In response to the Quora question "What are some important, but uncomfortable truths that many people learn when transitioning into adulthood?"

1. Every person is responsible for their own happiness -- not their parents, not their boss, not their spouse, not their friends, not their government, not their deity.

2. One day we will all die, and 999 out of 1,000 people will be remembered by nobody on earth within a hundred years of that date.

3. Practically all of the best opportunities (in business, in romance, etc) are only offered to people who already have more than they need.

4. The idea that you will be happy after you make X amount of dollars is almost certainly an illusion.

5. The idea that you will be happy after you meet [some amazing person] is almost certainly an illusion.

6. For most people, death is pretty messy and uncomfortable.

7. When you don't possess leverage (go look up "BATNA"), people will take advantage of you, whether they mean to or not.

8. Almost everybody is making it up as they go along. Also, many (most?) people are incompetent at their jobs.

9. When talking about their background and accomplishments, almost everybody is continually overstating their abilities, impact, relevance, and contributions.

10. Physical beauty decays.

11. Compared to others, certain ethnicities and races (and genders, and sexual orientations, and so on) are just plain royally f*cked from the day they're born.

12. Bad things constantly happen to good people. Good things constantly happen to bad people.

13. Very few people will ever give you 100% candid, honest feedback.

14. People are constantly making enormous life decisions (marriage, children, etc) for all of the wrong reasons.

15. Certain people -- some of whom are in positions of enormous power -- just do not give a damn about other human beings. A certain head of state in Syria comes to mind.

16. Often, the most important and consequential moments of our lives (chance encounter, fatal car accident, etc) happen completely at random and seemingly for no good reason.

17. Your sense of habitating a fully integrated reality is an illusion, and a privilege. Take the wrong drug, suffer a head injury, or somehow trigger a latent psychotic condition like schizophrenia -- and your grip on reality can be severed in an instant. Forever.

From Patrick Mathieson

Happy to share my system. This isn't supposed to be a jab at zero inboxing, I just never felt the need to physically move email. I've been using multiple addresses, filters and tags since long before I actually had things to do and they actually continue to do the job pretty well.

My current set-up looks something like this:

• Bulk inbox for everything unsorted.
• Business inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a person.
• Ad inbox for everything sent to me about my job by a robot.
• Accounts inbox for bills I intend to keep and any financial mail.
• Chat inbox for forum updates and responses to blog posts. >90% university-related discussions.
• Private inbox for close friends and family. When my phone is not on priority mode, I also get a notification for these.
• Subscription inbox for newsletters and advertisements at me personally. I go through these after work and sometimes tag stuff I want to read during dead time (e.g. waiting in line).

Bulk, Ads, Accounts and Subscription get automatically marked as read when I shut down the program.

Filters sort >90% of my mail for me and are mostly based on the address used, as it saves me the time to manually add the sender to my filters (and hope they only use one email). Since my starting screen shows the bulk folder, I can just glance at the other <10% and move on, as it's usually unimportant. Today's bulk mail includes two Japanese book shop coupons, Reddit, two seminar invites, a reminder at myself and a meetup proposal.

I also have an emergency email which has no inbox but forwards mails directly to my phone in all situations. Never been used, of course, because nobody remembers obscure email addresses in emergencies (and my life actually isn't as action-filled as one would expect the life of a business consultant with a dozen email filters to be...). Still, I like the idea of handing them out in the hope that it makes my other addresses "non-emergency" by contrast.

Each inbox currently holds several thousands of emails and after a few tantrums at having deleted that one email, they will likely stay undisturbed for the next couple of years.

Nice to hear that. I got the impression that is a chore not only for the poster but also for the voter - "do we need to vote again?" - given how little the polls are upvoted.

I enjoyed it, thanks for sharing. (Btw, are there more general, practical utility lectures like this?)

When you talk about being underwhelmed with other students, could you go into detail what criteria you'd specifically assess when making that judgment?

I've noticed that most intellectual doujins tend to think of themselves as particularly special and of other people as not quite as much, even if the empirical evidence isn't all that convincing (Mensa can be notoriously bad about this, so is the "I have goals!" self-help crowd), so I always take some time to look at the actual data before adopting a similar belief.

Even if you, personally, happen to die, you've still got a copy of yourself in backup that some future generation will hopefully be able to reconstruct.

Is there a consensus on the whole brain backup identity issue?

I can't say that trying to come up with intuition pumps about life extension has made me less confused about consciousness, but it does seem fairly obvious to me that if I'm backing up my brain, I'm just creating a second version who shares my values and capacities, not actually extending the life of version A. Being able to have both versions alive at the same time seems a clear indicator that they're not the same, and that when source A dies, copy B just goes on with their life and doesn't suddenly become A.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure the same argument doesn't apply to one brain at different points in time, too. If you atomize my brain now and put it back together later, am I still A or is A dead? What about koma, sleep, or any other interruption of consciousness?

It's all kind of a blur to me.

What would be high on your list, out of interest?

This depends entirely on how you use email.

I do almost zero personal communication via email. It's all notifications, receipts, etc. Thus I check it maybe 4 or 5 times a week.

The frequency I would check my email would vary if I did personal conversations, or business conversations, or support, or etc.

On top of that, with GMail (or Google's Inbox), you can set up all sorts of filters and searches. My phone notifies me of new emails from my wife, whom I know doesn't abuse email, but new emails from my mom whom is likely to be forwarding me something...mom-ish...get read when I do my several-times-a-week look over my inbox.

I don't think it matters much. I'm not a fan of instant notifications (avg. importance of my email is too low to justify the amount of distraction), but beyond that, checking frequency would be pretty low on my list of email productivity improvements.

I check mine once or twice a day; most of my email is pre-sorted correctly by using a bunch of filters and around a dozen of addresses with different uses and priorities. I don't think I could work with a global, unsegmented email inbox; I saw a friend use his years ago and it still terrifies me, even with his relatively low inflow (30-50/day).

More a warning to people who aren't taking care of business.

Being clever on the internet, particularly with a developed body of material, should be quite an asset. Yet he has obviously failed to leverage that asset, or any of his other assets, properly.

Main problem - the guy was putting up a front with the people he knew, and was committed to projecting that image more than evaluating his options and taking action to improve his situation.

I had hoped his post would spark more constructive discussion of what to do in his situation, and how to avoid putting yourself in that situation in the first place. His skills and failings seem extreme versions of a lot of people here, including myself.

For the sake of completeness, the two best counter-arguments I've heard so far (IRL):

1) MBAs are useful as a baseline business sanity tool, so you can get a decent employee to a point where they'll understand the basic vocabulary of a lot of different disciplines. For instance, they'll have a rough picture of what segmenting and targeting a market means, even if they won't know how to use it in practice, let alone compete with a junior marketer. Someone who's already read a bunch of stuff and managed a business isn't going to learn as much and might be disappointed by how close to common sense everything is.

2) MBAs teach you how to maneuver the minefield of the large company, where the decision-making process is complicated by personal alliances, office politics and employee/boss conflicts. To an entrepreneur, this will seem unreasonably complicated ("Why don't you just walk in a straight line?"), but someone having to deal with a fair share of Dilbert-esque behavior, additional ammunition, whether business lingo or complex models, might come in handy.

I should also note that I'm the only one with a largely critical view and that the rest of my tutor group is quite happy with the program.