The more terrible something is, the more important it is to crack jokes about it. Saying that any subject is too serious, too unhappy, or too important to joke about is letting the darkness win.

There are only two things we can do about problems: solve them or endure them. The first requires mental resiliency and the second requires emotional resiliency. Both of those things are helped if we don’t feel small and powerless.

Laughter makes you feel big and invincible.

An incredibly underrated life skill is knowing a whole bunch of weird people.

I knew a guy once who had “a guy” for everything. No matter what weird problem you were having, no matter how unusual or niche, he’d say “I have a guy for that,” and your problem would be solved in one phone call. Oh, you need tires for a car that hasn’t been made in 30 years? He’d call a guy and you’d have tires. House is infested with a bug not native to this continent? Boom, guy.

Of course, I knew that guy, so it’s like I had the same power, just with one extra phone call attached.

The point is, the more weird people you know, the more weird problems you can solve. And solving weird problems is about eighty percent of adult life.

Now if you want to really put a bow on this whole thing, add one extra step: Make sure you’re weird. Pick a weird thing you can do really well, and make sure your weird friends all know about it. Because I’ll tell you, getting the phone call instead of making it feels really great.

Some memories are stickier than others. It’s not always a good thing. We’ve all gotten jingles or misconceptions stuck in our heads forever – even after we want to abandon them.

Something I practice is trying to actively prevent “bad info” from becoming a lodged memory. I try to mindfully distance myself from information I know is just going to be wasted space or outright unhelpful. Sometimes it’s like trying not to think about a pink elephant, but often it’s successful. And it gets better with practice.

At least, I’m pretty sure it does.

A few weeks ago, I saw a short video clip of a standup comedian telling what seemed to be kind of a risky joke. However, in the video, the audience was roaring with laughter so I just thought maybe I was the outlier in thinking that the joke seemed a little too “out there.” Whatever, I thought, to each their own.

The other night I happened to catch the full comedy show that the clip was from. When it reached the joke I had heard before I recognized it, but something was off. I paused the show and looked up the clip on my phone.

Sure enough! In the clip, the audience was loudly laughing and cheering. But in the actual show, the joke fell flat, barely getting a few awkward chuckles. For the clip, someone had edited in the sound of uproarious laughter.

That was the only edit. The joke is the same, and the camera angle doesn’t actually show the audience so it’s easy to put in a laugh track. But it’s amazing how different the two clips seem! The delivery of the joke, the face of the comedian, it’s all identical – but in one, they’re met with enthusiastic agreement and in the other, awkward silence. And my perception of the joke was very different!

Like many jokes from comedians, it wasn’t a “bit,” but rather an opinion delivered in a funny way – and how I perceived agreement with that opinion was easily manipulated. In the short clip, I was convinced that I was an outlier for not sharing the opinion. In the full video, my impression is more that the comedian was the outlier. If I didn’t already have a fairly established opinion of my own on that subject, I could see it being easy to sway me with this trick.

Not all lenses are clear and straight, is what I’m saying. Every hoop information jumps through before it gets to you is a chance for someone to tweak what you hear and see, even if only through the context in which it reaches you. Keep your wits about you.

Some people bite into a piece of delicious food and their eyes roll back in their heads. Their taste buds fire off a symphony of experience and they savor every second of it. Either my taste buds aren’t as well-developed or my brain doesn’t get those signals as clearly, because no food has ever given me an experience like that.

However, there are certain songs – many, actually – that give me such a feeling of transcendent emotion that I can’t drive while I listen to them. Some songs have made me feel stronger emotions than actual events in my life ever could.

My point is that we all have different soft spots. Different parts of our brains are finely tuned versus bluntly calibrated. Don’t find it strange – instead, enjoy the opportunity for connection. Let someone describe their favorite food to you (or whatever their thing is), and marvel at the incredible range of human experience. Then, savor yours all the more because it belongs only to you.

People are funny about gifts and favors. They have a strange way sometimes of turning the receipt of one into the expectation of many.

When you do something nice for someone, especially the first time, there’s benefit to mastering the subtle art of putting the gift in its proper context. If you say, “Hey friend, I can give you a ride to work today,” the last thing you want is for them to get out of the car and say “Thanks, same time tomorrow?”

People will often get mad when you can’t (or even just won’t) repeat the gift forever! But me letting you slide on a dollar for your morning coffee one time doesn’t mean coffee is free now.

So it helps to put a little verbal bow on the present. Something like, “Hey friend! The timing doesn’t usually work for me, but I happen to be headed past your place tomorrow morning. Can I give you a ride to work?” It’s still a kind gesture, but you’ve set the stage for it being a one-time event without having to be awkward about it.

I write publicly. Not only here, but I’ve got a few other places where I share thoughts and opinions. Sometimes I share opinions that – gasp! – not everyone agrees with. And sometimes these folks share their disagreements with me. Passionately.

I almost always respond the same way when someone shares a strong counter-opinion with me: curiosity. I don’t claim to be infallible and I try not to accidentally act like I am. So when someone opines at me, I usually respond with something like “Could be! Could you tell me more about your experiences that led you to this thought?”

And nine times out of ten, that’s just… the end of the conversation. I really am curious, but I also seem to have accidentally stumbled onto a surefire way to end pointless arguments before they begin. Because if I don’t get an answer to that question, I’m guessing the other person just wanted to argue.

I don’t mind.

You know how you feel when you’re hungry? I’m not talking about moods or anything, I’m talking about the direct sensation, that pang at the top of your stomach with the rumble underneath. The gas light coming on for your body.

Imagine if you didn’t know what that meant. Imagine that you sometimes – often, even – got this feeling, but you didn’t know it was associated with needing food. You would get this pang, and maybe you’d take medicine or something. Maybe you’d lie down for a bit. Sometimes you’d eat because something tasted good or because you’d gone out with friends, and the feeling would go away – but you never put together the cause and effect.

That would be pretty miserable! You might even know that you need to eat, but if you never put the signals together you probably aren’t eating right, or eating enough. You might be surviving but you’d be hungry a lot without realizing that’s what you were. You’d not only have physical pain, but you’d have all the downstream effects, too – poor health, brain fog, mood swings, etc.

Our ability to correctly interpret the signals our body sends is paramount to a good life. We also need to temper and influence those signals, of course – but properly interpreting them in the first place is primary. All unpleasant signals from your body – all the pain, the discomfort, etc. – is your body warning you about something, hopefully changing your behavior. Your brain interprets those signals from your stomach as pain so that you’ll eat to relieve them.

Of course, that only works if you interpret the signals correctly. Okay, new hypothetical. Imagine a creature that has all those same signals. Hunger pangs when it needs to eat, yawns when it needs to sleep, and so on. But imagine this creature also gets random pains – signals not associated with any necessary behavior changes. Like a pain without a focal area.

This would clearly be bad! At best, it would cause the creature to doubt the true signals its body sends, and at worst it may cause the creature to pursue all sorts of bonkers behaviors in an attempt to get the signal to stop. In any case, the creature would have a pretty miserable life. So it stands to reason that “random, meaningless pain” isn’t an evolutionary advantage. Creatures with such a feature won’t exactly win the natural selection championships.

So it stands to reason that we probably don’t have random, meaningless pain.

Now sure, people can have individual damage and defects. If you’ve been in a severe car accident, you may have chronic pain for the rest of your life that doesn’t correspond to a specific, acute damage or necessary behavioral change. But if you find out that a huge percentage of the population of a species is experiencing the same kind of pain, it seems much more likely that this particular pain is a feature, not a bug. It’s pain that’s trying to warn you about increasing damage or necessary action, not the signals of a broken transmitter.

Remember my first example about the hungry person who didn’t understand what hunger pangs were? It’s not that they never ate, it’s just that they didn’t eat as much as they should because they didn’t realize they needed to. Without realizing it, they were accidentally doing what they needed to sometimes. So the pain comes and goes, but they don’t know why.

Well, modern life is, in many ways, totally different from the primary environment that shaped our evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. What if we need aspects of that environment and we haven’t realized that we’re not getting them?

Here’s an example: Humans need vitamin D. It’s really important, and there are plenty of health risks that come from not getting enough. But I’ll bet you can’t tell if you, right now, are low on vitamin D with the same level of accuracy and confidence with which you can tell if you’re hungry or sleepy. Why not?

Here’s my guess: You’ll die without water in a few days, so your “thirst” signals are strong. You can last longer without food but you’ll still see negative impacts quickly, so the same with your “hunger” signals. “Suffocating” and “cold” signals are likewise strong, because of how immediate the danger is. But the body’s signals are weaker when the condition is both A.) something that will kill you slower and B.) something the body expects you to get plenty of anyway, without much behavioral change.

So think about sunlight. You really will die without it (or without a lot of substitutes). In our evolutionary past, we got plenty of it without trying. But today, modern life is so weird from an evolutionary perspective that there are genuinely lots of people who don’t get enough sunlight.

So, a quick aside: among people who suffer from depression, there’s a sort of running joke. The joke is that despite the complex realities of the suffering caused by that condition, people who don’t understand it will often give the most basic and useless (albeit well-meaning) advice, along the lines of “Have you tried just going outside?” People with depression treat that comment (and those like it) with the same derision as comments like “Have you tried just not being gay?”

I was one of those people, for a long time. At some point, I realized that it’s bad to create a culture out of your flaws. But even beyond that, I realized that most of those well-meaning people asking about going outside were totally correct.

Look, some people really do have an actually damaged signaling system that is giving them pain signals when it shouldn’t. But it’s a tiny minority of the people who “suffer from depression.” In attempting over years to understand my own suffering, I’ve realized some facts I believe to be true.

When tech support asks if you’ve “turned it on and off again,” it’s a joke – but they ask that because it really does fix most problems, and if you haven’t tried the basics then you shouldn’t look for more complex solutions. General malaise and depression are signals that your body is sending – and if the underlying system is working properly (as we must assume it is in the majority of cases), then that signal means something. Before you take a bunch of meds to kill the signal, you have to at least try responding to it.

The basics aren’t that complicated, we’ve just engineered a lot of our lives such that we don’t get them automatically as much. We’ve hidden ourselves from sunlight. We don’t eat right. We don’t get physically exhausted every day. We don’t interact with physical people in the spaces around us. But those are all things we need as much as food, water, and oxygen.

When you ask a depressed person “Have you tried just going outside,” they roll their eyes and scoff. As if it were that easy! But in my experience, they almost never go outside. The problem is that going outside once doesn’t magically cure all depression, the same way one meal won’t cure a vitamin deficiency. So they go outside, don’t feel less depressed, and then go further back into a life without sunlight. It’s self-fulfilling.

Lifestyle changes sustained over time are about the only way to align your actions with the body’s signals.

An important note – This is automatically implied to be true with every one of my posts, but I’ll state it more directly here: I am not an expert on all of humanity. I write reflections of my own experience and things I believe to be true. If your experience with depression isn’t the same as mine, that is what it is. But if you’re open to advice, mine is likewise a reflection of my own experience. Before you assume your feelings are a medical condition that needs to be treated, get all the basics right. Go three months where you spend time in the sun every single day; have numerous conversations with real, physical people in your presence; eat a balanced and nutritious diet; cut out or severely minimize obvious poisons like nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and other drugs; sleep a full night every night; physically exhaust yourself at least once each day; hug someone every day; and do work that helps your community and provides some purpose.

You may do all of that and still feel depressed. If that’s the case, you may have an actual medical condition, but at least you’ll know. For a huge number of people though, I’m certain doing all of that, sustained for at least three months, will work wonders.

“Put the time in.”

Into what? There’s a sort of general sense that certain bad things get better if you do them more, and I’ve never understood it. From “Oh, this show gets good after Season 4, you just have to power through until then,” to “You have to stay with this company for at least five years to start seeing any real career advancement,” it’s all crazy to me.

If something is bad, disengage. You have a finite amount of time to deposit into various things in the world, and you really should know what the interest rate is. Some things are worth the time. But it’s certainly not a default.

Very few vices are vices in any amount. Most things that we consider vices are only such if they’re done excessively.

It’s not a vice to brag, only to brag too much. You can drink moderately, care about your appearance, have some ice cream, and chase a little money. You can do all of those things without them becoming vices.

But especially when it comes to the appearance of vice – namely, what our peers think of us – people seem often very afraid of being seen indulging even once. Why?

A big part of it, I think, is that we’ve changed who we consider our “peers.”

As we move into more and more “deliberate” and online communities instead of our local and circumstantial ones, there’s a sort of “tiny window” effect. If you consider your literal next-door neighbor your peer and talk to them every day, then that neighbor actually gets a pretty accurate picture of you. If you come home drunk one night it will look different to them than if you come home drunk every night. If you proudly brag about your big accomplishment over the picket fence to them one day, that will sound different than you proudly bragging about every little thing all the time. As such, your occasional vices aren’t likely to form an image in your neighbor’s mind that’s an over-exaggeration of your worst features, ignoring the moderation.

But be honest – you can name more celebrities than you can people who live on your street. Who you view as your “peers” has become less and less the people who see you every day and more and more the people who only get a curated view of you. They see you through a “tiny window” that only shows cultivated snippets. Through this window, every aspect of you looks like it’s all of you. If you make a post bragging about something, the people who read that post don’t have a long series of non-bragging normal interactions to hold in comparison.

As a result, people are more concerned about anything they do being “taken out of context” (and with good reason!), so more and more what they communicate is sanitized and curated with an exact image in mind. And there’s nothing wrong with that – as long as that world is just a world you visit, or use professionally, or keep light.

But more and more, people live there. They live in apartments or communities where they’ve never said a single word to a single neighbor. They don’t have any friends that live within a hundred miles. Their tribes have become entirely fictional, distant things with no real meaning in their lives. They may have thousands of people who feel the same way about issues that will never actually affect their lives, but not one person from whom they could borrow a cup of sugar.

That – like all vices – is very bad when excessive.