2026-04-13

One step at a time

I just ran a marathon without real training. Finished 5 minutes under the disqualification limit (5:30:00), but that was exactly my goal 🙃.

My whole body hurt, but I genuinely had a great time. Friends and even random spectators commented on how good and happy I looked. Some thoughts I had during the race:

Endurance is scarce
Each step is one step closer to finishing the bucket list
Gratefulness will make you/life run better
I don’t know if I have a higher pain tolerance, or if I just feel less pain to begin with when compared to other people¹
Always be movin’ theory is real, folks

Sub 4 is the goal for next year!

Feet don’t fail me now, take me to the finish line

Oh, my heart, it breaks every step that I take

But I’m hoping at the gates, they’ll tell me that you’re mine

Walking through the city streets, is it by mistake or design?

~ Lana Del Rey

Footnotes:

My hunch is both. When I carry a cup that’s burning my hands, I don’t scream, I slowly put it down and then say “ow, that was hot.” My dentist was always so happy he didn’t have to use anesthesia on me, even when doing tricky and deep surgeries on my teeth. ↩

2026-04-09

Jane Austen

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love

~ Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

2026-04-08

The always-be-moving-forward trick for getting out of bed and getting good grades

My trick for getting out of the bed is to keep moving. One leg out of the blanket, then one arm, then the other leg. And so on. You will be out of the bed before you know it. Same trick works for studying super boring topics at university. Sit down, start making progress. Don’t evaluate if you feel like it.

The subtle part: just like in soccer penalties¹, you never stop moving. No matter how slow, you keep going.

This is related to the no days off principle. If something feels expensive to do, you will do it less. That’s demand and utilization. Make it cheap, and it can even be fun if you talk yourself into it.

Also, put the phone far away from you.

Footnotes:

“a player stops in his run-up, it is an offence for which he shall be cautioned” ↩

2026-04-06

On intelligence

Knowledge is knowing your discarded toenails contain keratin, which in turn, contains nitrogen. And that your living room plants need nitrogen.

Wisdom is not putting your toenails in the plant pot.

Intelligence is making the leap from knowledge to wisdom. Or rather, it’s having the sensibility to put the toenails there, but having the wisdom to bury them deep in the pot, so people don’t see what you did. And intelligence is still not doing this in front of your friends, or talk about this in front of your friends. Maybe intelligence is hard-to-define, but it for sure entails the skill to not talk about this publicly. “Intelligence is what AI is not able to do,” they say ... but even AI will tell you to not talk about your toenails in your plant pot, so ... on a second thought, if you have hippie friends they might see what you do as resourceful, and it might be genuinely status increasing and inspiring that you put your toenails into plant pots. Ah well, this isn’t the neat conclusion I wanted to reach. Probably intelligence is heavily context dependent, and path dependent. And dependent on if you actually put your toenails into that pot or not, and if you behaved wisely while doing it. I guess intelligence is more of a verb?

2026-04-05

Bucket list: 40 for 40

Two months until thirty. Ten years until forty. Forty things I want to experience in between:

Hold a talk or an event at the Colosseum
Win a BJJ match
Attend a Sufi dhikr ceremony
Play an official soccer match again
Live in California again, specifically the bay area
Attend a jhana retreat
Learn how to sharpen knives properly
Be in the best shape of my life (the leanest or the most effective I have ever been)
Host at a technical conference
Learn a Latin language
Have someone come up to me and tell me something I wrote or said inspired them
Learn Arabic, read books from the golden age of Islam
Hold Swiss, German, and Turkish passports
Have equity in something, acquire land
Be married
Have kids
Leave something that gave me enormous success because the marginal loss was greater
Achieve enlightenment/fana, only the beginning
Maintain a narrated chronicle of my life, week by week, marking what happened
Complete a multi-day water fast
Record my parents telling their life story
Do improv at an open mic session
Run one marathon every year
Build a network where any two phone calls can solve almost any problem
Write my dad a letter in Turkish that makes him cry
Go a full year without missing a single day of publishing
Try transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation
Go back to Dortmund and give a talk or workshop for kids there
Start doing videos
Visit Korea, China, Tibet, Nepal
Learn my mom’s recipes
Do a major contribution to a technical project I love
Have a real, extended conversation with someone whose watcher also never sleeps
Fund someone else’s dream with no strings attached
Keep a powerful secret and never leverage it
Learn three chords and write one song and record yourself singing it
Reclaim something abandoned (a neighborhood, a company, a tradition, an idea) and make it alive again, and make it outlive you
Build an artifact that is simultaneously machine, art, and prayer
Learn dancing on a longboard
Increase liberty and happiness in the world

See ya in 10 years.

2026-03-29

ruminous fee

i have tried prudent planning long enough
from now on
insane

far away from home
once a city;
i turned into ruin

though
my essence flourished
by paying this ruinous fee

2026-03-28

The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch

$the \"they don't know\" party meme: a guy standing alone at a house party holding a bowl of oatmeal with the caption \"they don't know this oatmeal slaps\" while everyone else socializes with pizza and fancy food$

For me, eating oatmeal at lunch every day is almost a spiritual experience. Let me give you my rundown:

it’s healthy and cheap
it’s a great and efficient routine, one decision less each day
counterintuitively, it enables a wide variety of tastes

Healthy and cheap

Healthy, cheap and vegan. You can enrich it with bananas or goji berries for extra nutrients. You can use oat milk or other fluids that are enriched with stuff you might be lacking, like vitamin D and calcium.

Great and efficient routine

You have more time in the lunch break to do whatever. You can legitimately get down the ratio you like better each time you make it. If you skip breakfast, you are craving food by lunchtime¹.

Tribal creatures we are, there is always an undercurrent of “what will my work colleagues think about this?” Doing it anyway builds genuine self-confidence. I also think it’s secretly high status: you open the door for your work mates to do similar weird shit at lunch.

It doesn’t even mean you eat worse overall. My work colleagues might doubt this, but I cook really nice dinners. Oatmeal at noon is what enables that, in a kabbalistic way I can’t describe.

Variety

I’ll try to describe the exoteric side anyway: if you constrain your life in one area, it opens up a lot of options in another area. If you constrain your sleeping and wake-up time, that’s the only real way to have a routine where you write each morning, or exercise each morning, or do whatever each morning. Variety comes from constraint.

You can min-max your oatmeal with whatever nutrition (and taste) you need, and can even do morphological analysis on your combinations:

Fluid	Base oats	Topping 1 (fruit)	Topping 2 (seeds/nuts)	Topping 3 (extra)
Oat milk	Rolled oats	Blueberries	Chia seeds	Goji berries
Water	Instant oats	Banana	Flaxseed	Honey
Soy milk	Steel cut oats	Apple	Walnuts	Cinnamon
Coconut milk	Overnight oats	Mango	Almonds	Cocoa powder
Almond milk		Raspberries	Pumpkin seeds	Peanut butter
		Strawberries	Hemp seeds	Protein powder

I swear, I genuinely feel people are missing out on the greatness of oatmeal at lunch.

The easiest way for us to gain happiness is to learn how to want the things we already have

~ William Irvine

2026-03-09

How does your country pronounce "Wi-Fi"?

$Choropleth world map showing how 193 countries pronounce \"Wi-Fi,\" divided into four categories. \"Why-Fy\" (teal) dominates with 118 countries, covering the English-speaking world, Latin America, the Arab world, Russia, East Asia, South Asia, and most of Africa. \"Wee-Fee\" (red) covers 63 countries including France, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, the Netherlands, Eastern Europe, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Francophone Africa. \"WLAN\" (orange) applies to just 2 countries: Germany and Austria, which use the term WLAN instead of Wi-Fi entirely. \"Mixed\" (purple) marks 9 countries with competing pronunciations, including Switzerland, Lebanon, Morocco, Greece, Cameroon, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. The legend is positioned in the South Pacific, left of South America.$

International flights, connect me to the Wi-Fi

The only way you reach me, huh

~ Pusha T

2026-03-06

The Ozempic theory of societal change

Ozempic is the moment society stops pretending that discipline alone should govern the body.

If you take steroids you’re a loser — that’s the mood. It’s almost similar with Ozempic today¹, but the mood is shifting.

From what we know, Ozempic is safe², and people love it because of the upsides: improved health, looks. Downstream from that, confidence. Healthier, happier people lead to a healthier, happier society.

It follows that Ozempic won’t just make us healthier, it will change how we as a society think about external interventions into our bodies. I argue this shift will also lead to us becoming spiritually healthier, with the help of external devices.

There’s a growing literature on transcranial ultrasound neuromodulation, a noninvasive way to reach deep equanimity. You point ultrasound at specific brain regions, modulating neural activity toward equanimity, all without surgery. It’s a hot topic, soon you’ll hear all about these devices in societal discourse.

If you react with puritan disgust (why would anyone want help to meditate, this is backwards from its purpose), start observing how the mood around Ozempic changes in your society. Being overweight has huge effects on people’s lives, and by extension, society. Not being equanimous does too. You can almost run down the entire list of seven deadly sins: anger, envy, greed, pride — all failures of equanimity.

Within ten years, the idea that mental states must only be achieved through discipline will look as outdated as the idea that bodily weight loss should only come from discipline. Ozempic is just the first domino. I actually don’t know which intervention comes next, but they’re coming. All I know is that Ozempic’s success makes society change its mind.

Footnotes:

This is in the Western European context, where the puritan disgust around body interventions runs deep ↩
There are behavioral changes people discuss as downsides, I don’t want to downplay them too much, but from what we know, Ozempic is the real deal ↩

2026-02-25

Nasreddin on the Djinn of Algebra

A young man rushed to Nasreddin Hodja’s house, breathless and wide-eyed.

“Hodja, I have seen something extraordinary. A new kind of intelligence is coming into the world. Not from scholars, not from books, but conjured from algebra. This intelligence will be everywhere. Nothing will ever be the same.”

Nasreddin nodded slowly and sipped his chai.

“But Hodja, my friends won’t listen! I try to warn them, I try to explain, but they laugh at me. They don’t believe it. How do I make them understand?”

Nasreddin set down his cup.

“You say this thing will soon be everywhere?”

“Yes! Abundant. Unlimited. Like water from a spring.”

“Let me understand this,” said Nasreddin. “You say a great intelligence is spawning, almost like a djinn?”

“Greater than anything.”

“And yet you, a capable human, who has seen this, cannot convince a single friend?”

The young man blinked.

“Then you both are not so intelligent,” said Nasreddin, “or you are possessed by this. If this thing is truly as clever as you say, why doesn’t it do the convincing?”

2026-01-03

No days off

In the theme of 2026 and new habits, here’s what worked for me: the no days off principle¹.

Let’s say you want a good sleep rhythm, start exercising for reals this time, write more, etc. When dreaming up these habits, you automatically visualize the gold standard: the perfect 8-hour sleep, the unbelievably energizing exercise, the writing of exactly one hour in the morning, getting one article done per day. Ah, beautiful.

The flip side is that if you don’t achieve this dreamed up scenario, you feel bad and lose the habit. Also, because you have such a high expectation of the habit, you’re less likely to start. So in reality, the daily decision matrix looks like this:

Decision matrix with two rows (good motivation days, no motivation days) and two columns (doing the activity, skipping). Green checkmarks for doing on good days and skipping on bad days. Red X's for the opposite.

Skipping an activity you swore to do is such a normal thing that I don’t think I need to further explain the matrix and its implications. Some days, you skip the habit because of low motivation.

There’s a better way to frame the problem, in which skipping the habit is the ultimate enemy. This is the framing of the no days off principle — do a little even on days with no motivation. Here is the decision matrix with the new framing:

Decision matrix with a middle column added: doing the activity a little. Green checkmarks for doing the full activity on good days and doing a little on bad days. Red X's for skipping.

Let’s reframe the good sleep habit we want to achieve with this new matrix. The first insight is the trick of having good sleep is not really waking up early, but going to sleep early. But life happens, throughout the year you won’t always control when you sleep. You can, however, always wake up at 7am. So let’s reframe the habit to “Wake up at 7am each day”. Of course, of course, getting 7-8 hours of sleep is the gold standard. But! Internalize that the gold standard isn’t always possible, and skipping the habit is the enemy. So wake up at 7am, even if it means less sleep. In fact, we know that being regular in your sleep cycles might be more important than getting the perfect amount of sleep each night.

Reframing the other habits: exercise (a little) each day, write (a little) each day. That way you stay in motion, you beat the enemy. If you haven’t done exercise, just go out and do a little — just do some pushups, man, if you really have no time. You will notice that you will exercise more regularly, and once you started with just a few pushups, you’ll likely do more.

Instead of defining your habit goals as “exercise more” or “lose x amount of weight”, rather write them as doing something every day, and never stop. You also compound if you do it every day, and long-term, a little gain beats a loss. No excuses!

2026-01-02

On online psychopaths

Why giving good universal advice can be bad or I wish I could pre-filter psychopaths

In person, I tune advice to whoever I’m talking to, as advice is context-dependent. On the internet, advice I give is more universal and boring, as context is scarce.

And even the universal, boring advice has exceptions. “Just talk up people on the street” is a potentially life-changing activity, unless you’re socially awkward and/or considered creepy-looking. If you are unable to walk, “Take a long walk to clear your head” is useless.

The above examples are mostly harmless offenses, though. There’s a worse category: advice that becomes dangerous in the wrong hands — a.k.a. psychopaths.

“Look up which conferences someone attends and show up, people love to hear you came for them” is good networking advice. “Be persistent about meeting them, sending multiple follow-ups if you must, it usually works for me” is great communication advice. Both tips become stalking instructions for a psychopath.

This is a genuine problem. I’ve heard podcasters say they never discuss stalkers on air. Psychopaths are mimetic—talking about psychopathic acts motivates them.

So adding “unless you’re a psychopath” to advice doesn’t help. Even worse, it invites the psychopath. So you’re left with two options: don’t give advice, or give it knowing the wrong person might take it to heart.

Related

The Exemption Outsourcing Pattern
From Ruminating on read receipts: “Except in psychopath ex or dysfunctional family circumstances, I believe turning off read receipts does a person more harm than good.”
Death Grips - Giving Bad People Good Ideas

2026-01-01

Two tweets for twenty-sixteen

staysaasy

@staysaasy

If I’m leaving 2025 with any core reflection, it’s that I increasingly believe that the world has no place for those who lack conviction, that mistakes are forgiven while tameness is ignored, that perfection loses to done every time, that commitment and tenacity and audacity and self-promotion and risk-taking compound more than anything, and that all of this always starts with one very achievable next step that looks like a cliff but is much closer to the ground than you realize.

Jan 1, 2026 Link ↗︎

gaurav

@gaxrav

quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat clean. journal. save a life. learn to code. read poetry. create art. stay composed. refine your speech. optimise for efficiency. act sincere. help people. be kind. stop doing things that waste your time. follow your intuition. craft reputation. learn persuasion. systemise your day (or don’t). write. write. write. write more. iterate violently. leave your phone at home. walk to the grocery store. talk to strangers. feed the dogs. visit bookstores. look for 1800s novels. experience art. then love. sit with a monk and offer them lunch. don’t talk shit about people. embody virtue. sit alone. do something with your life. what do you want to create? turn off your mind. play. play a sport. combat sports. notice fonts in trees. fall in love. notice patterns on a table. visualise it. talk to people with respect. don’t hate. be loving. be real. become yourself. cherrypick your qualities. discard the useless. rejections aren’t permanent. invite what aligns. accept what does not. read great people. be different. choose different. do great work. let it consume you. lose your mind. value your time. experience life.

Oct 15, 2024 Link ↗︎

2025-12-30

All my criticism applies to myself, also

I don’t want to come across as negative, though I know some posts might read that way. Here’s what happens when I ruminate: I notice patterns in myself and others, try to figure out what’s going on, then post about it. Any criticism applies to me first.

I am a victim of the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern, I tend to overcomplicate things, I like complaining about complainers. I want my posts to read as optimistic, that noticing and learning is powerful, that I can be self-aware enough to change my behavior, and thus change the world.

Just like “Make America Great Again” can be read as both pessimistic and optimistic, any criticism holds both challenge and invitation.

2025-12-30

The Exemption Outsourcing Pattern

Two observations about how people interact with differing opinions they encounter:

it’s easy to mistake someone else’s opinion for an attack on identity
people rarely agree with things that feel like an attack on their identity

Pick a subject, nearly any subject, and there will be people flipping out about differing opinions. Nothing new here, no need to elaborate.

What I find interesting is one subtle way this plays out online. A subtle enough pattern that it’s worth talking about. Let me illustrate the pattern with an example, starting with a person posting their opinion/observation online:

Screenshot of a social media post by @hazn saying 'Most people who say they're too busy to exercise actually have the time, they just don't want to exercise as much as they want not-exercising' with 0 comments and 0 likes

When people encounter something like this, a fork happens: some get offended, some don’t. Most non-offended people agree with the opinion or simply scroll past. It’s the offended people who are more likely to engage with the post. The offended can be split into two groups again:

Tree diagram showing audience breakdown. Top: All people. First split: Non-offended people (scroll past) and Offended people. Second split from offended: People where the observation holds (majority) and People where the observation doesn't hold (minority, shown as single figure)

Here’s the part I find interesting: Someone from that small minority replies, explaining how the observation doesn’t apply to them. The majority, the ones it does apply to, then rally behind that reply/comment.

Flow diagram showing the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern. Original post gets 22 likes. A person where observation doesn't apply (tracy @singlemomlife) comments explaining her situation. Her comment gets 221 likes from hundreds where observation does apply. Result: Original point appears debunked, all offended people feel vindicated, original observation remains mostly true

The majority latch onto the exception case that doesn’t apply to them. I call this pattern the Exemption Outsourcing Pattern. A pattern where people avoid being uncomfortable by hiding behind someone else’s valid exemption. This happens because dismissing the original opinion is cheaper than changing behavior.

Once you zoom out a little, you notice this pattern everywhere. Simpson’s paradox is an example from the statistics world. From the legal world there is the “Hard cases make bad law” concept.