30 Lessons From 30 Years of Living

I am still in my 30th year of living, and I thought it is a good time to summarize some of the lessons and insights that I have found them to be useful so far in life to me. This would be the writeup that I wish an older version of me would have given me when I was starting my 20th year of living, or I would give to my children in the future.

While writing this, I have relied only on my memory, not really looking up any previous notes, bookmarks, or LLMs. I think there is a valuable signal in retrieving information in such a way: What comes to your memory first is likely what has influenced you the most and you remember the most on a day-to-day basis. In line with the same goal, I have refrained from adding sources or links to this post. You might be able to recognize some of the origins of these notes.

3 Lessons From 30 Years

1. Spend a lot of time in learning your own biology and psychology. Remember that anything biological is also psychological and anything psychological is biological. This meat machine is the vessel in which your consciousness is trapped and is operating for the next decades, and you have way less knowledge about and control and over it than you think. Understand it in order to at least have a chance at modeling why it behaves a certain way (certain joint hurts, an event causes anger or sadness) and cooperate with it.
2. Understand that a wealthy person is not one who has the most things, but the one that wants what he already has. This changes the equation, as you are in full control of how much things you want. Ultimately, you should come to a realization that the key to happiness is to want fewer things and be in peace with it. Every time you want something, you are making a contract with yourself that you are not happy until you get that thing. Doesn't sound like a good contract, does it?
3. Love is wise and hatred is foolish. Wise because ultimately it benefits you, on top of benefiting the subject of your love. Foolish because it ultimately hurts you more than the subject of your hatred.

The Rest

Psychology and Self

4. Study existential psychology, and specifically take time to understand existential responsibility and loneliness.
   1. Existential Responsibility: You can be the man with all of the luck and fortune in the world, and be unhappy. Or you can live a very modest, below average life in terms of means, but be immensely happy while doing so^[1]. How you react to your circumstances is 100% your choice.
   2. Existential Loneliness: You are born alone, and you die alone, in a single-player game called life. No one can really understand what it feels to be you, and you can never understand what it feels to be someone else. And this is not a bad thing at all, and it has a few positive implications, coming next.
5. Put effort into sharpening your theory of mind faculty, your ability to empathize with other poeple, and imagine how they feel.
6. Learn to love yourself and make yourself happy first, before attempting to do the same for anyone else. You are foremost responsible towards yourself. A happy, (self-)loved and fulfilled version of you is much more capable of loving others than your self-love-deprived version.
7. Having some form of spirituality, and belief in a greater purpose is one of our fundamental needs. In much the same way that our body needs food, our mind needs a higher purpose. Don't ignore it, and if religious ideas is what resonates with you, don't shy away from it. Find little snippets of different religions and beliefs that make sense to you, and form your own unique spiritual framework out of it. This higher purpose can also be achieved through completely materialistic means.
8. Learn the Vipassana meditation technique, and attend at least one 10-day retreat. When else in your life would you have 10 days of time to explore your own mind with zero responsibilities? And the best, it is free.

Relationships

9. Learn to be happy within yourself as a hedge against temporary periods of loneliness, but ultimately we are social animals and always seek the love and support of others, and when receiving it, effortlessly strive to reciprocate. Happiness is only real when shared.
10. Your work is absolutely not worth being treated above your relationships. Neither above your physical and mental well being.
11. Invest time and effort in being a good friend.
12. Set common (low-stake) goals with your friends (learn a new sport, climb a mountain, do a side project), and work towards them together. This yields time spent together + difficulty overcoming a shared goal, which is the best model of "how to bond with friends". This is why we make our best friends in schools: we spend a lot of time together, and we have a common difficulty -- surviving the school.
13. Relationships are made through time and not through blood. Sharing blood with your brother/son/cousin could be a tailwind in building a great bond with them, but it doesn't necessitate it.
14. Don't mix your romantic partner and your best friend; ideally they are different people. It is too much responsibility for one person to fulfill both roles, and they will likely fail.
15. There is no such thing as unconditional love in any relationship. Don't promise it, as it is an impossible one to hold onto.
16. Don't shy away from venting to your close friends about your romantic partner and visa versa. We all have bad days, and it helps to embrace than ignore them. Similar take about gossip. It is a great bonding tool as long as it is harmless.

Age Relate

17. Don't take yourself seriously, especially before 25. The notion of 18 being the age in which you are mature is probably rooted in 18 being the age when you are physically fit enough to work in a farm, or fight in a war. It has nothing to do with your brain being fully developed. You gain most of your mental maturity between 18 and 25, not at 18.
18. Start taking drugs at moderate and safe doses only at the age 25 for new ideas and some fun.
19. Don't care about stereotypical age-based milestones: 30, 40 etc. If we had 12 fingers, 24 and 36 would have mattered more.
20. Don't buy into the myth that your best years are in the past. A well-lived life should only get better with time. The only exception to this is your body and fitness, ergo the next points.
21. Know that a healthy mind can only live in a healthy body. Exercise consistently while you are young. Maintain and improve your mobility throughout your life, even when too old to exercise.
22. Be aware of how your prioritize your goals with respect to your fitness. Do the things that need high fitness at an early age. You cannot climb that mountain when you are an old retired fart. You should do it now. But you can learn a new language for fun when you are 60, even if the brainrot makes it a bit harder.
    1. A great framework for these questions is that when you are young, you have time and fitness, and no money. In mid life, you have more money and some fitness, but generally no time (kids, work). When you are old, you have time and money, and little fitness left.

Money

23. Learn the basics of financial systems. It is an amazing and complicated game that we are all players of, and no one teaches it to us. It is both fun, and useful.
24. Plan for your retirement as early as you can, and especially if you plan to have kids. The greatest gift you can give to your future child is to be happy, self-sufficient and not a burden on them, when you are old and they are going through the most important decades of their lives.

Productivity

25. 95% of the time, you cannot know if you like something or not, before trying it. And 100% of the time, the first time you try something it will be hard and unpleasant, especially as you get older and you feel more embarrassed at being a noob at something. Screw motivation, it is all about discipline. It is all about having the discipline to develop motivation, not visa versa.
26. Mastery begets motivation. most of the things that I am passionate about are skills that I learned (which were unpleasant at first), and I enjoyed the process of getting better at them, eventually leading to a sense of passion, not one day waking up and suddenly being passionate about them^[2].
    1. There are, however, some tasks that bring immense and a sort of inexplicable joy to all of us, and they feel effortless from the very first day^[3]. Cherish them, but don't limit yourself to this small subset.
27. Not always, but a great way to explore is to let your energy guide you towards what you simply feel like doing. This intrinsic energy is not just the fuel for your engine, but also the rudder that tells you which direction you actually want to go towards.

Misc

28. Write a diary/journal. Write as if your future self is the reader of your autobiography.
29. Treat others how you want to be treated.
30. Be as honest as you can with yourself, it is harder than you think, and many people are not.