Finally coming around to this one, I found that I was a bit disappointed in myself that I wasn’t able to generate as many leads as I did last Bug Hunt.
While I’m maybe not perfect at keeping my identity small, when I was visiting the identity, I found that I’ve already been pushing on the problematic areas, to the extent that I didn’t find anything interesting while examining where my identity may be too big. Following the heuristic of Inverting Advice, maybe I could invert this and ask where I might have too small of an identity? Or perhaps it can be worthwhile for me to just try to write out everywhere where I know I have identified too big of an identity in the past.
Regarding Pica, I suspect that there may be something to it, but if there is, most of it is flying under my radar. I was able to identify soda, video games, and walking as activities that may have pica-like motivations; I find that I most crave soda when I haven’t been eating enough (I always enjoy soda, but perhaps I’ve been drinking it more than I normally would lately due to suboptimal food intake), video games I generally have a positive relationship with, but I find myself wondering if some of my motivation lately to play videogames has something to do with me not doing practical things that my mind is built to want to do. I also suspect that walking may have provided some benefits in the ancestral environment that I’m not getting from walks in the modern environment; walking used to be a mode of transport, a way of exploring one’s locale, and something that could lead to discovering new resources; of course, none of these happen on my walks (aside from meeting people, but lately even that hasn’t been very helpful). Maybe there is some deeper purpose my mind hopes to achieve when it tells me to go for a walk? But then, I’m not sure this is true. Maybe I just go for walks because it’s good for the mind and body, when I’d otherwise be inside all day. It’s a thread to pull on.
Regarding Ambition, I think that I’m already quite good at pulling things in the direction of setting crazily ambitious goals—to the extent that I’ve lately grown somewhat jaded at overly ambitious goals, and now I just groan when I consider a goal that doesn’t seem realistic; instead of the wild excitement that Xiaoyu’s heart felt when he kept doubling the intensity of his ambition, the groaning in my head just grew louder and louder as I raised the stakes. I instead decided to invert this advice, and try to make realistic goals out of the wildly ambitious goals my brain gives me, but halving the stakes until I felt confident in my ability to achieve them. I turned the goal of increasing by 1 kyu in Go every week to the goal of increasing by at least 1 kyu every month. I turned earning $1,000 every month to simply earning at least $10 every month. Another low-ball goal I generated was to just photograph a person; I’ll let your imagination figure out what the original goal was.
For the daily challenge, I’ll lean right into it. My most subjectively immodest ambition is to govern a city-state on the Moon with at least 250,000 inhabitants, all of whom are people who are selected according to criteria I set. Actually, I can do better than that. If I want to be as subjectively immodest as possible, I want to govern the entire Moon, with a population of at least a billion people. That’s plenty immodest, and makes my heart throb with joy.
Finally coming around to this one, I found that I was a bit disappointed in myself that I wasn’t able to generate as many leads as I did last Bug Hunt.
While I’m maybe not perfect at keeping my identity small, when I was visiting the identity, I found that I’ve already been pushing on the problematic areas, to the extent that I didn’t find anything interesting while examining where my identity may be too big. Following the heuristic of Inverting Advice, maybe I could invert this and ask where I might have too small of an identity? Or perhaps it can be worthwhile for me to just try to write out everywhere where I know I have identified too big of an identity in the past.
Regarding Pica, I suspect that there may be something to it, but if there is, most of it is flying under my radar. I was able to identify soda, video games, and walking as activities that may have pica-like motivations; I find that I most crave soda when I haven’t been eating enough (I always enjoy soda, but perhaps I’ve been drinking it more than I normally would lately due to suboptimal food intake), video games I generally have a positive relationship with, but I find myself wondering if some of my motivation lately to play videogames has something to do with me not doing practical things that my mind is built to want to do. I also suspect that walking may have provided some benefits in the ancestral environment that I’m not getting from walks in the modern environment; walking used to be a mode of transport, a way of exploring one’s locale, and something that could lead to discovering new resources; of course, none of these happen on my walks (aside from meeting people, but lately even that hasn’t been very helpful). Maybe there is some deeper purpose my mind hopes to achieve when it tells me to go for a walk? But then, I’m not sure this is true. Maybe I just go for walks because it’s good for the mind and body, when I’d otherwise be inside all day. It’s a thread to pull on.
Regarding Ambition, I think that I’m already quite good at pulling things in the direction of setting crazily ambitious goals—to the extent that I’ve lately grown somewhat jaded at overly ambitious goals, and now I just groan when I consider a goal that doesn’t seem realistic; instead of the wild excitement that Xiaoyu’s heart felt when he kept doubling the intensity of his ambition, the groaning in my head just grew louder and louder as I raised the stakes. I instead decided to invert this advice, and try to make realistic goals out of the wildly ambitious goals my brain gives me, but halving the stakes until I felt confident in my ability to achieve them. I turned the goal of increasing by 1 kyu in Go every week to the goal of increasing by at least 1 kyu every month. I turned earning $1,000 every month to simply earning at least $10 every month. Another low-ball goal I generated was to just photograph a person; I’ll let your imagination figure out what the original goal was.
For the daily challenge, I’ll lean right into it. My most subjectively immodest ambition is to govern a city-state on the Moon with at least 250,000 inhabitants, all of whom are people who are selected according to criteria I set. Actually, I can do better than that. If I want to be as subjectively immodest as possible, I want to govern the entire Moon, with a population of at least a billion people. That’s plenty immodest, and makes my heart throb with joy.