Around that time I Somehow stumbled upon this[1] article on how to make a Buddhist bone trumpet. It took me completely by surprise, the topic, the author, the tone, the context of Buddhism, nothing fit together like I expected. It was the most absurd thing I ever read and I kept laughing, at the same time it felt utterly genuine. My curiosity piqued I read the other less bizarre articles from the author about Buddhism and life in general. It dawned on me that my attempt at completely controlling my life had, in fact, caused me to lose control over it. The process of learning to accept unpredictability and open myself to the world, that started the evening I read that article, was by no means always this fun, but looking back boy was it worth it.
This article inspired me on two things :
1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they started to create things at a very early stage of their life (but not consuming things as they advocate, think about celebrities, entrepreneurs etc), so they are able to practice and perfect the value creating skills to the extreme.
2) I start to realize that the world is binary in nature : I create to sell, I buy to consume. I either at the buyer side, or at the seller side. And in this current society, there is a huge buyer side trap, the whole idea of consumerism and social media is to trap you inside the buyer side, so you keep buying, you keep consuming. I really need to break free from this trap.
This blog post was written before COVID-19, but the idea feels even fresher during this pandemic era
https://danluu.com/googlebot-monopoly/
It's a short blog post that I've probably read a thousand times at this point. He wrote about how websites give Google a big advantage when it comes to web crawling and how that big advantage probably makes it harder for other search engines to compete with Google. This was a pretty striking idea to me and there was a lot of talk at the time about antitrust and Big Tech. Dan's post had been written in 2015, so I was sure that a ton of other people, especially DC policy people, already knew about this and were talking about it. Right?
Turns out, basically nobody in DC knew anything about this. A ton of website operators complain about it on their own forums like HN and SEO, it's not hard to find people griping about the cost of Bing's crawlers, but those people never saw fit to tell anybody in DC about this and how it impacts the market for general purpose search engines and gives Google such an advantage. So I started writing down everything that I was finding about Google's web crawling advantage and writing it in a way that policy people could understand these things called web crawlers they had probably never heard much about before.
And, long story short, the policy people were very grateful that I had gotten in touch and explained all this, and I got cited in the Big Tech Antitrust report published by Congress last summer and then featured in The New York Times:
https://knuckleheads.club/we-crawled-our-way-into-the-big-te...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
So, Dan's blog post has had a pretty big impact on my life so far and it's not quite done yet. The pandemic has slowed me down this year much more than it did last year, but I'm working on preparing to submit a paper to an economics journal for peer review that lays out the dynamics of web crawling, why Google accrues this advantage and why it matters. I'm very grateful to Dan for writing that post and, as far as career advice goes, I heartily recommend going back every once in a while and rereading everything he has ever written. Who knows what else he's hiding in there?
If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker. It greatly simplifies cooking because it's automated. Just add the ingredients, close the lid, press a button, and wait. You will get a perfectly cooked one-pot meal with minimum effort. You can even mix fresh and frozen ingredients and the timer won't start until the frozen ingredients are thawed. If you don't overfill it the only thing the food touches is the inner stainless steel pot, so it's very easy to clean. I get the majority of my nutrition from food cooked this way. I can't imagine going back to slow traditional methods.
It also makes dried legumes far more practical, because you can skip the pre-soak phase. If you eat a lot of legumes, and you switch from canned to dried, the savings will most likely pay for the cost of the machine within a few years. In addition, energy costs are reduced because cooking at increased pressure is faster, and good electric pressure cookers are insulated. I am happy with an Instant Pot brand one, although I don't guarantee they are the best. If somebody has strong opinions on which is best then please post them.
The one major downside is the texture of the food can become boring, because everything is mixed together and you can't make crispy foods with it, but you can always add things like pickles after you've cooked it.
The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler, the sequel to Future Shock. I was a nuclear trained engineer in the Navy. This book convinced me not to pursue a career in nuclear power after the Navy, which was the standard career path for guys like me, because it was "Second Wave." The Third Wave was information technology, which I pursued despite having no training in it.
At the height of my success, "The Arrangement" by Joni Mitchell made me realize that money hadn't made me happy and pursuing more was not something I wanted to do.
You could have been more
Than a name on the door
On the thirty-third floor in the air
More than a credit card
Swimming pool in the backyard
While you still have the time
You could get away and find
A better life, you know the grind is so ungrateful
Racing cars, whiskey bars
No one cares who you really areSpecifically this line "So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA."
I spent 5 years building a good business school resume and this post encouraged me to try out programming instead. The flexibility of a programming job let me escape the NYC / San Fran scene and start living abroad. Having way more fun living in different countries around the world now.
You got to build stuff too, not just learn. Still, you also have to figure out if you're a builder or a "learner".
I like to figure stuff out, once I know the solution, my interest is minimal.
I remember reading this first time in early twenties - it was mindblowing. After several years I can say that many things I’ve expierenced, noticed and learned are mentioned somewhere along these lines.
‚One must permit his people the freedom to seek added work and greater responsibility. In my organization, there are no formal job descriptions or organizational charts. Responsibilities are defined in a general way, so that people are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do as they think best and to go to anyone and anywhere for help. Each person then is limited only by his own ability.’
* How to negotiate salary : https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
* Don't call yourself a programmer : https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...
HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513713
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/07/spolsky.html
I don't think I've ever read a single life-changing blog post, but an entire blog over years and books can definitely be life changing.
I'd say that life-changing stuff has to be contrarian, and Taleb and PG are pretty contrarian. This also means they can be wrong, repetitive, and piss a lot of people off. You can criticize individual posts or passages easily; it's harder to do that of their entire career.
I'd also be careful to label them "not contrarian" -- contrarians can seem less so once people start agreeing with and imitating them, specifically as a result of the writing :)
http://www.merlinmann.com/better/
Written in 2008, but still amazingly relevant today. The opening lines are eerily prescient about our current "everyone needs to have a take on everything" culture.
"Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content.
These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical.
Each, in its own way, contributes to the imperative that we constantly expand our portfolio of shallow but strongly-held opinions about nearly everything. Then we’re supposed to post something about it. Somewhere."
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
By Blake Ross
https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...
Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!
It describes the concept of 'self-concept' and a, I guess, pseudo-treatment for addressing deep-set neurosis/anxiety caused by having one that is a little malformed. This post led (in a sort of roundabout way, hitting at a good time in my life and while I was already thinking in the direction of fixing this problem) to a sort of self-therapy where I snapped out of an unhealthy mental state I had been in for something like a decade. Probably good therapy could have had the same effect but I've always had trouble with that, and the ideas here led to a non-unsuccessful self-therapy. My issue was not at all related to the one he describes in the post, but the approach seemed to work anyway.
https://kajsotala.fi/2017/07/how-i-found-fixed-the-root-prob...
When I have anxiety and unhappy moments in my life, I feel stuck. My natural inclination in these moments is to run. To get away, to be somewhere new, do something new, just get the eff away from wherever I am. I frequently felt that traveling and being a digital nomad would cure this problem and I would never feel that way, but the article above outlines why that isn't the case. Our problems follow us everywhere, and just because I'm eating sushi in tokyo in some cool hole in the wall doesn't mean I won't dread and have anxiety.
I am very grateful for the traveling I've done, which is a fair bit more than a lot of Americans. But in addition to that blog post it has helped me realize it isn't the cure to anything.
The article is sort of dumb and probably doesn't resonate with everyone. But it helped me
Now Then by Adam Curtis for really reinforcing my suspicion that algorithms that feed me more of what I like prevent me from ever experiencing things I havent before. Tasting new flavors means ordering what I am least, not most, familiar with.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
And although I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup by Scott Alexander gets very lost and fails imho to come to a useful conclusion, I do muse both on its modern forgiveness-v-tolerance definition schism and more generally from the dark matter parts that an almost Time Machine Eloi/Morlock divide has happened to language, where everyone in America THINKS they are speaking the same language. But really, there are red and blue Englishes that are prominent, using the same words but that mean very different things. EG: Blue defines racism as something that cant happen to a majority. Red doesnt. They dont really acknowledge that the other is using the word to describe something different, they just call each other the word used from their own understanding, and then call the other side stupid. Through whistles, code switching, and signaling, phrases are now so detached from their meaning, that not speaking the language is almost assuredly an inability to interact with parts of the tribe, in any capacity more than the most superficial. In groups can have conversations where it sounds like they are saying one thing, but under the surface is a completely different conversation. Just imagine what the phrase "covid isnt real" (or "black lives matter [too/more]") means to you. If you read it ultra literally, you probably arent quite understanding what the speaker means.
If you can accomplish that then you'll be a much happier person.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-...
This was my favourite one on avoiding mediocrity. It crosses my mind at least weekly over a decade later!
https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/...
Read it a decade later than I should have, though
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zzQpvoYcQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s...
I read it early in my career.
It was a simple way to assess team quality.
It's relevant today (there are parts that are out of date, but most of it is still on the mark).
It showed me the power of long form writing to share ideas around software.
I spent a lot of time thinking about ideas that were good or smart or made me feel smart. Could easily have been a lifelong chase with no real gains. Focusing on execution hasn't made me a millionaire overnight but it has helped me think about concrete things that are undeniably moving in the right direction instead of hoping to strike a "genius idea jackpot" that changes everything in an instant.
* A THRIVE/SURVIVE THEORY OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM [1] - Still the best theory on the conservative/liberal divide. It changed how I view the conservative viewpoint and helped me understand it better.
* MEDITATIONS ON MOLOCH [2] - One of the most famous blog posts on the internet (certainly in HN circles at least). Part fantasy, part philosophy, part game-theory - all of it brilliant. It changed how I approach my life goals and what I need to optimize for in life. A blog post so famous that it has it's own podcast[3]!
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory...
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
[3] https://open.spotify.com/episode/7yGVsF2VPi4knhfRujM1Yx?si=q...
This one had some impact on me because it revived the importance of taking ownership not only on my personal data, but the infrastructure which generates it, processes and stores it; and that the same infrastructure should be well thought of by me through a tinkering process which adds value to itself and to data the more I invest time on it.
I felt very motivated to rethink my workflows, my opsec and the way I store any data, not only new data I create, but general content that find around the Internet and that I think could be of any use in the future.
An honorable mention would be this one: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm... which helped me look at how the web has been evolving from a different angle and, of course, triggered me to change some of my behaviors regarding privacy and the use of big tech derived products.
I almost doubled my compensation in large part thanks to it for one of my positions. I increased:
+ Base salary by $75k
+ Signing bonus by $35k (from $0)
+ Stock options by $100k total (standard four year vesting, so $25k per year)
If you're a knowledge worker in a sought-after field, particularly in the current environment of crazy salary explosion, you should absolutely read that blog post!
https://hackernoon.com/rick-and-morty-and-the-meaning-of-lif...
A blog about meaning of life and its purpose using clips from popular shows and movies. I have re-read this piece several times and I come out with something new at the end of each read.
Given the circumstances of the Snowden revelations, I was struggling to articulate how I felt about privacy, the chilling effects of surveillance, and making sense of it all in terms of who I am, where I come from, and how I make my livelihood. That farewell post, along with introducing me to the writings of Janna Malamud Smith (Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life), helped shape and define my perspective on privacy.
It was a blog post about how one man's perspective on fatherhood changed after he became a father, and he realized he regretted waiting so long, because all it really ended up doing was robbing him of being able to spend more time with his children.
Before reading it, I was ambivalent about whether I wanted children. After reading it, I wasn't.
This might be the second or third (and possibly redundant too) Tim urban blog post here.
This uses a visual representation to drive home the point that the time you have with your loved ones, especially parents is very very limited, and choices that you make to increase/decrease face time with them, have a pretty pronounced impact, for life.
This certainly woke me up to my relationship with my father and elder relatives in general.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/12/the-tail-end.html
``` It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93% of my in-person parent time. I’m now enjoying the last 5% of that time. We’re in the tail end. ```
^ This is the crux of it, in familial (parental) relationships, we spend most of our time with them early in life, and that we don't get nearly as much time with them after graduation.
Aaron Schwartz reviews growth mindset. It really changed how I approach things and I’ve attempted so many things I would have previously not tried because of reading that.
I know it’s silly to recommend a blog post about a book but it’s so well summarized that it’s better than the book IMO. The book seems to dilute the power of the message with a whole bunch of words and details.
To be clear - I support the idea of sharing insightful information especially as everyone takes different paths of life. I do however loathe the over the top language. This day and age everything is "life-changing", "epic", "GOAT" - its devalues the rest of the content.
This has changed my entire perception of what it means (or could possibly mean) to be happy and, by implication, of the entire self-improvement industry.
My advice is this: Introspection is a super power. The more you take the time to step back and reevaluate all of your actions/assumptions in life, the more you will be able to make meaningful change towards the life you want from NOW.
Also, find purpose outside of your career, find a hobby or cause and find fulfillment there. Corollary, if you are going to have regrets, regret doing something, don't regret not doing it.
https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-100-correct-way-to-do-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_The_Future_Doesn%27t_Need_...
A very famous blog post by Bill Joy on the dangers of rapid technological change. Rather then dismiss fears over exponential tech he takes the claims seriously and tries to reason about them. He even factors anarcho-primitivism into his analysis which is as far away as you can get from Silicon Valley views which he obviously eptimomises being the founder of Sun Microsystems.
I love it as its a truly open minded attempt to consider the potential existensial risk of tech and the deep, big picture, philosophical implications of technological progress. It's just so different to what most Silicon Valley luminaries talk about which are often full of certainty about our glorious future.
It resonates with me a lot as I often feel like a bit of an outsider as a technologist and software engineer who has the odd sleepless night about where it's all heading. This quote haunts me...
"I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses, will make the world a safer and better place; if I were to come to believe the opposite, then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may come."
For me that day has not come but I feel that moral obligation more as I get older so I think I'm on the same page as Bill here.
https://www.thecut.com/article/what-its-like-to-have-narciss...
It made me realise that some people are wired differently. You can't interpret their actions with the same framework you interpret yours.
https://jimleff.blogspot.com/2019/04/did-you-miss-part-about...
The concept of norms, laws, and social customs being set my the most stubborn and intolerant among us: "The Minority Rule", by Nassim Taleb.
He planted the idea of "The Blub Paradox" in my head, which years later made me look at Git and version control through a different lens. Eventually I co-founded a company (Sturdy YCW21) making collaborating on code better.
Inspired me to renege on my investment banking offer straight out of college and move to South America to work on my startup instead. Good times.
At that age, I had very much assumed that the world had to work according to "work hard for 45 years, get the biggest house you can, buy as much stuff as you can, on your 65th birthday your company hands you a final salary pension that will last the rest of you life". Something had always felt a bit wrong about consumerism and the hedonic treadmill, but it took the brusque and entertaining prose of MMM to really stop and make me think.
Funnily enough, I now find him very grating, but he absolutely set me on a path of rethinking my life in my early 20s to truly think about what matters to me.
Politics and the English language by Orwell.
Not a blog post but it’s within the spirit of the question.
It changed how I write.
Really interesting conversation about the nature of happiness. For a lot of my life I was convinced that if I achieved my goals then I would become happy - "if I get into this uni, get this grade, get this job, etc...".
Then when I started working I couldn't work out why career success wasn't translating into feeling better. In hindsight it's obvious that getting paid more money doesn't automatically make you happy, but it was only after reading this article that it really clicked for me.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null...
The main point of the article is that for trans people our priors are way way off and if we asked ourselves "what's more likely, that I'm trans or that I'm cis?" instead of "am I really sure I'm trans?" then the answer is painfully obvious and the weird doubts we obsess over are nothing compared to the mountain of evidence in support.
It was extremely comforting to me at a time where I was suffering from depression, and jobless -- struggling to obtain employment as a Software Engineer 2 years out of college. Most of what the blogpost described was immediately relatable. It gave me some peace of mind knowing that I was not alone.
I still suffer from intense anxiety during technical interviews, but I no longer have an existential crisis about it or feel guilty for not being able to whiteboard well.
Not a GP. The opinion is my own.
Original: https://scottbot.net/the-route-of-a-text-message/
VICE article for prettier version: https://www.vice.com/en/article/kzdn8n/the-route-of-a-text-m...
It's a story of two Neils dealing with imposter syndrome. Every time I start feeling like I'm just the guy who goes where others point and I didn't actually accomplish anything, I go back and read this. To every new engineer I've worked with who has struggled with self-doubt, I have sent this. I cannot overstate how calming and centering this post has been to me.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_ju...
* https://neilonsoftware.com/soft-skills-every-dev-should-know...
This next one isn't life-changing. But, it has intriguing ideas in it, summarized from Fooled by Randomness:
* https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/fooled-by-randomness
The last link has a trove of top-tier content if you go to the articles section. Smart lad!
- https://vasilishynkarenka.com/how-to-make-hard-decisions/
That was just the trigger for me to finally take terrifying but necessary actions.
- https://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-17613/10-signs-fear-is-runni...
I hit almost all the boxes and understood why I felt like a control freak.
I did fail out of school twice (as in 2.23 GPA) and never finished my phys-eng degree and at that time I was so stressed out like school was everything/I had debt piling up from loans, didn't know what I was going to do. Then this field pays you so much if you know what you're doing. Also lead me to the idea of entrepreneurship/trying to make some business like the stuff you'd see on Indie Hackers, this has not happened yet, I'm still an hourly Joe currently.
Actually I remember one site in particular: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ where a guy made a million dollars by selling a million pixels of adspace.
Similarly Peter Levels making $70K/month on his stuff... just things like this gave me the realization of an alternative life than what I thought to be "the way to success" at the time.
I had some really stupid ideas though, like BeforeYouDoIdo or dn2d8 which was a dating site. Anyway also learned about external validation vs. self delusion regarding what some idea is actually worth.
This article references something called The Coffee Can Portfolio. The idea of a coffee can is simple: You try to find the best stocks you can and let them sit for years. You incur no costs with such a portfolio, and it is simple to manage.
Robert Kirby, the Portfolio Manager who first introduced the idea recognized that most professional investors in the stock market focused on preserving capital as opposed to growing it. As a result, when their portfolios became “unbalanced”, that is, their winning stocks started to become large portions of their portfolios, they trimmed those positions and transferred capital into their “less successful” investments, the ones that had gotten “cheaper”.
Although that might sound prudent, what is really happening is that money is being transferred from the most dynamic companies, to the least dynamic companies.
This idea helped me become a longer term investor, and as a result, a better investor.
Reading the post, it became clear to me that it was not about how quick or deep you can learn a language, but rather what are all the ideas and abstractions that enable such a language to exist. Computer science really was more than just computers. After reading that post I looked around and discovered the youtube videos of SICP, which have done more for my love and knowledge of programming than the entire MA program I took.
Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
This one crystallized for me a feeling that I'd always felt deep inside but never known how to express.
I'd found it in virtual worlds, sure, but it goes far beyond that. Even beyond fiction. This longing for something beyond the fold, something that can never be reduced or pinned down or fully understood, a wormhole in understanding that always begs you to keep seeking, keep moving, keep wondering and imagining. The fundamental belief that there's always more out there above and beyond our grasp, and that that is a good thing, and not something to be remedied.
What's described here is one of the most important north-stars in my life, if I'm being honest. It has almost religious significance to me.
> Mystery is not merely the unknown. It is the impossibility of knowing and yet the continual attempt to know. It is unknowability itself. It is futile and essential.
For me, personally, it was the third time I was smacked in the head with that qualitative productivity jump based on superior technology before I could articulate it in words. First was with Cincom’s Mantis, then Dataflex 2 (3 was crap), and then with Zope.
More specifically, the post explains the difference in Social Class and Working Class and how we often conflate those two things when in discussion. We often talk about “lower”, “middle” and “upper” classes, but the author proposes that those are actually Working Classes and not necessarily related to Social classes. We often migrate one or maybe two social classes higher or lower in our lifetime, but movements more than two rungs is prohibitively difficult.
It is an interesting way to look at society.
https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light&fb...
Then one day I happened upon this https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/12/18/bruce-lee-artist-of...
That perspective on the meaning of self-esteem and its counterpart of Pride gives so much justification for the concern about it. It has also been extremely useful as a parent to explain the real value and meaning of self-esteem to my kids.
Just read it (and his other posts) and you will understand the whole philosophy behind Indie Hackers and why the traditional "jobs" are so broken.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
Can't find original blog post, by Roy Baumeister, but this were his thought while writing the book with sumirali title. Short writeup is even nicer and to-the-point condensed format. Connects, to me, very well biology, evolution, society (as a system). After reading this, I connected the dots for many behavior patterns and "social" programming.
This blog has had a huge impact in my life and I'll be forever grateful to Aron for uploading it to the internet and also grateful to Fede_V who shared the blog in this HN comment a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18176929
My life is much more fun and fulfilling thanks to its influence.
There are lots of other great blogs but none have had as great of an impact on my outlook.
https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a...
It is a succinct summary of what, with the benefit of hindsight, many people thought was important in their lives and what they should have done better.
Absent is "I should have worked harder" and "I should have spent more time at the office".
I read everything on this blog. This post made me realize how absolutely miserable I was running a company I had started, and led me down a path that resulted in selling my part of my company, taking time to be a stay at home dad, and getting back into tech. It also caused me to go off the deep end into 80000hours.org and read that whole site and associated books, and only apply for jobs with social impact.
Pretty influential post in my life!
Putting thoughts into words for others to understand is a creative activity that keeps on giving for all sorts of subtle reasons. (What reasons..? Write a blog and find out for yourself!)
All of Low-Tech Magazine's articles are worth reading, but this one in particular inspired me to start a web design business focused on radical sustainability. I haven't really succeeded yet, but this article gave me a goal I've been pursuing off and on since I read it.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...
The light tone and funny images make it stick, up to the point that it became part of my vocabulary; when my SO is worrying too much about what other people think, I mimick a mammoth trunk and she immediately gets it, and vice versa.
[1] http://haacked.com/archive/2013/10/21/argue-well-by-losing.a...
"Some people build boats to build boats – but that wasn’t us. We built a boat to go sailing. "
https://www.yachtmollymawk.com/2014/11/zen-and-the-art-of-bo...
Learned a lot from this fighting game community creator, Core-A gaming, video about community, and even tho I can't say it changed my life, it did change the way I see a couple of things forever.
https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p...
[1] https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-tr...
https://www.skynettoday.com/editorials/humans-not-concentrat...
Also maybe not life-changing, but absolutely gave me a lot to think about that I found incredibly rewarding and enjoyable.
It frees me up to try things and to give myself the time to stick with them.
https://medium.com/@elleluna/the-crossroads-of-should-and-mu...
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...
It's an incredibly concise "survival guide" for the modern "normal" way of life. It also raises way more questions than it answers so it's a great conversation starter.
I think the past two years has provided even more evidence that simply letting people act however they want based on self-interest and relying on Nash for good outcomes can even be deadly.
1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Made me realise smartwork is bs. If you want to boost productivity, increase your focus span. There's no other hack.
I was raised in a Christian family, as most Brazilians are, but was never really into it. I don't remember praying after I grew up a bit (10+ years), and even before I was more saying the words than really meaning it.
Then my father passed away when I was 12 (he was in his 40s, died of cancer).
This led me on a few rabbit roles reading and talking about religion and the great questions of life. As I think many with a more analytical mindset, nothing really felt right, so I ended up being mostly atheist, with a few sparkles of buddhism and cristianity here and there.
Later in my 20s, I dated and later married an amazing woman who is a True Believer. She's the daughter of a shaman with a buddhist monk, and has been meditating since she was born.
Many more conversations ensued. I explored some of the "alternative" religions, and enjoyed especially the animist ones (Earth, Sun and Moon are pretty close to gods in my mind). I also tried mushrooms, which were amazing on breaking my usual brain paths and allowing me to see from a different perspective.
But it still didn't feel right. Again, I was trying to understand religions with an analytical mind, which can only get me so far. I felt I was missing on something big (I still do).
The world is too complex to be explained only with rationality and the scientific method, but at the same time explaining things based on dreams and our collective memory didn't seem much better.
It was around this time I read the "Religion for the Nonreligious" article.
There were no giant breakthroughs, and the text is somewhat reductionist. Still, it was one of the first times I read about religion in a way that really clicked (other times were reading about some parts of buddhism and meditation).
One of the things that religion provides to people is structure. The world is too complex, and the nonsensical things happening every day can weigh someone down. Religious people can go on with their days knowing that there's a bigger plan. I think this makes them more resilient to the life challenges that will appear, sooner or later (although this resiliency can disappear quickly, just see at the number of people that blame God after some disaster happen on their lives).
This text gave me some structure to think about where I am, where humanity is, and where I want to be. It made the world a little less chaotic, allowing me to see not only the little daily things, but also keep the bigger picture in mind.
It gave me some peace of mind and, after all these years since I first read it, I still think about it every week.
^I believe this is the blog post that was the final straw on the camel's back that convinced me to start giving at least 10% of my income to charity. I don't think it will have the same effect on you, but it may.