2025-03-05 16:26:01
There's a pretty short list of Fundamental Things We Do Every Day – eat, sleep, breathe – where it's plausible that spending vast amounts of our time and money on improving them is actually worthwhile, because they'll have such an impact on the course of our lives. Yet, like most people, I struggle to implement that in practice.
The long version of how to breathe better is in books like Breath. I'm now in the weird position of believing that Butyeko Breathing might improve my life really significantly, if I managed to do a 10 minute exercise most days for a year, but (spoiler) I have been completely unable to follow through on that belief by doing the exercise. However, I do think I've got some of the benefits by doing the following easy things:
Your nose is made for breathing; your mouth is not. Your nose warms, moisturizes and filters air for you, your mouth does not. In short, mouth breathing should be used only as an absolute last resort. The best training for this is
1) consciously breathe through your nose while exercising – this is hard at first, and might require targetting your cardio level to be just as much as you can manage without opening your mouth, but it seems to pretty quickly increase your capacity/instinct for nose-breathing more generally.
2) just generally shut your mouth whenever you notice you're breathing through it – over time your mouth will just shut more by default.
The last time I recommended mouth-tape on here, beloved friends of the blog S. & S. reported they "kept thinking this was some sort of a satire." I assure you I'm serious: buy a box of 3M Surgical Micropore tape and tape your mouth shut every night before you sleep. This will make you breathe through your nose rather than your mouth at night.
2025-03-03 16:16:20
In a good whodunnit, the identity of the murderer is a surprise. But if you're watching a rom-com and somebody gets murdered, that's more like a meta-surprise.
Talking about "spoilers" is more complicated for meta-surprises. Obviously if you're reading/watching a mystery you should "keep the secret of whodunit locked in your heart," so that other people can enjoy the discovery for themselves.
But for a meta-surprise, even just revealing that there is a surprise is a spoiler. Some of the best meta-surprising books are almost unrecommendable: sometimes just saying that there is a twist can spoil part of the experience of the twist.
Maybe counterintuitively, working in a brand new medium seems to give more space for meta-surprises. You would think that the lack of pre-set expectations would make it harder to subvert expectations. Perhaps it's more a fact about the selection effects in publishing, where once expectations get set in stone perhaps it's harder to get your expectation-defying work published. Or perhaps it's a fact about human psychology, somehow: with an untouched field ahead of us, any path we take feels surprising.
2025-02-19 16:40:09
One thing I think is underrated is lifting your legs much higher when you're walking, and then varying the motion of your ankles/knees/hips with each step.
When you look at people walking, most of them are lifting their feet just barely off the ground. If you try lifting your feet up significantly higher, you'll notice two things:
1) it's much harder work than you think it would be – you can feel your breath go faster, so you're getting more exercise and burning more calories. This makes sense because you're significantly increasing the component of your motion that's going against gravity (vertically upwards) and therefore requires more force. (By comparison, moving forward is the easy bit)
2) you have way more options for how you move each of your joints, and can vary those choices with every step. (Despite the title of this piece, they don't have to be observably silly, you can just position and rotate your joints in slightly different ways).
The benefits of (1) are presumably self evident; the benefits of (2) I took from nutritious movement. The basic claim is that your joints etc would historically get a wide range of movement from walking barefoot on hilly ground (or whatever), such that walking gave you a varied diet of movements throughout the course of the day. As a modern person walking in shoes on flat asphalt, you get none of that natural variation, so to prevent your joints etc falling into "grooves" you need to generate more variation in your movement in tons of small ways.
My one note of caution is not to strike the ground too hard, you can definitely feel the difference that the additional height generates, although (frankly) this is presumably still less strain on your joints than jogging.
2025-02-12 17:13:05
A lot of mini-communities have a strong leader, but limited relationships between the members. The group (supposedly) meets weekly for drinks/board games/sports/dinner, but only one person actually organizes it, and if she stops organizing (temporarily or permanently) the group stops meeting. In some sense I'm not even sure this is a community, or if it's just Friends of The Organizer masquerading as a community: if the others in the group would never meet up with each other separate from the host, all you've really got is a hub and spokes.
Other mini-communities are fully decentralized and have no leadership. My experience with these has been that they either 1) meet incredibly rarely, or 2) turn into a Strong Leader community eventually. The goal of a democratic, self-organising group feels admirable, but in practice it seems like if nobody specific is in charge then nobody does anything at all.
I was once part of an interesting online thingumajig that matched you every week with one other group-member for a video chat. I was skeptical going in that this would be fun at all, because what kind of boor/bore would be interested in talking to a random stranger every week? To my surprise, I enjoyed most of the conversations and met many interesting people. However, I wouldn't really say it was a community, since I didn't meaningfully feel like I was part of a group, so much as a long series of (fun) 1-on-1s.
Which makes me sad, because presumably many of the people I met on the platform had also already met each other through it, and the same people I enjoyed meeting probably enjoyed each other too. And I think that points at an interesting alternative way to build communities: building them up via 1:1 relationships.
You can imagine a project like the online matching thing above, but which assiduously matches individual members in a dense set of 1:1s, then (once people have met each other) bundles them into 3s and 4s and 5s: pretty soon you have a friend-group.
Or you can imagine this as a better way to build real life communities: instead of just hosting group events, you match-make individual members with each other until everyone has at least a few strong 1:1 ties within the broader collective. Then the community stops just being Jo And Friends, and becomes A Bunch Of Interlinking Friends In A Dense Network. I suspect that this kind of network is much more likely to create a sustainable social community.
My friend D., a noted expert on group-chats, once told me that "a group chat is only as strong as the weakest 1:1 connection within it." I don't think this maps exactly to larger communities – it can't be true that a community requires every person in it to have a strong 1:1 link – but some weaker version probably holds.
Maybe there's a mathematical formula to it, and if I ever get less lazy maybe I'll look for it: maybe good communities happen when everyone in the group has a true 1:1 connection with at least n others in the group, or 1/m of the total members, or (p/q^2), or some other such thing. Whatever it is, I suspect that this is where many (modern urban secular etc) communities go wrong, and how better communities might start.
2025-02-05 17:12:29
Whether you're a human looking to invest in your future or a search engine crawler looking to index the web, everyone loves investment advice structured as a keyword-packed list with multiple clear subheadings. But in a world full of many different investment offerings, it can be hard to figure out the best investment for you. That's why we've put together this practical guide to help you find the investment offering that will best suit your needs.
As a woman, you love making good returns with a reasonable risk profile and a very low expense ratio; that's why the best investment for you is the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, a passive index fund with good yields and a 0.03% expense ratio.
If there's one thing millennials are known for, it's their passion for good returns with a reasonable risk profile and a very low expense ratio. For this group, we recommend the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund, a passive index fund with good yields and a 0.03% expense ratio.
Many people don't just care about making a profit: they care about environment, social and governance goals as well. If this is you, we recommend the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund + donating some money each year to charities that support your goals, instead of sending 1% of your money each year to a fund manager who'll put your money in Saudi oil stocks so long as they have a holding company with the word Green in it.
If you're close to retirement, you might actually be better off with a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund.
If you're a masochist who enjoys being financially dominated, we recommend the Absolutely Trash Value (Bad! Trash!) Fund, which will take all your money and return nothing: please email [email protected] for details. Failing that, a great option is to pay $$$$ for a charismatic person in an expensive suit to actively pick stocks for you and under-perform the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund.
As this article shows, everyone's needs are different and it's important to find the investment that's right for you! But if we had to make just one pick, we'd say that for most people the best option is to avoid getting bilked and put your money in the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund.*
*or other low-fee index fund. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, ATVBT is not a licensed financial advisor, etc etc etc etc.
2025-01-29 16:37:01
If there's one thing people love to see on a blog, it's self-indulgent meta-posting about the process of blogging – you're welcome.
Pre-scheduling posts is a psychological trick to maximize the chance that this blog continues to exist in future. Basically: most blogs seem to die because the authors hit some kind of life-or-writing block, where they fail to write anything for a number of months. If they don't pre-schedule any posts, that means the blog doesn't publish for a few months.
It's already hard in general to re-start a habit you've gotten out of, as anyone who's stopped going to the gym for a bit can attest, but I think it's extra-hard to re-start publishing after a long break: once a blog has been dead for a while, authors feel like their next post has to be "good enough" to justify suddenly troubling people's inboxes again.
At ATVBT, our lack of abilities and therefore low standards for Good Enough are already a bulwark against this issue, but pre-scheduling posts is another trick we keep up our sleeves.
Pre-scheduling posts has a definite Ants vs Crickets, storing-up-your-grain element that truly is difficult to manage psychologically. While you're on a writing kick and writing 2 posts per week, it's hard to imagine you'll ever hit a drought, so most authors either just pre-schedule minimally (one post per week till they run out of posts) or send out bonus posts while they have them.
But anyone who read about Joseph and his multicoloured dreamcoat as a child should know that this behaviour results in starvation and/or humiliating conversations with your little brother. You really should save up some poasting for a rainy day.
As a result, most of the time this blog has a bunch of time-insensitive content scheduled ~monthly for ~six months into the future. I guess the really smart thing would be to space the scheduled content even more – one per month for 3 months, then every couple months for 6 months, then every three months after that. [EDIT: when you say "I should really do X instead of Y," very often you should just immediately go and do X, so I went and re-scheduled our posts to taper out more at the end.]
In the meantime, we'll probably write other posts that are either more time-sensitive or that we're more excited about, and slot those in before the pre-scheduled ones. So your experience as a reader will be (theoretically) weekly newsletters, right to your inbox. But even if we fail to write anything new in 2025, we can be confident you'll at least get some atoms and bits in your inbox throughout the year.
My one great fear about this system is that eventually, by accident, one of these posts will be incredibly topical and in very poor taste unintentionally. If there has been a national scandal about pre-scheduled email systems immediately before you read this piece, I apologise – it was not intentional, this was written last year.
[edit: I apparently wrote a very similar post two years ago, and then forgot about it. Fortunately I believe in spaced repetition through newsletters].