I now "know" going to the gym is good, whereas before I just didn't. Previously, I hadn't truly internalized why or how going to the gym was good, nor that it was realistic for me. Now that I've actually started doing it, it's no longer possible for me to avoid "knowing" that going to the gym is good. The results speak for themselves.

Three weeks ago I described self-discipline as internalizing the dominator, splitting yourself into two, where one forces the other to do stuff. But highly productive people are not actually doing that, or they would get burned out. I wrote about this in 2019 in this post, Why willpower is overrated.

The other way to get yourself to do stuff, is to have an expanded sense of self, such that you know that what you're doing will help you. But propositional knowing doesn't work. At best it just gives you fuel for self-domination. And deeper understanding, that what you're doing will help your larger self, is really hard -- at least for me. I forced myself to floss for over 20 years before I started to enjoy it, and only because, in that time, I skipped two nights and lost two teeth.

Related: We're watching a new TV show called The Curse. It's painfully dark and relentlessly awkward, but well done, with great music and a timely theme. It's about a young wealthy couple who gentrify a neighborhood while making a TV show about it. On the propositional level, they totally care about poor people and want to help them. But on a deeper level, they're selfish and so clueless that they make things worse. My point is, choosing what to think is easy; understanding is really hard.

The Information Age is clearly pushing us towards low-res conclusions on questions that warrant deep, long, high-res consideration. Consider our poor hominid brains, trying to form a coherent worldview out of monetized feeds made of low-resolution takes on the most complex topics imaginable.... Unsurprisingly, amidst the incredible volume of information coming at us, there's been a surge in low-res, ideologically-driven views.

And some music for the weekend, a really nice new indie folk album, forestlike.

Existential crises are often seen as a phenomenon associated specifically with modern society. One important factor in this context is that various sources of meaning, such as religion or being grounded in one's local culture and immediate social environment, are less important in the contemporary context.

I'm not sure what I'm grounded in, something inside me I guess. I see my internal world as friendly and the human-made world as hostile. My anxiety is about people getting mad at me for doing it wrong, which has happened many times, or my money running out and having to be inauthentic to beg for a job.

Thanks Andy for sending this new paywalled piece, Where Does Religion Come From? This is a radical statement for the NY Times: "that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism in a world where it's increasingly beset." The author, Ross Douthat, distinguishes three aspects of religion: 1) the personal desire for meaning; 2) "the societal need for a unifying moral-metaphysical structure"; 3) the mysterious origin of religion in uncanny experience.

One way to get at this weirdness is to look at situations where there's a supernatural experience without a pre-existing tradition that makes sense of people's experiences and shapes their interpretations. By this I mean that if you have a mystical experience in the context of, say, a Pentecostalist faith-healing service or a Roman Catholic Mass, you are likely to interpret it in light of existing Christian theology. But if you have a religious experience "in the wild," as it were, the sheer strangeness is more likely to come through.

From there, he goes into UFO sightings! UFOs are not exactly in the wild, but in the firm context of the modern story of outer space as the realm of the unknown. A good book on this subject is Passport to Magonia by Jacques Vallee, and there's a promising book I haven't read yet, UFOs: Reframing the Debate.

If we fully know everything about the Now moment, we know the entire past and future. With this in mind, explaining any given draft of the universe becomes a matter of explaining the contents of a single Now moment of that draft. This in turn means that we can view the evolution of the successive drafts as an evolution of different versions of a particular Now moment.

I disagree with his assumption that physics is deterministic. Reality might be deterministic on a level deeper than physics, but physics itself says no such thing. Not only is quantum physics non-deterministic, but this article, The Dome, expains how "even quite simple Newtonian systems can harbor uncaused events."

In e.g. software development, too many specialists have been abstracted away and replaced by tools and automation and fewer and fewer people understand anything even one layer directly beneath the layer they are working on. This is a major problem because we will eventually reach a point in which very few people can fix anything in the layers below.

My rude-ass car is about all the new features that are supposed to make cars more safe and convenient, and instead they make the driving experience frustrating.

China's Age of Malaise is a long article mainly about how bad their dictator is, and while this is true, America is also in an age of malaise and we don't even have a dictator yet.

Great Reddit thread, Is there anywhere in the world someone can just live for free? What people mean by "live for free" is the same thing I mean when I say my highest value is free time. I want to have fewer relationships with modern society.

For the last few hundred years, humans have been experimenting with a radical new way of thinking and living, based on individualism, competition, number and measure, predictability and control, linear progress, and naive ideas about quality of life. Life is getting better in the most simple-minded and obvious ways, at the expense of many subtle ways that life is getting worse, and because our culture doesn't show us these things, we don't know why we're unhappy.

The mainstream left is completely blind to this. The right can feel it, but they don't know how to think about it, and they're unable to imagine any alternative except strong leaders backed by violence. So we're going to get more of those, as shit falls apart.