I agree with @grundomatic about the back-to-basics feel of our last meeting. Nothing revolutionary, but it still felt like a worthwhile discussion.
The topic we talked about that I find myself coming back to is environment design - specifically, how to design your personal environment so 'good' processes have minimal friction and 'bad' processes have maximum friction. It's not a new idea (the most basic rule of dieting is to not keep cookies in the house so you're not tempted by them) but I've been considering how you can take it way farther than most of us are will to, even on this forum.
Like, if you want to get in shape, you can make some small atomic-habits style changes so that it's a little bit easier to work out each day. Or you can just sell your car so that your only option for transport is to bike or walk, thereby forcing yourself to rapidly get into better shape*. If you want to spend less time using social media, you can download an app that helps you track the time you spend on your phone, or you can just put your phone in a closet for a month and see what happens.
To most non-ERE people, doing something like getting rid of your car seems crazy and way too hardcore, but we know people who have done it and gotten on just fine. I did it, and it definitely did introduce a lot of friction into my systems - though admittedly, not all of the friction was positive. It made it much harder to go see my friends, for example.
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I guess the idea of intentionally introducing large amounts of friction into my life systems feels interesting to me... I'm not sure why, maybe because it's unintuitive and the opposite of the way I would default to thinking about lifestyle design?
*This isn't meant to discount the value of little optimizations to your life systems. There's a lot of value to be gained from compounding small improvements. I just find it more interesting to think about the extremes you can take this idea to.
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grundomatic wrote: ↑Sat Apr 27, 2024 7:01 pm
My favorite tangent was talk about homing pigeons.
Same