Rejecting Modernity & Enjoying Life

Over the past years there’s been one idea I’ve struggled a lot with, in simple terms it’s about if you should pay attention to ‘the world/society’ or not.

Another framing would be “how to most effectively manage information while getting all the upsides?”

I’ve not found a definite answer to this question but I thought I would share my views on this.

But why?

The extremes I’m talking about are best illustrated with the following tweets:

https://twitter.com/Crypto_McKenna/status/1555615118968233986?s=20&t=tDL20nSK9d8UEKYBfcCzWw

treehouse chad energy is real https://t.co/OMtVuAte3v

— Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) March 4, 2022

https://twitter.com/jackiehluo/status/1555279570806390784?s=20&t=tDL20nSK9d8UEKYBfcCzWw

And this image

In my case it is actually closer to home in the sense that my wife doesn’t know the narrative of the day, the week or the month or even the year, unless I share it with her.

In fact over time I’ve shared less and less ‘clown world stuff’ because I realize that “will this affect her? Nope, so why is it relevant? It’s not.”

This is especially true if you apply the lindy rule wrt books and information ie. If you think your time and the things you’re feeling is special, just read some Seneca or Marcus Aurelius to realize it’s the same old problems and stories across 1000s of years.

Closely followed by:

Death is scary. Embrace our faith and you can maybe live forever.

The myths don’t change, just the tools we use to spread and defend them.

— Nat Eliason (@nateliason) August 1, 2022

So the person I want to become most like is her but she would counter the argument and say that the only way she can choose not to care about the world without consequences is because she knows I will.😑 Goddamn why do we Indian’s always end up doing outsourcing😂

So what about me? Can I still stop caring about people, modernity, and society? What will be the consequences?

As you’ll see from this article, the reason I share this topic is maybe because I pay attention to wayyyyyyyy too many bubbles and have a very ‘overthinking’ personality🙅‍♂️

War cares about you

In 2019 I spent 2 months completely off the internet while traveling India. 

I didn’t care about the news, I was in 12 countries that year and even experienced a bunch of ‘disasters’

• I was in Sri Lanka during the Easter terrorist attacks
• I was in Albania when the massive earthquake happened

Yet in both cases I didn’t have to check the news for more than 2-3 days after the disasters. I even flew out/back in to Sri Lanka the week after the attacks and I didn’t face any negative consequences from not ‘having my hand on the pulse’

Fast forward to 2020.

We did a lite version of going offline, we were living in a cabin at a base of a volcano in Chile. I happened to be reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ at that time.

But it was Jan 2020 and the day we came out of the national park was when Covid was not only on my radar but it had escalated and was now obvious that this thing was relevant.

Here’s where the weird thing happened.

I couldn’t read.

I tried every couple of days to pick up the book and continue but I just couldn’t read.

Probably I could’ve read a popcorn book if I tried to but my attention was so disturbed by Covid that I couldn’t continue reading.

We had scenarios to think about so I needed to know what’s happening “out there”

• ”do we still try to go to Brazil for the carnival” we decided no
• In March once Italy locked down it was obvious the world would so “do we go to Peru and relax by the beach”
• ”okay it seems like we won’t be able to make it to Peru so we have to be in Argentina”
• ”alright let’s get out of the city so we’re not stuck in a city”

Anyways we made it to a nice house in a mountain town in the foothills of the Andes, 2 days later the entire world locked down.

1 week later, I could read again. Once we knew “alright we just chill here until this blows over”. I didn’t have to pay as much attention to the world as before.

Argentina allows people (in normal times) to overstay legally ($100 for 2 years, $200 for 4) so we were just going to hike, ride horses and chill until the world went back to normal. So I didn’t have to pay attention to the news anymore.

But I thought a lot about how my ability to read was lost. It made me realize that most people are living in that state of chaos all the time and think that’s normal.

And from another perspective I was slightly annoyed.

I had a funny conversation a few weeks ago when someone said “Jeremy you’re spoilt”

and I replied, “yeah and don’t you want to be? When did putting up with bullshit become a virtue?”

I was annoyed that the world took away my reading attention span for 2 months. You can find all the reasons why it’s ‘understandable’ (it’s a global pandemic ffs) but this isn’t about if it’s understandable or not.

So obviously on my journey of figuring out how my bubble was ‘popped’ I came across the quote by Trotsky

“You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,”

Or is it?

If the lesson Covid taught me was that ‘okay outside forces and narratives have lots of power over you so it’s important to have a pulse on them’

The Covid vaccine taught me the opposite.

For starters, there’s an idea I had best described as “the extremes see the other extremes and the people with nuance are invisible”

Update: Eric Weinstein quadrant does a better job of explaining this than me.

The Covid vaccine was very clear on this.

One group believes that the Covid vaccine saved lives and was a *net good* to society.

Another group believes that the Covid vaccine was a *net negative* and is harmful (to everyone).

My view like most people I knew was nuanced

1. I wasn’t in the risk group so I didn’t need to get vaccinated
2. I believed my parents (risk group) and a lot of other people should have had the option of the vaccine even earlier than they did and the FDA dragged their feet.
3. I believed that the vaccine was net good
4. I didn’t believe the (now obvious) lie that it was my responsibility to get vaccinated to prevent the spread (or the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ etc) which meant all mandates made no sense.

But I knew one thing was obvious. I was invisible. Group 1 only sees Group 2 that is against mandates because they believe that the vaccine is harmful to everyone.

So from the point of view of Group 1, “against vaccine mandates = believes vaccine bad”

This is a very very very important idea I wish more of my friends understood. It’s not that your view isn’t taken into account, instead you’re invisible and the groups don’t even see you.

The same way as the anti-crypto people just sees the gamblers investing in shiba Inu and don’t see the refugees using bitcoin to escape or fight tyranny or people in Argentina using stablecoins cause that’s their only way to hold usd.

”why the hell are you paying attention to that bullshit extreme? why can’t you see people like me and my friends? Why are you missing the point and just focusing on the extremes in the other side?”

Stop it, you’re invisible. Accept it and adapt to that world.

https://twitter.com/JeremyNoronha/status/1552321454242500608?s=20&t=jVVQXcXKlYHTO5WZ1ai32Q

Herd mentality, people going along with it because they need to, preference falsification etc mean that the group/system/narratives evolve along this way and your nuances are invisible.

Additional note: This is my biggest pet peeve with most conversations with friends today when they complain about other people. Stop always getting sucked into fighting the straw man, you’ll get a pat on your back but you won’t learn anything new.

eg. Instead of arguing with the 25 year old socialist zombie, take the actually time to go through some work of the Marxist internet archive. ‘Fight’ the strongman, because in that was you’ll actually get useful ideas.

So as obvious from the above I never got vaccinated against Covid.

Did I get any downsides from that decision?

• People think I’m crazy or won’t talk to me because of a medical decision or I had to hide the truth: unaffected because I didn’t have zombie people around me who could do that. You can’t cancel someone who’s uncancelable.
• can’t travel or limited freedom: I’ve been to 14 countries in 5 continents since the start of Covid✌️
• Unnecessary tests: Did 5 tests since the start of the pandemic for travel and would have done only 2 less if I got vaccinated.
• got Covid: yup twice and both knocked me out for only 2 days and I was back lifting 150kg a week later.

And now it’s basically a post mandate world.

So in my case it was the opposite of Keynes famous quote, “I could stay free longer than the system could be insane”

The false narratives, the illogical mandates vs no mandates, the virtue signaling, the ‘authoritarianism’, the #clownworld…

Did paying attention to any of that matter? A little in the sense that it helped me pick which country I would go to.

But past that? Not really.

My information about how every country from Albania to Vietnam to New Zealand to Argentina was with Covid and mandates didn’t prove useful at all.

I wasn’t going to convince anyone of any arguments against it so basically should’ve cared less and just enjoyed my freedom and saying “screw you guys I’m going home to enjoy life” to the clown world.

So the fact that people are still losing their jobs in certain countries or families are falling apart or schools have been closed in SF for 3 years in a row and that people are living lives governed by wimps…

I can genuinely say, “cool was irrelevant to me in the past and for the future as well, Outside analyzing human psychology pov but it’s not necessary to pay attention to it in real time”

You Can’t Just Dismiss Things, We need to Fight

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

– Martin Niemöller

You’re right I can’t.

But if we take 3 things as a given.

• life is fragile and I can die anytime
• Serenity Prayer/Stoicism aka let go of the things you genuinely can’t control
• bandwidth and attention span is limited so I have to value some things over others.

I might pull from the other extreme of caring less than I should but as I said at the start I’m still figuring this idea out.

For example let’s take Ukraine’s war:

• Is Putin being an asshole and killing innocent people on the streets of Ukraine? Yes
• Does Ukraine have the right to be independent? No, because rights don’t objectively exist and are just a human belief.
• Separate what you want to happen from the actual reality of the world
• ”The energy in the hearts of the people will win” Not if those hearts have bullets in them.
• Read: Realpolitik theory & Sovereign Individual for the economics of violence.
• Do I wish Ukraine to be happy, free and independent? Of course.
• Will anything I do change that? Nope
• Do I care about the opinion of people who believe I should care? No, if you are voicing for ‘self determination/rights’ for Ukraine but not Catalonia, Kurdistan, Kosovo or the infinite other nations I don’t care about your pov.

I actually had a discussion with my cousin who is deep in AI about this, we were talking about existential threats of AI. I read basically all of cold takes recently so it was on my mind

I remember saying, “AI risks are out of my control so there’s nothing I can do about it so I should probably treat it like the Ukraine-Russia conflict in the sense that I can’t control the direction of it but I need to know enough to protect myself and the people I care about.

But that might not be the case for you, because ai risks might be a place where you can actually do something, so while I can genuinely dismiss it you probably shouldn’t.”

Now here’s the thing, I might be in Moldova before the end of this year. I’m sure I’ll be 300km away from Odessa in a few weeks.

So can I just ignore the Russia-Ukraine conflict? Of course not that’ll be risky and I need to keep my hand a bit on it so that I know if the trip to Moldova is worth the risk or not.

But I’ll be paying attention to the “this is what’s happened and happening” news. And not the “this is how you need to feel about what’s happening or this is who’s good and evil” news.

Which in the case of Ukraine would be reading Turkish/Al Jazeera news and not American or western news.

Less fiat news, more dashboard news.

Despite all this including probably being near the Ukraine border, I’ll read less news than the average Twitter moralizer.

A lot of these practices whether around “the current thing” for or against are almost religious rituals that are a waste of time. Personally I’d rather read some of the classics of history.

Groups Of People I Dismiss

Here are a few examples of people who I basically almost automatically dismiss. Now you may have your own lists and don’t think you need to share mine (in fact, I might be on your list because I’m so ranty at times 😂 in my defense it’s more fun this way)

1. People who identify with a group because they’re insecure in their beliefs

People who don’t really believe in whatever thing they’re in and look to other people to believe in what they want. Eg. Bitcoiners who only believe in bitcoin if other people do, “creators” who need other creators around them to believe that the ‘risk’ they took was worth it etc etc.

Best described a child who’s starting to walk and is looking back to you to smile and give support. That behavior is fine as a baby, less so with grown adults.

In the past I used to spend more time helping people and giving support but over time I’ve realized it’s easier to help people who are walking to run vs getting people who are sitting down to walk and also my time is limited and I’d rather go ‘further’.

Read: When representation matters and perspective

2. People who don’t live in the real world

Most clear with journalists like Taylor Lorenz or vox or other media organizations that aren’t tied to reality. Balaji might still argue with them on Twitter but I personally can choose to completely ignore their pov because it almost doesn’t matter for how you optimize your own life.

Especially if you live in jurisdictions that aren’t influenced by bullshit.

https://twitter.com/JeremyNoronha/status/1549287874822111233?s=20&t=N0VHeyrUIPNcuM2ojero4g

95.75% of the world is not from the USA and yes you can ignore most of the American problems just as Americans ignore Yemen problems.

Me and my friends actively avoid meeting Americans here in Europe because it's literally the only group of people who can't avoid talking about politics/gender/race within 5 minutes of meeting them

Everyone else? Super chill and nice

— @levelsio (@levelsio) May 27, 2022

3. People who think that worrying about risks makes them special/different

People who point out risks and have a perspective of “look at me, I’m thinking about risks, I’m smart and avoided that thing” yah cool fuck off. Eg, people who never did a bitcoin transaction talking about the “what if” risks, people who never ran a webpage talking about risks of seo, people who don’t lift weights talking about possibly of injuries etc.

Pessimism is the default in the world. Pessimists have this point of view of “it’s only stupid people who are optimistic” it’s kinda like the stupid “if you’re smart you can’t be happy”. Yeah cool.

Worrying or highlighting risks doesn’t make you smart if you don’t take the risks into account and actually act, but most people just worry and then never act.

“The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge.” – Aristotle

Almost everyone I know sees the same risks you see, then just choose to integrate them and act.

Learning The Wrong Lesson From History

There’s a simple example to illustrate this. Pets.com is a really popular example used by ‘I’m smart and think about risks, haha I wouldn’t invest in crypto”

Here’s a simple question. If Pets.com is an example of how people were “stupidly” throwing their money at startups and tech, who lost the most money on Pets.com?

Cool some rando named Jeff Bezos…such a dumb fool believing people would buy pet food online.

The wrong lesson is “look at those risks, it’ll be another pets.com”

The right lesson is “Pets.com was a bit too early for its time but the people who decided to stay after the hype and build ended by basically making the lost money back (times 100) and everything Pets.com talked about became a reality in the next two decades.”

Think about the following the next time you hear a stupid economist who’ll use Pets.com as an example without knowing who lost the most money.

s/o to Dan Morehead for bringing Pets.com history to my attention.

4. People with opinions without research or experience

One of the reasons I write or have a book list on my site is to send my friends down rabbit holes. Like here go all these books before talking about this subject.

“But those people don’t have time, their opinion still matters”

If they don’t have time to go down the rabbit hole and read 5-10 books, I don’t have time for their opinions.

Can their opinion still be useful? Yup

The world is so big that they’re literally experts who spend all their time studying subjects. Why pay attention to the people who seem popular but have no idea what they’re talking about.

However there’s a big big caveat, I try my best to isolate people and only dismiss them on the subject they’re uninformed about. A surgeon can be completely uninformed on money & taxes while being completely informed on surgery.

This conversation is always hard because people think you have a superiority complex when you say stuff like this, but in almost all of these things they’re objective metrics on which you can judge people’s information.

Also at the end of the day, it’s not about winning arguments, it’s about just winning.

As I said in No adults in the room, they’re no adults in the room, but they’re people who’re adults/experts on specific subjects. Take ideas in isolation, punch the ideas, ignore the people.

https://twitter.com/JeremyNoronha/status/1542781159784042503?s=20&t=QaC_WK4-N2SjoFK_TglRgA

God is dead

Join me in the deep end

Everyone has heard the quote, “God is dead”

A highly highly dumb (probably something I believed when I first became an atheist in my early teens) take on it is “haha god doesn’t exist, why are you still going to church or praying?”

But I thought I would share the whole quote over here:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Another way I have rephrased it when sharing with my friends is

God is dead. We have killed him, we have his blood on our hands. We used the systems of religion to navigate this world but that same system led us to over analyze religion and believe we could move past it. Now that he is dead, how are we going to replace him? What new ‘religions’ are we going to buy into? Who are we going to follow? Who else are we going to sacrifice?

(The quote contains multitudes but for this article my paraphrasing works)

That’s the quote. That’s the point.

Not “god is dead haha yay atheism”. It’s “fuck! we’ve moved past religion as a society, what crazy mess is going to replace it and how do people create meaning in it”

Alright now that you understand the entire quote let’s see a simple example of this in the real world.

Legal Vs Illegal

A good way I’ve tried to describe modern especially western societies is multiple generations of people not asking themselves if things are good or bad and instead asking if things are legal or illegal.

Basically statism has replaced Religion. GOD -> GOV

It’s completely rational when you think about it. Modern day legal systems are structured in such a way that everyone is guilty. There’s always some fine print somewhere that makes someone ‘guilty’.

So the way the ‘system’ works is the lite version of the Soviet Union where there’s ‘dirt’ (making people’s life hard with fine print) on everyone but the system only goes after people that it wants to.

So if that’s how society works what’s the rational action? Don’t stand out and just be like everyone else.

It’s most illustrated in the following.

don’t start a business because taxes I’ll become complicated and what if I make a mistake.

Or “yes it’s completely legal for Fed officials or sitting government employees to play the stock market on inside information”

Intent of Laws

So now if you accept my premise of how society works

• People as a whole don’t care about good vs bad and instead focus on legal vs illegal
• Everyone is guilty so people will do whatever is necessary to stay in line.

so the evolutionary correct action is ‘don’t stand out, stay in line with everyone else’

Now let’s talk about Digital Nomads:

Being a digital nomad is *technically* illegal in many countries in the world. Why? Because it’s breaking the exact text of the words of the law.

Cool.

So let’s take Thailand in isolation and see how that evolved.

1. Thailand started being a digital nomad hub 15+ years ago.
2. It started getting big, many articles and videos about it. Even entire coworking spaces dedicated to it.
3. Fast forward to 2014, Boom a coworking space raided and digital nomads arrested.
4. They were questioned for a while and then let go.
5. Fast forward and Thailand makes it easier to get digital nomad visas and even stay longer and no digital nomad has been questioned since.

”But they’re guilty”

Yes, by the word of the law but not the intent.

What’s the word of the law?

”It’s illegal to work on a tourist visa”

What’s the intent?

”it’s illegal to come into the country on a tourist visa and steal local jobs”

No digital nomad was breaking the intent of the law while everyone of them were breaking the word of the law. The more the government questioned people the more they realized this.

Another example of this was my interaction with Swedish immigration recently.

Officer: “Where are you going to stay”

me: we have this airbnbs booked

O: your wife, does she live in Sweden?

me: she’s a citizen but we’ve been traveling full time for about 3 years

O: you have your outbound flight

me: yes here.

o: alright cool and *probably looking at proof of funds on her list* you work online so that’s alright.

*stamp* welcome to Sweden.

me: *smirking*

I didn’t tell Swedish immigration that I worked online (which I don’t actually anymore). In 2024, when I said “yea we’ve been traveling for years” she just made the obvious assumption and considered it normal.

Young immigration officers now consider it normal if you’re on a tourist visa and going to work online, and it doesn’t matter if you have digital nomad visas or not. (It never did because you never broke the intent of the law)

Why do I share both these stories?

Because in the past 10 years and including today they’re probably 10,000 and maybe even 100,000 people who could travel the world and never did because they’re too afraid of the grey area of digital nomadism.

Even on Reddit, the past month in 2024 there was a Brit who wanted to only go to countries that clearly said they allow people to work online legally.

Think about the fear in people that they’re so afraid of breaking laws even though they know that they’re ‘right’. This is what happens when a society replaces right vs wrong with legal vs illegal and people lose autonomy.

So here’s the question, is it worth paying attention to that perspective when the reality of the world as I just described is so different.

Or do you just realize that they’re millions of businesses that were never started because people are afraid, that at the minimum 10,000 people didn’t go on that digital nomad trip cause they were afraid of legalities. Read: That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen

Another example I remembered was a Swede who didn’t want their (obviously free) birthday gift in Bitcoin cause they didn’t know how to deal with its taxes.

Do you gain anything in your life by having those perspectives?

Or do you treat them like you would an Indian not eating beef or a middle eastern not enjoying bacon like ‘cool bro, you do you’

Well, to some extent you should pay attention. If your goal is to solve any of those problems for those people Eg. create a business tax tool, a digital nomad legal service or bitcoin education. You benefit from paying attention to them.

But past that isn’t that perspective just pointless and (here I’m probably talking to myself🫣) you should probably just ignore them.

I’ve always struggled with this, firstly it happened with fitness where ‘sure 39% of the world is overweight’ (yes bmi isn’t accurate etc but obesity and overweight % rise equally so🤫 ) and their pov on health and especially diet and fitness is completely irrelevant.

But that doesn’t mean they’re no consequences, cause if you live in a socialized health care system, you pay with higher taxes for other people’s stupid health decisions.

Like most things in life, it is a trade off.

Another examples I can use to describe this effect:

One of my friends believes that Jordan Peterson is just self help for young men, it shocked me cause that’s the least interesting and honestly most boring part about jp along with his stupid political fights.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, ‘Where’s the self-help section?’ She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

– George Carlin

Personally I always gained value from his biblical lectures and old maps of meaning lectures. But my friend had never been exposed to either of those bubbles and believes that Jp is just self help motivational bullshit.

Another example of the extremes only see the extremes, there’s depth in a lot of bubbles but learn to quickly ignore the shallow noise and go deeper.

So action items!

There’s a quote from Fintwit that came across my radar earlier in this year that I can’t find. But paraphrased it’s:

“When global debt is at the level it is, the money printing is a switch for the economy not a dial. Everyone is forced to be a macro day trader.”

I agree with it. But I also don’t want to be affected by it.

As you can already guess by now, while other people want to argue about if something bad will or will not happen my pov is along the lines of “this bad thing is probably going to happen to society, how can I be unaffected by it?”

A friend of mine compared me with my friend John saying, “if there’s ever a revolution, Jeremy will find a loophole to be comfortable reading his books in some national park, John is probably on the frontlines”😂 I couldn’t disagree

Here’s a recent video of John on Ari Shaffir, highly recommend a listen to get the opposing pov of why you should care.

So one easy way to understand how to be unaffected would be by me explaining the idea of Flexibility reserves.

Flexibility reserves is an idea I picked up over the years from Jerzy Gregorek and Christopher Sommer (Both podcasts I’ve listened to 5+ times over the years)

I’ll sum up my idea of flexibility reserves as:

1. Let’s say you don’t work on flexibility

Naturally you might have 60 points of flexibility (just a made up number, think of a credit card limit)

Day to day you’re probably unaffected , you go about life as normal using max 30 points.

Even in your day to day sports training you’re normal cause you only need 50 points

But let’s say one day you wear a new pair of shoes and you weren’t adjusted for it and you basically end up injured. This happens to a lot of professional athletes.

Really? A new pair of shoes/lifting a suitcase at an airport/reaching for the top shelf caused you to injure yourself?

It’s not the shoes, it’s that your flexibility was “just enough” for you to play the sport in a “comfort zone” but not outside it.

You did not have more reserves than you needed.

It’s a fitness version of living paycheck to paycheck.

Another example is people thinking they have too weak wrists to do Olympic lifts (I believed this). Really? Maybe you just never made getting strong wrists a priority.

2. Now let’s say you max flexibility by doing Pilates, yoga and gymnastics.

You improve your flexibility along with your strength and always have more than you need. Ie need 60? Have 90. Need 100 points have 150.

Eg. I deadlift 160kg but I probably have the ‘flexibility reserves’ to Deadlift 200kg safely.

By the time I reach 200kg, I’ll have worked on my flexibility to increase it to 250kg and so on. So I’m never really using up all my reserves and putting myself at risk of injury.

If you’re going to play a professional sport you probably should be doing yoga just as often as you train. And If you’re the strongest person in the gym, you should become the most flexible.

Applying this to the finance, if you need $10k/mo to fund your lifestyle, doesn’t it make more sense to make $5k*4=$20k diversified across different assets and businesses, so that even when times get tough you’re basically unaffected?

The more reserves (both in $ and fitness) less you need to be right/careful.

If you have just enough money to get by, you need to be more “right”. If you have a buffer, you can afford to be wrong more often (which you will be).

”Jeremy are you literally saying ‘just make more money’ 😑”

To some extent kinda, but not really.

Reserves isn’t just in income or net worth, another example can be let’s say you have a freelance career that’s easy to handle and grow but once you reach a comfortable income you stop taking on more work.

You stop running the rat race and say no to money in the short term.

You give up money for freedom and just make less money and explore ideas. So you always have “reserves in ability to make more money when times get hard” and you continue to expand that by jumping s curves.

Apply that idea of reserves to everything: countries you are comfortable living in, business you are comfortable building, jobs you’re easily capable of doing, bubbles where you can bring value to other people, frameworks/mode of thinking that you are able to handle, etc etc.

At the end of the day, it basically is all about getting anti fragile so that bad things will happen but you’ll be unaffected and don’t have to even think about those things.

But as I shared in Freedom.

Most of the freedoms you’ll get aren’t hedonic goods it’s internal and will come from within.

You need less “Reserves” by being comfortable with less, not being emotionally negatively affected when something bad happens and being at peace in chaos.

So possible conclusion would be the less you need, the less you need to care

and, the more reserves you have, the less you need to care.

It’s simpler (but harder) to get rid of insecurities than it is to try to fulfill those insecurities.