The Procrastination Matrix Note: To best understand this post, you should first read Part 1 of Wait But Why’s previous post on procrastination. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Back in high school, if you had asked me if I was a procrastinator, I would have said yes. Except I wasn’t. There was definitely an Instant Gratification Monkey in my head, but he was cute more than anything. One day, high school ended, and so did my life as a somewhat normal-acting person. Without deadlines to occupy him, my Panic Monster, who can’t think too far ahead, began to spend a lot of time in hibernation. The more the Panic Monster slept, the more confidence the monkey gained. The RDM would slip further into despair, and only the times when things reached their most dire would anything change. It didn’t matter how obvious a decision seemed to the RDM, it was becoming clear that he was totally unable to control the monkey without the Panic Monster’s help. 1) The Disastinators
The Truth About Religion in America: The Founders Loathed Superstition and We Were Never a Christian Nation Once they begin to circulate, falsehoods—like counterfeit currency—are surprisingly tenacious. It doesn’t matter that there’s no backing for them. The only thing that counts is that people believe they have backing. Then, like bad coins, they turn up again and again. One counterfeit idea that circulates with frustrating stubbornness is the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation. Unlike some of the wackier positions taken by evangelicals—think Rapture—the claim that America was founded as a Christian nation has gone relatively mainstream. So the notion that America was founded as a Christian nation is widespread. There are three primary candidate groups, and each is regularly invoked by the Christian Right. Puritans as Founders Cynthia Dunbar is among those who believe that the Puritans who began migrating to New England in the first half of the seventeenth century are our nation’s founders. This sounds good on a first run-through. Christian Majority as Founders
Say Yes To The Stress In relationships, you can have identical actions that generate vastly different consequences. Kind of like watching “Say Yes To The Dress.” Which is to say that my wife adores watching fluffy wedding shows where the bride tries on a zillion froofy outfits, parading this latest dress in front of her family, before finally settling tearfully on the perfect dress. The bride flutters her hands in front of her face. And sometimes, when Gini is having a bad day, she needs to curl up and watch a “Say Yes To The Dress” marathon. We have one big television, so if she watches it, then I can’t spend my Saturday ferociously trying to beat the new Dragon Age game on the Xbox. Yet I recognize watching silly wedding shows makes Gini happy, and as such it’s a worthy thing to do. Which is to say that I occasionally get emails like, “Hey, I’m polyamorous, but I want my monogamous partner to be happy. And it’s okay that sometimes, you’re going to be uncomfortable in this relationship.
Food Timeline: food history research service The Political Compass The Sunk Cost Fallacy The Misconception: You make rational decisions based on the future value of objects, investments and experiences. The Truth: Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it. You can learn a lot about dealing with loss from a video game called Farmville. You have probably heard of this game. In 2010, one in five Facebook users had a Farmville account. Farmville has shrunk since then. So, it must be really, really fun. In psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, he writes about how he and his colleague Amos Tversky through their work in the 1970s and ‘80s uncovered the imbalance between losses and gains in your mind. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely adds a fascinating twist to loss aversion in his book, Predictably Irrational. In one of his experiments, Ariely set up a booth in a well-trafficked area. When you lose something permanently, it hurts.
How to Name a Baby The first time a friend of mine had a child, it was intensely jarring. I’d be living my normal day, and then the thought would hit me—”Matt has a son”—and my whole world would get turned upside down. Three years and six friend babies later, I’m 32 and have numbed to the whole thing considerably. It’s still weird. But not jarring. This new phenomenon in my life has introduced several new experiences—things like “having your feelings hurt and losing self-confidence because your friend’s toddler doesn’t like you” and “learning that talking about the baby as a ‘toy’ or a ‘pod’ and commenting on ‘it not having a brain yet’ is less funny to the baby’s parents than it is to you.” (Note: definitely best to keep the name candidates a secret until after the baby’s born—no name will please everyone and other peoples’ opinions really shouldn’t be part of the process for something so personal. Parents choosing a name have a few options: 1) Go Timeless Drawbacks: It’s kind of boring. 2) Go Super Weird
20 Things I Learned While I Was in North Korea Well that was weird. I was only in North Korea for five days, but that was more than enough to make it clear that North Korea is every bit as weird as I always thought it was. If you merged the Soviet Union under Stalin with an ancient Chinese Empire, mixed in The Truman Show and then made the whole thing Holocaust-esque, you have modern day North Korea. It’s a dictatorship of the most extreme kind, a cult of personality beyond anything Stalin or Mao could have imagined, a country as closed off to the world and as secretive as they come, keeping both the outside world and its own people completely in the dark about one another—a true hermit kingdom. A question, then, is “Why would an American tourist ever be allowed into the country?” Allow me to illustrate what I believe is the reasoning behind my being let in: High Level Government Meeting And so, I was allowed in, along with a small group of other Westerners, accompanied (at all times) by three North Korean guides. 1. 2. 3. This is it.
How to debug your brain 47.9k shares Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Our brains are the most bug ridden pieces of junk since Internet Explorer. To replicate one common bug, try telling your brain to “go to the gym”. Most brains will respond by updating their Facebook status, and watching cat videos. This is not the desired behaviour. Fortunately I’ve developed a fix. This code is a mess Looking at our brain, it’s clear it was developed by a team of ten thousand monkeys with a serious drinking problem. The brain is event-driven, which is to say it does almost nothing until an event occurs, and then it responds to the event. Unfortunately there are a lot of events. Too late the developers realised this would leave us bouncing between distractions like a cat chasing a laser pointer, and they hacked in a priority system. Unfortunately, our priority system is a bit pants: the default priority for sitting down is higher than the priority for working out. But wait! Well, yes. The bug fix Here’s your new event: “No” “Now”
How To Stop Being Lazy And Get More Done - 5 Expert Tips Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my first book become a Wall Street Journal bestseller. To check it out, click here. Some days the to-do list seems bottomless. Just looking at it is exhausting. We all want to know how to stop being lazy and get more done. So I decided to call a friend who manages to do this — and more. Cal Newport impresses the heck out of me. He has a full-time job as a professor at Georgetown University, teaching classes and meeting with students.He writes 6 (or more) peer-reviewed academic journal papers per year.He’s the author of 4 books including the wonderful “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” And yet he finishes work at 5:30PM every day and rarely works weekends. No, he does not have superpowers or a staff of 15. Below you’ll get Cal’s secrets on how you can better manage your time, stop being lazy, get more done — and be finished by 5:30. 1) To-Do Lists Are Evil. To-do lists by themselves are useless. Here’s Cal: Sum Up
Raechl | Herself. Where did you grow up? Holland, Mi. The Bible-beltline of the state. Were you brought up religiously/secularly/other? As much as our peers seemed to demand it, my mother was vigilant in keeping my childhood relatively open when it came to the possibilities of religious belief. Was there turbulence throughout your childhood/adolescence? Growing up in a Southwest Michigan town with a lesbian mother and a childish, mostly-absent father will cause some turbulence, definitely. Were you ever embarrassed about your development/puberty? With a mother as supportive as mine, I tended to dabble in gender-fluidity and sexuality but never felt any embarrassment over it, as I had been raised with the ideal that exploring aspects of ourselves is the greatest adventure we’re able to embark upon. Can you remember any key moments in your formative years that shaped you? Yes. Any that shaped your perspective of women? When did you become aware of your gender? Have you ever struggled with your sexuality? Yes.
The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being. Despite a steadily swelling human life expectancy, these concerns seem more urgent than ever — and yet they are hardly unique to our age. Seneca writes: It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. To those who so squander their time, he offers an unambiguous admonition: Thanks, Liz
What I Learned From Dating Women Who Have Been Raped What I Learned From Dating Women Who Have Been Raped I don’t know how I expected a rape victim to act, but I didn’t expect her to be so funny. Or to be punk, in this kinda sexy bleached blonde but kind of too lazy to really care sort of way. “I may be a lesbian because of what happened to me, I don’t know. I guess, maybe in some way, I didn’t expect her to be so over it. People aren’t destroyed through being raped though. Another rape victim I dated was a butch woman who had just adopted a kitten that completely befuddled her. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I’ve historically been more of a dog person.” She was pretty open about her anger towards men, and her sexual orientation was difficult to quantify because her attractions included “any gender that’s not cis male.” How I think of women who have been raped contrasts greatly with how I think of men who have experienced non sexual violence. I think that event changed him in some ways. Then, I brushed it off. I also started meditating.