Author: ryanewolverton

Something I’m quickly realizing as I write these posts is that I actually have pretty strong opinions on some things. It’s weird, because in public life I’ve gotten pretty used to not expressing strong opinions on pretty much anything. There’s this mental machinery that gets in the way most times, saying something along the lines of:

Whoever you’re talking to might have the opposite point of view, and you might upset them by being so militantly against it.

But really, they’re just opinions! They’re not going to kill anybody. If I find out that one of my strongly held opinions goes against the deeply held beliefs of someone I respect, that’s nothing more than an opportunity to listen to them. Hopefully we can both come away with an expanded view of the world.

I think the problem is that I expect everybody I interact with to act like people online do: holding their opinions as part of their identity, and freaking the fuck out when they are challenged. I might end up running into a handful of these people within the confines of this blog, but hopefully I will be able to see them for who they are (people that refuse to change their mind no matter what) and ignore them.

So if you do come on here and want to have a discussion about something that I’ve said, I am excited to talk to you, but I only have one request: please be nice!

I have found that LLMs are excellent short term therapists.

Let me be clear: I don’t think that means real therapy is going to be replaced anytime soon. Real therapy is awesome. Human to human connection about your problems is one of the few things that I don’t think AI is going to take over. A lot of the skills in being a therapist are interpersonal and contextual, which are things that AI is quite bad at (so far).

But there’s one thing that AI is able to do today that I think is extremely valuable: listening to you in your own words, without judgement, and providing encouragement.

I think a main function of therapy is having someone to talk to about the things that you don’t want to talk about with your family and friends. Maybe other people are more open than me, but I feel like blasting people with my deepest personal problems makes me less of a good hang. I feel like everybody has stuff that they don’t talk about that they wish they could.

Therapists step in here and say “You can say LITERALLY ANYTHING to me, and it is MY JOB to not be annoyed or judge you at all for any of this. In fact, it is my number one priority to help you out. I’m getting paid to do it.”

I think that this is a massive social good, and therapists deserve a shitton of money for doing what they do (and the profession does pay quite well!).

Recently, I’ve tried out something a little weird: I open an anonymous ChatGPT session, and I just rant about whatever little thing is causing me strife. I don’t know where this training data came from, but it always responds in the most compassionate, most understanding way possible, always making me feel like my problems are valid and that there’s a solution.

The only downside to real therapists is that you can’t text them in the middle of the night and have them immediately ready to help you out. ChatGPT fills that gap pretty darn well!

And yeah, I know that it doesn’t have real empathy for me, and I know that it’s just choosing the next word that makes the most sense, but darn it, it really helps me out!

As much as it’s become a cliche to make a product that is just a wrapper over a vanilla LLM, I think if someone was able to really nail down patient confidentiality they could turn this unexpected benefit of LLMs into something that helps a lot of people. People need support sometimes, and it seems to me like LLMs are willing to provide it ad infinitum!

If you were able to sell the mental effects of a 30 minute run as an anti-anxiety medication, you would be a billionaire.

This is a thought that crosses my mind whenever I go on a run, but I don’t usually bring it up to people because I feel like it comes off pretentious and holier-than-thou. But I’m on my blog so I can say whatever I want!

I think a lot of our ills come from not moving as much as we should. Most jobs nowadays consist of looking at a screen for 8 hours every day, and I don’t think that trend is going to reverse itself anytime soon. This makes it critical that you do some amount of moving in your off hours.

I think a lot of people hear the standard “you should move more” advice from doctors or whoever, and brush it off as something that might make them feel 10% better. I would like to weigh in and say that pre-run and post-run, my mood can get better by a factor of 100% or more. I can be a total mess coming out of a workday, filled with worry about how things are going to go, and come back from running as Confidence Man, a completely different person that has zero neurosis and whose life is going great.

It’s important to note that nothing about my life actually changes before going for a run. The only thing that changes is how well I think I’m able to deal with challenges.

I’m sure there are some complex physical things happening that cause this, but during and after a run I feel like I can do literally anything. A lot of the positive changes in my life have come from having the guts to follow through on something that I thought of on a run – the normal version of me would never be so bold.

Moving your body also makes you not worry about stuff that doesn’t matter

A few years back, I ended up inadvertently annoying this guy at work that was trying to help me out. He was an expert at the thing we were working on together and I was a total noob.

For a few days, I was fretting about how poorly our short interaction went. I was spending time with my family over the weekend, but couldn’t stop worrying about how I came off to this person. It made it so that I had a hard time enjoying things.

And then I went on a run.

This was a HOT run, and it was taking everything I had to just keep going. My mind habitually went to think about my embarrassing interaction, but I literally couldn’t. It’s as if my body was saying:

We are fighting for survival here! I am not going to waste precious resources on worrying about that stupid thing! You are being ridiculous!

And then I didn’t worry about it again.

This illustrates another excellent side effect of exercise: it stops you from worrying about things that don’t matter in the big picture.

There has been interesting new research stating that past a certain point, humans might expend the same number of calories regardless of if we exercise or not. This suggests that the body is capable of expending a lot of energy, even if you’re not doing anything. I think that a huge candidate for high energy expenditure while sitting in a room doing nothing is rumination and anxiety.

If you use some of that extra energy on exercise instead, you simply don’t have the energy to spare to ruminate endlessly about things. I think this is a big part of why exercise is always recommended for people with anxiety disorders.

So if you find yourself worrying about things a little too much, I cannot recommend this enough: get out there!!!!!!

I think the correlation between going viral on Twitter and mental illness is very high.

It’s not original to say that algorithms reward high engagement, and it’s well known that the emotions that get engagement the best are rage and despair. The people that do the best on Twitter and other sites like Reddit seem to, as a rule, think that the literal apocalypse is descending on us, and SOON. They have no problem expanding on how any given recent phenomenon is the last straw before literal genocide in the street. I think that the effects of reading this stuff on the daily is disastrous for your mental health, particularly if you’re a sensitive person.

We don’t have the mental machinery to take in every terrible thing that happens in the world every day. Doing so long term can erode belief that anything can ever be good, regardless of what your immediate surroundings look like.

So why do people do it? “You need to be informed” is something that a lot of people point at, but what does reading about every tragedy worldwide do to help? If anything, it turns you into a less effective, more anxious person that can’t do as much to cause positive change.

In fact, positive change is not emotionally possible if you don’t believe in the future. That is why I think this is so insidious: smart, driven people are spending all of their energy on panicking about the state of the world instead of feeling like there is something they can do about it.

It’s wild to me that we’ve gotten to the point where hope for the future is seen as naive. Hope for the future is all we have! All we’ve done as a species is fight for a better tomorrow; it’s who we are. I’m not sure where we lost that identity, but we need to pick it back up.

We, unfortunately, need money to survive.

All of our needs are met by people that have no idea who we are. The reason they do this is because we give them money. Without money, the post industrial revolution world that we live in would stop functioning. We would be able to live in small groups without many issues, but past a certain number of people you need money to make everything work.

Money is great for meeting your physical needs (I personally don’t know how to grow all of the food that I eat or build a house), but it’s bad news for your spiritual health. It turns out the best way to make money is to become so specialized that you have no idea what your work is actually doing. We weren’t built for interacting with such an advanced economy.

There is a cool movement on the internet called Financial Independence, Retire Early, or FIRE for short. They agree with the premise that working for money isn’t good for your spirit – and they have an actionable plan that gets you to a point where you don’t need to worry about money anymore and can sort of just do your own thing.

Famous economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay in 1930 called “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”. In it, he said that by the year 2030 there will be so much abundance that people will have 15 hour work weeks, at most. And the crazy thing is, he was completely right about the abundance part.

So what gives? Where are the 15 hour work weeks? It certainly seems like people are working more than ever – where is all of that surplus value going?

It’s all going to status games.

When you learn about the lives of the ultra rich, people that have more wealth than they would be able to spend in 30 lifetimes, you find out that they’re all just in huge dick measuring contests with each other. The size of the biggest yacht in the world keeps growing because that’s all these people can compete with anymore, it goes so far beyond practical that it’s obscene.

With our increasing wealth, you would think that we would hit the point of complete satisfaction for a human at some point. The problem is that there is no point where a human is completely satisfied – it’s written into our DNA. This has driven us to create amazing abundance, but it also stops anybody from ever thinking they have “enough” money.

The missing piece – “enough”

The FIRE community makes an attempt to correct this part of human nature – setting a level of “enough wealth” that is far below having super yachts. It does this by coming to a few important realizations.

First, your happiness does not increase that much past a certain level of spending. Once you’re making about the median American salary, all of your needs are covered, and if you’re prudent you can avoid being taken out by the unexpected expenses of life. Once you don’t have financial stress, your life feels much easier, and anything on top of that is just gravy that you can invest.

Second, the amount of money needed to sustain “enough” indefinitely is way lower than most people think. It’s nothing more complicated than your annual expenses * 25. For super spenders, this number is terrifying, but look back at point #1: you don’t actually have to spend a ridiculous amount of money to be happy. Even on a modest income, you can get to your “FIRE number” way faster than your usual financial advisor would suggest.

These points together (which were figured out just a few decades ago) have empowered thousands of people to take control of their time and energy decades before retirement, no longer being beholden to a paycheck from any employer.

Importantly, this does not mean that these people stop working. In most cases, they start working harder, but doing the work that they want to do, the work that they would do if they never saw a dime from it. I’m sure there are a few examples of “sit on the beach for 6 decades” style early retirements, but the working way just sounds more fun to me.

I think that anybody making more than the median American salary should deeply consider FIRE as a long term strategy. In my opinion, it seems like the best way to get the most out of your life.

Some people will look at the date of these first few posts and think that I’m crazy. They just invented robots that generate unlimited text! What do you think you’re going to contribute that can’t be generated ad nauseam?

I don’t have any illusions about how amazing my writing is going to be – the odds are, I’m not going to discover anything that wasn’t gone over by like, Plato hundreds of years ago. But I still think it’s important to try.

The AI models we use today were trained with what we can equate to the entire content of the internet. Everything everybody ever wrote and put online, you can make the assumption that it was used to train an AI. They contain the sum of every single hot take ever made from the last 20 years.

The thing I’m concerned about is that the hot takes need to continue. We can’t just have AI come up with them – it will just repeat what other people said before. That’s what I am hoping to help contribute towards: creating new text and ideas in an internet that is going to become more and more homogeneous now that there’s a profit motive behind making as much text as possible.

When well written but generic text is commoditized, all I have to offer is my unique perspective. I’m hoping I can use that perspective to connect with people and try to figure life out together, without always resorting to the conventional wisdom that AI models spit out all the time. Will I come up with anything particularly original? I’m at least going to try!

Why I wish there were more blogs

You may be familiar with the word “sonder”:

The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, with their own unique stories, experiences, and emotions. It’s the awareness that everyone, even strangers, has a profound, personal narrative unfolding around them, often without our direct knowledge or involvement

You can just imagine the Instagram aesthetic image behind this text, right? But regardless of that, it’s a powerful idea.

I feel like blogs are one of the few ways that you can actually tap in to a person’s inner thoughts without already knowing them closely. Every blog presents a new unique version of reality from somebody. Great bloggers are able to share their perspectives so well that they can change how others see the world.

As for me, I am just an intensely introspective person that needs a place to put all of these thoughts. So I hope that you enjoy coming along for the ride!

I am starting a blog. Exciting!