Emily Nagoski’s Burnout has some practical advice, but the single most powerful thing you could be doing right now is mindfulness meditation.

Why? Because burnout usually comes associated with a set of bad experiences that we learn to shut out. That is why we need to re-learn to experience life instead of shutting it out.

How can you do it? I personally like the Healthy Minds app and program, but there are plenty online.

Other tips? Yes. Do Loving-Kindness meditation too. It makes you happy quickly and improves your relationships with people. This, in turn, improves your work.

How am I so sure? Check out Sonja Lyubomirsky’s meta-analyses. In them, she shows that the data overwhelmingly shows that happiness is associated with, temporally precedes, and experimentally induces success in work, relationships, and many other domains of life.

Finally, I’d suggest learning the basics of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Why? Mindfulness will reconnect you with your experience and avoid rumination, but ACT will also ask you to find meaning in your life. Work can be meaningful if you’re not ruminating and you do the necessary values work. I love Hayes’ A Liberated Mind, but, again, there are other resources out there.

As the other comment says, Anki already changes dynamically so that you study the hard stuff more. Just make sure to mark whether you got the answer and how hard it was to get it.

Now, here’s something that could help you, perhaps more than any multiple choice exam could ever help you with: when studying, make sure to not only blurt the answer but also use elaborative recall. In other words, make an effort to think and do so mindfully (rather than mindlessly).

Why? You learn through effort and through mindfully (and not mindlessly) connecting the new knowledge with what you already know.

You could even structure your elaborative recall through Visible Thinking Routines.

How does that look like?

• You start your study session.
• You get an Anki card.
• You remember this card clearly, and so you say it out loud and then check.
• You get it right. No need for elaborative recall. Better to focus your energy elsewhere.
• You get another Anki card.
• This one’s tough. You’re unsure.
• You say out loud why it could be any of the two answers you think could be right.
• You get the answer and sure enough it was one of the two you thought.
• You decide to do elaborative recall so that you learn this well. To guide your elaborative recall, you decide to use the thinking routine “Connect-Extend-Challenge”.
• So you do elaborative recall through a thinking routine. You do it by talking out loud or writing it out.
• This step may sound silly but make sure to celebrate so that you feel pride and satisfaction for doing something that takes effort (especially if you’re struggling with the habit of studying).
• Then you move on to the next Anki card.

Anything is possible if you can do anything…

Where’s my Lemmy Gold when I need it

I’m glad we both want to see fairness and kindness in the world. I see you interpret cruelty, abuse, and dishonesty’s effects as respect. I see it a bit differently. When I see cruelty, abuse, and dishonesty, I usually see fear, terror, hiding, lying— anything but respect.

If I see a serial killer who tortures people, I would never respect them. I’d probably fear them. But fear is not respect.

To me, respect is deep admiration. It involves feeling aligned in values, feeling that someone is doing things right and well. If someone is doing things wrong and cruelly, I’d feel deep disrespect towards them.

I suppose our cultures have wrongly conflated respect and fear. People don’t command respect. They deserve it and earn it. They deserve base respect for the mere fact of being human trying to be happy in a brutal world. And they earn admiration-like respect when their hearts are aligned with virtue.

Ah that makes sense. Maybe it’s a European/US difference, but it could be just a Time Timer thing. My air fryer is from an American company and it has the same timer as you (wind it up clockwise, then the hand moves counter-clockwise).

I wonder if both types of timers (wind up clockwise and wind up counter-clockwise) seek to distinguish themselves from normal clocks in different ways:

• Wind up clockwise timers (like your stove and my airfryer) let you know it’s not a normal clock by flowing counter-clockwise.
• Clockwise timers (like a Time Timer) let you know it’s not a normal clock by having a red disk slowly become smaller.

Earplugs come in different sizes. Maybe it’s a matter of experimenting?

Ah. To set up the timer, you do pull the hand counter clockwise, as if you were pulling a spring-loaded car backwards for it to move forward on its own. After you release the Time Timer, its hand will move forward on its own, normally, clockwise.

It is a bit unusual, but the point of the timer is to see how much time you’ve got left. It’s like a battery charge percentage. You know that when the battery reaches zero, you’ve got to charge it up again.

I hope the explanation helps. If not, feel free to ask or to check out the videos in the Time Timer website. After all, it is a strange product.

A Time Timer.

They’re not cheap, especially for a timer that’s bare bones (~20 USD).

But it has changed my work life.

1. People who want to interrupt me while I’m working can now see how long until I have my next break. So I am interrupted less.
2. Now I self-regulate a bit better, so I’m able to work longer without destroying myself in the process. I take breaks that help me with repetitive strain injuries and with feeling like I’m a human being and not just a machine.
3. Now I remember to actually start timers when I start working. I know this is a bit silly, but I was having trouble creating a habit of stopping for breaks. I tried to solve this by setting timers on my phone, but I constantly forgot doing it. Now I’m reminded to start a timer by something that I see on my desk.

I’d say the fight against entropy is an attempt to retain specific expressions of energy in the system. The expressions of energy are assemblages that have created order. And yes, as you said, the creation of order has a cost: greater global entropy.

In case you’re interested, this way of looking at entropy and life comes from Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.

After reading what I have posted, it’s totally fair to believe that I do not find beauty or inspiration in nature. However, I can give you some reassurance.

How? Well, I actually I find the battle against entropy amazing and inspiring. A while ago I was sipping tea while my dog nestled next to me, and I was moved thinking about how we make each other so happy. I am also moved by people, people who look beyond their belly button, people who are kind, people who are good at what they do.

It’s not just that we’re doomed to accept brutality and appreciate tiny slivers of beauty. There’s actually steps that we can take to support life. For example, we can become a part of an assemblage that we like. Sometimes that assemblage is a group of friends, a political group, or an organization. You know you’re in the right place when your incentives align with that of the group. There’s an alignment around shared values, shared goals. Your atoms are keeping your structural integrity. Your cells are keeping you alive. Your thoughts are aiding you in problem solving and connecting with others. And your friends are connecting with you.

There’s quite a bit more to this, so if you’re interested in this way of understanding the world, you can check out Prosocial by evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and psychologists Paul W. B. Atkins and Steven C. Hayes.

Cordyceps fungus

Holy crap. This gave me the creeps. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis This opened the door to the broader category of parasitoids https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid

Prion diseases

Truly scary stuff. I vaguely knew that genetic problems are a thing, but I didn’t know the specifics. Thanks for sharing this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

I agree that there’s a layer of human subjectivity in this whole discussion. Within that layer, I think it’s okay to get a gut sense that nature is brutal and grotesque. My goal is to avoid romanticizing nature.

Once we’re able to avoid our human bias of romanticizing nature, we can take the discussion to another layer, a layer that could be called more objective.

For example, we could talk about entropy and evolution’s attempts to fight against it. We could talk about evolution occurring at multiple scales and dimensions simultaneously, such as atomic structures, cells, and multicellular organisms. These are examples of assemblages, and they expand the possible behaviors of the parts. In other words, assemblages make the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

So, how does entropy, evolution, and assemblages connect with our discussion? Well, brutality and grotesqueness can usually be translated into the language of entropy and assemblages. Killing someone destroys an assemblage and increases entropy. Torture and trauma reduce the probability of an organism exhibiting variation in their behaviors. They reduce the emergent properties of the assemblage.

Is it always better to choose the language of entropy and assemblages over brutality and grotesqueness? No. Context matters. Again, if the goal is merely to avoid the romanticization of nature, the brutality and grotesqueness layer is appropriate.

Ouch. Looked it up. Its brutal. https://enviroliteracy.org/do-lions-eat-their-prey-alive/

TIL lions eat some prey alive because it saves the lions energy. They avoid spending too much energy killing a prey that is difficult to kill. Instead, they incapacitate (but not kill) a prey and start eating right away.

I agree. The boundary can easily become diffuse or even silly.

However, there’s a reason I asked what I asked. My ultimate purpose is to show that existence is not perfectly designed, that sometimes it is brutal and grotesque. Unfortunately, people often retort saying nature is brutal and grotesque because of humans. So, by focusing on non-human nature, I’m sidestepping the retort.

Pinecones are indeed beautiful. However, they are decidedly not one of the greatest arguments for the existence of an intelligent higher power. In fact, the whole claim about pinecones having the Fibonacci sequence is false https://youtu.be/1Jj-sJ78O6M

Additionally, I wouldn’t think that cones having nice shapes are an example of nature being brutal and grotesque. But I suppose you wanted to make the opposite argument: that nature is perfect and beautiful.

Ouch. Rape. Sometimes gang rape. Bloodied female. Sometimes drowned female. https://misfitanimals.com/ducks/how-do-ducks-mate/

Awful.

Here’s some I know:

• Dolphins rape other dolphins https://theconversation.com/dolphin-sexual-politics-gets-the-tabloid-treatment-6063
• Praying mantis females often eat the head of males they have sex with. Some spiders do that too, like the appropriately named black widow spider. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_cannibalism
• Mass extinctions have occurred in the past, way before humans existed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
• Genetic mutations often lead to inviable offspring or awful conditions (I don’t know specific examples off the top of my head)
• Parasites can take control of insects and lead them to drown (also don’t know examples off the top of my head)

Others have talked about the ultimate measure: your GPA. However, for you to get that high GPA it can help to:

• Train your relational frame skills.
• Develop good learning habits through Tiny Habits or something like that.
• Develop a good relationship with your thoughts and emotions through something like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy or the Healthy Minds Program or any program designed to improve your relationship with your thoughts.
• Internalize something like Make it Stick or another book that teaches how to learn quickly and well.
• Internalize habits of mind such as Harvard’s Project Zero’s Visible Thinking Routines.

We share the goal of making the world more private. I’m not trying to be cheeky or mean. I’m genuinely curious. Would you be against reading to learn how to talk more compellingly?