Ask HN: Name one idea that changed your life

That which seems very important today, will seem far less important tomorrow.

I'd like to hear more about how you have implemented this. Do you not read any news? Some? How do you find out what's going on?

I've been dabbling with this too, and my current state is that I don't consume any news or social media (twitter) that I cannot consume via my RSS reader, which in practical terms means I don't subscribe to any major news outlets, but instead subscribe to a smaller newspaper in my country that sends out daily newsletters which I then forward to my RSS reader that then shows it along regular RSS content - it's a feature of feedbin.com and it's a great feature!. Then I follow a lot of personal blogs, lobste.rs and HN, and then a curated list of twitter accounts, all via my RSS reader. The twitter thing is also a feedbin.com feature. And then I try to read books about a lot of different topics according to my mood, obviously. I get the feeling that any news that is not relevant to me after a month, six months, a year and so on, is probably not worth my time anyways except if it touches me directly, in which case I'll know anyways, so by reading books about, say covid-19 in a few years instead of news now, I'll get a much better picture of the whole thing than if I was intensely following the news every single day doing the pandemic.

But fear of missing out does often present itself. It's a constant fight between my rational mind, and some kind of stupid, irrational thing that is also part of me.

The Elephant in the Brain

A lot of common ideas about education, charity and laughter (we laugh because something is funny) are evolutionary useful lies we tell ourselves.

"But while we humans often play by ourselves (e.g., with Legos), recall that we laugh mostly in the presence of others. So what communicative purpose does laughter serve in the context of play? Gregory Bateson, a British anthropologist, figured it out during a trip to the zoo. He saw two monkeys engaged with each other in what looked like combat, but clearly wasn’t real. They were, in other words, merely play fighting. And what Bateson realized was that, in order to play fight, the monkeys needed some way to communicate their playful intentions—some way to convey the message, “We’re just playing.” Without one or more of these "play signals,” one monkey might misconstrue the other’s intentions, and their playful sparring could easily escalate into a real fight"

Solipsism is correct.

To me, "having my back" doesn't mean nodding yes to everything. It means starting with the strong assumption that I'm a pretty good guy. It means doing for me what someone who loved me would do. Kind of the opposite of an Internet troll. In any case, it's up to each person to set the mark.