Interlude: Q&A on the EA forum

My writing time this week was spent answering questions on the effective altruism forum, so I don't have a new blog post in the "removing guilt" series this »

Your "shoulds" are not a duty

I have a friend who, after reading my last two posts, still struggled to give up her shoulds. She protested that, if she stopped doing things because she should, then »

Not because you "should"

A few months ago, a friend of mine was describing her motivational issues to me. As an example, she explained she was having trouble making herself clean her room, despite »

"Should" considered harmful

My last few posts have been aimed at addressing what I call the "listless guilt," the vague sense of guilt that stems from not doing anything in particular. »

You don't get to know what you're fighting for

A number of my recent posts may have given you the impression that I know exactly what I'm fighting for. If someone were to ask you, "hey, what's that »

Caring about something larger than yourself

In my last post, I said that in order to address the listless guilt, step zero is believing that you can care about something, and step one is finding something »

You're allowed to fight for something

The first sort of guilt I want to address is the listless guilt, that vague feeling one gets after playing video games for twelve hours straight, a guilty feeling that »

The Stamp Collector

Once upon a time, a group of naïve philosophers found a robot that collected trinkets. Well, more specifically, the robot seemed to collect stamps: if you presented this robot with »