Things I’ve noticed lately
2021, Q4
⛰️ Maslow
It’s easy to sing “all you need is love” when you’re at Maslow’s fourth floor. Before understanding his pyramid of needs, I didn’t know how to think about the “money and happiness” dilemma.
I think that happiness becomes a choice once you’ve covered most of your basic needs. True, I’ve been fortunate enough to always be above level four, so I don’t know if happiness can still be a choice while lacking those basic needs.
The important reflection for me is that after a certain point, there’s no doubt that you are your worst enemy. It’s then when it becomes especially important to see reality as it is and not as we wish it was.
🤮 Mental health
During middle school, some friends started saying that they wanted to commit suicide. Instead of talking nicely to them as my other friends did, I just thought they should do that to stop bothering others, or else fix their problems and stop acting like victims.
This could sound very controversial very soon, if not already. What I really want to say is that empathy has never been my greatest strength so every time I heard “mental health” I just thought it was a trendy topic.
Long story short, this year my own battles against my mind. Every day could be a rollercoaster from feeling okay, very sad, or very angry.
I’ve loved life so much and fear death so badly that I think killing myself would be the stupidest and scariest thing to do. My favorite way of transforming my energy and matter and potentially losing consciousness (aka dying) would probably have to do with black holes… but that’s another story.
After many asynchronous conversations with some people I’m very grateful to, I realized that I would be the only person who could help myself. Nothing any other person said would matter. No book, no video.
My last hypothesis: if I slowed down the pace of everything to enjoy doing the things I’ve always enjoyed, I would find that intrinsic motivation again.
Hypothesis was true! It was like magic: one day I just realized I felt better. I had healed myself and it was hella crazy. My immediate reflection:
“That’s literally the craziest shit I’ve been through. My mind’s a wild beast that I gotta control better. I can’t believe I let myself go through this for so long.
I’m now way more empathic towards people who don’t feel very well emotionally. I finally got the teenage stuff everybody talked about (LOL). And connecting to Maslow, I know that many times we’re just being weak.
☠️ Don’t do sugar
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just when I wasn’t feeling very well up there, my eating habits also started changing.
Sugar is that it’s addictive. It triggers very similar patterns in the brain that some drugs trigger.
Unlike drugs, what scares me the most about sugar is that it is everywhere. in Ketchup, cereal, juice, yogurt, even salad dressings, and that matcha drink I love ordering at Starbucks.
What pisses me off is companies selling these products. They use the “sweet spot” to calculate the right amount of sugar to use so most people like the product and it becomes addictive.
When I put this into perspective I cannot help think about how valuable consciousness is and how a handful of stupid people are throwing it to trash by creating a system that won’t take us toward collective enlightenment. Here’s the train of thought:
- Historically, the purpose of a company has been making the most profit
- Today, more people think that companies are also a group of people working towards a common purpose
- Cinnabon’s mission as a company is to “spread warmth”. Coca Cola’s is “to refresh the world in mind, body, and spirit”. This doesn’t make any sense if they’re *killing people in the long term
- Free will? If science has already proven that sugar is addictive, what kind of group of people puts something out there that most won’t be able to resist and will cause them harm?
- If money is just a collective belief that allows us to organize our civilizations, why can’t we align economic incentives with collective progress?
- It’s not only about money. Precious effort, time, and consciousness are being put into these products.
- As Elon Musk and others, I believe that we should strive for greater collective enlightenment.
- Companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Coca Cola are therefore, not a way to achieve this. In fact, they’re just creating more problems to solve (e.g. disease and climate change)
Some extra thoughts:
- I do complain about why my generation is expected to solve the world’s biggest problems instead of creating an interesting future
- What’s the purpose of someone in Maslow Level 4+ who works at CocaCola?
We do need sugar and we do need to connect the world. I think there are better ways to do it and I’m most likely being a hypocrite by just complaining and not building better solutions.
This is just one of the biggest realizations I had this year and my opinion will continue to evolve.
🐒 Darwin
At this point, it would be worth reading the actual book “On the origin of species”. So far, the mental model of evolution continues to blow my mind.
Our genes seem to do it better than us. They don’t seem to make the same mistake twice. They learn and do things differently.
I agree with Ray Dalio in that this may be the most powerful force ever. Learning from our mistakes and doing things differently every time is obvious. Actually doing it is hard.
2 extremely important ways to engineer our evolution are:
- External: Asking for, understanding, and implementing feedback
- Internal: reflecting on what went good and what can go better
Quick thoughts
- Life is obvious. All of these are just reminders. Millions have had these same thoughts before
- Constrained by our biology. We can’t avoid adrenaline being released when our senses detect a threat but we might train for the better
- The internet changes everything. I feel in control of my success. I know I can learn anything. Now I gotta prove myself I can execute anything.
