The True Rejection Challenge

Two: The sun is too big.

This is my new favourite objection :)

It's a good exercise in finding your true objections.

Two: The sun is too big.

I'm afraid I don't get your joke. Does this have anything to do with the system itself, or is it just an example of an insurmountable obstacle?

The sun is too big.

How big is too big?

It seems to me as if some bodyweight strength training exercises might not trigger any of these problems. I would suggest very small sets of comparatively high-load exercises, e.g. work your way up to one-legged squats, one-armed pushups, and chinups if you have a suitable thing to hang from or are willing to get a chinup bar (I sometimes do chinups on the metro). If you are interested I can give you some details on how to work your way up to these exercises, since many people are not initially strong enough to do them (I sure wasn't!).

Sweat: Short sets don't give you much of an opportunity to overheat or sweat. Also, with bodyweight exercises, you can do them at home and take a cool shower/bath immediately afterwards. (By the way, do you hate sweating, or do you hate being sweaty? I am assuming the latter for now.) You could even do the pushups in a cool bath to get some of the advantages of swimming.

Environmental Issues: You can do this at home and indoors.

Cost: Only the time investment, plus (optionally) the cost of a chinup bar.

Boring: This type of exercise does not take very long, so you won't have much time to be bored. Not very long means 5-10 minutes total, a few times a week. You don't even have to do it all in one session, you can take a minute at a time through the day.

As a bonus, strength training can make other sorts of physical activity less unpleasant, since you will be operating at much less than capacity.

I play DDR at home (all you need is a DDR pad and a computer). It solves all the problems except the sweat. But since it's at home, I would think you wouldn't mind that as much (plus you can have a towel nearby). I find this the most convenient exercise ever, since I can do it at home, any time, and for free.

I do the Five Tibetans every morning, and they may meet these requirements.

• They don't raise a sweat on me, except for the 5th. I can't say whether they will for you.

• I do them indoors.

• They are free.

• They only take 10 minutes -- much less if you're not doing the full 21 reps of each exercise. How long does it take for you to be bored?

This isn't the only thing I do for fitness, but it does seem to have a significant effect for me. The other things I do probably don't meet your requirements: using a bicycle for transport whenever practical (sweat and sunshine), running (ditto), taiko drumming (sweat, sweat, and more sweat), lifting weights (my own, bought with money), and taking the stairs, not the lift (sweat?).

Dance in the shower?

Even fairly restrained dancing over an extended period can elevate your heart-rate and trigger many of the benefits of exercise.

If you have a shower and live in an area where cold water is provided for free, then there is no cost. Additionally, this should address your sweat issue much like swimming in a pool.

It is indoors which eliminates sunlight.

Vis-a-vie the boredom constraint. Dancing to music by itself may be a varied enough activity to keep you mentally engaged. If this is insufficient you might consider audiobooks or talk radio.

Complications:

1. Safety. If you dance too vigorously then you may slip or injure yourself. You will know better whether this is a very likely issue. If it is, you may be able to mitigate with protective clothing (either purchased such as no slip water-shoes/socks or made from household objects; feasibility depending on your particular budget constraint and safety concerns).

2. You may not have a sufficiently strong set of external speakers to overcome the noise of the shower. If so, you might mitigate by (1) reducing the water flow for your shower, (2) purchasing or building louder speaks (for example, build a cone out of cardboard to amplify and direct the volume.)

3. Just cold water may be too cold for you. To mitigate either (1) add hot water (and possible add cost), (2) exercise outside the shower first to raise your body temperature, (3) acclimate yourself to colder water (this has been done by many people in the past either by necessity or due to a specific purpose such as Channel swimming).

• Sweating is going to happen. Exercise hard, take a cool down lap and a cool to cold shower.
• Sunshine is (and I'm saying this as someone who spent over a decade in the Goth scene, and still is into the music) absolutely critical. It does wonderful things for your body's chemistry.
• Life costs. You may not always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.

Now, before you can build yourself a workout you have to have a reason for doing it. There are many combinations, but they boil down to:

1) Rehab of injuries. if this is the case you need to consult a therapist and work out exactly your regime, but I doubt it. 2) Body re-composition--commonly called "losing weight", but is more accurately called "reshaping this mess". 3) Getting stronger 4) Building Endurance (you could argue that this is a subset of 3, but in practice it's different enough)

There are some others, but they are usually either a subset (body building is really an extreme of 2 and some of 3 for example).

Once you have your goals clearly defined some of your other objections can be worked around, except possibly for the sweat thing. The one thing "we" can do is keep the workouts of high intensity (meaning short and hard (get your mind out of the gutter)) so that you don't have time to get bored, and you minimize the length of time you sweat.

This won't work if your goal is to do the Leadville 100 (http://www.leadvilleraceseries.com/page/show/309879-run-series), but if you just want nicer hips and a little thinner belly, it isn't that hard.

One suggestion--and this WILL involve sweat--is to find a 25 or (better) 35 pound kettle bell and do kettle bell swings 3 mornings a week when you first get up. Do as many as you can in 5 minutes, then take a walk around the block to cool down. Shower and go to work. This will work your legs, lower back, shoulders and abs. It won't turn you into super$GENDER but if you currently do nothing, it'll help. As you do these try to do longer and longer sets with fewer breaks. At first you'll probably do 10-20 at a time, but it's 15 minutes a week. If that's too boring for you, then you've lost anyway.

Edited to add: Here's a three minute workout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOYpU9gg1yc&

He's barely started sweating, but it'll come in a few minutes. Oh, and he's already (clearly) in shape--either that's a 50 pound bell, or he's really short :)

Known route around all of these problems: happening to have free access to an outdoor pool which is open at night and a person who will go with me and chat while we both backstroke laps. This would be great but I don't happen to have access to a free outdoor pool that is open in the dark.

Make friends with someone who has a backyard pool and invite yourself to swim laps with them. I don't actually know where you live and what the climate is like there, but even if it's colder, you can at least swim for part of the year. Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who has a backyard pool, and invite yourself.

Ideal long-term solution: build your own backyard pool. Probably not financially feasible right now, though.

What about practicing balance?

You don't need to buy a special balance board or exercise ball for it. You can just use any board on a pivot of some sort...say a plywood board on a solid rubber ball (depends on your weight).

Balance will protect you well into old age and practicing it should strengthen your leg joints, abdominals, and lower back, as well as forcing you to be more aware of your body's position, movement, breathing, etc.

For entertainment, you can listen to music or an audiobook.

As for sweating/comfort it is definitely on the less strenuous side of things and can be done indoors with air conditioning (though this may be an expense you don't want to incur).

Taking evening walks while listening to audiobooks seems to deal with all of those issues, assuming you aren't like one of my friends who can't stand audiobooks. Audiobooks aren't free, but if you take 3 30 minute walks a week it will take you months to get through a single book.

I do not exercise.

Why do you think you should, or wish you did?

I recently have been trying to exercise more as well, I bought a door hang pullup bar for 20$ and so far in terms of exercising its quite relaxing. You can do assisted chair pullups if your tired, you can do just a few and be done fast, you can do extended sets if you feel like it. All infront of the tv/computer movie of your choice.

Going for walks at night would seem to solve everything except for possibly "boring." You could try to get a friend to walk with you, or call a friend on the phone, or listen to an audiobook.

The obvious answer: http://movieclips.com/jCdx-rocky-movie-the-meat-locker/

My suggestion is that you learn to get over your fear of sweating. There's nothing objectively harmful about it, so it's merely a preference that can (and probably should) be changed through gradual exposure. Start slowly and work your way up. If you refuse to change your behavior in any substantial way I don't know why you're asking for advice.

For 4 is internet poker an option?

I see no reason for you to play games unless you wish to discuss games with these people and have something in common with them.

For number 2 and 3, my gut reaction is to say you haven't found the right kind of games for your aptitudes, if you're experiencing it as work. For computer games, there are genres which don't rely so much on spatial awareness and/or reflexes such as turn-based strategy. For board games and card games, there is an extremely wide range of play styles out there, some of which will appeal to you more than others.

For #1 you can combine games with other activities, mainly the relationship. Playing boardgames together is a delightful experience. Especially games that require direct interaction like Alias. Generally you should look for games with 2 players as the minimum requirement and a low setup/ cleanup time.

If you specifically want to overcome issue 3, spending some time in Second Life might do the trick. It uses a 3D environment, but it's not really a game per se - there's no time limits or negative repercussions to making mistakes, except looking like a doofus which 1) is expected of newbies and 2) can be mitigated by finding uninhabited places to wander around in, which is easy. Also, your viewpoint can be separated from your avatar if you're not actively moving around, so if you find yourself stuck, you can swing your camera around to get a different perspective on the obstacle, which might help. You can also teleport 'home' to get un-stuck at any time.

For number 1, single-instance games. An RPG with 30 hours in the MAIN storyline and 100 more in optional sidequests would probably not be your ideal. But drop-in, drop-out type gaming might be better. TF2 is one I've started playing, especially since it's free. And the learning curve is fairly gentle, especially with tutorials. Find a class you like, play it until you're comfortable. Then find another. The only issue is that it would require a sufficient investment in hardware if you don't have it already.

Playing on (and joining, if you're so inclined) Kongregate.com is another option. Some "hardcore" gamers look down on flash gaming as a lesser form, but I've seen some wonderfully crafted games on Kong. They have a rating system and actual submission criteria. They don't accept any crap, so the quality of games are better.

There's also a lot of puzzle games, so the whole learning-something-gathering-skills-while-playing area is covered.

For number 4... it requires a larger number of people, but it's a decent party game: Liar's Dice. Yes, Liar's Dice as seen in Pirates of the Carribean. All you need is at least 5 dice per player (dollar store in bulk, you can probably spend only a dollar per player) and some dice cups (I cut down and taped up some paper cups.) Deception, strategy, all the elements of poker. Just with some added novelty.

1, 2, 3 - You can get into opensource social coding like Github or Bitbucket. This will improve your coding skills and make you some coder friends to help with tough questions (worked for me). Time constraint is harder to deal with.

2) Do small, quick projects to build confidence. Write a calculator to compute Bayesian probabilities, or an alarm clock. Start small! Once you're comfortable with that, pick a simple game (Checkers, TicTacToe), break it down in to "issues", and slowly work on finishing each one. Just focus on "draw a board" first, then "allow player to place marks", then "alternate between two players", and finally "check for victory". If you're feeling comfortable after all of that, feel free to write an AI to play the game, or pick a more complex game like Chess or Go and implement that.

This is a lot of how I built up my own skills. I also downloaded open source video games and went through their source code to see how they implemented it. For some games, you'll learn what not to do. For others, you'll see some fairly advanced techniques illustrated. Quality varies :)

For #3, after I'd done #2 for a while, I started offering patches to open source games, as well as joining a development team for one that was incomplete. I'm not real sure exactly how you'd go about finding an interesting project; I usually just happen upon them because I want to fix a bug in LessWrong source, or a friend had discovered a new board game and the only computer version isn't finished yet, etc. :)

#1 Is probably helped dramatically by addressing the others. Small, manageable chunks help me when I'm running in to this. Having a specific "to do" list that I can go through methodically is also wonderful. "Program TicTacToe" makes me anxious, but "draw a tic tac toe grid" is something I could do in my sleep. As an added bonus, I get to check things off a list, which is a guilty pleasure of mine ^_^

I personally use GoogleCode for storing everything. It's got nice built-in SVN support and issue tracking, which works wonderfully for me. If you're not yet used to using SVN for source control, it's a great way to learn :)

What sort of strategies would you say give the best leverage?

This may not have been as good advice as it appears. I posted it because I was annoyed at the suggestion of a Roomba for someone who was very broke, but the result of the suggestion was information that it's possible to borrow a Roomba for one day for free.

There may be a general principle to be found, but I don't know what it is.

There are clothes rotting in my washing machine. I had a migraine and couldn't hang them up, and the migraine lasted about a week, and now there's fungus growing on them. I've read online that this can be fixed by washing them 3-4 times and then hanging them in the sun to dry. Adding vinegar to the washing machine can help. The washing machine is right next to the bathtub, and I can't bathe properly because the smell is overpowering and makes me dizzy and light headed.

Do not fuck around with possibly-toxic fungus. The fact that the fumes have immediate negative effects strongly suggests that it's toxic. Do not ignore sudden health problems that coincide with the appearance of mold in your environment, especially not ones as severe as a perpetual migraine. Those clothes are probably not salvageable, but they should be the least of your worries. You need outside help cleaning your apartment, and you need it yesterday. You also need a physical.

More information about your situation might be useful here. My first suggestion is to see if you can find someone local to help you with it (friends, family), but that seems like an obvious enough solution that I expect that if it were that simple you'd have done it already. So, what resources do you have available?

Move.

It sounds like you're living in a toxic environment which is making you sick. Does that fit your experience (is your history of illness - migraines, etc. - concentrated in the time when you've been living in your current apartment)? So find a new place to live. And be careful what you bring - you don't want to bring the toxic stuff with you.

As a trial run, you could try staying someplace else for a week or so to see if you feel better. Bring as little with you as possible (even the clothes you wear should be new/borrowed), and don't go back to your apartment at all during that time.

As others have mentioned get help. If you have no friends who can do it look on Craigslist for someone who cleans houses. Explain the situation to them and have them bring their steam cleaner.

While the clothes are washing have them steam clean your carpets at least twice.

Then when you get done paying this off, go get a good vacuum cleaner, and if you are the sort of person who's always tracking in dirt (I am) get a cheap carpet shampooer.

Also--have to comment--the migraine thing really should be your focus. My wife gets these and absolutely refuses to do the food/activity diary thing, is horrible about exercise and the rest. Fortunately for her she only has them for a day or two about once a month.

You could use hydrogen peroxide instead of chlorine bleach. It's not as effective as a disinfectant but it's odorless, cheap, and probably a lot more effective than vinegar. If you get 3% concentration (the most common) you'll probably need to pour a whole bottle over the clothes, then wait an hour or two.

Depending on what's underneath the carpet, you could consider just removing it.

I've sent an overview of your situation to all my friends who are doctors or training to be doctors. I will let you know their opinion. (I've also included information from your meat and vegetables post).

I strongly suggest you do not wait for them to get back to me and consult with local experts as soon as possible.

Also, if anyone in the LW community has medical training or knows someone who does who would be willing to offer an opinion on this, I encourage them to do so.

For the unnumbered reason of potentially getting another migraine by having to do the laundry, and just in general to get past this rut/problem: Ask a friend or family member for assistance with the task. Alternately, offer someone money to do your laundry (an amount less than the cost of replacing the clothes).

For 4 specifically, maybe try wearing gloves (dishwashing gloves or latex gloves) to avoid touching the mold/fungus directly.

Re: vacuuming when you are physically unable.

I strongly recommend an iRobot vacuum cleaner (roomba). It will vacuum for you.

By the sound of it, your carpet is badly ingrained with dirt, so the vacuum will not get it all out in one day - but if you set it to vacuum every day (which few humans would normally do voluntarily, but the roomba doesn't mind) it is highly likely that over time it will improve until "clean" it a normal state for it.

On 2: What kind of drugs are we talking about that don't help? If you haven't tried triptans, that could be a thing.

Watch some episodes of "hoarders". Just a few should provide enough motivation to implement the suggestions of others...

Since you say you're prickly about advice, I will try just giving you the reasons for my suggestions and omit the actual suggestions when possible. Please let me know if that way of phrasing is actually helpful, or just annoyingly indirect.

On buying more vegetables

I've heard that people buy more food if they shop while hungry. People also are more likely to interpret more things as edible if they are hungry.

I find I buy more vegetables when I am somewhere that sells primarily vegetables, like a farmer's market. At the farmer's market, there is also the illusion of scarcity since it's a once-a-week stuff (even though I could buy similar things in the grocery store later), so I stock up a lot.

Some friends of mine subscribe to CSA or other vegetable-delivery programs, which takes pretty much all of the effort out of it.

On eating the vegetables you've bought

It is possible to make a meal or part of a meal that is nearly 100% vegetables.

After experimenting with a few methods of preparing them, I found that roasting works for me as a way of preparing solo vegetables; most vegetables taste good to me when coated with olive oil and some light seasoning (and sometimes some grated Romano or Parmagiano cheese), and roasted. It gives them a satisfying, almost meaty/buttery taste. It is also pretty easy and doesn't require a lot of time once I got the timing right and stopped needing to keep peeking into the oven to determine doneness. If you want some more specific roasting suggestions I am happy to provide them. But you may find other preparations are more appealing.

Even if you prefer to mix veggies with non-veggies, I suspect you wouldn't be able to eat around veggies in a smooth or fine-textured soup very easily (e.g. cream of broccoli, carrot soup, gazpacho). And you'd have to decompose a sandwich to avoid eating a cross-section of the ingredients.

Related question: Vegetables are more easily visually identifiable in some foods than others. For example, in something like pasta with broccoli, you can see the broccoli pieces and they are obviously separate from the pasta. On the other hand, in something like a curry or stew, it's not always easy to see which lumps are meat, which lumps are something like potato or cheese, and which lumps are veggies, since they're all covered in sauce. Do you find you eat around the veggies to a different extent in foods that differ along this dimension, or is it a pretty uniform phenomenon?

What have you actually tried to train your brain to reclassify them?

Example training task: There is a deck containing images of various food items, vegetables/fruits, whatever you currently classify vegetables like (non edible plants maybe?), and completely random objects. Sort it into edible and non-edible piles as fast as possible, without thinking and while maybe listening to an interesting podcast or radio or somehting to distract you.

No idea if that'd work, but if you think up 20 exercises like that at least one of them should work.

I think you are thinking about the wrong kinds of parties. In fact, you are solving the wrong problem. If your goal is to network and meet people, there are much much better ways of doing that than going out to parties. Go to local clubs/meet-ups (chess, book, poker, sewing, toast masters, etc...). Meet more people through other people you already know, and through workplace if you have a job. You said you like going to church, do activities with those people. You'll meet new people there. See what fun things they do. Go to those things too.

b+c: drink caffeine, not alcohol?

a) What are you doing at parties, then? You seem to do something wrong. b) Go to a party where not everyone drinks, often quite a few persons will drive home so they won't drink. Alternatively, drive other people home. c) You can shift your sleep schedule by going to sleep 15 minutes (or more) later each day. It's a quite simple mechanism, and it works. d) Simple: attend a dancing course! It's a simple yet valuable skill, worth the money and the time. Alternatively, you could watch tutorials on youtube. e) You don't. You don't want to tell me that you're busy with such other things every single evening. If that really is the case, take one of those activities and either let it fall or do it somewhen (I'll just use this word, I don't care whether it's proper English) else.

Now, because that was your true rejection, it's party time for you. Let your friend take you to a party, and have a good time.

Yer a Gurl, if yer buy'n yer own drink yer doin it wrong.

Yes. I'd also love to see follow-ups afterwards to report on what was effective, what wasn't, what form of advice worked best, and what would the relevant known and (at the time) hidden variables.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for tracking.

though the bright green edges on new comments help a lot.

That's what the bright green edges mean!

Procedural Knowledge Gaps had almost three times as many comments.

On that note, many props to Alicorn for starting these great instrumental rationality threads.

Yea.

Actually, this meme is great enough that it should become a monthly thing!

Some intuition is also telling me there is a "mirror" challenge to this one that would complement it and also should have a thread, but I don't know what this one would be. It feels like some fragmented memory of an idea I forgot or somehting like that. I think it might have somehting to do with finding/formulating problems.

Strategies for dealing with money seem to me to come in two varieties: Have as much income as possible and don't worry much about the outgo, or have as little outgo as possible and don't worry much about the income. It seems to me like you'd prefer the latter, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

It is a less popular kind of choice, and one that many people don't really understand, so you might always have to deal with people objecting to it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just means that they don't understand it, or possibly that they're jealous. ;)

Googling 'frugality' should get you some good advice about making that kind of lifestyle work.

I also suggest testing your assumption in #8 that you can easily make money whenever you need it by doing so in order to set some money aside in case of an emergency as in issue #7. This is actually more about #8 than #7, though - basing your lifestyle on an untested assumption like that isn't wise, and if (as I expect, actually) the assumption turns out to be accurate, having the experience of finding a job (or whatever) when you don't have an emergency will be useful if you have to find one (or whatever) when you do.

On: 4&7) How old are you? Is it likely your preference for having kids/living arrangements etc will change over time? Do note that even if your own preferences for living with friends remain constant, they may want to go the traditional family, home route. Also medical emergencies etc are of course rarer for the young than for the elderly.

8) This is a reasonable assumption, but be aware that if you are looking for a 9-5 job with a steady salary later in life you will need to explain the gap years to the recruiter. Also, if the need comes in the form of an emergency, you may not be able to acquire money fast enough.

Perhaps you need to investigate ways to monetise your talents instead of thinking about a traditional job that pays you a lot more than you need.

Wait, so why do you want to then?

7) i'm in my mid 20s, so the health risks aren't looming large yet. i can quit later.

Um - I'm afraid I have to tell you that "later health effects" are not caused by smoking later in life. They are caused by smoking early in life... and then getting older (whether or not you quit).

You can improve your chance of recovering from the damage you are doing by quitting right now.

As a frequent health-campaign in Aus tells us "every cigarette is causing you damage"

Agreed, Cigarette smoking is usually a frequency habit. For arguments sake, a pack a day is 20 cigarettes in the 16 hours you are awake, that means the smell/taste/sight is always around.

1) Nicotine, while addictive is nowhere near as addictive as the other chemicals put into cigarettes to keep them burning. I smoked cigarettes for 3 years before picking up cigars. While it would take a research team to find what is in a cigarette, I can tell you what is in my cigars, aged tobacco leaves. I smoked less and less cigarettes as time went on (about 3 weeks). I have been without cigarettes for a year and currently smoke cigars once to twice a week.

2) Cigars, while some can be stupidly expensive, are relatively cheap. One of my favorite cigars is about $5 a stick, at 3 sticks, that's $15 a week. I am sure that is cheaper than your current cost. You can also find "mistakes" for as low as $1.(I do realize that is my current cost, and while weening myself off of cigarettes, it was more expensive.)

3) I thought that as well, though I found that once I proved to myself that I had willpower to quit cigarettes, it was much easier to maintain, and even lose weight.

4) Don't spend more on food if you don't need more, put it towards savings.

5) I love smoking cigars. Sitting down after a long day with your favorite drink and a cigar is incredibly relaxing. The best part is, it is not addicting. I have gone weeks without needing to smoke.

6) I think this is an excellent alternative. It makes smoking a true luxury, not an addiction. When the time comes, you can stop for 9 months and pick it back up if you want to, not because you need to.

7) The human body is incredibly resilient. Although, anything in excess will destroy it. 20 cigarettes in a 16 hour period for 10 years, killer. 150 cigars a year (slightly more than the number of cigarettes consumed in a week) is not excess. While I can't say it is helping my health, I can say I am still able to hike, climb, run and swim.

8) As you lessen your dependency on cigarettes, you will have these oral and manual cravings less, though you will still see me twirling a paperclip in my mouth from time to time.

I hope this comes as some help.

If you want to use it as a nootropic, unflavored nicotine is pretty cheap. For example, you can get 60 ml at 25 mg/ml for 8.75 plus shipping. Only about 1mg is absorbed from a typical cigarette due to combustion, so this is the equivalent of 1500 cigarettes.

Have you considered electronic cigarettes?

5) smoking is my only vice and my only luxury.

Sounds like you need more luxuries :D

One of the things my brother did near the end of when he smoked and during while he was quitting was getting into really good scotch. He'd take a little glass of very expensive scotch and nurse it for an hour or so.

8) i need something to do with my hands and my mouth. i dont like gum or lollies all that much.

chew on the end of your pen. of get a ring and twirl it around your finger. or take up knitting or some other hand-crafty activity to quell your fidget-cravings (which I get too).

I think you should put separate things into separate comments so the threading makes more sense.

Switch to chewing tobacco. It's less harmful*. Also, it's much more disgusting, so you will have more motivation to quit.

[*] IIRC from when I read about it years ago. Do your own research.

Invite others to come visit you.

Sounds like the only reason you're even considering travel is social pressure. I'd recommend doing somehting to pre commit to not travelling instead, so you can just point at that to get people to stop nagging you.

I would think #12, that you don't actually gain anything from this travel, would be pretty fundamental. Most people spend thousands of dollars on plane tickets because they value seeing family / being social / the actual experience. You don't seem to value any of those things, so why are you doing this?

6. I don't really like losing connection to the internet, or my main computer. This isn't a sufficient condition for some of the possible trips, but not all.

A smart phone, netbook, or tablet are all lightweight ways to maintain the Internet connection as much as possible (i.e. always, except for when the plane is in the air). Personally, I found myself much more willing to travel after purchasing a smart phone ~1.5 years ago.

For #10, rent your house out while you're gone via airbnb. And when you travel, rent rooms via airbnb, which is apparently significantly cheaper than traditional hotels, at least where I live (NYC).

@ 1,2&9 are trains a viable method of transport in your area?

most ingredients for cooking don't keep for more than a day or two, even in the fridge. milk, bread, veggies, leftovers, they all go bad

If milk goes bad after a day or two no matter when you open it, you might have a malfunctioning refrigerator.

If milk is OK until a day or two after you open it, you might have a dangerously elevated level of airborne microorganisms.

1. Get protein from non-meat sources. Consider, in particular, eggs. Monitor the sales at your grocer of choice; if they have a free loyalty program fill out their form and take their junk mail to get in on that.

2. See above

3. Buy canned beans in large amounts when they are on sale. Or, consider trying to make a deal with a friend or neighbor where you split batches of beans and only have to do cooking some of the time.

4. This should admit of self-modification. If you know your food will go off if not eaten, there is no waste or "not lasting longer" associated with eating it before that time. But perhaps you need to work around it instead...

5. Heartburn can be medicated. If you can't afford to get that checked out or afford the meds, eat around it...

6. I really do recommend eating, but would need to know more about the etiology of the habit before I offered advice on breaking it.

7. Consider sharing meals with friends/neighbors. Or, get a freezer. Freezers are really useful.

8. If you can't get a freezer, buy your veggies canned. Many veggies come that way. Cans are smallish.

9. Consider disposable dishes, or covering your dishes with something like plastic wrap and being careful with your utensils. (Possibly expensive.) Also, note that not every use of dishes requires washing between uses, especially if you are the only user: you can use a water glass for days as long as you don't leave a lot of water standing in it; you can brush crumbs of relatively dry foods off a plate and use it again; etc. When you do have to wash dishes, soak them overnight with water and dish soap first, or at least rinse them out, to reduce the amount by which things cake on and to help give the grease a head start on dissolving.

10. Freezers are useful. Like, a lot.

Veggies you did not mention include: miscellaneous greens such as turnip or collard, kale, spinach, green or wax beans, bamboo, peppers, artichokes, beets, water chestnuts. (All of those things exist canned.) Also, celery, celeriac, turnips, rutabagas, parsnips, miscellaneous sprouts, assorted squashes, fennel, leeks, scallions, avocados, cucumbers, broccoli, cauliflower, edamame, radishes, jicama, seaweed of various sorts. I don't know if these ones are available canned. (Seaweed has the advantage of being available dried. You can reconstitute whatever amount you desire.)

As for what to do with them: Your favorites, tomatoes, onions, garlic, carrots, corn, and potatoes (plus most of what I just mentioned) can all be put in soups, stews, pot pies, sautés and stirfries, kabobs, and curries, or just eaten by themselves cooked or not with the spices/seasonings of your choice. Google is your friend; search for [vegetable] recipe and see what pops up. If you require more specialized help, pick some likely-looking veggies and I will locate or fabricate simple preparation instructions for you!

A handheld steam cleaner like this can remove food from dishes with almost no effort, and costs a lot less than a dishwasher.

Specifically regarding protein: You are probably underestimating how much protein is in many foods. Here is a brief list of foods which, if you got all of your calories from them, would give you enough protein:

• Any sort of bean, including fast cooking beans such as lentils, lima beans, and peas.
• Most nuts
• Many dark green vegetables (e.g spinach, kale, broccoli, green cabbage)
• Bread. Yes, really - there's lots of gluten in there.
• Pasta. Again, lots of gluten.
• Potatoes, so long as you eat the skins. Get red ones, they're easier to clean and the skins are more tender.
• Quinoa (a grain).

Brown rice is close, but not quite there. So you should not worry about eating meat, it's unnecessary.

One specific dish you should consider is dal. Cooked lentils with spices. Popular in India. Lots of other things you can throw in, too, including onion, tomato, garlic. carrots, and corn. In small quantities the tomato and onion should be less likely to cause heartburn. To keep the cost of the spices down, buy from the bulk section - it can be as little as 1/10 the price of bottled spices, and you can get only however much you need. Dried lentils and spices keep for quite a long time, and it only takes 45min to prepare, in one pot (or two if you make a tarka).

When you store vegetables in the fridge, do you keep them in plastic bags? I find that helps for many green veggies in particular. I just use the bags I get them in from the store or my farmshare.

Consider shopping more like a European - buy fresh ingredients every day or every other day instead of doing one big shopping trip once a week. This will minimize your food spoilage problems.

I agree with everyone else that you should check that your fridge is functioning properly. Measure the temperature. It should be between 33 and 38 degrees F. Above 38 and I'd expect fairly high rates of spoilage.

If your beans are taking forever to cook, are you adding salt? Adding salt will keep beans hard -- wait to add it until the beans are fully cooked.

Also, I second the suggestion to either make your fridge colder, or replace it.

Based on #2 and #5, if I were you I would experiment to see if you have hypochlorhydria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochlorhydria). Symptoms are (ironically) basically the same as GERD. (Note: I'm not a doctor!)

10)

eggs: can be kept uncooled for a while, very long shelf life hard-boiled, easy to prepare in small portions.

milk: do you get UHT milk? It has an uncooled shelf life of months and tends to be cheaper than fresher variants.

meat: consider smoked or dried meats (bacon, salami).

pasta: reasonably easy to prepare in smaller portions

Out of interest, where do you live that cigarettes are so much cheaper than food? One pack of cigerattes here (Germany) will buy me 2 days worth of (cheap) food.

1) Calculate how many lives you can save with your organs. Pre-commit to donate enough money to save as many lives, on top of what you would normally want to donate.

2) Since you are under 18, I can see your problem. Your chances of dying where cryonics would be an option (read: not in an accident) are so tiny, it's probably OK to wait. But you can always take out a loan (maybe?) or borrow from someone.

3) Do you want to take that chance? I also believe that the Singularity will happen within my lifetime, but I am totally willing to pay ~$80 a month to increase the chance of my brain existing when it happens (even if it's only 1%).

The singularity (or the technological state we roughly mean by it) could easily depend on centuries of continued incremental research. Moore's Law is coming up against some fundamental barriers. Furthermore, it may be advisable to slow the approach of the singularity for precautionary reasons (e.g. by restricting access to the most powerful hardware), as a bad singularity is to be avoided pretty much at all costs.

Cryonics also doesn't depend directly on a singularity, just either very good (compared to today) scan/emulate tech or very good cell repair tech. These involve progress in different areas of science, so one might be a dead end whereas the other turns out to work.

Supporting cryonics as a younger person (whether by signing up or by supporting it from the sidelines) could result in earlier development of hypothermia and other related biochemical alternatives, eliminating the need for cryonics as we know it. Instead you could conceivably enter a state of hibernation as you near old age, for a few years at a time, until a cure for aging is developed.

1: If cryonics is appealing because it potentially saving your life, then not signing up once you have the money is effectively suicide / voluntary euthanasia. The fact that other people could be saved by your organs is true whether or not you are signed up for cryonics -- so if your life is worth less to you than 4 or 8 strangers' lives, you should commit suicide and donate your organs.

If you don't want to commit suicide to donate organs, you shouldn't want to avoid cryonics to donate organs.

2: This is not a reason not to do it, it's a reason you literally currently can't. So make more money (there are lots of other better sources of how to do this; if you want to delve down this road, reply or PM and I'll provide more resources).

3: How confident are you that it will happen before you die? Given the number of years of additional life you are buying a chance at by signing up for cryonics, the extra chance at preserving your identity and 'coming back' via cryonics may still be worth the extra cash. But that depends on the probabilities you assign to the various relevant factors (chance of singularity during lifetime & chance of cryonics resulting in extended life, mainly).

1) I think I can save more lives by being an organ donor.

There were about 6 thousand people last year in Canada who needed an organ transplant [1] and around 247 thousand deaths [2]. Of those deaths, about 1/3rd were prevented by existing donors. We'd be preventing less than 2% of all deaths in Canada if everyone got the donations they needed.

Donation is only viable in cases of brain death (~49% odds) [1], and I couldn't find any statistics on how often a donor body is actually usable (but I'd assume vastly less than 100% of those cases, since you have to die of brain death in a hospital and still have cardiac activity) All in all, there's a deficit of donors, so it's probably still helpful (unless you're a man who has had sex with another man, in which case you might not even be legally eligible; it's banned in Canada).

I think you're probably saving less than 1 life on average by being a donor. You'd probably do better to convince some friends and co-workers to sign up with, since organ donation is "low hanging fruit" (free, socially acceptable), and sign yourself up for cryonics (you can claim you've gone with the more complex "donate body to medical science" if you need a social excuse for why you're not an organ donor yourself)

If you're not doing cryonics, there's no excuse for not being an organ donor, of course, so don't use this as an excuse to wiggle out of doing one or the other! :)

[1] http://www.transplant.ca/pubinfo_orgtiss.htm [2] http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/demo07a-eng.htm

If number one is part of your true rejection, look to see if there are head-only cryonics available in your area.

You're under 18.

If you avoid cigarettes, meth and drunk drivers you should be able to live damn near forever, unless we completely f* up and lose our drive or our ability to continue to advance technologically. By the time you're in your late 30s or early 40s you'll have a much better idea. If you're still typing on the Internets (in whatever form it is 20 years from now) you'll be able to make a MUCH better informed decision. If you're sleeping in a rough shelter and hunting/gathering for food with what's left of civilization, well the cryonics wouldn't have helped anyway (the corpsicles will have been thawed and eaten with the rest of the stored food).

Keep a public blog under a psuedonymn, where you post the ramblings, daily life, and so forth. Your friends might enjoy reading it, and it lets you practice writing. Whenever you write something particularly interesting on your personal blog, do a second draft that cuts down on the rambling and post it on your main blog.

Write suggestion-driven fiction.

Keep a private blog, and consider posting to a public one those essays that you're particularly proud of.

In accordance with my commitment below, here are the ten ideas I came up with.

1. An introduction to real analysis using Python.

2. Gurren Lagann fanfiction where characters die left and right for being idiots. (Thanks chelz!)

3. Semi-realistic Solar System space opera. Moral horizon-hopping protagonist reclaims humanity's drive toward space.

4. An argument against mathematical platonism.

5. An explanation of the taxonomy of birds.

6. A follow-up to the quantum physics sequence.

7. A type theory-based explanation of tensor analysis and differential geometry.

8. An argument against the usefulness of Rawls' "veil of ignorance".

9. An essay on romantic aesthetics, using Rand as a starting point but blowing away her chaff.

10. A review/update of Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path.

When you do write, what prompts it? Find out what the impetus is and then arrange to have lots of it. (Fo instance, mine is attention, so I have lots of beta readers and publish everything I write on the Internet.) NaNoWriMo isn't the ideal writing environment for everyone.

Write down ideas for things to write about as you have them. Pick the best/most original/etc. the next time you have an opportunity to write. If you are short on time and find that you tend not to be pleased with the ideas you use, this is probably more workable than just writing about everything you think of.

Do one pass of editing on each thing you write, after letting it sit without looking at it for at least a few days. This will give you practice at drawing your attention to things you find "overwritten" after the fact; hopefully you'll eventually nip those patterns in the bud before they make it into your writing.

Generic advice that doesn't address anything specific you said: Do not delete things you write, ever. If you are tempted to do this, bury them somewhere in the deepest recesses of your computer, but never delete.

Long-winded address to #1 and #3:

I'm currently learning to drive, and I've found breaking it down in to steps has helped a lot. "Learn to drive" is a crazy insane task that I could never do, after all :)

I started by addressing your #3, since the only person I had available to teach me was a friend with a manual. We spent a couple hours in an empty lot, braking and turning off the car any time someone drove even vaguely near me, just starting and stopping the car and getting used to the clutch.

Once that was done, we found a corporate lot, where we could wind around buildings and generally do things slightly more dynamic than "start and stop" while still not having any traffic to worry about (we did this on a weekend evening). That got me more comfortable with steering, handling the shift between 1st and 2nd gear, and more experience with the clutch. Since it was mostly 10-20 MPH, and a fairly empty lot, there wasn't a lot of risk. I also didn't hesitate to just slam the break and stop the car if I ever got uncomfortable.

Between these two, I had an environment where I could safely freak out while still learning the skill. Once I was actually on the road, I was a lot more comfortable because I knew I could at least do the basics, and about the worst I'd generally result in is another driver being a few minutes late to wherever they were going. Practicing on weekend evenings also helps, because generally people aren't in a hurry then, and traffic is lighter.

2) This one solves itself come Autumn and you don't seem to be particularly eager. Wait until then :)

4) Can your parents or a friend spend a couple hours a week teaching you? I will say that a calm instructor is very useful in helping to dissolve the "driving = stress" reaction. I only practice an hour or two each week, and it works fine for me. Generally we drive until I get exhausted or over-stressed, and then I hand the keys over and she drives us back :)

5) My main reason for driving is simply so that I can offer to do it on long trips and in emergencies. I occasionally go on 12+ hour drives with friends, and I'd feel better being able to do some of the work for them, especially when it's obvious that they're exhausted. Learning to drive is useful even if you don't do it often, and you don't have to enjoy it for it to be a useful skill.

tl;dr You can overcome stress, multitasking and a manual transmission, given sufficient time and lessons. Consider just not doing anything about it til the fall, but making firm, detailed plans for once you get home. If you feel you should learn to drive it's probably worth the money, just for the extra possibilities it opens up to you.

1. It sounds like you still have a ton of competing demands on your time. You need to prioritise learning to drive so that you practice regularly. As far as clumsy with slow reaction times goes, I'm 27, I have Asperger Syndrome with mild sensory processing difficulties and high base stress levels and I have less than four months driving experience, definitely under 70 hours driving experience and I may have my licence by Friday and will within two months barring epic failure.

2. Just wait until the fall.

3. Get a good driving instructor and you can do it. If you can automatise the sequences of involved, complicated motions involved in competitive swimming you can learn to drive a manual transmission. Your description of lifeguarding competitively, particularly how you were well below average when beginning but became competent over time also strongly suggests to me that you can get past getting freaked out.

4. How much do you have saved? How much is being able to drive worth to you? What's the just better use of the funds, the just worse use and the current best use?

5. Ditto, but, um, I'm not under the impression that most Canadian cities are much friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists or public transport users than in the US. If you ever want to live in the suburbs, ever, it'd be worth it

Note that a driving instructor provides you with a practice car.

I don't drive much now, and I'm so clumsy that I've wondered if it's pathological... but I learned to drive over the summer I was 18, paid for my own lessons, and got my license. I would have thought I could never do it, but it's very possible.

Spending money isn't really awful, I've learned over time. Spending more than you can afford is awful. But if you have a cushion of savings that you haven't been using, and you spend it down a little for a one-time investment in your human capital, it's not actually that bad. Attaching an emotional valence to how many dollars you have in the bank gets in the way of living.

With regards to the stress, enjoyment, and environmental issues: Consider that knowing how to drive doesn't obligate you to have a lifestyle where you do so regularly. This also covers some of the financial objection, too: I've heard that it's cheaper to have a generally non-driving lifestyle and rent a car (possibly through a car-sharing program) when you need to than to have a lifestyle that involves driving on a regular basis.

Addressing 1 and 5, I honestly think you're a better person if you don't get comfortable with driving. Ever. One of the main points of the book Traffic was that being comfortable is often more dangerous than being at high alert. Granted, you can't always be in panic mode, but once you have learned to drive, just use the car as a tool to get things you want done, and embrace your fear. Make habits that contribute to being a better driver, like always looking at your blind spot, always go the speed limit, don't brake so hard that a person's head would jerk forward (unless you have to!). And maybe set challenges for yourself, both for fun and to keep you paying attention to the road. I like to pretend that I'm in a space ship with very limited fuel, so I accelerate and brake as infrequently as I can.

As for 2 and 4, maybe you can get help learning from the parent of a friend. It will be awkward, but it will help to limit emotional issues clouding the learning process because you are on your dealing-with-strangers behavior mode.

Finally, I don't have a lot to say about manual cars. They are indeed a pain in the ass, and if you don't think you can handle them now, then maybe you shouldn't start with them. But if you care about Black Swan events, it might be a good idea to learn how to use one after you've learned automatic, just in case you're on a road trip with a friend, who is driving a manual, and the friend has an emergency, and you need to get them to the hospital. Or whatever.

Being the son of a successful engineer and having chosen to study philosophy/psychology and not buying in to the christian/American morality of work as a value in itself, I hardly think I'll want to make enough money to pay for me.

Wow. I had a surprisingly strong emotional response against that. I'm still trying to parse why, and it probably says more about my psychology than about yours. I think it boils down to the following beliefs that I seem to have: a) everyone should try their best to be self-sufficient, otherwise the weight of freeloaders will drag the rest of society down, b) anything can happen to anyone at any time and if you're not trying your best to be prepared, you're an idiot. Etc. Again, I'm not trying to attack you in any way. Your system sounds reasonably healthy, as long as you can afford it financially. (I know people who are similar but who really can't afford it, and that may be coloring my perception.)

That probably means that my mind works sufficiently differently from yours that my suggestions may not work, but I'll try my best.

a) Focus on the good feeling of having gotten something done, rather than the negative feeling of starting something that seems like harder work than the 'better experiential options'. Over time, you might find that the satisfaction of having accomplished something is so addictive that it bleeds through into 'I want to start more projects and finish them, so I can have the fulfillment of having finished them.' Of course there are things that are easier than finishing difficult projects, but you might find that after a while, they aren't as fun because you become conscious of how little you've accomplished at the end of doing them. That being said, that's how my psychology works. Yours may require other tactics to get it to cooperate.

b) Your life may have been great for the past 25 years. Don't focus on your life. Making the whole world a better place is not about you. In fact, plenty of people who've tried to make the world a better place, and sometimes succeeded, have suffered in the process. It's not about you. According to utilitarian moral theories, every person's happiness is of equal weight. If the stress of putting off spontaneous, fun activities to finish projects makes you a teeny bit less happy, but it makes just 2 other people much happier, than the total sum of happiness in the world is greater and you can be at ease, having accomplished your goal.

Unless the person complaining is the person who checks your work, or there's some reason to believe that they'd have more information about the ideal speed to mistakes ratio than you do, I suggest just ignoring it. If one or the other of my caveats is true, I suggest asking the person who checks your work for more information about the issue, so that you can see why you should want to work slower and avoid more mistakes.

I used to think I needed to learn this. Then I was given unsupervised access to do accounting entries, and discovered I could double-check my work quite well when there was an actual nee. I just can't stand wasting time on it normally, for the #1 and #4 reasons you listed.

If you can afford it, you may be able to nonverbally signal to onlookers that you are there for Serious Running by showing up in a Serious Running outfit with corresponding accessories.

...and I recommend getting an iPod and noise-dampening earphones. Even if you don't listen to music, they're good so you don't have to deal with hearing people and can ignore them more easily.

I run a decent amount and I used to be self-conscious about it. Eventually I realized: What does it matter what random strangers think? Their opinion of you has no effect on your life. They won't even know your name or remember your face.

Now it doesn't feel the least bit unusual when I ignore people. I'm breathing hard. In a few minutes I'll be half a mile away from this person. Why spend the effort to make eye contact and nod?

You could always exercise at home. Pushups, squats, and crunches are all easy muscle building exercises there. I personally love "DDR" (video game) for this - a used copy of the game, a cheap dance mat, and a used PS/2 can be had for under $100 pretty easily.

I also occasionally just jog or walk especially fast during my normal day. I've never had anyone comment on it, even when I do this downtown. Amongst other things, I'm moving faster than them ;)

I would second the suggestion of "self modify so you don't mind if people think you're high", but I don't think that's the simplest way to get exercise :)

Vegetables that stay fresh for a long time without being frozen, and can be eaten raw or with a dip or dressing (i.e, no recipe needed):

Whole carrots, snow peas, romaine lettuce (look for a plastic bag with three fronds in it), spring mix lettuce, basil, zucchini

Potential sources of vegetable phytonutrients that come as ready-to-eat preserved snack foods:

Terra Chips, V-8, Bloody Mary Mix, Roasted Nori (Seaweed)

Ask someone to look over your shoulder at random times but maybe once per 10min on average.

I know someone IRL who was having that problem. They modified their computer so that they were simply unable to access certain sites. I believe it involved having the browser block certain IP addresses but I can't really remember. It was possible to undo this but it took far to much work for a stalling activity.

I believe I need to teach myself QM and Thermo to a sufficient level to do well on the GREs.

Yes, that will be necessary to do well on the test. You should also be prepared to review classical mechanics and E&M. Having a good set of freshman-level physics textbooks is helpful, because many of the problems are at that level. I recommend the two-volume set by Resnick, Halliday, and Krane.

You should check out the physicsgre.com forums. You will be able to find a fair amount of advice threads for people in similar situations (lacking the full complement of upper-level physics courses, in need of research experience, etc.), as well as a lot of general advice about the physics GRE test. You can also try starting your own thread on that forum to solicit more advice. The consensus is that going to grad school in physics without the undergrad in physics is difficult and requires a lot of effort, but it's not impossible if one is dedicated and takes the initiative.

In general, a career in physics is going to require a lot of self-study. Grad students often end up working on such specialized research problems that the only way to learn about the topic is to read lots of published papers, which are often much more difficult to understand than textbooks.

For quantum mechanics, I recommend Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics. I am not sure why you haven't been working problems all the way through, but if it's because you don't have the correct solutions against which to check your answers, the manual for Griffith's textbook is easy to find. Unfortunately, I really don't know of a good undergraduate-level thermodynamics textbook.

For the general GRE test, buy a commercial test-prep book (personally, I prefer Barron's) and go through it cover to cover. Take the diagnostic test, figure out where your areas of weakness are, study them by working through the sections in the book that address them, and then take more practice tests. (Repeat if necessary.)

I think you would have an easier time finding a professor who would let you work in eir research group, or a college that might let you audit classes, if you were in an English-speaking country. The language barrier will be difficult to overcome for both of those activities. This would also help with the problem of loneliness. In addition, if you take the general GRE in the US, you can take it on the computer instead of on paper, which some find to be a more intuitive format. (At the least, it's nicer for writing the essays.)

I don't have this problem, but I'm told this article is excellent: How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off

If the clocks are enough to make you wake up even for a brief moment (but not enough to keep you awake), try having a supply of caffeine pills next to your bed, and take one when the first alarm rings. Then sleep for half an hour more and get up.

That's worked for me for several years, though my difficulties in getting up were nowhere as serious as yours.

Part of the problem could be that your alarm is waking you up at a bad part of your sleep cycle. The times when you wake up more smoothly could be times when your alarm happens to sound during a phase when you are less deeply asleep. There are apps (like Sleep Cycle on the iPhone) and devices that track your sleep cycle and make the alarm go off at the appropriate part of your sleep cycle.

Have you got friends or roomies who would be willing to help? Every time I ask someone to ensure I'm awake at a specific time, I wake up before my alarm AND before the friend wakes me up. Though it is only a trick I use for important occasions, it has a perfect success rate for me.

If you can't get someone to help, and you are capable of receiving phone calls, depending on time zone and time of day, I would be willing to give you the occasional wake-up call.

There is a device called a "zeos" (http://www.amazon.com/Zeo-ZEOBP01-Personal-Sleep-Coach/dp/B002IY65V4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309340321&sr=8-1) that is basically a low-rent EEG that can do the math and wake you at the optimal part of your sleep cycle. Yeah, it's kinda expensive, but I'm trying to talk myself into buying one.

Beyond just waking you at the appropriate part of your sleep cycle you can also use it in conjunction with a food/sleep diary to track how changes in your life patterns effect your sleep.

I just finished reading 4 hour body (Tim Ferriss) where he mentioned this, and one thing he mentioned was that eating a high-protein snack (he recommended tablespoons (or was it teaspoons?)) of almond butter right before bed lead to better sleep, and less problems waking up (he attributed this to low blood sugar in the AM, which might be). (I also learned about the zeos in his book).

I have the same issue. My current patch is to have ten alarms set on my phone and one on my alarm clock at ten minute intervals starting from the half hour or so before I have to wake up.

Even still, it's a struggle.

Now, is it a matter of not getting a sufficient amount or sufficiently restful sleep? Or is it inability to wake on time regardless of how much sleep you get?

I personally set 5 alarms :)

If that sort of thing isn't working, try opening a window to get sunlight in, or if possible have a friend call you when you want to get up.

Can you eat grapes, or do the stems give you trouble? Consider keeping canned fruit around (peaches, pears, mandarin oranges, pineapple, &c) or dried fruit (raisins, dates, craisins, papaya, whatever) as a way to get fruit that does not include non-food parts. Similar options exist with vegetables. Frozen also works - frozen cherries are already pitted for you just like canned ones.

Keep simple stuff around: for instance, buy hummus, spreadable cheese, guacamole, cold cuts, etc., and keep a sliced loaf of bread in the freezer. At will, break off an arbitrary number of slices, toast bread, put stuff on it, nom.

Hardboil eggs - you can do an entire layer of eggs (how many that is depends on pot size) in half an hour, during most of which time you don't have to be doing anything, and they keep really well. (Put eggs in a single layer in pot. Cover with cold water, plus an inch above the top of the eggs. Bring to a rolling boil, then remove from heat, cover, time 15 minutes, and then drain them and put them in cold water with some ice to bring the temperature down. Store in fridge. To eat, peel (thereby removing all nonedible parts) and take a bite; good with salt, better with salt and also other spices.)

I'm assuming that by 'pre-prepared' you mean something like TV dinners or pizza from a restaurant. If that's the case, you can look for things that are close to pre-prepared without being as expensive as that. My go-to meal solution in that vein is microwavable rice or pasta (example), possibly with things added to it. A packet of cheddar-broccoli rice or pasta with a can of tuna mixed in makes a nice casserole-type thing, for example, or a packet of pasta alfredo with a can of chicken mixed in. You can also mix in veggies (canned or frozen are probably most convenient) in addition to the small amount that most of those packets have. This takes less than 5 minutes to put together, cooks in 10-15, and even with added things shouldn't come to more than $3 or so per instance - $1 or less per instance if you look for sales on the packets and don't add anything. If you don't mind bland food or taking the time to add spices by hand, you can do something similar even less expensively by buying large boxes of instant mashed potatoes or instant rice, or instant oatmeal for breakfast.

On Sunday night cook for your family. Cook them chicken breasts, or steak, or pork loins. Cook 6 extra (or, if your mom is willing have her cook these with sunday's dinner). This is your lunch the rest of the week. Before the meat is even cool put it in ziplocks and put it in the refridgerator.

At the same time buy a bunch of carrots, celery, bell peppers and green beans. Buy a bunch of cans of various kinds of beans--go to the Save-A-Lot or whatever store the poor folks in your city go to. Kidney Beans, Black Beans, whatever. Cut up the celery, carrots and bell peppers and put it in baggies with a bit of water to keep it fresh. Green beans you can cook or not as you want. Get two gallons of WHOLE milk, a big tub of Protein powder and some way to mix it, and a dozen eggs. While you're cooking the meat and cutting the vegetables Sunday night, hard boil the eggs. You can find protein powder on the internet delivered much cheaper than you can buy it from GNC. Oh, get Whey protein, not Soy. Unless you want tits of your very own.

Breakfast is 2 hard boiled eggs and a 16 ounce protein powder milkshake. There is a phenomenal amount of nutrition in that. Lots of calories too.

Lunch is whatever meat is left over from Sunday dinner and a couple bags of fresh vegetables. (I would suggest varying the type of meat to cover more bases nutrient wise, but chicken seems to generally be the cheapest per pound).

I'm assuming you eat dinner with your family? This will fill in enough of the other micronutrients you need that you should be ok.

This should take about 1 hour on Sunday to do the prep and cooking, and about 10 minutes a day to mix the shake and pull stuff out of the fridge. If you have extra money you can do stuff like squash (cook one on Sunday, eat it all week) etc. Chili and stew are other things you can make in bulk on your one day and eat the rest of the time

Aim for getting about 200 grams of protein a day (that's grams of protein, not grams of meat use www.nutritiondata.com to sort out what you need).

Buying in bulk saves you money. Cooking them all at once saves you time. Putting them in the fridge saves the food. Having it all prepared saves you from having to think about it.

Oh, and two or three times a week stop by the gym and pick heavy shit up and put it back down for a while. This will solve the thin part.

I don't think you should donate if you don't understand your own financial situation.

You keep coming back to your mental health issues.

Before you donate to charity you should try to make sure you don't wind up in a position to need charity (and yes, this is not something one has full control over, but an F4 shattering your house to toothpicks is a very different thing from getting thrown out of your apartment because you were incapacitated for a couple months and got reduced/no pay). Save your money or spend it on specialists/treatments likely to reduce your problems.

This will wind up cascading into other areas of your life.

My advice is give money to charity up to your tax deduction level as a starting point, then use the rest of your money according to your personal utility function ;)

There is none to have any social contact WITH.

It would help to know approximately where, geographically, you are. I hear people in west coast US say that all the time, because it's just plain difficult to figure out how to find interesting people if you're not a natural extrovert. I don't really know any other portion of the world, but I'd assume that it's very rarely true that there really aren't any interesting people around.

I probably need some kind of person who already knows me well to pull me out

Speaking from my own personal experience, with my own personal issues, which are totally not your issues: There are really cool people out there who are safe to be yourself around. If you can find them, then (a) you have someone you don't need to worry about being strange around and (b) they can then help you navigate larger groups.

If you live in the right city, you can probably find groups of 10-20 people that don't mind you. I've found a few gatherings of 100+ where I can get away with being myself, but those are usually annual music festivals, geeky conventions, etc..

Depending on the issues, it may also be more likely than you think that you can learn to function socially despite it. I've developed high-functioning abilities despite three different psychological issues that can impair me. Part of it is just recognizing my good days and having people close enough to make impulsive plans with. Part of it has been finding weekly gatherings where I can flake out as needed and no one minds, because the group is large. Part of it is a lot of practice. And, unfortunately, part of it is just being privileged to have been dealt a higher-functioning hand in the first place, which not everyone gets. But if you can handle online social, I'd guess there's good odds you can learn to handle face-to-face :)

You've provided a lot of useful information towards coming to possible paths to the goal you've posed.

I've a few more questions mainly around the strictness of your constraints that I hope will clarify the space of reasonable solutions.

I'm also trying to point towards a profile for what you consider the boundaries of an interesting person as well as easy heuristics for filtering to find these people.

Regarding (1):

Can you provide some elaboration around what you mean by an "interesting person?"

What heuristics do you currently use to determine whether a person is interesting?

Generally how long does your evaluation period last?

Regarding (2):

In the past, what kind of traits unify people that know you well and whom you would feel comfortable pulling you out if you were acting strangely?

In the past, have any of these people not stand out in a crowd? If so, do these people share traits that are different from the larger group of people who've known you well above?

Regarding (3):

How strict is this constraint i.e. how far would you be willing and able to travel on a regular (say weekly?) basis for face-to-face social interaction? The answer could be 0...in which case all social counter-parts would have to travel to you.

Is it possible to get into town via public transit such as a bus or train? Do you know anyone (apart from your mom) nearby who might be willing to drive you into town? For those people who are on the margin in your belief of their willingness, have you tried asking them to test the proposition?

How strict a constraint is your psychological problem with breaking routine? Are we talking no behavior modification on your part, and so simplifying the question to finding people who're willing to come to you / alter their behavior for you? Or are you open to exploring routine breaking as a means towards this end?

I've noticed that some varieties of interesting people (programmers, writers, painters, composers) like to get away from their regular routine to work on projects. They sometimes get invited to retreat centers, which are in remote areas, where they work on their projects, and get housing and regular meals.

Do you have the resources to invite interesting house guests for brief project visits?

Have a look around to see if there's a social/support group for the particular psychological issue that you are dealing with. Then meet with them.

they will understand the issues you are facing and may even have new ways to help you deal with them... but most of all they will at least understand what you are going through.

Can't guarantee that they won't be tools, of course, but I've often found I have to get different needs fulfilled by different groups of people. For the "being interesting" need look into groups that have similar interests to you. Meetup.com is a good place to look for groups nearby to you - they have groups for just about anything you can imagine and you can find the closest one to you that way... and if there isn't one... consider starting one up. If you register a group with meetup - other people near to you that are interested in the same thing will be notified - especially if you tag it appropriately (people watch, say, "meetups in my area that are to do with futurism" or whatever...)

Disagree! Less Wrong needs more meme-y posts like this. Longness is not an inherent virtue.

It's not clear to me how the two parts of your issue are related - noticing a problem, brainstorming solutions on my own, and then telling other people about it so that they can either make new suggestions or critique my ideas works well for me. Also, 'be less secretive' is rather broad - did you have some class of situations in mind?

I agree with the suggestion

Would you be happy if someone told you to do something fun in a way which, in your eyes, is likely to reduce existential risk?

After talking to jsalvatier offline for a bit about the issue of wanting to do AI research, but being afraid to fail, I've came to realization that I haven't fully analyzed why I am afraid of it. I'll need to take more time to break it down, but my first guess is simply lost time. But it's very likely that if I try to do the research, I'll realize really fast if I am at all capable of doing it, so the time wasted would be a year or two, which is not too bad IMO.

You said you are interested in existential-risk reduction. I don't know if you mean specifically AI research by it, but if you do, we should try to solve this problem together. I am sure there are other people in similar situation (and there will be even more in the future), so it makes sense to create some kind of standard way of answer the question "am I cut out for this".