Why is this? Why do these platforms make me feel so inadequate?

It’s not because I’m an inherent dummy (at least I hope not) or some conspiratorial social media kabal of techno-bros trying to spread fear (although that’s closer to the truth). From what I can decipher, this post-scrolling malaise occurs for a far less interesting and uncoordinated reason. 

It’s because these sites are loaded with deceptively manipulative phrases.

You know the type: 

• "Top performers always..."

• "If you're not doing [X], you're missing out!"

• "True leaders know that..."

These phrases are intended to make you feel deficient, and in creating that sense of inadequacy, compel you to click on the post, read the entire driveling thing, and buy the poster’s product so you can be powerful and whole once again.

And the algorithms love this stuff. The more deceptively manipulative the post, the more clicks; the more clicks, the more the post is amplified in the feed. It’s a flywheel of deception.

These deceptively manipulative phrases are so persuasive because they frame arguments in ways that appear reasonable or emotionally compelling while subtly steering the dialogue. They often leverage social proof, authority, and FOMO to drive engagement and ultimately, get you to buy things.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Advertisers have been leveraging deceptively manipulative phrases for ages, but I’d argue it’s a much different (and more insidious) experience when your ex-colleague Doug is dropping a deceptively manipulative phrase in his post vs. Coca-Cola. We’re already primed to not trust soda conglomerates (although we often forget to); we’re not primed to distrust every quasi-coherent person in our social feeds.

So how can we combat this?

The first step is to recognize deceptively manipulative phrases. The next step is to ignore whatever comes after them and remind yourself you are not missing out on anything. Anyone who posts a deceptively manipulative phrase is not to be trusted. They are trying to manipulate you.

To help you combat the minefield of deceptively manipulative phrases on your social feeds, I’ve compiled a list of the most common ones I see. My hope is it can serve as a touchstone for you while scrolling.

List of Deceptively Manipulative Phrases

"Top performers always..."

Implies that to be successful, you must follow the suggested behavior.

Example: "Top performers always network extensively. Are you doing the same?"

"If you're not doing [X], you're missing out!"

Creates a sense of urgency and FOMO.

Example: "If you're not leveraging AI in your business, you're missing out!"

"True leaders know that..."

Suggests a disagreement with the statement indicates a lack of leadership.

Example: "True leaders know that continuous learning is the key to success."

"Successful people understand..."

Implies success is tied to the specific advice given.

Example: "Successful people understand the importance of personal branding."

"Here's the secret that [industry] professionals don't want you to know..."

Creates FOMO and suggests insider knowledge.

Example: "Here's the secret that top marketing professionals don't want you to know: content is king."

"Don't settle for less than..."

Implies anything less than the advised standard is inadequate.

Example: "Don't settle for less than a job that values your unique skills."

"If you're serious about [goal], you'll..."

Questions your commitment or seriousness.

Example: "If you're serious about advancing your career, you'll invest in professional coaching."

"Everyone's talking about..."

Implies widespread discussion and popularity to create social pressure.

Example: "Everyone's talking about the new productivity hack. Are you using it?"

"It's clear that..."

Asserts an opinion as if it's an established fact.

Example: "It's clear that remote work is the future of business."

"Only [type of person] would disagree..."

Dismisses opposing views by attacking your character.

Example: "Only someone who doesn't understand the market would disagree with this strategy."

"You must [action] to succeed!"

States an action as essential for success.

Example: "You must build a strong online presence to succeed in today's market!"

"If you're not [action], you're doing it wrong."

Creates a dichotomy where only one approach is correct.

Example: "If you're not using social media to grow your brand, you're doing it wrong."

I plan to revisit this list every few months and add more deceptively manipulative phrases I come across in my feeds. Am I missing any? Let me know in the comments. Good luck out there!

And all I got was extreme loneliness. Bad health insurance. Tidal waves of anxiety. Neverending paperwork. And constant mental churning on how to make ends meet.

I was beyond stressed out.

Somehow, I had stumbled into a lot of clients for my business, which was supposed to be a good thing, but I couldn’t handle it.

There were multiple balls in the air that seemed destined to come crashing to the ground: a massive consulting project that was going off the rails, a pile-up of inbound sales requests I couldn’t get to, and a half-finished curriculum for my upcoming cohort course launching the following week.

I remember looking at my girlfriend and saying, “I don’t know how I’m going to make it all work. I don’t think it’s possible,” as I curled into the fetal position on our couch and felt an anxiety so strong it numbed my entire body.

But I wouldn’t trade the solopreneur experience for anything.

Because amidst all the anguish, the banality, and the loneliness of running a single-person company, there are some incredibly beautiful things: the freedom to experiment; an opportunity to structure alternative working norms; the ability to choose who you work with; and a sense of personal ownership that is both humbling and inspiring.

But I wish someone had warned me before I got started on this path of the vast array of psychological traps in running your own solo Internet business, which is now more doable than ever, but also fraught with extreme challenges.

The tales of building hyper-growth startups that become billion-dollar unicorns or fast-burning dumpster fires are well-told. These are the success stories and failure porn of Silicon Valley. But what about the lone person at their home desk? The person who wants a little more from work than the corporate superstructure but isn’t interested in raising venture capital, conquering the world, and giving a lobotomized Ted Talk on how you just need to learn how to code? What does this parallel, smaller, more approachable entrepreneurship path look like?

The rosy promises for wannabe solopreneurs are clear from online discourse: when you start your own company, especially something as small as a single-person Internet business, you are setting off on a path paved in freedom, unilateral passion following, 4-hour work weeks, and $30k/month in passive income while you surf off the coast of Bali. 

There is some truth to those promises. But to get there, it takes extreme discipline, consistency, luck, and a radical deprogramming (especially if you’re coming from the corporate world) that is hard to fully articulate. The self-employed path is laden with self-imposed traps and external pressures everywhere. The ability to grind from sunup to sundown; to say yes to any opportunity that crosses your desk, no matter the personal sacrifice; to scroll Twitter and compare yourself unrealistically to someone further on the path—if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself constructing a perfect self-torture device. And in a company of one, no one is there to tap you on the shoulder and tell you you’re creating the very thing you left behind.

So how did I end up in the fetal position on my couch, numb to the core with anxiety? How did I, at one point, fuck up the perfect paradigm of solo employment? 

I applied an old playbook to my new vocation. 

I worked ten years in the corporate world, and that way of working, a constant sense of “on-ness”, low-grade performance anxiety, and a debilitating need to people-please, was etched into my bones. My new boss (my literal fucking self) was just as big of a jerk as my old one: equally demanding, uncompromising, and disrespectful to my personal boundaries. 

It takes intention to develop a personal way of working that inculcates you from the modern corporate tradition of grinding, competing, and growth-at-all-costs mindset. Simply starting your own thing won’t intrinsically fix your relationship with work, and in some cases, it will amplify them. I have to remind myself daily to not fall into the work tempo traps of my own making—to slow down, to do less, to create space. And I’ve been at this for two years.

There’s a gift self-employment gives you, if you’re willing to take it, that’s not as readily available in the corporate world—the ability to say no; to turn down things that don’t serve you in favor of things that do. That muscle was so atrophied in me, it's taken years to learn how to use it again.  

I’m not even close to figuring this thing out, I’m constantly stumbling in the dark along this vocational path, but I wouldn’t change one second of the experience. It’s painful. It’s lonely. It’s stressful at times. But there are moments when I’m doing it right, when I go on long walks with my girlfriend in the middle of the day, or when I’m working on exactly what my soul wants to work on, that it’s worth it. It can be both—challenging and beautiful.

I remember this website. The first tweet I ever posted was a link to this page. Back then, it was a beautiful techno-art web project that excited a college music student. A bunch of strangers on the internet collaborating around a single key.

Now, it’s a reminder of what the Internet used to be. An old signpost of a forgotten place. A cozy place. A place without cookie banners or AI-generated SEO articles or five million websites with the same design aesthetic asking me to sign up for their newsletter. It wasn’t optimized. It wasn’t capitalized. It was small. It was beautiful.

Then it got big. Like most good things. And in its growth, it lost something.

E.F Schumacher, author of “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered,” wrote about the insatiable appetite for scale in the West. He saw this happening in the mid-20th century industrial era: a ravenous consumption of fossil fuels for economic progress, the dehumanization of work through endless abstraction, a loss of community and accountability through a neverending pursuit of bigness.

I’ve seen this pseudo-philosophical economic credo of growth-as-the-zenith etch its way into my own life: a constant moving to bigger cities from my rural upbringing; an interest in technology and leverage for broader impact; a burning desire to climb the proverbial corporate ladder—to sit at the top of something, anything; a seeking to resonate with a faceless mass that I can’t touch or feel or comprehend.

Despite believing small is beautiful, it takes a constant reminder to myself to embrace this ethos: to do less, to keep it simple, to be patient, and to invest in the little things around me at the expense of abstracted, bigger things. To not outsource the work I love for the sake of making something larger, richer, or more impactful.

The administrative pain of my life always seems to be inflicted by bigness: a complicated tax code I’ll never understand, a health insurance card issued by a mega-corporation that doesn't work at my local pharmacies, and an endless stoking of outrage from the global feeds of techno-capital.

Amidst all of this bigness, I take a breath. I share a cup of coffee with my girlfriend. I go to inbflat.net and enjoy a quiet moment of creativity. Because as much as the world around me is preaching for growth, small is beautiful.

It was amazing. It was like magic. It was like nothing we had ever experienced before with technology. I thought there had to be a human on the other side of the screen penning the joke. Something magical was happening but we couldn’t put our finger on it. If you’ve used an AI tool like ChatGPT, I assume you have experienced this watershed moment too.

Fast forward 18 months, and my use of ChatGPT has drastically increased in volume and complexity. A few examples:

• It writes all of the code I need for my consulting job as an AI/automation consultant

• It generates custom graphics for my Substack posts (like for this essay)

• It performs research for essays I write 

• It brainstorms names and creates copy for things I build on the Internet

The list goes on. It’s become such an integrated part of my work and personal life: a constant co-pilot for my ideas. As a solopreneur, it’s like having my own team of collaborators with specialized skills that I can partner with at any time on any subject. It’s made me far more prolific, capable, and expansive as a maker.

Dan Shipper of Every, one of the most influential thinkers I’ve seen covering the topic of working with ChatGPT, defines this revolution of working with AI as a shift from the knowledge economy to the allocation economy; from makers to managers. From Dan:

We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not. 

It means a transition from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done. 

I love this analogy, and what it's gesturing at, something has deeply changed in the way we work when we work with AI, especially with an all-purpose AI tool like ChatGPT. But I might offer a slightly different take. Managers and allocators, to me, conjure up a modus operandi of organizing and deploying finite resources, with the most important skills being the ability to expertly develop systems, decision-making protocols, and collaboration practices that enable optimum outputs based on the maximization of these finite resources. 

It’s in the context of resource constraints that I see a difference between classic managers and allocators and what makers with AI are doing. Makers with AI have no constraints with the resources they are managing, except their own time and energy (which, as a tangent, this area of self-management might become the primary place for classic management skills in a workforce of automated AI agents…), because the costs of riffing with AI in a less-than-efficient way are marginal.

As a manager of teams of people, you have to be deeply skilled in cost/benefit analysis, opportunity costs, and human psychology to skillfully direct and operate an organization. Similarly, for capital allocators, you have a finite amount of money you can invest, so it’s in your deft ability to weigh one investment vs. another that makes you realize outsized returns. 

However, these skills don’t seem as applicable to makers with AI. Why? Because tools like ChatGPT have infinite capacity. They don’t need to be managed skillfully from a resource management perspective. If you go down a rabbit hole, you’re not wasting any real resources, save your own time. And if you riff enough with ChatGPT, you might come back with an output that redefines the problem you initially intended to solve.

So what does this mean? Makers with AI can be far more explorative, experimental, and unskillful with resource management than managers and allocators. They can quickly test, iterate, pivot, and move on with a velocity that would cause any traditional employee major whiplash. They can scrap projects and efforts without a second thought.  

Instead of us turning into managers and allocators, I would posit AI is turning us into creative directors. Our focus now encompasses a blend of strategic oversight and creative execution. A copywriter turns into a creative director, a graphic designer turns into a creative director, a software developer turns into a creative director, and so on and so forth ad nauseam. 

A set of core responsibilities in a traditional description of a creative director could look like the below:

• Developing the creative vision and strategy for projects.

• Providing creative leadership by guiding efforts and ensuring that the output meets certain standards.

• Project managing the creative process from concept to completion, ensuring projects are completed with cohesion to the rest of the work.

• Leading client and stakeholder interaction by acting as a bridge, presenting ideas, gathering feedback, and making necessary adjustments to creative strategy and execution.

This feels more akin to what it’s like to work with an AI tool like ChatGPT. It’s a creatively liberating experience. Traditional creative and innovation teams are often given the license to experiment and wander and test since they are charting new territory—attempting and scrapping ideas is in the DNA of their workflow. Managers and allocators are not given this same license. It’s in the most prudent use of finite resources that they shine.

So rather than AI allowing us all to become managers, I’d venture that AI is allowing us all to become more creative. I’m not managing the AI, I’m co-creating and brainstorming with it. I’m not allocating resources effectively, I’m offering an initial creative direction and then iterating and redirecting based on new outputs. I’m not working in an allocation economy, I’m working in an innovation economy.

With AI, we're unlocking a collective creativity that elevates our capacity to innovate, making every one of us a creative director of our future. 

What do I mean by clever vs. wise? In his seminal work, "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," E.F. Schumacher, a German-British economist, uses the term "cleverness" to refer to the technical and analytical capabilities that have enabled humanity to achieve remarkable feats, such as landing on the moon, creating powerful computers, and developing sophisticated technologies. Cleverness, in his view, is about mastery over the material world, efficiency, and the pursuit of economic growth often at the expense of environmental health and social well-being.

On the other hand, "wisdom" for Schumacher encompasses a deeper understanding and respect for the natural world, the recognition of the limitations of human knowledge and technology, and the importance of moral and ethical considerations in guiding human actions. Wisdom, to Schumacher, implies a commitment to sustainability, where economic activities are conducted in harmony with the environment and society's long-term interests. It involves making decisions that are not only technically feasible but also ecologically viable and socially just.

As LLMs continue to get more and more performant, as seen by Anthropic’s recent Claude 3 release besting almost every performance benchmark, it’s starting to feel like AI is the exact technological outcome Schumacher warned of when a culture focuses almost entirely on cleverness and growth vs. wisdom and sustainability. 

I see Schumacher’s ethical-economic framework applying to AI in two respects: the first is concerning the current state of the technology, which is more tongue-in-cheek and likely won’t be the case forever. The second application is in the trajectory of the technology and the consequences of the current pace and approach to which we’re developing it, which is less tongue-in-cheek and more existential.

Starting with the current state of the technology, I’d claim nothing AI currently outputs is particularly wise by definition. It can solve known, complex math problems, find specific data across massive text documents, and even write decent prose, but nothing it has produced to date is truly novel. LLMs are derivative machines; they use vast amounts of training data and reinforced learning to predict the next most logical token in an array. There is no deeper understanding happening within the machine; there are no moral or ethical considerations to its output. That’s why some experts refer to LLMs as stochastic parrots; they generate plausible outputs, without understanding the meaning of the language they process and produce.

If a human behaved this way, we might call them clever, but we certainly wouldn’t call them wise. It’s the same reason we refer to children as clever but not wise. When a young child does something particularly intelligent, we often recognize they are pantomiming the adults around them, not connecting disparate threads of thought into a novel new application.

As I said earlier, this claim about the current state of the technology may not be the case forever, which leads me to the second AI application of Schumacher’s ethical-economic framework: the trajectory, pace, and approach to which we are developing AI, which is to say, as seemingly fast as possible. So much so, that many leaders in the space are constantly expressing fears about the technology—even what’s been released so far. Take Sam Altman’s comments on his AI fears: "What I lose the most sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT. That maybe there was something hard and complicated in there (the system) that we didn't understand and have now already kicked it off."

Maybe that fear will turn out to be invalidated, or maybe not. The real issue is in our current inability to know the difference, without any pause or reflection, as teams race to push the edge of AI even further each day.

There’s no rewinding and putting LLMs back in the proverbial box, and I wouldn’t argue for that course of action; there are many beneficial, equitable applications to this technology, but I believe E.F. Schumacher would press us to go slow here, tread lightly, and make sustainable progress that is not only technically feasible but also ecologically viable and socially just. 

Time will tell if our leading AI technologists will listen. If they, like their AI creations, will be wise, or simply clever.

What do I mean by tempo? In this context, tempo means the expectation set with the self, collaborators, clients, or bosses as to when work of various types and sizes can and will be completed.

If you’ve ever sent a request to a co-worker and had the thought, “I’ll probably get that back from them by the end of the day today,” then you are engaging in the physics of tempo. You took an underlying size estimate of a piece of work and the relative speed said co-worker typically completes that type of task and calculated the turnaround time. As an equation, tempo might look something like this:

Tempo (T) = Size of Work (S) / Expected Turnaround Time (E)

Having legible tempos between employee-boss, consultant-client, or colleague-colleague helps develop predictable and pleasant work relationships. However, things can go awry when there is a tempo expectation deviation on either side of these relationships.

Tempo deviations on this micro-level can happen for several macro-level reasons: staffing changes, sudden shifts in business needs, process or requirement updates, or many other classic organizational pivots.

The resulting impact is someone, somewhere is requesting a piece of work (the Requester) and has an expectation of the person fulfilling that piece of work (the Fulfiller) that isn’t being met, which can lead to the Requester feeling anxious. That anxiety then leads the Requester to do whatever they can to feel less anxious about the “delayed” work, which often looks like following up with the Fulfiller, complaining to a co-worker about the situation, or even going as far as messaging the Fulfiller’s manager.

These actions typically have the consequence of passing the anxiety from the Requester to the Fulfiller who now senses, or flat out is aware, the Requester thinks the request should have been completed at this point.

And the world goes round and this game of anxious hot potato happens again and again and again in work relationships where there is tempo mismatch.

Now, things get particularly interesting when tempo mismatches are self-induced; when they emerge on the micro-level. This phenomenon typically only happens on the Fulfiller side of things.

How can tempo mismatch be self-induced? Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say Mark is a new employee of Company X. His job is to design social media assets for the content team. Since Mark is new and deeply cares about what his new co-workers think about him, he delivers high-quality social media assets at a pace that is not sustainable for him. For instance, he’ll work overtime the first few weeks on the job to get 1-2 more requests completed than he has time for in a reasonable shift, or he’ll skip lunch or not move from his desk for an ungodly stretch of hours. After a few weeks of this pace, the content team starts to think of Mark as “that one designer who can turn around high-quality assets at the last minute.” So, when those types of requests come up, the content team always goes to Mark. Now, Mark finds himself in a working norm where his tempo requires constant overtime work and lunches at his desk hunched over his keyboard.

In playing this example out further, Mark will eventually get burned out and either quit, complain constantly to everyone in his life to no avail, or maybe he will set new boundaries with the content team. But that final option would require him to be aware he’s in a trap of his own making and therefore has the authority to get himself out of the situation.

This self-induced trap is one I have often created for myself at the expense of myself. I think this trap might be especially sticky for the over-achiever or people-pleaser types. As mentioned above, the only way of truly getting out of an existing self-induced tempo bind is to reset expectations with Requesters.

But the better option is to understand what your tempo is in specific contexts and set expectations upfront accordingly. For new, unknown situations, better to set these expectations far more conservatively than you expect and then slowly beat those expectations over time.

This is something I’m consistently trying to get better at, and I’m confident if I can master tempo-setting with myself and those I work with, I’ll feel a little lighter, calmer, and free.

• If you hope for perfect conditions, you’re always going to be disappointed. 

• If you don’t know what you’re doing, watch what other people are doing and emulate them until you know what you are doing. 

• If you’re good enough, you can make shitty conditions look good (I am not that good). 

• As measured in energy and time, surfing is 90% paddling, sitting, waiting and diving. It’s max 10% riding waves. The internet portrays it as an inversion of this ratio. 

• Stretch. Just do it.  

• Take breaks. Let the whitewater pass (it eventually always does), then paddle. 

• Paddle like hell when you have an opening to do so. You don’t know when you’ll get another opportunity. 

• If you feel frustrated at the surf, look at the clouds, feel the water, smell the salty ocean and realize that being out there in nature is more of the point than anything else. 

• Find a way to work with conditions vs. fight with them. Things are more fun when you let go a little and adapt. 

• You always have to paddle a little more than you want to get out of the whitewater, but it’s always worth it.

• Try to laugh when you take a wave to the face.

• If you feel overwhelmed in the water, take a deep breath (not under water), focus on your next move and the fear will usually subside. Concentration can burn anxiety as fuel. 

• Waves can be surprising. Don’t underestimate them. A seemingly innocuous one will steal your soul if you’re not careful. 

• Other surfers are often the most dangerous thing out there. Pay attention to your surroundings. 

• Planning ahead can set you up for more success than raw talent. Had I checked the surf report this morning, I might’ve gone out at a different time and place with better conditions. I didn’t, and I got shitty conditions. 

That’s all I have for now. I may revisit this list in the future. I’ll definitely revisit this list when I’m having a rough day–in the ocean or otherwise. Shitty conditions can be frustrating, or they can be intriguing and challenging. The interesting part is you get to decide. That choice is important.

Before I go further, it’s important to acknowledge the privilege of optimizing for vibes, which is made possible only by satisfying your basic needs and wants first. Jack Butcher at Visualize Value has a great visual spin on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that does a wonderful job of articulating this hierarchy, putting vibes at the highest order (i.e. self-actualization).

There are several ways to define vibes. According to Wikipedia, vibes are an emotional reaction to the aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing. Linguistically, vibes are short for vibration and resonance. Here’s a few visceral descriptions of times when I personally have felt vibes:

• Vibes are swaying like a singular amoeba with groups of strangers at a concert

• Vibes are losing yourself on the dance floor

• Vibes are “yes, dude!”

• Vibes are snuggling in bed

• Vibes are an hour whiteboard session that feels like five minutes

• Vibes are riding a clean right-breaking wave

• Vibes are uncontrollably laughing with a group of people about something ridiculous

• Vibes are flow state 

• Vibes are losing track of time

tl;dr: vibes are when something feels deeply, indescribably right. You know the feeling, when you wouldn’t want to be with any other person than the one you're with, when you wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world other than where you are at a specific moment. Things just click when the vibes are right. It’s a synchronicity with the universe.

And with that, I’d argue that you should optimize your entire life around finding and maintaining good vibes over everything: marry based on vibes, select jobs based on vibes, follow hobbies based on vibes, move to cities based on vibes, dress based on vibes. Everything sorts itself out if the vibes are right. When the vibes are off, things fall apart.

Alright, I’ve written enough in the abstract. Time for a concrete example. What might making a decision based on vibes look like versus more traditional decision making models (e.g. pro/con lists, external validation heuristics, etc.)? 

Let’s say you’re deciding between two job offers. Company A is prestigious with a good brand, a lot of employees and strong social capital. Their job offer pays incredibly well and you know there will be stability with this job. However, you’re not too excited about the work and during the interviews, you didn’t feel like you clicked with your future colleagues. They were nice enough, but not necessarily your type of people.

On the flip side is Company B. It’s a smaller company with less stability and brand equity, none of your friends or family have heard of this company. The job they’re offering you has less pay and stability than Company A’s offer; however, you’re excited about the work and you hit it off with your future colleagues during the interview process.

If you took a traditional decision-making approach to choosing between the two job offers, I’d venture most people would end up choosing Company A. For example, if you used a pro/con list to make the decision, there would be so many more pros for Company A: stability, pay, comfort, social cache, etc. If you made the decision based on external validation heuristics (e.g. what people would think about your job when they heard it, how your LinkedIn profile would look with Company A’s logo on it, etc.), you’d most definitely go with Company A.

In either of these cases, if you go with Company A, you would be more miserable day to day. You would not look forward to working with your coworkers; the work would be less stimulating. And with that, you would not perform at your peak. I would know, this was the decision I made for my first job out of college. I went with Company A. My manager ended up being a total asshole who would mock me in front of my coworkers. I also had to wear a tie. It was fun to say where I worked when I went to the bar, but overall, life sucked that year. 

However, if you were to make the decision based solely off vibes, you would go with Company B. The end result: you would be more happy day to day, you’d enjoy your coworkers, you’d enjoy your work, and you would progress faster in your career because of all these things. 

The vibes-based decision making framework can be applied to all areas of life decisions, big or small:

• Who you marry: pick the person you vibe with the most

• Where you hang out: pick the place that resonates the most with your soul

• What activities you do: pick the hobbies that make you feel flow

Life is all about decisions. Humans are better than all other animals at decision-making, but we’re still suboptimal at it. We’ll never have enough information to make well informed decisions. So a good set of heuristics are the most powerful tools in the world. Good heuristics lead to good decisions, which leads to a good life. Most people use suboptimal heuristics for decision making: what will make them feel safe, what will make other people happy, the list goes on. But if you use one heuristic, I say make it vibes. Vibes are the pathway to the soul. Make decisions based on vibes and you’ll have very few regrets. 

A counter argument to a vibes-based decision making system could be that vibes are a short term, fleeting experience. Therefore, if you optimize for them, you’ll not be investing in the long term and subsequently not make progress towards a meaningful life. But life is just a daily experience. Compounding effects occur when you are consistent, even if that consistency is mundane. Optimizing for vibes creates consistency and a joyous present. There isn’t a better balancer for short term happiness and long term compounding effects. 

So, next time you need to make a decision, look for the vibes. Forget everything else. I bet you’ll be happy with your choice. 

It might be helpful to define ambition, which for the sake of this essay, I define as the lofty drive to improve yourself or the world around you. Improvement is hard and painful. So, if you’re wired with an ambition-oriented outlook, it’s not always the smoothest ride. 

I’ve collected a short list of ways I’ve found, in the mid- to long-term, to move myself out of that depressive feeling caused by a ceaseless want to do “better.” These aren’t quick wins. These won’t zap you out of a depressed state instantly. But, if you can hold any of the below as truths in your head, they can act as helpful touchstones to beat back the self-judgment that often comes with latent ambition and transmute your ambition from a greedy antagonist into an exciting partner in life. 

1/ Judge your work on your current ability, not your perceived capacity 

Dreaming is great. And thinking of yourself as capable of achieving your dreams is even better. But there’s a delta between your perceived capacity and actual ability right now. For instance, you might think you have the capacity to write the next great American novel. And maybe you do. If that’s your bar for success, amazing! You have big dreams and belief in yourself. However, if you struggle on certain days to make progress on that novel and judge yourself in those moments for not “reaching your full potential” because of it, you’re being too hard on yourself. Why? Because until you write the next great American novel, you don’t have the ability to do it. Capacity is not a fair measuring stick to judge your today self with. If you judge your work or hobbies or impact on what you might eventually be able to achieve, you will always feel like you’re underperforming, because if you’re a dreamer and a thinker, you will always feel like there is a next level you can unlock. And there probably is. But you’re not there yet! So, judge yourself on what you’re able to execute on right now. Maybe your ability today is writing a nice short story, or a pithy essay, which are great milestones as you work your way to writing a novel. Move your measuring stick to these closer time horizons and attainable milestones. You’ll be able to better achieve them, and it’ll create a reinforcing flywheel of success that will propel you to achieve your more ambitious dreams. 

2/ Think less; do more

Our minds are wonderful self-torture devices. Ambitious minds even more so. This torture typically manifests in what psychologists label “intrusive thoughts” (e.g., unwelcome thoughts that create more misery than joy). You might feel you can think your way to joy and happiness. And that is simply not true. No amount of thinking will make you happy. In fact, it’ll increase the chasm between you and the feeling of joy. What brings joy? Action. Doing something. Anything. You don’t even have to do it well. Just do it (thanks, Nike). It doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t need to be big. It just needs to be something. If you’ve been meaning to exercise more, go and do a 15-minute walk around your block. If you’ve been meaning to plan a vacation, hop on Google and enter a few, random destinations. Getting started is the hardest part. Doing something will silence the ambitious critic in your head and it will provide some forward momentum to something even bigger and better. If you keep doing stuff and kicking up dust, you’re increasing the chances of doing or finding something that resonates with you, and at that point, you’re well on your way to doing something incredible. 

3/ Invest in relaxing activities that are not mentally or physically harmful 

For me, after a long day of stressful work, a beer or glass of wine or [insert favorite inebriate here] always sounds like a nice way to take the edge off. But I’ve found that more and more, this shortcut, with the equation: stress + inebriant = less stress, is actually: stress + inebriant = less short term stress + more long term stress. As an example, if I have a couple beers on a weekday after a particularly trying day at work, the next day, I wake up feeling a bit more groggy, a bit more irritated and a bit more pissed off at the world. So, to counteract those blues, I consume more than a healthy amount of caffeine, which in turn gives me anxiety, which then requires me to come back down at night with another inebriant. And the cycle continues. Nowhere in this flywheel have I addressed the root issue at hand. I’ve actually even further exacerbated the issue as well by creating a less restful version of myself day after day. I’m not trying to demonize booze or caffeine here. Maybe these things don’t hit you as hard as they hit me. But finding a relaxing activity that doesn’t negatively impact your mental or physical health is a much better alternative. For me, as of late, I’ve turned to having a cup of tea, a piece of chocolate and listening to a comedy podcast while I wind down for the night. I can’t make this happen every night, sometimes I really need an IPA, but the nights that I do, I know I’m moving a little closer towards my goals without actually working on them. 

4/ Draw motivation from your impact to others, not the impact to you

If you have a lofty, ambitious goal, thinking of what it will mean for you if you achieve it is not always a powerful incentive. You can look around at your current life, and think, “this isn’t too bad, why am I pushing myself so hard for more?” That is a very reasonable, rational and healthy way of thinking. In doing so, this point of view can temper unfettered ambition. In keeping you emotionally safe, it can also have the adverse effect of blocking you from realizing some of your ambition. To counteract this, I’ve found it useful to think about how my ambition, if realized, will impact a greater set of people, other than myself. For instance, the thought: “I’ll never become an entrepreneur if I don’t work on my project tonight,” is a lot less motivating than “I’m really excited about providing this service to those that need it.” This shift in mentality is akin to, “giving your gift to the world,” which I think is a beautiful and admirable quest. You can also hold this truth in tandem with your previous, rational thought of “my life isn’t too bad, I don’t need to push myself for more.” You don’t. Your ambition is only providing you the opportunity to push yourself to help more people, and if you want to do that, fantastic, and if you don’t, equally fantastic, taking care of yourself is a net positive for this world too. 

5/ Get excited about actions, not achievements

I’ve often found myself daydreaming about the outcomes of my work. One of my good friends calls this “future tripping.” Future tripping is fantasizing about what the future would feel like and what it would bring you when you realize your ideal outcome. This is unhelpful in a few ways: 1) you will never realize your ideal outcome, so you are destined to not meet this bar and disappoint yourself 2) dreaming about the future is a serotonin hit that gives you the release of achieving success without actually achieving it, demotivating you from doing the work and 3) it focuses on the outcomes, not the inputs, which is a recipe for not enjoying not enjoying the present, which is always about doing the work and never about receiving the accolades. 

6/ Join in communities that are in tune with your goals and personality

Working alone is hard. The more we advance in society, the seemingly more we isolate ourselves and detach from a center of community. It’s proven that decade after decade, we have less friends than the generation before us. This could be a negative consequence of economic prosperity (I don’t need to be supported by my family or community because I can take care of all my basic needs) or technological supremacy (I don’t need to rely on my neighbor for sugar, I can one-day Amazon order it to my front door). Or maybe it’s something else. This essay won’t try to answer this question. But, given this trend, finding a community that resonates with you and inspires you and pushes you is more important than ever. It can be the difference between realizing your life’s work and never making progress on your dreams. These communities can be in-person or online. I don’t think it matters. As long as you have a tribe that fuels your fire, offers encouragement and inspiration, among many other things. On the flip side, I’ve found it less helpful to try to join as many communities as possible (more of this below on focusing on less things). Not that you should double down on a single echochamber, diversity of thought is always great; however, a community acts as creative catalyst, and if you’re part of many divergent groups, it can send you down many divergent, creative paths, which can lead to less focus, which can lead to you not grinding long enough on that one, special gift you have to give to the world. 

7/ Focus on a small set of things

I have a long list of things I want to do and try to accomplish. My default mode is to jump from whim to whim, enjoying the excitement of trying something for the first time and dreaming up a big idea. My friends and family must surely roll their eyes when I share yet another thing that I’m going to get into and make my life’s work (these fleeting obsessions of mine typically last no more than three months). This approach is a great tactic for understanding what you like and don’t like, but at a certain point, I discovered it was in my best interest to pick one thing. I was scared to pick one thing. What if I was wrong? What about all the things I was leaving on the table? What about all the different ways my life could go that it now certainly would not? These are all very real questions that rattle through my head when I make the conscious decision, day after day, to focus on one thing (which is writing). But making tradeoffs is a blessing, it supports the conviction of your focus. Giving yourself constraints is helpful, it reduces the cognitive load of making decisions: you can easily review an opportunity and make a yes/no call based on whether it brings you closer to your focused goal or not. So, pick one thing. Give yourself six months to do that one thing. You’ll be surprised where you end up after that time.  

And that’s what I’ve got for now. This list is not exhaustive. I might come back to it and add more later. Focusing on one of these and holding it as a personal truth, where it becomes my default reflex, has been tremendously helpful, dare I say life changing, in taking the ambitious critic in my head and turning it into a true friend and partner, one that inspires me, motivates me, and very rarely tortures me for not always working steadily towards its ambitions. Your ambition is not you, it’s a part of you, and an ally is always better than an antagonist. 

To put the payoff upfront – to give the “so what” before the context – let me list a few, tangible things the practice of daily journaling has done for me: 

• enabled me to change my career

• led me to move to a different city

• helped me develop deeper and more meaningful friendships

• and most importantly, and the throughline through all these changes, is it has reintroduced me to myself, creating a deeper sense of self-understanding, self-trust, self-love and peace 

Before I tell you the “how” of journaling, I think it’s important to define what I mean by “daily” and how I got into it. In early 2021, I got out of a long-term relationship. Or to put it more accurately, a long-term relationship left me. To say I was lost and confused is an understatement. A large chunk of my identity was fused with another person, and when that person was no longer in my life, a large chunk of my identity departed as well. This should read as a cautionary tale for how not to be in a relationship, but I digress, this article is not about my failed relationship. It’s about journaling. But this context is helpful. This is the emotional milieu that kickstarted my writing habit. I started journaling because I was sad, lonely and lost. 

You don’t need to start there. In fact, it would be lovely if you’re feeling the opposite of those emotions right now. But at some point or another, we all feel sad, lonely and lost in our lives. And that’s a great mental space to start a new habit. You’ll have the motivation and drive because if you are sad enough, you’ll do just about anything to feel better. 

My medicinal recommendation to stave off those feelings for as long as you can, or to put it another way, learn to cohabitate with them (you will never not be sad, lonely or lost for too long – this is something that journaling makes abundantly clear) is to try daily journaling. It’s easier on your body than running, it’s better for your liver than drinking, it’s less confusing than meditation and it’s cheaper than buying stuff. I’m not demonizing or condemning any or all of these other options, trust me, I’ve tried each one, but through a scientific experiment with a sample size of one, my evidence shows that daily journaling is the most effective habit to treat existential dread. 

So what is daily journaling? Let me break down both words:

Daily

In an oxymoronic twist, this journaling practice does not have to be daily. But daily is a satisfying proxy for habituality. I don’t necessarily journal every single day, but it is enough of a habit now for me that it has become interwoven into my daily life. It’s as natural for me to journal as it is to make a cup of coffee in the morning to start my day. That’s the level of habit I’m recommending here. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good enough. 

As with any other hobby or investment in your life, the results are compounding. And journaling is no different. If you want to learn the guitar, playing once a week for thirty minutes will not get you very far. You might be able to play one John Mayer song in its entirety after a few months. But that’s hardly worthy of calling yourself a guitarist or impressing people at parties with your six-string skills. Not that either of those are real reasons to pick up the guitar (they aren’t), but they are helpful heuristics for determining if you’re any good at the instrument. 

Journaling is no different. Other than the fact that it is far easier to do than playing guitar. It requires a lot less hand-eye dexterity and zero musical talent. 

tl;dr - treat journaling as a compounding skill that takes daily-ish investment to realize real results. 

And how might you form this daily habit? I recommend reading Atomic Habits by James Clear for techniques on how to weave this into your daily life. He has written far more about how to develop habits than I can ever hope to communicate. A few of his tactics that I think will help you pick up daily journaling are:

• Habit Stacking: Pair daily journaling with something you already do. For instance, if you make coffee for yourself every morning, when you hit the brew button, go sit down and journal for the duration of the brewing. Since you already have a coffee-making habit, pairing journaling, or “stacking” journaling, as Clear writes, is an effective way to make it a habit. 

• Two Minute Rule: Make the habit take no longer than two minutes. This is my favorite habit tactic for journaling. You don’t need to write the next great American novel every time you sit down to write. In fact, oftentimes, I write no more than a few sentences each day. Everyone has two minutes in their day to do something new or different (commence eye rolling).  

• Prime Your Environment: Also known as reducing friction. Make it as easy as possible to journal. For me, this means leaving my journal on the kitchen table with a pen inserted into the next blank page. I walk past it multiple times a day and all I have to do is flip open the journal and start writing. This is far easier than opening a drawer, grabbing my journal, rummaging for a pen – you get the picture. 

So now that you understand what I mean by daily, let’s shift to my definition of journaling. 

Journaling

If you take nothing else from this article, my one hope is to humble the word “journaling” from any temporal ivory tower where it might reside in your head. Journaling is not about being deep. It’s not about writing like Joan Didion. 

It’s not for anyone except yourself. 

My first rule of journaling is there are no rules. When you look back at past entries, if you’re not feeling juvenile, if not feeling insecure, if you would not die of embarrassment at the thought of someone finding your journal, then you’re not being fast and loose enough with the practice. 

If there’s any nectar in life that is the sweetest, it is the taste of freedom. And I’ll be damned if there’s any greater freedom than writing down whatever you want on a blank page. The page can’t judge you, the page can’t laugh at you, the page certainly can’t eat you. This is your place to unabashedly be you. 

So what should you write? Anything and everything. Write down the tasks you want to do in the upcoming week. Write about the dream you had last night. Write the insecurity you’re feeling this morning. Write a stupid joke that came to you as you were daydreaming during that really boring meeting that you don’t know why you still attend. Draw pictures of flowers. Sketch designs for the tattoo you are never going to get. Make a pro/con list for the decision you are trying to make. Draft a nasty email to that person you will never send. 

In short, do not confine yourself to any definition of what journaling should be. 

What I hope the above paragraph elucidates is that journaling is the practice of putting what’s in your mind, whatever it is, in whatever format, into physical reality. Making the temporal, tangible. Why is this important? Because there is so much shit going on in your mind. 

Psychology experts claim humans average 6,000 thoughts a day. That’s terrifying. And what journaling does, is it takes that mental exhaust, and distills down the most salient things in your mind – consciously or otherwise – and tattoos them into physical reality. As nauseating marketing folks would put it, journaling helps you find the signal amongst the noise.   

It’s also important to state that the medium for your journaling doesn’t matter either. You can write on napkins in restaurants. You can purchase a beautiful leather bound diary and nice ink pen. You can use the notes app on your phone. You can pull open an email draft on your computer and send it to yourself. You can live Tweet your stream of consciousness like Kanye West (although I might not recommend this one).  

My only true recommendation for the medium is to pick the one that has the least friction for you. What’s important is to write. What’s not important is where the writing lives. 

And this pontification on medium here leads to my final advice on the art of journaling, which is, there should be no expectation for you to re-read anything you’ve ever written. The thought of chronicling my life and saving notebooks and the relative utility of re-reading them to help my future self was a large barrier for me in ever getting my journaling habit started. That’s a lot of pressure to put on yourself. As I’ve stated above, write with reckless abandon. Don’t try to teach your future self anything. Don’t try to be poignant. Don’t think about how the words or doodles will stand the test of time. They won’t. Nothing really does. Especially whatever you put in your journal. Give yourself the permission and freedom to write whatever, whenever. This is how journaling becomes powerful and effective. 

There are so many places in your life where you try to be “good” and “respectable” and “not a shit head” – your place of work, your cousin’s wedding, with your kids, etc. – your journal is not one of these places. It’s a place to be sad and messy and uncomfortable and honest. It’s a friend that’s always there to listen to you, no matter how pathetic or self-involved you are each day. And maybe that’s why journaling is so helpful. It’s a crystallization of the characteristics of what a good life is but what reality often prevents in each of us – vulnerability, honesty, curiosity and freedom. 

I hope this essay is helpful. I hope you try to pick up journaling. I hope it changes your life as it has mine.

In this automated future, there would be no reason for human labor, as machines will do all work, and humans will focus on leisure, philosophy, arts and vocations of fulfillment, while all of their first order needs (eg food, shelter) and second order needs (eg entertainment, hobbies) will be met at no cost.

However, in modern society, classism and hierarchies have never been eliminated. Will this hold true in a post capitalist society? I think it will unless every human on the planet reached enlightenment and collectively decided to stop trying improve their standing in society. So in this end of classism version, there is nothing that would inherently provide someone more power, or “elite” status, than anyone else. This seems far off if ever achievable by Homo Sapiens. In contrast, in a post capitalist society where classism still reigns, the only things that will remain scarce, and therefore a limiting factor to denote classes, are 1) intangibles: fame, influence and admiration and 2) synthetic scarcities: 1 of 1 digital art, 1 of 1 skins in the metaverse. The first class divider (intangibles) could afford the new bourgeoisie the second class divider (synthetic scarcities).

The above plays out today in a capitalist society. However, the inputs and outputs are different. In a capitalist society, leverage for power comes in the form of capital, which is used to command human wage labor and technology. The outputs of that leverage are actual scarce resources (eg vacations, homes, fancy dinners, etc). In a post capitalist society, capital is no longer the leverage device. In its place, is information. You trade information (knowledge, time, etc) for synthetic scarcities (NFTs, etc). Your collection of NFTs (acquired via fame, not capital) then become your new class signaling device.