Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I'm falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It's as if I need to justify my existence, by staying "on top of things", in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.

What if – and personally I find this thought almost unthinkable in is radicalism, but still, here goes – what if there's nothing you ever have to do to earn your spot on the planet? What if everything you actually get around to doing, on any given day, is in some important sense surplus to minimum requirements?

But I think many of us overlay this instrumental sense of obligation – "in order to have this, you'll need to do that" – with the existential one described above: the feeling that you must get things done, not merely to achieve certain ends, but because it's a cosmic duty you've somehow incurred in exchange for being alive.

And make no mistake: paying off your imaginary productivity debt completely – in other words, working so hard and so efficiently that you no longer feel like you're falling behind – is literally impossible, not just grueling and unpleasant. In the modern world of work, there's no limit to the number of emails you might receive, the demands your boss might make, the ambitions you might have for your career, etcetera – so there’s no reason to believe you’ll ever get to the end of them.

Whenever I manage to remember that this is just the way things are – that the cosmic debt I seem to imagine I must pay off is in fact inherently impossible to pay off – I find I'm far better able to relax in the midst of having too much to do, as opposed to making relaxation dependent on first getting on top of it all (which I never will).

I think virtually everyone, except perhaps the very Zen or very old, goes through life haunted to some degree by the feeling that this isn't quite the real thing, not just yet – that soon enough, we'll get everything in working order, get organised, get our personal issues resolved, but that till then we're living what the great Swiss psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz called the "provisional life."

Most of our attempts to become better people, fitter and healthier, more moral/productive/organised, and so forth, make this problem worse – because it's basically impossible to pursue any program of personal change without the thought, somewhere in the back of your mind, that successfully completing the change will catapult you into a new and somehow realer kind of existence.

One antidote is to allow yourself to imagine what it might feel like to know you'd never fully get on top of your work, never become a really disciplined exerciser or healthy eater, never resolve the personal issue you feel defines your life's troubles. What if I'll always feel behind with my email? What if listening attentively to other people will always take the weird amount of effort it seems to take now? What if that annoying thing my partner does annoys me to the end of my days?

To return to information overload: this means treating your "to read" pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don't feel overwhelmed by all the unread books in the British Library – and not because there aren't an overwhelming number of them, but because it never occurred to you that it might be your job to get through them all.

It’s natural to assume that .strip(" Python") will remove the substring " Python", but it removes the individual characters " ", "P", "y", "t", "h", "o", and "n" instead.

In Python 3.9, there are two new string methods that solve this exact use case. You can use .removeprefix() and .removesuffix() to remove the beginning or end of a string, respectively

This will make your code easier to write and eliminate the confusion about having both list and List. In the future, using typing.List and similar generics like typing.Dict and typing.Type will be deprecated and the generics will eventually be removed from typing.

This, then, is the role of guilt: it provides assurance to others that we will be punished for our misdeeds even if there is no external authority to punish us

In this case, guilt would be an entirely adaptive response to a disaster with which you were associated, even if your own actions were beyond reproach. A level of unhappiness worse than any benefits you could get by profiting the tragedy, but less than any punishment you might receive if you were suspected of profiting from the tragedy, would be helpful in clearing your name of any wrongdoing.

In evolutionary terms, guilt becomes more credible the more it requires publicly visible behavior that no reasonable cheat would want to fake. Hurting oneself, avoiding pleasurable activities, lowering your own status, and withdrawing from social activities are all evolutionary costly and therefore good ways to prove you are experiencing guilt; the usual vocal, postural, and facial cues of being miserable are also useful.

People often seem to use the word "should" to assign a value of "negative infinity" to all alternative actions. They should do X, so if they don't do X, they're bad, end of story.

Setting percentages of your portfolio at a level of the sector of the economy doesn’t make sense. If you set those percentages today, based on current levels in the S&P 500, our economy may never again match those percentages. There is no reversion to the mean for sectors of the economy. Setting investment percentages also doesn’t allow you to make strategic investments in sectors that you expect to grow and outperform over the next three to five years. Rebalancing at the capitalization level (large cap and small cap) makes sense because large- and small-cap companies will always exist. Small companies have a higher expected rate of return because it is easier to double the size of a small company than a large company. Similarly, it makes sense to rebalance using investment style (value and growth) criteria because these are universal descriptions of stock types and not specific to industry. A company can move between value and growth based on its price. Overweighting value companies outperforms growth stocks because of the risk of a growth company faltering in its expansion and causing a serious price correction. Limiting your investment in such stocks slightly smooths and boosts your returns.

People that don't own any capital are usually less supportive of capitalism than those that do.

When you get married, your boss will give the longest speech at your wedding, praising your diligence on that last project and bright future with the firm.

UTF-16 is generally considered a bad idea today. It seems almost intentionally designed to invite mistakes. It’s easy to write programs that pretend code units and characters are the same thing. And if your language doesn’t use two-unit characters, that will appear to work just fine. But as soon as someone tries to use such a program with some less common Chinese characters, it breaks. Fortunately, with the advent of emoji, everybody has started using two-unit characters, and the burden of dealing with such problems is more fairly distributed.

However, employing those strategies requires considerable skill. In practice, that skill barrier has meant these strategies are used by no more than a tiny handful of people. By contrast, in Quantum Country an expert writes the cards, an expert who is skilled not only in the subject matter of the essay, but also in strategies which can be used to encode abstract, conceptual knowledge.