I have never been very active on Twitter.

I’m looking to change that moving forward, so let me start with 20 snippets of hard-earned realizations about life.

A THREAD

1. Truth is bound by context. Each moment has a different truth. Some truths, however, have greater reach than others; they are true in more contexts (eg. laws of physics), making them probabilistically sound. Both “it's relative" and the reach for "objective truth" make sense.

2. Real freedom is earned when our mental model of reality somehow reconciles the paradox between a deep, abiding love of life with an indifference towards death. Not just our death, but the death of loved ones, too. It’s counterintuitively what gives birth to true gratitude.

3. Ambition is driven either by insecurity or by the desire to self-actualize. The former is more common, and it’s born out of not feeling enough, which is a mask for self-hate. The latter is an attempt to do the most you can with the body you have; it’s an affirmation of life.

4. Both overt materialism and overt spirituality are traps. The first makes life about power, which is obviously disappointing. But less subtly, so does the latter. For some, material power isn’t enough, so they have to prove how “enlightened” they are, leading to the same end.

5. Self-love without self-responsibility is self-pity. Self-responsibility without self-love breaks mind and body. Self-respect connects the two. Respect yourself enough not to feel sorry for yourself and also enough not to live the delusion that you possess no vulnerabilities.

6. The only time you have free will is when you’re in the present acting creatively - a delicate mix of a) not acting out of habit b) not thinking too much, either. All else are deterministic action or thought patterns gifted to you by culture, technology, or the laws of physics.

7. Love is synchronicity. Agency (or power) is asynchronicity. Time is the spread over which they harmonize into a complex dance that makes us come alive as human beings. Love without agency is a selfless delusion. Agency without love paves the path to sociopathy.

8. We connect in three ways: small-talk, depth, and banter. Small-talk is necessary but uninteresting. Depth is great, but over time, there is only so deep you can go. Banter, however, is vastly underrated and generally the sturdiest foundation for any long-term relationship.

9. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can buy freedom. The fruits of freedom, however, are unevenly distributed. Those who can handle the complexity of increasing freedom are probably notably happier for it. Those who can't are probably a lot more miserable.

10. There is roughly a certain amount of pain we all have to go through in life to earn wisdom. Many spend life avoiding signs of pain, and this gets them stuck in cycles of suffering. Yet, the earlier you learn to sit with pain, the more life there is to live without suffering.

11. If you accept the religious God, then God is love and truth, and life is a kind of test. If you don’t believe in any God, then life is either meaningful suffering or a game to be won. But there is also a third option: What they call God is simply creativity, and life is art.

12. In reality, there is no such thing as morality. Only courage. Courage born not from the judgement to artificially, absolutely, and abstractly distinguish between right and wrong, but the judgement gained from seeing someone's pain and then making the right call, iteratively.

13. The kindest thing you can do for someone is to believe in them. Most people don’t need your help. They just need a dose of vitality so they can help themselves. Simply asking more of them, in a way that hints at your support and your confidence, can go a long way.

14. The problem with valuing self-interest too highly isn't that being self-interested is a vice. It's not. But putting self-interest on a pedestal makes you self-absorbed in the process, which repels other people. And that, paradoxically, often isn't in your self-interest.

15. It doesn’t matter how often you are right or wrong. What matters is how right or how wrong you are. People over-weigh the rightness of an outcome and under-weigh the magnitude. It’s okay to be wrong often if the cost is low. You only have to be right once if the gain is big.

16. Time exists more vividly in our imagination than it does in reality. We use this imagination to reinterpret the past and create the future relative to other people. When we act, we essentially crystalize our conscious and unconscious imagination into reality.

17. There are few things as beautiful as controlled aggression (eg. sports). Humans are violent because life itself is violent. An antidote to violence in society is to pretend otherwise. It works until it doesn’t. But mastering it via different forms is a kind of transcendence.

18. The best books are either less than 200 or more than 600 pages. If it's less than 200, there are often no wasted words. Anyone writing more than 600 clearly couldn't get the job done more efficiently, so again, no wasted words. Anything in between leaves temptation to pad.

19. Introspection leads to compassion because it shows the complexity hiding behind the veneer of the self. And how much of it fuels bad behavior in ways that aren’t obvious. And how none of this is your fault. When you forgive yourself, it’s easier to forgive others.

20. When I think of the kind of life I want to have lived, I like the idea of a rich life. Not a happy, or a comfortable, or a fulfilling one, but a rich one. To me, rich means everything - the good, the bad, and even the ugly. To become the whole mosaic of human experience. END.