This will be a relatively quick substack post - which means that I will both have to edit it more heavily in the future, and also that I’m not leaning as much on things I wrote in the past, here. Unfortunately I’m traveling next week, but my hope is to get a post out Sunday regardless.
I want to address roughly how I’m going to go about the content both on this substack and, hopefully, eventually in a book.
In my opinion there are two major tracks to the thoughts I want to share. The first of these tracks is the more specific, and probably of more interest if you’re looking for advice about dealing with specific categories of life, like ‘personal fitness’, ‘finance’, ‘socializing’, and such.
In those, I will lay out my history, my successes and failures and how I learned it, characteristics of practicing it and how they differ from other areas, and expand out exactly how you can select goals in various sub-categories (for example raw physical capacities like strength and endurance, vs diet, vs training skills, and so on).
Brief Summary of Specific Categories
Here is the rough outline, which itself is pulled from when I briefly did some life coaching a few years ago.
Physical
Diet
Strength
Agility
Cardiovascular
It is ironic for me that I am dreading the physical section the most. I am well aware of my credentials in that area, but it is also the area I’ve thought about the least. I can give general advice about how to approach it but I think I have the least deep thoughts here - and perhaps the least marginal to add.
I will be focusing on mindset and approach, and pointing primarily to other resources to achieve your goals.
Mental
'Technical'
'Humanities'
'Power'
'Knowledge'
The mental section is one of the ones I think I’m looking forward to most, because it’s the one I have both worked hardest at (from my perspective) and seen the best results at. In brief, I am not compelled to genius or incredibly depth in any one area of knowledge, so I have had to build processes that encourage me to build up knowledge in various areas.
Moreover, the life of the mind is one that the cultivation of yields insight into in the first place - unlike fitness, where you don’t necessarily learn much theory in the process of pursuing fitness itself.
This may be broken into a number of further sections.
Social
Family
Romance
Friendship
Civic
The social section I think is easy to neglect, because we often don’t consider the social constructions around us to be things we can build in the same way we can learn, or exercise, or work towards other life goals.
However, our relations with others are critical both towards these goals, for pure enjoyment, but also to further our qualities as individuals, to help us be more who we want to be. This, of course, is a loose mapping to Aristotle’s in Ethics. Many of my thoughts on the social sphere were shaped by both Ethics as well as Cicero (On Old Age and On Friendship), and I will treat these heavily in the classical section, while discussing important considerations in the other.
Professional
Finally, a way to look at jobs and careers. What they are for, what they are not for, what considerations to make when making tradeoffs. Once again, I feel like I may say extremely obvious things, but they’ve been of some help to people around me in my everyday life, so my hope is that they can help you as well.
Worldview / General Content
The other major area is essentially worldview. This is perhaps less interesting for specific advice, but I think it ties together closely with how I generated that advice. It also serves as a way for me to have a forcing function to getting my thoughts on systems living all out on paper.
Together, they will hopefully serve as a cohesive whole that both expresses my approach to living and the world, as well as the specific advice and practices that’s generated. You can take from it what you will.
Sharing a worldview is difficult, and I can’t give an exhaustive table of contents like I can do (or, at least closer) for the list of specific areas. There are certainly things I want to cover, and here’s a brief overview of some of them. If there’s specific things you’d like me to write up first, please feel free to suggest it.
Virtue
What is it, how do the classical authors treat it, what are the various components of it according to different taxonomies? As is common, you can expect me to look at the very least at Greek and Jewish thought, and possibly pull in from other sources as well. I’ll also relate it back to my repeated them of ‘as without, so within’ with some systems based perspectives.
Aesthetics
Once again, relating to ‘as without, so within’, what is the ‘within’? What does or does not reduce to aesthetics? How do aesthetics and taste differ? Much like Aristotle had his four ends, what are the three aesthetics (briefly, even as a note to myself - appealing visual arrangement, Kantian aesthetic, self-recognized informational output).
Relating to this is
Taste
What is the value of taste, and how should we indulge in it? If taste could be manipulated, what should it be manipulated to? Is it better to have more delicate or less delicate tastes?
Persistence and Timing
As mentioned, different areas of life improvement have different characteristics - time commitment, payoff, etc. Another one of these major areas is ‘persistence’. Not the fact that you need to persist at them - which you will need to do, no matter what - but how you need to persist at them. This also relates to timing, which is to say that given a finite amount of time to achieve things, it is more efficient to sort out your life goals such that you pursue certain things at different periods.
Learning Methodologies
What do I do to make sure that things stick into my head? What challenges have I faced? Spaced repetition, writing notes tediously, working examples…how can we learn things faster?
Life-Planning Algorithms
I did a brief twitter thread on this, but what are some heuristics and algorithms we can use to improve our own life planning? As I mentioned earlier on, we can do regret minimization, but what else is there? Can we measure our downside risk aversion? How valuable are purchases to us? This is a collection of cognitive tools I use myself when trying to think things through or make plans.
Closing
I’ll likely be trying to alternate between the different areas, general and specific, in upcoming posts. I’m not quite sure where I’ll start - I have a number of partially finished drafts. Again, feedback will help me choose what to tackle when.
There’s an additional area of content that I will likely talk about, which are broader social thoughts. Yes, it’s not quite the focus of this substack. However, once again a lot of it intersects with both broad worldview and various areas of focus, and it’s better than writing long twitter threads.
I don’t mean to go into specific politics, that would be incredibly tedious. More things like the intractability of complexity in a modern state, the balance of professional forces resulting from large language models, whether or not we’ll see the reemergence of true conspicuous consumption as a result of technological unemployment, and so on.
Many of these things I’m interested in because they relate precisely back to my other interests - how to live optimally, but also how to express agency into the world. I’m not sure how they will all cohesively pull the threads together yet, but you’ll find out with me as we go.