• keep on not working for startups
• sometimes there comes a point where the thing (fandom, hobby, friendship, romantic relationship) you loved no longer brings you joy. And that's okay. Try to mourn the loss, take joy in the memories, and don't burn any bridges in case ten years go by and you find yourself back in that fandom/hobby/relationship again
• it turns out that (ugh) moderate regular exercise is (spit) good for you. The sooner you make it part of your life, the easier it'll be
• related: if you throw yourself into a new exercise regime too hard and too fast, without stopping to rest or consider whether a particular move is good for you ... well, shoulder injuries are painful and consults with orthopedic surgeons are expensive
• knees are bastards too
• don't even get me started on ankles
• there may come a time when your digestive system is too fragile for ibuprofin. I'm sorry
• one day you're gonna wake up and realise you no longer give any fucks about some things that used to bother you
• on the other hand, you might be alarmed to realise what you still give a fuck about
• never get down on the floor without an exit strategy for getting back up

• "loving yourself" is less of a feeling and more of an action. you can start doing it any time and it will make your life better and better as you go on
• this will happen incrementally - be patient
• along those lines, if you haven't started making an active effort to quit shit-talking yourself, suck it up and do it
• no, shut up. do it. "but it's haaaaard!" don't care. do it.
• whether you like it or not, you are mortal and you need to go to the doctor for an annual checkup
• stretch regularly - your future self will thank you
• at some point you will encounter people much younger than you arguing passionately and incorrectly about history you personally remember and experienced
• this will be infuriating and annoying
• otoh, most other things just... will not matter to you as much
• at some point you will shift from wanting to go out to being like "eh" and deciding to stay in. this is okay.
• you will have absolutely no idea what The Youth are talking about and you will not care
• but if you keep your mind open to new ideas you'll never be irrelevant
• your company still doesn't love you - don't give them more than they pay you for
• get a fucking hobby, especially a hobby that involves physically creating/handling something and/or moving your body in physical space. it will do you more good than you can imagine

• Find joy, every kind, it's always worth it
• I'm talking that massive, never-ending Discord chat with your bestie? The one that makes you giggle through the day? It's not a "waste of time," it's what time was made for
• If that's fanfic for your favorite characters who never even met on screen celebrate that!
• If that's building a tiny fleet of snake villagers for your snake town and they just cover your mantel hell yes!
• If that's collecting pillows and making a fort of them every weekend I'll be right over
• Feeling and sharing joy is the whole point

“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ’70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”