There is a liberating side to toothbrushing problems: the stakes of any given unit of effort are low.

With diploma problems, if you blow it, you really blow it, with often irrevocable long-term consequences. All of your effort is building to a high stakes climax and if you miss your shot, that effort can all end up wasted. It's videogame permadeath mode for life.

But with toothbrushing problems, you can have an off day and usually make it up today. Of course, every day's effort does matter. You can't make every day an off day. But I find something very comforting about problems where some random variance in my output does smooth out to the mean over time.

You know, that’s actually a great way to look at it.

I think I feel like I can’t let myself excuse any slack, because I’m worried I’ll just start excusing everything — one day off at the gym becomes a week off, becomes a month off.

But I guess the point is that no matter how much you have failed, the toothbrush problem is always best served by you starting again tomorrow, no matter how many tomorrows it takes.

"Everything needs maintenance." It's not just something a wise old engineer would say; it's life. Life itself is a Toothbrushing Problem.

That is to say, if all your problems are Toothbrushing Problems then you're doing pretty good! That means you're living. At that point you can do one or all of these things:

    * Complain about your Toothbrushing Problems (<- you are here, haha)
    * Bring NEW problems into your life
    * Work to make your Toothbrushing Problems a bit less troublesome

The HN crowd would probably say that 3rd bullet is where great startups are born ;D

I'm floored by how good this article is, and I just read another, and was also floored. His writing reminds me a bit of Raptitude in its - everything-is-fucked-heh-let's-try-to-function-anyhow attitude. And the writing is so, so good, and wildly relatable.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/its-very-weird-to-hav...

Yes, what the hell! It's so good. One of the rare writings that's extremely insightful while being an absolute pleasure to read.

Thanks for sharing this link. My god there is something about this writing style that's just incredibly entertaining to read.

Most of the time I get so bored reading such long articles, like the New Yorker ugh. But this is the first time I've enjoyed such a lengthy read! I hope I can decrypt what the author is doing to make reading such fun.

Literally all of his posts are like this. It’s crazy.

These two are more life-advice-y, but he also does some fairly deep dives on various problems he sees with scientific research (and psychology in particular), and his writing is no less entertaining.

In fact, one of his posts is actually about how he thinks scientists should make more effort to make their papers fun to read!

It’s fantastic, and I also hope to emulate it.

Probably because the author is not trying to appeal to a corporate organization but just writing in his own tone of voice.

> Most of the time I get so bored reading such long articles, like the New Yorker ugh.

I must be boring AF; I usually like the New Yorker's articles.

Indeed; it seems like being happy is a lot of work; I wonder if the type of people the author mentions in the "Impossible satisfaction" section aren't wrong.