224 - KISS 📈😽📉
Hey there, !
Happy Valentine's Day :) Unfortunately the clickbait title, which makes it seem like I'm gonna be talking about kissing, has betrayed you. Stay on your toes 👣
Also, thank you for the love on the Chinese Zodiac post - I love practicing my translation chops, I love writing some spicy fortunes every year and I love hearing that you've read it and shared it with others <3 It's here if you want to read it again!
Anyway, on to the post:
I kept seeing this meme on Twitter, and I wanted to share it because it explains something I could never adequately do with words, and I completely vibe with it.
It's called the bell curve meme - and for me, it vibes because I spent a lot of time overthinking my entire life as the "mid-wit" at the top of the bellcurve, and though I think I've come through to the otherside to enlightened master, it's so hard to distinguish whether you're actually a dumbass.
Look at some of these examples:
I feel like I had to build myself out of the top dude, because I could overthink my way out of EVERY SINGLE THING in my life - from work, to love, to life; it was honestly ridiculous. I still have some of those tendencies today, where I can easily easily overcomplicate things. It's one of those things I'm trying to unlearn - what most people think is super complex and complicated and requires so much thinking - in many cases can just be 'keep it simple, stupid'.
It's taken a while, and a lot of laziness, to really believe that things can just be simple.
- Why are there so many fad diets in the world when it boils down to 'don't eat so much'?
- Why are there so many exercise routines when it's basically 'move around every day'?
- Why are there so many get-rich quick schemes when it can be as easy as spend less than you earn'?
A lot of things in the world are designed to be complicated, and perhaps for good reason in some cases (like rockets, or the Sicilian Defense in chess), but I believe that for a majority of key life problems, they often have to obscure simple truths to do so.
If you're already doing these things, then great - power to you! But I just question the amount of complexity we build into our lives because we think that the extra optimality will bring greater than marginal gains.
Nowadays I do so many more things head empty because I just don't think the extra thinking leads to any significantly greater outcomes (for a majority of things). It is truly, as the consultants say, an 80-20. For me, if I don't think this way, it leads to running down paths in my head that will likely never happen, or are being defended against and not compared to reality. And I really just want to optimise my life to be happy and healthy - which I wish wasn't so hard. Or easy. I'm not sure any more.
To bring this back to memz, I'd like to think I'm the guy on the right, having been enlightened, ascended and perfectly conscious that y'all are doing too much and that simple is best...
...on second thought, nah - I'm still the dumbass :D
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
-
Aftersun - a movie that I described to my sister as 'The experience of this movie was the most boring shit I've ever seen' and also 'This was a masterpiece'. It's a slow burn, nothing really happens...but everything happens. It follows the story of a daughter and a father (Paul Mescal!) at a Turkish resort just living their lives. But there's something off, perhaps, and by the end you get the shape of it, but not the whole thing. There's enough there to make it a little mysterious, and that's what makes it so real. I loved this movie, but I probably won't watch it again. Highly recommended.
-
One-shot Wonders - niche content again, but it's a book of adventures / one-shots for Dungeons & Dragons. It has about 100 sessions or so that you can run in a game, or link together in different ways to build plots, NPCs, encounters - all of it! I've been using it in some of my campaigns and it's been hella fun. Recommended if you're into that as a DM :)
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
-
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero - this is a weird, non-intuitive article about why it's good to have a li'l bit of fraud, which I also kind of related to a friend who works in ER who said 'there's gotta be some people who are turned away' - some of the choices you make have tradeoffs, and if you didn't have tradeoffs then you wouldn't have the benefits of the other things you didn't trade off. Does that make sense? Maybe - have a read.
-
In-Depth: Why the Position of a Watch Influences Accuracy - extremely niche content - how does gravity influence the accuracy of a watch?!
-
In 1886, the US Government commissioned 7,500 watercolor paintings of every known fruit in the world - WHEN GOVERNMENTS KNEW HOW TO SPEND THEIR MONEY RIGHT.