What would you need to say no to right now? You mentioned wanting principles partly to be able to say no. That’s really practical. If you told me what’s currently on your plate and what you’re considering, we could work backwards from the decisions you’re facing rather than forward from abstract values.
Initial brain dump - what to say “no” to
Social things
- A nice but plausibly nerd snipe-y thing about living in community is that there are a lot of unplanned hangouts that happen and you’re like “oh shit it’s been 3 hours, I was gonna do x thing”
- Tbf, this is a new problem for me, and a good problem to have, given that for the first 3 or so months here, I pretty much never hung out!
- A similar thing is events, like “let’s go to a night club”, and I’m like “ugh, I guess I should” , so I buy a ticket, and then when the thing comes around, I don’t go, because I don’t like it
- Also team meals here are often quite… shallow and non-connective. I could do a more skillful thing of bringing structure, have people check in for 2-3 minutes
Emotional work stuff
- There are some post-rat-types here, and I think I sign up for too much “emotional work” stuff that I don’t really need
- E.g., doing daily Joe Hudson VIEW conversations - seems like a good idea, but what’s the terminal goal? Is there other stuff I could do that would be better, e.g. stuff as simple as doing all the admin that I never get to, replying to messages, etc? Closing my open loops, innit
- Sounds good, so I guess I’ll do it, but it’s not actually connected to any first principle “oh yes I want to do this because it’s important to me for x reason”. Rather, saying yes to stuff like this by default because it’s like, VIEW is cool, Art of Accomplishment is cool, people like Joe Hudson a lot, and the guy who I’ve been doing the daily VIEW conversations with really loves the shit (in a way where it probably connects to a first principle for him)
Messages, dude!!!!!!!!
- Oh man, dude
- It’s such unplanned time, how I’m often sending voice notes on whatsapp and signal
- And also, I have so many aversive messages to reply to, from people who I don’t super want to talk to (family members, for example)
- Always drowning in messages. I’d love to just declare bankruptcy on a bunch of them, communicate to a large subset of people like “hey, I don’t do messages anymore, maybe we could email but we probably won’t”
Group chats
- I’m in a single group chat where we message a bunch daily, including probably an average of 1 hour per day of voice notes, factoring in speaking and listening. Indicative of not having a life? Lol. But it has led to incredibly high context friendships over time, the occasional google doc roast of someone else’s blind spots, etc. Feels easy to say that it’s too much time, but it has been pretty great