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First day I was outside for a good chunk of that had really pleasant weather aside from a rainy bike ride in the morning. I was even able to walk around with shorts!

Had a really nice conversation with a friend over lunch about how we should determine our life goals. The sort of consensus we came to was that you shouldn’t have a fixed goal for your entire life, but rather that you should have a dynamic goal that you iteratively update as you learn more about yourself and whatever brings you genuine joy (however you define that). Relatedly we talked about type 1 and type 2 fun and sort of felt that type 2 fun may just be deliberately lying to yourself to convince yourself that you enjoyed it. We think that maybe if you are enjoying enough of what you are doing during a type 2 activity then it may be more of a deliberate lying in the sense that you are lying to yourself about the hardship you endured. That might not be such a terrible thing as enduring hardship can bring about future gains in a delayed gratification sense. Anyways its a little difficult and even uncomfortable to think about what really drives us.

Another related aspect we talked about is how another method you can use to determine what you should do is assign your time at $100/hour and only say yes to things that are worth more than that. I think it is sensible from the perspective of picking tasks that make you money (eg don’t grade assignments for $25/hour in a one off - you can use that time better), but it may breaks down when used in other contexts. The professor suggested buying pre-made meals that are cheaper than this price as one example (which is maybe just the professor justifying this to themself? Those are expensive meals you can allow yourself!). How do you assign a price value to cooking? You probably are not making that high of quality of meals, but maybe you enjoy cooking? How much do you factor in your enjoyment? Even worse is considering hanging out with friends? This easily lends itself to comedic sketches:

“Sorry I’d love to see you, but right now you’re only a $90/hour friend!”

The time pricing model can be helpful, but it does not seem to be a sufficient method for making all decisions in your life.


Daily Listening

This track in particular was in my head a lot.

Daily Reading

A bit social and busy with work so no reading.