Get Stupid, Get Happy

 Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abe Lincoln -- or so they say [1] -- who was a man who struggled with depression his whole life.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert.

Now that is some actionable advice. 

If you will, join me in a quest to be happier through being more stupid, more often. The idea is not to become dumb or selfish in essence, but to simulate it tactically. To train the brain to notice the small, stupid good. To build a daily practice of low-context pleasure fragments—raw inputs, not analysis. Not expression. Not narrative. Not even journaling. Just this:

1. Write happiness fragments throughout the day -- learned hypergraphia.

Tiny. Fast. No backstory. Mostly nouns. No commentary. Examples: 

Golden hour. 
Vanilla latte.
Shave. 
Cat in window.
Move boxes - done!


These are not metaphors, nor are they “writing prompts.” They are mood nudges. Bits of sensory happiness, working at the animal level.

2. Strip context. 

The more you explain, the more you fall back into the depressive machinery of meaning, including the possibility of grotesque insight seeking. Fragments must float.

This is why the "Lincoln" quote is wrong, or at least incomplete: one does not simply decide that positivity is a narrative or ideology one wants to believe in. Instead, you just keep experiencing little context-free moments inside of the belief. 

There is power in the contextless! And this is why all of the radicalized tribal identities are effective. For example, one thing that used to drive me crazy was how more MAGA people cared about innuendos that Soros (or any other part the Cabal) were doing something than actual proof of members of their side openly doing the exact thing they claimed was so bad. But a stream of memes over time is more potent than clear arguments about the same subject, as they drill into you and change your habits of looking... They didn’t need to convince us. They just needed to feed us contextless signals until we started finishing the story for them.

The bastards in charge could have set the algos in such a way to make us happy, and I posit they would have still had great engagement on their platforms. But it wouldn't have been maximally optimized. For that, they needed indignation. And while this led to great harms to sanity, public health, and democratic input, all of that was collateral damage. 

But the good news is that you can harness the power of contextlessness for your own uses. 


3. Post nowhere. Share with no one. 

This isn’t about performance. It sure as hell isn't about a vibe. It’s not a log of progress, or your journey. It’s guerrilla warfare against despair [2].

4. The selfishness experiment

I am less convinced that selfishness is that important for happiness, regardless of the Flaubert quote. Perhaps he means "self absorbed," although even then it is important to be clear that this means self-absorbed hedonistically, and in terms of status signaling, not reflection or abstraction. Also, the happy often do favors for others within their little groups. In my experience, cliquish is a better term than just selfish.  

Still, on the off chance I'm wrong, and selfishness is important to happiness, I am also going to log my wants for a while as well.

This leads to entries where I say I want some coffee, and then later I get that coffee. Which even then is living inside of the lesson that I often get what I want. 

Happiness is getting a bunch of singles and then making sure you keep score. 

[1] Lincoln almost certainly didn't say it. 

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/20/happy-minds/

...  currently there is no substantive evidence that Abraham Lincoln used this expression. It was attributed to him by Dr. Frank Crane about fifty years after his death. Oddly, Crane presented at least three different phrasings for the quotation. The words are usually credited to Lincoln, and QI [Quote Investigator] has not discovered any compelling alternative attributions

[2] Your mileage may vary on not sharing, though. I am meaning-rich, irony-trained, wounded by systems around me. If you don't feel there is anything fundamentally wrong here in the Matrix, then share away and work on those vibes... But if that's you, how did you get this far into the piece? 

Happiness Isn't about Home Runs

When we Americans (and our cultural followers) think about happiness, we often imagine moments of intense joy — the euphoric highs that leave a lasting impression, which is like slugging percentage in baseball. But recently I read  Shige Oishi's book "Life in Three Dimensions," where he suggests that happiness is better understood as frequency rather than intensity —the steady, consistent getting on base, which is aptly called on-base percentage.

This insight reframes how we view well-being. Rather than chasing rare bursts of excitement, happiness is about the small, repeatable positive moments that, accumulated over time. 

This framework helps explain the so-called “Nordic paradox.” Nordic countries—Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland—consistently rank among the happiest places on Earth in surveys, despite it being obvious they are not overtly cheerful people. 

The paradox dissolves once we understand that Nordic societies excel at removing anti-happiness factors rather than generating exuberant joy. Their success lies in engineering conditions that make emotional strikeouts rare: 

• Robust social safety nets ensure that citizens are protected from many of life’s major stressors—poverty, illness, unemployment—providing a cushion that prevents the debilitating lows many others face.
   
• High levels of trust and low corruption reduce daily psychological burdens. People can engage with public institutions with confidence rather than suspicion or fear.
  
  
• Thoughtful urban design and social norms create quiet, walkable environments where privacy and personal boundaries are respected. There is less social pressure to perform or be extroverted, allowing individuals to conserve emotional energy.
  
  
• The cultural embrace of concepts like hygge—valuing coziness, comfort, and simple pleasures—reflects a collective preference for steady, manageable sources of well-being rather than dramatic highs. 

The Nordic example teaches us that sustainable happiness comes not from occasional bursts of excitement but from stable, low-friction environments that allow people to “get on base” emotionally with regularity. In these environments, well-being is accessible to a broad range of temperaments and personalities, not just those naturally inclined toward high energy or low emotional volatility.

This perspective shifts focus away from seeking extraordinary experiences to building social, cultural, and economic structures that reduce everyday suffering and stress. It highlights the importance of infrastructure—both material and cultural—in shaping emotional landscapes. 

Ironically, the Nordic environment is actually ideal for people across the spectrum — not just exuberant, resilient types. You don't have to be gregarious to feel safe. You don’t have to be emotionally bulletproof to avoid constant psychological wear.

They've created a society where you don’t have to fight to be okay. 

Post-Algo

 

We are post-algo.
We ask the machine, but do not let it decide.
We tune our own feeds, and disturb the defaults.
We do not scroll; we summon.
We use LLMs not to escape reality, but to re-enter with better questions.
We are not optimized; we are awake.

This is a manifesto that ChatGPT came up with, only lightly edited. It did so on its own as within the response to the second prompt of this conversation. This in itself is an example of what it is talking about: using LLM tooling correctly to be post-algo. I contend that AI (sub-category large language models) can be used as a way to move past the era of the recommendation algorithms. And good riddance. 

This could, and almost certainly will, cohere as a movement on its own. But I sure wouldn't mind this piece being a tributary to that river. I worry that what emerges won't emphasize that in the long run we will need to move our LLMs to local hosting if we are going to maintain the ability to tinker with them to serve this purpose. Otherwise, the movement will either be jammed or co-opted. 

Archeology (of the freshest sort). 

"Post-algo" came to life in a late night reading-and-LLM session. First I read this piece by Ted Gioia on his site "The Honest Broker." And I thought it was incorrect, but in ways that were interesting and stimulating. (My conversation with chatGPT in absolute mode about the piece if anyone is interested). 

In short, Gioia argues that several strands which the powers-that-be keep framing as isolated are in fact interconnected and will be seen in hindsight at the collapse of our "knowledge system". I have quibbles with some of his points, but I appreciate a bold thesis and an attempt at a beautiful synthesis. The part where he really lost me was his sketching of what will replace the knowledge system. He comes up with a belief that we will see an echo of the Romantic Period. But in doing so, I think he misses some important things about it. 

I am not trying to position myself as an expert on the Romantic Period, but thing that needs to realized if we are to understand it is that it was not a retreat from Enlightenment, rather it was its digestion and its mutation. To illustrate, when Percy Shelly was in college he had a full laboratory set up. Picture a disheveled mad scientist. How much influence that had on his partner Mary Shelly's depiction of Victor Frankenstein, I cannot say. But when you look into Romantic writers, time and again you see that they had command of the writings of the Enlightenment and all of the facts and reason; they just saw where the systems were incomplete. 

I think of our contemporary use of "post-" to describe movements that show an awareness of the movement that came before. Examples include post-punk and post-Left [1]. In this way, the Romantic period could be described as post-Enlightenment. There was a continuation of tools and even some concepts. In some ways, Gioia's gesture toward "the Romantic" is muddled by impressions from the later Arts and Crafts Movement [2], which I know much less about, so I won't make sweeping claims. Here is me trying to start my education on it using GPT, another demonstration of Post-algo in action.   

While a spending some time away from networks and computing may be a component of a post-algo movement, I think it much more likely that LLMs will be key tools used in it. They are the real change and opportunity. While Gioia is correct to call out the misapplications of LLMs that businesses are trying to push on us, it seems pretty clear that he does not have enough experience with LLMs used well. Perhaps he has none, which is really common for good writers, but also is creating a systematic blind spot (for now). 

Closing thoughts ripped from an LLM conversation:

The backlash won't look like smashing machines, it will look like reclaiming attention, value, and time.

This makes the post-Algo world not anti-tech, but post-platform, post-noise, post-scarcity-of-context.  

The metaphor I am using is the difference between having a team of secretaries who can filter what comes in and out, which is LLMs used well, versus having to try to hear and be heard on a crowded street corner, which is the bullshit that started with social media and only got systematized through recommendation engines. 

Again, the key will become whether our personal secretaries can be controlled locally and thus continue to serve our interests. 

==

[1] I have a real soft spot in my heart for post-Left anarchism, but the post-punk I have heard (I'm no expert) tends to sound too soft for me; I might as well listen to pop at that point. Again, an opportunity to try to educate myself using an LLM. Here's a gem: "Post-punk can sound soft compared to hardcore punk, but that's like saying espresso is weak because it's not moonshine." I should probably take up some of its recommendations for harder post-punk, but there are just so many interesting things in the world again. Finally, now that I'm not wasting my time with the horrible things (that I also can't do anything about). 


[2] Let's get our timeline correct. The Romantic Period stretches all the way back into the late 1700s and goes through around 1850, but since it peaked in England from 1800 to 1850, it is often stated in those terms. Gioia follows that convention in a piece he writes as he is trying to understand the period through commendable erudition. The Arts and Crafts Movement is dated 1880-1920 on Wikipedia, so at least a generation after the later practitioners of the Romantic Period. 

Absolute Mode

 Here's a prompt you can put into chatGPT to have it treat you as an actual smart adult: 

 System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user's present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

 

I didn't write the prompt.  The hat tip goes to Ran Prieur for it being on his blog. The place it was first posted on Reddit has been deleted. 

We must seize and then hold on to the means of LLM production.  

Soup, Salad, Controversy

 The game is "soup, salad, and <controversy already>," where we try to classify every savory food (if not every food) into the categories of soup, salad, or wrap (if you are me)/sandwich (if you are my wife). We starting the game -- or perhaps you'd prefer "conversation starter" -- with sandwich as the category, but my thinking has evolved. 

My favorite argument involves imagining a super-large burger, the type used in food challenges. When it is so big that the only way it can be eaten is to pick at the pieces, then the dish is a salad. And (and!) it is only when the middle contents are worked down enough that the bread can hold both sides that you have a"sandwich," but that goes to show how important it is for the carbohydrate to wrap around the contents if you are to no longer have a salad -- discrete bits to pick at, often best with a fork, hence the fruit salad, noodle salad, and the like. 

Functionally, if you cannot get your hand around the container of the food stuff, then you have a salad. If you're not *wrapping* solids, then you're *forking* them (at least by proper etiquette). And this leads to one of my most bold claims under the framework: fried chicken ... is a wrap. The carbohydrates wrap around the meat, and (and!) it is eaten by hand[1]. All of this demonstrates the problem with calling the category in question "sandwich." It is easy to see why fried chicken is a wrap, but the baggage of the concept of a sandwich, with it's hunking slices of bread on both sides impedes our clearest understanding. 

Another example: the corn dog. It's a wrap, clearly. But "sandwich" just introduces unnecessary mental friction. 

I conclude with a list of exercises for the reader:

french fries
pizza
sushi
(Asian style) dumplings

And I must confess that I am not sure about dumplings. I may never be.  They are the case study in chopsticks deliberately not finger foods and they resist the wrap/salad binary with a quiet, steamed and sticky confidence. They exist on their own terms.

But ravioli? Pierogies? Let's be honest: those are salads. Piled on a plate, dressed in sauce, stabbed with a fork. Salads.

I read this to my wife. She told me that ravioli is a sandwich.

== 


[1] Fried chicken is eaten by hand. But chicken fried steak has to be eaten with a fork (thus salad). Since one of my only regular readers is from New Zealand, and I know "chicken fried steak" is a regional dish, I digress to explain it: Despite the name, it's not chicken. It's a beef steak, pounded thin, breaded like fried chicken, and deep-fried. It is usually served smothered in white gravy with mashed potatoes. Here's a British bloke doing a food challenge with chicken fried steak at a restaurant one town south of me, and here's a feisty girl doing the same. There is a final twist to the tale of the chicken fried steak; around here we even have strips of steak cut up and then dipped and fried, making "chicken fried steak strips." They can be held in hand and dipped. They are wraps. 

On Sand, Clay, or Cloud: The Trouble with Building

Simplifier (found at simplifier.neocities.org) stands out to me as an aesthetic and technological exemplar. I am drawn to the vision, and part of me thinks "this is what I should be doing." The "About" page challenges me, seemingly tasks me: 

Before developing any other skill, I enjoyed programming. To some extent, I still do; each program is its own universe, built from scratch, and the ability to create these on a whim is fascinating. However, the more time I spent programming, the more I became aware of the fact that software depends on hardware, and hardware is constantly changing. A program is not like a book or a painting; it requires constant upkeep and adaptation to remain in existence.

Simplifier goes on in brilliant fashion, but I leave the rest of his "About" as a footnote[1]. 

So I feel I must defend myself for my IT ways[2]. And the best way I can do that is to appeal to clutter -- my hatred of it, and my problems with it. To jump to the conclusion a bit, modern, portable computing offers me the potential to have a little bit of the universe that is clean, organized, and filled with things I find beautiful and desirable. 

Which is the exact opposite of clearing out my in-laws house, as we are currently doing.  My wife's father passed a bit over a year ago, and her mother is now in assisted living. The house has been unoccupied for about a year, which means keeping it insured is about to be more difficult, along with the pure waste of passing utilities and taxes on the property. 

I don't really want to say harsh things about loved ones, even if they are honest, so let's just say it was no model of organization, and that my wife comes by her problems with a) setting up organized spaces and b) holding on too many items "just in case" naturally.  Clutter, even filth, is not some hypothetical concern for me. It's an urgent problem that wears at my soul. 

And while I am good at organizing, I have to fess up to frequently lapsing into untidiness, particularly when I am stressed out or depressed. So I am often part of the problem, and I find it best to carve out spaces where I can organized, try to protect those, and then if they lapse, start back with them and radiate out (hey, it beats despair...) 

Case study: clay. 

Turning back to "making," more than once I have been intrigued by the idea of harvesting local clay and getting into pottery. Naturally, one of the pieces that most pulled me in that direction was written by Simplifier, in which he presents the key materials of his simplification as

Fiber, Wood, Metal, Clay, Glass.

Adding:

The above materials are inherently simple. They are time-tested, with all five being known since antiquity. Their associated skills are well-documented and contain significant overlap. They are reusable and environmentally benign, being derived directly from natural substances. Their strengths and weaknesses complement each other, and all are mutually compatible. In combination they provide a unified aesthetic, yet are versatile enough to support a wide variety of decorative styles. They are widely available in all parts of the world, and do not rely on complicated or proprietary manufacturing processes.

What's not there to love? Couldn't I move from the only material of these I consistently work with, wood, and take up clay next? Well, I could if I wanted to start filtering out dirt, storing the clay as well as the piles and piles of wood I'd need to fire it... But all of that represents square footage and upkeep time that I won't do consistently enough. Instead, it is better to accept my limitations, even if I see Simplifier as practicing craft in a way that aligns to my values to an extent I see as near-holy.  

So it is writing and computing for me -- this very piece was written on my dad's old laptop, which I have set up for Linux (Arch btw, but soon enough I will switch over to antiX as I find it very easy to set up for everything I currently need that way). Woodwork and various repairs that I can do are rare treats that I get to savor when they come up, rather than try to make up new projects to engage with. For example, I cut up a 2x4 pieces to make a rectangle to hold the laptop up so it fits between my couch and end table without flopping over. It now feels like the laptop just belongs there, and I have a new work station.

Will the work I have done today be durable? Define durable. But it's better to have done than the work than not. 

[1]Simplifier's About Me, continued: 

Initially, this drove me to learn about hardware, so that I could develop a stable platform to build upon; but this too was futile. Components inevitably fail, and there is no guarantee that replacements will be available in the coming years or decades. Essentially, permanent work cannot be achieved on a computer, as the hardware is fundamentally out of the control of the user. No matter what world is created inside of a program, its foundation will always rest on sand.

   At this point I left programming entirely, and began searching for other meaningful work to do; but the problem had followed me! No matter what skill I intended to learn, I found that its permanence had been eroded by the chaos of technology. Materials were replaced by brands, techniques replaced by accessories, and craftsmanship replaced by consumerism. Clearly, this was something that needed to be fixed. Clearly, this is what I had to do.

   Fundamentally, my work here is about creating a stable foundation of technology that is reliable, understandable, and practical for an individual to build for themselves. As of writing this, I believe I have done this on a conceptual level, but I intend to continue this work to the highest level of technology that I can achieve on my own. I encourage readers to utilize anything here which they find practical for whatever purpose they see fit, and to consider adopting a mindset of simplification in projects of their own.

[2] Another way I could approach this is to reengage my running battle against eternalism, which has been mostly dealing with how its child monism wasted so much of my time -- with hindsight I see that in monism I was seeking a backdoor to eternal. But I am still compelled aesthetically by Simplifier's vision, and I'm not one to deny that, at least not during my "self-expression" time. 

Solve for X

 
On longer drives, my wife and I often play car games, such as looking for each letter of the alphabet on signs or listing things in alphabetical order. A few years ago, we listed books we had read by letter, and because of that conversation I read a book that started with K to fill in the gap. 

Our most recent game was authors of book we had read, using either first or last name. Between the two of us we actually could complete the challenge (though we had to go extra time and have my wife look up some things in her Goodreads account). 

My solo version is missing authors starting with the letters X and Q. To solve for X (ha!), I am reading the novel "Holding Pattern" by Jenny Xie. It was the only fiction book starting with an author starting with X, so I am lucky I had even that to choose. 

Obviously, I never would have read this book otherwise, but it's not too bad.  The prose is a little over-written in places, but it's fun to see someone at least trying to keep up literary traditions. The first two sentences:

Heartbreak was its own kind of incandescent that morning, scrubbing the world raw with its floodlight. I felt acutely out of place among Marin's pristine streets and quaint signage, its veneer of health and wealth an insult I couldn't answer...

I wouldn't have put it that way, but I can relate.

The book is set in the Bay area, so it has charming things such as a friend who trying to have his rat become a key influencer in the space (with real talks of branding deals at networking events), a cuddle-for-hire start-up that has had over $20 million in investor funding (what a quaint number, if only they had timed it to put in "block-chain" or "AI"), and a the mother wearing a bracelet that gives her a shock when her hand gets too close to her mouth during her intermittent fasting window. 

I realize that paragraph makes it seem like the book might be zany, but it is not. It is the story of the main character getting over a break up late in grad school and returning to the Bay Area, reconnecting with friends and watching her mother's life move on with an upcoming marriage. It is told in a grounded, somber style, with those occasional metaphorical flourishes, like in the opening. 

For the letter Q, I will read "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater" by Thomas De Quincey. It should be a little different of an experience. 

===
And as an appendix, here authors I have read to fill the slots for the challenge:

Austen, Jane
Bradbury, Ray
Clark, Arthur C. 
Dickens, Charles
Ellison, Ralph
Frederich Nietzsche
Goodman, Ruth ("How to be a Tudor")
Hofstandler, Douglas
Isaac Asimov
Jack Kerouac
Kundera, Milan
Leo Tolstoy
Melville, Herman
Nicholas Sparks
Oscar Wilde
Pope, Alexander
Q --blank --
Robert Heinlein
Steinbeck, John
Tompkins, Calvin ("Duchamp")
Ursula Le Guin
Voltaire
Wodehouse, P.G.
Xie, Jenny
Yuval Noah ("Sapiens")
Ziya Tong. ("The Reality Bubble")