2025-07-13

What I could have learnt from René Girard #mimetic #culture

René Girard might have found metaphorical use for this. The French theorist’s great idea was that religion and culture grow out of what he called mimetic rivalry. Human beings, uniquely, choose the objects of their desire largely on the basis of what other people desire. “There is nothing, or next to nothing, in human behaviour that is not learned, and all learning is based on imitation,” he writes. But while mimesis helps us learn, it also leads to escalating competition, and ultimately violence. Religion evolved as a means for containing rivalry by projecting communal violence on to an arbitrarily chosen sacrificial victim, the scapegoat.

As always happens when an intellectual becomes popular, distortions have followed. The main problem, though, is not misinterpretation. It’s omission. What is often left out of discussions of Girard is the most challenging part of his theory, about how we break the cycle. Here he turns to one of the firmest messages of the gospels: the injunction to love our enemies. Girard knew, as we all know, that renunciation and mercy are almost impossibly hard, and quite alien to human culture. Yet he argues that it is the moments when the mimetic crisis has reached a hysterical crescendo, when “the vanity and stupidity of violence have never been more obvious”, that it is possible to see our enemies in a new way. Might we not be living in such a moment right now?

Extraction vs Creation

From Dollar Dominance to the Slop Machine - by kyla scanlon #economics

The US has become an extraction economy.

• We extract value from our existing position through dollar dominance, military supremacy, and technological leadership and now are choosing to tear down the foundations that created that position in the first place.
• We extract attention through spectacle without creating the trust that makes spectacle meaningful.
• We extract wealth from our own institutions without replenishing the capacity that generated that wealth.
• The UFC image captures this well - it takes the symbolic power of American institutions and converts it into entertainment value, with no consideration for what that conversion costs us in terms of credibility or coherence.

China, meanwhile, has become a creation economy1.

• They're building electrical generation capacity, training engineers, developing industrial policy that spans decades.
• They're creating an “electrostate” with an economy driven by the technologies that will determine 21st-century competitive advantage.

Immigration Policy of the Danish left

Denmark’s left defied the consensus on migration. Has it worked? #denmark #immigration

These are uncomfortable facts, so much so that to point them out is to invite the disgust of European polite society. Whether in France, Germany, Italy or Sweden, parties of the hard right have surged as they—and often only they, alas—persuaded voters that they grasped the costs of mass migration. But the National Rally of Marine Le Pen in France and Giorgia Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy have an unexpected ally: Denmark’s Social Democrats, led by the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen. The very same party that helped shape the Scandinavian kingdom’s cradle-to-grave welfare system has for the past decade copy-pasted the ideas of populists at the other end of the political spectrum. Denmark is a generally well-run place, its social and economic policies often held up for other Europeans to emulate. Will harsh migration rhetoric be the next “Danish model” to go continental?

The Danish left’s case for toughness is that migration’s costs fall overwhelmingly on the poor. Yes, having Turks, Poles or Syrians settle outside Copenhagen is great for the well-off, who need nannies and plumbers, and for businesses seeking cheap labour. But what about lower-class Danes in distant suburbs whose children must study alongside new arrivals who don’t speak the language, or whose cultures’ religious and gender norms seem backward in Denmark? Adding too many newcomers, the argument goes—especially those with “different values”, code for Muslims—challenges the cohesion that underpins the welfare state.

The upshot of the left’s hardline turn on migration has been to neutralise the hard right. Once all but extinct, it is still only fifth in the polls these days, far from its scores in the rest of Europe. For good reason, some might argue: why should voters plump for xenophobes when centrists will deliver much the same policies without the stigma? Either way, that has allowed Ms Frederiksen to deliver lots of progressive policies, such as earlier retirement for blue-collar workers, as well as unflinching support for Ukraine. The 47-year-old is one of few social-democratic leaders left in office in Europe, and is expected to continue past elections next year.

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2025-07-12

AI Therapy

AI therapy bots fuel delusions and give dangerous advice, Stanford study finds - Ars Technica #ai #therapy

Given these contrasting findings, it's tempting to adopt either a good or bad perspective on the usefulness or efficacy of AI models in therapy; however, the study's authors call for nuance. Co-author Nick Haber, an assistant professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Education, emphasized caution about making blanket assumptions. "This isn't simply 'LLMs for therapy is bad,' but it's asking us to think critically about the role of LLMs in therapy," Haber told the Stanford Report, which publicizes the university's research. "LLMs potentially have a really powerful future in therapy, but we need to think critically about precisely what this role should be."

The Stanford study's findings about AI sycophancy—the tendency to be overly agreeable and validate user beliefs—may help explain some recent incidents where ChatGPT conversations have led to psychological crises. As Ars Technica reported in April, ChatGPT users often complain about the AI model's relentlessly positive tone and tendency to validate everything they say. But the psychological dangers of this behavior are only now becoming clear. The New York Times, Futurism, and 404 Media reported cases of users developing delusions after ChatGPT validated conspiracy theories, including one man who was told he should increase his ketamine intake to "escape" a simulation.

In another case reported by the NYT, a man with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia became convinced that an AI entity named "Juliet" had been killed by OpenAI. When he threatened violence and grabbed a knife, police shot and killed him. Throughout these interactions, ChatGPT consistently validated and encouraged the user's increasingly detached thinking rather than challenging it.

The Times noted that OpenAI briefly released an "overly sycophantic" version of ChatGPT in April that was designed to please users by "validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions or reinforcing negative emotions." Although the company said it rolled back that particular update in April, reports of similar incidents have continued to occur.

Stablecoins and 100% reserve requirements

What does one hundred percent reserves for stablecoins mean? - Marginal REVOLUTION #crypto #stablecoin #reserves

The statute’s policy goal is to keep a payment‑stablecoin issuer from morphing into a fractional‑reserve bank or a trading house while still giving it enough freedom to:

• hold the specified reserve assets and manage their maturities;
• use overnight Treasuries repo markets for cash management (explicitly allowed);
• provide custody of customers’ coins or private keys.

Everything else—consumer lending, merchant acquiring, market‑making, proprietary trading, staking, you name it—would require prior approval and would be subject to additional capital/liquidity rules.

Why Your Brain Gets High on Uncertainty #neuroscience #brain #uncertainity

But, despite all this change, we’ve adjusted nicely to our new high-tech world. Why? Because we thrive on a challenge. We thrive on the uncertainty that comes with learning new things.

But why would our brains evolve to thrive on uncertainty? Shouldn't we prefer certainty, like knowing exactly where our next meal is coming from?

As I mentioned earlier, uncertainty was critical for our survival. Think about our ancestors who conquered new lands. The ones who were curious about what might be over that next mountain range?

So what can we do with this knowledge? Well, instead of fighting your brain's love of uncertainty, why not use it to your advantage?

• Want to learn something new? Frame it as a mystery to be solved.
• Need to exercise more? Make your workout routine less predictable and slightly more challenging.
• Trying to stay motivated at work? Gamify projects with elements of discovery and reward.

Like anything pleasurable, too much of a good thing can ruin it. Like too much candy for a nickel. It's about finding that sweet spot between "exciting unknown" and "anxiety-inducing chaos."

Meditation and Boredom

Find meditation really boring? You’re not the only one | Psyche Ideas #meditation #boring

In fact, what my colleagues and I call ‘spiritual boredom’ has a long tradition. Christian history contains numerous depictions of boredom: paintings of yawning congregants, people sleeping during sermons, and so on. In the Middle Ages, this phenomenon was recognised as a spiritual malaise called acedia (from Latin), characterised by listlessness and melancholy. Christians referred to it as the ‘demon of noontide’ – a concept described by St Thomas Aquinas as the ‘sorrow of the world’ and the ‘enemy of spiritual joy’.

Beyond these examples from Christian history, reports of boredom can be found in almost every spiritual practice. For instance, in Buddhist contexts, there are accounts of boredom during Asanha Bucha Day sermons. Similarly, some reports relating to mindfulness meditation describe experiences of ‘void’ – an emotional state combining boredom and psychological entropy.

Having said all that, I don’t believe boredom is just an obstacle – it could also be informative. From an evolutionary perspective, boredom exists to signal misalignment. It’s your brain’s way of saying: ‘This doesn’t suit you – change something.’ If you ever find yourself bored while meditating, praying or listening to a sermon, it might be helpful to ask yourself: ‘Am I over- or underchallenged?’ and ‘Does this practice (still) hold personal meaning for me?’

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale | Hacker News #postgres #pubsub #queues

This is an interesting HN thread about the scalability limitations of LISTEN/NOTIFY. The blog post is worth reading. What caught my attention was this thread which had some interesting discussion

This is roughly the “transactional outbox” pattern—and an elegant use of it, since the only service invoked during the “publish” RPC is also the database, reducing distributed reliability concerns.

…of course, you need dedup/support for duplicate messages on the notify stream if you do this, but that’s table stakes in a lot of messaging scenarios anyway.

Yeah, but pub/sub systems already need to be robust to missed messages. And, sending the notify after the transaction succeeds usually accomplishes everything you really care about (no false positives).

Boosterism

Boosterism - by Rob Kurzban - Living Fossils #evo-psych #heirarchy #power

Boosting seems to have to do with cases in which an individual2 does something—I’m going to call it the Thing, with a capital letter—that that individual is either not allowed to do, by convention or rule, or is stereotypically not good at—according to the current cultural norms, or both.

…

Boosterism seems to be the feeling you get when someone does someThing stunning and brave that fits the scheme above.

Why?

Scholars such as Chris Boehm—see, for instance, his book Hierarchy in the Forest—have suggested that humans have a propensity to try to flatten hierarchies. As we have seen in posts about power, when there is one individual—or a group of a few individuals—who everyone else always backs, these few powerful people can do practically whatever they want, advancing their (fitness) interests at the expense of others’. Boehm suggests that humans naturally want to limit the power of the powerful. Certainly there is cross-cultural evidence of this preference, especially in the so-called collectivist cultures associated with Asia.

This resonates with boosterism, if imperfectly. The story about the marathon can be seen as part of eroding the power of men in society, reducing the extent to which it is an identity-focused regime, as I’ve called it. Generally, boosterism feels anti-hierarchy. So maybe boosterism is a leveling system, designed to support underdogs to prevent domination by the few, or the one. It’s probably often fitness-good to support the erosion of power of people or groups who can impose their will on you. Leveling is good for those who aren’t part of the elite.

As some researchers put it, “[a]lthough people prefer to associate with winners, there is also a strong desire to support the lovable loser or underdog.” It feels good to stand up and say, yes, I too support people doing that Thing.

But if everyone else has the same belief, well, that’s neither particularly stunning nor especially brave. When the battle is long over, and the moral arc has fully arced, boosterism changes. It still feels good—but it’s no longer subversive. It’s orthodoxy in the costume of rebellion. And like all such performances, it risks slipping into the theater of the absurd: applause lines for acts no longer forbidden, cheers for victories already won.

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2025-07-11

Why I don't want a boyfriend

Why I don't want a boyfriend - by Sky Fusco - Unsupervised #boyfriend #relationships

I’ve been dating men for twenty years. I’ve merged lives with brooding musicians, flamboyant jocks, hard-working farmers, single dads, tortured professors, treehouse builders, and award-winning chefs. I tried to love these men for who they were, and not for what they did, but it was impossible. Their actions towards love were clouded by ego, coercion, control, dominance, manipulation, self-loathing, reactivity, weaponized incompetence, and cowardice. With one exception, I don’t remember any of them taking the time to sit still, self-reflect, or even jot some thoughts down in a journal.

Currently, I see multiple generations of men who haven’t done any inner work, and generations of women who have done all of it. Men can barely look at themselves, and women are taught to look too much. This disparity is sad for everyone involved, but because of it, I rarely feel the benefits of the “love” men try to offer me, especially when compared to the nourishment and deep intimacy provided by my friendships with everyone else.

It turns out that love starts with the self, and it requires courage, attention, and devotion. Deeply loving someone, and being loved by them in return, requires radically loving ourselves. In my experience, most men don’t even like themselves. It’s no wonder I don’t really feel their love.

Ok this made me chuckle

An exception to my boredom is when I’m romancing academics—men who read profusely and have knowledge to share—or men who are phenomenally skilled and obsessed with their work. I learn so much from them, but both of these archetypes ultimately make difficult partners, namely because they’re workaholics. They are, however, good temporary lovers, and can turn into the best peers.

These days, I cherish my friendships with men who aren’t trying to court or possess me—mentors, dads, friendly neighbors, helpers, or the partners of my friends. They almost see me; there’s no fantasy for them to project onto me, blocking their view. And if there is, I don’t have to know about it.

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2025-07-10S

Rigidity in Islamic Societies

State Power & Punishment - by Alice Evans #islam #religion #power

Nobel laureates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have a brilliant new paper, published in the Journal of Economic Literature, proposing a dynamic interaction between culture and institutions. They suggest that a society’s values legitimise particular economic and political institutions, which then shape emergent configurations of culture. In their theory, each cultural set has a set of ‘attributes’ (which can be abstract or specific). These sets can be ‘free-standing’ or ‘entangled’

Contrasting cultural evolution across world regions, they suggest that Islam has some ‘highly specified’ attributes, which are also ‘entangled’. Sharia reigns supreme, since it is the word of God, revealed by Mohammad. Given this fundamental set of attributes, reinterpretation or critique becomes illegitimate. Instead, Muslims usually gravitate to scriptural literalism, and the religion thus becomes relatively ‘hard-wired’, less open to contestation or institutional reform. Rulers then cement their authority by invoking and entrenching Islamic values.

Alice Evans critically engages with Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory on the dynamic interaction between culture and institutions, focusing on Islamic societies. She argues that state power, prestige, and punishment are key engines sustaining cultural norms, especially through religiously sanctioned enforcement mechanisms like the office of hisba.

Key Takeaways

• Islamic cultural rigidity is not "hard-wired" but enforced through state power and punishment. • The office of hisba historically policed morality, legitimizing rulers and controlling social behavior. • Power, prestige, and punishment together shape cultural evolution and institutional legitimacy.

“Positive” Masculinity

The problem with ‘positive masculinity’ | Dazed #masculinity #gender #patriarchy

Masculinity is always in crisis, and the crisis is always new. In 1100, chronicler Oderic Vitalis railed against pointy shoes, for initiating young men into lives of effeminacy and sexual deviance. In the 1930s, George Orwell blamed the suburbs and middle-class morality. Today, it’s violent misogynist Andrew Tate and his legion of off-brand masculinity influencers.

TIL about the term "toxic masculinity"

‘Toxic masculinity’ was not a concept born of feminism. The phrase was coined, at least in print, by Shepherd Bliss, a member of the mythopoetic men’s movement – a mostly 1980s and 90s phenomenon that tried to explain why men felt like shit.

Can we really solve patriarchal violence with good patriarchs, who deserve their authority and always get things right? Envisioning a way out of oppressive masculinity is obviously better than defending it, but the positive masculinity movement hasn’t done much envisioning. ‘Healthy masculinity’ means both everything and nothing at the same time. Plus, some of its advocates are startlingly conservative: a recent BetterHelp ad features a man with a soothing voice being asked what ‘healthy masculinity looks like in 2025’, and telling the listener “maybe the tropes of provide and protect still hold,” clarifying that “maybe it’s less about muscles right now and maybe it’s about protecting your partner’s spirit or protecting their emotional safety.” Some are pushing back against traditional gender roles in more meaningful ways, but the language of ‘healthy masculinity’ leaves their endgame a great big mystery box. Do they want the borders of masculinity to be less policed, or do they just want to slightly expand the territory of what is acceptable for men? And where, if at all, do women fit into this?

Notes from an experienced software dev

All high value work is deep work, and all motivation is based on belief. #software #programming

Advice about software engineering that is worth repeating in full

Senior SWE, 12 YoE. The discourse around software development is incredibly chaotic and anxiety-inducing. I deal with the same emotions as everyone, but I manage to keep going despite having worked in a very poorly run company for a long time on a severely neglected product amidst product cancellation, brand cancellation, mass layoffs (one of which affected me), mismanagement, offshoring, you name it. I have managed to stay actively learning new tech, engaged on challenging problems, and having positive interactions with my coworkers consistently, even when one or more parties are being difficult to work with (which we all can be guilty of, myself included).

Here, I am to about share what keeps me grounded within all the noise.

This post itself is not a statement of fact, but a belief. But it keeps me going through all the noise and bullshit.

Also, a caveat: The claims I am making aren't the only claims to be made, and there are other important things to know. For example: It is true that all high value work is deep work, but it's not true that all deep work is high value work. A rectangle isn't necessarily a square.

All high value work is deep work, and all motivation is based on belief.

High value work is differentiated work. It's your moat. Not everyone has the grit, the attitude, the determination, and the ability to focus on challenging problems involving abstract concepts, especially when there is no immediate gratification, and when there is significant adversity in the environment. This is true of the population at large. But even within engineering/development, there are levels to this. Most people refuse to read. Most people refuse to do research. Most people panic when they see big log messages or stack traces. Most people give up when their code won't compile after googling for 20 minutes, if they even try googling at all. If you're the opposite of that kind of person, you will always be valuable in development.

All motivation is based on belief. Use this fact to be a leader, and use this fact to motivate yourself. All hard workers work hard because they believe they will benefit from it.

For some people, it is enough benefit to simply get in a flow state and enjoy solving a problem. But there is something deeper. Ask yourself what it is for you. Some examples:

• ego boost (I am so smart wow)

• prestige/praise (he/she is so smart wow)

• distraction/addictive pattern (my marriage/family/health/social life sucks so bad, I need to forget for a while)

• raw gratitude (or is it cope energy?) (I am grateful I get this fat paycheck to sit inside in comfortable temperatures and ergonomics, safely on a computer with no risk of injury or death, no one berating me constantly, no dealing with unreasonable patrons/patients/customers/schoolkids etc, just to solve challenging problems and be in a flow state, and if I could earn this money in a band or as a gamer I would but I can't so I'm just grateful for this opportunity so I can focus on myself and my family and my hobbies outside of work and build a nest egg for my family)

• social (I love the people I work with, I genuinely have fun at the office with these cool people and I would still hang out with these people even if I weren't being paid)

Find out what motivates you, understand it, contextualize it, and ACCEPT it. Once you do that, you can have the space to figure out the same for others and help them along. I recommend taking the gratitude route. Gratitude can apply pretty broadly. It is actually a major life lesson in happiness.

Also, yes, corporate America is toxic. But you choose to work there. Every day you choose to work there, you should 100% double down on acceptance, or 100% double down on trying to find another job. Anything in between is total misery. Don't live life in resistance to what is. Accept what you can't control and work hard on what you can control. Either go to a startup and accept the risks, become politically active and solve the problem that way, or accept that you want the money badly enough and that the greedy, lying toxic charlatans running corporate America are the ones most able to give you the fat paycheck you signed up for.

Find what it is that motivates you in this field, and use that motivation to power some deep work so that you have some staying power in this field. It all starts in your own mind.

I know this devolved into a ramble. Just my two cents, hope it helps.

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2025-07-08

The Perils of ‘The Perils of Design Thinking’

The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’ - The Atlantic #design #politics #culture

The concept of design, as the French philosopher Bruno Latour observed in a 2008 lecture, has had an “extraordinary career.” No longer is design about making objects more beautiful and useful; instead, he suggested, “design is one of the terms that has replaced the word ‘revolution’!” That might be the problem. “Our contemporary idea of design,” Gram writes, is often used to convince ourselves “that positive social change could be achieved without politics and government action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable.” But most ambitious changes on the societal level require political consensus, and what’s profitable for some may not be beneficial for all. Design may be a distraction from the real work.

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

In Praise of “Normal” Engineers – charity.wtf #engineering #normal #productivity

I really liked the part How do you turn normal engineers into 10x engineering teams?

1. Shrink the interval between when you write the code and when the code goes live.
2. Make it easy and fast to roll back or recover from mistakes.
3. Make it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.
4. Invest in instrumentation and observability.
5. Devote engineering cycles to internal tooling and enablement.
6. Build an inclusive culture.
7. Diverse teams are resilient teams.
8. Assemble engineering teams from a range of levels.

Decentering work

Is it finally time to decentre work?  | Dazed #work #hustle #capitalism

“The journey of emerging into adult responsible contexts [the working world] involves at some point the need to do some sort of deprogramming and unlearning as the fantasy of your working life becomes deconstructed by reality,” 25-year-old Olivia tells Dazed. Olivia graduated with her MA in 2023 and started working at her university shortly after, but she recently quit her job. Her last job made her acutely conscious of the structural violence of late-stage capitalism, and shaped her plans for the type of job she’d like to do next. “[It is important to look at] how you are being valued at a place where you swap your time, skills, mind and body for money,” she says. “And I use those words with a lot of intention.”

Framing work in the way that Olivia has is beneficial to understanding the oppressive nature of work under late-stage capitalism because you are exchanging your limited time on earth and your health, which can be seriously jeopardised by doing a desk job, for money. And this is, of course, not by choice. Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek argue in their book After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that “we are coerced into work on pain of homelessness, starvation and destitution.” In other words, we work because we have no other choice. This isn’t to say that work isn’t fulfilling and deeply enjoyable for some. It can provide a sense of purpose and optimism, especially when you’re doing something you love and feel passionate about. But the amount of time we’re expected to expend on our jobs (and lack of choice) can significantly sour that devotion.

I would argue that young graduates’ dissatisfaction with work is potentially connected to the fact that their priorities differ from those of past generations. As older people were marrying young and able to buy their homes and have children on their salaries, they were able to acquire symbols of the “good life”, as theorist Sara Ahmed describes it, even if it didn’t really make them happy. Gen Z (and millennials) struggle to receive the economic benefits that previous generations achieved through work, which potentially makes them less resilient to its brutality. It’s also important to note that the markers of the “good life” have changed in the social media age, where we are confronted 24/7 by influencers who are always on holiday, live in big homes and wear enviable clothing. They could not afford their lifestyle through a traditional nine-to-five job, and it makes one question the point of having one when you could just become a content creator.

As we’ve already established, under capitalism, everyone needs to work; and detailing the ways work under this system is coercive and detrimental to one’s health doesn’t change that fact, if anything, it’s just depressing. The intention of this article is not to depress anyone, but rather to prompt an examination of our feelings about work, as it often defines so much of our self-worth, creating fears about how others see and value us. You are not a failure if you can not find work in our incredibly fucked-up job market. You are more than the work you do and what you produce, and the same energy that goes into your working life should be expended on your personal life. Of course, our personal lives do not provide us with income, but they do equally (if not more so) provide us with the tools we need to stay alive: our friends, family and our communities (if we invest in them).

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2025-07-06

AI, ML and Deep Learning

PyTorch in One Hour: From Tensors to Training Neural Networks on Multiple GPUs #ai #ml #deeplearning #tensors

I was working my way through this article when I came across a nice, simple definition of the different categories - AI, ML and Deep Learning

AI is fundamentally about creating computer systems capable of performing tasks that usually require human intelligence. These tasks include understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. (Despite significant progress, AI is still far from achieving this level of general intelligence.)

Machine learning represents a subfield of AI (as illustrated in Figure 2) that focuses on developing and improving learning algorithms. The key idea behind machine learning is to enable computers to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to perform the task. This involves developing algorithms that can identify patterns and learn from historical data and improve their performance over time with more data and feedback.

Machine learning has been integral in the evolution of AI, powering many of the advancements we see today, including LLMs. Machine learning is also behind technologies like recommendation systems used by online retailers and streaming services, email spam filtering, voice recognition in virtual assistants, and even self-driving cars. The introduction and advancement of machine learning have significantly enhanced AI’s capabilities, enabling it to move beyond strict rule-based systems and adapt to new inputs or changing environments.

Deep learning is a subcategory of machine learning that focuses on the training and application of deep neural networks. These deep neural networks were originally inspired by how the human brain works, particularly the interconnection between many neurons. The “deep” in deep learning refers to the multiple hidden layers of artificial neurons or nodes that allow them to model complex, nonlinear relationships in the data.

Unlike traditional machine learning techniques that excel at simple pattern recognition, deep learning is particularly good at handling unstructured data like images, audio, or text, so deep learning is particularly well suited for LLMs.

Oliver Burkeman on Insecure Overachievers

The Imperfectionist: Acting because you don't have to

The spiritual teacher Michael Singer says somewhere that the basic stance most of us take toward the world is that we try to use life to make ourselves feel OK. And this is certainly true of the type psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’, who often accomplish plenty of impressive things, but who do so, deep down, because we don’t believe we’d have earned the right to feel good about ourselves, or to relax into life, if we didn’t.

It’s a soul-crushing way to live, not least because it turns each success into a new source of oppression, since now that’s the minimum standard you feel obliged to meet next time…

Most productivity advice, I think, caters to people mired in this mindset. It promises ways to help you take so much action, so efficiently, that you might one day get to feel good about yourself at last. Which isn’t going to work – because the real problem isn’t that you haven’t yet done enough things, or got good enough at doing them. The real problem is the fact that for whatever combination of reasons in your childhood, culture or genes, your sense of self-worth and psychological safety got tethered to your productivity or accomplishments in the first place.

This is a really good take on ambition, and continuing to be ambitious without being constantly in insecure-overachiever mode

One of the most important consequences of all this, for me, has been the realisation that when you begin to outgrow action-from-insecurity, you don’t have to give up on being ambitious. On the contrary: you get to be much more effectively and enjoyably ambitious, if that’s the way you’re inclined.

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

So you don’t need to choose between peace of mind and the thrill of pursuing ambitious goals. You just need to understand those goals less as vehicles to get you to a future place of sanity and good feeling, and more as things that unfold from an existing place of sanity and good feeling. (Besides, I’ve got to believe that ambition pursued in this spirit is far likelier to make a positive difference in the world.)

How do we boost birthrates

How do we Boost Birth Rates? - by Alice Evans #fertility #demography #children

Six factors need to be addressed

1. Women procreate if they expect rewards such as personal fulfillment or social approval.
2. People are more likely to have kids if it’s fun relative to other alternatives.
3. Economic and housing incentives from governments must outcompete other alluring alternatives.
4. Community plays a role by creating social expectations and shared activities among families.
5. Films and cultural portrayals could make parenting seem more desirable.
6. The rise of singles and solitude makes it harder to raise children alone and affects dating prospects.

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