Ask Lemmy

Emulate honorable people instead of popular people.

Never use 'telling the truth' as an excuse to speak without thought or compassion.

You are 100% responsible for what you say and what you do. Own your shit.

If someone is trying, but struggling - encourage them. If someone is struggling, but not really trying - encourage them.

Don't waste your time trying to 'be a leader' or climb any corporate ladders. Just do your job and be kind, generous, truthful and compassionate. What is meant for you will be for you.

Read. A lot. From actual books. As many as you can get your hands on.

Stop putting yourself down. Seriously, it's not fucking helping you. AT ALL.

Take care of your teeth.

Set unbreakable rules for yourself BEFORE you are in a high pressure or mind altering situation. (Don't trust the drunk or stressed out version of you to make good choices. If you decide that you won't be driving BEFORE you take the first drink, drunk you won't have to make that decision later.)

Most people are too busy worrying about that super embarrassing thing THEY did to think about the super embarrassing thing YOU did.

People who are different from you do not add or remove value from who you are.

Knowledge is knowing how to make french fries.

Wisdom is to know when to stop eating them.

I'm not very wise.

Treat people with love, respect and patience. For the vast majority, you won't get a second chance.

"Man who runs in front of car gets tired. Man who runs behind car gets exhausted." - Confucius

"The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is right now"

Results that require a long time to from work are ultimate started long before you need the results. However that isn't always clear at the time back then. Sometimes it is and procrastination means you're without the results today because you never started and the time has passed anyway. That doesn't mean that you should simple discard the idea the results were needed for. You can still achieve the results, but delaying the start of the work now is the worst thing you can do. Starting right now is the best choice to move forward to get the results you want.

You can only be sure of something if you know too little.

• me, 2025

Wisdom as distinct from knowledge is a performance of one's experience. Think on your experiences, and how to portray them for an audience. That will appear to be wisdom.

Another version of wisdom is a lack of self-seriousness. Unlearn your self regard to achieve this.

Unearned wisdom sounds like hollow platitudes and is easily forgotten, synthesis without thorough analysis is a waste of time.

This is one of my personally learned lessons of wisdom that took me far too long to figure out:

"A lot of the time you just need to let people continue to be wrong"

I'm not talking about when you're going in for surgery and your doctor told you he is going to amputate the wrong leg. I'm talking about when someone says something that is factually or morally incorrect. There is an infinite amount of wrong people in the world. You will encounter dozens of them on a daily basis. You would have an opportunity to personally correct quite a few of them. Don't do it. Smile, nod, and walk away.

Lets say you want to correct them and in the best case you're successful. They now know what they said was wrong. Most people really don't like to be corrected, even if they were wrong. They are embarrassed, possibly shamed, and at worst, humiliated. What kind of interaction do you think you're going to have with that person going forward into the future. Do you think they will embrace you as the really intelligent person that took your time to help them out? No. They will think you a pompous, arrogant, know-it-all. And for what? You spent all this time and energy on something you don't even really care about. Your purpose in life is not to be "Defender of the truth, hero of logic" or anything. You're just a regular person, and the guy on the subway does not give two shits that he mispronounced the word "nuclear" as "nucular".

In the professional world its a bit different, but even then, most of the above applies. You have to be careful where and how you correct someone. Even if the ultimate outcome is for the good of the organization, you can alienate those that you need to like you for you to effectively get your job done. You can quickly develop a reputation as an uncooperative "Diva". That is career poison and no matter how good your subject matter expertise, this reputation can forever limit your advancement.

So unless the outcome of something really and truly matters to the outcome pf your life or your job, and sometimes even then....let it go without saying anything. Let them be wrong, and leave them behind you never to be seen by you again in your entire life.

You'll often have to choose between being right and being kind.

Make sure you choose what you're willing to live with later.

Forgetting something is the universe’s way of telling you to be more present.

The "system" in place is not as elegant as it seems. Some things are actually very done very informally or "ghetto".

Courts are just essentially like when kids have to meet in a "dean's office", but for adults; it doesn't have the same feel, the same "elegance" as depicted on TV. Judges aren't some legal god that is untouchable, they're just humans. In several occasions, I had to accompany my mother for a civil hearing about some bussiness (small-bussiness) lawsuit I can't talk about. We met the judge in the elevator and just awkwardly said hi. Also one time we met another judge right outside the courthouse and my mother was trying to discuss the court case, but then the judge suddenly realize it was a case he rulled on, so he stopped discussing it because that's not really supposed to be discussed by a judge outside of court. I never seen them have any personal security. As a kid, I always thought they would have like at least a squad of special bodyguards assigned to protect them, but these experiences shattered that belief. This is a large city in the USA, btw. There's nothing special about judges, they are just humans.

Same thing with cops, they aren't the those hard working investigators as depicted on TV shows, they mostly just are lazy (and some corrupt too) and won't actually help you with anything. Maybe write a report if its serious like robbery, but they won't actually do any investigations. Maybe if you or a close relative knows the chief of police or sheriff or something like that, but otherwise they don't do shit.

The "system" is just a bunch of humans that created a made-up concept of governance. There is no magical machine ruling over us, we are part of that machine, whether its democratic or autocratic, its us that allows the machine to run.

The judge is a human, the cops are humans. They could at anytime lose loyalty to the state. The state isn't that special, its just a made up concept that we all have in our minds.

My interpretation of what that means is something like "knowledge about how to live well".

One thing I wish I knew when I was younger is that no matter how smart you are, you're not that smart. Basically, unless you have a positive argument why someone else hasn't thought of a thing, they have.

A simple corollary to that is that meritocracy doesn't exist, which is also why this fact gets played down in public discourse.

There will never be a time in your life when bad things stop happening, but the same is true of good things. Don’t get too high or too low.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”