Podcaster with 1bn+ plays. I write about the most important lessons from the best thinkers on the planet. 300,000+ people read my free newsletter. Press subscribe to join.
3MM: Clarity, Boys & Nazis
3 MINUTE MONDAYHi friend, Post-Content Clarity. This is the best way to work out whether the content you consume is making your life better or worse. You see, there is a problem. While you watch anything, you are distracted by the content itself. Which means you can’t judge how the content impacts you. The creator has designed the content to be compelling and to keep you hooked, because if they didn’t, they’d be beaten by another creator who achieved that more effectively. But just because something is compelling, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. You hate-watch adversarial, argumentative videos, not because there is a fascinating question being answered, but because you want to see your team make the other team look silly. You pity-follow accounts to check in on the slow motion car crash of whatever catastrophe is happening to that person’s existence. You descend into scroll-holes and browse Twitter arguments as your heart rate gets jacked up through the roof in silent apoplectic indignation. But once you finish consuming, you forget that you consumed it, move on with your life and don’t assess whether it was actually good for you. In this way, you are like a shop owner in a shop with no walls - you allow your most valuable resource (your attention) to be stolen by whichever individuals are most bold and aggressive, then tomorrow you forget that they didn’t pay you and allow them to do it all over again. The solution is to ask yourself this: How does watching different creators make you feel? Some YouTube channels are compelling and limbically hijacking and keep me watching, but I feel uptight and tense and negative or cynical and zero-sum after watching them. I don’t want to message my friends and tell them I miss them or pay people compliments or go outside and see nature. I feel like the world is against me. That’s not the sort of content I want to consume any of, no matter how much it makes my dopamine fire. On the other hand, what is the content that makes you feel most connected to the world? What makes you feel hopeful, open, prepared, informed, light and aligned? If your body is made up of things you put into your mouth, your mind is made of things you put into your eyes and ears. Your content diet should be spirulina for the soul, not fast food junk for your amygdala. To achieve freedom you must be able to think for yourself. If you don’t step in and live intentionally, the best you can hope for is to become a rich, successful or famous slave. A slave to your base instincts, the worst norms of the society around you and the confused chemical signals of your body. You will spend your life focused on unhealthy aims defined for you by others and the worst parts of yourself. You will pass these bad assumptions about life onto your children and loved ones. Worst of all, you will reinforce these boring, desperate defaults in everyone you encounter. If you never peer into your programming then you may end up being the cleverest rat in the room, but that’s hardly worth celebrating. MODERN WISDOMI do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. This week’s upcoming episodes: Monday. Thursday. Saturday. THINGS I'VE LEARNED1. “Young men are more likely to end up in prison or jail in the US than they are to graduate from college if they’re raised in any non-intact family setup.” — Brad Wilcox 2. The word “bankrupt” comes from the Italian banca rotta, meaning “broken bench.” In Italy, money dealers worked from benches or tables. If a money dealer ran out of money, his bench or table was broken in half and he was out of business. The word had its French equivalent, banqueroute, and subsequently made its way into the English language as both a figure of speech and a literal definition of what happened to the affected person. In ancient Greek civilization, the idea of bankruptcy did not exist. If one person owed money to another and lacked sufficient means to pay, the indebted man, his wife, and family (if he had one) were put into “debt slavery” until the debt had been worked off. Often, such debt slavery could last a lifetime. 3. “Those who don’t know history are doomed to compare everything to Hitler.” — Lou Perez LIFE HACKSome advice from Franz Kafka in 1912. “Dearest, I beg of you, sleep properly and go for walks.” Big love, Try my productivity drink Neutonic. PS |
3 Minute Monday
Podcaster with 1bn+ plays. I write about the most important lessons from the best thinkers on the planet. 300,000+ people read my free newsletter. Press subscribe to join.
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, The Gastric Band Surgery of Being Busy. After undergoing gastric band surgery, people’s risk of suicide goes up. That’s perhaps unsurprising - gastric band surgery is a big deal and can sometimes have complications, infections and painful outcomes. But one of the unseen reasons for the increased suicide risk is actually due to the surgery going right, not it going wrong. Many patients used food as a way to deal with issues in their lives like emotional challenges,...
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, I’ve been thinking about how to achieve a Realistic Path To Enlightenment. As much as moving to a cave in the woods and spending a decade in silent retreat might be great for your spirit, it’s not going to be doable by pretty much anyone. If you’ve meditated enough, you know that you accumulate momentum in mindfulness, kind of like a swell moving underwater. After enough time, there is a force and a power to your ability to drop into the present moment, and...
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, It is a sad fact that it’s more socially acceptable to be your own biggest critic rather than your own biggest cheerleader. This creates a fertile environment for external criticism to make you doubt yourself more than it should. Here are some strategies you may have used to try and avoid the pain of criticism with varying degrees of success: Get bitter and think of any critic as a hater just throwing envy and shade; recite the quote “Don’t take criticism from...