People remain surprisingly passive when faced with the prospect of death. Fear of public ridicule or losing one’s livelihood is more likely to drive men to extremes and the breaking of their customary habits.
It does make me quite anxious. I had already been anxious about it and now I’m maybe 30% more anxious than I had been.
My overall plan is to work my 9-5, make money, retire early, and then try to do something useful in AIS. I thought about forgetting the make money and retire early part due to the shorter timelines. But for whatever reason that sort of thing would make me anxious. I’d feel better knowing that I have the nest egg, so that seems like a good enough reason to pursue it. Plus I finally have a job that I enjoy, and I’ve been thinking that there might be some wisdom in what people were talking about in this thread regarding the sort of grounding that a normal job provides.
I’ve been a little bit more liberal with spending money on fun things. I’m planning a trip to Thailand right now that I’ve always wanted to take and never got around to before. I think the shorter timelines has influenced that somewhat, but not too significantly.
I don’t think much about long-term health stuff, a la Peter Attia. I’ve always gone back and forth about being a health nut, but now I feel confident that being a health nut is not worth it. I’ve even pushed things in the direction of not caring about eating unhealthy food, but I’m finding that eating too much unhealthy stuff isn’t worth it due to the short-term impact of how it makes me feel alone, physically and cognitively.
This one is probably unique to me, but I stopped caring about the risk of death due to things like Covid and cars. Previously I cared about that risk due to my having assigned a very high expected value to life, but that expected value has since gone down. Although given how things have developed with new variants being more mild and such, I probably wouldn’t be caring much about Covid anyway right now. Similar with the possibility of nuclear war.
Updates
I went to the dentist today. I have problems with teeth grinding that seem like they’ll cause TMJ and enamel erosion down the road (and have already started to). I could get a mouth guard. But mouth guards are uncomfortable for me to wear. So I have to weigh that discomfort against the down the road problems. The short timelines probably move me from “get the mouth guard” to “don’t get the mouth guard” here.
I had been spending time learning functional programming with Haskell and Clojure. I’d like to continue that—it’s fun and will be helpful to me in the long run—but now I feel like I don’t really have time for it and need to spend my time on higher priority things. Whereas previously I guess I figured that there’s time to get to the higher priority things down the road. Maybe this push towards focusing on higher priority things isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it is.
On a detail (!) there are mouth guards (‘sleep clench inhibitors’) that you wear in your sleep to train you not to clench/grind your teeth both at night & in the daytime. I’ve used one; my dentist got one custom made to fit my teeth. You wear them nightly for a week initially, then just once every week or two. Unpleasant the first couple of nights, but you soon get used to them. Worked for me!
Probably not as much as it should.
It does make me quite anxious. I had already been anxious about it and now I’m maybe 30% more anxious than I had been.
My overall plan is to work my 9-5, make money, retire early, and then try to do something useful in AIS. I thought about forgetting the make money and retire early part due to the shorter timelines. But for whatever reason that sort of thing would make me anxious. I’d feel better knowing that I have the nest egg, so that seems like a good enough reason to pursue it. Plus I finally have a job that I enjoy, and I’ve been thinking that there might be some wisdom in what people were talking about in this thread regarding the sort of grounding that a normal job provides.
I’ve been a little bit more liberal with spending money on fun things. I’m planning a trip to Thailand right now that I’ve always wanted to take and never got around to before. I think the shorter timelines has influenced that somewhat, but not too significantly.
I don’t think much about long-term health stuff, a la Peter Attia. I’ve always gone back and forth about being a health nut, but now I feel confident that being a health nut is not worth it. I’ve even pushed things in the direction of not caring about eating unhealthy food, but I’m finding that eating too much unhealthy stuff isn’t worth it due to the short-term impact of how it makes me feel alone, physically and cognitively.
This one is probably unique to me, but I stopped caring about the risk of death due to things like Covid and cars. Previously I cared about that risk due to my having assigned a very high expected value to life, but that expected value has since gone down. Although given how things have developed with new variants being more mild and such, I probably wouldn’t be caring much about Covid anyway right now. Similar with the possibility of nuclear war.
Updates
I went to the dentist today. I have problems with teeth grinding that seem like they’ll cause TMJ and enamel erosion down the road (and have already started to). I could get a mouth guard. But mouth guards are uncomfortable for me to wear. So I have to weigh that discomfort against the down the road problems. The short timelines probably move me from “get the mouth guard” to “don’t get the mouth guard” here.
I had been spending time learning functional programming with Haskell and Clojure. I’d like to continue that—it’s fun and will be helpful to me in the long run—but now I feel like I don’t really have time for it and need to spend my time on higher priority things. Whereas previously I guess I figured that there’s time to get to the higher priority things down the road. Maybe this push towards focusing on higher priority things isn’t a bad thing. Maybe it is.
On a detail (!) there are mouth guards (‘sleep clench inhibitors’) that you wear in your sleep to train you not to clench/grind your teeth both at night & in the daytime. I’ve used one; my dentist got one custom made to fit my teeth. You wear them nightly for a week initially, then just once every week or two. Unpleasant the first couple of nights, but you soon get used to them. Worked for me!
Interesting, thanks for pointing that out! I’ll look into it.