(2026apr24) /copes/ is emerging as an important central node on my blog. Relevant blogs include…
- why were you late – I often share this story with people about an interaction I had with my boss that was very meaningful to me. I think it’s a good starting point because it conveys the emotional texture of flinching.
- safety rituals – everyone has reasons to be scared, and everyone has reasons not to admit that they are scared, sometimes even to themselves. this can result in some really strange, complex muddles, which we might then perceive inaccurately.
- /archives/taskmaster – conversation with a younger friend that really conveys how attempts to solve the problem are misdirected.
- we turn our lives into mostly-predictable sitcoms – fragments from a couple of conversations… about narrative homeostasis. we come up with a story and we stick to it.
- a theory of pissbabies – this was me attempting to transmute my frustration with a friend’s emotional incontinence into something funny and hopefully helpful
- how i rebuilt my trust in myself – declaring trust bankruptcy and starting over with baby steps (section 2.5 of introspect)
- emotional knottedness – sometimes rest doesn’t bring relief – you need to find a way to get into the knot and/or do something dynamic. sometimes what you need is ‘strength training’. (maybe worth considering in tandem with exhaustion funnels — why so tired?)
- rugpulls –
These aren’t all the posts, but I’m putting them here to look at them a certain way, to see if they spark some realization for me in a way that makes it work out.
(2025jan14) now updating the list to include everything in reverse order:
- beating yourself up is egotistic — it’s my fault and that’s a good thing —
- transmuting the 7 sins
- learn to laugh at yourself
- how to be more optimistic
- my experience of depression — how i rebuilt my trust in myself — earning self-respect
- the prestige trap
- notes on narcissism — notes on shame — on holding yourself hostage —
- narrow utilitarianism — just a youtube video for now, but I expect to revisit it
- “I’m such a failure” – youtube vids for now
- “shouldn’t I want to make the world a better place?” — start with yourself and the garden that you can tend to
- imposter syndrome – the solution is not in your head, it requires knowledge of the interiority of others
- write your memoirs
- happiness
- self-worth
- advanced stupid
- What does it mean to “process” an experience?
- rugpulls
to be further updated and consolidated
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trying to reduce reliance on a cope (cigarettes, screentime, etc) is very difficult. it gets much easier if you define an outcome that you’d like to inhabit, and focus on that. eg if you focus on wanting to get fit, run a 5k, etc you’ll likely find yourself smoking less as you progress.
similarly something like “I should spend less time on twitter” rarely ever works, I keep hearing from people beating themselves up over this. when i ask them “why do you wanna do that?” they often have vague answers. a strong answer will displace the cope. focus on what you want.
(I expanded on this in a substack note a while ago…
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it’s very rare that you actually need to have a focus on reducing X in order to increase Y. i’d go so far as to say that people often overfixate on reducing X *at the expense of increasing Y*. you end up seeing people impose all sorts of weird self-flagellate-y restrictions…
someone once DM’d me about wanting to be less overanalytical. n i’m like… why? “because it’s getting in the way of my life”. how? what does that mean? articulate it. precisely, what specific things are you not doing, bc of your overanalysis? prioritize the actual thing u want
someone else said, “i want to spend less time doomscrolling”. it’s the same thing. what do you actually want? until you articulate something you actually want, doomscrolling will win! if it were as easy as “stop doing X” everyone would’ve done it by now.
i went looking for a transcript of a chat i had with a friend about something similar the interesting thing to me is how people will… when they don’t have clarity about their goals, will often switch to “taskmaster mode”, and get mad at themselves about little imperfections
imho, generally speaking, the problem with most people isn’t what they’re doing wrong, but what they’re not doing right someone out there is doing everything you’re doing wrong, 10x worse, harder, and still way more successful and happy despite it because they’re doing Y right
suppose you listen to podcasts 4 hours a day and you feel like shit about it somewhere out there is a guy who listens to podcasts 6-8 hours a day, and somehow has a great life (ish? maybe?) despite it i’m not saying you should be like the second guy, but he’s worth considering
text I sent the doomscrolling friend: “if you 2x’d your output on the thing that mattered the most to you, you wouldn’t mind scrolling 8 hours a day” in his case he’s a writer, so i’m asking him to consider how it would feel to write a 2x better essay than anything he’s done
problem is that people get so acclimated to their circumstances that they struggle to imagine big wins and so they end up nickel-and-diming all the little fucken nonsense that doesn’t really matter, and then feel doubly shitty for it
to be updated