The Zettelkasten in Action: My Book on Habit • Zettelkasten Method
The Zettelkasten in Action: My Book on Habit • Zettelkasten Method
A book to show the power of the Zettelkasten, to change the perception what kind of books are even possible, and change the way we think about habits.
Howdy, Stranger!
Comments
This is great. I am very much looking forward to further installments and to the book.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
One aspect around nutritional science is that, as someone who doesn't want to spend much time reading papers, is that there seems to be an infinite supply of studies/new studies.
I feel a lot of influencers focus on tiny results because they need to create content for income. I've been thinking about ways to handle this, like ordering results by effect size that follow power laws (a few routines/habits) produce >90% of worthwhile results. Otherwise you end up drowning in this life style stuff.
For example, Huberman recommends getting 10 minutes of sunlight in the mornings. So, my day looks like: wake up, 10 minutes of sunlight, salt+lemon drink etc. this quickly detracts from my overall life quality; I suddenly think "what am I even doing?"
Other people have reported their friends (who are influenced by Bryan Johnsons Don't Die movement) leaving gatherings early because they need to run at 6am; is running at 6am more important than staying for dinner with your friends? It seems like arbitrary sacrifice for meaning - next month they'll sacrifice something else for a short term sense of meaning.
Interested to know if you've had similar thoughts or handle this in your book.
Zettler
The short-term-ness is an interesting angle: that it's not sacrifice for a greater good, but just something ought to be done according to , becoming a meaningless activity itself.
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
80% agreed.
Most people need to get the basics right. Especially the biohackers. If you are not doing your strength training, your endurance training and your athletic training (fast twitch fibres are important), you don't need to optimise anything in your physical training regimen. First, you have to establish a baseline (strength can be barbell stuff, gymnastics, strongman, weight lifting or whatever. Just lift heavy things and put them down for example)
However, it comes down to your standards, your trainability and the margin necessary to succeed in competition. Basis fitness can be done in an hour per day. But if you want to live a life of high performance, you need more and need to tinker with your regimen.
Also: Being just 5 % might not seem that big. However, if you want to have a great career in the corporate world, being just 5 % better consistently better than your competitors is big.
Then: It is not clear what actually 100 % is. To give you an example: When I can train myself to get into 0°C (32°F) water without shivering and my hands and feet not hurting, I can observe tangible changes in my overall mood, clarity of mind and immune system. So, if I wouldn't have pushed myself (my longest time in that ice bath was 35 min with now shivering), I never would have experienced that.
So, the power law needs to be specified for stuff, time and effort separately. I think that is the main problem with such biohacks bellow:
This is stuff. If you just stuff your life, you get into the problem of fragmentation. Fragmentation is one of the major problems of modernity anway. So, repulsion is a natural reaction to this stuff.
If I'd describe all the hacks that I do in the morning, it would be a pretty long list and would seem that I stuff my morning myself. However, if you'd observe what I do, it is pretty simple: I have a cold shower, run with my dog and then do some strength training. Then I eat a breakfast (new for me; I used to do intermittent fasting).
I, for sure, will address the problem of harmony (which is one of the core issues when it comes to building life structure which is part of the meaning structure of your life).
However, these conflicts are pretty normal. When I was on holiday with my friends (and band -> I played bass), they sat on the patio and drank beer, while I performed a burpee tabata session. My friends got used to it.
But if you are part of a social circle that as late night gatherings as a habit, especially during the work week when everybody has to get up early(sh), then you have to make a decision.
So, the answer to this question
It depends on
I, personally, couldn't care less if I had a group of friends who meet until late at night during the week to drink beer and hang out. Then I'd leave after with no hesitation, so I won't mess with my sleep. I am not partaking in unhealthy habits.
But there is also the other side: Are those Don't Die acolytes just a bunch of sissies that obsess over 30 minutes of less sleep once per week just because a vampire cos player uses his mission to alleviate his depression? (True opinion, but also said with much irony and love. I truly appreciate people that make such sacrifices to further our knowledge like Johnson, Musk, Goggins etc.)
So, this is not an easy question because it depends on the circumstances.
But there is actually a principle that allows you to avoid such questions and ask a better one: Kaizen. Look at your life as a whole and ask yourself: How can you improve?
The above is an example of attending to the existential layer of your life. Many thanks for your question. It reminded me a lot that the existential layer is really missing in all of the book I read.
I am a Zettler
Been lurking this forum for a long time, decided to finally jump in. When you talk about fragmentation, how do you propose avoiding that in a way that is not to much of an abstraction? If the suggestion to put your shoes in the door to prime your brain to go the gym doesn't work in the long run (it didn't for me), how thinking about fragmentation will be practical for someone that can't do the minimal?
@andsil What do you mean by "fragmentation"? I am not sure that we use this word with the same meaning. (I want to answer your question, but don't want to base my answer on a misunderstanding).
I am a Zettler
You made the following commentary in this thread: "This is stuff. If you just stuff your life, you get into the problem of fragmentation. Fragmentation is one of the major problems of modernity anway [...]".
I understood that to mean that fragmentation is a problem of the available solutions for habit implementation. And made de assumption that maybe it´s something you would tackle in the book. By the way, is there a estimated time for the book to be released?
Ah, got you.
Fragmentation is a term that I use envisioning the defragmentation visualisation on the old windows PCs.
It is a problem that you rip apart wholes. While everything is still present, nothing acts correctly. This is how I'd describe the modern life world.
Examples:
My guess is that you tried to use a method to make an action easier, but didn't integrate the action itself into your life. If it is about training, it needs to be integrated on the low level ("make access easy") but also on the high level. The high level is what needs some work for most people. I, for example, don't train for any specific goal (e.g. a certain lift or something more abstract like fitness). Surely, there are by-products and I use goals to provide my training with structure. But here are some of the higher-level reasons why I train:
So, when I train, I don't just lift things up and put them down. I express my faith, my role as a father, my ethical system etc.
I am a Zettler
Thanks for sharing this insight about yourself! I find it both satisfying and enlightening.
Two thoughts.
I have heard at least three different lines of critique levied against Huberman, and the third is relevant here.
I don't think there is any need to refer to a group of human beings as a shorthand to insult others---sissies, autistic folk, hard r word, etc. This language insults people (specifically, gender non-conforming men) for no reason, when "cowards" is a perfectly fine alternate in this context. I pursue lifelong learning so as to continuously grow as a person and broaden my circle of empathy, not label entire groups of people and their self-expression as cowardly or emasculating.
You have absolutely no business language policing me or anyone here.
I am a Zettler
@Sascha
This's a good article.
Thanks for the dopamine reference.
I have a couple of nitpicks.
I'd say that there's enough information for an interested person. This opening looks too much like a salesman's speech. It might be a result of my professional deformation, but I was put off by it. Maybe others would be as well.
On the training intensity chart the lables should be "effective".
You are right. I mean what I say. There are no demonstrations of complex work being done, at least I am not aware of any. But in part it is indeed salesman's babble. It might stand out because our sight is extremely low on that?
Thanks. Will be corrected.
I am a Zettler
Correction is now uploaded
Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/
It is very much "stuff". Unless the habit, or ritual, is connected to a problem or identity, random optimisation leads to anxiety (at least in my case)
For example, it's obvious when optimising software that the result is useful, because you have an obvious, measurable problem, but drinking Don't Die branded salt water/sun gazing for 10minutes at 6am does not seem connected to a problem (only helps getting weird looks from neighbours) or greater identity (at least until I've finished Nietzsche studies
)
Mode of being thinking helps fight the fragmentation issues, which you've mentioned on the forum before. My Powerlifting and Stone Age diet is connected to the sense of treating myself as an athlete, but I'm not competing so don't need to over optimise. But it is not connected to my "arete", because I've never heard the term until now.
So the problem moves to the highest level: existential, which is shaped through life and studies.
Zettler
I 100% agree. The emboldened part is the most important.
This is why I wrote the three examples of my deeper connection to training.
The major problem for many people in modern times (to be more specific: in the developed countries) is a lack of urgency and a low-effort mentality. Figuring out your identity is something that needs to be mostly done in your teens and then be finalised in your 20s. Otherwise, you are spiritually underdeveloped but now have an ageing brain that is more and more resistant to change, which makes it harder and harder to do this inner work.
Habit work is the major method of lifestyle design because it takes care of the vast majority of how we live our lives. But it needs to be routed in a strong sense of identity.
Part of this strong sense of identity means that you are focussing on your essence. This is another modern fallacy. The modern man assumes that you can do a lot of stuff just for its own sake. This is the opposite of finding and focussing on your essence as a human being and ultimately leads to failing to answer to Life's question to you.
The above is not a personal-moral judgement. I claim objective truth. (Not, that I cannot be wrong. But rather that my claims are based on natural laws of Life)
You can see the result in the situation of modern man (I like the German "Moderner Mensch" better): People get sick, physically, psychologically and spiritually.
And the modern way of living doesn't even keeps the promise: Living a life that revolves around your own happiness makes you unhappy. Modernity is self-contradicting which means: It is leading into death, spiritually and ultimately evolutionary. (You suffocate your soul to death, and you won't propagate - whatever this "you" is: family, culture or whatever way of grouping people you can think of)
This is one of the reasons why I make it a point to let this book grow deep roots into the existential layer. I am a Christian. So, I have it easy. My faith ultimately gives me an orientation. But I found to god, because I pretty relentlessly dug deep into the existential layer until I found god. You won't find any direct reference to the bible. This wouldn't be intellectually reasonable, because it would be just an appeal to authority.
Rather I will keep it existential and let people decide on their own what they make of it.
I think it is binary. You made the decision to spend your time like this. So, you better make the best of it, because you just have this life. Every second counts. (I have a Hindu client, greetings if you read this A.
; I make the joke that he errs on the side of patience because he has limitless time because of his rebirthing; I am a Christian, so it is a one way ticket - hopefully to heaven)
I don't mean that your life should revolve around training and eating. But given time and resources, you should optimise every second of your life. Because it is true for every second of your life, optimising your complete life will lead to some triage regarding eating and training. (e.g. I will sacrifice a tiny portion of my health when my daughter is old enough to eat ice cream, since my daughter's happiness is more important than my health)
The existential layer is not the highest level.
My instinct tells me to write that it is the second lowest, but this would be too much of fighting over words. But if you orientate yourself towards the top or the bottom. The spiritual layer is one step behind, if you left the human existence behind.
I am a Zettler
To quote the Zen Buddhist Master Hakuin, "Is that so?" If it is so, I blew that one by decades. Didn't Nietzsche write about discovering who we are over time, and about overcoming who we were?
"What have you done to overcome him?
What have you done to overcome yourself?"
— Also sprach Zarathustra
"Become who you are!"
— Ecce Homo
"We want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!"
— The Gay Science
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
Me too, not by decade but by one decade.
It took awful methods to clean up my mind and soul. I re-created the Gom Jabbar which sounds silly to say it like that. In practice, it meant that I lived a David Goggins lifestyle for years, except for going for intensity instead of ultra endurance. However, I did combine it with intense meditation (until the point of having visions).
I don't know if I was messed up so bad or if I was just highly resistant to change. In any case, this was necessary to end various vices like self-deception.
I love Nietzsche's work. But he might be the original gangster of incel rage. It doesn't invalidate the value of his work. Not a tiny bit. However, most of his work on identity is rather a war cry of encouragement to himself, instead of successfully lived principles.
The saying "fake it until you make it" sounds like the phrase I am searching to describe Nietzsche's work. I admire him to actually dare to look for what it is that you are trying to fake it until you make it. Nietzsche is a great source for what you could be. But he is not a source on how you actually become the person that you are intended to be.*
*Pick you frame of reference: Arete, God or whatever.
This picture tells you about Nietzsche more than many of his philosophical work:
I am a Zettler
Do you have any article talking about this?
Nietzsche suggests that one discovers who one is over time. Since I agree with Nietzsche on determinism, there isn't much choice. Information and experience can change the person you become and seek to overcome, but the rest is determined once acquired.
Then, there is the dialogue between King Milinda and the Buddhist monk Nagasena on personal identity:
The Venerable Nagasena knows how some of us feel on occasion.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.
No, not in depth. My learnings are sprinkled throughout my older blogposts on me-improved.de (most likely from 2014-2018ish). I might have some low-quality vids (just turning the camera on and speaking) on that but nothing systematically.
But living like this shouldn't be the starting point. I, for example, started by slowly cleaning up my lifestyle while avoiding creating problems like orthorexia.
For a starter, you can search for "nightmare mode" by Alex Becker. This could be the starting point. Factually, it is a fairly individual journey. However, in 99% of the cases, the more mundane aspects of one's life need to be cleaned up. This is btw. the main reason why monasteries exists. They provide an artificially clean environment to focus on one's inner life. But what works in a monastery doesn't work in real life, at least not with a hefty adaptation. This is why I think that most of the spiritual sources out there are the product of reckless snake oil selling.
True spiritual methods need to work for the plumber, the mid-tier manager and the housewife alike.
This seems to work only if you leave out the consequences of the Übermensch idea. The idea can be experienced by trial and error: Living in the spirit of determinism makes you feel like shit and your consciousness will feel like more as an observing tool. Living in the spirit of self-determination starts a positive feedback loop, resulting in gayness (gay as in gay science) that elevates you similar to the meaning Viktor Frankl talks about. Also: Your consciousness transforms from a tool of observation to a tool of decision. You'll slowly transform yourself into the rope over the abyss (Thus Spoke Zarathustra):
->
Or in short: Rejecting determinism while facing the doom of eternal recurrence ("ewige Wiederkehr") is what makes you human, elevating oneself from the ape like hideousness to the man one should be as the only honourable goal, giving birth to the overman.
To be honest, this sounds awfully similar to the boring question of the nature of identity we discussed in university. Sounds like a typical anti-life question that is just another excuse to press the pause button, ein gefährliches Zurückblicken, ein gefährliches Schaudern und Stehenbleiben.
I am a Zettler
Are you saying you conceptualise the spiritual layer above the existential one, where the existential layer is still grounded in the human/physical world?
Do you have any sources that helped shape your spiritual journey? I am also Christian, but I struggle to interpret Christian work properly or embody faith in my everyday action. I appreciate the various influencers du jour Jocko, Goggins etc. on the importance of discipline, but I don't find "be disciplined" compelling. It is not persuasive, similar to other discussions on the forums around academic writing being very dry.
I've been interpreting Dante's Inferno recently, specifically how the dark wood Dante finds himself in represents Acedia. I was surprised mere laziness brought Dante into hell; being a "kind" person is not enough, inaction is still sin. I found this incredibly compelling, since you would think lying or robbing people would be a greater sin. Merely being lazy can lead you into hell; so go lift those weights to prepare for what life throws your way.
I guess I've gone full circle, but interpreting works (mythology, literature, anecdotes from my life) is the most engaging, compelling and transforming experience. Of course I process all this following the Zettelkasten Method, which lends itself nicely connecting all these pieces to general ideas (Acedia in my example).
Zettler
Perhaps, a better way to frame it is, that the spiritual layer is more foundational. I really like Dante's Divine Comedy in its depiction: The deeper you go, the more hellish everything becomes. But you go deep enough you'll pivot and your direction is not to heaven.
This is how I, myself, connected to god.
The sources that helped my journey are not the same I think that help you as a Christian: For me, it was Kant, Nietzsche, Luhmann, quite some Sufi and Yoga books. They were the starter who lead me down into the abyss. But I then did the same stuff Goggins does. So, it was a lot of putting myself into the meat grinder, since I felt that I needed to be broken down.
Peterson initiated the purgatory phase. Now, my spiritual journey is mostly guided by my wife and my daughter.
Lazy is one of the starter sins. I am absolutely not familiar with the Divine Comedy. But I seems to me, that Dante tried to create a model of cause and effect. Like in real life you don't start with big sins, but normally start with the little ones and which lead to cardinal sins which then multiply themselves.
Laziness seems to be a perfect candidate to be the start of something bad.
I think one of the major shifts in my perspective came when I realized that the tell-sign of how I really interpret how I live my life. I only can say that I admire somebody when I make an effort to emulate what I admire about him.
I am a Zettler
...
I must disagree--personal identity is more fluid. But the identity I had when I cited AN 3.65 differs markedly from the identity writing this, which is determined by external and evolutionary pressures, not to mention my choice of parents and a troubled childhood. The current "I" cannot offer more self-transcendence than a cursory reply.
GitHub. Erdős #2. Problems worthy of attack / prove their worth by hitting back. -- Piet Hein. Alter ego: Erel Dogg (not the first). CC BY-SA 4.0.