By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2
This is the first of five posts in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the second, third, fourth, and fifth parts.
Many of us struggle at times to know what to do. We are surrounded by conflicting advice about how to live our lives - from our parents, peers, and communities, from ancient philosophers, and from modern gurus and intellectuals. Faced with these confl...
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reflection
The FIRE Framework: deciding when to trust your gut
Here’s a link to a recording of me giving a talk about this topic in 2019.
The idea that you should "just trust your gut" - that is, make many life decisions solely based on intuition (as opposed to based on reflection) - is obviously very popular. But I think that there are pretty much only four types of situations where we're best off relying on intuition alone: when a decision is Fast, Irrelevant, Repetitious, or Evolutionary (FIRE for short).
Case 1: Fast decisionsThere is no cho...
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Subtle Introspection
Here are ten subtle things it's easy to miss about yourself that you may find it valuable to pay mindful attention to:
Your natural posture when sitting at your computer → this may affect how your body feels in 20 yearsWhere emotions manifest in your body (e.g., I feel anxiety in my chest and annoyance as a twinge in my face) → greater awareness here may help you more quickly and accurately identify your emotions.The clothing you feel your best and worst in → this may lead you to dress in a ...
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Wanting While Not Wanting
Why do people who hate that they overeat keep overeating? Why do people who know that their girlfriends or boyfriends are bad for them keep taking these girlfriends and boyfriends back? Why do so many people who want to go to the gym never actually bother to do it?
These circumstances can be explained, at least partially, in terms of desires changing and conflicting with each other. What we want when we consciously reflect on a situation sometimes differs from what we want when we are actuall...
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