The Mind Did Not Age Well for the Internet
The information diet is unsustainable, full of unhealthy expectations and an ultraprocessed reality. Just as our gut microbiome craves junk food if used to it, so does the mind crave junk information. Just as the gut craves healthy foods, the mind craves nutritional content. Being healthy is being kind to the gut and mind. Nourish your informational gut microbiome instead of polluting it. Let the healthy bacteria flourish, not diminish. Be kind to your mind by feeding it nutritional content.
The Mind Loves Energy and Anxiety
Desire is the root of suffering, yet suffering is the root of greatness. The mind wants great things for you and has good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The mind wasn’t built for today’s information overload, so we naturally tune out external noise - we close our tabs. But there’s one tab that keeps reopening itself - the voice in our head, our internal monologue, our self-limiting beliefs and negative thoughts. Our mind virus.
The mind LOVES anxiety and is biased towards negative energy. It exploits this “infinite thought-loop” to harness negative energy internally, even when we’ve shut out external stimuli.
This isn’t a mere maladaptive feature, it’s a bug - a virus. Non-living, yet it requires a host (a negative thought) to self-replicate and cause dysfunction.
The mind gravitates towards extremes; outliers and out-of-distribution events capture our attention the most. We fantasize about success and are haunted by failures.
Seneca said, “We suffer more in our imagination than reality.” The ancient Greeks knew this 2000 years ago, yet we STILL haven’t fixed this mind bug that slams the brakes when we’re gaining momentum.
We remain haunted by our self-limiting beliefs, unable to escape the infinite thought-loops of anxiety and negativity hardwired into our psychology. We’re stuck with a mind full of legacy code that needs to be refactored.
The mind virus lives on, and it wants to live vicariously through imagination.
The Tragedy of the Thinker
If you start living, you’ll feel behind. We get feedback and perspective, and realize the bar for greatness. We get some distorted expectation that we’re failing because we see the highlights of the people “winning” at life, and can’t help but contrast our lowlights to these highlights.
The belief of being “too far behind” can make us give up. So we cope. We’re haunted by failure, so we fantasize about success.
The mind virus wants the best for us, it wants us to feel better and gets dopamine from thinking. So it conjures up a shadow of the thing we wanted, which is the brain’s attempt to work with the situation. Dopamine from thinking means getting worse at life, but the more we think, the less connected we are to reality.
We suffer from the vanishing gradient problem – the feedback from real experience degrades the more we think and get distracted by new thoughts. If we don’t act on the feedback soon enough, the gradient becomes zero. We never change and stay stuck in the tragic cycle of overthinking instead of experiencing and progressing in reality.
To progress, we cannot substitute thinking for reality. Thought is not a substitute for experience. Overthinking disconnects us from reality.
Infinite Money Glitch of the Mind
The decel mind virus has discovered an insidious “infinite money glitch” to keep itself stimulated and satisfied, despite leading you astray from real progress. It creates the illusion of work and forward momentum, even when you’re stuck in loops:
- The mind simulates the shadow or illusion of what you ultimately want but can’t immediately attain. This keeps it stimulated.
- When negative emotions arise from lack of real progress, the mind copes by amplifying and looping on the simulated desires.
- The more you engage with this infinite thought loop, the less real-world experience and capability you develop.
The tragic thing is that while exploiting this glitch, the virus still intends the best for you. The mind gets dopamine hits from merely thinking about and simulating success, tricking itself into feeling like it’s making progress when it’s not.
This infinite money glitch powers two of the virus’s common manifestations:
1. Thought Looping
- You start living and experiencing some success
- You feel behind compared to others’ curated highlights
- The belief of being too far behind seems impossible to overcome
- So you cope by doing the best you can with the shadows/illusions of what you want
- Engaging in maladaptive daydreaming where imagination temporarily relieves the anxiety
- But then the cycle repeats from the lack of real progress
2. Theorycrafting, or Paralysis by Analysis
Refers to the process of developing theories, hypotheses or strategies through logic, math, and analysis rather than through practical experience or testing.
- Step 1: Theory
- Step 2: Math to prove theory
- Step 3: Profit
If you skip step 2, you’re technically feelycrafting.
Faulty Assumptions (e.g., 0.90^7 < 0.50)
It is mathematically foolish to base your reasoning on many high-confidence assumptions. Recognize when you’re fooling yourself. Another reason to keep it stupidly simple.
Success = Selective Suffering that Leads to Greatness
- Success is winning the battles you choose
- Progress in the right direction is winning
- You can lose many battles but still win the war!
- Fight the good fights, not the bad ones
- Choose your battles wisely, and opt-out of those not worth fighting
- Two Ls make a W; 4 Ls make 2 Ws, and so on
Boy Math
- A static object requires more energy to move than a moving one. Feeling “behind” stems from lack of momentum
- We feel left behind when we feel stuck and see others moving forward
- It takes much more energy to overcome static friction than kinetic friction
- My boy math proves why we can feel “far too behind”
- Starting is hard and can feel hopeless. It requires a lot more activation energy to overcome that static friction and get started. But it takes much less energy to stay moving
So the tragedy of the thinker arises because they’re mechanically inefficient. They keep slamming the brakes on themselves every time they think in a different direction instead of continuing in one direction. So have conviction and be persistent.
- Stop stopping yourself from being great
- Stop slamming the brakes
- Stop preempting yourself
- Stop rate-limiting yourself
- Stop braking yourself
Sometimes the answer is just “by the principle of vibe.” Vibes are self-evident. If the brain goes “brrr,” then go “brrr.”
Principle of Vibes
The solution is the “f**k it, we ball” mentality.
- Once you’re balling, do whatever it takes to stay balling
- The one rule of compounding is never letting it stop
- When unsure, the solution can simply be: “Principle of vibe” – if it vibes, then vibe
Resolve your thought loops with Principle of Vibes so you can experience reality instead of whatever shadow your mind virus conjures up. If unsure, take action by the principle of vibe.
The World is a Pretty Decent Place
I’m not blindly putting faith in high conviction and persistence. I have faith in you because of the principle of vibe and boy math.
The principle of vibe is the “f**k it, we ball” mentality. When the vibe is right, go with it, like going to Tokyo with no plans and making it work via the principle of vibes.
Now go and win by the principle of vibe.
Shout out to Yash for the POV (Principle of Vibe).