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You will notice over time how Stoicism is actually philosophy, it grows on and with you through the years. I know you did not mean it deeply but it is not self-

by caio1982 9y ago

You will notice over time how Stoicism is actually philosophy, it grows on and with you through the years. I know you did not mean it deeply but it is not self-help, no need to leave it behind after you finish your readings; and it's okay if you see it as self-help too though, no dead classical greek dude will come after you to question it :-)

rainbowmverse 9y ago
It seems like most people come to this sort of thing to improve their lives. If your life is already fine, learning for the sake of learning is great. Most people whose lives need changing are stuck in habits and, speaking from experience, learning can come to replace the time spent on bad habits. Which seems great, but it never gets applied, and your life continues to have the problems you set out to solve. It's easy to get stuck in a loop: If I just click through to this one article, maybe it'll have the answers... Personally, I had a breakthrough in the last few weeks when I did the following: * Instructed Firefox to not save history. Not being able to immediately jump to my go-to distractions with two keystrokes helped break the cycle, and not having sites in history adds just enough friction to keep me away. I also make heavy use of reader mode. This means I'm better able to focus on what I do end up reading. * Switched to Microsoft Launcher, removed the Bing box, and installed DuckDuckGo. Stories disabled (they're getting rid of it soon anyway), JavaScript disabled. The abundance of sites that completely fail without JavaScript is a great habit breaker. * Stopped saving articles to Pocket. Now I decide in the first paragraph if it's worth reading now, which is different from deciding whether it's worth reading. Farnam Street (https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/) has been tremendously helpful here because it's almost all good. Still, it's easy to get stuck in a loop reading it. Too much of a great thing is just as bad as too much of a good thing. If I were advising myself four weeks ago, I would suggest reading only the 10,000 or so words of their page on mental models: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ * Started using Thunderbird's feed reader. It's more tedious to manage feeds, which keeps me from piling every new site I find on to it. * Mindfulness meditation. I'm not very practiced at it, but saying (in my head) "break the cycle" while focusing on my head helps a bit. * I make extensive use of Evernote's Windows 10 app. It's fast, and having a place to put ideas I have and read saved stuff keeps me away from the browser. This is one thing I want to have as fast as possible. The longer it takes to access the system and structure my ideas go into, the less likely I'll do it, and the less likely the thought will survive long enough to record. Basically, I choose my frictions. I put orange cones around the stuff I want to avoid and try my best to clear the way to things that keep me moving forward.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

It seems like most people come to this sort of thing to improve their lives. If your life is already fine, learning for the sake of learning is great. Most people whose lives need changing are stuck in habits and, speaking from experience, learning can come to replace the time spent on bad habits. Which seems great, but it never gets applied, and your life continues to have the problems you set out to solve. It's easy to get stuck in a loop: If I just click through to this one article, maybe it'll have the answers... Personally, I had a breakthrough in the last few weeks when I did the following: * Instructed Firefox to not save history. Not being able to immediately jump to my go-to distractions with two keystrokes helped break the cycle, and not having sites in history adds just enough friction to keep me away. I also make heavy use of reader mode. This means I'm better able to focus on what I do end up reading. * Switched to Microsoft Launcher, removed the Bing box, and installed DuckDuckGo. Stories disabled (they're getting rid of it soon anyway), JavaScript disabled. The abundance of sites that completely fail without JavaScript is a great habit breaker. * Stopped saving articles to Pocket. Now I decide in the first paragraph if it's worth reading now, which is different from deciding whether it's worth reading. Farnam Street (https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/) has been tremendously helpful here because it's almost all good. Still, it's easy to get stuck in a loop reading it. Too much of a great thing is just as bad as too much of a good thing. If I were advising myself four weeks ago, I would suggest reading only the 10,000 or so words of their page on mental models: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/mental-models/ * Started using Thunderbird's feed reader. It's more tedious to manage feeds, which keeps me from piling every new site I find on to it. * Mindfulness meditation. I'm not very practiced at it, but saying (in my head) "break the cycle" while focusing on my head helps a bit. * I make extensive use of Evernote's Windows 10 app. It's fast, and having a place to put ideas I have and read saved stuff keeps me away from the browser. This is one thing I want to have as fast as possible. The longer it takes to access the system and structure my ideas go into, the less likely I'll do it, and the less likely the thought will survive long enough to record. Basically, I choose my frictions. I put orange cones around the stuff I want to avoid and try my best to clear the way to things that keep me moving forward.