“Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.” "Well, don't do that then."| drmaciver.substack.com
This is a guide on how to clean my kitchen.| Overthinking Everything
I have a typewriter! Hear me typewrite. It goes click clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickBING. KACHUNK! SHUNK click click click click click click click click ...| Overthinking Everything
Allow me, if I may, to introduce you to a novel meditative practice.| Overthinking Everything
If you want to read more books, stop making excuses and just figure out more ways to read books. Here are some that work for me.| Overthinking Everything
Sometimes the universe hands you fruit and you've got to use it somehow.| Overthinking Everything
I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently. This is both good and bad.| Overthinking Everything
I'm looking for short-term technical projects. Think of me as a Solver type staff engineer for hire, with an interesting collection of technical specialisations and a general focus on producing quality software that solves hard problems.| Overthinking Everything
The easiest way to make something is to be angry that it doesn't exist| Overthinking Everything
Self is not a simple thing. It's large, and fractal, and exists at every scale. You are one scale, an important one, but it's equally important to appreciate how selves scale up and down.| Overthinking Everything
Here's a spell I use to have a good rest when I'm not able or willing to nap.| Overthinking Everything
I use a fairly well-developed todo list system to manage my workload during the day. Some of the details are unusual, so I thought it would be worth sharing.| Overthinking Everything
I've been exploring the physical side of journalling recently and it turns out there's a whole lot of weird stuff going on.| Overthinking Everything
Why are things nebulous? What do we do about it? What is that squirrel up to?| Overthinking Everything
In which I try to articulate an aesthetic quality that I call Realness, and talk a little bit about my relationship to it.| Overthinking Everything
It sounds mundane, or like I'm joking, but what I'm talking about is important and I want you to understand that.| Overthinking Everything
My idea of magical practice is pretty contiguous with other common experiences, and looks a lot more like what "real" magical practitioners do than it seems like.| Overthinking Everything
This is just a courtesy email to let previous paid subscribers know that they're paid subscribers again.| Overthinking Everything
In which I explain the esoteric magical discipline I practice, and invite you to join me in it. I also teach you a neat trick for avoiding writer's block, and tell you a mostly pointless story about an orange tree and a hamster.| drmaciver.substack.com
Miscellaneous thoughts as I figure out life. Click to read Overthinking Everything, by David R. MacIver, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.| drmaciver.substack.com
The world is a mess, and we can feel upset about that but at the same time notice that it's hilarious. Here's how.| drmaciver.substack.com
People have a weird habit of acting without caring if their actions work. They should stop doing that.| drmaciver.substack.com
Mondays, am I right? This is a letter about why you should complain about your problems to your coworkers.| drmaciver.substack.com
Most people don't give very good advice. Here is my advice on how to give better advice.| drmaciver.substack.com
Human flourishing requires embracing the specific. You must follow the inscrutable exhortations of your soul.| drmaciver.substack.com
If you want to get better, you need to start by being honest about your current level.| drmaciver.substack.com
I basically look at everything through the lens of evolution. You should too.| drmaciver.substack.com
What is agency? How does agency work? Can you get better at it? It's actually doing stuff that gets you what you want, IDK, and maybe respectively. Here are some useful distinctions and observations that might help.| drmaciver.substack.com
I like to think of estimations as moves in a game. The rules of the game are simple once you've picked the scoring system, but unfortunately the real world provides a lot of uncertainty in what the best move is. Your job is to learn how to play the game the best you can.| drmaciver.substack.com
Estimation is hard! Especially when you don't do enough of it. Some tales from my recent flat move and all the ways in which I got estimation wrong (mostly by not doing it).| drmaciver.substack.com
Estimation should often start with coming up with a range of plausible values for the true value. In this article I show how that works.| drmaciver.substack.com
Task estimation is hard because you don't actually know what task estimation is. Let me fix that for you.| drmaciver.substack.com
Practical wisdom is the quality of knowing what to do is in a particular practical contexts. We all have some of it, and we could all benefit from learning more of it. I talk about how this newsletter is primarily a place where I try to teach practical wisdom, and provide some theory of how it works and how to get better at it.| drmaciver.substack.com
It's easier to become good at restricted ways of interacting with the world than it is to grasp it in its full complexity. This is fine and good, but sometimes leads to limiting conceptions of the world that we need to be able to break out of.| drmaciver.substack.com
Sometimes you just start writing a newsletter about a neat little metaphor and end up screaming onto the page. Sorry.| drmaciver.substack.com
