I’d probably tell myself to take a different undergrad major (I did 4 years of military before college, so it would still be relevant.) That said, I don’t know that my 20-year-old self would listen to me any more than he did to anyone else.
1.) Close the bathroom door when you poop. (Especially when your spouse is having company over… or is on a Zoom call.)
Probably, and life will probably be short and toilsome for quite a while. Short because there’ll be loads of unintended consequence and we will probably learn there are many more aspects of Earth that are consequential to our wellbeing than we ever understood. Toilsome because, as European explorers in Africa thought that everything was trying to kill them, Mars colonists will find that there is not one thing there that wants them alive. Every task involves pushing a boulder uphill.
I have meme-blindness. It’s like ad-blindness (which I also have) and is probably caused by the same state of mind. If you want my attention, pony up some dough or produce something worthwhile — vaguely clever regurgitation of pop culture references and cliched slang ain’t gonna cut it.
The Langar Hall (found in Punjab, Haryana, and wherever else Sikhs are found) is an excellent tradition. They are places that serve free communal meals every day. It’s not like a soup kitchen that attracts only poor, nor is it like the many institutions that make meals (implicitly or explicitly) only for one particular ingroup (e.g. members of a particular religion.)
Too much time in the big city and missing the beauty entirely.
Beautiful Day. U2.
Despite its grim lyrics.
Swimming in the deeps.
Swimming day in and day out until my buoyancy became an incontrovertible fact of nature that not even my amygdala could deny.
Going the places that scare you.
I’m fond of primitive living skills and unarmed martial arts that train against armed opponents. There’s something about stripping away all technologies that you can’t build yourself in the moment that gives one faith in one’s capability far deeper than a high GPA, a good paying job, or any of the usual markers of success in today’s world. I highly doubt any cavemen experienced Imposter Syndrome. If you managed to be alive into adulthood, you had an intuitive understanding that you were some kind of awesome. Not so in the modern world.
I don’t know and I kind of hate the term “loyal” applied to commercial and / or attention capturing domains. There can’t be any reasonable expectation that someone who bought your product once (either in cash or attention) owes you their attention and / or dollars in the future. If the answer is anything else than do your best work EVERY. SINGLE. TIME, then I think we’ve jumped the shark as a species.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 