons for this. The first is straightforward: the simplest and earliest lessons are also the most important. This is easiest to see in sports: if both you and your opponent have mastered the basics, the victor is determined by your mastery of the more advanced techniques.² But if you flub the basics, your opponent can generally crush you without breaking a sweat.

“What does you in is not failure to apply some high-level, intricate, complicated technique. It’s overlooking the basics. Not keeping your eye on the ball.” -Jerry Cleaver (as quoted here)

The second reason is more subtle. When are you most likely to forget the basics? Probably not when you’re relaxed, well-rested, and focused–but if you’re under stress, pressed for time, tired, hungry, distracted? That’s when you’re most likely to make simple mistakes (like forgetting to drink water when you’re in a funk).

Of course, those are also the times when you’ll get the most benefit out of low-effort, high-impact fixes. Hence, the common advice.

So here’s my self-care tip of the day: don’t forget the basics. Stay hydrated, eat healthy, get rest, exercise as much as you’re able. Most importantly, when you know that forgetting the basics isn’t the main problem, take extra care to remember them anyway. It won’t make your problem go away, but it will make it easier to handle.

Joy and health to you all.

You may be wondering why our “basics” is literally an entire alphabet of volumes. The answer should probably be its own essay, but the footnote version is that (a) rationality is such a young field that pretty much the whole thing is basics (there are no fancy high-level techniques, or at least very few), (b) the majority of those basics consist of un-learning habits and intuitions that are either inborn or cultural, and (c) the majority of what remains is stuff so basic that in other fields it’s learned in childhood–less “keep your eye on the ball” and more “a ‘ball’ is a spherical object, held in the hand and used for sport or play (though there are exceptions, notably…” ↩︎
Actually, the dirty secret of televised sports is that the more exciting and high-level the game, the more likely it is that the outcome will be determined by sheer luck. Sufficiently advanced technique is indistinguishable from superstition. ↩︎