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Objectively, I'm super successful! I'm top 1% globally in income and creative output. I'm married to a top 1% woman. I have a rich social life in New York, home to an awesome 0.1% of the world's population. And yet, I'd feel like a total loser if I just stayed at this level.
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Why? Partly because I always compare myself to people more awesome than I am. I don't read the 99 blogs that are worse than Putanumonit, I read Slate Star Codex and feel inadequate. But part of it is just that my self-esteem depends on the derivative of my success, not the level.
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On one hand, this leads to continued misery. The further I go the harder it would become just to stay mildly satisfied with my life. The Buddha tells me to relinquish my attachments and illusions. And it's not like losing this unhappiness is a guarantee that I'll stop improving.
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But from my current internalized value system, it's incredibly painful to do anything that would risk the "impending awesomeness". For example, learning to make peace with my current subjective mediocrity. So there it is, I'm stuck in this weird catch 22 and it's not very fun.
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Ironically, I could only really write this as a Twitter thread. I'm worried that my friends would just say that I'm awesome as is if I told them all this. But everyone reading this is following hundreds of people more impressive than I am; on Twitter I'm *objectively* mediocre.
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A better example might be inner ear bones, which developed from over-thick jawbones with spare bone (whole new meaning to slack-jawed). In a talk I did on fat thinking (my post on that is probably where I started down this road) I use that as the prime example.