This page is an archive of the Tumblr blog worldoptimization-lifeadvice. The archive was compiled on November 11, 2022. The content of the blog may have changed since then.
Post ID: 184024766503
Date: 2019-04-08 02:12:01 GMT
Body: I think my best culinary innovation in a while has been buying a bunch of sipping vinegars and shrub syrups to keep around my apartment. (You can also make them yourself, obviously, but I’m lazy.) Mixing them with seltzer just gives you the perfect refreshing drink for a warm day, and something about the vinegar really does it for me when I’m craving a cocktail but don’t actually want to drink alcohol for whatever reason.
Post ID: 182422395980
Date: 2019-01-30 13:01:51 GMT
Body: people have so many feelings and it really fucks shit up
Post ID: 181040694973
Date: 2018-12-12 07:31:49 GMT
Body: People tell you that “self-esteem is important!” or something. I always thought this seemed dumb.
Right now I think that I’ve made a lot of really poor life choices due to consistent underestimation of and weird insecurity surrounding my intelligence. I’ve dismissed career paths and avoided applying for jobs I actually wanted. I’ve missed opportunities to date guys because I thought that I wasn’t smart enough for them to want to date me (??). Thank god I applied for [past job]; I almost didn’t because I was sure I wouldn’t get it.
It’s pretty disturbing to me that I can have made bad choices due to this glaring cognitive bias so many times and not noticed it until years later. Like what the fuck, past me
Post ID: 180017310938
Date: 2018-11-12 01:41:52 GMT
Body: I used to think “wasting time on the internet” was a problem to be solved but now I basically think it’s a symptom not a cause—if I feel happy and relaxed and well-rested I feel no compulsion to scroll through tumblr or watch dumb things on Netflix or whatever
Post ID: 179816835313
Date: 2018-11-06 07:04:48 GMT
Body:
illidanstr replied to your post “If I had to give one piece of romantic advice to my past self I think…”What do you do if every person you’ve ever been into wasn’t into you?
It feels like that says something deeper about me in some terrible, sad way, more than just romantic failure
I really don’t think so. People’s attraction is so weird and really not based on your worth as a person to whatever extent that is a meaningful concept.
Luckily because the attraction thing is dumb it is also potentially feasible to hack.
I think the best thing you can do is just work on becoming more okay with yourself.
Please don’t listen to anything I’m saying, I just got back from a wine tasting class and I’m still pretty tipsy. Please ignore me
Tags: #illidanstr
Post ID: 179816098393
Date: 2018-11-06 06:29:28 GMT
Body: If I had to give one piece of romantic advice to my past self I think it would be something like “find the most attractive person in the world. try to date him. if that doesn’t work move on to the second most attractive, and so on”
My formulation is kind of extreme, and it definitely doesn’t apply to everyone. But I think I spent a while in my youth dating people I wasn’t that into because I assumed the most attractive people were out of my league. Since then circumstances have led me to discover that actually the people I’m most into are about 100% likely to be into me. So if you are a person who is similar to me along the relevant dimensions I think this is something you should consider.
Post ID: 178435152348
Date: 2018-09-25 03:18:04 GMT
Body: no promises on whether I’ve actually internalized the feeling of agency, but I just read that blog post and proceeded to pay my parking ticket and clean out the leftovers from my fridge and it was pretty great
Post ID: 178433249633
Date: 2018-09-25 02:10:17 GMT
Body:
multiheaded1793 replied to your post “incomplete list of emotionally moving Roissy writings: Game is Pushing…”women unironically liking crude misogyny honestly confuse me. like, I’d understand if that was a fetish, but… are you serious?
tempted to reply that the fact that you’re confused by women liking misogynists and Roissy isn’t suggests his model of the world may have more explanatory power :P
In all seriousness, I don’t like misogyny. I do think that it’s possible for misogynists to also have interesting things to say.
Tags: #multiheaded1793
Post ID: 178406250768
Date: 2018-09-24 06:30:28 GMT
Reblogging: worldoptimization-lifeadvice
Body:
I realize the weather in Berkeley is exactly the same today as it is every day, but today I was feeling really #fallvibes and now I’m wearing a chunky mustard yellow sweater and burnt orange socks and listening to reputation (apparently the fact that it came out last November makes it autumnal?)
honestly listening to this album just … got me into the mindset of fall 2017!me in a way that I couldn’t have gotten without the music and it was pretty interesting
apparently the things that made me happy in fall 2017 were Allbirds, going to the gym a lot, and drinking mulled cider spiked with bourbon
past!me feels like … a very different person … but also I admire the intensity of her aesthetic appreciation for experiences and want to recapture some of that. and I will definitely start doing the bourbon thing again because that was delicious
Post ID: 178390008613
Date: 2018-09-23 20:36:54 GMT
Body: I realize the weather in Berkeley is exactly the same today as it is every day, but today I was feeling really #fallvibes and now I’m wearing a chunky mustard yellow sweater and burnt orange socks and listening to reputation (apparently the fact that it came out last November makes it autumnal?)
Post ID: 178256361906
Date: 2018-09-19 20:02:13 GMT
Body: people often tell you that your anxietythoughts are wrong/biased and it is unlikely that people are actually thinking all those horrible things about you
a message that I think is even more helpful (if harder to internalize) is that yep, sometimes they are thinking exactly the horrible things you are afraid of, and it turns out that’s totally okay and no big deal
(I mean, sometimes it’s instrumentally bad for people to think bad things about you. but I feel like brains think it’s terminally bad and it’s just not)
Post ID: 178226575558
Date: 2018-09-18 22:17:01 GMT
Body: Recently I tried writing up a list of tasks I felt like I “should” do and tried to estimate their costs and benefits in something like neutral hours.
It seems pretty obvious (and embarrassing that I wasn’t doing this already), but apparently my brain is pretty badly calibrated on how valuable things are.
Lessons (for me, ymmv):
Post ID: 178219475218
Date: 2018-09-18 18:01:34 GMT
Reblogging: swimmer963
Body:
kale needs to go. I like bitter, I like green vegetables, not just because “eating healthy” has a virtuous wholesome miasma that’s comforting in a way divorced from the object level sensory experience, brussels sprouts are close to a genuine comfort food for me as such per se for their own sake. but kale, in any preparation whatsoever, has the texture and mouth feel of despair. if I never see it on my plate again it will be too soon.
@discoursedrome said:
I can tolerate it in contexts where a bitter green is an asset and you want the frizziness for textural or architectural reasons but that doesn’t come up that often and everything, everything is kale right now. we have spinach, we have arugula, don’t give me kale
no. visual aesthetic is not a sufficient reason, unless it’s literally purely table decoration in which case why are you fussing in that weird way with the table. and there is no situation in which the texture of kale improves anything about the eating experience. it is a massive detriment in and/or on every dish.
it combines the dreariest aspects of both rigidity and flaccidity, being unyielding nearly to the point of hostility yet at the same time limp, listless, and entirely devoid of cronch.
it’s hellishly dry for fresh non-starchy produce. if you want something to add a refreshing bit of green zing tempering an otherwise rich and heavy plate of food, kale will deliver literally nothing in service of your objective other than bitterness as a one-dimensional flavor note. there is no relief in it, no refreshment, it provides no balance. (I also have a bit of a grudge against collard greens in this regard, but considering they get cooked in literal pork fat it’s harder to blame them. also, I am not continually pelted by collard greens, which I am by kale, because opposite semiotics, so I don’t have nearly as hot and steaming a head of grudge built up.)
in short, kale delenda est, thank you for coming to my ted talk.
I agree 100%
I remember eating kale as a kid, before it was trendy, and hating it
I was really baffled when it became hip
ime Americans don’t know what the hell they’re doing with kale when they prep it. Like try it Ethiopian style, lightly braised with plenty of onions, niter (spiced butter) and berbere (ethiopian curry mix), served on injera (a soft, spongey bread that tastes like sourdough).
Apparently these people are eating it raw??? Jesus, why did anyone think kale was a salad green?
Yeah, kale is pretty gross raw. I like to throw ~2 lbs of chopped kale into a slow cooker beef stew or lentil curry, where it softens enough that it adds a nice chewy texture without any of the “frizziness”. (Love that as a descriptor of raw-kale texture). My mother also has a wonderful raw-kale recipe that involves massaging it with salt, which draws out the water and wilts it, before putting in a fuckton of garlic and oil. Deliciousness.
Arugula and baby spinach are 1000% superior if you want raw salad greens, though.
I actually like collard greens even better - I will saute them in a pan with a ton of oil until they’re just barely limp, add one of those broth-gel sachets, and then eat them plain. Or with cheese, but I like them enough that plain is sufficient.
Spinach (frozen, defrosted in the microwave, with cheese melted on top, with or without defrosted brussel sprouts) is one of my favorite comfort foods, but you have to admit it has zero appreciable texture.
kale is good raw!! I think most people don’t know how to do raw kale right.
My mother also has a wonderful raw-kale recipe that involves massaging it with salt, which draws out the water and wilts it, before putting in a fuckton of garlic and oil. Deliciousness.
agreed. my usual recipe is something like: cut in thin strips. dress it with 1 part champagne vinegar and 1 part olive oil. put on a shit ton of dressing, like way more than you think you need. let it sit for a while for the dressing to soak in. add toasted hazelnuts and shaved Parmesan
kale caesar salads are also good
the virtue of kale is that its bitterness and toughness let it assert itself in salads where the dressing and other ingredients would otherwise be overwhelming. this is why I like e.g. kale caesar salads better than normal caesar salads (where the lettuce just kind of disappears behind everything else)
Post ID: 177794020308
Date: 2018-09-06 07:14:46 GMT
Reblogging: wanderingwaif
Body:
incomplete list of emotionally moving Roissy writings:
Game is Pushing Me Away From Love
The Hazards of Long Term Relationships
Women Are More Comfortable Sharing A Lover
let me know if you have any more good ones!
“emotionally moving” in like a bad way? cuz I opened these links and im pretty sure there’s several days worth of scathing rage in my tabs now
yep that’s quite reasonable.
I think what I like about these posts is like–there are lots of songs/movies/books/etc. about love, and most of them are kind of just telling people what they want to hear. In the real world, love is selfish and fickle and shallow and like 80% about status, and can be drastically affected by things as dumb as hormones, and there are lots of shitty people who are romantically successful and lots of people who are pure of heart and get nowhere.
And all of that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something beautiful there. Joy in the merely real, you know? And no matter how cynical you are, there’s a point at which the only way left to go is to dive wholeheartedly in—
The perfect woman reaches across the table first to touch my hand. Her eyes are sad over flickering candlelight and half-drunk glasses of wine and her soul is laid bare for me.
The intimacy, the shared experiences, the knowing winks and nods in crowded rooms, the quasi-telepathic unspoken understanding, and the cosmically unfathomable depth of love that seems to stop time —
I once lost a girl I loved. The rush of pain was so intense even a fight club pummeling couldn’t have distracted me from it. But I didn’t stoically shrug it off. I threw glasses at the wall. I broke things. I smashed up my apartment.
If you aren’t smashing stuff after losing a lover you don’t know the pleasure of relinquishing everything for love.
Anyway, yeah, I know he’s an asshole.
Post ID: 177687077853
Date: 2018-09-03 08:27:13 GMT
Body: incomplete list of emotionally moving Roissy writings:
Game is Pushing Me Away From Love
The Hazards of Long Term Relationships
Women Are More Comfortable Sharing A Lover
let me know if you have any more good ones!
Post ID: 177369913273
Date: 2018-08-25 08:43:49 GMT
Reblogging: studyinglogic
Body:
the problem with getting emotional support from people is that you end up fitting your feelings into their models of the world. this is why you should only talk to people whose models are strictly bigger/more detailed than yours
This approach immediately raises some questions from me, which I’d be happy to hear you answer! I’ve bolded the questions for easy reference.
Why should a bigger or more detailed model be better? It seems that if your model is faulty by having too much in it, a bigger model would make things worse, not better.
To put it another way: why should complexity be better? For example, I’ve found stoicism a useful model in everyday life - but it’s a very simple model, dividing the world into what you can and can’t control. For the purposes of emotional support, it does well. (I have a hunch that we have very different examples in mind - if you could give an example of what you mean, I’d be grateful.)
How do we measure detail? By the number of divisions the model makes? By how many processes or steps the model requires you to take to improve? By how long it takes you to internalise the model?
Your advice seems good, but I’m wondering what it means in practice.
Yep, I think you’re basically right. My post was #epistemic status: random thoughts I have at 2 am, and I don’t particularly stand behind it.
To be more specific, what I was thinking of was something like:
Say you have a friend whose model is something like “there are two kinds of women with romantic problems–those who are too picky/only want to date guys who are out of their league, and those who are only attracted to guys who are unavailable/treat them badly.” You tell them about a romantic problem you are having, and you know they already have you assigned to a category from previous experience, and they will want to fit your current problem into that category. You find yourself unavoidably shaping the narrative of your feelings to fit their model: “yeah, maybe I did start to like him more because he didn’t text me back.”
This can sometimes feel kind of constraining, and false, and effortful, and it’s a relief to feel like you can just dump a shitton of data on someone, even data that doesn’t make sense in your model, and they will just sort it out.
Now, none of this says anything about the predictiveness of different models. I agree with you that simple models can be quite useful and predictive.
Post ID: 177339395307
Date: 2018-08-24 12:01:52 GMT
Body: the problem with getting emotional support from people is that you end up fitting your feelings into their models of the world. this is why you should only talk to people whose models are strictly bigger/more detailed than yours
Post ID: 176729845273
Date: 2018-08-07 10:47:36 GMT
Reblogging: gatherers-incorporated-deactiva
Body:
illidanstr replied to your post “I kind of think that if you think dating you is net negative for your…”This seems reasonable? Who says “I’m hurting someone I’m very close to through our relationship, let’s keep doing this”… a lot of people apparently? maybe this is just the people I hang out with? i d k
“I won’t make decisions for this person because it’s their choice if they associate with me” vs. “I’m making an executive decision about someone else’s happiness because I love them”
I think it depends on which makes a person more uncomfortable, and also how much they don’t actually want to be dating their partner anymore
yeah, I was being unnecessarily flippant–I think the counterargument of “it’s good to respect your partner’s autonomy/self-determination” is not crazy or anything
Post ID: 176711804543
Date: 2018-08-06 22:53:20 GMT
Body:
illidanstr replied to your post “I kind of think that if you think dating you is net negative for your…”This seems reasonable? Who says “I’m hurting someone I’m very close to through our relationship, let’s keep doing this”
… a lot of people apparently? maybe this is just the people I hang out with? i d k
Tags: #illidanstr
Post ID: 176706507691
Date: 2018-08-06 20:02:09 GMT
Body: I kind of think that if you think dating you is net negative for your partner, even if it’s net positive for you, you should at least try breaking up with them (stating explicitly that this is the reason).
I have no strong opinions on what to do if they are like “what no this relationship is super net positive for me!!” but if they are like “yeah okay that’s pretty reasonable” then breaking up was probably a good outcome
Post ID: 176250251228
Date: 2018-07-25 02:26:06 GMT
Body: In one of my previous relationships, my ex started spending a lot of time with someone–let’s call them Y. He told me a lot about how great Y was, and how much fun he had with Y, and even posted some pictures on Facebook where they were sort of touching and did indeed seem to be having lots of fun.
I felt jealous, though I thought that this was a dumb irrational thing to feel, and I told myself that they were just friends and there was no reason for me to be jealous.
… and then of course one day I got the “we need to talk” and he informed me that actually he liked Y better than me and was going to date Y instead.
And this is one of the reasons I think jealousy is good and don’t actually want to get rid of it–I think it tells me useful things. Sometimes maybe it just misfires, and a lot of the time it’s not literally correct about “your boyfriend is going to leave you for this person.” Even then though I think it’s saying something useful–how I feel about e.g. my boyfriend having lunch with an ex is going to be really different depending on how secure I feel in our relationship.
(another reason is that for me jealousy and attraction are really intertwined and I’m not totally sure how one would work without the other)
Post ID: 176242503238
Date: 2018-07-24 21:43:52 GMT
Body: People say things a lot like “rejection is good! embrace rejection!” which is good advice, because if you don’t get rejected from lots of things that just means you’re not aiming high enough. I ignored this advice for a while, because even though it is obviously true, rejection sucks and is embarrassing and makes you feel low-status.
But I have discovered that there is a trick to getting around this, which is that by getting rejected and then talking about it openly and not seeming too embarrassed about it, you can actually countersignal high status! I think this trick should be part of the advice.
Post ID: 175926332423
Date: 2018-07-15 20:49:07 GMT
Reblogging: gruntledandhinged
Question: Top 5 places to visit on your bucket list?
Answer: I’m not sure! I love going places and just living there for a bit.
Here are some things on my list:
Memento Park in Budapest
Taking the former Orient Express across Europe to Istanbul
Spending some time in Mongolia, esp venturing outside of Ulaanbaatar and maybe seeing the Genghis Khan statue.
Shetland Islands
this is a professional interest rather than person, but I really wish I could spend like, six months working with SCARF India in Chennai, but while also not being limited by my English-only linguistic skills.
Post ID: 175447223588
Date: 2018-07-01 20:15:31 GMT
Reblogging: purgatory--and--probiotics-deac
Body:
I’ve heard two conflicting pieces of flirting advice for women trying to attract men:
1. Men enjoy the thrill of the chase. Be coy, play hard to get, let him approach you.
2. Men are socially oblivious and won’t make a move if they don’t think it’ll work. Don’t play games, be obvious and direct.
Does anyone have opinions on which piece of advice is more applicable?
help a friend out here, I may have a crush and I don’t know how to proceed
So I think you should ask a guy out iff you would be interested in going out with him, conditional on him saying yes to you asking him out, but never asking you out himself if you do nothing. So it depends on why you think this scenario would be the case. Three options I can think of:
The first two are often considered unattractive (but might not be by you); the third can be problematic if you are looking for a committed relationship, since guys who are less interested at the beginning will be less likely to commit to you in the future and more likely to just want to sleep with you. (Obviously, one can apply filters later in the process to avoid this–but at that point you’ve already invested time and emotional energy, the spirit is willing, etc.)
So I guess my opinion is, based on your knowledge of the guy, come up with a probability distribution over these cases and think about how bad each of them seems to you.
In any case, I think “playing hard to get” is probably overrated and even if you don’t go a super direct route, flirting and indications of interest are good. (I think women might overrate it due to typical mind fallacy and tending to find unavailable men attractive, but am not super sure about this.)
Post ID: 174811781068
Date: 2018-06-12 05:42:07 GMT
Body: places in Berkeley that are good (in descending order of goodness within categories):
Post ID: 174811542453
Date: 2018-06-12 05:31:41 GMT
Body: I never had an electric kettle growing up (we always boiled water on the stovetop), and I thought of them as sort of an undesirable class marker (they seemed to be more common among immigrant families)
then I got one, and fuck class signaling, electric kettles are much more convenient and I wholeheartedly endorse them
Post ID: 174597754954
Date: 2018-06-05 14:01:14 GMT
Body: important fictional crushes, in chronological order:
Tags: #about me, #not sure if this says anything in particular about me
Post ID: 174362188038
Date: 2018-05-29 05:59:25 GMT
Body: if you want to break up with someone, but you don’t because you are already sad all the time, and if you broke up with them you would be even more sad, and have no one whose shoulder you could cry on–
consider that maybe the reason you are sad all the time is that you are dating them and once you stop dating them the sad will go away
Post ID: 174362064578
Date: 2018-05-29 05:53:36 GMT
Body: men expressing interest in having sex with you is not like, a thing that should make you feel special. it should barely even be an update and if it is then you are probably miscalibrated!
(this post is not based on a real life event. it is actually based on a dream I had the other night where this happened to me, and I felt happy and special, and woke up being like “well that was stupid, dream self.”)
Post ID: 174361865408
Date: 2018-05-29 05:44:53 GMT
Body: my sister was complaining about how people don’t blog enough about scones. So here is some sconeblogging.
these are my favorite scones. they are super moist and really good. I often put chocolate chunks in them.
these are my second favorite scones. the cumin and cornmeal are important.
I made these recently and they were pretty good.
apparently you can make Icelandic scones by using milk in scone recipes instead of cream. I have never tried this.
Post ID: 173758367588
Date: 2018-05-10 05:50:17 GMT
Body: tbh if you think a basic tenet of Redpill Dating Philosophy doesn’t apply because you’re A Nerd it probably does
filtering is still a thing … even if you’re a nerd … not even sure why that should mean it wouldn’t apply … no matter who you are you should not say yes to everyone who asks you out
guys who just want to sleep with you/don’t want commitment are also a thing. being a nerd doesn’t mean the basic economics of the sex market doesn’t apply
Post ID: 173758275458
Date: 2018-05-10 05:45:36 GMT
Body: When people tell you that exercise is good for your physical health, I think they mean something like if you do it regularly and push yourself to your limits, for a while, eventually your health will improve slowly in ways you might not notice but can measure if you do things like time how fast you run.
When people tell you that exercise is good for your mental health, it is not like that at all.
It turns out you can spend a week being a ball of anxiety and not getting anything done at work because you’re too anxious to concentrate on things and not going to the gym because you have too much to do at work
(and then get sick, and not see a doctor right away because you have too much to do at work, and then get sicker and end up on antibiotics with side effects that make you feel too bad to exercise for a few days)
and then you can spend 45 minutes breathing hard and sweating in spin class and just. be. better. You can walk out of the gym with a clear head and a positive attitude and zero buzzing anywhere in your brain, and go to work the next day and do things and be calm and happy.
Exercise is really effective!
Tags: