The Journey of Emily Fan

I realized that a lot of the questions that I sought answers to probably won't be answered within my lifetime .  what does it mean to be a "good" person?  how do we do the most good in the world and what does that mean?  do we even want to try to do the most good?  what kinds of institutions / incentive structures that will bring the best in people and how do we make them happen? Religions and philosophies have evolved thousands of years trying to answer those questions, and more, and yet, we as a society do not seem to have come to a consensus unlike the fundamentals of math.  It honestly used to terrify me , that I wouldn't be able to know, that I might not be armed with enough knowledge to really know that what I am doing is good for society or myself, and accidentally follow the footsteps of the likes of Karl Marx, Adam Smith who seemed idealistic, and perhaps craved for a better society, but had their teachings warped in a way that may have caused a lot of suffer

  Why might we be so mean to ourselves? I like to think that I am accepting and forgiving of others , and that I make an effort to understand the challenges others face, yet my own inner critic is quite harsh. It seems to be a common experience, but why do we engage in such self-sabotage? My hypothesis is that my inner critic is driven by how I feel about how society judges me.   I see people be mean to each other on social media. I recall my parents’ harsh reprimandings in their attempts to make me a better person. I hear gossip. I falsely believed that the unkind statements, perhaps made by the person while they were in a bad mood, were how society was judging me. I was afraid of being “a bad person,” “lazy,” or the countless negative things others said. I believed that what others said about me was the scale that I would be weighed on. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be accepted by society. Having been socially awkward and lonely for a large chunk of my life, the inner critic perhaps

  Who Would Find This Article Most Helpful Those who find going to bed at a reasonable hour a major bottleneck to getting enough sleep and maintaining a healthy sleep schedule Those interested in thinking more deeply about their mindset with respect to sleep and productivity TL;DR Things I’ve Tried Shortened Paying someone else $0.01 for every minute later I go to bed than my bedtime. (Perhaps next time I could use SPAR ). FocusMate while doing bedtime routine.  Posters reminding myself to sleep.  App/Website blockers.  Reading Why We Sleep . Making rough calculations on productivity loss. Things I am Currently Trying App/Website blockers.  Listing out the ways I fail to go to sleep earlier and strategizing ways to combat those failure modes. Mindset Shifts Framing staying up late to meet deadlines as a high-interest loan . Recognizing planning fallacy with variability in how we feel the next day while being sleep deprived.  Realizing that giving up sleep to be successful backfires