5-Bullet Friday

Hi All!

This week we have a 6-Bullet Saturday, an expanded list of what I’m enjoying or pondering.

The most Japanese thing on my mind

​Hibi Box of 30 Incense Matches (Amazon, Ameico, Urban Natural). Thanks to the inimitable writer Dan Levy, perhaps best known as David Rose on Schitt’s Creek, for introducing me to these via “10 Things Dan Levy Can’t Live Without | GQ.”

Article I’m reading

“Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life” by Clay Routledge (The New York Times). Alternate link.
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​The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.
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[Consider] anxiety. A certain amount is useful; it helps keep us alert and motivated to reach our goals. But start viewing anxiety as a disorder and you can become hypervigilant about avoiding anxiety-provoking situations — which, in turn, can increase the risk of developing an actual anxiety disorder.

Tech feature I’m using

​Vertical view of tabs in Chrome. Have you ever clicked on open tabs, just to see what the hell they are? I certainly have, and it wastes a lot of time. The new “vertical tabs” feature of Chrome solves this completely and also helps you clean things up, closing unneeded tabs and so on. Don’t like it? Just revert to horizontal tabs by clicking the “View” menu dropdown and deselecting “Show Tabs Vertically” OR right-click on the vertical tabs menu on the left-hand side and select “Show Tabs Horizontally.”

Book highlights I’m rereading

​Four Thousand Weeks Quotes by Oliver Burkeman on Goodreads.

Soothing videos I’m watching again

“Snacks for Spring Festival”
“For Everyone Who Knows My Name.”
“I Turned the Woodshed into a Forest-Themed Closet.”​
All of these videos are from creator Li Ziqi (李子柒), who has amassed 32.7M subscribers on YouTube alone. Li stepped out of the spotlight in 2021 shortly after breaking the Guinness World Record for the most subscribers for a Chinese language channel on YouTube. Following negotiations with her agency Weinian, Li is back, sharing her serene landscapes and idyllic activities. It doesn’t hurt that she’s as beautiful as she is crafty. No Chinese knowledge required, as the visuals drive everything.

Quote I’m pondering

“We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”
​— Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize laureate and one of the central contributors to quantum physics. The quote was a response to Wolfgang Pauli after his presentation of Heisenberg’s and Pauli’s nonlinear field theory of elementary particles.
(Click to share on X.)

You can complement this edition of 6-Bullet Saturday with my brand-new episode on a subject very close to my heart and currently consuming a large percentage of my waking hours: writing. The episode covers the complete arc of a creative project—choosing it, starting badly, revising ruthlessly, and shipping it—told by seven people who’ve done it hundreds of times.
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And, as always, please give me feedback on X. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all.
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Much love to you and yours,
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Tim