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Hey Alexey, any update on the status of the newsletter?
Psychologically, I would be angry because, apparently, everyone else was littering but it was just me who was picked for the punished. It would be unjust. Also, there were no trash bins so I couldn't had behave even if I wanted to. That doubles the injustice. Moreover, I was carrying the cup for hours, you do-gooder moron!
Historically people had to develop a thick skin if they wanted to be pro-social because of exactly this. I think from there you get the "turn the other cheek" phrase (personified in Jesus being crucified) or the idea of an invisible being watching you doing good or bad deeds and rewarding/punishing you in the afterlife.
The Ostblock, of course, got rid of these ideas. Not sure what's going on with the Muslim countries though (something something colonialism?)
The "Moment of Maximum Tiredness"
To me, this sounds unreliable because I've experienced that tiredness can be triggered very reliably within minutes via breathing techniques such as NSDR (1, 2) therefore shifting my sleep window forward 1-2 hrs.
Hint: Macs and iOS devices come with build-in “accessibility” tools that read out loud everything on screen. The voices can be improved even more by downloading the “Siri enhanced” voice in the settings.
Here is a little detail I learned in behavioral finance class: you don’t need behavioral finance/econ to discover loss aversion. All you need is a rational utility maximizing agent in a standard neoclassical framework who has a concave utility function (such as LOG which is commonly assumed to model diminishing marginal utility). From this you see that the rational agent has more to loose from a one unit negative change than a one unit positive change i.e. loss aversion.
I did actually unfollow ~95% of my friends once but then found myself in that situation where suddenly Facebook became interesting again I was checking it more often. I recommend the opposite and follow as many friends from high school and work as possible (assuming you don’t work at a cool place).
Try practicing doing nothing I.e. meditation and see how that goes. When I have nothing particular to do my mind needs some time to make the switch from that mode where it tries to distract itself by coming up with new things it wants to do until finally it reaches a state where it is calm and steady. I consider that state the optimal one to be in since only then my thoughts are directed deliberately at neglected and important issues rather than exercising learned thought patterns.
I suspect doing long-term (or any) studies on people diagnosed with depression and weightlifting would be difficult, since the motivation required to do regular heavy exercise is either preventing people from following a strict routine or it would disqualify them from the clinical diagnosis of depression. I have tried exercise as part of my life-long battle against depression and in a recent conversation with a therapist was told that I am in fact not depressed, because a depressed person "is not be motivated to invest effort into doing something about their depression".