Halo! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a very special "Centennial" edition, as we celebrate issue #100, and then explore humility, connection, intellectual honesty, happiness, and classic rock. Enjoy!

First, a celebration of reaching 100 issues of TDD, which is also our two year anniversary! Iamsofuckingexcited!! THANK YOU for all of your support along this ride by reading, replying, sharing, and role modeling over these past couple years. Simply put, life and this digest are better because of your participation. I deeply appreciate your contributions, and feel honored that you let me reciprocate by sharing this with you every week!

For those of you who joined midway, this digest is largely a result of three desires: 1) Wanting to do a better job of capturing learnings and takeaways from all of my various content consumption; 2) Wanting to synthesize those learnings and takeaways into a useful and lasting format; and 3) Wanting to  share the best of those learnings and takeaways in a manner more thoughtful than ad hoc social media posts. 100 issues and two years later, and here we are! Mission (kinda sorta) accomplished.

As always, your feedback is incredibly important in making sure TDD is the best that it can be!  In that spirit, I have one very important question for you... What is the #1 thing that TD Digest can do to add joy and knowledge to your life? My goal is to put gigantic, wise smiles on your face for the next 100 and beyond :D

Source: Giphy

• MORNING MANTRA OF THE WEEK - HUMBLE MYSELF TO AIM UP
   
• ARTICLE - The New York Times: How Not to Be Alone by Jonathan Safran Foer - Jonathan's touching op-ed reminds us of the implicit trade-offs we make when connecting via more advanced technologies.
   
• BLOG POST - Wait But Why: The Thinking Ladder by Tim Urban - Tim's 'The Story of Us' epic continues, this time with an incredible deep-dive into the different mindsets of knowledge acquisition.
   
• ARTICLE - The New York Times: Five Lies Our Culture Tells by David Brooks - Another engaging op-ed from David Brooks advocating for self-transcendence and personal leverage over traditional career success and autonomy.
   
• MUSIC - Smash by The Offspring - A classic rock album, and one of my favorites from the angsty teen years.

• UT Southwestern Medical Center: AI helps scientists predict depression outcomes: Studies show brain activity patterns influence effect of antidepressants - "We need to end the guessing game and find objective measures for prescribing interventions that will work. People with depression already suffer from hopelessness, and the problem can become worse if they take a medication that is ineffective."
   
• University of Nebraska-Lincoln: Stressed out: Americans making themselves sick over politics: One in five report lost sleep, damaged friendships - "Politics is really negatively affecting a lot of people's lives, or at least, they're perceiving that politics is really negatively affecting their lives in deep and meaningful ways."
   
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: The Link Between Self-Esteem and Social Relationships: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies - "The reciprocal link between self-esteem and social relationships implies that the effects of a positive feedback loop accumulate over time and could be substantial as people go through life."
   
• Examine.com: Will eating breakfast keep you lean? - "Overall, it is likely that breakfast is commonly part of a healthy lifestyle that promotes weight loss or the maintenance of a normal BMI, but it isn’t the cause of either. When the effect of breakfast is directly tested (as in this meta-analysis), no positive effect on weight loss is seen."

• After On: Exponential Medicine |  Daniel Kraft
   
• After On: The Science & Practice of Happiness | Laurie Santos
   
• The Portal: The Dark Laureate of Generation X | Bret Easton Ellis

• Scientific American: A New Theory of Obesity - "This “ultraprocessed” food, he and a growing number of other scientists think, disrupts gut-brain signals that normally tell us that we have had enough, and this failed signaling leads to overeating."
   
• Aeon: The well-educated person - "We might see in Aristotle’s well-educated person... one who is evidence-sensitive, reality-focused and aware that the Universe itself is a vast experiment of which we are lucky to be a conscious and thinking part."
   
• Aeon: The consciousness illusion - "The subjective world of phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains in order to help us track the impact that the world makes on us. To call it a fiction is not to disparage it. Fictions can be wonderful, life-enhancing things that reveal deep truths about the world and can be more compelling than reality."
   
• The Cut: Who Would I Be Without Instagram? An investigation. - "After countless adventures through the black hole, my propensity to share, perform, and entertain has melded with a desire far more cynical: to be liked, quantifiably, for an idealized version of myself, at a rate not possible even ten years ago."

• Brain Pickings: Why Love Hurts: The Sociology of How Our Institutions Rather Than Our Personal Psychological Failings Shape the Romantic Agony of Modern Life - "The institutional organization of marriage (predicated on monogamy, cohabitation, and the pooling of economic resources together in order to increase wealth) precludes the possibility of maintaining romantic love as an intense and all-consuming passion."
   
• Farnam Street: A Wandering Mind: How Travel Can Change the Way You Think - "Be open to growth. Travel is an opportunity to choose to be different. Anticipate that you might add to the construct that is “you” when you travel."
   
• J.K. Rowling: On Writing - "Ultimately, in writing as in life, your job is to do the best you can, improving your own inherent limitations where possible, learning as much as you can and accepting that perfect works of art are only slightly less rare than perfect human beings."

• Sensible Living: Reflecting on the Fine Essentials of a Beautiful Life
   
• TSD Ventures Consulting - We give Proactive Health companies strategic and financial clarity for the best path forward.
   
• TSD Ventures Coaching - We help our clients build healthy, fulfilling habits.

• It is harder to intervene than not to, but it is vastly harder to choose to do either than to retreat into the scrolling names of one’s contact list, or whatever one’s favorite iDistraction happens to be. Technology celebrates connectedness, but encourages retreat... My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others.
   
• Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.
   
• ...[A] funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes. It’s easier to make a phone call than to schlep to see someone in person. Leaving a message on someone’s machine is easier than having a phone conversation — you can say what you need to say without a response; hard news is easier to leave; it’s easier to check in without becoming entangled. So we began calling when we knew no one would pick up... Each step “forward” has made it easier, just a little, to avoid the emotional work of being present, to convey information rather than humanity.
   
• People who become used to saying little become used to feeling little.
   
• We often use technology to save time, but increasingly, it either takes the saved time along with it, or makes the saved time less present, intimate and rich. I worry that the closer the world gets to our fingertips, the further it gets from our hearts.
   
• ...[E]veryone is always in need of something that another person can give, be it undivided attention, a kind word or deep empathy. There is no better use of a life than to be attentive to such needs.

• Truth is mostly irrelevant to the Primitive Mind. The Primitive Mind’s beliefs are typically installed into its system early on in life, kind of like the way our immune system’s settings are initially configured by our environment. The “intellectual environment” that configures our Primitive Mind’s core beliefs is typically made up of the prevailing beliefs of our family and the broader community we grow up around. On the individual level, the Primitive Mind views those beliefs as a fundamental part of its person’s identity—and therefore about as sacred as the person’s arms or lungs or heart. On the group level, beliefs are the key node that wires its person into a larger giant, which—in the Primitive Mind’s ancient world—means being safe on the lifeboat. For reasons like these, the Primitive Mind puts beliefs into the same ultra-critical category as core biological needs. Given all of this, the last thing the Primitive Mind wants is for you to feel humble about your beliefs or interested in revising them. It wants you to treat your beliefs as sacred objects—as precious organs in your body or precious seats on a lifeboat.
   
• To top-rung thinkers, chasing truth is like climbing through thick fog up an infinitely high mountain. It’s the pursuit of something that can never be fully achieved, but it can be approached—and their goal is simply to continue moving up the mountain. They make their way up the mountain using their sacred process—the scientific method—as their compass. They’re intellectually flexible about everything—except the process itself.
   
• Top-rung thinkers form hypotheses from the bottom up, by reasoning from first principles. When you reason from first principles, you do your best to ignore conventional wisdom and your own preconceptions, and you focus only on fundamental facts. You treat those core facts—the “first principles”—like puzzle pieces, and using only those pieces, you employ rationality to puzzle together a conclusion.
   
• Stuart Mill says it best: "There is the greatest difference between presuming an opinion to be true, because, with every opportunity for contesting it, it has not been refuted, and assuming its truth for the purpose of not permitting its refutation."... "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion."
   
• ...[A] Scientist knows that the truth is always buried somewhere in the wrinkles of nuance, and that a satisfying, clean-cut, one-sided viewpoint is almost always wrong or incomplete... Top-rung thinkers know themselves, their peers, and history well enough to know that all human intellect is fallible... The Scientist’s learning process is exhausting because knowledge is hard. Because truth is hard. Which is why people who tend to think like Scientists are more than happy to say “I don’t know” most of the time. 
   
• Weird things happen to your thinking when the pure drive for truth is infected by some ulterior motive. Psychologists call it “motivated reasoning.” I like to think of as Reasoning While Motivated—the thinking equivalent of drunk driving. Sent-ts’an explains: "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease." – Sent-ts’an, c. 700 AD
   
• ...[W]hen the Primitive Mind becomes the alpha character, confirmation becomes more important to you than truth. Whether you’ll admit it or not (you won’t), the desire to feel right, and appear right, has overcome your desire to be right. And when some other motivation overcomes your drive for truth, you leave the world of integrity, of rationality, of reality, and enter a new place—a place I call: Unfalsifiable Land...
   
•  A Sports Fan wants to win, but when pushed, they care even more about fair play than winning. An Attorney’s job is to win, and no matter how hard you push them, nothing can alter their allegiance... The problem for you when you’re thinking like an Attorney is that you’re not doing so as half of a complete picture, for the purpose of playing your role in a truth-finding process—you’re doing so as a thinker so flawed that winning arguments has become more important to you than truth.
   
• This is the power of human delusion. A delusional feat of this magnitude—to leave you filled with a level of conviction you have absolutely no ground to feel—is usually a tag-team effort between two types of delusion: 1) A distorted view of yourself. When you look in the mirror, instead of seeing a dramatically flawed thinker, the Primitive Mind’s thick smoke shows you a model intellectual. 2) A distorted view of the world... While the Scientist’s clear vision shows them a complex, foggy world, the Attorney’s foggy vision shows them a world that’s straightforward, full of crisp lines and black-and-white distinctions.
   
• Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction. This is an especially deadly combo because it prevents you from improving. It not only leaves you without real knowledge, it deprives you of the humility needed to gain real knowledge or grow into a better thinker.
   
• When you forget that people and ideas are separate, your entire thinking process is laden with a crippling burden: to protect your beliefs like you protect your body.
   
• This is what thinking like a Zealot feels like... Thinking, for you, is about worship, not learning.

• ...[S]uccess spares you from the shame you might experience if you feel yourself a failure, but career success alone does not provide positive peace or fulfillment. If you build your life around it, your ambitions will always race out in front of what you’ve achieved, leaving you anxious and dissatisfied.
   
• ...[P]eople looking back on their lives from their deathbeds tell us that happiness is found amid thick and loving relationships. It is found by defeating self-sufficiency for a state of mutual dependence. It is found in the giving and receiving of care.
   
• It’s hard to see other people in all their complexity. It’s hard to communicate from your depths, not your shallows. It’s hard to stop performing! No one teaches us these skills.
   
• In reality, the people who live best tie themselves down. They don’t ask: What cool thing can I do next? They ask: What is my responsibility here? They respond to some problem or get called out of themselves by a deep love... It’s the chains we choose that set us free.
   
• The message of the meritocracy is that you are what you accomplish. The false promise of the meritocracy is that you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love — that if you perform well, people will love you.
   
• We’ve taken the lies of hyper-individualism and we’ve made them the unspoken assumptions that govern how we live. We talk a lot about the political revolution we need. The cultural revolution is more important.

• Self Esteem
   
• Smash
   
• Bad Habit
   
• Come Out and Play