11. Sometimes you are “forced” to consume a drug. If you are in an airport, they play music and you see half-naked women in the ads at the duty-free. I wrote forced between quotes because I can choose not to go to the airport. But not going to the airport because of the previous reason doesn’t make sense to me. And the same for other activities. Hence, a skill is needed: in the presence of “unavoidable” drugs, I can train to not be affected by them. To repeat to myself, this is fake, there is not a woman singing for me. When my eyes look at the movie on another person’s phone, I close my eyes and tell myself there are not incredible things happening on the movie on the phone, but that those are happening outside.

10. Define technology as anything that is present now and wasn’t present in a primitive tribe. The highest risk of being confused by technology is when you think that you are of higher or lower status than you are. For instance, Instagram is a bigger problem than having lights at 10pm since Instagram distorts the perception of your status, while lights at 10pm distort your judgment on whether it is day or night, which isn’t a big problem. You consciously know that is night even if there are lights at 10pm, and you consciously know that the person you see on Instagram is not with you. But it doesn’t totally feel like nighttime with lights, and you don’t totally feel physically disconnected from a picture. Why is being confused about your status such a big problem? How fit you are is given by your social status, so primitively your status is the only metric that matters.

9. Why was smoking so widespread? Drugs have a “diffusion coefficient,” which I define as how much one person consumes a drug by not consuming it themselves but by being “close” to another person that is consuming the drug. For instance, on the airplane, you are close to people watching movies, and just by looking straight, you find yourself watching another person’s movie. If someone smokes, you inhale part of the smoke. Music almost doesn’t decay if someone is listening out loud (compare to how much smoke decays for the person that smokes versus a person close to the smoker.) It might be that drugs with high diffusion coefficient are more difficult to be recognized as drugs. A high diffusion coefficient also means that it is very visible when a person is consuming the drug, which makes it easier for the drug to use social pressure to make people consume the drug. And high diffusion coefficient initiates people in the drug since by being close to someone you are already consuming it.

8. A problem with the internet is that it comes with information you don’t ask for. Ads are an example of that. But it’s more subtle: you would generally see a photo of a pretty woman when you enter any online electronic store. And this makes you take irrational decisions. Why? That image is there because it increases profit, which means that if it wasn’t there, you would have bought less. So that the image makes you lose clarity.

7. Anorexia might be explained by the high quality of mirrors, which weren’t present in the past. Wait, but you can look at your belly without mirrors. Yes, but with mirrors you identify your belly with your identity because in the mirror you see your whole body. Also, the mirror shows you how other people see you.

6. I say, I stopped listening to music. She says, but music is a beautiful human expression. She is right, but also most of the time I was listening to music to not feel alone. If I am listening to music to appreciate it, go for it! Also, when I stopped listening to music, I started to create it. I found myself unconsciously singing songs I knew and new songs. I wanted to play the guitar more.

5. Stop exaggerating, overstating. More generally, stop “saying instead of doing”. It is an addiction, in the sense that we are tricking our primitive brains. Indeed, before language, you couldn’t say “I did this”. So people could only judge you by your actions. To impress people you had to act. Be careful with what you say. And with what you listen.

4. Having an addiction implies being out of your nature. But being addiction-free is not enough, you also need ethics.

4′. It is not that a “natural” life is a goal on its own. (Or is it?) But a fake life has confusion, it is not accountable. Having a true life allows us to fulfill our goals because what we feel is closer to what happens.

4”. To be able to point out why you do things out of nature. I have a curtain, why? because society lives in a shifted time and so we simulate as if there was less light.

3. Consider what motivates the people that generate the content. Is it communicating an idea? Or is it making money, which may translate into them optimizing the amount of consumption from you? Consider also the medium. You don’t become addicted to a single movie, or a single book. But you may become addicted to TV shows. Few things from nature are addictive. They need someone to refine them to become addictive. And this only happens if the person has a goal to make them addictive. This can’t be a goal for its own sake, but it is a by-product of another ulterior goal.

2. How much you enjoy something represents how much you needed it. If you keep saying that the food is not good, maybe you don’t need it as much. I feel rich people say that food is bad more often than poor people do, but rich people’s food is better in quality than that of poor people. If you want lots of enjoyment, go for a run of 3hs and only drink water at the end. The water will taste better than any other drink in the world.

2b. Doing something very hard has beauty on its own. Playing difficult chords in the guitar, solving challenging math problems. Pleasure is derived from action. Take that to the extreme: deep enjoyment is derived from exhaustation (not the only way.)

1. I sit close to the duty-free in the airport. I see people being hypnotized when they see things in the duty-free. I am not free of this: I got hypnotized by looking at the people that get hypnotized. Two reasons for me being hypnotized: (a) trying to understand people, and (b) believing I am different than the people hypnotized by the duty-free. Reason (a) is good, (b) is bad. Be conscious of what I will be hypnotized by. Perhaps you can’t choose every thought you have. But you can choose the context. A lack of deliberation can be deliberated.

0. Idea: an interface that shows one email at a time only showing the title of the email. Similarly for chat apps. More extreme version: a blank screen with a search bar, so that you have to check for messages manually by entering the name of the person. I use this extreme version for chats (you can do it too by using some adblock extension.) So whenever I want to send a message, I don’t have to look at all the other messages. Around once per day, I disable this interface and look at all the messages. The idea is that it doesn’t make sense for the sending and reading actions to be mixed, but companies do this because it will make people spend more time on the apps. You could tell me that you can look at the messages but just not answer them. But seeing a partial message and a profile picture (this only in chats) makes you feel you have to answer quickly. Why? First because of being curious about how the partial message continues. Second because we are not prepared evolutionarily for receiving a direct message without answering it (ever received a text saying something untrue about you and felt in a rush to answer?) I find it important to be reachable. For that, I use a flip phone that only supports calls and texts that I reserve for urgent things.

-1. Once I had a skin rash. When I put powder on my skin, it seemed I felt the same way as people feel when they take drugs. First something feels wrong with your body, as if your body is fighting against you. Then I started putting the powder and I felt a very big relief, as if there was harmony in my body.

-1′. On the street I saw a person walking quickly and weirdly straight into a corner to light up some drug. The person was walking awkardly like when you code a robot to walk and it doesn’t do it naturally. It made me think that when people are dominated by drugs, they act in a primitive way. But we only do that when survival is at stakes. The disstress coming from no drugs is like trying to survive.

Thanks to Harshu Musunuri for a discussion about 10.