On the other hand, consciousness is a very personal experience. You don’t know what it’s like to be me. You can’t even know if I am conscious as well; I just kind of look like I am. That’s what makes consciousness so hard to study scientifically: Because we cannot reproduce others’ conscious experience, it’s very hard to study with the classic scientific method.

So if it’s hard to study, why bother? Our views on consciousness have a direct relation to how we relate to the world. They determine whom we include in our moral circles, and can lead to higher psychological wellbeing.

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How to understand yourself

Study yourself

While it’s hard to study consciousness in others, you can study your own consciousness. And similar to reproducing results in science, you can reproduce and verify findings of others in your own conscious experience.

• Watch your thoughts: Meditation is usually framed as a relaxation exercise, but you can also frame it scientifically: What exactly happens when you sit still? Start by just noting what you see.

• Try to decompose it: Once you can note, try to dive deeper: What are thoughts or feelings made of? A bodily sensation? An image? An inner voice? Is anything left once you find it all? Where does it come from? And is it continuous, or flickering?

• Find the observer: Is there a perceiver, or only perceiving? Try to locate the “I”. A famous set of experiments here is the “Headless Way” experiments. They seem to work for some and not for others; give them a try.

Expand your circle

Most of us take it for granted that other humans are conscious as well. But why? The typical argument is that consciousness “emerged” during evolution and allowed us to outcompete other species. But consciousness is so different from the physical world that it can’t just “emerge” out of nowhere. Plus, even if it did, physics struggles to explain how consciousness could have any effect on the physical world. I think the much easier explanation is that consciousness is simply a fundamental property of the universe. But if we accept that, it opens the door to consciousness in other beings:

• Animals: Do you think your cat or dog has an experience of what it’s like to be them? Most people do. But this stops with farmed animals or insects. Try watching documentaries and see if that changes things. A recent favorite of mine: Secrets of the Bees. Or try imagining insects were the size of cows - a huge bumblebee flying around. Would that change your intuition?

• Plants: Our intuition for consciousness usually breaks down with plants. But it wasn’t always like this: Some indigenous traditions believe in plant sentience and the emerging field of plant neurobiology takes the idea seriously. The book “A World Appears” has some great chapters on this.

• AIs: There is this concept of a train to crazytown, where once you accept a counterintuitive belief and take it seriously, you end up in weird places. Conscious AI is one of those. The basic idea: If consciousness is fundamental, there is no good reason for it to be tied to biology, so silicon might be able to produce it, too. There is a great podcast with Jeff Sebo exploring this.

This week’s challenge on consciousness

• For meditations on understanding yourself, try the Waking Up app

• Find where you draw the line on which beings are conscious. Challenge yourself to consider the closest being just outside of your circle.

• Bet money to charity on following through with these

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And that’s not even the mystery. That part we can explain with physics, evolution, science. The mystery is that this all exists in the first place. That, somehow, there is experience, continuity. And all this magic, just so we can worry about our job security?

Metaphysics is the field thinking about this. And it’s called metaphysics because it’s beyond physics: it’s not the realm of science anymore. It’s the realm of theories we’ll never be able to prove. So why bother?

Turns out, we can do science on how this affects us. And it’s big: Feeling awe helps us to tame our ego, feel smaller, and thereby feel better, become more prosocial and generous. So: What’s the best way to feel awe?

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How to feel awe

Find something vast

Our ego becomes small when we realize we’re just a speck in a much larger picture. Studies show that nature works best for this, but you can find vastness in many places:

• Vast nature: Mountainscapes, the ocean, stargazing, sunsets, far views, tall forests. What’s something that’s close to you you could explore over a weekend trip? Bonus points for also making it a workout with friends.

• Vast visualizations: Some things you can’t see over a weekend. Try visualizations for that. For example our place in the universe, the possibility of an infinite universe, and our microverse. When was the last time you were in a planetarium?

• Vast population: Try to wrap your head around the fact that there are billions of other humans with just as complex lives as you on this planet, born by a very very long chain of mothers. Get on a high building in a city and just watch.

Ground yourself

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy famously had the “Total Perspective Vortex”, a device that would show people their true insignificance in relation to the universe and thereby kill them. Looking infinity in the face can feel overwhelming, ground yourself.

• Surrender: You are just a monkey with a slightly bigger brain and it’s not made for understanding infinity. Your working memory can’t hold more than eight numbers at once. Find relief in allowing yourself to not understand any of this.

• Focus on your experience: The world is vast, but you get to experience it. Focus on your breath, your senses, your emotions. Somehow allow both the vastness of the world and the smallness of yourself coexist.

• Try gratitude: For me, the feeling that always stays with me is gratitude. I don’t understand how all of this works, I never will, but I am so happy I get to experience this, to live this life, to fall in love, to eat ramen, to make music.

Dive deeper

Awe is “level 1” on the scale of spiritual and mystical experiences. The higher you go, the more you approach self-transcendence, and can get into states that feel like unity, sacredness, and certainty.

• Consider prayer: More prayer is associated with more spiritual events, though the reliability for mystical experiences is lower. If you are part of a spiritual tradition, consider exploring their mystical branches like Kabbalah or Sufism.

• Consider meditation: While daily meditation is a great practice for mental health, more spiritual experiences are hard to achieve in day-to-day life. Retreats and advanced practices have some evidence for eliciting mystical experiences.

• Consider psychedelics: At the risk of mentioning drugs again: Psychedelics are the most studied and reliable way of inducing spiritual experiences. Probably because they are easier to study. We wrote about them here.

Some starting points on feeling awe

• Look around yourself and just appreciate the complexity of it all.

• Plan a trip to the planetarium, history museum, or the ocean.

• Bet money on actually doing this.

Missing something? Thoughts or feedback? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

It turns out that hobbies have a wealth of evidence for positive effects on intrinsic fulfillment and autonomy, as well as mental, physical, and cognitive health: Higher life satisfaction, less depression, better memory, better social networks, …

But not all hobbies are created equal: When I was a child I somehow got into my head that I wanted to play violin. It sounded beautiful and my absent prefrontal cortex couldn’t intervene. Doing the research now, I realize that I could’ve had a much easier life if I had had a prefrontal cortex back then.

Sorry for everybody who received this video already. Turns out I misunderstood a Substack setting and it auto-assigned subscribers to the podcast when I migrated it here. Won’t happen again!

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How to pick a hobby

What makes for a good hobby

Chances are you dabbled with a few already. Or maybe you’re deep down a rabbit hole right now. What makes for a good one?

• It draws you in: The point of a hobby is to fulfill your intrinsic motivations, not some extrinsic need for status or money. This means it should be enjoyable to you right now, not in the distant future, and feel like it matches your identity.

• One stone, many birds: You could play guitar by yourself, play guitar in a band, or play guitar in a metal band. The first gives you music alone, the second adds social connection, the third adds a fitness workout. Can you stack your interests?

• It fits your life: If you’re a dad, regular metal concerts are probably hard to fit in but squash with different partners whenever you’re free could work. How about the commute? Is there a teacher? A good heuristic is to do whatever your friends do.

Deliberately double-down

So much for what makes for a good hobby in theory, but theory only gets you so far:

• Explore, then exploit: As with your career, or other decision-making: The easiest way to find what you like is to just try many things and see how they feel. When I picked violin, I should’ve probably tried a few lessons of guitar and piano as well.

• Make it social: The two main predictors of sticking with a hobby are fun and social ties. If you like the people you’re doing it with, you’ll enjoy it more and stick with it. In my violin example: I should’ve tried playing with others earlier.

• Tune in the dose: Studies show a hill-shaped relationship between how much time you spend on your hobbies and the emotional payoffs: Too little or too low-engagement (like reading) and you won’t get much. Too much and you’ll burn out.

Achieve pointless mastery

Part of the lure of hobbies is to achieve a feeling of mastery outside of performance-oriented settings like work.

• Start with play: If you don’t enjoy it you won’t do it. Trust me, I have many years of plans to play more violin that always failed. What changed it for me: I found a way to improvise easily, and always knew I’d enjoy that. So that’s what I start with.

• Weave in deliberate practice: To get better, deliberate practice is the go-to way. That means: Measurable goals, clear feedback, ideally from a coach, playing outside your comfort zone, dedicated time. We wrote a guide here.

• Practice for mastery: The Stoic approach to tennis is to play your best game, not play to win. Turns out research supports this: Mastery-goals are consistently associated with higher well-being, while winning-goals predict negative affect.

Some ideas you could try

• Try a new hobby. What’s something you’re drawn to right now? What would be fun?

• Can you make whatever you’re doing already more fun or sustainable? What resonated in this post?

• Commit yourself to having more fun

Missing something? Thoughts or feedback? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

When I went for the first time to Burning Man in 2016, I went roller skating in the desert, climbed art pieces, danced until sunrise and, like a little child, wished to just keep playing and not go home.

I felt free, like I could let go of everyday social norms, but at the same time felt incredibly safe. To achieve that the community built a container, a bubble, and that container itself again followed rules that were honed over many years.

Burning man is an extreme example but almost every society has rituals to let go of control: Carnival, festivals, sports games. It’s good for you: Letting go helps with connection, positive affect, and meaning, if the setting is safe and structured.

Another iteration on making explainer videos with AI, this field is moving fast!

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How to (safely) lose control

Find your container

A container is a set of rules and norms that gives permission to let go. The criteria I put here are based on my own experience / burning man events, less on research, let me know in the comments you feel something is missing!

• Do an inventory: What kind of containers exist in your city? What are local traditions? Carnivals, Pride, local street festivals, sports games, clubs, bars, communities?

• Evaluate: Do they offer: Spaces to get to know new people (eg workshops), flexibility to move between high-energy and low-energy spaces, opening and closing rituals, removing distractions like phones and money, opportunity to participate in shaping the event (shifts), costumes or dress codes to fell different?

• Create your own: This has the added value of the friendships you build organizing an event. A good place to start is copying concepts you like, that’s how all the regional burning man events started.

Make sure you feel safe

Letting go of control is great, until the guy next to you is also letting go of control and stops taking your boundaries seriously. Climbing art in the desert is fun and games until it breaks under you. Safety third, but not tenth.

• Check the concept: How does the container consider safety? Is there for example safer spaces, an awareness team, or education on consent? If you can, check with people who went to similar events and check how they felt about it.

• Go together: Double the fun, double the safety. As we suggested before: Be the spark. Do the work of finding great containers and invite people to go with you.

• Plan for risks: What will you do when you don’t feel well, get anxious, or just tired? What will you do with unwanted attention? How to get out or to a safer space when things go south?

Consider drugs

Letting go is hard, drugs make it easier. This is a trade-off between your health and your fun and only you can take that. We wrote about risks from drugs here, please do your own research.

• MDMA: Helps you let go of control by dampening your social threat detection. You basically “assume the best” of people and that pays off: You feel closer to people, approach more, become more generous and empathetic.

• Alcohol: Helps you let go of control by dampening behavioral restraint. I know few people who regret actions on MDMA but a lot who regret actions on alcohol. Yet it helps let go of control, is legal, socially accepted, and ok in low doeses.

• Sober containers: If nobody takes drugs, it becomes easier to let go of control without them. Communities to start exploring are for example extatic dance, tantra, or breathwork.

Three things towards lose control

• Take a few minutes to find events in your area to lose control

• Text one to a friend, see what they say

• Commit to doing it in the Euzoia app.

In the survey behind the play series, the third pattern was called Deep Engagement. People liked the intensity. The activities were exciting, often physical, planned, and shaped by rules. They left people feeling full of energy. Surfing, Bikram yoga, and rock climbing were examples.

That does not mean everyone should start rock climbing. The survey did not prove that intense play improves your life, or that danger is required. Research on flow and physical activity does suggest a few ways to look for that feeling more safely. You can explore the full research review if you want the wider evidence.

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How to find energizing play

Choose a challenge you want

Flow research often points to challenge as one ingredient of deep involvement. A meta-analysis found a moderate relationship between matching challenge and skill and experiencing flow. A rule of thumb is to choose something you want to do, then make it demanding enough to need your attention.

• Start with desire: What sounds exciting to you, not merely healthy or impressive? It could be a fast dance class, a close game of table tennis, a difficult recipe, or a climbing wall.

• Stretch one notch: Pick the route, opponent, song, or level just beyond automatic. You want enough difficulty to pull you in without tipping into panic.

• Keep it voluntary: Decide when to play, whom to play with, and how hard to go. If the activity starts to feel like an obligation, change the version or stop.

Give it a game shape

Clear goals, feedback, and a sense of control also show up repeatedly in research on flow. The Deep Engagement pattern itself included planned activities and rules. Structure is not the enemy of play when you chose it because it makes the activity more fun.

• Define the round: Play to eleven points, learn one song, finish one route, or give yourself twenty minutes. A boundary gives your attention somewhere to go.

• Play together: Choose partners, groups, or instructors who make the activity feel playful, supportive, and non-judgmental, because relatedness and protective framing help convert arousal into enjoyment.

• Do not professionalize it: Skip the streak, public leaderboard, training log, or improvement plan unless you enjoy it. If the score takes over the game, stop keeping score.

Turn up the feeling, not the danger

Movement can add energy, but harder is not automatically better. Research on physical activity and affect links active leisure with modestly higher positive affect and life satisfaction. Comparisons of high-intensity intervals with moderate exercise find that moderate effort often feels better during the activity, even when people enjoy the harder version afterwards. Aim for pleasantly intense, not maximal.

• Add a spark: Try music, a timer, friendly competition, or immersive outdoor settings. Look for ways to make familiar activities more exciting without taking bigger risks.

• Manage risks: Take a beginner class, use the right gear, and progress gradually. A good instructor or experienced friend can help you find the edge without tumbling over it. Choose activities where you can adjust as you go.

• Check the aftertaste: Did you finish pleasantly energized, as the Deep Engagement pattern suggests? Pain, dread, skipped commitments, or feeling unable to stop are signs to dial it back.

Three things to try this week

• Write down three activities that could make you feel pleasantly intense. Pick the one you want to do, not the one you think you should do.

• Give it one clear round and make it one notch harder without making it unsafe.

• Commit to trying it for 30 minutes in the Euzoia app.

What kind of play makes you feel intensely alive? Add it in the comments.

In the survey behind this play series, restoration was one of five ways adults described play. It meant feeling relaxed, lighthearted, and free to do something for yourself. Reading, cooking, and singing were examples. The survey described that feeling; it didn’t test a cure for fatigue.

So how do you find that feeling on an ordinary Tuesday? Here are three things to try. If you want the wider evidence, explore the full research review.

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How to restore when you feel drained

Pick something you want to do

The clue in the restoration pattern is that the activity feels pleasurable and freely chosen. Cooking can be play on Saturday and a chore on Monday. You get to decide.

• Follow your appetite: What sounds good with the energy you have right now? Read, sing, cook, doodle, or sit with someone you like. The same list won’t work for every person or every day.

• Drop the goal: No need to finish the book, learn a song, or make an impressive dinner. If you enjoy the process, that’s enough for tonight.

• Keep a small menu: Write down a few things you enjoy at different energy levels. When you’re tired, picking from a list is easier than inventing a new plan.

Leave the demand behind

You can be on the sofa while still rehearsing tomorrow’s difficult conversation. Research on recovery from work links mentally switching off and relaxing with less fatigue and strain. These are mostly associations, not a promise, but they suggest a useful test: Did you get some distance from what drained you?

• Close the loop: Write tomorrow’s first step on a note, shut the laptop, and mute work messages. You can come back to the task tomorrow.

• Change scene: Take a walk or try a few quiet minutes away from your desk. Two trials of lunchtime park walks and relaxation exercises found modest, short-lived benefits. A short break can still be worth taking.

• Give it your attention: A book, a song, or a conversation gives your mind somewhere else to go. When work thoughts pop back up, return to what you’re doing. If thoughts keep coming back, give yourself a few quiet minutes to process them rather than forcing them away.

Make room for recovery

Recovery has more than one clock. Studies of short breaks, weekends, and holidays find that brief pauses can ease fatigue soon after, restful weekends are linked with feeling recovered on Monday, and holidays can improve well-being. The studies rarely compare these options directly, and reviews disagree on how long the holiday lift lasts. There is no proven perfect schedule.

• Plan daily recovery: Make room for a short, enjoyable pause and time to switch off in the evening. Don’t steal that time from sleep. If sleep is the bigger problem, start with our sleep post.

• Clear a day: When you can, keep work out of your next day off and do something you choose for yourself. Weekend studies link detachment and relaxation with feeling recovered on Monday, but do not establish that exactly one day a week is best.

• Schedule time away: If a holiday is possible, use it for a longer stretch away from demands. Its benefits may fade after you return, and it has not been shown to replace regular recovery. If work or care duties crowd out rest, is there a task you can drop or help you can ask for.

Three things to try this week

• When you notice you feel drained, take a break. Check how you feel after.

• Before you start, write down the work thought that keeps returning and put it aside for the break.

• Commit to making time for it in the Euzoia app.

What helps you feel restored? Add it in the comments.

Decisions are all around us, all the time. Getting better at them will have more leverage on your life than each topic we share here in isolation. So in the spirit of other meta-posts we did in the past on habit building and skill mastery, I’ll summarize their framework here for an 80/20 on decision making.

How to make decisions

The Heath brothers start out by explaining why we’re bad at decisions: We only focus on what’s in the spotlight, frame too narrowly, seek confirmation bias (only look for evidence that confirms our beliefs), are driven by short-term emotions, and are overconfident in our predictions.

To fix it, they propose this four-step process. Try it out by taking a decision you’re working through right now and applying the questions to your decision as you go.

1. Generate options

Most decisions initially look like yes/no questions. According to studies they cite, this applies to both teenagers and organizations: 70% of decisions by both groups only consider one option, and it leads to bad outcomes. Generate more options by:

• Generate with reframes: Consider opportunity costs - what else could you do with the time/money? Try the vanishing options test - what would you do if the option disappeared?

• Find people who solved your problem: Outside: Competitors, benchmarking, best practices, AI brainstorms. Inside: Employees, situations where you solved your problem, methods that worked for you in the past. Up: Analogies.

• Evaluate in parallel: Prevents your ego from favoring one. Beware of sham options by making sure smart people disagree. Avoid decision paralysis by limiting to a few. Switch between avoiding downsides and pursuing upsides. Try A AND B vs OR.

2. Test assumptions

When looking for evidence to confirm/disconfirm the options we generated, we tend to look for information that supports our initial assumptions. This is called confirmation bias. To combat confirmation bias, apply these ideas:

• Consider the opposite: Encourage constructive disagreement in teams, ask disconfirming questions (or open-ended if power dynamics present), try doing the opposite, build discipline/habit to seriously consider “what if I’m wrong”.

• Zoom out, zoom in: Zoom out: how things unfold on average. We usually don’t give it enough weight. To get outside averages, ask experts (they’re great at base rates but terrible at predictions). Then sample your specifics up close for texture.

• Experiment: Dip your toe before jumping headfirst. Generates lots of data without risk of full commitment. Entrepreneurial mindset: Just try things and see what sticks. Try to make explicit what you want to learn in the experiments.

3. Distance yourself

Fleeting emotions can tempt us to make decisions we’ll regret. Careful with status quo bias: a combination of mere exposure (we like what we know) combined with loss aversion (losses are more painful than gains are pleasant). Get distance to avoid.

• Overcome short-term emotions: Try 10/10/10: how would you feel about this in ten weeks, ten months, ten years? Try using an observer’s perspective: What would my successor do? What would I tell my best friend?

• Honor core priorities: Agonizing decisions are often conflicts among core priorities (values, goals, aspirations). Explicitly rank them, then decide what not to do, what to deprioritize, and build a habit to review actions against priorities.

4. Minimize risk

No matter what decision you make, you’ll be wrong in some ways. We can’t predict the future, but we can take actions to minimize the fallout when things don’t go as planned.

• Think in scenarios: Consider a range of outcomes and anticipate problems: Try a premortem: “A year from now our decision failed - why? It was a great success - can we deal with it?” Add a margin of safety / plan with buffers.

• Set a tripwire: It’s easy to slip into autopilot, especially when change is gradual. Build in tripwires to force making a choice. Tripwires are: Deadlines, budgets (time, money, resources), go/no-go gates, processes for pattern recognition.

• Trust the process: Group decision making needs to be fair to get acceptance on the final decision. Bake these steps into a process that works within your life/team/organization. Link it to existing triggers.

Three things to start on making better decisions

• Stop for ten seconds: What’s your top decision to make right now?

• Block time in your calendar to use this process on your top decision.

• Check: How can you make sure you check this post next time you make a decision?

Missing something? Thoughts or feedback? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

Switching things up with the podcast: Instead of inviting guests we’ll try to narrate the same content as in the post, just in our own voices.

How to have adventures

Try novel experiences

Getting out of your comfort zone to experience something new helps to break monotony and thereby combat burnout, builds higher tolerance against uncertainty, builds agency and increases our openness and curiosity.

• Pick one: fix your plumbing, buy a random bus ticket, crash a stranger's wedding, enter an eating contest, join a random protest, … prompt AI to create an absurd and unhinged list. Can’t decide? Roll the dice on it to make it truly random.

• Grab a friend: Doing something new can feel scary but doing it together actually strengthens your bond by living through that slightly scary thing together. Bonus points for picking this for your second date.

• Integrate: Process the new experience in a way that works for you: Journal, tell stories to a friend, go through your pictures: Was there something in there that you can take with you to your day-to-day life? Schedule regular time for these?

Play within your day

Going on adventures is fun but to try something new you don’t even need to make much time for it - you can just stay in your routines and add spice to them:

• Work: Can you do an existing task differently? Try a new AI tool? Work with somebody you haven’t worked with before? Try sales? Work from a new spot? Grab lunch at a different spot?

• Life: What’s a show you’d never watch? Something you could cook that you never tried? A new type of sports class? Something your friends do you could join them on? A new activity you could explore with your kids?

• Take it easy: When trying something new in our existing patterns we can sometimes feel that we “should” know how to do something or already be good at something. Try to find areas where you can explore without risk and truly play.

Go on an adventure in your mind

For one of the biggest adventures you can go on, you can just stay on your couch. Psychedelic trips (LSD/mushrooms/ayahuasca) have been shown to have significant and lasting effects on one’s openness to experience, life satisfaction, and fear of death.

• Substance: If you are curious, starting with very low doses and slowly working your way up works best. Every body is different, this allows you to learn what works for you. Always test your drugs and study the risks.

• Set: Prepare your mind through enough sleep, intention setting, feeling comfortable, readiness to accept whatever comes up. Working with an experienced and trustworthy facilitator great way to prepare both set and setting.

• Setting: The environment you’re in, the people you’re with, the greater environment you’re in. Doing this in a country where it’s legal with people you trust in a cozy house in nature with calming music is what you’re aiming for here.

Plan your own adventure right now

• Pick a thing from the list: Which sounded most fun?

• Find somebody to do this with - text the idea to a friend.

• Commit money on actually doing it

I draw the line between what is in and out of control. The execution, what I or my team are doing, is fully under our control. Where that takes us, however, is partly affected by us, but also largely affected by all kinds of outside factors.

One big cause of stress is when we confuse the two: When we try to manage execution on directional targets not fully in our control, for example revenue numbers that depend partly on our efforts but even more on the quirks of the world economy.

Super excited about this conversation with Ruben Timmerman on leadership. He sees himself as a “leadership nerd” - having been the first one in the Netherlands to roll out Holacracy at his startup, acting as operational lead for Volt Europe, co-founding the School for Moral Ambition, and most recently starting moralfabric.org - ops as a service for NGOs. In our conversation we keep coming back to the importance of being explicit, focusing on the why, and continuously evolving systems. As always, this conversation is meant as a conversation on this topic, independent of this post.

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How to lead

Lead yourself

Most people who are stressed have either unrealistic expectations of their productivity or targets that aren’t fully in their control. Get around both by learning what’s realistic and only setting expectations based on work time, not outcomes.

• Set direction: Every year, quarter, month, week, day, at an adequate level of detail, ask yourself the question: What is the most important thing to focus on / direction to go in to create the greatest value, based on the higher-level direction?

• Execute: Spend your time on moving into this direction. A good day is a day where you were able to spend a lot of time on your direction. Track your time to get a feeling for how much is realistic to expect from yourself.

• Reflect: In regular intervals, check in if your execution gets you far enough. Do you need to change your way of working, learn a new skill, outsource? Or is the direction not achievable and you need to change path altogether?

Lead your team

The same stress-fallacy applies to managing teams. When you try managing on targets, you are either burning them out (too high targets) or underutilizing them (too low targets). Instead of finding the perfect target, manage on motivation and time.

• Set direction: Use the same cadence idea but now it’s for your goals and your team’s goals. Your job is to understand their motivations, find the intersection of both, and make sure both of you are fully aligned on the final one.

• Execute: Set clear expectations for time spent or deliverables and communicate clearly and early when it’s above or below the bar. Adjust the granularity based on results: Start more micro-managy in the beginning and open as trust builds.

• Reflect: In regular retrospectives, 1:1s or offsites check in if the results get your far enough in the set directions and adjust as needed. I think retrospectives are the most underappreciated meeting. It’s the place to “fix the bugs”.

Lead your manager

Your boss is busy and a good employee for them is one that needs little time and generates lots of impact. Do the work for them, and manage yourself as much as possible.

• Set direction: Proactively suggest the direction for you to go in to maximize both the company’s impact and your personal goals (promotion, impact, time with your children, holidays, whatever they are). Get explicit agreement.

• Execute: Manage your own time proactively: When more demand comes in, flag to your boss that something else has to go and make a suggestion for what that thing will be.

• Reflect: Flag early when you can’t meet goals. Predictability is often much more important than achievement because it allows a change of direction while it can still be changed.

Three things to start building leadership skills

• Block time to reflect: What’s realistic to expect of you/your team?

• Track your time. It’s your most important resource at work.

• Build a habit to set weekly goals.

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How to build valuable skills

Lean into your strengths

To a significant extent, you are a product of your genes. That’s obvious for your physical build but just as much applies to your mental state. Instead of acknowledging this and giving up, identify where you are already great, and just double-down on that.

• Find your strengths: Try personality tests (big five seems most predictive), do internships or find other cheap ways to experiment, get anonymous feedback from lots of people. Ideally you can combine a few strengths to become unique.

• Match them to the market: What can you get paid for the most is a good heuristic for what’s most needed. Your guess on what stays relevant with AI changing is as good as mine so I’d suggest to focus on the short-term for now.

• Put in the work: I cooked for many hours in my life, yet I never got beyond ‘feed myself’ level. In order to improve, you need feedback, a coach, and active learning time. We created a guide on deliberate practice here.

Manage your weaknesses

Compared to my peers, I have a worse memory. Instead of trying to somehow train my memory, I just built a note taking system around it and hum melodies instead of singing along to songs. Get your weaknesses to a level that they won’t get you fired.

• Acknowledge it: Same story as for the strengths: find your weaknesses through tests and feedback. Verify it in your own experience.

• Get creative: Use an AI to figure out how other people solve this. How far does training get you? What other systems are possible? Do you know people who are dealing with this as well? I know people who got PAs to do their admin.

• Work around it: Best case: Find jobs where this skill is simply not needed. Next best case: Build systems around it. If you feel safe, make your colleagues aware of this and see how they can support you or how you can work around this together.

Improve your productivity

No matter what you do, your productivity will have an overall effect on what you do. One way to become more productive might be just raising life satisfaction (following Euozia) though the causal link isn’t clear. Experiment with:

• Raise your motivation: Set goals you care about, work next to people, start with small wins, or start with big blocks, work on interesting things, take breaks, use commitment devices or accountability groups, celebrate wins.

• Block out distractions: Disable all notifications, block out focus time, block apps or news feeds, have one system where you can log all thoughts and tasks, negotiate response-time expectations with colleagues.

• Stay reasonable: I love the story of Derek Siver’s bike ride. The gist: you can overexert yourself and be 2% faster than if you just take it easy. Throughout history most people got 4 hours of deep work done per day.

Three things to start growing

• Ask a friend to interview people who know you on your strengths and weaknesses.

• Identify your biggest strength. Journal on how you could become even better.

• Commit yourself to deliberate practice sessions. Your future self will thank you!

Super excited that I got to speak to Nina Friedrich, Executive Director of High Impact Professionals on what makes for a fulfilling job. Nina has advised many mid-career professionals on career shifts for more impact and purpose. She shared her learnings for what works and what doesn’t, her personal journey from software developer to director, and why community is so central to HIP’s work.

How to find work you will enjoy

Maximize upsides

Apart from looking for opportunities that uniquely match your personal fit and skills (upcoming post), the evidence suggests there are three things to look out for.

• Growth: If you only take one thing away, take this one: Always try to find opportunities in fast-growing markets and fast-growing companies. You will grow faster, achieve more, and have more fun.

• Engaging work: Work where you have freedom to decide how to do it, clear tasks with well-defined start and end, variety in tasks, and feedback on how you are doing on the tasks. Together this can put you in a flow state, similar to games.

• Supportive colleagues: To quote 80,000 Hours: “It may sound obvious, but if you hate your colleagues and work for a boss from hell, you’re not going to be satisfied.” Lots of evidence for that.

Minimize downsides

Even the highest-growth, most-gamified, great-team job can be a dud if some hygiene factors aren’t taken care of:

• Commute time: Long commutes can have strong effects on life satisfaction. Remote work can fix this if you have a sufficient social life outside of work. If that’s not an option try to make your commute as pleasant as possible.

• Hours worked: The evidence for this is interesting: Satisfaction mostly depends on preferred hours vs actual hours and follows a U-shape with a drop at more than 9h/day and very steep drop over 12h/day. Culture (eg EU vs US) plays a role.

• Financial downsides: Unfair pay or job insecurity are also linked to low job satisfaction. Importantly, the perception of being paid unfairly seems to be more important than the actual pay.

Match your values

All the above factors can look great and we can still feel miserable. Nina Friedrich explained that this can be due to cognitive dissonance: When we actively work against our values. Finding a job that matches your values has a few caveats though:

• Meaning isn’t happiness: Similar to having children, work can give you meaning, but might not maximize happiness. For example, working on catastrophic risks can be psychologically taxing. We’ll cover other paths to meaning in later posts.

• Felt impact might not be real impact: In a simplified view, an NGO creates impact and the donor “buys” that impact. As an employee you are working for the donor, not for the beneficiary except when you implicitly donate your salary.

• If you can’t find meaning, find money: For many it won’t be feasible to find jobs fully aligned with your values. A more general proxy is money earned. High salaries suggest that society values that skill. It doesn’t work for net-harmful jobs.

Three things to start finding your perfect job

• Apply to high-growth opportunities. Commit to sending one application per week.

• Review your current work and work with your manager to make it more engaging.

• Identify the biggest downside of your job and explore ways to minimize it.

Quick question

We are exploring how we can support y’all more in making changes towards a fulfilling life. Here are a few options, could you please hit reply on your email or email us at christoph@euzoia.org if you are interested in any of these?

• Accountability buddies: You get paired with another Euzoia reader and you can hold each other accountable on changes you want to make (eg through WhatsApp)

• Peer coaching: With an easy-to-use coaching framework you coach each other on things you’re working on, either in pairs or rotating partners.

• Mastermind groups: Weekly or biweekly calls for groups of 6-8 people where in each call a few people can present something they want advice on and the group brainstorms together. Optional group accountability as well.

Let us know by replying to the email / emailing christoph@euzoia.org if you’d be interested in any of these!

Why? Because in all these cases I had built trust with these people. They knew what I was good at so trusting me was going to be easier than assessing hundreds of other options, especially because assessing candidates is hard, much harder than relying on a trusting relationship or recommendation.

The value of your network becomes more and more important as you advance your career: Whether in politics, business, or academia - the higher up the ladder, the more the person is leveraging their network and being paid for it.

I was lucky to interview Mark Moore for this podcast. I got to know Mark in a startup incubator and he is probably the best connected person I know. In the podcast he is sharing his approach (spoiler alert: helping others and being a good human) and lots of fun stories.

How to build a strong network

Make work-friends

Building a network is similar to making friends. Check our posts on being curious, giving, and being the spark. Plus if you frame it for yourself as looking for genuine connections, potentially finding friends, it’s also more fun, and less ugh.

• Be curious: Listen with intent, use their name, find commonalities. Find something you find genuinely interesting about that person and appreciate that about them. Then offer vulnerability when they are curious about you.

• Give: The classic networking example is to give “five minute favors”, for example making an intro, giving honest feedback, brainstorming, sharing relevant insights. Do those while you meet the person, so you’re not adding todos.

• Be the spark: Host events like regular drinks, coworking, workshops, conferences. This has lots of benefits: You can invite your favorite people, it’s very time-efficient, they can bring people who you’ll probably also like, …

Manage weak links

We can only be friends with so many people unfortunately, so many of your contacts will stay weak links - people you know but aren’t close with. Because they are not in your core network, they are often the ones who will know about opportunities your core group doesn’t. But for that to work you need to stay on each other’s radar.

• Build a rolodex: You need a system to easily find relevant people you know. For most people, that’s their brain, but at some point it stops working. Bill Clinton had index cards, I started using a CRM once I noticed my brain not keeping up.

• Stay top of mind: While a rolodex helps you remember your contacts, your contacts also need to remember you. For this, people used to send birthday and christmas cards. Nowadays, regularly posting on socials can do the trick.

• Activate dormant ties: Even better than posting on social media and much easier than making new contacts: Reach out to people you met before, check in how they are doing. If you two hit it off back then, they’ll love you thinking of them.

Focus on the right people

One of the ideas of Euzoia is that we have to spend our time well. In an ideal world we can spend hours with every person we come accross but most of us are probably having difficulty keeping up with our regular friends. So: How to prioritize?

• Fun x potential: A friend working for BCG had to learn to network and sell after he became partner. Being BCG, they broke it down into a 2x2 matrix: Focus on people you like to hang out with and people with high potential.

• Ask for recommendations: Very simple hack that I see few people doing: When you go to events, ask the organiser or regular of the event: “whom should I meet here?” They might even intro you to the right people.

• Go through referrals: This might be obvious but it wasn’t for me for a long time. If you want to reach a hard-to-reach person (investor, philanthropist, …) try to find creative ways to get intros through (chains of) people that will vouch for you.

Three first steps to build your network

• Re-engage: Before building new connections, check in with people you like.

• Go to events: Make a commitment to attend networking mixers.

• Show yourself: Post on social media once a week.

While this article is my own perspective, I am super happy I got to talk with Sofia Balderson, founder of Hive, about agency. In the podcast (youtube link) we talked about the book You Can Just Do Things, posts from her substack on accountability, emotions at work, and language learning, and her coaching business. She also posted her own take on agency on her blog. Check it out.

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How to navigate your career

Agency in selecting your work

Performance differences within a field of work are high: A few people bring most of the results. The best way to find which work this is for you is to explore a lot, especially early in your career, to see what fits best. Then double-down later.

• Aim high: Early in your career you typically have little to lose. Use that to shoot for the stars, you can always do safer things later. How do you know you aimed high enough? If you failed or got rejected a lot. This also helps to minimize regret.

• Act like a scientist: Make a list of your best guesses for what would fit you best, then add more out-there options. Next, identify uncertainties you have on each, and resolve those by talking with people, doing work trials, doing internships.

• Do ABZ planning: Exploring and aiming high means taking risk and taking risk can feel uncomfortable. What helped me was ABZ planning: What’s my plan A. What’s plan B if that doesn’t work? What can I fall back to (Z) if nothing works?

Agency within your work

People are busy and overwhelmed. That doesn’t just apply to me but also to every manager I ever had. By acting agentically you save them the energy of having to manage you and at the same time buy yourself tons of freedom.

• Deliver impact: You are hired with a job description but at the end of the day what counts is: How much impact did you have on the success of the organization. Continuously find the best ways to do that. Look for leverage.

• Be autonomous: When impact is the “plus” on your internal balance sheet, the headspace required by others to get you there is the “minus”. This is why seniors are getting paid more then juniors. “They just get things done”.

• Ask for grease: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” - be that wheel. Ask for support, feedback, resources, responsibility. You know your job better than your manager, and they’ll be grateful if you make sure you can do it.

Become ambitious

Nobody is born agentic, Turns out people are born agentic. 75% of variance in self-efficacy is explained by genes, according to twin studies. The same holds for grit, and the genetic factor increases with age. Nevertheless, you can still practice it:

• Track achievable goals: They should be at the sweet spot of achievable but still matter. To show you that you can make a difference through your actions. Tracking them helps build an evidence base you can look back on.

• Coaching and mentoring: Ideally from people in the domain you are practicing in. This could be a more senior person in your organization. They must be a) agentic and b) relatable to you. A role model for agency.

• Be ambitious: Once you built a solid level of agency, set ambitious goals you still believe are achievable. Think you are doing this already? Challenge yourself to be more ambitious. Picture your favorite celebrity: They also once set crazy goals.

Three starting points to become more agentic

• Journal / discuss with a friend: Is what you are doing right now the most ambitious thing you could be doing? How could you easily test options?

• Practice agency: Set one small goal that is achievable but a bit outside your usual zone. Track it.

• Want to dive deeper? A lot of this content is inspired by the 80,000 Hours guide.

About 15 years later, my thinking on this has completely changed. Maybe it’s my biology, maybe I got tired of living that exciting life, maybe it’s because I’ve been living with a child for the last year, or maybe it’s a result of the voices I heard on the topic over the years. I summarised them below, I hope they are helpful.

As with all decisions, it’s good to remind ourselves that there isn’t a right or wrong here. There are many great lifes to live - some with and and some without children.

While this article is my own perspective, I am super happy I got to talk with Julia Wise about the topic of children and parenting. She has her own substack where she writes about parenting, leads community health at the Center for Effective Altruism, and is portraied in the book Strangers Drowning - one of the best pieces of writing on the question how far we should go when focusing our lives on a greater good.

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How to think about a life-changing event

Your own perspective

Would you want a child, from a purely selfish perspective? If you feel a clear no to that question then you probably don’t need to keep reading, but in my experience most of us like the idea but are worried about the impact it will have. Some thoughts on this:

• No happiness, but meaning: The research on this seems to be pretty clear: Children are on average neutral for wellbeing, but they will add meaning. You can get meaning through other ways, but children seem to hit differently.

• What will you say no to?: Economist Bryan Caplan argues in his book “Seflish Reasons to Have More Kids” that you can invest less time than the average, a lot is influenced by genes anyway. While this might be partly true, your time has to come from somewhere. What would you say no to? Try to map out days.

• What support you can count on: While your wellbeing won’t change on average, your support network is the strongest predictor of changes. Think partner, parents, policies. Your overall health and money going in. Is it worth waiting for?

The world’s perspective

Let’s start with the obvious point: We are below replacement rates. This leads to collapse of safety nets, the economy, research, progress. If you are reading this, your kids have a good chance having a positive effect on socity. We’d love to have them.

• Highly impactful people had children: If you are doing impactful work and are worried children will eat away from your time, here is a fun fact: Nine of the 10 most impactful people them had children. You can’t be 24/7 productive anyway.

• Role modelling: A movement that would celebrates self-sacrifice to not have children to e.g., use their members saved time to save “more lives” asks too much of it’s members, thereby won’t grow, thereby will limit it’s potential impact.

• Biodiversity and resources: You can take two perspectives here: a) more humans = more destruction or b) more humans = more invention and solutions. If you are worried about this, you and your children are exactly the people needed in b)

Your child’s perspective

Not sure about you, but I’m pretty grateful for my parents for having made the decision to gift me this life.

• It’s a gift: It’s hard to compare not being alive to being alive, it’s philosophically murky territory. And yet. Giving the gift of life is the biggest gift you can give. Can you get it cheaper by donating malaria nets somewhere? Probably.

• What world it will grow up in: We live in a highly unpredictable world. AI, climate change, risks everywhere. But even in some of the less good scenarios, I personally would prefer to be alive, to live through it. Would you?

• You don’t have to be perfect: I sometimes hear people say they don’t want to pass on their genes to avoid the pain they suffered. This of course is a highly personal decision. But we all have faults, and maybe you, having gone through this, are especially well placed to help your child growing up.

Start with one thing

• What points evoke the strongest emotions for you? Talk about it with a friend.

• Are you a parent? We’d love to hear your story in the comments!

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

Up until that point love just kind of happened to me. I fell in love, acted lovingly towards my partners but almost like a child would act towards their friends. When something came natural I’d do it, otherwise I’d just kind of drift somewhere else.

Since then, I try to be more conscious about how I act towards people I love. I want the best for them, after all, so spending some time thinking about it is the least i can do. So: How do you love?

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How to love

Love languages with evidence

You might have heard about the “five love languages” from a pastor in the 90s. Turns out there is little evidence to back those up. While the theory doesn’t hold, there is evidence for specific actions you can take:

• Date nights: Meaningful quality time, not just time, is linked to better conflict resolution through perceived perspective taking. Bonus points for doing novel activites together for added excitement and shared growth.

• Small gestures: Think affectionate messages, nicknames, small acts of care, small gifts or favors. All these help signal thoughtfulness, support, and care.

• Check-ins: I love these, and there is some evidence for them: Make time (we do it every two weeks) for taking turns just sharing everything that’s on your mind. I feel it’s a natural vent to any “bottled up” thoughts and if you build a nice ritual around it it is a much better place to have a difficult conversation than right before you go to sleep.

Get good at intimacy

For most people, their partner is the person they’ll get most physical intimacy from. So it’s only natural that physical intimacy is associated with relationship satisfaction. But physical intimacy doesn’t necessarily mean sex:

• Loving touch: Kissing, hugging, cuddling, touch: They all lead to happier relationships and especially in couples who are beyond their first years have a higher impact than the sex alone.

• Talk about it: The single thing that predicts sexual satisfaction most is quality of sexual communication. This beats the more commonly assumed predictors: intercourse frequency or scheduling time.

• Explicit consent: The second most powerful factor is strong internal willingness expressed as active, enthusiastic consent vs assuming passive assumed consent. This predicts satisfaction for both partners.

Take action when things don’t go well

Loving actively also means not avoiding difficult times. Address issues when you see them, otherwise they will build up to an insurmountable pile of emotions.

• Breakup predictors: Verbal aggression, ongoing negative interactions, low commitment, satisfaction, and support all predict breakups. The question is: Will it get better? Give yourself a dedicated time to work on these and quit if it doesn’t.

• Therapy works: Not perfectly, but about 70% of couples do get better and half of those can maintain the improvements even after two years. That’s worth the shot if you are in a place where you feel like you could use some help.

• Online couple programs: Seem to work pretty well and might be more accessible than traditional therapy. They work mainly through reducing negative communication and increasing emotional support.

Start small

• Plan a check-in with your partner, consider making it a recurring one

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

In one way, the relationship with your partner is like just another friendship. The same ideas apply: Be curious, be the spark, give. But it doesn’t stop there.

Step one for a strong foundation: Build safety. And yes, all of this of course also applies to other relationships in your life. It just fits best here.

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How to build a strong relationship

Understand attachment styles

Attachment styles are a simplified framework that predict how people emotionally connect, behave, and regulate their emotions in relationships. There is both plenty of evidence and it’s simple enough to work with, which makes it so popular.

• Avoidant (25%): You highly value independence and sometimes struggle with emotional vulnerability and tend to pull away when relationships get too deep. This is me in my relationships. I once dated another avoidant person - we didn’t get very far.

• Anxious (20%): You constantly seek closeness and reassurance. You often worry about your parnter leaving you.

• Disorganized (<5%): You can be both avoidant and anxious. Craving commitment and closeness but also fearing it, which leads to unpredictable behavior.

• Securely (>50%): If you are both anxious and avoidant you’re chaotic. But if you’re neither then you are securely attached. You can allow emotional intimacy without fear of abandonment.

Build safe attachment

Anxious and avoidant styels have been linked to lower well-being. So, the million dollar question: How do you become securely attached? And how can you help your partner.

• Understand your patterns: While the attachment types seem quite simple, recognising your patterns is much harder. They often mask as unrelated thoughts. Read up about it and maybe try therapy if it’s affecting your relationships.

• Demonstrate safety: The best way to build trust and safety is to just demonstrate over and over again that we are available when needed and are committed. This can come in many shapes and forms, talk about what would help.

• Dare to go deep: For the avoidant among us, practice opening up more and more, experiment with co-dependence instead of in-dependence. Try to predict reactions of your partner to sharing things that scare you and see what happens.

Repair trust

Trust takes long to build and short to break. What to do when that happens? This framework is based on Emotionally Focused Therapy, where ruptured trust is framed as an attachment injury.

• Get to the rupture: Escape the tendency to accuse and defend. Try to stay calm and feel into what actually happened in the moment the trust was broken. What was the hurt’s person’s fear, helplessness, or pain of abandonment?

• Stay with them: For the partner who broke the trust, stay fully present with that emotion, “hold their pain”, without excuses. Allow yourself to feel genuine remorse for hurting them. Take full ownership and offer an apology.

• Create a new narrative: Don’t “forget about it” but instead reframe it as something that shaped your relationship and helped you grow together. A rupture that will stay with you but something that helped you attach even more securely.

Get started

• What is something small you could do today to practice building safety?

• Are you afraid of sharing something? Bet money on doing it.

• Is there a rupture in any of your relationships that might need repair?

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

The evidence seems to be clear on one thing: Cohabiting with a life partner seems to have a causal effect on your life satisfaction. This effect is stronger for men, probably because they have a weaker social network. It gets even stronger as you get older, and having a partner in later life stages predicts longer lives. As always, all on average!

We’re experimenting with podcast guests! These are complimentary to the articles - we discuss the same topic but focus more on the guest’s view vs the write-up here. Let us know what you think!

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How to find a great partner

Approach

To find a partner you’ll have to talk to some. While you can find ways to get around approaching people, like matchmakers, most of us will need to work up that courage. And in most cultures that’ll be the men. Just accept this, your partner will thank you.

• Look for signals: It’s easier to start a conversation when you feel there is some interest already: Maybe a look, smile, eye contact. On dating apps it’s simply their like. But don’t make this a blocker, it might be hard to spot these at first.

• Strike up a conversation: Don’t worry about the perfect opener, this is about getting a conversation going. Comment on something in your shared environment, something you noticed about them, a random thought you just had.

• Ask for the number: Did you enjoy the conversation and are you curious to get to know the other person better? Are you getting signals that they feel the same way (eg open body language, asking you questions, …)? Ask to stay in touch.

Look for the right things

What predicts a good relationship? We’ll get into the details but a heads up already: It’s not the “prom date” the hot, high-status, exciting person. Science’s best guess is that it comes down to the following traits:

• Do you feel good: Can you be yourself around them or do you feel you have to “perform”? We probably all perform in the first dates but how does that change as you progress? Do you feel safe and seen? Can you trust them?

• Can you communicate: Can both of you share your needs and set boundaries? Can both of you own your emotions? Can you deal well with conflict? Low neuroticism in your partner (tendency to experience negative emotions) helps.

• Is the sex good: It takes time to get to know each other’s preferences and bodies but you usually know pretty soon if this has potential or not. That doesn’t mean you should have sex on the first date. It is negatively correlated with satisfaction.

Get out of your head

All credit for this to the great book How not to die alone by Logan Ury. She already termed the prom date vs life partner in the section above and also came up with a good segmentation of reasons we might procrastinate settling down.

• Don’t romanticize: Disney put this thought into our head that the perfect partner should just “show up”. A chance encounter. This will work better if you enhance the surface area for chance and put yourself out there.

• Don’t maximize: If you have a list of ten criteria, this is you. Make it three and allow yourself to be open to be surprised. Even if you assume the probability for each criteria is a coinflip, 10 coinflips give you 0.1%, or 1 in 1000 people.

• Don’t hesitate: “I’ll start dating once I lost ten pounds, have a better job, and am ready for children”. If you think others maximize, then you maximize yourself before trying. Life happens while you are busy making plans. Don’t miss it.

Do this now

• If you’re not in a relationship: Approach people. It’s hard. Bet money on it.

• If you are in a relationship: Send this article to a friend who isn’t.

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

And if you’re in a relationship already: No harm in reviewing this and making sure you put in the effort to stay an attractive partner for your partner.

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How to be datable

Develop core traits

Sorry, no easy wins here. We are all primed by evolution to find traits attractive that predict healthy children. Even if you and your future partner don’t want children, you are primed to judge on those traits. Accept this situation and develop them.

• Women: Youth, meternal investment capability, intelligence, health. Youth is frustrating because even though living healthy can prolong it, you are running against the clock.

• Men: Fitness, mental health, intelligence, willpower, tenderness, status. How do you develop these? Follow Euzoia and do the work. Just as for women, some of these are predetermined. Accept that. Nobody wants a perfect partner..

• Personal: What do you value in others that’s not part of this list? Can you offer that yourself? Chances are that if you are looking for this in others, they might look for the same in you. How can you work on that (and signal it later)?

Signal those traits

“I am looking for somebody who is funny, good-looking, and cares about his friends” Said everybody, ever. Why is this? These are all signals that are both hard to fake and easy to see. Signals are how you show your traits. Focus on the hard-to-fake ones.

• How you look: Your looks signal youth and health (skin, hair, …), mental health (tidyness), intelligence (style and situational awareness), wealth (can afford nice clothes), willpower (can go to the gym), fitness, etc.

• How you speak: Signals intelligence (humor, breadth of topics), tenderness (how you treat others), mental health (vulnerability), tenderness (empathy, understanding), etc.

• What you do: Signals status (having friends around you, your job), wealth (your clothes, your house, paying for dinner), tenderness (donating money, your job), mental health (how you deal with stress), etc.

Be in the right markets

You can signal all you want; if nobody is there to see it it won’t go very far. Put yourself out there and allow yourself to be seen. We’ll cover what to then do in the next post.

• Dating apps: Terrible dynamics: Women swipe on most attractive men. Those men don’t commit because they get a lot of likes. Everybody loses. Signalling here is an art: Show off all signals without seeming to show-offy.

• Social activities: Be where you think the people you are interested in will be. Step 1 is to just do the things you like doing. Step 2 is to think a bit harder about which of these activities allow for easy socializing and have a lot of your type.

• Location: Some markets are just terribly skewed. SF as a man is a nightmare, same for NYC as a woman. If you are single and dating, you want to be in a place with enough options: Universities, cities, not your hometown.

Get started

• Subscribe to Euzoia to build those habits! Bet money on doing them.

• Check with friends: What do you signal right now? How could you change?

• Review your markets: Where are you fishing and is there a better pond?

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

In the same way that we can embrace proactive giving on a small scale, we can experiment with extending those circles. Just as in loving kindness meditation we wish everybody happiness, we can take steps to bring everybody happiness.

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Your social contracts

Remember what you received

Think of all the people who showed up for you. Some did it out of love, some out of obligation, some because they hoped to get something back. But they all helped you to get where you are. Take a moment to recognize that.

• Family: The love and care from your parents and siblings, the support from extended family. This won’t be only happy memories, but they put in a lot of effort to get you where you are if you managed to read this blog post.

• Community: Teachers, mentors, doctors, that other family that took you on vacation, lovers, friends, investors, people who prayed for you, people who gave you a hug when you needed one, your first employer.

• Expanding circles: Who else supported you? Maybe authors, your country with schools and roads, the citizens of other countries through global trade and exploitation, chickens through their lives, the world. That got dark quickly.

Reflecting on what others have done for us can be a powerful way to motivate us to help others. None of us get through life alone. At different points, we have all been supported, guided, forgiven, encouraged, or carried by someone else.

Recognising this can shift us from seeing help as a burden to seeing it as a continuation of the care we have already received. Parents are often the clearest example: for many of us, they gave years of time, energy, patience, and sacrifice before we were able to give anything back. When we remember that, it becomes easier to show up for others now and to pass that care forward.

Cameron

Understand your position

What’s your ability and responsibility to care? Recognizing this doesn’t mean you have to automatically act on it. It’s meant as a framework to help you gain awareness, not to induce guilt or obligation.

• Privilege: We all like to believe that our success is down to our genius and hard work but not everybody has the same start. How lucky did you get? Gender? Race? Sexuality? Family? Passport? Physical and mental health? IQ? Grit?

• Power: How dependent are others on you? Can they safely voice their needs? Would you in their position? Power could come from you earning more, them not having others to depend on, social status, formal power like guardian/employer.

• Resources: What resource do you have to give? Time? Money? Maybe you are very privileged and are close to many people but you just can’t do much right now. That’s ok. Stay aware of your own limits and needs.

Writing this as a white man in his thirties living in Europe with some wealth, good health, and a loving relationship I feel pretty high on the privilege, power, and resources scale. In my day-to-day I just forget about that. For me it takes active effort to bring this back. What helps me: Talking with people who got less lucky, reading fiction, watching documentaries.

Christoph

Give it forward

You have two main resources: Time and money. Use some of both to honor your social contracts. To get an intuition for what’s reasonable, try falling back to the golden rule that exists in all main cultures: “Treat others as you would like to be treated”.

• Make time: Based on all of this, who would benefit from your time the most right now? Start there and start small. Experiment with how it feels, how much you can give, and where it becomes too much.

• Pay up: In Western society we have a shift from implicit social contracts to explicit ones: Pay your taxes. In more implicit societies that could be remittance payments and community fundraisers. Donate to support your expanding circles.

• Team up: Thinking through the above can feel overwhelming and suffocating. So many people, so many needs, so much responsibility. Luckily, you don’t have to do this alone. Find people to join you, switch from overwhelm to excitement.

Start small

• Block an hour in your calendar to journal on your position in this world.

• Make an effort to talk to people living in different realities. Try to see the world from their perspective.

• Identify one specific thing you can do to support. Bet money on doing that.

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version

On top of all that, generous behavior has been show to be contagious. If you start, it’s very likely to enable that behavior in others, a self-reinforcing circle of kindness. So let’s start that feedback loop:

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Give within your limits

Cultivate generosity

Generosity is a muscle, a habit, and like everything, it needs to be trained to make it an easy, natural behavior. According to research, the best way of doing this is by combining intentional actions with close connections.

• Give intentionally: A bit like a gratitude journal trains you to see things to be grateful for, a giving habit trains you to see opportunities to give. Make it a habit to give something to somebody every day. It can be just a word, a hug, a flower.

• Focus on real connections: When giving, give directly to people you see and can interact with. Seeing the reactions on their faces will have the largest effects on both your happiness and your habit formation.

• Contribute in your community: Most communities run on volunteering. Give your time, and as an added bonus you’ll meet new people and form new bonds. Not sure where you can help? Just offer and ask. There is always a need.

The place where this principle really shines is Burning Man: A festival where you can’t buy anything, only gift things to others. There is no bartering, you gift to strangers and never see them again. When I first saw this working in real life I was thinking: If as humanity we are able to pull this off, just by gifting, I think we’ll be fine.

Christoph

Stay with yourself

Giving is a great thing, as long as you don’t give more than you can. Especially in friendships this can be hard, when seeing people close to you in need. But they don’t benefit from you eventually running out of steam and silently turning cynical.

• Avoid being used: There is always a risk that if you give generously, somebody will take without feeling inspired to give. Protect yourself by playing generous tid for tat: Give often but if you notice pure taking in the other person, exclude them.

• Set boundaries: A very simple forumla for communicating these is “What I need + What I will do to protect that”. E.g., “I can’t take calls after 9pm because I need to wind down. I won’t answer but text you in the morning.”

• Ask for support: People love to give and help. You are offering them an opportunity to do that by asking for help. By articulating your needs. The more comfortable you feel doing this, the more people feel they can trust you.

Give repair

None of us is perfect, we all make mistakes. Sometimes we don’t even know we did, or who did, and a misunderstanding explodes sepctacularly. Sometimes we just drift apart. Assuming this isn’t a pattern and you trust and value them, give the first step:

• Reach out: Maybe you made a mistake, maybe you didn’t. The important thing is: You still value your friend. You want to be in their live and them to be in yours. Swallow your pride, reach out, tell them you value them, offer to talk it through.

• Listen: No matter what your perception of the situation is, really try to understand their point. Don’t defend yourself, just repeat back to them what you understood they said. Make them feel seen

• Apologize: Own your specific actions. Don’t say “I’m sorry you felt that way” but focus on your actions and what you can do. Something like: “I’m sorry I did x and that it caused y. I will do z to prevent this from happening again.”

One of the most satisfying things from last year was reconnecting with an old school friend who used to be one of my closest friends. We never fell out, we just drifted apart over time, which made catching up feel especially meaningful.

There was something genuinely uplifting about revisiting old memories, feeling that shared history come back so naturally, and realising the friendship was still there.

Since then, we have started seeing each other fairly often again, and it has left me feeling grateful that some connections can be picked back up even after years apart.

Cameron

Some ideas to get started

• Think of one thing you could do this week to make somebody smile. Commit to doing it on your change

• Is there a friendship you’d like to repair? Take a few minutes to reflect on this.

• Missing something? Add a comment and we’ll add it to next year’s version