Patterns of Deep Response

Category: Patterns

  • live close to where you go

    Action Live walking, biking, or easy public transportation distance away from the places you regularly go like work, grocery stores, and social locations. Discussion If you live close enough to the places you regularly go, then you don’t need to own a car. Car ownership is expensive, and living further from the places you go…

  • do therapy

    Action Find a therapeutic modality you respond well to and do it. Your therapeutic modality of choice could be ACT, it could be EMDR, it could be regular yoga, it could be grounded in a religious context, it could be lifting weights, it could be fishin’. Discussion Almost everybody will improve their subjective experience of…

  • schedule workout dates with friends

    Action Schedule dates to work out with friends. Ideally, schedule regular weekly workout dates with friends. The workouts can be cardio (walk, run, bike, swim) or strength (calisthenics, bodyweight, kettlebell, DIY crossfit, olympic, etc) or mobility (yoga, tai chi). Discussion It’s difficult for most people to stick to a consistent workout schedule on their own.…

  • design mandatory movement into your life

    Action Instead of designing movement-minimizing solutions into your life, design movement-maximizing or movement-optimizing solutions into your life. Some examples: Discussion Human bodies are designed to move, but they also are designed to adapt. If you move a lot, your body adapts to moving a lot. If you don’t move very much, your body adapts to…

  • build a life you like

    Action Design and build a life(style) that you like. Discussion If you like your life, you can’t be sold to. If you like your life, you can’t be convinced that you need to buy XYZ bullshit product in order to finally be happy. You’ve heard of FU money? This is an FU lifestyle. If you…

  • maintain a high savings rate

    Action Save most of your income, instead of spending most of it. Discussion Conventional personal finance advice is to save 10% of your income, and spend the rest. This advice comes from within the paradigm of consumerism, which is the fundamental idea that quality of life scales linearly with consumption as measured in dollars spent.…

  • cultivate autonomy

    Action Seek to increase your personal freedom-of-action over time, which can be roughly understood as the freedom to decide for yourself how to spend the bulk of your time per day, per month, per year, per decade. Discussion The primary reason to cultivate autonomy is so that you can align your work, actions, thoughts, effort,…

  • draw reverse fishbone diagrams

    Action When deciding whether to do something or not, draw a reverse fishbone diagram of it. First, write down the action and draw a box around it. Then, draw the primary Why – the goal, desired outcome, objective, reason, etc for doing the Action – out to the right, and connect the two with a…

  • don’t own a car

    Action If you have a car, sell it. If you don’t have a car, continue not having a car. Discussion Car ownership is expensive (fuel, maintenance, depreciation, repairs, negative health impacts from inactivity, exposure to toxic materials, and elevated risk of injury/death) . And car ownership is assumed to be a given in many cultures…

  • live in a tiny house

    Action Live in a tiny house that you either built, bought, or rent. Discussion A tiny house is generally considered to be around 400 square feet (38 square meters), although the range of area of tiny houses that people live in is quite large. Regardless of whether you build, buy, or rent, the overall cost…