The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding.

Cheryl Strayed

Your second paragraph is good enough to earn at least 30 karma points as a standalone rationality quote. Too bad it's written by a LWer on LW.

Wow, you're welcome! Happy to help.

As do I!

Yes, in my experience -- which includes observing others -- first world kids who have the luxury of setting high expectations for themselves tend to beat themselves up most when they are in the midst of discovering whether or not they can actually meet those expectations. They do that for a few years and then figure out how hard they're actually capable of working, and at what pace.

I think the self-abuse is just another way of describing what it's like to not know how to intelligently push yourself. You end up pushing yourself too hard before you establish a sustainable rhythm.

you are somewhere around 28-32 and currently feeling very confident/happy with your life navigation in relation to your earlier twenties?

I'm 33. I would call myself only moderately confident and happy, but that in itself is a major improvement on my 20s... when I was floundering around doing the above. I'm still getting better at it all the time. Around 28-29 I passed some kind of competency threshold and got slightly more competent than incompetent, with an attendant drop in pain from self-abuse.

If the majority of your day is spent justifying doing things you find to be annoying, you might want to rethink some of your routines.

Yes. But IME one's early to mid-twenties are for self-flagellation. You essentially become your own parent, and you don't start out good at it. The effect starts to peter out around 28 or so. Ideally you end up with a more precise model of your strengths and weaknesses than you had at 18.

Makes me wonder about the average age of the "optimization culture" on LW and its associated blogs and forums and such.

I think what would be most interesting about a post-singularity novel -- thematically, at least -- is the chance to explore which human truths survive the end of human limitation, if any. Or do they just change shape? Is man vs. nature still a theme, but now instead of building outposts in Indian territory, we're building orbital platforms around black holes?

Mine tastes kind of like nougat.

"Homer's" Iliad was a collaborative project, in which many authors (presumably) agreed that the story was the important thing, not one author's vision of it, and (also presumably) added to it in much the way that science is cumulative today.

The modern equivalent is TV shows like The Wire and Treme, I think -- although both were set in motion and guided by David Simon.

Can you at least tell me the line that you found funny? And maybe what about it is compressed well (or poorly)?