Thought Shrapnel

I’m not really on any of the big centralised social networks any more, but I’m interested in the effect they have on society. Apparently there have been calls recently complaining about, and resisting, changes that Instagram has made.

In this post, Ben Thompson cites Sam Lessin, a former Facebook exec, who suggests we’re at step four of a five-step process.

1. The Pre-Internet ‘People Magazine’ Era
2. Content from ‘your friends’ kills People Magazine
3. Kardashians/Professional ‘friends’ kill real friends
4. Algorithmic everyone kills Kardashians
5. Next is pure-AI content which beats ‘algorithmic everyone’

There's a bit in this post which I think is a pretty deep insight about human behaviour, identity, and the story we like to tell ourselves. Again, it's Thompson quoting Lessin:

I saw someone recently complaining that Facebook was recommending to them…a very crass but probably pretty hilarious video. Their indignant response [was that] “the ranking must be broken.” Here is the thing: the ranking probably isn’t broken. He probably would love that video, but the fact that in order to engage with it he would have to go proactively click makes him feel bad. He doesn’t want to see himself as the type of person that clicks on things like that, even if he would enjoy it.

So TikTok and other platforms reducing the need for human interaction to deliver 'engaging' content have the capacity to fundamentally change the way we think about the world.

In another, related, post Charles Arthur scaremongers about how AI-created content will overwhelm us:

I suspect in the future there will be a premium on good, human-generated content and response, but that huge and growing amounts of the content that people watch and look at and read on content networks (“social networks” will become outdated) will be generated automatically, and the humans will be more and more happy about it.

In its way, it sounds like the society in Fahrenheit 451 (that’s 233ºC for Europeans) though without the book burning. There’s no need: why read a book when there’s something fascinating you can watch instead?

Quite what effect this has on social warming is unclear. Possibly it accelerates polarisation, but rather like the Facebook Blenderbot, people are just segmented into their own world, and not shown things that will disturb them. Or, perhaps, they’re shown just enough to annoy them and engage them again if their attention seems to be flagging. After all, if you can generate unlimited content, you can do what you want. And as we know, what the companies who do this want is your attention, all the time.

As ever, I don’t think we’re ready for this. Not even close.

---

Sources: Instagram, TikTok, and the Three Trends | Stratechery by Ben Thompson and The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us | Social Warming by Charles Arthur

This article is from a series that Arthur C. Brooks has in The Atlantic entitled ‘How to Build a Life’. He includes four bits of advice but I’m sharing this mainly so I can share my own approach to dealing with general background anxiety and existential angst.

First, I found several years ago that taking L-Theanine tablets every day is a gamechanger. I recommend them to anyone who will listen. And then, recently, I’ve found that running almost every day makes a huge difference. I literally can’t be anxious while running.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a handy tool to blunt everyday mental pain a bit? Not to become numb to life—just to take the edge off, especially when it is interfering with normal life, the way you can swallow a Tylenol when your back hurts. It turns out that there are safe and healthy methods to do exactly this, including taking the same sort of painkiller for what ails your body and your mind. And that’s only the beginning.

Source: A Shortcut for Feeling Just a Little Happier - The Atlantic

I’m writing this outside a coffee shop in Tynemouth. The place is absolutely heaving on a sunny summer’s day, but it’s takeaway only as they can’t get enough staff. Elsewhere, everywhere from postal workers to bin men to lawyers are on strike.

An editorial in Le Monde comments on the “worst crisis since the 1970” in the UK:

The pre-eminence of ideology over pragmatism – a supposedly British virtue – has already led to the Brexit disaster, and risks prolonging and even worsening the deteriorating situation left by Mr. Johnson, whose lies have widened the divorce between public opinion and politics. An economic crisis and instability could feed the temptation to resort to anti-European and nationalist rhetoric. At a time when threats are mounting across Europe, highlighting the need for strengthened solidarity, the crisis in the United Kingdom is a warning to all its neighbors.

Charlie Stross goes further:

Politics is dominated by an incumbent party who have ruled, except for a 13 year period (during which they were replaced by the Tory-Lite regime of Tony Blair), since 1979—43 years of conservative policies. They're completely out of new ideas, but the next leader of the nation is intent on recycling the same tired nostrums indefinitely, using an astroturfed culture war on wokery as cover rather than trying to address the deep structural problems of a state that has been hollowed out and looted for half a lifetime, so that there is no resilience left in our institutions.

This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.

Sources: The UK's downturn is a warning for Europe | Le Monde, and The gathering crisis | Charlie's Diary

Image: DALL-E 2

I’m writing this outside a coffee shop in Tynemouth. The place is absolutely heaving on a sunny summer’s day, but it’s takeaway only as they can’t get enough staff. Elsewhere, everywhere from postal workers to bin men to lawyers are on strike.

An editorial in Le Monde comments on the “worst crisis since the 1970” in the UK:

The pre-eminence of ideology over pragmatism – a supposedly British virtue – has already led to the Brexit disaster, and risks prolonging and even worsening the deteriorating situation left by Mr. Johnson, whose lies have widened the divorce between public opinion and politics. An economic crisis and instability could feed the temptation to resort to anti-European and nationalist rhetoric. At a time when threats are mounting across Europe, highlighting the need for strengthened solidarity, the crisis in the United Kingdom is a warning to all its neighbors.

Charlie Stross goes further:

Politics is dominated by an incumbent party who have ruled, except for a 13 year period (during which they were replaced by the Tory-Lite regime of Tony Blair), since 1979—43 years of conservative policies. They're completely out of new ideas, but the next leader of the nation is intent on recycling the same tired nostrums indefinitely, using an astroturfed culture war on wokery as cover rather than trying to address the deep structural problems of a state that has been hollowed out and looted for half a lifetime, so that there is no resilience left in our institutions.

This is the sort of crisis that brings down nations.

Sources: The UK's downturn is a warning for Europe | Le Monde, and The gathering crisis | Charlie's Diary

Image: DALL-E 2

Hypothes.is is an annotation service. I can’t remember who recommended I follow his annotations, but Chris Aldrich’s gleanings are worth following via RSS.

For example, I never would otherwise have come across this, from a Discord chat room, which got me thinking about roles within networks and communities.

I think this is the interplay where things get lost. There are very few theorizers, and tonnes of enactors. And everyone ends up thinking the enactors are theorizers, but they're not. They're developing specific methods without building up — and especially without critiquing — the underlying theory.

Source: Chris Aldrich | Hypothesis

I don’t know anything about the author of this post other than what he’s put on his about page. He doesn’t look very old, and he’s a developer for Just Eat, the food takeaway app. Neither his about page nor this post mention family, which is a massive red flag for me when people are talking about the downsides of working from home.

You see, while he may have problems concentrating, and miss the social element of the office, that’s not true for everyone. It’s particularly not true for those with a family. So I’m posting this as a reminder to myself and others, that context matters.

Much like the effect of the plague in medieval times, one of the effects of the pandemic has been to perturb the power balance between employers and employees. As an employee, I was initially excited by the benefits of working from home, but slowly realised that complete remote working was an alienating experience that has diminished the boundaries between work and leisure.

I want to make a developer-centric argument that the current state of majority remote working is bad, not because it is bad for your company or for your salary but because it is not best for yours and others mental well being.

Source: What Tech Workers Don’t Understand They’ve Lost by WFH | Michael Gomes Vieira

It’s no secret that I believe that private schools shouldn’t exist. I’ve explained why so many times over the years I almost don’t know where to link, but try this from 2012, or this from 2019. Ben Werdmuller also shared his thoughts a week ago.

I’m pleased to see this report of comments made by Eddie Jones, England Rugby Union’s head coach on private schools. I think we’re coming to realise, as a society, that more diversity really is better for all of us.

Jones, 62, claimed the pathway produced players who had enjoyed a "closeted life" and lacked "resolve" in a weekend interview with the i newspaper.

[…]

Jones had claimed in his interview that “you are going to have to blow the whole thing up” as the system yielded young players who struggled to lead because “everything’s done for you”.

“When we are on the front foot we are the best in the world,” Jones added. “When we are not on the front foot our ability to find a way to win, our resolve, is not as it should be."

Source: Eddie Jones: England head coach admonished by RFU over private school system criticism | BBC Sport

I have no idea if this has since been debunked, but it’s fascinating to me.

Biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson advanced a strange new idea in his 1917 book On Growth and Form: He found that if you draw the outline of an animal or plant on an ordinary Cartesian grid, and then you put the grid through some mathematical transformation (stretching it, for example, so that its squares become rhombuses), very often the resulting shape is that of a related real creature.

Source: A Stretch - Futility Closet

As I’ve said recently elsewhere, I don’t think technical projects do a good enough job to proactively defensively license their outputs. This, I’d say, is why we can’t have nice things.

While I agree with the sentiment around ‘ethical source’ models, the philosopher in me would argue that it’s an absolute minefield.

Ethical impulses aren’t new to software. The Free Software Foundation advocates for a “struggle against for-profit corporate control” and against restrictions on users’ freedom to inspect and modify code in the products they buy. It was started after its founder, Richard Stallman, found he was unable to repair his broken printer because he was unable to edit its proprietary code. However, the open-source movement distanced itself from this political stance, instead making the case that open source was good for corporations on “pragmatic, business-case grounds.” But both free and open-source software allow anyone to use code for any purpose.

[…]

So what about developers who don’t want their work to be used to help separate kids from their families or create nonconsensual pornography?

The Ethical Source Movement seeks to use software licenses and other tools to give developers “the freedom and agency to ensure that our work is being used for social good and in service of human rights.” This view emphasizes the rights of developers to have a say in what the fruits of their labor are used for over the rights of any user to use the software for anything. There are a myriad of different licenses: some prohibit software from being used by companies that overwork developers in violation of labor laws, while others prohibit uses that violate human rights or help extract fossil fuels. Is this the thicket Stallman envisions?

[…]

Will people who intend to commit evil acts with software care what a license says or abide by its terms? Well, it depends. While the anonymous users of the deepfake software I studied might still have used it to create nonconsensual porn, even if the license terms prohibited this, Ehmke suggests that corporate misuse is perhaps a more pressing concern: she points to campaigns to prevent software from being used by Palantir and a 2019 report by Amnesty International that raised concerns that the business models of big name technology companies may threaten human rights. Anonymous users on the internet might not care about licenses, but as Ehmke says and my own experience with lawyers in tech companies confirms, “These companies and their lawyers care very much about what a license says.” So while ethical source licenses might not stop all harmful uses, they might stop some.

Source: Can you stop your open-source project from being used for evil? | Stack Overflow Blog

As I’ve said recently elsewhere, I don’t think technical projects do a good enough job to proactively defensively license their outputs. This, I’d say, is why we can’t have nice things.

While I agree with the sentiment around ‘ethical source’ models, the philosopher in me would argue that it’s an absolute minefield.

Ethical impulses aren’t new to software. The Free Software Foundation advocates for a “struggle against for-profit corporate control” and against restrictions on users’ freedom to inspect and modify code in the products they buy. It was started after its founder, Richard Stallman, found he was unable to repair his broken printer because he was unable to edit its proprietary code. However, the open-source movement distanced itself from this political stance, instead making the case that open source was good for corporations on “pragmatic, business-case grounds.” But both free and open-source software allow anyone to use code for any purpose.

[…]

So what about developers who don’t want their work to be used to help separate kids from their families or create nonconsensual pornography?

The Ethical Source Movement seeks to use software licenses and other tools to give developers “the freedom and agency to ensure that our work is being used for social good and in service of human rights.” This view emphasizes the rights of developers to have a say in what the fruits of their labor are used for over the rights of any user to use the software for anything. There are a myriad of different licenses: some prohibit software from being used by companies that overwork developers in violation of labor laws, while others prohibit uses that violate human rights or help extract fossil fuels. Is this the thicket Stallman envisions?

[…]

Will people who intend to commit evil acts with software care what a license says or abide by its terms? Well, it depends. While the anonymous users of the deepfake software I studied might still have used it to create nonconsensual porn, even if the license terms prohibited this, Ehmke suggests that corporate misuse is perhaps a more pressing concern: she points to campaigns to prevent software from being used by Palantir and a 2019 report by Amnesty International that raised concerns that the business models of big name technology companies may threaten human rights. Anonymous users on the internet might not care about licenses, but as Ehmke says and my own experience with lawyers in tech companies confirms, “These companies and their lawyers care very much about what a license says.” So while ethical source licenses might not stop all harmful uses, they might stop some.

Source: Can you stop your open-source project from being used for evil? | Stack Overflow Blog

If you think I’m sharing this image because my name is Doug and I find the accompanying image amusing then you’d be 100% correct.

I used to think being swamped was a good sign. I’m doing stuff! I’m making progress! I’m important! I have an excuse to make others wait! Then I realized being swamped just means I’m stuck in the default state, like a ball that settled to a stop in the deepest part of an empty pool, the spot where rainwater has collected into a puddle.

Being swamped means probably not getting enough rest, making things more complicated than they need to be, wasting time on petty decisions, and not thinking deeply about important decisions.

Now, I’m impressed by people who are not swamped. They prioritize ruthlessly to separate what’s most important from everything else, think deeply about those most-important things, execute them well to make a big impact, do that consistently, and get others around them to do the same. Damn, that’s impressive!

Source: Being Swamped is Normal and Not Impressive | Greg Kogan

If you think I’m sharing this image because my name is Doug and I find the accompanying image amusing then you’d be 100% correct.

I used to think being swamped was a good sign. I’m doing stuff! I’m making progress! I’m important! I have an excuse to make others wait! Then I realized being swamped just means I’m stuck in the default state, like a ball that settled to a stop in the deepest part of an empty pool, the spot where rainwater has collected into a puddle.

Being swamped means probably not getting enough rest, making things more complicated than they need to be, wasting time on petty decisions, and not thinking deeply about important decisions.

Now, I’m impressed by people who are not swamped. They prioritize ruthlessly to separate what’s most important from everything else, think deeply about those most-important things, execute them well to make a big impact, do that consistently, and get others around them to do the same. Damn, that’s impressive!

Source: Being Swamped is Normal and Not Impressive | Greg Kogan

Well, we can but hope. The backlash from Instagram-obsessed people would be too much for politicians to bear, however…

Meta has—as it must—warned its investors that it’s in deep trouble in Europe. It’s neither a threat nor a bluff, but rather a statement of fact: without a successor to the U.S.-EU Privacy Shield deal, which the EU’s top court nuked a couple of years back, Facebook and Instagram will be forced to pack up and abandon the European market.

Indeed, this uncomfortable reality was made clearer last month, when Ireland’s privacy regulator submitted a draft decision to its EU peers that would ban Facebook and Insta from transferring Europeans’ personal data to the U.S., because there is no longer any legal basis for these transfers to continue.

[…]

I find it astonishing that even Facebook’s critics, let alone the markets, haven’t glommed onto the reality of the situation. I suspect the culprit is a deep-seated notion that Mark Zuckerberg’s all-powerful company can somehow fix this by modifying its legendarily bad privacy behavior—as though it had some brilliant solution hidden up its sleeve, just waiting until the last possible second before pulling it out.

Source: Even Meta’s critics don’t grasp how likely it is that Facebook and Instagram will soon have to exit Europe | Fortune

Image: created using Midjourney

Any article that quotes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus and talks about the importance of being yourself is a winner.

When we are ourselves, we have value. When we are like everyone else…we are fungible. We are replaceable–by definition. We have little value…by definition.

[…]

BE YOU. Be the only one of you in the whole world. Be the red. That’s where the fun is (without having to fake it). That’s where the money is (you can name your price). That’s where the value is (you can’t be replaced).

[…]

Two thousand years before Peter Thiel said that, “competition is for losers,” Epictetus quipped that, “You can always win if you only enter competitions where winning is up to you.”

[…]

Too many people pointlessly enter contests where the outcome is dependent on forces outside their control. They think it’s safer to be like everyone else…when in fact, what they’re really doing is hiding themselves in the chorus, protecting themselves from judgment. They’re less likely to be singled out and laughed at, sure, but they’re guaranteeing that they’ll never really be noticed or appreciated. Theirs becomes the Indian restaurant that will never be great, but it will never be closed. That is the best you can expect when you’re not playing to win…you’re playing not to lose.

Source: This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make | Ryan Holiday

A couple of weeks ago, I was experimenting with Midjourney and speculating about machine creativity. This post is interesting if you haven’t tried using an AI drawing model as it talks about what Dan Hon calls ‘prompt engineering’ (a term he doesn’t like). Dan also linked to this fantastic example from Andy Baio.

Everybody has heard about the latest cool thing™, which is DALL·E 2 (henceforth called Dall-e). A few months ago, when the first previews started, it was basically everywhere. Now, a few weeks ago, the floodgates have been opened and lots of people on the waitlist got access - that group included me.

I’ve spent a day playing around with it, learned some basics (like the fact that adding “artstation” to the end of your phrase automatically makes the output much better…), and generated a bunch of (even a few nice-looking) images. In other words, I was already a bit warmed up.

To add some more background, OctoSQL - an open source project I’m developing - is a CLI query tool that let’s you query multiple databases and file formats in a single SQL query. I knew for a while already that its logo should be updated, and with Dall-e arriving, I could combine the fun with the practical.

Source: How I Used DALL·E 2 to Generate The Logo for OctoSQL | Jacob Martin

I listened to a great episode of CBC’s Spark podcast with the excellent Nora Young on what ownership will look like in 2050. One of the contributors talked about what it might look like to be “on the wrong side of the API”. In other words, the person responding to the request, rather than giving it.

We’re already heading towards a dystopia when people are having their behaviour influenced by black box algorithms that we don’t understand. This article talks about shopping on Instagram and listing property on Airbnb, but the point (and the anxiety) is universal.

Only in the middle of the past decade, though, did recommender systems become a pervasive part of life online. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all shifted away from chronological feeds—showing messages in the order in which they were posted—toward more algorithmically sequenced ones, displaying what the platforms determined would be most engaging to the user. Spotify and Netflix introduced personalized interfaces that sought to cater to each user’s tastes. (Top Picks for Kyle!) Such changes made platforms feel less predictable and less transparent. What you saw was never quite the same as what anyone else was seeing. You couldn’t count on a feed to work the same way from one month to the next. Just last week, Facebook implemented a new default Home tab on its app that prioritizes recommended content in the vein of TikTok, its main competitor.

Almost every other major Internet platform makes use of some form of algorithmic recommendation. Google Maps calculates driving routes using unspecified variables, including predicted traffic patterns and fuel efficiency, rerouting us mid-journey in ways that may be more convenient or may lead us astray. The food-delivery app Seamless front-loads menu items that it predicts you might like based on your recent ordering habits, the time of day, and what is “popular near you.” E-mail and text-message systems supply predictions for what you’re about to type. (“Got it!”) It can feel as though every app is trying to guess what you want before your brain has time to come up with its own answer, like an obnoxious party guest who finishes your sentences as you speak them. We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious. In a recent essay for Pitchfork, Jeremy D. Larson described a nagging feeling that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and automated playlists were draining the joy from listening to music by short-circuiting the process of organic discovery: “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal.”

[…]

“Algorithmic anxiety,” however, is the most apt phrase I’ve found for describing the unsettling experience of navigating today’s online platforms. Shagun Jhaver, a scholar of social computing, helped define the phrase while conducting research and interviews in collaboration with Airbnb in 2018. Of fifteen hosts he spoke to, most worried about where their listings were appearing in users’ search results. They felt “uncertainty about how Airbnb algorithms work and a perceived lack of control,” Jhaver reported in a paper co-written with two Airbnb employees. One host told Jhaver, “Lots of listings that are worse than mine are in higher positions.” On top of trying to boost their rankings by repainting walls, replacing furniture, or taking more flattering photos, the hosts also developed what Jhaver called “folk theories” about how the algorithm worked. They would log on to Airbnb repeatedly throughout the day or constantly update their unit’s availability, suspecting that doing so would help get them noticed by the algorithm. Some inaccurately marked their listings as “child safe,” in the belief that it would give them a bump. (According to Jhaver, Airbnb couldn’t confirm that it had any effect.) Jhaver came to see the Airbnb hosts as workers being overseen by a computer overlord instead of human managers. In order to make a living, they had to guess what their capricious boss wanted, and the anxious guesswork may have made the system less efficient over all.

Source: The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety | The New Yorker

I’m hoping other countries follow suit and bring some attention to heatwaves as human-caused extreme weather events.

The world's first named heat wave hit Seville, Spain, this week, pushing temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit and earning the most severe tier in the city's new heat wave ranking system.

Heat wave “Zoe” has brought scorching temperatures to the southern part of the country for the last few days, particularly the region of Andalusia where Seville is located. Even in the evenings, the Spanish meteorological service recorded temperatures that hovered in the mid-80s in some areas — an extra stress on the human body, which relies on cooler nights to recover from high daytime heat.

Source: ‘Zoe’ becomes the world’s first named heat wave | Climatewire

I’m reading The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. It’s an eye-opening book in many ways, and upends notions of how we see the way that people used to live.

This article suggests that 15-hour working weeks are the norm in egalitarian cultures. While working hours are steadily declining, we’re still a long way off — primarily because our desires and means are out of kilter.

New genomic and archeological data now suggest that Homo sapiens first emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. But it is a challenge to infer how they lived from this data alone. To reanimate the fragmented bones and broken stones that are the only evidence of how our ancestors lived, beginning in the 1960s anthropologists began to work with remnant populations of ancient foraging peoples: the closest living analogues to how our ancestors lived during the first 290,000 years of Homo sapiens’ history.

The most famous of these studies dealt with the Ju/’hoansi, a society descended from a continuous line of hunter-gatherers who have been living largely isolated in southern Africa since the dawn of our species. And it turned established ideas of social evolution on their head by showing that our hunter-gatherer ancestors almost certainly did not endure “nasty, brutish and short” lives. The Ju/’hoansi were revealed to be well fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.

Subsequent research produced a picture of how differently Ju/’hoansi and other small-scale forager societies organised themselves economically. It revealed, for instance, the extent to which their economy sustained societies that were at once highly individualistic and fiercely egalitarian and in which the principal redistributive mechanism was “demand sharing” — a system that gave everyone the absolute right to effectively tax anyone else of any surpluses they had. It also showed how in these societies individual attempts to either accumulate or monopolise resources or power were met with derision and ridicule.

Most importantly, though, it raised startling questions about how we organise our own economies, not least because it showed that, contrary to the assumptions about human nature that underwrite our economic institutions, foragers were neither perennially preoccupied with scarcity nor engaged in a perpetual competition for resources.

For while the problem of scarcity assumes that we are doomed to live in a Sisyphean purgatory, always working to bridge the gap between our insatiable desires and our limited means, foragers worked so little because they had few wants, which they could almost always easily satisfy. Rather than being preoccupied with scarcity, they had faith in the providence of their desert environment and in their ability to exploit this.

Source: The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week | Financial Times

This article uses the analogy of a burger chef to show how software teams can be more productive by focusing on a small number of features at a time.

I think this is more widely applicable. The factory production line was designed to make already-designed things with the fewest mistakes. It does not make people happy, nor does it foster creativity.

Figuring out problems is hard. It’s kind of what I do for a living. Having lots of different things on the go at the same time does not improve things, it makes each one worse.

Now that we understand the burger and the software variations of the problem, we can make a recommendation to both cooks and software engineers alike:

Reducing transaction costs enables small batches. Small batches, in turn, reduce average cycle times, diminish risk, and enhance reliability.

You should only start without having finished when transaction costs are high, and it wouldn’t make economic sense to spend time decreasing them, either because you have agreed to a particular delivery date or because you don’t have the capital to invest.

That said, I’d be careful to avoid falling into a situation where “you’re too busy draining the flood to be able to fix the leak”. The earlier you decrease transaction costs, the earlier you’ll be reaping the benefits from having done it.

Source: How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable | Lucas F. Costa

On Saturday, my Garmin smartwatch told me that my ‘fitness age’ is now 33.5. This is eight years younger than my chronological age, and apparently as low as I can get it using the Garmin app.

This is not a surprise to me. Covid absolutely battered my lungs from January to March. So I decided to do something about it, and built up to running every single day.

Willpower is necessary to form habits, but then willpower is necessary in life in general. So yes, get a personal trainer as this guy has done. But someone shouting at you to try harder is an extrinsic motivator. What you need to do is to develop intrinsic motivation to go harder and be better.

We all know the benefits of regular exercise, from living longer to better mental clarity. However, it is notoriously difficult advice to digest, especially for someone in their early 20s who hasn't even experienced a real hangover. The gist of the advice being that money and career success will come if you work at it. But prioritise your mental and physical health and your day-to-day work will improve. It's much easier to stay in shape than it is to stagnate and rebuild your fitness. Your 40 year-old self will thank you.

For a long time I’ve know this to be true. During periods of consistent exercise I’ve had more energy and mental clarity throughout the day. My personal outlook on life is generally better as well. Not to mention that outdoor activities with friends are more accessible and less daunting. Despite this, it has still always been a struggle to stay consistent.

A wave of “habit fetishism” has swept through the West in recent years with books like Atomic Habits regularly topping the best seller lists. It’s a tantalising concept as it sells an easy way to “live the life you’ve always wanted”.

It may work for some, but very few people who try these techniques actually “live the life of their dreams”. What keeps fit people going to the gym on a regular basis isn’t wearing their running shoes to bed at night. It’s discipline and accountability.

This brings me to the best investment I’ve ever made: A personal trainer.

Source: The best investment | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Herman’s blog