Scott H. Young's Blog, page 2

The Attentional Junk Food Hypothesis

A recurring theme in my ongoing Foundations project is evolutionary mismatch.

This is the idea that our bodies and behavior were designed for a different sort of environment than we live in today. Since evolution is slow, we haven’t had time to adapt new instincts that safeguard us from novel dangers.

Exercise is an example. For most of history, life was laborious, so exercise purely for the sake of getting in physical activity was unnecessary. The sedentary life that causes us health problems today comes from an attitude that was essentially correct for most of our history: don’t move if you don’t need to; it’s better to conserve your energy.

Another is diet. For most of history, starvation was a much more likely danger than obesity. Overeating, when possible, let us build some fat on our bodies for the likely lean times ahead. Only, in our modern world of abundant food, we can consistently overeat.

What’s more, modern ultra-processed junk food acts as a superstimulus. That is to say, no food stuff in our ancestral environment has the combination of fats, simple carbohydrates and varied flavors and textures that junk food does. So, what were probably appropriate cues to (modestly) overeat honey, ripe fruit or wild game when they were available has cascaded into a much stronger drive to overeat always-abundant junk food.

For the vast majority of us, modernity has solved starvation, but given us a new self-control problem—trying to eat a healthy diet in a world saturated with junk food.

Attentional Junk Food

While the evolutionary mismatch is pretty widely accepted in explaining our inadequate exercise and nutritional woes, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it also explains a lot of our attentional consumption behaviors.

At work, Gloria Mark’s research suggests we experience interruptions roughly every three minutes and five seconds—roughly half of which are self-initiated distractions. After an interruption, it can take as long as twenty-five minutes to resume the interrupted task. This suggests a repeating carousel of attention—quick dips into different tasks, but rarely sustaining the focus needed for creative accomplishment.

Our personal lives fare no better. We now carry with us devices that have infinite, bite-sized content, algorithmically designed to maximally satisfy our drive for new information. No wonder that Americans report reading fewer books—who can sit through an entire book when even a five minute YouTube video feels too long?

The attentional junk food hypothesis is that these new forms of digital media and work environments are another kind of superstimuli. They exaggerate features that would have encouraged us to pay attention in our ancestral environment, while also divorcing those signals from the actual value they used to reliably provide.

For instance, our brains were designed to pay attention to gossip. Knowing what was going on socially in one’s tribe could be a matter of life or exile. But now we have celebrity gossip, which feeds us information on people we will never interact with and whose status and problems are out of proportion with those of our own friends and family.

Similarly, we’re predisposed to pay attention to potential threats. So online media surfaces rage-inducing examples that exactly trigger our primal threat or fear responses, even if the objective risk is small and the examples rare.

Is a Healthier Attentional Diet Possible?

Given our mismatched drives, what should we do if we want to live a better life?



One answer would be a pessimistic take: there’s nothing we can do. We’ll simply be compelled to eat too much, exercise too little and spend our limited attention on pursuits that don’t matter much to us.


Certainly there’s reason to fear the pessimistic conclusion. Despite decades of well-researched health advice, almost nobody actually follows the guidelines.1 This is even more true when you use objective indicators like heart rate monitors rather than self-reported measures.2

At the very least, we can probably reject the overly optimistic conclusion that simply recognizing this problem is enough to solve it with reason and a bit of willpower. Self-control, while necessary, can never be a permanent solution to problems of mismatched drives—eventually you’ll wear out and give in.

However, I think there’s a middle ground between impotency and ease. We may not be able to rely on willpower to consistently resist our mismatched drives, but we can take steps to redesign parts of our environment to support the kind of life we want to lead.

For me, that meant getting off social media, switching to curated consumption (rather than algorithmic feeds) for most of the online media I did want to consume, and getting rid of distracting apps on my phone and replacing them with Kindle and other long-form content I want to consume.

The end result was much better for sustaining good habits than simply admonishing myself to “do better” when I caught myself wasting hours of the day or getting enraged at the latest social media dust up.

A New Session of Life of Focus

Life of Focus, a three-month course I co-instruct with Cal Newport, is designed to be a tool to facilitate this transition to a more deliberate approach to your attentional life. 

We wanted not just to teach ideas and facts, but also to help people create new attentional environments so they could overcome the problem of willpower in sustaining behavior changes. Each month of the course, students work through a guided challenge in work, life or mind that both strengthens the skill of focusing and cultivates the environments that support it.

If you’ve felt like the modern world is too busy, chaotic, stressful or distracting to do meaningful work, I highly recommend joining us for our next session, which will be opening for registration on Monday, July 21st.

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Eight Books on Focus

I’m in the middle of the tenth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s topic is focus. I’ll share some personal updates in the next post, but for now I’d like to share some of my takeaways from this month’s reading.

In case you’re interested, here are the previous nine months’ reading:


FitnessProductivityMoneyFoodReadingOutreachSleepReflectionConnectionThe 3-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Focus is the ability to direct your attention according to an intention. This happens both over the span of minutes and seconds, as you concentrate on a task and ignore interruptions, as well as over years and decades, as you consider how to use your finite time here on Earth.

On the shortest timescales, what we pay attention to is a competition between top-down and bottom-up influences. Bottom-up circuitry includes interruptions from our sensory environment (you hear a ping on your phone), and from internal impulses (wondering if there’s something fun to look at on your phone). It is both more primitive and more powerful than our top-down, goal-directed attention.

Researchers have identified the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as a major contributor to this top-down control over attention. If the PFC is damaged, such as in patients who have undergone a frontal lobotomy, the result is impulsiveness and a lack of self-control. Disruptions in these networks are also thought to underlie attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).1

This neural circuitry is late to develop and does not fully mature until adulthood, as the parent of any teenager can attest. It is also susceptible to early degradation in adults, making older adults more susceptible to distraction than their younger peers.

Over your lifetime, broader-scale focus may be even more important. We often fail to grapple with our mortality, to consider clear trade-offs in how we should use our limited time. In the end, we should worry less about wasting the minutes and hours than we do about wasting the years.

1. The Distracted Mind by Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen

This is the best popular scientific book I’ve read on how our attention works and why it is currently in jeopardy.

Human beings possess an incredible ability to set and plan goals. What we lack, the authors contend, are strong cognitive control abilities to keep our attention on those goals. As such, we’re highly susceptible to environmental distractions and internal impulses that interrupt our tasks.

Animal foraging provides a useful analogy to human information gathering. A squirrel deciding whether to stay in a tree depends both on its knowledge of the likely remaining nuts, the nuts likely available in the other tree, as well as the distance it would have to climb to reach that tree.

The authors argue that new technology has drastically reduced the “distance” people must cross between information sources. This, plus escalating boredom and anxiety, causes us to lose interest in our current tasks more quickly, hoping to find the next informational acorn in a digital forest.

2. Deep Work by Cal Newport

Newport argues that focus is becoming more valuable, just as it is becoming more rare. As a result, those who can do deep work are earning a premium in our economy.

As new technologies arise, the returns are increasingly going to superstars, those who can effectively work with smart machines, and to capital. Getting into the first two categories depends largely on skill, which in turn depends a great deal on deliberate practice. This requires hard concentration, driving the demand for focus up.

At the same time, the supply of focus is getting smaller. Open office environments, incessant emails and social media are dwindling our reservoir of attention. With both increasing demand and reduced supply, this is creating an economic opportunity for those who can focus.

3. Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky

How do you find time for things? If you’re like most people, you don’t. Life is an endless stream of constant interruptions and assignments. Endless busyness that means anything not screaming for your attention gets ignored.

Knapp and Zeratsky don’t offer advice for trimming your to-do list or getting more done. Indeed, getting more things done might even be a trap, as new things magically arrive to fill their place. 

Instead, they argue the key is to pick something and consistently make time for it. Squeeze out the noise and give yourself time to work on something you care about. 

I particularly liked their suggestion of a “daily highlight,” a key task or project you want to work on the next day that you elevate above your other work. I ended up using this for the keystone habit for the month, as it manages to effectively communicate the value of focus without succumbing to the facile counterargument that you can’t literally focus on only one thing today.

 Life will always be chaotic and busy. But we should still make time for at least one thing that matters.

4. Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder edited by Russell Barkley

Imagine a disease that impacts children, devastating their studies, socializing and home life. It is almost entirely inherited, with over 80% of the differences in diagnoses owing to genes (around the same amount as human height). Parenting and psychotherapy are of little use.

Yet, there is a treatment for the disease. Given the right medicine, children perform much better in school, with friends, and at home. The medicine is well-tolerated and has minimal side-effects.

How would you feel about treating those kids with the medicine we know works?

This is essentially the picture painted by Russel Barkley, one of the world’s foremost researchers of ADHD. He argues that ADHD can be devastating for families, with those who have it struggling for their entire lives, with outcomes only modestly attenuated in adulthood. He argues that the cause is largely genetic and biological (although prenatal factors like viral exposure during pregnancy may also be a contributing cause). And he argues that in contrast to the failed promise of parental counseling and psychotherapy, the drugs here actually do work.

I found this textbook fascinating because it was one of the clearest cases of a book with an explicit worldview running so counter to my general intuition, perhaps best exemplified by this recent NY Times piece, that ADHD is perhaps overdiagnosed and overprescribed (particularly to children).

In fact, I found Barkley’s position to be so at odds with the general sentiment I hear from non-experts that I kept asking ChatGPT/DeepResearch to try to poke holes in various claims. Yet, Barkley’s position emerged mostly unscathed. There may be overdiagnosis/overprescription at the margin, but for the clear cases of ADHD, the biological nature of the disorder as well as the benefits of pharmaceutical options for treatment seem pretty close to the expert consensus.

I take this experience as reaffirming my belief in the value of reading textbooks (unpopular truths don’t make good popular nonfiction), and in the value of defaulting to trusting expert judgement, in general.

5. Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

The average human lifespan is around four thousand weeks. What should you do with that time?

Burkeman doesn’t answer this exactly, but he does set out some things you shouldn’t do. One is that you shouldn’t expect that you’ll someday be able to “get everything done.” That isn’t going to happen, and freeing yourself from the expectation that it will is liberating.

Another expectation to be freed of is the idea that the perfect life is completely free of constraints. The constraints in life—coming from being enmeshed in communities and social ties—are what make life deeply meaningful.

Burkeman worries about the instrumentalization of all life’s moments. I enjoyed his description of Rod Stewart’s model train obsession—something so decidedly uncool that, Burkeman reasons, the pop superstar must just like doing it a lot. Shorn of the need to impress, perhaps such pursuits are actually more intrinsically valuable.

6. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

This book takes Burkeman’s ideas from Four Thousand Weeks and presents them as daily, bite-sized reflections to think about over the course of a month. A useful companion book to the previous one.

7. On Settling by Robert E. Goodin

Over the years, I’ve interacted with a certain kind of ambitious young person. This person has a handful of projects they’re eager to begin immediately—they want to learn German, programming, kitesurfing and jujitsu.

My advice to this person is usually to pick one of those things and work on it for a time. While it’s easy to sustain multiple projects so long as they’re not too hard, the real grit required to make progress tends to require focus.

Sadly, this never seems to be the advice they want to hear.

I thought of this story when I considered Goodin’s interesting discussion of what it means to settle. Settling involves momentarily putting aside other options to pursue one. Although we tend to think of this as being opposed to striving, Goodin argues the two are necessary complements, for in order to strive on something, we must settle upon an object of our striving.


Focus, and ultimately all striving, requires the ability to say “this thing is good enough” and sustain your attention on it.

8. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware

While much of my reading this month was centered on focus as concentration, I also wanted to explore the idea of focus as meaningfulness. Ultimately, we’ll evaluate our lives at the end not for how many minutes we spent well or wasted, but for how many years went towards pursuits we did or didn’t value.

Ware, who worked in palliative care for a number of years, retells stories of her clients as they reached the end of their life. She suggests five regrets are particularly common:

I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.I wish I had stayed in touch with friends.I wish I had let myself be happier.

It’s interesting how much the regrets focus on relationships, particularly in sustaining bonds and being authentic, rather than in achievements.

Perhaps the irony of focus, then, is that in emphasizing the “productive” activities that lead to achievements, we may ultimately neglect the aspects of our lives we’ll truly value in the end.

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P.S. – If you would like to put some of these ideas into practice, you might consider joining Cal Newport and my 3-month long course – Life of Focus. We are opening it up for a new session starting Monday, next week. Once the course starts, we will work on improving three different dimensions of focus: practicing deep work, eliminating digital distractions and, finally, applying focus by working on a meaningful project with your new reclaimed time. If that sounds interesting, be sure to join the waiting list by clicking here and we will keep you posted.

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Focusing on Your Strengths Isn’t Always Good Advice

Few pieces of self-help lore are as misunderstood as the advice to “focus on your strengths.” Like most popular ideas, it has a kernel of truth, but there are also many situations where it simply doesn’t apply.

In fact, the opposite—focusing on your greatest weakness—is often more productive. There is a simple mental model for understanding the distinction.

When Focusing on Your Strengths is Helpful

The basic argument for focusing on your strengths is the economic principle of comparative advantage, first articulated in 1817 by British economist David Ricardo.

Ricardo considered two different countries, Portugal and England, who produced two different goods: cloth and wine. Suppose, Ricardo argued, that Portugal was a generally more efficient country than England, so that the hours needed to produce one unit of each looked like so:

If the two countries cannot trade, it takes 220 hours for England to make one unit of both wine and cloth, while it takes Portugal 170 hours to do the same. 

In contrast, if trading is allowed, both will be better off if they specialize. In the same amount of time it takes to make one unit of each cloth and wine, England could make 2.2 units of cloth and Portugal could make 2.125 units of wine. If both trade one-for-one, that gives England an extra 0.2 units of cloth and Portugal an extra 0.125 units of wine for the exact same amount of work.

In your own life, there are plenty of places where the theory of comparative advantage makes sense. Most people only perform a few different kinds of work, even though our standard of living relies on tens of thousands of distinct professionals. Within a family or a corporation, each individual adopts a specific role. Each person specializing in a niche of their strengths, rather than being a generalist, makes us all better off.

However, note a key assumption: you need to be able to trade in order to ignore your weaknesses!

When Focusing on Your Weaknesses is Helpful

Weaknesses deserve our focus when they cannot be delegated, outsourced or ignored. There are plenty of situations when a skill cannot be delegated to someone else:

When one component of a skill is necessary for another. A lawyer who isn’t a good reader can’t be a good lawyer—there’s too much reading in the job to avoid it. Similarly, a programmer can’t easily avoid knowing about systems that interact with her work.When there are rules forbidding it. A golfer can’t hire a replacement to putt for him, even if he’s lousy on the green.When transaction costs make outsourcing prohibitive. I’m not a great handyman. I wouldn’t attempt a bathroom or kitchen renovation by myself. But fixing a squeaky hinge or hanging a picture frame isn’t going to be worth the cost of hiring someone, so it helps to learn to do it yourself.

In short, when a component of a skill is unavoidable, focusing on your weaknesses, not your strengths, becomes the more useful advice. When you can delegate, outsource or choose a niche that doesn’t require a particular ability, focusing on your strengths usually pays off.

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Focus – Day One

Today is the first day of the tenth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s theme is focus.

Focus is a complement to productivity, the second month, which emphasized creating systems that capture, organize and plan your efforts. But this system-building has an obvious weakness: it doesn’t decide what needs to be done and dedicate the attention needed to do it.

This weakness became apparent in running the companion course to this project. While many of the students enjoyed the second month of the program, it was also the focus area that brought up the greatest difficulties for many students.

This surprised me. I had anticipated the effort required for daily exercise, the complexity of a dietary overhaul, or even the technical fussiness of money management to be harder units. In retrospect, the difficulty makes perfect sense: capturing and organizing to-do items skips over the difficult work of choosing which you’ll actually do (and which you’ll deliberately procrastinate on), but it doesn’t force you to do any of them.

Focus, then, was missing.

How Do You Focus?

Focus is a combination of a philosophy, a skill and key habits:

As a philosophy, focus is about accepting finitude and being comfortable with leaving things undone. All choices to work on one project are implicit rejections of everything else. All decisions to stick to a book, an exercise plan, a career move or a relationship confront all the other alternatives. If you haven’t fully accepted this part of human nature, focus is impossible—you’ll constantly be chasing the other thing you could have done and fail to focus on anything.As a skill, focus is about resisting the impulse to switch. It’s about resisting the temptation to rethink your goal or project, to change your plans midway, to check your phone, email or news for a little break. People who are good at focusing are low in impulsiveness, which is partly a hardwired psychological trait and partly downstream of our attentional environment.As a habit, focus is upheld by routines that shape your attention environment and center your goals: daily reviews, deep work rituals, putting your phone in another room, going to a space without internet to work, booking time with yourself in your own calendar, and so on.

The multifaceted nature of this foundation has made it hard for me to decide which keystone habit ought to be central for this month. My initial guess was for daily deep work, but I’m now reluctant to make that the core pillar. This is partly because it treads on my other course co-taught with Cal Newport. But mostly, it’s because my experience with students in the second month of the Foundations course suggests that deciding seems to loom even larger than simply putting in extended time to do the work.

Thus, I’m going to experiment with a few habits this month before making my final recommendation for the class. 1

My Plans for Improving Focus

I consider this month’s area one of my strongest foundations. Not because I’m immune to distraction or procrastination (I do plenty of both), nor because I work especially long hours or obsessively (I do at times, but on average I have a modest workweek), but simply because choosing projects to undertake, sticking with them and finishing them as planned is something I’ve felt comfortable with for decades.

As such, I don’t really anticipate major improvements to this area, and I’m not sure exactly what improvement would look like. If anything, I’ve always struggled more with the periphery—I have few problems getting central tasks done, but odd errands and low-priority minutia can sit on my to-do list for months. I always have to consider the possibility that my personality defect is too much focus—tunnel vision that forecloses spontaneity and improvisation.

However, I’m still eager to work on focus this month, both for the possibility of unexpected discoveries in revisiting the research, and also for trying out concrete habits to see which may be most useful for the students in the course.

As of right now, here are the tentative habits I’m going to play around with this month as I try to narrow down which provide maximum efficacy for the least amount of extra burden in ordinary life:

Daily reviews. This was a suggestion in the productivity-focused second month, but many people didn’t follow it. I suspect part of the reason is that many people’s original reviews were too elaborate—instead, a quick glance at the tasks and reshuffling the list may be better, if only to underscore which tasks are at the top (and which are not).The “MIT” method. The Most Important Task method is to center your work on one key task at a time. You may not literally be able to work on it in every moment (interruptions intervene) but the idea of having only one task top-of-mind at any time can be a good focusing habit. When the task is done, create a new task.“What Three Things” method. This is like the MIT method, but there are three tasks prioritized, instead of one. The idea here is to keep a very short list of priorities, across different timescales. This rewards a kind of focus, and is an encouragement to break down bigger projects into smaller tasks. Three things is few enough that the choice at any moment is relatively constrained, but it also affords more flexibility than only having one task, allowing you to adapt your work to your current energy levels or situation.

This list is tentative. It may be that some other habit or technique is more appropriate—especially given that I may be atypical in applying this advice—so I’m glad to hear what other people find that works for them.

Reading and Research

This is a topic I’ve already researched fairly heavily, so I expect this month to be largely re-reading. Deep Work, Indistractible, Focus, First Things First and Essentialism are good popular books, and I plan to re-read Kahneman’s Attention and Effort and revisit a few cognitive science monographs on attention.

The only major topic of scholarly research where I feel a major blindspot is ADHD research. I’m always a little hesitant to comment on clinical disorders owing to my outsider status. But given the sky-high rates of self-diagnosis, I think it’s a gap I ought to fill in my own knowledge, if only to be able to redirect people to more credible sources of research than the flotsam that drifts around online.

_ _ _

Jumping forward in time (I write these updates three months in advance to give my team time to prepare the course content), I can say that the keystone habit I ended up selecting for this month is the idea of picking a daily highlight–a technique I learned from Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s book Make Time.

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Connection – Month-End

I’m wrapping up the ninth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus was connection, or improving the most important relationships in life.

The keystone habit for this month was avoiding phones and devices while spending time with friends and family. While there are many different habits that can have an impact on your relationships, simply being more present and attentive is certainly at the top of the list.

For those interested in my previous months’ efforts, you can read more here:

Fitness: Start, End, Books.Productivity: Start, End, Books.Money: Start, End, Books.Food: Start, End, Books.Reading: Start, End and Books.Outreach: Start, End, Books.Sleep: Start, End, Books.Reflection: Start, End, Books.Connection: Start, Books.Lessons on the Value of Connection

From the usual perspective of this project, this month was difficult. I got quite sick for almost an entire week, after which I had a one-week vacation planned. As a result, I read fewer books for my Foundations project this month than almost any other month.

Still, from the perspective of this month’s focus, my illness was actually opportune. Being sick put me in temporary isolation from my family as I tried to avoid spreading it to them before our planned trip. This simultaneously made me more dependent on my wife and more appreciative of how much she had to shoulder looking after the kids alone. 

It doesn’t take much to shatter one’s illusions of total self-sufficiency, and I was grateful for the opportunity to reflect on how much I depend on the close relationships I have.

Getting sick was followed by our family vacation, which gave me a chance to take a week off of work (and reading) in order to spend time with my wife, kids, parents and in-laws, and I felt grateful for the chance to shift away from thinking about work and to focus entirely on the people in my life.

Connection and Connectivity

The keystone habit of not having my phone nearby during family hours was deceptively hard. The habit to check the news, weather or just look at something when there’s a blank moment is so impulsive you often don’t realize you’re doing it until you’re already distracted. Keeping the phone out of arm’s reach is key, and I’m embarrassed to admit that this wasn’t my habit until now.

Still, if I do have my phone with me (such as when heading out of the house), I can still fall into the same trap of giving it a “quick look” during those normal lulls in conversations or activities, so some work on this will likely be ongoing.

My work on this particular habit over the month also made me realize that being present in interactions with loved ones isn’t a binary yes/no. It’s an entire spectrum of attentiveness, from simply being in the same room to listening empathetically and without an agenda. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of mindfulness practices, which have a similar spectrum ranging from being absorbed in some stream of thought all the way to being completely engaged in the present moment.

It’s also this work that has made me realize that I’m not as far along the attentiveness spectrum as I could be. While avoiding devices when spending time with family is a good start, I could do a lot more to really listen and be present. Still, it’s good to sense the space for potential improvement rather than believe you’ve already got it all figured out.

Updates on Previous Foundations

Most of the foundations I’ve worked on so far have been maintaining fairly steady—productivity, money, reading and reflection.

Being sick for a week meant my first week off exercising since the project began. Vacation eating was definitely more indulgent than my usual diet at home, but I managed to run nearly every day while away and even went surfing a few times—which I haven’t done in almost a decade. My sleep was unusually good this month, although the circumstances were not typical.

It’s still too early to predict the long-term shape of any of these foundations, but the overall pattern for each seems to be that there has been a large boost in knowledge from doing all the reading, and the basic keystone habit for each has been sticking, more or less. However, many of the auxiliary behaviors start to slip once they’re no longer my central focus for the month.


I mention this because I think it pretty accurately describes how most improvement works long-term: a mix of stable improvements due to increased skill and knowledge; a brief, temporary improvement due to focus; followed by a more subtle increase of the overall baseline.

Occasionally you can experience really radical changes, but I think those tend to occur when there’s a dramatic shift in priorities that accompanies the efforts. Still, getting +1 to your overall habits in an area is an improvement worth striving for, so I think it’s important to set expectations right, especially for people who are likely to see anything other than perfect adherence as failure.

_ _ _

That’s it for this month. Next month’s foundation is focus. I’ll share some of my preliminary updates in next week’s post!

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7 Books (and 1 Paper) on How to Have Better Relationships

I’m wrapping up the ninth month of my year long Foundations project. This month’s focus was connection—improving the closest relationships in your life. As part of my efforts this month, I read seven books, including one textbook, on the topic.

For those interested, here are my previous reading lists about fitness, productivity, money, food, reading, outreach, sleep and reflection.

The 1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Relationships matter a lot. Not only are relationships one of the best predictors of happiness and well-being (married people are consistently much happier on average than single people), but they matter for your health. Bad relationships are associated with poorer health outcomes, and social isolation is about as bad for you as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.

How do you have good relationships?

It helps to have good genes. Personality is associated with good relationships. People high in agreeableness, low in neuroticism and high in conscientiousness fare better. And, of course, personality is at least moderately heritable.Keep it positive. Marriages succeed when the ratio of positivity to negativity is at least 5:1.Keep your temper in check. It’s a myth that you need to “let out steam.” Expressing anger tends to make you more angry. Collecting yourself before you engage is better than responding out of anger.But avoiding conflict isn’t great either. All relationships have conflicts, but it seems like how those conflicts are managed matters more than the conflicts themselves.Notes on the 7 Books I Read1. You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy

Our culture has a speaking bias. We give awards to the best speakers, those with the quickest wit and most incisive arguments. Listening, in contrast, is almost completely absent from our efforts at improving communication.

Murphy makes the case that this is woefully misguided. We need to listen more, and better. But what’s needed isn’t a special skill or technique—we already know how to listen. Instead, we need to find the motivation to truly understand what people are saying instead of merely trying to project our own thoughts and motivations.

2. Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle

Turkle indicts our modern technological environment for undermining our ability to communicate authentically. 

Young people feel unable to talk on the phone, anxious about the improvisational nature of conversations that don’t occur over text. Families claim that the dinner table is a “no phone zone,” but the parents pull out their devices at the first empty moment. AI chatbots replace real friends with sycophantic simulacra instead.

Twenty years ago, when I started writing online, it was easy to be optimistic about technology’s role in enhancing communication. Today, it’s hard not to be a pessimist. It turns out that while technology has enabled some new virtues (video calls are a genuine improvement for long-distance friends and family), it has mostly exacerbated our vices.

3. Why Marriages Succeed or Fail by John Gottman

Everyone claims to know the secret to a successful marriage, but few have data. Gottman does.

Gottman has studied couples for decades, taking them into a laboratory setting to rehash a recent conflict, while capturing the details of their interactions. He finds that there are three “stable” styles of relationship conflicts: validators (who compromise and discuss), passionate (who fight strong but make up stronger) and avoiders (who are happier to let sleeping dogs lie).

His research finds that the key variable for marriage longevity is the ratio of positivity to negativity. Couples whose positive-to-negative ratio is at least 5:1 are most likely to stay married. His team has an impressive track-record of predicting marital success as well, with a 94% success rate in anticipating future divorces.

In addition to maintaining positivity, avoid the four horsemen of relationship malcontent: criticism (which attacks the person, instead of the situation), defensiveness, contempt (name-calling and verbal attacks meant to hurt), and stonewalling.

4. Intimate Relationships by Rowland Miller

This was my textbook for the month. The data on relationships were wide-ranging and often counter-intuitive. For instance:

People who live together before getting married are more likely to get divorced later.Those who get married experience a bump in happiness, but that bump returns to baseline after a couple years.Research finds that marriages tend to fail most often when people have unrealistic expectations about marriage (such as expecting the initial passionate intensity to remain high forever).Despite stereotypes, men tend to be more romantic in their beliefs about relationships, being more likely to fall in love at first sight and less likely to compromise on passion for practicality.Playing hard to get doesn’t work. Both men and women prefer a partner who is intensely interested in them (and only them).

Most of the data here describe relationships rather than provide useful advice for having a better relationship. But descriptive statistics are generally underrated—you can’t offer advice if you don’t even know what’s typical.

5. Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

Sex therapist Esther Perel asks if sex can still be hot long after you’ve coupled together. Overall her answer is … maybe?

Despite her equivocation, I found this book interesting for the portraits of her clients: people who feel like they have a great relationship, but aren’t satisfied with their sex life. Perel argues that a mistake of modern relationship counseling is to assume that if a couple simply communicates better, sexual dysfunctions will resolve automatically. Instead, a good sex life depends as much on psychic separateness as it does on intimacy.

Overall, I found it hard to relate to many of Perel’s clients, not to mention a lot of the tentative advice she doles out—divorcing your spouse but remaining together or consensual non-monogamy seem like high-risk gambits just to spice things up a little in the bedroom.

6. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

Rosenberg argues that much of our communication is inherently “violent.” We threaten, cajole, criticize, attack and hurt each other with our words. He proposes a style of communication that expresses our feelings while also taking responsibility for them. By listening empathetically and communicating our needs (not demands) we are more likely to get what we want enthusiastically from other people.

I have to admit I was a bit skeptical upon hearing about this book, but the detailed examples of the method won me over. Saying things like, “It annoys me when you’re late,” may sound innocuous, but it puts the other person on the defensive. Rosenberg’s prescription would be to express your feelings while also taking responsibility for them. “I was feeling agitated because I had expected you to come earlier than you did,” does really seem like an improvement.

7. The New Psychology of Love by Robert Sternberg and Karen WeisVersion 1.0.0


I didn’t manage to finish this entire volume, as it was more theoretical than useful.

The book was largely about different theories of love—ranging from explanations about love’s origins, to theories as to what constitutes love. The basic conclusion is that love is universal across cultures, evolutionarily adaptive, and has multiple components (caring/attachment/sex, passion/intimacy/commitment), although researchers can’t entirely agree on which ones.

*8. The Anatomy of Marital Happiness by Sam Peltzman

Okay, so technically this was a paper, rather than a book, but I found it so fascinating that I just had to include it here.

Economist Sam Peltzman looks at data from the United States’s General Social Survey, which includes a question asking people how happy they are. Those who are married enjoy a robust happiness advantage compared to non-married people. The difference is not trivial: a married person in one of the poorest 10% of households—with combined household earnings of under $19,000 per year—would need to earn over $200,000 per year to make up for the happiness penalty for being single.

The marital happiness premium is robust to all sorts of ways you can slice the data. Cohabitation also increases happiness (but not as much as being married). The marriage premium doesn’t go away when you control for age, gender, income, race, education, whether you’re gay or straight, or even if your marriage is a sexless one.

The easy conclusion would be that getting married is probably the #1 thing you can do to improve your personal happiness. But correlation isn’t causation. Indeed, the research from Intimate Relationships suggests the arrow of causality is probably reversed—people don’t seem to get much permanent happiness boost after being married.

Instead, the more plausible (albeit, disappointing) implication is that happy people are much more likely to wed and stay married. Still, I found the research refreshing as an antidote to the numerous cliche’s about marriage being a cause of misery—the data show conclusively that those who partner up are happier than their single peers.

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That’s it for my reading. In the next post, I’ll share some personal reflections from a month focusing on connection.




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How Should You Choose Your Career?

Work is a huge part of life. A person who starts work at 25, retires at 65, and works the United States’ average of roughly 2000 hours per year will spend 80,000 hours on the job during their lifetime.

But work is more than just time spent. It provides us with the money we use to live, friends and colleagues who form a community around us, and, for many of us, an identity.

I’ve written a lot about how to make progress in your career, but less on how to choose what you do in the first place. Today I’d like to share some ideas I think would have benefitted me when I was first starting out:

Money isn’t everything … The people who think the most important thing in life is to be rich are delusional. Being rich is better than being poor, but being rich doesn’t magically make your life perfect.… but it’s definitely not nothing! At least where I went to school, pretty much everyone was broke (or pretended they were). In such an environment, the major you chose functioned like a badge of personality. In the outside world, different career choices have starkly different degrees of renumeration and difficulty, which can lead to an abrupt transition when you get into “real life.” College is for proving your abilities; it’s not a substitute for job training. Most of higher education is signaling. That doesn’t mean you don’t learn anything useful, but simply that appearing smart and conscientious (and conformist) is probably the biggest reason college students tend to get better jobs. This means harder majors are more valuable than easier ones, and broad knowledge is probably more useful than highly vocational specializations (which can be risky if the exact job you’ve trained for isn’t available after you finish your degree).Beware of your talents. It’s natural to want to pick a career that highlights your best abilities. But this can be misleading if your best strengths don’t correspond with actual jobs. As an example of this, one paper found that girls’ relatively low participation in STEM originates not from low math ability, but from high reading ability relative to boys!Early jobs are for learning, not earning. A lot of genuine learning happens on-the-job, but not all jobs are created equal. Some will force high performance standards, give you challenging assignments and offer a varied set of work problems. Others will stick you with routine office work that never changes. You’ll learn more in the former, even if it’s (temporarily) stressful.“Cool” careers tend to be overrated. All else being equal, the career paths that look fun, interesting or high-status tend to be more competitive. That might be fine if you’re passionate and highly-ambitious, but it does mean you’re picking a steeper hill to climb than a less-glamorous career in which you do useful work.Be receptive, not passive. Few people I know deliberately chose the specialty for which they are now renowned. Open-mindedness and flexibility about the eventual path your career will take are virtues. But combine that flexibility with a willingness to take on challenges (or make some, if none are offered to you).  Focus on making friends. Despite universal education and online job application boards, most opportunities still flow through personal connections. Doctor’s children are 24x more likely to be in medicine than people whose parents were not doctors. A big part of the reason for this is that the details of a career path are often obscured, and opportunities are hard to find if you don’t know someone who is in a given line of work.Where you work matters more than how hard you work. While ordinary people tend to use the word “productivity” as synonymous with “working hard,” the sense in which economists use it is almost the opposite: high productivity means getting a lot of output for relatively little input. Thus, those who work the hardest are often the least productive in the economic sense. Being in a less productive country, city, sector or company can result in orders-of-magnitude differences in the economic value of your work (and, in turn, your pay and perks), which go far beyond what you can achieve by simply putting in extra hours.

Agree or disagree? Any points of advice you would have given your past self? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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Connection – Day One

I’m starting the ninth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus is on connection. Whereas outreach (month 6) was about broadening your social network, this month’s focus is on close relationships—people you see all the time—so success here looks more like good communication skills rather than extraversion.

As a reminder, you can see my previous eight months’ notes here:

Fitness: Start, End, Books.Productivity: Start, End, Books.Money: Start, End, Books.Food: Start, End, Books.Reading: Start, End and Books.Outreach: Start, End, Books.Sleep: Start, End, Books.Reflection: Start, End, Books.My Strengths and Weaknesses

Overall, I feel quite happy with this foundation. I have a good relationship with my wife and kids, family and friends. It’s hard to judge these things objectively, and I’m not even sure such a judgement is even possible, but I do feel like this is one of the stronger areas of my life.

My relationships are generally happy. Some of that is probably temperament. My wife and I are both compromising, rather than combative, so we rarely fight. When we do disagree, it tends to be more of a discussion than an argument.

While I do occasionally get frustrated or upset, I’m temperamentally unsuited to grudges as I find anger fades extremely quickly. A telling example of this was when I took a personality inventory that measured how I dealt with anger. The questionnaire began with asking me to think about someone who wronged me recently, and I simply couldn’t think of anyone. I could think of some examples from my past, but even then, I found it hard to hold a strongly negative feeling about them.

Some of this is probably good fortune, but I suspect it’s part of my hardwiring as well. I’ve known many people who get into long-standing feuds over issues that seem silly to me. And I’ve had my share of abuse and wrongs inflicted upon me, if I reflect on it. They just don’t make me upset when I think about them today.

But, of course, I’m far from perfect. I have a number of long-standing communication weaknesses that I’m very aware of but have struggled to fix. Some examples:

I’m a poor listener. I both talk and interrupt too much, and I rush to project my own opinion on what other people are saying rather than genuinely hearing them out.I like to debate too much. I have strong opinions about things, and I like to debate about them with other people. While I love intellectually debating with people over ideas, I have come to appreciate that most people do not.I am not always patient. I don’t see myself as an angry person, in general, but I do occasionally get upset momentarily. If I act on those feelings in the moment, it can lead me to raise my voice or act in ways I wouldn’t if I were calmer. I see these feelings as very transient, so the key seems to be letting them pass without engaging. As with many parts of emotional self-regulation, it’s easier said than done.

In short, I think my temperament has naturally led me to having decent long-running relationships, but there are still lots of obvious places for improvement.

My Plans for the Month

Trying to figure out the keystone habit for this month was difficult.

For starters, it’s not at all clear that a single, universal behavior underlies success in this area. In contrast to, say, fitness (where exercising is key) or money (where saving is central), having good relationships seems to be a more idiosyncratic effort that depends on your personality and specific issues. The right way to have healthier relationships for someone who is apathetic and aloof may be totally different from someone who is passionate and argumentative.

Second, a lot of what seems to be success here looks more like skill than habit. Having good relationships is less what you’re doing and more how well you’re doing it. The same conversation can strengthen a bond—or tear it apart, depending on if the people having it are respectful and open or angry and shouting.

Still, after some brainstorming, I’ve come up with three new habits I’m going to try to implement this month to improve my relationships:

1. No phone use during family time.

I’ve largely eliminated distractions on my phone. But news and Kindle remain, so I still find myself with my device in hand while nominally spending time with my family. For this month, I’m going to keep my phone away when I’m actively spending time with my wife and kids.

This one seems to me to be the closest candidate for a universal “better connection” keystone habit, although I’m less sure how applicable it is to people who live alone.

2. Count-to-three rule.

I interrupt too much, in general. It’s a bad habit that I’ve long been aware of, but have had little success in eliminating. One suggestion I heard was to wait for a three-second count after a person finishes talking before saying your piece.

I don’t think it’s necessary to actually count it out, but it’s a reminder to make sure the other person is truly finished before I weigh in. Sticking to this one will be harder because so much conversation happens on autopilot—but I’ll make a note of any conspicuous failures in my journal. Hopefully sustaining awareness of this policy for a month will make a difference.

3. No losing my cool.

I’ve always admired parents and teachers who stay calm and composed even when dealing with seriously misbehaving children. Fortunately, my kids are generally pretty sweet and well-behaved. But, as is the case with all kids, I still have to break up fights and step in occasionally. I’d like to think I typically do a good job, but I’ve definitely had moments when I’ve been short, especially when tired, stressed or when my calmer pleading is ignored three times in a row.

Still, I believe losing my cool is unproductive here. While it can sometimes get me their attention, it often makes the situation worse. 

I know I’m capable of maintaining composure, because it’s the kind of thing I do when I watch other people’s kids. In those cases, I limit myself, and it usually works out better.

Therefore, for this month, I’m going to try to avoid losing my cool, getting visibly angry or showing frustration. This applies especially with my kids, but I would also like to extend this to my other relationships.

Reading and Research

The topic this month is a lot less familiar to me in terms of the underlying research. I’ve bought a few textbooks ahead of time, but I’m not sure the academic, theoretical approach will be all that valuable here.

Additionally, a casual skim seems to put attachment theory front and center, which raises red flags for me given the theory’s insistence on the importance of early parental influences even though such influences are basically non-existent in the wider ambit of behavioral genetics research. Perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised when I encounter the research, but such a lapse makes me concerned the field’s findings may be a lot squishier than I’d like.

Still, I’m going to try to do a decent survey of some theoretical work as well as try to tackle some of the more popular therapeutic and self-help advice out there—mostly to see what already exists. However, I’m going to put a bit more emphasis on my own habits and skill development than on reading this month.

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That’s all for now. Toward the end of the month, I’ll share the books I read and my major takeaways as well as how my own attempts at improving my close relationships have gone!

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Reflection – Month-End Update

I’m wrapping up the eighth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus was on reflection. In addition to reading eight books about thinking and feeling better this month (which I wrote about here), I also stuck to a habit of daily journaling.

In case you’re interested, you can see my day-one plans, books read and final takeaways for each month so far here:

Fitness: Start, End, Books.Productivity: Start, End, Books.Money: Start, End, Books.Food: Start, End, Books.Reading: Start, End and Books.Outreach: Start, End, Books.Sleep: Start, End, Books.Reflection Reflections

So far, journaling every day is probably the easiest keystone habit of the project for me that I wasn’t already doing. It felt a little bit like slipping into a warm bath—something immediately enjoyable, even if you don’t always think about doing it.

But perhaps that’s a side effect of years spent writing for a living. I’m not sure everyone will have the same experience, particularly if writing isn’t something they do often. But, at least for me, the effort of writing in spare moments was much lower than, say, reading a book—something else I often do during random moments with my phone.

I had a few takeaways from this month of journaling:

Despite buying a new paper journal, I prefer digital. In fact, I found things even easier once I started using the Journal app on my iPhone. This experience further strengthens my belief that a lot of important life habits basically survive or die on the basis of extremely small amounts of friction. Tiny increments in effort seem to have a disproportionate influence on how much we do of various things.There’s an ideal length to journal writing, which is probably 5-10 minutes for me. This was shorter than I was expecting. While I find it frustrating to be interrupted before this mark, I find my ideas naturally peter out after it. Perhaps there’s value in stretching beyond this time frame, but I found the tool most helpful to get organized on a few next steps rather than to exhaustively think through a problem.My entries are largely devoid of daily record keeping, and I have a fairly detached, unemotional writing style. I tend to write about problems and then approach them in a more orderly, logical way than I feel my actual thinking is. It’s hard to say whether this is a virtue (helping me keep my cool) or a missed opportunity (restricting my writing to exclude aspects of my mental life that may need some expression).Topic choice matters greatly. The format for the iPhone app is to title an entry and then begin writing on it. While I could stick to something generic, I find picking a title for the entry has an irresistible effect on what I end up writing about. Simply stating the topic, problem or idea I want to write about seems to automatically create a resolution.Writing is kind of magical. While my ordinary writing for publication has more starts, stops and deliberate problem solving, writing in my journal seems to occur almost effortlessly without any deliberate effort. It sometimes feels a little bit like watching ChatGPT generate text—one token after another. The reflection part only seems to come afterwards when I read what I’ve written to myself.

I expect this habit will be fairly easy to maintain, although I don’t think I’ll be religious about doing it daily—still, keeping journaling as one of my easy-access phone habits seems like it will become a more integral part of my routine.

Updates on Other Foundations

Now that I’m two-thirds of the way through this project, the previous months’ habits and work are starting to accumulate. In some ways, this creates a struggle as it’s impossible to simultaneously manage and attend to seven different things. But, in other ways, I’m happy that my efforts seem to be coming together into a broader refinement of some basic life routines that seem to be more mutually reinforcing than conflicting.

Some reflections on each:

Fitness. This month felt like a setback. I had a cold at the start of the month, and felt like my overall fitness had slowed down compared to the previous month, which was excellent. Some of this is probably regression to the mean, but I should keep an eye on things in case there’s some overtraining or underlying issue.Productivity. Good, although this month was definitely lazier than ones past. The full-capture system I’m using now is basically established. Although, I’ve come to accept that many of my “failures” of productivity are simply priorities in disguise. I continue to put off a lot of little side errands and chores, but I’m coming to realize that this is mostly because I value other things more, and time is short.Money. I finally got the RESP set up for the kids. This was a bit delayed owing to some extra paperwork. But I’m otherwise happy there are no changes here. Ideally, everything financially should more or less be on autopilot. Set-it-and-forget-it is probably a better philosophy than actively managing things.Food. I’m definitely more relaxed here than I was during the initial month. But some of that is simply a reflection that I’m happy with my weight, and the volume of exercise I’m doing right now seems to be sustaining things. Still, I think this is an area to monitor. Results here tend to lag behavior by quite a bit, so it tends to be the case that I only notice I’ve fallen behind far later.Reading. Another good month, although project fatigue is setting in a bit, so I’m satisfying myself with around eight books per month rather than my original goal of a dozen or more.Outreach. Not much change here. I’m pretty happy with my social life as a whole, given my available time, so I think part of this foundation is simply accepting I’m in a phase of my life that is more defined by maintaining relationships rather than actively expanding into new ones.Sleep. Slightly worse than last month. This was something I expected, given that my focus changed. But, if I look at my Fitbit stats, I’m still averaging more sleep than I did in the first six months of the project, so I consider that a win. I’ve been mostly good about following my bedtime curfew and sticking to one coffee each day, but not perfect. Still, I think having the tools to feel like I have control over my own sleep quality seems to be the biggest improvement from last month, where I had a somewhat fatalistic view that I just would be tired all the time.

If I have to give an overall summary picture of the year, thus far, it would be major improvements in fitness and diet, solid improvements in sleep and productivity, with minor tweaks or maintenance in money, reading and outreach.

Next month, I’m moving to focusing on improving my communication skills and habits in the ninth foundation, connection. I’ll share some thoughts next week on my self-assessment and plans for the month!

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Insights from 8 Books on Reflection

I read eight books on reflection this month. I chose to interpret the topic fairly broadly, with my reading covering not just thinking itself, but therapy, meditation, journaling and philosophy.

Those interested in the previous seven reading lists for my year-long Foundations project can check them out here:

FitnessProductivityMoneyFoodReadingOutreachSleep1-Minute Summary of What I Learned

Our quality of life is largely a function of the quality of our thinking, both in the long-term (good thinking means good decisions and better coping) and in the short-term (you are what you pay attention to). This makes reflection one of our most important foundations.

But changing habits of thought is hard. Imploring yourself to “try not to think of a white elephant!” leads immediately to picturing an albino pachyderm. Telling yourself to think and feel a certain way often backfires, and we get stuck in cycles of depression, anxiety, anger or subclinical (but still significant) patterns of maladaptive thinking.

Despite these difficulties, it is possible to think better. By now, we have good evidence for two different avenues of changing our thinking:

Cognitive therapy – Which works by teaching us to try to catch our thoughts and, instead of contradicting them, open them up to doubt and self-experimentation.Mindfulness – Instead of doubting or experimenting, mindfulness teaches us not to get wrapped up in thoughts and feelings at all, instead observing them as sensations detached from specific judgements and reactions.

Writing things down, although not a panacea, is one way to create a space for improving how we think.

The Eight Books I Read on Reflection1. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Kahneman considers two different systems that rule our lives:

System One is fast, effortless and intuitive. It’s good at pattern-matching and stereotyping, but also likes to swap hard questions, such as “How happy am I in life?”, with easier ones, like “How do I feel right now?”System Two is effortful and calculating. It allows us to apply abstract rules and integrate information. System One is our default—we only switch to System Two when intuition conspicuously fails.

This was my second read of this book. I first read Thinking when it came out. Reading it for a second time was enhanced considerably by some of my adjacent reading in cognitive psychology, especially Philip Johnson-Laird’s work on mental models, ACT-R and other developments in cognitive psychology.

In this book, Kahneman illustrates the mistakes in our reasoning, but his greatest contribution here is sussing out what those mistakes tell us about how our mind actually works. Just as visual illusions teach us more about how vision works than when we see things “correctly,” cognitive illusions teach us more about our mental machinery than when people typically get the right answer.

2. The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef

Galef compares two styles of thinking:

Soldiers, who try to defend and win arguments.Scouts, who try to understand the objective terrain.

Most of us default to being soldiers—trying to prove why we’re right and they’re wrong—rather than scouts who simply want to survey the terrain.

I enjoyed Galef’s book, and she does a good job of handling basic objections to the ideal of being more rational, such as the spurious belief that self-deception is necessary for politics, success or happiness.

 Still, I couldn’t help notice the meta self-contradiction of a soldierly book carefully defending a scout mindset against attacks from those predisposed to various forms of self-deception.

3. Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson

Does long-term meditation practice have an enduring impact on how your mind works?

This is the question Goleman and Davidson hope to answer in the affirmative, while trying to be mindful of the biases and poor study designs that impact a lot of ardent mindfulness research.

In the end, they find that it does, with some of the most compelling evidence coming from brain scans of expert meditators. Enlightenment doesn’t come cheap, however, with far more than 10,000 hours of meditation needed to see the most dramatic effects.

I doubt this book would do much to persuade mindfulness fans or skeptics either way, but I did find it to be a useful overview of what research has been conducted (albeit, presented by two advocates of greater mindfulness). My own experience with meditation is that mindfulness is valuable, but it is far from clear that the benefits of daily meditation reach the evidence bar to suggest it as a universal prescription.

4. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

Unleash your God-given creativity by allowing divine energy to flow through you and unlock a creative life.

Normally, books with this kind of framing put me off. But I found myself enjoying this classic in spite of the woo.

Cameron’s advice is essentially about how you can overcome your own fears and internal blocks by being more spontaneous and less inhibited. In many ways, it’s the opposite mindset of Galef’s—allowing for more System One thinking with less System Two supervision and monitoring. However, for domains of creativity—or any domain that relies more on fluency than control—this is probably good advice.


I particularly enjoyed her advice of free, spontaneous writing and an “artist’s date” where you go by yourself on a small outing for inspiration.

5. The New Diary by Tristine Rainer

I’ve always preferred the term “journal” to “diary,” possibly because of the latter’s feminine connotations, but also because I associate “diaries” with my grandmother’s long-standing practice of dutifully recording the day’s mundane events. Keeping a journal, for me, has never been about documenting but about getting my thinking out to solve problems.

I found Rainer’s book to be very much in the spirit of my original journaling efforts, although she opened me up to many more functions that keeping a journal can provide, ranging from emotional catharsis to role-playing, creative free-association, and exploration of thoughts and drives that may not be acceptable to share publicly.

6. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by Jason M. Satterfield

Last year, I did a deep dive into CBT which I shared in this article. Rather than re-read Judith Beck’s book, which I enjoyed, I chose to listen to this course by Jason Satterfield instead.

While the material and concepts were quite familiar, I found the included snippets of therapy sessions to be helpful for contextualizing what CBT actually looks like in practice, much more so than the transcripts I’ve seen elsewhere.


Given the impressive evidence base supporting CBT, I think it’s a shame that the basic theory and methodology aren’t more widely taught and understood.

7. What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin Seligman

I remember reading this book in paperback decades ago, but I decided to listen to the abridged audiobook version for a refresher. Seligman covers a number of well-studied areas, ranking them in terms of their ease of modifiability.

Mood disorders, such as depression and anxiety, are largely changeable. Sexual performance is changeable, but sexual and gender identity is much more rigid. Diets don’t work, and hence sustained weight-loss is largely a pipe dream.1

8. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

A classic of Stoicism, Aurelius invites the reader to view life dispassionately, pursue justice and remember that we’ll all be dead soon anyway, so don’t worry so much.

I hadn’t known that this book was a journal, thoughts that Aurelius addressed to himself rather than an imagined future audience. Knowing that changes the reading experience. Instead of coming off as preachy, we see a man clearly struggling with following his own advice and wanting to continually remind himself of his ideals.

This book didn’t do much for me. Where they overlap, I’ve always preferred the Buddhist conception of the aims of human experience rather than those of Stoicism. Both seem grounded in denying illusion, warding off desire and maintaining equanimity. But Stoicism has always struck me as a more negative approach to the problem, trying to rid oneself of weakness, without cultivating the positive qualities of compassion found in Buddhism.

Perhaps the fault is with me. Aurelius frequently weighs two competing possibilities: either the universe is all logos or all atoms. He weighs both options, but ultimately lives in accordance with a belief in the former. But since I think Democritus was right on that point, I find it harder to take solace in Aurelius’s conclusions.

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That’s it for today. Next week, I’ll share some of my personal updates from journaling (almost) every day this month, and share some updates on my previous seven foundations.

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