For all the technological progress we’ve made as humans over time, psychologically, the pursuit of happiness and peace is still challenging for most of us. That’s clear if we look at our behavior closely. We tend to regret the past or worry about the next thing rather than focus on what’s in front of us. And with our attention always on what’s next, we aren’t present for the thing in front of us or the next thing, because the next thing becomes what’s in front of us when we replace it with what follows. This perpetual striving starts early in our lives. We learn about important people that left their mark on history and we want to be like them so we begin to measure ourselves in relation to others and we create goals that will help us become successful. And once we reach these goals, then we will reward ourselves with peace and happiness. The common prescription for this is to “love the journey.” Loving the journey is great, but not when it’s a rat race. When ambition becomes our condition and not something we can control, in most cases it’s difficult to achieve the outcomes we want. And when we give all of our attention to a moving target, eventually there’s nothing left to sustain our health, relationships, and effectiveness in any pursuit.

But in our society people need to produce. Until they crash at least. The pandemic was that crash for a lot of people. It gave those out of work time to reflect and think harder about what they wanted to spend their time doing. And all the self-help content they could dream of was there waiting for them on the internet if they looked for it. I saw ancient philosophy make a comeback through wisdom synthesizers like Ryan Holiday and The Daily Stoic. I spent my days living in a pocket of Twitter inhabited by entrepreneurs, authors, life and business coaches, therapists, and other forms of guides that carved out their own chunk of the creator economy with their bites of wisdom, iconic quotes, guides, and courses. After a year of doing all the things everyone said to do like meditate, journal, and read a bunch of books, I started to zoom out and think about the problem these people were tackling - how to help others help themselves. But instead of pretending to be a guru that has all the answers, I started curating twitter lists and automating my favorite tweets into posts on instagram and in a channel in the North Star discord.

I first wanted to make it easier for people to find guides and content I’d vetted already. And I didn’t want to push any one thing. Moving forward, my newsletter will curate these things and I’ll be using this blog to dig deeper into the questions we I think we should ask ourselves more often if we want to help ourselves live happier lives.