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I can't prove this, but I believe it more than anything else: love is the capacity to accept suffering; and everyone gets equal amounts of suffering to deal with.

First, love is the capacity to accept suffering.

Physically, we need some stress to stay healthy. Exercise is a form of stress. Kids who aren't exposed to dirt develop overactive immune systems. People who aren't challenged at school or work look for ways to escape. To play guitar, you gotta build callouses. To excel in a technical field, you gotta start at the bottom, being wrong a lot.

If you love something, you look at it without any illusions, and that's hard as hell. The fewer illusions you have about any situation, the more skillfully you'll deal with it.

Parents don't want their kid in the dirt because they're worried about diseases. But ironically, their fear causes disease to manifest in a different form. People don't want to exercise because it's uncomfortable. But then they suffer backaches, pulled shoulders, shortness of breath.

We look at people born into wealthy families, and we say, 'how lucky!'. But to have more potential means you have more to lose.

Some folks were born under a good sign, very little has gone wrong in their lives. They get bent when tiny things go wrong, because they don't understand how small the thing is. If a child acts this way, throwing a fit over some small matter, we forgive them. But sometimes adults don't know any better.

When someone says it's the worst day of their life, you have to believe them, even if it looks like the best day of yours.

I'm interested in the practice of uncertainty, at the intersection of science and the humanities.

Most things in life repeat. To get good at life, get good at repetition.

Exciting times in life happen when intentional repetition – practice – results in a new outcome. But we have no idea when. From scientists to songwriters, we know practice is essential to breakthroughs, but it's not a guarantee.

Practice can seem absurd in the face of uncertainty, pointless. Why bother putting in the effort when you might get hit by a car tomorrow?

Most things in life are uncertain. The things we know for sure shrink under the infinite shadow of everything we don't know. To get good at life, get good with uncertainty.

Practice uncertainty.

I love surfing Wikipedia. Some of the best stuff I've found shines light on the relationship between the immune system and the mind.

This one's funny, the brand name of an early antidepressant medication: Ambivalon. The slogans write themselves. "Who cares? Not you! Am-bivalonnnn."

Ambivalon and a couple similar drugs came about as side effects during testing of potential antihistamines. Histamines control your body's immune system; you take an antihistamine to stop an allergy attack.

The anti-depressant connection to anti-histamines seems like it could be a fluke, unrelated. But the connection is deep.

The reason we get sick more over the winter is because our immune system is holding back. Colder temperatures and shorter days cause our bodies to reserve energy in case we need it for warmth.

Another indicator the immune system will hold back is the presence of depression. People experiencing depression get sick more often and longer.

Or do people who get sick more often and longer tend to experience depression? It doesn't matter whether the chicken or the egg came first.

Earlier, I wrote mental health is physical. But physical health is mental. If you're experiencing depression, you're much less likely to exercise, which makes you more likely to get sick, which makes you more likely to get depressed.

Physical health is mental. You'll never really be at peace in your body if you can't be at peace in your mind.

The term "Spacetime" has an almost mystical connotation. But it seems a lot more complicated than it is.

The basic premise of putting the two concepts together, space and time, is there's no such thing as stillness.

Imagine any day. We wake up, we go do some things, we go back to bed. The next day, we say we wake up again in the same place.

In common sense, everyday usage, "the same place" is correct. Zoom out to a larger scale, and it's not.

The earth rotates completely in 24 hours, so it faces the same position towards the sun. But it also orbits the sun; so in a day, it has moved 1/365th of that distance. If you could drop an cosmic anchor out your window one morning, absolutely stationary, it would be tens of thousands of miles away the next day.

After a year, the earth has moved 365/365ths around the sun. Like each morning, it's in the same relative position to the sun as a year before. But you won't come back to the anchor. The sun also orbits around the center of our galaxy. The absolute position – the anchor – is hundreds of thousands of miles away a year later. The galaxies move too, so a 300 million galactic year doesn't come back to the "same" place either.

I sit here typing, watching the clock on my wall. We say we sit still and watch time go by. But me, and you, and the chair and the clock are all racing through space.

Say you ran down the street with a clock strapped on your back. After sixty seconds, the hand would have made a full turn.

Someone running directly behind you would say the hand is now back where it started. But if there was a smoke trail off the second hand, someone sitting on the sidewalk would have seen it trace a spiral in mid-air. From the point of view of the anchor, instead of moving in a circle, clock hands actually move in a spiral.

Time is motion, and nothing ever stands still.

I had an unusual childhood. From age 5 to 6, I read the dictionary every night. This has had unexpected results through my life.

I learned a lot of vocabulary, but I also learned a meta-lesson. There's nowhere the dictionary "starts", no first word. Every word is defined using other words, so all of language is ultimately self-referential.

We have a technical term for this: the symbol-grounding problem. Even more useful, a related technical term: referent. The referent is the thing a reference refers to. But the thing the referent points at can change instantly. If I say "bitches", you might think I'm terribly rude – and I am – but you might feel differently to learn that's the joking way my wife and I refer to our dogs.

For most of history, it seemed natural language suffered from this imprecision alone, compared to mathematics. But Gödel's incompleteness theorems pulled math back in. Gödel basically proved that in any mathematical system, you can always construct a paradoxical statement, like "This sentence is false."

Mathematics is a form of language specialized to describe the objective, external world. So it's no surprise that around the same time, imprecision spread to physics, in the form of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It says information about position can only come at the expense of information about momentum, and vice versa. Reality has a limit on how much we can possibly know built in.

In everyday practice, these distinctions are meaningless. I have a bookcase and some plants in my office, and if I talk about the big plant or the spiky one, anyone should know what I mean.

But there's an interesting moral implication: if we can't assign absolute meaning to words, then we can't label things as good or evil.

We can't label things at all, actually. The world is what it is, and it doesn't give a dman what we call it. So many problems come from believing that words and reality are welded together.

Words are the problem.

The most important thing I know: no absolute truth. I guarantee you that something we believe right now is wrong.

Mathematics seems so pure it should have immunity to errors. But what if a proof has an error so subtle, the smartest people in the world can't find it? There's a (wikipedia page)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incomplete_proofs] listing exactly those cases. Some of the errors persisted for dozens of years, a few for hundreds. Computers can't make the problem go away, they have to be programmed by people.

Some say religious texts hold absolute truth. I won't argue anyone's faith; but I will counter that any holy text has to be interpreted by profane, flawed, ordinary people.

If absolute truth exists, then it can only be known at the end of time, when every last fact is finally known. Some things we feel sure of right now, we will find out in the future are not true. There's no way to tell.

This concept can bother people, but paradoxically, accepting it actually leads to a more accurate view.

Unlike Mathematicians, Engineers work exclusively in the messy physical world. They know, like truth, a service can never be completely relied on. 100% of anything promises a false sense of security. Even 99% reliability isn't great – a service that's 99% reliable is unavailable 4 whole days per year.

Instead, engineers look for "five nines": 99.999%. Accepting the possibility that something could change frees you to deal with it.

Changing your view to five nines will change your life.

In Deuteronomy, God says to the Israelites, "Behold, this day I put before you a blessing and a curse."

Every day seems to hold both, and the present moment is no exception. In the last 100 years, life expectancy has gone up all over the world. The "green revolution" in the 1970s reduced hunger and famine to historically low levels. There are fewer active armed conflicts right now than at any point in human history.

At the same time, due to electronic media, we're more acutely aware of discrepancies, those who have not received these benefits as fast as others. We're paralyzed with fear at the thought of terror attacks, although more people die every day in auto accidents. And those autos, which bring ordinary grocery stores more amazing food than the kings of the past had, they're making us and the planet unhealthy in many other ways.

All of the successes of Progress haven't made us happier. But with seven billion of us on the planet, and more to come, going back is not an option.

Every system can be balanced in two ways: increase effort, or decrease need. A car can have a bigger engine, or less resistance. You can earn more money, or spend less.

Unhappiness comes from expectation. We think that the future could be better if X happened, whether X is all the nations of the world signing climate agreements or you personally winning the lottery. In reality, lottery winners tend to end up less happy, because all actions have unintended consequences and complications you can't see until you're already there.

The balance we need is to decrease desire. I don't hope for a beautiful future to come along and save us all anymore.

The essence of spirituality is not supernatural. It comes from humility – acknowledging something larger than one's self.

There's a commonly repeated factoid that the human brain is the most complex object we know of in the universe. The complexity comes from the way the neurons cross-connect to each other through synapses.

But this takes the brain out of context. Human babies take years to become self sufficient, compared to minutes or months for other animals. No other animal is dependant on its parents as long as humans; and the reason why is because of our huge brains. They eventually become a great advantage, but at first they're a great drawback.

The brain was only able to become the complex object it is because of human social behavior. The tribe all cooperated to raise children; but also the language they spoke to each other contributed to the growth of the brain.

Far more complex than a single human brain is the network between all human brains. With some effort, a person can move to a foreign country, learn the language, and interact with the culture. But through connections, you're only a handful of degrees away from most of the billions of people on Earth right now.

Connection multiplies the complexity of the brains that interact. Anyone who's ever seen the process behind creating a seating chart for a dinner event knows how fast the complexity goes up.

No matter how great one person is, they are miniscule compared to the sum of all people.

My faith in science helps me to maintain my mental health.

Depression runs in my family. 3 of my 4 grandparents had it, both my parents had different expressions of it. But surprisingly, I found relief through a concept called information theory.

The short version: information is physical. When you save a file on your computer, inside something changes its electronic or magnetic properties. Just like writing on paper changes it, as the ink soaks into the fibers. Science is still debating about how the mind comes from the brain; but there's no doubt that thought comes from the brain, and that physical changes to the brain have a direct effect on thought.

Mental illness is to the brain as heart disease is to the heart. It's simply a malfunction that needs to be treated. Like heart disease, the best treatment is prevention. But we don't put any shame on someone for whom heart disease runs in the family; it's not a moral failing if you've got a bad ticker. Likewise, I don't feel any shame in managing my mental health. It's just part of my family history.

Family history is underrated; it has much more of an effect than we acknowledge. Studies have shown that Olympic champion athletes have just average reaction time and hand-eye coordination.

Instead, what they have that the general population doesn't are parents who were high-level competitors, if not champions themselves. I had a buddy whose parents were ski patrol. He learned skiing at the same time as walking. He'd put in his ten thousand hours by fiftenn.

If you don't come from that background, you can still win, but it's gonna be hella hard. The interpretation of quantum mechanics that takes background into account, Superdeterminism, helps me to put my life experiences in perspective. The 3 out my 4 grandparents who had depression were all highly accomplished college professors. That's not a coincidence.

The highest levels of performance happen almost completely mentally, but people who take great care of their bodies pay no attention to their mind.

Your brain is another organ in your body. The health of one is dependant on the other.

Mental health is physical.

There's a difference between a description and an explanation. A description tells you what and how; an explanation, why.

When Newton described gravity, he explicitly avoided explaining it. The description was calculus, and it was spectacularly powerful. So powerful, it continued to describe other natural phenomenon long after his death. Magnetism, radiation, subatomic particles. But it never explained any of them.

Quantum mechanics makes both the most precise and accurate predictions in history. Its measurements are beyond question.

But the commonly accepted explanation, Copenhagen, is almost certainly wrong. There's a simpler explanation that makes all the same predictions. And everyone who's studied enough physics already knows about it, but they dismiss it because they find it philosophically distasteful.

If you can let go of the concept of free will, all of the mysterious voodoo of Copenhagen can go away too.

That's a tough one to let go of. When you go to order at a restaurant, the decision seems to spring up out of you with no source. In everyday life, it definitely feels like we have free will.

But things that feel right based on common sense have turned out to be wrong before. It feels like the sun goes around the earth – we still say "sunrise", not "earthturn". Newton invented physics to demonstrate that although uninitutive heliocentrism was almost certainly true. When experiments showed the speed of light didn't change based on the speed of the observer, Einstein let go of the common sense notion of absolute measurement.

Neuroscience increasingly agrees. The more we learn about the brain, the more it seems that decisions are made by the hardware alone. The feeling of being in control of the decision comes a split second later. We know taking our hand off a hot stove is not an act of free will, but we make two categories of intentional and un-. That assumption may be wrong.

Lots of people panic at the concept of being controlled by this determinism. But I think they forget the determinism is balanced by uncertainty. The future may already be written in stone, but we don't know what it is. And sometimes when we're most sure about how we think things are gonna go, we get the most surprised when they go a different way.

Let go of free will, and let uncertainty guide you.