any domain is fine — mental health, physical health, intelligence, friends, productivity, anything that i'd count as leading to a more flourishing life.
EDIT: adding that Sam Atis' ideas about good advice are wonderful. good advice is nonobvious, applicable, and based on some true insight.
if you'd like them, my demographic details can be read on my death market:
keeping the bounty criteria mildly vague to avoid Goodharting.
EDIT: @Dave_9000ish made a market on whether i would implement ideas that i awarded bounties to. go trade on their market, too!
1,000
3.00Set up projects for yourself and complete them. I can't say which things fit with you specifically, but committing to something and completing it is a good habit if you're young. Later on you will learn when to quit, which is an important skill once time and energy are more scarce.
Thing is, by seeing projects through to the end (write a book, build a home server, invent a new beer) you will pick up generalizable skills and you will get to know yourself. You can reflect on why some things are hard and others are easy for you. You can choose to develop skills that need work.
Self-knowledge is one of the key traits for happiness and well-being. Committing to things (not just starting) grows self-knowledge
Go through the following list every so often to see how well you're doing on basic life things (from https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/12/13/scrupulosity-sequence-3-load-bearing-things/):
Are you sick or in pain?
Do you do some sort of exercise on a regular basis? (Walks count.)
Are you eating enough food?
Are you getting enough protein? Vegetables?
I said ‘sleep’ two bullet points ago but are you getting enough sleep?
Are you going outside and getting fresh air and sunshine on a regular basis?
Are you either not taking mind-altering drugs or taking a normal, responsible amount of mind-altering drugs that doesn’t make all your druggie friends go “please take fewer drugs”?
Do you experience physical affection from a person or pet? (There is no shame in getting a stuffed animal or body pillow if the answer is ‘no’.)
Does there exist someone who would notice if you were dead? Someone who will talk to you when you’re sad?
Do you talk to a person face-to-face sometimes? Do you get enough introvert time?
Do you do something you think is straightforwardly fun on a fairly regular basis?
Do you have something to take care of, even if it’s just a plant?
Take 15 minutes of your day and close your eyes to focus on your state. Focus on how your senses (breathing, touch with the surfaces your body is interfacing, etc) are being perceived, and try keeping an otherwise blank state where you're not chasing a chain of thoughts. This has been shown to be remarkably effective for people who have ADHD to have better control over their attention; and in people who don't have ADHD, to have ability to sustain focus for long periods of time.
Try a hobby, and don't be afraid to expand from a hobby to a side hustle, but avoid choosing your hobby based on considerations of possible future profit. Find a few people who are among the leading thinkers on that subject (you'll know them because they'll stand out from the crowd, and you'll find them because they'll be among the most popular content creators in that niche) to learn from and a few people who also enjoy the hobby to trade tips with.
Why a hobby? You probably already have some ideas as to what you want to study, and may have ideas about what you'll do with it after that, but having an unrelated (or distantly-connected at best) set of interests makes it easier to make connections with people who don't share that academic or professional background while making you a more memorable and interesting person to those who do (oh, isn't he the guy who brews his own coffee at his desk? or the one who sings in 20 languages? or are they really into relatively niche sport or cultural experience and happy to bring along a newbie?) Pick a relatively common or broad hobby first, then perhaps a few more niche ones, so that if you can't find a common interest, you are likelier to at least have a common dimension (and although there are a few very interesting people who only really do one thing but do it very well, most of the most interesting people are less spiky than that).
an easy way to improve all other areas of your life is to have a goal that's larger than yourself.
You see lots of entrepreneurs online working out, maxing out their health, sleep, even relationships etc. They do so because it directly impacts their goal of making money, growing a business or solving a problem (that their business solves)
But you don't have to have financial ambitions to do that, you need to have a goal that stretches beyond you.
For example, if you say "I want to be healthy" that only affects you and only in one way (you may have good sleep and diet but not be financially free for example)
But if you have a goal like "I want to be the best father i can be" or "I want to create the best family i can"
That doesn't just end with you, it affects your spouse and your kids.
because kids pretty much copy you when they're young, every single behaviour and action that you do, how you look, what you eat etc will be reflected on them.
That will make you want to go gym, fix your sleep, become a reliable and functional adult, finally fix your trauma that makes you react emotionally and so on.
It will also make you think about your partner, and you'll want to look the most attractive for them, you'll want to be the most helpful, supporting and capable for them.
If you take most goals to their extreme end, it will make you improve yourself.
Digital higyene tips here.
Get a phone browser that supports desktop addons and install two basic ones ublock (obvious stuff) and leechblock, leechblock (both on mobile and on pc) is a cool addon that you can limit access to sites in many ways and control that access by a bunch of variables (block after some time, block on some days, between some hours etc).
You can use ublock's element picker to block things you don't like in a site, very helpful to cut off all the ways a site tries to funnel you into stuff you don't want to be funneled into (like youtube/instagram does with shorts/reels).
I use invidious instead of youtube but it's not always stable, but if you are tired of the algorithms and want to watch only your subscriptions and hook it up to an rss reader for notifications it works marvelously (I do that.) for a while I would have recommend setting up a simmilar thing with rss feeds of tweets from accounts you want to be up-to-date with but x murdered nitter (alternative frontend that made that happen), some instances work but they work on borrowed time.
Another cool recommendation is a classic, separate the space where you chill in front of the screen and where you work in front of the screen, for some people another account on their PC is enough, I dual boot on my laptop and move to a second desk in my room.
Read and listen to books from the gauntlet, courtesy of @DrewSpartz and his bro Emerson https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bqj6PSFxn1UjctVBgK-1RQW0SeWfL3PZ3xijPjR7cyc/edit
