You Are Going To Die: Leveraging Your Existential Dread For Fun And Profit

Syllabus:

1. You are going to die.
2. No, seriously. Dead. Like, dead dead. Forever.
3. Jesus Christ, pay attention, you’re running out of time!!!
4. Practical: putting the fear of God in your heart with a near death experience.
5. Okay, I can see from your shell-shocked faces that you are listening now. Now sit quietly and think about your inevitable death.
6. If you knew you would die tomorrow, what would you do with your last day alive?
7. If you knew you would live to 100, what would you want to do in your life?
8. At the moment you die and everything goes black, you will be alone and must look death in the eye and shake its hand. How will you prepare yourself to face this moment with courage, instead of curling up in a ball and crying like a little bitch?
9. Practical: seeing death out of the corner of your eye - questing into the wilderness and doing an ass-ton of mushrooms.
10. Breaking down your goals into smaller goals: creating an outline for your life.
11. Breaking down your small goals into itty bitty goals that arent so scary.
12. Just fucking show up: the most important part of getting literally anything done.
13. Stick to the program: giving up your ego and just doing as you are told to see if it works.
14. Every day: turning small steps forward into sustainable habits.
15. Playing the numbers game: how to make your own luck.
16. Practical: Grind it out - one month of being a hyper-optimized perfectionist
17. Burnout - what to do when all you do is delay gratification
18. Impatience and frustration: your biggest assets in getting things done
19. Evaluating progress and re-evaluating goals
20. Not good enough - if it’s important, never settle for anything less
21. I want it NOW - realize that your “sensible” plan is actually a form of procrastination
22. Practical: Pull the trigger - challenge your limiting beliefs about what is possible and do something that scares the absolute shit out of you to make your dreams come true.
23. Passive progress - focusing on changing your life so pursuing your goals becomes effortless.
24. The big keys: mindset, health, friends, and environment.
25. Mindset
    25.1) Go touch grass - when you feel hopeless, you probably just need to go outside and not think about anything for a while.
    25.2) Go touch grass - if you are chronically online, you will be extremely anxious about everything because the internet keeps your attention by telling you the world is scary and most people are evil. Stop it.
    25.3) Go touch grass - no, literally. Being in contact with nature will improve your mental health.
    25.4) Anytime something bad happens to you, it is your responsibility to turn it into a learning experience that you can grow from. Yes, even trauma. Especially trauma.
    25.5) Life is a mirror for your mindset - how your beliefs about the world reflect back to become outcomes.
    25.6) Be a contender, not a champion - the real victory is the journey not the outcome.
26. Practical: go backpacking in the wilderness for a week. No electronics.
27. Health
    27.1) Sleep
    27.2) Diet
    27.3) Exercise
28. Practical: do sleep, diet, and exercise right for once in your life.
29. Friends
    29.1) Making new friends: just walk up and say “hi”.
    29.2) Making new friends: go places where people who like the same things you do hang out.
    29.3) Deepening relationships - offering and asking for help.
    29.4) Deepening relationships - share feelings, not just facts.
    29.5) Asking for support - people love to help you when they can see you are already doing the work.
    29.6) Boundaries - establishing and maintaining them.
    29.7) Cutting people out when they are detracting from your life.
    29.7) Yeah, that goes for family, too.
30. Practical: pick a friend or make a new friend. Open up to them about a personal goal, and ask for their support.
31. Environment
    31.1) Pro surfers don’t live in Nebraska - how your environment impacts your success.
    31.2) Move to the right city - if the best in the world don’t live there, you are in the wrong place. 31.3) Move to the right part of the right city - if you can’t walk to where you work on your goals, you are in the wrong place.
    31.4) Move to the right home in the right part of the right city - if you can’t relax at home, you are in the wrong place.
32. Practical: Make a plan to move somewhere better next semester.
33. Remember, you’re going to die - appreciating each moment that you are alive.
34. Final: get wasted at a secret forest rave. Students will be graded based on how shamelessly they embarass themselves on the dance floor. Bonus points for getting shot down trying to hook up with an attractive stranger.

I highly doubt most high school seniors would pay much attention to a class about math and personal responsibility.

The land value and carbon taxes are key here. The carrot is people seeking better, happier lives and developers seeking to turn a profit - the lower bullet points serve to allow these carrots to be attained. But the taxes are the stick. And people tend to move a lot faster when you beat their asses.

A land value tax removes the incentive to speculatively hold onto land. Instead, it charges landowners a heafty fee to hold onto valuable land in or near walkable areas, which sends a clear message - build something (like housing or a business) that will make good use of this valuable land, or give it to someone who will.

Of course, this will light the fire under some asses. Owning valuable land is still valuable with a land value tax - it is just that the value is in the potential profit to be made, which is only realized if you build something. So expect land owners to be ready and willing to pay big sums to import the labor and materials necessary to get their land to a profitable state as soon as possible. And this would also be a strong incentive to use existing unused building space in walkable areas. All those luxury apartments with outrageous rents sitting empty would see steep price drops as owners scrambled to get someone in the door to make the building profitable. Same with all those empty storefronts which have been vacant as the landlord lazily searches for the “perfect” tenant. And all that office space in downtowns, unused since covid? Expect it to be rapidly retrofitted into affordable housing.

So while rents in walkable areas are screaming downwards, the carbon tax creates an additional incentive to move there. Of course, we pair the tax with a dividend, so an average person is actually making money from the tax - but the incentive is clear: the less carbon you emit, the more money you make. Which encourages people to choose less carbon-intensive forms of housing and transportation. Which means more apartments and cycling, and less detached homes and driving.

but there’s no way that’s sustainable

Why not?

Very fair. It works for me, but I am probably a better adherent to this particular strategy than most.

For sure! Good luck deciding where to go from here. Regardless of choice, you’ve done great so far and things are only going to get better!

Why not? The Netherlands does just fine prioritizing cycling for everyone - on par with the “childish” scooters and skateboards.

Nah. With the right reforms, we could make cities walkable in a decade.

• Land value tax
• Carbon tax
• End single use zoning and upzone everything
• End parking minimums and free public parking
• Streamline building permits
• More in-the-weeds zoning reform, like removing minimum lot sizes, removing setbacks, removing aesthetic constraints, etc
• Defacto policy of not removing privately installed speed bumps that people make in front of their houses

Of course, good infrastructure and transit would be nice, too. But these reforms would cost very little money and could be implemented immediately, and would likely result in a city overrun with chaotic, uncontrollable ebike traffic - which I’m okay with.

Suburbs can be walkable. Rural areas, too, depending on your definition of walkable.

What is disturbing about it? Cars are more expensive now, so we found something else? That’s the only way it would ever happen. People hate change. It is either “cars too expensive, so people change” or “traffic too terrible, so people change” or “cars too full of annoying electronics, so people change.”

If she was such a great existentialist, why’d she stop existing?

Yeah, I have a friend. She emancipated herself from her family at 16 and got her GED. Worked nannying and waitresssing jobs when she needed money, but otherwise spent about 5 years traveling the world.

Literally just apply to teach English in Asia. Typically the wage is a solid middle class income, and you don’t need to know anything about teaching or English.

You can also look into WWOOFing if you want to explore that.

Moving the goalposts. We can assume from context that they are speaking to an audience from developed nations.

Because people wanna know how to look classy and fancy, and they know that “old money” is snootier than “new money”, and they wanna emulate the snootiest of snoots. So influencers give some generic “dress fancy” advice and then call it “old money” so that people will give a shit.

New Money cares that you have a LV bag.

Old Money only cares if you don’t have it.

I would say look into surgery for the skin if you want.

Beyond that… what are your goals? What do you want? Because you are currently hot enough to be attractive to most people. You could be buffer or more cut, but if your concern is attractiveness, you have hit a point of diminishing returns with your body, and would be better served focusing on things like dressing well or becoming a good conversationalist.

If your goal is health - just keep doing what you are doing. Good job. Don’t overthink it.

If you just want a goal, my recommendation would be to get some kind of hobby that allows you to express your newfound athleticism in a fun way - martial arts, gymnastics/acrobatics, team sports, etc.

And if you are really committed to having the best looking body you possibly can - then it is time to stop pretending and become a bodybuilder. Sign up for a bodybuilding gym, make bodybuilding friends, hire a bodybuilding coach. Asking the internet for advice won’t take you nearly as far as really committing in real life

I’ve done IF in the past and I find it a pretty ideal solution. I think it is easier if you have a history of exercising a lot - enough to deplete your glycogen reserves - because this will train your body to utilize your fat stores more readily. I find that when I do IF, I might feel a bit peckish in the early afternoon, and then in the early evening I am quite hungry and eat dinner. I feel like it isn’t a big deal, and one of the big benefits is learning to experience the sensation of hunger and accept it, rather than thinking it is an emergency.

Why would I do that?

Because it would be an experience that brings you outside yourself, giving you the opportunity to directly witness the beauty of the human experience through others’ point of view.

Hence why I said “if you are reasonably self aware.” If you need actual, real help, obviously go to a therapist. But if your problem is “sometimes I feel sad” or “certain situations make me nervous” or “I had a shitty childhood and this is causing maladaptive behaviors”, then a chatbot can, like I said, be just as good as some journalling or a work book or whatever.

AI chatbots can be good for, like, therapy, if you are reasonably self aware. You can talk about your feelings, your life circumstances, and the chatbot can make some fairly generic suggestions or ask some fairly generic followup questions, and these can help you reflect and come up with your own solutions - kind of like playing with Tarot cards or something. Or they might help you roleplay some kind of event or situation, and that can be helpful.

But anyone saying that a chatbot is anything like an actual romantic partner is either lying for sensationalist hype or, quite frankly, insane. I don’t know about the specific chatbots in the article, but every chatbot I’ve talked to is very clearly a chatbot. If not immediately, then after a couple dozen messages. They forget things. They repeat themselves. Everything they “do” is a trope in the genre of fiction they inhabit. They can be fun to fuck around with - its a decent way to make personalized porn. But as an actual companion - no. This does not exist.