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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 30th, 2023

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  • Second this. Vanlife stuff is focused on size, mass, durability, efficiency, replaceability, repairability, modularity, price. There is nothing better than vanlife videos for learning how to live minimally within an apartment.

    Some additional tips,

    • folding furniture.
    • Human baseline happiness returns to set points. Remove something non-essential and you may be sad at first, but will eventually stop caring.
    • No couch or TV: if it cant fit on/in my car or is fragile, I’m not buying it.
    • if you don’t mind appearing “poor”, you may realize that the products that best fit all the above criteria are just basic things from walmart, target, etc. Those folding plastic tables and metal bed frames, plastic tubs and drawers, actually solve their problems 90% as well as traditional products at 10% the price, while being readily available everywhere. You don’t worry about damaging them either.
    • take or leave advice. Maybe you want a nice desk. I have a nice office chair. It will be hard to move, but it’s worth it. The point is you can be minimal in unimportant areas.





  • For most people, big breaks in habits fall apart fast, while more gradual changes stick.

    For example, many make resolutions to get fit, and start a bunch of related things. But since none of it is habitual, it requires mental effort to do consistently. Soon, something else important requires that mental attention, and the plan falls apart.

    The successful ones aren’t special, but they created one, little, achievable metric to hit:

    1. “Subscribe to 2 science-based fitness influencers and watch their content regularly”.

    Because it was easy, it became habit. Then, they chose another simple thing to build on:

    1. “Change evening commute to pass by gym”
    2. “On Tuesdays, go into gym”
    3. “Learn proper form for one excercise”
    4. “Bring a protein shake”
    5. etc.

    Each of these is so small they don’t really feel significant at all. And they’re not. The important thing to understand is we’re all lazy. The real challenge isn’t getting yourself onto a diet or into the gym, it’s designing your habits so that the diet isn’t “a diet”, it’s just what you eat. It’s designing your life so that going to the gym requires less mental effort than not going.

    I could write a lot more about this but it’s already getting long. Atomic Habits is a good book on how to design your habits and habit chains, if you have the time.