Doubling down on narrative rationality. I buy into the most compelling story I can find at any given time and navigate by it, whether it is apocalyptic, utopian, or in between. Narratives get you acting, instead of sitting around investing in or predicting others’ actions.

Narratives can turn and the meaning of what you’re doing can change but at least you’re acting. Maybe you build a bunker while living in the zombie apocalypse, but it turns into a nice economic boom and zombies go away. Fine, recode/reuse the bunker for aging wine barrels.

The problem isn’t narrative thinking, but getting attached to particular endings and being unable to shift meaning basis around your actions as the story twists and turns. Even fictional stories twist and turn. The butler turns out to be innocent and the cook guilty. Roll with it

Statistical spread thinking and lindy bayesianism is for sitting around investing, not for acting. It’s a kind of spectatorship with money. Something deeply unsatisfying about it. You can invest in two stories at once, but you can only act — Arendt sense — in one at a time.

A person who has hedged their bets across two stories is half dead in both. Optionalty is overrrated. You live with continuous partial deadness. Antifragility is overrated. You may live twice as long, but you’ll be half as alive.

But a powerful story can transcend optionality. It can forge multiple weaker stories into one, making you fully alive in one story rather than half alive in two.

Yes this means accepting volatility in subjectiveity. Instead of boring equanimity you’ll be gloomy in gloomy stories, exuberant in exuberant ones, and fully alive in both.

Equanimity is overrated. Up to a point it improves decisions.

Beyond that, it’s just fear of intensity.

I’m fundamentally not an investor type. I can do investor type thinking ok at an intellectual level, but I cannot make myself viscerally want to do it, let alone enjoy it. It’s like turning life into a never-ending tax filing project to maximize your refund check.