 For me, I found that nowadays being a human is about being intentional, and also not neglecting the exponential. So I've been thinking about things that could happen if you devote your full attention to a particular topic, and intentionality is a state of being which can be refined. It means that you are paying attention to your surroundings, but also to yourself. You are taking things seriously, or at least attempt to grasp and play around with the idea of taking things seriously. You don't just go through things at a surface level, even though you might not be properly equipped to tackle a specific problem, paying attention and taking it seriously will set you apart from the crowd. But you should not do it just because of that. You should start thinking about yourself as a self-modifying, self-updating, intelligent agent. And your ideas, either that new, old, wrong, or right, are the elements, the data points, alphas, and the metas of your upcoming intelligence explosion. You get software updates every single day, and if you start thinking this way, you will be more inclined to consider what each piece of software does for you. Does it add friction? Or can it boost your outcomes? Or maybe you are running a trial. But make sure you don't forget to cancel the trial because everything has the price. And there are different ways you can start taking things seriously. By taking things seriously, I'm not talking about being a serious person, but instead the act of paying attention to what might seem small, insignificant things. Taking things seriously means not checking your phone during a writing session, or watching a movie without pause, comments, criticism, reading a full book, and not scanning through the pages. Considering each argument, spending time to read it, thoroughly and carefully, things you possibly thought of before, but not with full force, but trying to deconstruct them to an atomic level. You know that state when you watch a movie sporadically in random myths and snippets while browsing your phone and exchanging superficial DMs, while someone who is taking the movie seriously and watching it in full force might even be able to write an essay about it. But you still go out and use a casual conversation to tell the others that you have seen the movie. Paying attention to what you might think is trivial can solve multiple problems in the long run. Breathing, drinking, eating, reading, writing, living. Everything is art. If you take your breathing seriously, if you view it as a piece of art and not think about it as something you do as a default and start paying attention, you will find out that there are better ways to self-regulate and produce more efficient breathing techniques, which will be hard to build at the beginning, but true practice will get you to a point where your new and upgraded breathing state produce a lot more benefits than you always do. You understand breathing, and this gets you closer to blending and synthesizing information so that you can end up having a beautifully solid and compressed stack of mental devices you can deploy in times of need, because everything is interconnected. And you can take the same mental framework and start applying it to everything around you, but there's also balance to be found. Again, approaching things seriously is not something you will be able to do instantaneously, as the current state of affairs acts as a yoke on our necks, but paying more attention to how you do things, how you breathe, how you speak, how you eat, how you drink, how much you drink, when you go overboard and when you pull back, how you sleep, how you talk to people and how you listen. These small acts of improvement will get you closer to having a clear set of lenses you can put on to gaze at reality.