One of the most tragic things is missed opportunities. What I’m thinking about rn is primarily missed opportunities to connect with other people.
Q: Why do we miss this sort of opportunities?
- maybe we feel awkward / embarrassed or something
- maybe we have some fear of rejection
- maybe we are just playing on default mode, and default mode is to not deeply connect with people
- maybe its easier to be cynical
- maybe logistics are difficult
What specifically are opportunities that I want to avoid missing out on?
- Enjoying my classes and classmates / peers
- it’s super easy to be negative about classes. this is the default mode that we are taught in grades K-12, I guess it’s an American society thing that we’re taught not to enjoy classes? maybe we think it’s cool to be too good for a class?
- idk but I think this is a good one to keep in mind
- I’m taking some really weird classes this semester, like physics, ethics, ML, algorithms
- but they all can be cool, even if I already am familiar with some of the content
- and yeah it’s just generally good to error on the side of being extroverted even if your not naturally extrovert
- going on fun outings like randomly walking around Boston
Anyways, what to do about it?
choices are bad, so whatever you do it’d better be automatic.
well, the obvious thing is to have a TAP for talking to people and scheduling things.
ok, let’s define two TAPs. gosh I love how this blog is a free accountability mechanism. Just writing something here makes me feel pressured to do it. Thanks reader!
TAP1: (sit down at big table ⇒ “hello I’m Alek, what are you excited about today?“) It’d be a bonus if you also talked to ppl other times but let’s not get greedy. at some point I just wanna make a page with a whole table of a bunch of TAPs. but empirically I have a pretty bad track record with this. so anyways, let’s see if I can remember TAP1 for a week. I’ll put reminder to check.
- alkjash suggestion: meta-TAP
/root - unfortunately I only have the RAM to install one TAP rn but I’ll get to this one later
update re TAP1: I think this TAP was too ambitious but kind of worked.
Currently the TAP has worked out more like, sit down at table ⇒ think “I should talk to ppl”. My rate of following through on this idea is maybe 70%. But I think this has still substantially improved talking to people baseline.
I think another aspect of not taking life seriously is having predictable bugs. If you have a predictable bug FIX IT FIX IT PLEASE. If your strategy of fixing it has not been working in the past you need a new strategy (akrasia = there is no try harder button).