A lot of my experience of embracing change reduces to embracing new proportions and priority orders for old things rather than new things. Simply adding a new thing to your life is easy. Just make some room in the right place. Changing proportions and orders is hard.
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For example, “video games” gets classified as “evening relaxation and entertainment” and I add it in by reducing tv or reading.
But swapping tv and writing so I watch tv during daytime and write in evening... nearly impossible, even though both are 3-4 hours. Just too profane 😆
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Putting something into a morning slot is signaling to myself that it is the highest priority, even if I could conceivably manage energy and attention to make it work.
What I slot into the 10 - 2 slot is most central to lived identity.
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Non-temporal example. I grew up with 1 cutting board but many plates in the kitchen. Took me a while to get used to the idea that owning half a dozen cutting boards and using them as freely as plates is okay. Same with ratio of gym clothes to regular clothes.
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Your conservatism is a sort of genome of proportions and priority orders that you’re not willing to change. You can be surprisingly open to adopting new objects, people, and behaviors while being deeply conservative in this behavioral dna sense.
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Fun question. Who is more conservative: somebody who won’t try a new cuisine, or somebody who won’t eat a lunch sized meal at a random irregular time like 4pm.
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Who is more conservative: someone who won’t dare outside their own ethnicity/race, or someone who won’t go on dates that deviate from a set variety of types like “dinner and movie”?
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Who is more conservative: somebody who won’t consider writing their idea as a series of blog posts instead of a book, or someone who won’t change the amount/source of feedback they want from others (in terms of “read my draft! requests)?
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Policy level example. It used to strike me as awful that healthcare is like 18% of GDP and headed towards probably 80% in our lifetimes, but now it sorta makes sense. Healthcare is what the economy is for in a postscarcity economy where other stuff is cheap going on free.
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