Eight ways you can validate someone’s emotions in a healthy way (and four strategies to avoid)

October 1, 2023

A lot of times, when people are upset, they want their friends and loved ones to "validate their feelings." I think there is a lot of confusion about what it really means to "validate feelings," and I also believe there are both healthy and unhealthy forms of doing this validation. Healthy vs. Unhealthy Emotional Validation I would say that the main difference between the healthy validation of emotions and the unhealthy version is that the healthy version is based on genuine c...

Five metaphorical tools to help you climb your personal mountains

May 19, 2023

You're on a mountain range, trying to reach the highest mountain peak you're capable of reaching. That peak reflects the total sum of your achievements according to your intrinsic values. This may include, for instance, your happiness, the happiness of your loved ones, your positive impact on the world, living virtuously, achieving your deeply meaningful goals, and so on. Unfortunately, the mountains you face are foggy as hell. Plus, they have dense forests, huge boulders, and bra...

How can you help friends or family members who are struggling with a mental health challenge?

January 8, 2023

I've noticed that it's quite common for people to struggle to know what they should do to support friends or family members going through a mental health challenge, and it's also quite common to say counterproductive things in such situations. With the aim of helping you better help those people in your life who are struggling, here's a list of five things that are usually a *bad* idea to say to someone who is dealing with a mental health challenge, along with seven things it usually is ...

Eight methods to make conversations with acquaintances more interesting

December 3, 2022

If you're like me and really dislike small talk, you may find these ideas useful. (1) If you end up talking about their work, ask what they (i) most like about it and (ii) find most challenging about it. (2) If they end up asking about your work, try to explain what you do in a way you've never experimented with before. Example: if you're a programmer, maybe you'll say your job is to convert ambiguous human goals to instructions that are so precise a computer can follow them. ...

Intersecting advice from highly successful people

January 26, 2021

Photo by Paulina Milde-Jachowska on Unsplash

It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...

The Reciprocation Problem

December 18, 2020

The "reciprocation problem": a mathematical tragedy in relationships regarding how often people should ask each other to hang out The Setup Person X and person Y are friends (or lovers or close work colleagues or whatever). Person X and Person Y happen to both feel the same way about each other (i.e., equal amounts of interest, affection, lust, respect, etc.)Person X's ideal is to make plans with person Y every two weeks, whereas person Y (who has a lower amount of free time, or less need...

The Impact of Indirect Punishments

October 4, 2017

I think it’s important to be aware of what we punish other people for. Including, and perhaps especially, barely detectable punishments that we give (which we may ourselves only be dimly aware of), and punishments that we give to people in our life, such as friends, family members, romantic partners, and work colleagues. Since punishment reduces certain behaviors, it’s important to consider whether we actually want to reduce the behavior we’re punishing. It’s critical that we not punish beha...

Ways to be a Better Friend

September 9, 2017

A list of simple ways you can be a better friend to the people you care about most (including close friends, family members, and romantic partners): INTERACTION - Avoid devices: don't use your phone when with your friends - Give focus: try to focus fully and completely on what your friend is telling you and, if you are momentarily distracted, return your full focus to your friend as soon as you notice that your attention has wandered - Rephrase for understanding: if your friend say...

Your Best and Worst Influence – a two-minute social thought experiment

June 21, 2017

A simple 2-minute social thought experiment for you: Note: I highly recommend that you don't just read this list of steps, but instead, that you actually do them! Reading these steps will not give you any benefit, but doing them might! Step 1 - Think for a moment about the person who is the best influence on you, or the person in your life you don't see that much that you most admire the traits or actions of. Step 2 - Visualize something great this person did or said, or think of a ...