I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others.

Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart.

In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware—not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.

I had a chance to grab some drinks recently with a good friend of mine who I consider to be the absolute smartest person I’ve ever met.

As is often the case, our chat devolved into a brutal critique of the current state of affairs: the real threat of nuclear war in Europe, dealing with the ramifications of climate change, the weaponization of artificial intelligence, and so forth.

As we were wrapping up our chat, I got the sense that both of us were looking to each other for a glimmer of hope. Something that would allow us to go to bed thinking, “yeah, the world sucks right now, but we’ll figure it out.”

Wiliam Shatner’s observation about our species’ ability to be aware of such things might be the thing that we could have potentially used.

Our awareness is what gives us such existential dread in a moment in history that is otherwise the undisputed best time to be a human.

We need to balance our innate ability of detecting danger with our other innate abilities of strategizing and inventing.

After all, what’s the point of stressing about the future if there is no hope? What’s the point of fixing the future if we can’t also appreciate the present?

Seidel went to Eugene in late June, during the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships, for what is known as team processing, an administrative session to prepare athletes for international competition. They fill out paperwork and get sized for uniforms. And, new in 2021, athletes undergo a mental health screening.

Seidel answered the questions on the screener honestly—and her responses raised red flags. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) doctors, who administer the screening, referred her for treatment.

A USOPC spokesperson wrote in an email to Runner’s World that the test screens for anxiety, depression, eating disorders, drug and alcohol abuse, and sleep disorders, among other things. The results athletes provide are then flagged for follow up by a USOPC licensed mental health provider. From there, the athletes are connected to mental health resources.

“The screenings are not intended to screen athletes out of competition or off Team USA, but are a part of a broad approach to intervene and provide support to athletes who struggle with mental health, so they are able to achieve their goals,” the spokesperson wrote.

Seidel said she was connected with a new team of specialists, many in Salt Lake City. “USOPC set up everything for me and they’re continuing treatment for me,” she said. “Honestly it was so much easier being able to have them take the reins on it. And feel very much like, ‘Okay, they’re going to help me out on this.’”

I recall sitting with my therapist for the first time during my big depressive episode in 2021. I hadn’t said a word yet, and I started welling up almost immediately.

“I have no idea why I’m crying,” I said to her. I hadn’t even explained why I was there.

“It’s probably because you are feeling relief,” she said.

She was completely right. I hadn’t really appreciated the need to unload your trauma and to allow someone to help you unpack and sort through your anxieties.

I’d still say that 99% of the tears I’ve shed in the past three years came after being vulnerable and letting others help me.

I felt those same tears well up when reading this piece about Molly Siedel, particularly the section in the pull quote above.

Say what you will about our Olympic committee: this policy is a walk off home run. Kudos to them for offering help, and mega kudos to Molly for being strong enough to take it.

I’ve had the fortune of getting to hang around several Olympians, and hearing them share stories of the pressures they face is incredible. I’m glad they have an opportunity to get relief when they need it.

Moving your body, even a bit, has enormous benefits – again to almost all people towards reducing the probability and severity of almost all diseases. So can you imagine the benefit of moving your body for several hours per day in a natural environment, and including heavy load bearing and bits of extreme exertion?

These things are not speculative pieces of alternative medicine. They are known, easily and reproducibly tested, and proven to be the most effective things we can possibly do with our time.

So why, the actual fuck, are people still sitting inside, watching Netflix, driving to work, and then driving to the doctor’s office to get deeper and deeper analysis of a neverending series of exotic and mysterious and unsolvable problems with their physical and mental health?

Okay, okay, this got me to put the book on hold at the library.

What I find is that those who lean too much into this logic of optimization are the ones that suffer from a (literal) maddening degree of alienation.

It’s an easy trap to fall into as it is so very sensible: Why would you spend six hours cleaning (doing a chore you hate and doing it badly) if you could just work an additional hour and outsource that? So you hire a cleaner. And a cook, a personal shopper, an interior designer and a nanny. But if you don’t watch out, all your little self worth eggs, so to speak, are kept in the same work basket – and, step by step, you start to live the life of a stranger. You eat the food of someone else, wear the clothes of not-you, in an apartment that might as well be a hotel room, with kids that are more attached to their nanny than to you. Your vacations are glamorous, but there’s little connection to anyone or anything in them.

At this point you might start to feel a little unease. You might start to wonder why you’re unfulfilled and try to treat yourself better – so you double down. You get a PA because dealing with a schedule is annoying, you get a personal trainer because mens sana in corpore sano and while you’re at it, you also start therapy, where you learn techniques that help somewhat and where you analyze childhood events. But what somehow is kept at bay, in a fish-not-having-a-word-for-water-way, is that you identify with your job of optimizing processes to maximum efficiency to a degree that you treat yourself like any work project.

Boy, this pull quote within the bigger article here really struck a nerve.

Fortunately, I’ve been trying hard to not always make the optimaly decision lately. It’s tough to break the habit, but “good enough” often is just that.

"You become more resilient, and your body learns that the anxiety and stress isn't needed because there is no threat to losing anything when there's always more ways to gain what you want or need," says Papetti. "The only thing that's certain in life is uncertainty, so embodying an abundance mindset that trusts you'll be safe in the uncertainty is the secret to living a life of greater gratitude, ease, and satisfaction." 

Great advice in here for helping you to adjust your mindset. The journaling tip and the celebrating the wins of others tip are resonating with me as of late.

Style Guide Liberalism is only loosely connected to progressive politics. Really, it’s an expression of the worst kind of cynicism—the notion that we don’t really need to reform society or power structures but merely slap new labels on things. It’s a dodge, a pathetic sop to the left from corporations and other powerful institutions who at bottom don’t give a shit about any of this but assume that invoking on-trend progressive words and phrases will make up for all the injustice and misery they cause. As with any use of language, context is key.

Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available. At the time this was a 3.5-inch floppy disk.

Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That’s a huge consumer.

There’s also medical equipment, which requires floppy disks to get the information in and out of medical devices.

The biggest customer of all is probably the embroidery business though. Thousands and thousands of machines that use floppy disks were made for this, and they still use these.

There are even some industrial companies that still use Sony Mavica cameras to take photographs.

I found some floppy disks at my parents house a few years back and was able to get nearly all the data off of them.

One included photographs taken by a Sony Mavica.

This whole article made me appreciate the impermanence of our digital lives, and is also making me consider getting some photo books printed.

The most complicated reasoning programs in the world can be defined as a textual I/O stream to a leviathan living on some technology company’s servers. Engineers can work on improving the quality and cost of these programs. They can be modular, recombined, and, unlike typical UNIX shell programs, are able to recover from user errors. Like shell programs living on through the ages and becoming more powerful as underlying hardware gets better, prompted models become smarter and more on task as the underlying language model becomes smarter. It’s possible that in the near future all computer interfaces that require bespoke negotiations will pay a small tax to the gatekeeper of a large language model for the sheer leverage it gives an operator: a new bicycle for the mind.

I have a fairly lengthy backlog of Instapaper articles that I’m combing through, and I prefer to consume them in reverse chronological order.

This article is roughly 10 months old, and it’s funny how out of date it already feels (remember when GPT-3 was state of the art?).

But more importantly, the conceit of the article is still spot on. The internet (hell, pretty much all computers) are built on thousands of tiny programs, each programmed to do one specific task extremely well, interoperating together to do something big.

It’s like an orchestra. A superstar violinist really shines when they are accompanied by the multi-faceted tones of equally competent bassoonists, cellists, and timpanists.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.

Yet this Silicon Valley escapism – let’s call it The Mindset – encourages its adherents to believe that the winners can somehow leave the rest of us behind.

Humans got to where we are by a mix of individuals driven by a bootstrapper mentality and groups driven by a sense of cooperation.

I’d rather take my chances in gen pop than go at it alone in solitary confinement… but to each their own.

We choose the most convenient arguments to preach our convictions but demand bulletproof facts before we will rethink them.

It’s not just due to confirmation bias – the tendency to seize ideas that validate our views, while dismissing information that challenges them. It’s also because of distance. We’re often too close to our own arguments to evaluate them critically. To recognise our blind spots, we need other people to hold up a mirror.

I love arguing. I think it might drive my wife up a wall sometimes, but I often can’t help myself.

I love seeing all sides of an argument. I love learning new things and having my worldview shifted ever so slightly.

One of the people I enjoy arguing with the most is my father-in-law. Despite our many disagreements about people and how the world works, we always end each one on friendly terms, and more often than not, we each walk away with something new to chew on.