A growing list of practical paradoxes.

  • The human fixation on bad things is strong evidence of our deepest goodness.

  • Constraints are necessary for freedom.

  • Pursuing happiness leads to less happiness.

  • Making everything easier makes everything harder.

  • Effort produces much less than non-effort produces.

  • Attempting to lose weight almost always leads to weight gain.

  • Focusing on quality over quantity leads to lower quality.

  • For a game to work, everyone needs to be invested in the game, meaning that they need to suspend their disbelief that it is a game. And every attempt at organizing or cooperating in the world is a game.

  • Speed of learning is limited only by how much one can slow down.

  • The best way to remember things is not to try to remember them.

  • The best way to achieve goals is to no longer care about them.

  • The only way to give up drug use/drinking/smoking is to stop trying to control them in any way.

  • Assuming that a choice can be rational is deeply irrational.

  • Free will is the last bastion of magical thinking, but there is no choice but to behave as though free will exists.

  • There is no predestination, but there is also no free will: This is equivalent to predestination.

  • Getting what one wants can only be truly achieved by not wanting it anymore.

  • Everything that you think is true has once and will once again be shown to be false.

  • The more someone hates someone else’s shortcoming, the more likely it is a shortcoming of their own.

  • The more willing one is to fail, the more likely one is to succeed.

  • The more one learns, the less one knows.

  • The more one keeps, the less one has.