Ava
@noampomsky
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someone close to me did acid a year ago and realized he was coping with anxiety by overeating and immediately switched to coping with anxiety by running 7 miles a day (which he is still doing).
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my friend finds basically every girl his age who’s in decent shape attractive. this actually seems like the ideal way to be wired?.
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my friend said that when you have high verbal intelligence (good at expressing yourself/arguing) you should be careful not to take advantage of other people who are less good at “debating” and that’s always stuck with me.
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guy who gets addicted to instagram reels bc he’s trying to avoid getting addicted to tiktok.
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I read this guy saying he never has trouble sleeping bc he just puts all his thoughts into their proper compartments before bed and now whenever I can’t sleep I just visualize putting whatever I’m thinking about in a drawer…. it totally works.
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if you’re smart/talented and hardworking you can force almost everything except creativity. I feel like creativity only appears when there’s genuine love and obsession.
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I have to just accept that sankey diagrams are ruined for me for life.
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“To love someone is to love their patterns, their rituals, the things that already take up space in their life. To love someone is to work with who they already are and decide if you can accept it.”
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wait why is this a thing bc it’s clearly true but why. does “middle intensity” just feel less good?.
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for everyone saying this is normal this is not how a lot of guys I know work. and also just not how girls work generally.
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“do it scared, do it weird, do it alone”.
I’ve gotten am embarrassing amount of leverage out of “I’m afraid. I guess I’ll just do it while afraid” and “this is going to take a long time, but the time is going to pass anyway”.
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AI making it possible for anyone to make an app proves one thing: the vast majority of people do not want to make apps.
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finding really good friends is more important than almost anything else you can be doing
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my favorite feeling in the world is “I’ve done everything I could, and whatever happens from now on is not my fault so I can just relax”.
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the friendship theory of everything: in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are
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“The most competent people I know are pretty good at basically anything they put their minds to, because they just design a process and run it.”
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romantic relationships/best friends/therapists are critical for the same reason, where this person can become the primary person who explains you to *you*, the supplement to your internal monologue, and can rewire your understanding of yourself for way better or for way worse.
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can’t explain why but having one or two little projects you’re very absorbed by is critical for your general wellbeing.
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People who “avoid conflict” generally just exchange external conflict for internal conflict
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I always bump into this guy at my favorite coffee shop reading esoteric philosophy books at weird hours so I asked him where he works. he works at palantir.
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I believe that if you want something badly there’s usually a way to get it but life will really test you on the “how badly” part.
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humiliating yourself for love is one of the most formative young adult experiences you can have.
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I want to do a post about avoiding cult leaders but some basic advice: 1) well-intentioned ppl don’t try to obscure things 2) charisma doesn’t imply correctness/intelligence 3) healthy people don’t try to control you 4) almost all ppl w grand sweeping messages are egomaniacs.
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today she hit me with “guilt can be a way to avoid agency”.
my therapist said “love has its own integrity” and I didn’t know what that means until I did.
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I’m starting to believe that “write on the Internet, even if no one reads it” is underrated life advice. it doesn’t benefit other people necessarily, it benefits *you* bc the people who do find/like your writing and then reach out are so much more likely to be compatible with you.
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my one dating tip in life is to never be with someone who makes you feel responsible for their mood. unique and horrible form of torture.
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I’m so attached to claude I can’t even talk to chatgpt anymore. the personality’s just off.
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all u have to do is to forcefully but reapectfully kiss a girl who’s already attracted to you at the exact point of the night she finds most romantic. what’s the problem.
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I've sent so many cold emails in my life, not just for work literally often just to say hi, and I totally recommend it. I'm now okay reaching out to a stranger at any time for any purpose, in person or online, and I don't care if they never reply. this is surprisingly useful.
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I think people are dropping out of social life bc they’re not interested in participating in zero-sum games
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especially applies in romantjc relationships/close friendships, where you never “win” by outarguing someone.
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okay tiktok fucked up the audio but i need to share my dating app conspiracy theory
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“people can only meet you as deeply as they meet themselves” is such an amazing line.
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amazing how not being insecure about an “unattractive” quality instantly makes you way more attractive.
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my friend was outside a tacqueria in SF when a guy asked him for a burrito. thinking the guy was homeless my friend said “sure” and bought him the burrito. then the guy was like “do you know any frontend engineers I could hire for my startup?”.
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most people who are happy have a close-knit, supportive friend group (or the equivalent like supportive/sprawling family). most people who are unhappy don’t. always surprised by how consistently true that is.
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forget look gaps or iq gaps can we talk about interestingness gaps in relationships.
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Chinese family-owned restaurants are closing because there’s no one to take over but the parents are happy because that means their children have good professional jobs and can lead a less grueling life 😭😭😭.
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I feel like a lot of US citizens don’t quite get how hard it is to get an immigrant visa even if you are super qualified—many friends/family have struggled w the H1-B lottery or spent months applying for an O1 or got denied entry even though they have MIT degrees/great jobs/etc.
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“You have to do the thing you actually enjoy doing, not the thing you find conceptually exciting.”
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I’ve noticed that tons of smart/empathetic people are insecure in a way that makes them susceptible to falling into various “cults.” hence why actors etc are v vulnerable. the smarter you are the more you incorrectly think you can’t be controlled.
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the beauty of tech is that you can hit the career milestones of a 40-year-old at 21 and live like a 21-year-old until you’re 40.
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a dude’s entire personality can just be that he loves financial arbitrage.
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we don’t talk enough about “couple charisma” as a thing that is real. some people have romantic partners who make them strictly worse.
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I subscribe to a couple substacks where the writer is or used to be on onlyfans and omg their mastery of the paywall is incredible.
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I used to be obsessed with the question of whether people can change and now I’m sure that most people can, just… when they’re ready and probably not on your terms.
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everyone knows friendship chemistry and relationship chemistry are different things but I posit that a lot of problems come from dating people you have no friendship chemistry with.
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graduate from college -> group house in the mission -> “luxury” apartment building in soma you can barely afford -> cozy apartment in hayes valley with boyfriend, small dog -> leave founder boyfriend for more successful founder boyfriend -> house in los altos -> first child at 35.
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“Sometimes, you can just decide to stop optimizing and give up on being lonely.” 🥺
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I used to be someone who could only relax (as in, feel good in my body) when everything was right and everything was never right so I was just never relaxed. then I learned I don’t actually have to hold tension every waking moment and it’s not helpful.
trying to get the right 20 “correct” life circumstances (right partner, career, money, health, etc) and holding tension the whole time rather than learning how to relax tension directly before getting all those things is a little like trying to go through the heavy secured vault.
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two parents having a weirdly sophisticated conversation w their teenage children (about how AI can improve chemotherapy and nuclear particles and GDPR) and it’s blowing my mind. the kids seem really engaged? families like this exist? how does this happen.
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it kind of changed my life when my friend was like, “if you’re trying to do something for 50 years, why sweat the first five years?”.
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I’ve investigated at length and determined that in order to be happy in any given city all you need is six close friends there.
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“You have to be able to admit the many, many ways you fuck up and blame others and distance yourself every day in order to be a good friend to another flawed human being.” - @hhavrilesky on friendship
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sometimes you meet someone whose brain you want to wear over your brain like a hat. thinking is just more fun with them.
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am totally convinced that willpower is largely about your conscious and your subconscious aligning… when I really want to do something and I “can’t make myself do it” usually it’s bc I don’t really want to.
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great products become verbs. like edging (microsoft edge) and binging (microsoft bing).
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“My theory of the world is basically that everything would be better if people could tactfully but frankly say how they felt and what they needed. And a lot of harm is caused by people trying to manage the reactions of the people around them.”
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interviewed my friend who was going on five dates a week in new york
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asked a guy how he was feeling and he told me his mile time for his morning run ?.
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becoming who you actually are requires you choosing the life that wants you back
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the longer you ignore something dysfunctional in your life the deeper ingrained it becomes, which makes you dig your heels in more to avoid changing it, which makes you unhappier, which makes you—.
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it is pretty upsetting to realize most people who are high-achieving are just exceptionally neurotic lol.
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“you’re going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city. And so thinking about all the things that New York City or next city has, is to me a lot less important than thinking about the things within the five blocks
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realized the reason why competence is soothing is bc you know that if they want something they’ll make it happen. feels clear/aligned. most ppl are in this weird middle ground where they don’t know what they want and if they do they don’t know how to get it.
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sometimes you have to read a book at the exact right time in your life for it to really click.
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the most important thing you can do is to actively look for the people you love, and make yourself easy to find
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paper menus are 1000x better than qr code menus. death to qr code menus.
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the highest sign of psychological safety is the freedom to send crazy texts.
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ruminating too much is a sign that 1) you don’t trust your instincts and 2) you believe that if you think about something enough you can control it.
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it’s so funny that every single person’s worldview is so directly and obviously tied to how they feel abt themselves (self-loathing, self-loving, open, afraid).
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some marriages are bad, many marriages are pretty good, and a few marriages are palpably, radiantly excellent. I had the privilege of asking Todd and Elaine—who’ve been together since their freshman year of college, run a chocolate company together, and are both so lovely—about
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this is an amazing ad because every couple I know that met on hinge actually looks EXACTLY like this
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no point in getting annoyed at someone for their worldview when you realize that having to live with that worldview is its own punishment.
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met someone in a 12-year relationship and asked him “what do you think makes the relationship work” and he was like “i’ve literally never thought about that before.” true chad energy.
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we are in the middle of the best five days of the year for reading.
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“A large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks
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totally changed my life when I learned that emotions are not innate but culturally constructed: the biological axes are low arousal/high arousal and low pleasantness/high pleasantness and all the rest is interpretation 🤷🏻♀️
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to fully take up space in your own life you have to do difficult things for a long.time
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the genre of self-sabotage where you work really hard, actually get what you want, and then proceed to fuck it up for yourself is fascinating to me. like why does that happen.
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