Awesome lists! Those were both funny and inspiring.
I decided to mix the three prompts together. Here’s my babble:
Entice your directionless, mobile, remotely-employed, twenty-something friends to move to your area. Practice radical honesty with regard to what it’s like to live there.
Find out how much of your regular diet you can replace with rice and beans before your quality of life drops too much. It might be a lot, and food is expensive.
Have a friend visit you for a week, and goad them into expressing opinions about your town/city. See with fresh eyes, vicariously.
Get some sweet genital piercings
Visit a bunch of places that you have been told are “nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”
Go for a long walk.
Longer than you just imagined.
Still not long enough. Think bigger.
Experiment with wardrobe changes and keep an eye out for changes in how people treat you.
Reread “The Intelligent Social Web” and pick one small thing to try to influence in your own web. (For example, if your family uses lazy insult-based humor as their default mode of relating, try imagining the conversation tree in advance and memorizing good retorts.)
Intentionally build up an appreciation of all of the little cosmic jokes around you. (Did you know that Netflix doesn’t let you watch any Captain America movies if you’re located in the US?)
Try calling a friend every day during lockdown.
Wear progressively more makeup every day until someone comments on it
Get into a friendly rivalry with your friends over who has the best home workout during quarantine
Boop your dog’s nose with your own nose. Heheh awww.
Set up a video conference room that lets you amble around with free hands instead of sitting at a desk or holding your laptop out in front of you.
Try Direct Primary Care (DPC) and supplement with high-deductible insurance
Squeeze your dog’s tail and see what they think about that
Get a dog for your dog
Get a health-share plan
Make your dogs wear diapers and treat them like precious little babies. When your friends express distaste for this, simply appeal to cultural relativism and ask them to leave.
Stay in an AirBnB for a couple of weeks with no easy internet access. Break your routines and rethink your life.
Pick some regional peculiarity or stereotype and try and lean into it. If you live in Berkeley, try lowering your Conscientiousness with drugs. Do some Hippy Flipping and then see how long you can talk about the trip without your friends trying to change the subject. If you live in Canada, start peppering in “eh” to all your sentences, until it stops feeling like a deliberate and ironic affectation. If you live in Oxford, dress up even more. If you live in the American South, try becoming a football fan. Try to set personal record for hours spent talking about football in one day. If you live in Michigan, buy a camo jacket, make a quarterly gun budget, and start hitting the range at least once a month. If you live in New York, start acting like an apprehensive, surly asshole...or an au courant and haughty élite—either way, stay focused on the negative. If you identify as a rationalist, do any of the above and put an awesome rationalist spin on it.
Start writing a novel featuring people like you and your peers. It worked for the protagonist of the 2002 hit comedy “Orange County”
Quit memes, cold turkey. If you’re already clean, start imbibing them in huge amounts.
Try babbling?
Put the dog in a headlock and give em a kiss on the snout.
Try actually using one of your rationality techniques for once. Start a journal, make a pro/con list, google it, write down a line of retreat, write your hypothetical apostasy, readdress the hamming prompts, generalize your financial budget, or so on.
Clean your damn room. Take pictures of it while it’s clean, frame them, and hang them up.
Trade some money and convenience for mobility and flexibility. Use the mobility and flexibility to have a summer home and a winter home.
Delete your twitter account, delete the app, and surround it with barriers and encumbrances in your browser.
No Dad, YOU’RE a disappointment!
Try an elimination diet.
Get some coordinated motion with your people. I hear this is one of those deep human needs.
Join a sports league. Or just somehow be playing a group sport on a regular basis, with people you like for non-sports reasons.
Dance parties. Dance classes?
Watch some action movie about an elite special forces unit pulling off some crazy extraction or something. Imitate what you see, except with paintball guns. (Real flashbangs though, obviously.)
Gnarly escape rooms that require human pyramids and shit.
Get vaccinated and go out for a karaoke night with your peeps.
Infiltrate your local MRA group and write an ethnography
Instead of shopping around for a “good school”, try making your own rationalist homeschool. The teachers can help the students make and do real things that aren’t forgotten 2 weeks after the exam.
Urban exploring
Toughness is a virtue. Don’t activate the heater and the long sleeves as soon as the first snowflake of the year hits the ground. Try cold meditation or something. Become worthy of the ancestors whom you sing about once a year at solstice.
Same but opposite for hot summers
Grift all your friends into joining your niche fetish subculture by approaching each of them privately and telling them that all your mutual friends have already privately signed up for the next kink event. It’s like a Dominant Assurance Contract, except instead of putting money at stake, it’s your social capital and reputation for honesty. This is in fact how DomCon got its name*.
Less unethically: get your favorite friends to come visit you and intermingle with your local friends. Get your visiting friends to talk and behave in ways that look especially cool and enviable to your local friends. Get them to discuss/do things you wish your local friends would discuss/do.
*That’s not true, I just made that up. Puns like that just write themselves, I’m sorry.
Awesome lists! Those were both funny and inspiring.
I decided to mix the three prompts together. Here’s my babble:
Entice your directionless, mobile, remotely-employed, twenty-something friends to move to your area. Practice radical honesty with regard to what it’s like to live there.
Find out how much of your regular diet you can replace with rice and beans before your quality of life drops too much. It might be a lot, and food is expensive.
Have a friend visit you for a week, and goad them into expressing opinions about your town/city. See with fresh eyes, vicariously.
Get some sweet genital piercings
Visit a bunch of places that you have been told are “nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.”
Go for a long walk.
Longer than you just imagined.
Still not long enough. Think bigger.
Experiment with wardrobe changes and keep an eye out for changes in how people treat you.
Reread “The Intelligent Social Web” and pick one small thing to try to influence in your own web. (For example, if your family uses lazy insult-based humor as their default mode of relating, try imagining the conversation tree in advance and memorizing good retorts.)
Intentionally build up an appreciation of all of the little cosmic jokes around you. (Did you know that Netflix doesn’t let you watch any Captain America movies if you’re located in the US?)
Try calling a friend every day during lockdown.
Wear progressively more makeup every day until someone comments on it
Get into a friendly rivalry with your friends over who has the best home workout during quarantine
Boop your dog’s nose with your own nose. Heheh awww.
Set up a video conference room that lets you amble around with free hands instead of sitting at a desk or holding your laptop out in front of you.
Try Direct Primary Care (DPC) and supplement with high-deductible insurance
Squeeze your dog’s tail and see what they think about that
Get a dog for your dog
Get a health-share plan
Make your dogs wear diapers and treat them like precious little babies. When your friends express distaste for this, simply appeal to cultural relativism and ask them to leave.
Stay in an AirBnB for a couple of weeks with no easy internet access. Break your routines and rethink your life.
Pick some regional peculiarity or stereotype and try and lean into it. If you live in Berkeley, try lowering your Conscientiousness with drugs. Do some Hippy Flipping and then see how long you can talk about the trip without your friends trying to change the subject. If you live in Canada, start peppering in “eh” to all your sentences, until it stops feeling like a deliberate and ironic affectation. If you live in Oxford, dress up even more. If you live in the American South, try becoming a football fan. Try to set personal record for hours spent talking about football in one day. If you live in Michigan, buy a camo jacket, make a quarterly gun budget, and start hitting the range at least once a month. If you live in New York, start acting like an apprehensive, surly asshole...or an au courant and haughty élite—either way, stay focused on the negative. If you identify as a rationalist, do any of the above and put an awesome rationalist spin on it.
Start writing a novel featuring people like you and your peers. It worked for the protagonist of the 2002 hit comedy “Orange County”
Quit memes, cold turkey. If you’re already clean, start imbibing them in huge amounts.
Try babbling?
Put the dog in a headlock and give em a kiss on the snout.
Try actually using one of your rationality techniques for once. Start a journal, make a pro/con list, google it, write down a line of retreat, write your hypothetical apostasy, readdress the hamming prompts, generalize your financial budget, or so on.
Clean your damn room. Take pictures of it while it’s clean, frame them, and hang them up.
Trade some money and convenience for mobility and flexibility. Use the mobility and flexibility to have a summer home and a winter home.
Delete your twitter account, delete the app, and surround it with barriers and encumbrances in your browser.
No Dad, YOU’RE a disappointment!
Try an elimination diet.
Get some coordinated motion with your people. I hear this is one of those deep human needs.
Join a sports league. Or just somehow be playing a group sport on a regular basis, with people you like for non-sports reasons.
Dance parties. Dance classes?
Watch some action movie about an elite special forces unit pulling off some crazy extraction or something. Imitate what you see, except with paintball guns. (Real flashbangs though, obviously.)
Gnarly escape rooms that require human pyramids and shit.
Get vaccinated and go out for a karaoke night with your peeps.
Infiltrate your local MRA group and write an ethnography
Instead of shopping around for a “good school”, try making your own rationalist homeschool. The teachers can help the students make and do real things that aren’t forgotten 2 weeks after the exam.
Urban exploring
Toughness is a virtue. Don’t activate the heater and the long sleeves as soon as the first snowflake of the year hits the ground. Try cold meditation or something. Become worthy of the ancestors whom you sing about once a year at solstice.
Same but opposite for hot summers
Grift all your friends into joining your niche fetish subculture by approaching each of them privately and telling them that all your mutual friends have already privately signed up for the next kink event. It’s like a Dominant Assurance Contract, except instead of putting money at stake, it’s your social capital and reputation for honesty. This is in fact how DomCon got its name*.
Less unethically: get your favorite friends to come visit you and intermingle with your local friends. Get your visiting friends to talk and behave in ways that look especially cool and enviable to your local friends. Get them to discuss/do things you wish your local friends would discuss/do.
*That’s not true, I just made that up. Puns like that just write themselves, I’m sorry.
This is amazing, I cried from laughing.
this post is pure gold. If I could give more Karma, I would give it :)