B'chasdei Hashem, over the past almost 20 years, Beis Mevakesh Lev has produced over 13,300 audio shiurim and over 31,000 written posts, unmatched by any one-person website - all completely free of charge. There are no paywalls or anything else. Now we are turning to you for help so we can continue - any amount will help. Even 99 cents! Thank you to my sweetest and most beloved friends!!!:-)!!
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You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you.
The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging experiences of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good; lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign.
There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.
There is, annoyingly, really something to the idea that our childhoods have a massive effect on our later lives, and it’s possible to be totally convinced that you’ve gotten over your past while still laboring under all sorts of mental distortions as a result. At the same time, the point of engaging with all that stuff has to be to become more functional, not to develop an identity as a victim, or to constantly be peeling your skin off.
There is no such thing as enough dopamine. Whatever tells you that more will satisfy you lies. You will never, ever, ever reach the limit of your longing for it.
Productivity is not effort x time — if you want one quick way to burn out, it’s believing that you just need to crank harder in circumstances where your effort is not efficiently creating results.
Ideas are cheap and easy to find; execution is everything. Effective altruists would be a lot more effective if they internalized this.
It’s possible for someone to have a motivational system very different from your own and still be a force for good in the world. I’m turned off when people are motivated primarily by prestige, but many great works have been produced at the altar of social status.
Many social dynamics are paradoxical — social acts that seem weak from the inside, when undertaken without apology, actually read as very strong. For example, being willing to say “I’m wrong” or “I don’t know.”
If it’s really the path, you’ll find it more than once.
The people who make real change in the world are those who live on the knife edge between optimism (everything is really going to be okay) and pessimism (but everything is bad by default).
People are their own punishment, which means revenge is rarely worth it.
Almost as soon as something crystalizes into a useful handle for a pathology — trauma, autism, ADHD — it will be co-opted by a wide range of people who benefit from pathologizing relatively normal behavior.
You can save yourself a lot of grief when dealing with someone who’s upset by leading with: “Are you in venting mode or solutions mode?”
Knowing when to quit is one of the most valuable skills in the world. I have managed to achieve success in multiple fields only because I have managed to quit multiple fields.
Service is the only thing that makes anything feel better in a real, lasting way. This is because acts of service provide a temporary respite from the inherent cognitive dissonance of living selfishly.
If you always let people in in traffic, no one can cut you off.
Being able to live in the “world as it is,” rather than getting permanently fixated on the “world as it should be,” is a superpower. The classic aphorism is often true: “A liberal is someone who doesn’t understand the difference between is and ought.”
You will always feel bad about being mean to people after the fact, even if they deserved it.
“You are ruined by your gifts” — the traits that make you exceptional are the very same traits that show up in your neuroses and limitations. Learning to love the upsides, if undertaken with clarity and gentleness, also creates more space to address the downsides.
You can’t save the world if you can’t save yourself.
The freedom to be fully honest with other people is hard to overrate or even describe. It is always available to you.
Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.
It’s almost impossible to have an easy life and be interesting. Suffering is what gives people texture.
Forgiveness is a thing you do for yourself, not the other person. In fact, the reason to overcome most conflictual feelings is not for the benefit of others but for the benefit of your own soul.
Much of life, and increasingly so, is a battle against superstimuli encroaching on your mental autonomy.
You basically don’t need to worry about being too kind or too chill. If you’re the kind of person who worries that being a little more relaxed or emotionally open will destroy your whole life, you could probably stand to relax and be more emotionally open.
If you can train yourself to ask “is there a better way to do this?” at random intervals ten times a day, you will become unstoppable.
People who are eager to insist that every action is “selfish” because it reflects some kind of preference, or who claim that altruism is just virtue signaling, are telling on themselves — they might be very clever, but they should never be trusted with real power.
You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.
No matter how hard you try, you will always look back and wonder what the heck you were thinking.
