Because of this, they’re surprised when their attempts to curb addictions don’t work: they either fail, and come to believe that the “lack willpower”, or they succeed at dropping one addiction, but find themselves picking up new ones:

The Locally Optimal view of addictions is that addictions function as anesthesia. As strategies for managing suffering.

Like, if you’re in pain, it’s often wise to employ some method of anesthesia.

…which also means that if you’re in pain and you forcibly remove your addictions (anesthesia), either you’re going to get overwhelmed, or you’re going to find another way to numb.

Addictions help with suffering because anesthesia helps with suffering.

Therefore, the way to unlearn all addictions simultaneously is to remove the underlying suffering. With suffering, there is a sort of “addiction whac-a-mole” that happens. Without suffering, there is no need for any kind of anesthesia.

Addictions are one of my preferred measures of suffering and internal conflict. If you have addictions you dislike, there’s probably suffering in your system. It’s common not to realize that addictions are present to anesthetize deeper pain. (I’m sorry.)

But this is a good thing.

In my research, I’ve specialized in working 1:1 with people who are situated such that they can remove underlying suffering without risking terrible consequences. But many people aren’t in this position yet. For these people, addictions often are the best they can do to manage the current suffering.

This is why I get concerned when I see advice that blindly recommends people tear down their addictions. Hey, Chesterton’s Fence! All things considered, addictions like scrolling can be some of the best copes for many people!

^{Note: The most virtuous copes are community and relationships. The problem is that they’re also the least convenient.}

Meanwhile, when underlying suffering disappears, you’ll see addictions disappear without using willpower:

^{Until our 3mo follow-up, I didn’t even know he’d *had* addictions.}

Have you ever noticed that you didn’t get addictive urges during the times you were happiest? — in a past role, in a past relationship, around people you love, while on vacation, after meditation or psychedelics, when younger, when life was more stable, when you felt differently about yourself… Perhaps it was because there was no suffering for which you needed anesthesia.

About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people helping superintelligence go well

Chris joins the show to discuss how he developed his unusual bounty-based, pay-on-results approach to his practice, which grew out of his frustrations with a coaching and therapy industry optimizing for the wrong things (like feeling good) instead of the right things (like people actually winning at life).

Notable Timestamps:

(00:06:50) The efficient market hypothesis, Chesterton's fence, and "local optimality" as a lens on self-help claims
(00:09:16) Chris's own burnout story and the limits of self-guided meditation and self-help books
(00:14:52) Developing embodiment, equanimity, and internal awareness together, safely and in sequence
(00:20:15) The origins of "one-shots" and the early pay-on-result bounty model
(00:27:03) Learning vs. unlearning: two fundamentally different modes of client transformation
(00:36:03) The structural incentive problems baked into therapy and coaching business models
(00:43:36) The origin story of Chris's pure-bounty, pay-on-results model in year one
(00:48:22) The "woo" language of coaching vs. tracking real, externally visible results
(00:59:13) Why awareness-raising practices can backfire, and the myth that equanimity comes from more awareness
(01:01:36) What actually gives people lasting equanimity, according to the success stories Chris has tracked
(01:15:33) Why unlearning is more like surgery than skill-building, and the risks of untracked self-help
(01:21:52) How Chris's business model is evolving from pure bounty toward value-based pricing

Here’s why:

Here I care about two dimensions of internal development:

• Awareness: How aware you are of sensations in their body/conscious experience. How embodied, perceptive, sensitive, and “feely” you are. This includes how intensely you feel beauty and pain.

• Equanimity: How equanimous you are with situations and emotions, on average. This is roughly the fraction of their experience that feels okay, secure, and chill. The more equanimous you are, the less frequently you show anxious, triggered, or avoidant behavior.

Now, usually people get into inner work because they want to improve both their Awareness and their Equanimity. But sometimes people choose practitioners and practices that get them Awareness++++ without Equanimity++++. This can create big problems.

Increasing Awareness is like turning up the volume on conscious experience. So if there’s suffering in your system and you turn up the volume enough, at some point you’re going to either get panic attacks, destabilization lasting years, anesthesia, or overwhelm.

Panic attacks:

Destabilization lasting years:

Anesthesia (reduced awareness):

Overwhelm:

To be clear, improved awareness can have benefits…

…it’s just not everything:

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What improving Awareness and Equanimity are like

Where many people start: Low Awareness + Low Equanimity

Signs of this: Burnout. Reduced agency. Frugality despite having wealth. Addictions like doomscrolling, vaping, porn, overworking, etc.; addiction whac-a-mole. Stress despite ‘having everything’:

Also: muscle tension that keeps coming back, dating bottlenecks.

Benefits: Reduced variance of outcomes.

Improving Awareness:

What it’s like: Access to intuition and knowledge of one’s own desires. Noticing sensations within one’s body. Life is more vibrant and beautiful. Pain is more intense. Improved creativity:

Also: memory, dancing ability, pleasure, expressive speech and facial movements, less chronic pain; in extreme cases, psychedelics having any effect at all.

Downsides: Greater awareness of pain and suffering.

Improving awareness: Most inner work already seems to be focused on increasing awareness, so I doubt this is a common bottleneck conditional on effort.

Improving Equanimity:

What it’s like: In the limit, anxiety, avoidance, insecurities, and triggers stop happening. Fewer days lost after events that ‘should’ feel insignificant. Greater risk-taking → Greater potential for higher EV success.

Also: attractiveness, socializing as much as while drinking, handling conflicts well.

Downsides: Greater risk-taking → more failures. More people disliking you.

Improving equanimity in real life: Big successes from intentional effort are rough. It’s common for people to invest years in random paths that don’t have track record, and so end up merely more aware of their existing bottlenecks. (The problem is almost no one tracks this.)

Nearly every big success I’ve seen or heard of someone massively increasing their equanimity seems to have involved ≥1 of:

• Stressors or incentives disappearing: Mitigating a health issue, moving away, achieving financial independence, etc.

• Supportive, loving relationships for years

• Successful 1:1 work

• Getting lucky with psychedelics on one of their first trips (?)

Which is also to say: I haven’t really heard of big success stories involving people who didn’t have Maslow’s safety, relied entirely on self-guided approaches, or exclusively followed advice from people who themselves are destabilized. In general, my “advice” for how to be successful at X is to first make sure you’re not copying failures of X. Then, attempt to copy successes of X. I share a bit more in this podcast.

Both: High Awareness + High Equanimity

Signs of this: Flow. Naturally high agency. Effortlessness; e.g., dropping addictions without trying. Charisma. Romantic success. Saying what you want. Caring better for others. Improved coordination skills. Better impact.

About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people making superintelligence go well

• Emergent Misalignment coauthor Daniel used to get burnout lasting weeks or months; not since our eight calls 9 months ago. He’s also gained ~5h/day after losing interest in distractions.

• Founding engineer’s burnout lifted in weeks: he was planning to leave; instead he started shipping again. He also shared feedback he’d been withholding for half a year; the founders acted on it immediately.

• Frontier lab researcher went from avoiding conflict with respected colleagues to challenging them. 18mo later he still does this, and even runs his own team.

These were bounties: payment forbidden until lasting results. People dm’d me to set bounties, I chose which to hunt, they chose if/when to pay. I follow up 6, 12, 18+ months later to track results.

Year 0

In the first year, my research focused on what can be done with ~1–4 afternoons. Because I was learning how to screen for who I could help, the sessions were basically the screening (though I also tried to screen for people who’d done years of therapy, coaching, and meditation already so I knew my work was creating counterfactual change). Of 8 AI people who did 1–4 sessions, 6 chose to pay bounties and 2 didn’t.

It was very experimental. All payment was forbidden until their genuine satisfaction with results.

Year 1

In my second year, I wondered what could be done with more time and commitment. For this reason, the incentive structure became half upfront, half on results, 8 weeks.

last person on the table paused due to external crisis

My super boring conclusion from my work with both AI and non-AI people is it’s significantly easier for me to help people who are more successful. People who were less successful had worse external circumstances (most were non-AI people)—eg, sleep, financial, housing issues—and had trouble showing up to meetings and completing the agreed work, so results suffered accordingly. I’m also finding I’m weirdly disincentivized from figuring out if it’s possible to work with people in less than ideal circumstances because it looks like ‘my’ failure.

Also re the success thing, there’s something where people who are successful necessarily already have learning solved, so they’re mainly bottlenecked on unlearning. Meanwhile I don’t help with ~skill-formation/discipline, which is maybe closer to what less successful people need to become successful.

In my second year, I also learned how to track results and share stories better:

Year 2

Now in my third year, I’m trying to unblock positive ASI work I like.

Because many of the people who have internal bottlenecks blocking their work don’t realize it, I’ve started offering internal bottleneck evals so they can see this for themselves. The eval also teaches prerequisite skills and serves as comprehensive screening for both parties.

The incentive alignment for unlearning has also evolved to more closely align with impact. Roughly: refundable effort bond + payment forbidden until their genuine satisfaction similar to Paul Christiano’s Certificates of Impact.

What would they do?

— People would avoid practitioners and approaches that are disconnected from lasting results. They’d stay away from practitioners with feedback loops that optimize for temporary breakthroughs and spiritual bypassing. They’d notice when an approach hasn’t helped their friends and update accordingly.

— Practitioners would follow up. Coaches and retreats would check in months and years later to see how peoples’ lives changed. Did they get into happy relationships? Lose interest in doomscrolling et al.? Recover from burnout? … Or did they experience temporary breakthroughs that faded in weeks? Practitioners would track outcomes to improve outcomes.

— People would prefer to pay for results rather than experiences. A client who was optimizing for results would both commit to a practice and voluntarily set bounties/give unsolicited performance bonuses.

— Practitioners would attempt to align their financial incentives with results. For example, they might experiment with bounties, equity, or performance bonuses on top of regular rates.

What actually happens?

— People choose practitioners and approaches without checking results. Ask yourself: Do you know what lasting results your practitioners have gotten? Also, some people even prefer to work exclusively with practitioners who have negative track records — themselves. (I started with this, I’m still not entirely sure why.)

— Practitioners highlight testimonials showing experiences. About 2 of over 200 testimonials from three of the most well-known traditional “inner work” practitioners in my network described observable life changes — the rest described how activities felt in the moment. ~15 other practitioners’ testimonials showed the same. See: Most “inner work” looks like entertainment for details.

— People engage with practitioners and content that are disconnected from lasting results. They choose retreats, workshops, self-help books, and substacks by what seems fun, what fits their personal aesthetics, and what their friends find entertaining — not by lasting life changes. Some take relationship advice from people who do not have happy relationships. Some talk more about “breakthroughs”, Terminology With Capital Letters, and jhanas than Results.

— Practitioners never follow up. A retreat that called itself ‘life-changing’ and ‘data-driven’ doesn’t track data on how alums’ lives changed. When an alum offered to do the follow-ups for them, they declined. Dozens of coaches had never considered following up until I asked them.

— People pay for experiences rather than results. I’ve watched capitalist decamillionaire friends choose cheap practitioners without wondering “What results can I expect?”, “How fast?”, or “Wait, why are they so cheap?”

— Practitioners charge for experiences — sessions and retreats — not lasting life improvement. The times I’ve discussed bounties with traditional inner work practitioners, they’ve either reacted with surprise — they’d never considered aligning incentives with results — or anger — they feel taking responsibility for results is morally perverse. A few have since experimented with pay-for-results structures, but none had before.

For many people doing inner work, maybe getting better in two months versus ten years isn’t the point, maybe it’s the friends they make along the way.

If you were optimizing for results, would your behavior look different?

Thanks to Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson for drafting discussion.

About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people making superintelligence go well

You open one trainer’s webpage and read their testimonials: “I had an experience tied for the most intense experiences of my life”; “They do it all with fun, care, and a sense of humour.” You notice that none of the testimonials mention improved body composition, fitness, or bloodwork. What would you think?

Personal training should improve your body. Inner work should improve your life. If inner work were optimized for results, what would we expect to see?

I’d expect to see success stories: people who got undeniable life changes. Like:

Founder was single for years due to romantic risk-aversion; today, they’re celebrating their one-year anniversary.

Researcher used to lose 5 hours per day to doomscrolling. After our program, he got bored of them all and stopped. It’s been six months; he’s used the extra time to host parties for his friends.

Executive recovered from burnout, negotiated for the first time, and started shipping again.

But this is not what we see.

Look at the testimonials

I reviewed every testimonial posted by a popular retreat, a well-known coach, and a prominent organization in my network. How many describe a specific life change — something the client durably started doing, stopped doing, does differently, or achieved?

• For the popular retreat: 0 / 20

• For the well-known coach: 0 / 3

• For the prominent organization: 0 / 14 (homepage)

The organization also had an additional ~200 testimonials posted on another page, which I had Claude review. Finally, we found 2 of 200+ testimonials that described specific life changes: a husband confirming his wife sleeps better, and a CEO crediting the work with helping quadruple revenue.

Nearly every testimonial from every practitioner focused on fleeting emotional states (“I had an experience tied for most intense experiences of my life”), practitioner personality (“They do it all with fun, care, and a sense of humour”), and unfalsifiable claims (“The ROI is immeasurable”), but not results. Experiences appear to be the product.

This surprised me, so I checked another ~15 similar practitioners. Almost none of their testimonials described specific life changes either.

I’m sure some clients get lasting results, but isn’t it odd that these practitioners don’t get testimonials long enough after the intervention to show durable results? If lasting life improvements were the goal, wouldn’t practitioners highlight their success stories?

Check for yourself: Pick the practitioner you most recommend, and count how many testimonials describe a lasting change in what the client does, avoids, or achieves.

If the purpose of most inner work were to improve people’s lives, then why do testimonials focus on experiences? Why don’t practitioners solicit testimonials about lasting results? And why don’t clients write about them?

Seven years of Duolingo

I believe the purpose should be results. I’m reminded of an AI researcher I worked with in 2024 who called his prior seven years of inner work (Vipassana, Tibetan Buddhist meditation, various retreats, IFS) “LARPing working on the problem.”

When we caught up this month, he added: “It’s like entertainment. It’s like identity. It’s like wearing a costume.”

Once he gained the ability to ask people out without risk-aversion and to stop avoiding relationships, he lost interest in communities organized around talking about problems they haven’t solved. Last month he celebrated one year with a girl he loves.

Are you playing Duolingo or are you getting results?

—@chrislakin | Writing | Now

contrast this with “whack-a-mole”—

“four moles whacked, only one left…”

“one mole whacked, only one left…”

“one mole whacked, only eight left…”

two months in, an AI founder I worked with said he’d stopped vaping a month earlier. this was cool because I had forgotten he vaped.

he said he had tried to quit before, but it felt like a fight requiring lots of willpower. (so… it didn’t last)

except this person ↑, none came for help with their addictions. they just felt something was off.

other people:

a researcher was doing 5 hours of chatgpt per day for emotional stuff. we worked on dating. the chatgpt petered off. he hadn’t even realized until I followed up a year later

“I used to watch all this mindless TV. Recently… I just got bored of it.”
cool… didn’t know you watched TV

simply swapping one addiction for another would not be ideal.

Ideal: “I don’t have the urge at all anymore”

if a sufficiently longstanding addiction could be unlearned through more willpower, it would’ve already been.

About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people making superintelligence go well

And then you, uh, ‘went back to normal’.

Breakthroughs aren’t results. Results are results:

Asking people out for the first time, and getting into a relationship. Going from eating alone to hosting parties for friends every week. Negotiating for the first time, and saving millions. Life is obviously better months—years—later.

If life goes back to ‘normal’, it isn’t a result.

Daniel, coauthor of Emergent Misalignment (Nature), was trying to continue his alignment research and enjoy his life, but kept losing weeks and months to burnout. Willpower and deadlines only worked temporarily. With my help, he unlearned his internal bottlenecks in summer 2025. In the [update: 12] months so far since, he reports that long periods of burnout no longer happen. He’s also regained about 5 hours a day from distractions, and has instead naturally used the time to pursue personal projects and host events for his friends.

I followed up 3 months after our eight calls:

How did you used to spend your time?

On an average day I might do around 6–8 hours of work and then 5–6 hours of just going home and vegging out in some form… watching YouTube...

More than 50% of my waking life was avoidance… I wasn’t getting that much work done.

What do you do with the new time?

I do a lot more things… Being social, spending more time with friends... reading good books to improve my thinking... writing things, putting myself out on the web more, communicating my ideas... working on passion projects like a  life dashboard that tracks various metrics

I’ve mostly stuck to hosting something every week… bouldering… board game night… theater trips… hot pot party. We just did another one yesterday.

Has your orientation to research changed?

People would ask me, ‘Are you available for a meeting at this time?’ And actually it would be mildly inconvenient... I’d be like, ‘Oh, sure, let me make that work for you.’ Whereas now I’m like, ‘Okay, these are my convenient times. Can you make this work?’

I used to struggle with retrospectives - ‘what went well, what didn’t go so well.’ I would always not have a very good sense of this. Now... I mostly just gave really good answers and my teammates liked what I said.

I recently sent a cold email [to a professor whose work I was interested in]... in the past I’d have stressed a lot about making a concrete pitch but this time I settled with “I feel there could be interesting synergies” and left it open. [Update: The professor invited Daniel to visit.]

Intuition has definitely helped… for example being more willing to make snap decisions based on vibes rather than overthinking it

How’s dating?

I would be quite obsessive… trying to fully determine what the person would be like just by reading their profile... I had this very high bar… Now it’s like ‘Okay yeah, good vibes, let’s try.’

Have you taken any new risks lately?

I never asked anyone out for 27 years and asked out two people in the last couple months.

How’d that go!

She said No… and I felt good about the fact that I asked her out.

About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people making superintelligence go well

The first step was to keep a list of all of my single-and-looking friends. So I asked friends if they wanted to be matchmade:

And added a new tag to my friend database to stay organized:

But soon I realized that when you ask someone for their type, they usually reply with vague adjectives. “Kind.” “Funny.” “Smart.” I needed to find a better way to match people.

When I was single and asked friends to matchmake me, I gave them a list of examples of exes, crushes, and friends I almost dated. Within seconds they’d exclaim: “Ohhhh, I see your type! Hm, do you know so-and-so?” Their suggestions were surprisingly accurate.

So I started asking my friends for examples too.

It’s easier to think of “People like Alex” than “People who are kind”.

Matchmaking got easier after that: over the next several months, I made several dozen 1-on-1 matches.

But something weird kept happening.

Friends would be excited about some of the matches and then… not schedule the date for weeks? Or months?

Other friends would go on a first date or two, realize “dating isn’t a priority for me right now”, and stop.

It was quite frustrating. But I didn’t know what to make of it, so I kept matchmaking.

I also doubled down by experimenting with other matchmaking methods, including running public events and inviting friends to parties outside their social graph. But these too were less effective than I hoped.

Men complained that it was “too hard” to interact with women in group conversations.

A single friend I brought to a party had a hard time even standing near cute guys…

I thought, “Maybe she just needs more matches?”, so I posted a twitter classified:

Over 30 men reached out, including founders of companies you’ve heard of and people with Wikipedia pages.

But… she only went on dates with four of them ¿

Later, I tried the twitter classified for another friend:

Again, lots of interest from men who seemed promising… but, somehow, nothing came from it?

At this point, I’m reminded of a matchmakers meetup I ran several months ago:

At the meetup, I met someone who had professionally matchmade six marriages (with more than 7 kids so far!), and many more relationships.

Surprisingly, despite her success, she had actually moved away from matchmaking and towards helping people get ready to get married.

The significance of this hadn’t dawned on me until just now.

Why had she moved her focus?

Because most people who ask for matchmaking aren’t ready to get married.

And one way they avoid getting ready?

By asking to be set up instead.

Oh no.

About | Twitter

Once this happened “fumbling” and “success” both became meaningless.

When my girlfriend and I were first flirting, I was super into her… and completely lacking in anxiety.

“How would it feel to date her if she doesn’t like me?” Bad! If she wasn’t charmed by my relaxed self, I didn’t want her.

No “please like me.” Just: “Are we in the timeline where this works? Let’s find out asap!”

V3. Revised 2025 Nov 1. View this essay on Twitter.

About | Twitter

Mentor: “…and how do you feel in your body about that?”

Me: “Wait, feelings are supposed to be IN THE BODY?”

For the first few months after this exchange, I thought, “Maybe I’m just different and don’t have feelings in my body. Maybe that’s just a weird thing that happens to other people but not to me.”

Nope.

Turns out I was bottlenecked on feeling sensations in my body. Sure, I’d get butterflies in my stomach or “know” emotions in my head, but I didn’t notice things like “a feeling of expansiveness in my chest”, “tingling in my fingers”, “tension in my arms”, or “pleasure on my skin”.

Ok, so I was living at 360p. So what?

Well, the nervous system is a distributed system, so information must propagate somehow.

“Feelings in the body” seem like a very common way to experience this:1

This information flows freely, unless there’s resistance. When there’s resistance to feelings, updates fail to permeate the entire system.2 And there was a lot of resistance in my system…

To be clear, this bottleneck appeared to be locally optimal; it helped mitigate body pain and social risks. So, “feeling” made my life worse, locally.

And while it was locally optimal, it wasn’t globally optimal:

• I’d brush my teeth too hard and only notice from the blood instead of the pain.

• Other people made decisions in seconds by checking their gut. I made a decision by agonizing my way to a heady answer that still felt bad. Decision-making spiraled because every option felt equally gray.

• I thought I didn’t like animals! I missed the beauty around me—even though I found it incredibly cute when crushes would suddenly stop on a snowy street overwhelmed by what she was soaking in.

• Everything I did had to be “useful”. All of my desires needed reasons.

• I couldn’t tell the difference between “I’m feeling really jealous right now” and “Did I eat something bad?”

• I didn’t really experience deep pleasure.

• I was more prone to addictions, distractions, ‘time-waste’.

At the same time, this bottlenecked numbed awareness of itself. I went like this for years until people I trusted pointed it out.

Eventually, with courage, 1:1 help, and (a lot of) time, what made feeling risky got safely unlearned.

After I regained the ability to feel in high resolution, I journaled:

Wow.

There’s so much intricacy to the emotional ripples in my stomach alone. I found strange happinesses in the tip of my fingers (???). And self-loathing there, too! Love in the “cave of the heart” on the right side of my chest…

Soon I realized that feelings are better described as tuples (sensation, location) rather than emotion words:

My progress continued: Decision-making became so easy it feels like there isn’t even a “me” making the choice. I became more empathetic and see others’ emotions easily. I notice fears without avoiding, allowing me to integrate them. Life is more colorful and I’m more intuitive. I see and hear more. 4k feeling enables 4k being.

Related posts

1. Engineer started taking on more difficult projects and dancing weekly

An engineer I met at a prediction market conference set a bounty on increasing his social and career agency.

One session in July 2024; he kept up the practice on his own.

Within a month, he was:

• Dancing weekly

• Choosing more difficult projects at work

• Embracing social interactions that used to be triggering

• Expressing romantic feelings frankly

Previously he’d done:

I’m choosing to work on problems beyond my capabilities, and get excited about situations where my weaknesses are repeatedly on display.

He continued the work.

6 months:

Every week I’ve had some new ridiculous, fun, stupid project that I had others rallied around. It's exactly the stuff I kind of pictured doing but never really did…

One of my new friends said, “You're so adventurous.” That shocked me

—6 month follow-up recording

18 months: He says he’s very happy and resilient, has lots of friends (and dates) now :)

2. Antoine is no longer incapacitated by corn

Antoine was the first to try. Multiple therapists and modalities had fallen short; “I’ve had anxiety my whole life.”

One session and he kept up the practice on his own. We also had a refresher call in month 9.

11 months:

I used to get triggered by very small things that some of the people surrounding me would say or do. Something as simple… “You told me that you didn’t like corn. Why have you bought corn?” These things would incapacitate me for 48 hours, I would have to shut myself in my room. Now I just laugh. —Video

18 months: He reports all is well; he’s continued unlearning through what he’s learned.

3. Sid asked out women without delay

Seven years of meditation and hundreds of hours of IFS therapy hadn’t gotten this AI researcher the results he wanted. He still didn’t ask out women he was attracted to.

After he started asking women out, we continued unlearning for further goals.

5 months after first unlearning (1 month after conclusion), we recorded this reflection.

At 11 months I asked for updates and he replied:

Update: They’ve been dating for over a year now. Things are good :)

4. Happy guy who had a 20y porn addiction for some reason ?

A man man set a bounty on his 20-year porn addiction. He had tried to quit for most of that time.

One session, a little take-home work.

1 month: “very few urges”

7 months: “I don’t have the urge at all anymore”

13 months:

18 months: he says things are good ya.

Update (2026 September): I’ve been puzzling on why this case was so easy. I think it’s because he had no external bottlenecks, happy life, good job, happy relationship… and just happened to have a porn addiction. His addiction wasn’t load-bearing anesthesia (as addictions usually are), so the unlearning was quick. This was the only time I can recall accepting a bounty on a predetermined outcome, let alone an addiction. Historically I’ve mostly screened out people with addictions, too, though this is no longer necessary.

Not for everyone

I noticed that internal bottlenecks can be unlearned faster when they have low-latency access to sensations in their body, so in my first year of research I tried to exclusively choose these people. I had been already selecting for people who had tried years of meditation, coaching, therapy, etc. already (so I can know I’m creating counterfactual change), which happened to help with this.

The absence of external bottlenecks is also essential.

The end of single-session attempts

In my first year of research, I focused on “How much is possible in as few sessions as possible?” In my second year, I focused on “How much is possible in ~8 weeks?” This allowed me to help people who have trouble feeling emotional sensations in their body, which takes some learning (gasp) not just unlearning. This can support even greater change than the results above, especially for my target audience (AI people), e.g.—

—so I no longer attempt to handle everything in one session. It was cool though.

About | Twitter | Finding & removing bottlenecks for people helping ASI go well

Version 2.4. Originally posted 2025 Feb 27, last updated 2026 Sep 25.

I’m burned out. And I’m frustrated at being burned out: Why are my emotions so irrational!?

Women I like aren’t responding, ‘boundary-setting’ is creating more conflict (??), and I have no idea what I want in my career. It feels like whenever I do stuff, stuff goes wrong.

Now.

Back then, I thought burnout was preventing me from achieving my goals. I was wrong. Burnout was a strategy.

After all, if ~everything is going poorly, then one way to avoid more stuff going poorly is… to avoid doing anything at all. And one way to do that is to feel burned out.

Looking over my journals from 2022, there were actually a few days where I felt totally normal—and I quite enjoyed those days! The problem came in the days that followed: as I acted more brazenly again, I got into conflicts with friends, family, and people I was living with.

So, to avoid that, “burnout” returned.

Eventually, with courage, 1:1 help, and (a lot of) time, two patterns got unlearned: that which made me get into so many (honestly, dumb) interpersonal conflicts, and that which made even the good conflicts feel horrible. After that, conflict became fun, interesting, even beautiful.

I haven’t needed this burnout since.

Suffering as a strategy

Any longstanding internal bottleneck, like burnout, can be understood from two different points of view:

The classical view: “Past bad experiences (traumas) caused your burnout.”

The Locally Optimal view: “Burnout is often a strategy for steering towards desirable futures and away from undesirable futures.”

What’s nice about the classical view is that it absolves you of responsibility: Because you can’t change the past, your dysfunction isn’t your fault. There’s no need to feel ashamed.

What’s nice about the Locally Optimal view is that it bestows you with responsibility: Because your current strategies aren’t globally optimal, you can find even better strategies!

My burnout wasn’t globally optimal (it sucked), but it seems to have been the best strategy accessible to me at the time.1 Locally Optimal!

My emotions were never “irrational”—they were just locally optimal.

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v3.0.2. 2024 Nov 23 – 2026 Sep 23.

I used to think that conflicts are bad and hard. Then I realized conflicts are only hard because I have conflict anxiety. Once I unlearned my conflict anxiety, conflicts became fun an interesting.

People who handle conflict well are magnetic. You trust them immediately. You can say anything to them without fear they’ll get triggered, avoidant, or secretly combust from suppressed anger three months later.

It’s wonderful.

When I became conflict-chill, something awesome happened: I got curious.

Instead of feeling “YOU’RE CROSSING MY BOUNDARIES,” I began to wonder: “Wait, what did they actually mean? Did I understand that as they intended?” Most conflicts are mistakes, so the first step should always be to ensure that we’ve understood the other correctly. But conflict anxiety blocks this natural curiosity.

How many dumb fights have you gotten into because of personal anxiety?

For me… a lot.

Many conflicts have little to do with ‘reality’, but mostly our own insecurities. After I unlearned my conflict anxiety, that simply stopped.

Instead, conflict feels like I’m there to investigate, a detective looking for clues, a researcher testing a hypothesis. Other people might still get triggered in my direction, but I don’t feel emotionally threatened anymore.

Conflict anxiety is there for a reason, of course. Locally optimal. Nonetheless, conflict anxiety can be skillfully relaxed.

After you unlearn your conflict anxiety, conflicts become interesting, and even beautiful. They become fun, riveting ways to learn about others. Like exploration: both of you can quickly hone in on your differences, and learn a lot quickly. Conflicts become a great way to make friends—fights become play.

Source: Lion Cubs Play & Fight - CUTE!

There are two ways of managing unwanted feelings and behavior: The first is learning a bunch of techniques to subdue the symptoms every time they arise; The second is figuring out how to unlearn them so they trigger vanishingly less often.

They’re the two ways to grow: Learning and Unlearning. adding and subtracting:

Learning is acquiring new skills: “learn” to flirt, “learn” to say ‘No’, “learn” to self-accept, “learn” to suppress your addictions… It’s adding code to your mind.

Unlearning is removing harmful skills: deleting romantic anxiety, removing conflict-aversion, stopping self-rejection, dropping addictions… It’s deleting code from your mind.

We need both.

When I first started trying to intentionally improve how I felt and behaved, I learned too much. For example, I hyper-focused on pickup advice that ultimately made social interactions cloudier, not more clear.

Instead, eventually, with courage, 1:1 help, and effort, what made me want this got unlearned.

So what I wanted wasn’t bottlenecked on doing more learning, but on strategic forgetting.

For example, someone I helped didn’t “learn how to ask women out”; with my help he was able to delete what incentivized his avoidance:

About | Twitter | Finding bottlenecks for people making superintelligence go well

Part I: Evaluating the core claims of the book
Part II: How I’d rewrite it to be more effective

Part I: Evaluating the core claims

Claim #1: Emotional bottlenecks often have hidden functions

The most important mindset presented in the book is Teleology: the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause.

For example, the book would claim that someone who is burned out is in that state not because of childhood trauma, but because burnout helps them avoid situations that currently feel unsafe. This mindset is contrasted with the more common “etiology”, which blames today’s problems on past injuries, leaving little room for future growth.

Put another way:

Teleology is quite contrarian to our usual way of making sense of the mind. It’s also extremely valuable. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to resolve my own bottlenecks or help others with theirs. Despite this value, people really, really, really don’t get teleology. Teleology is essentially antimemetic in our culture.1 Understanding teleology is one of the best reasons to read TCTBD, in my opinion.

But. The book’s explanation is awful. The part that attempts to explain it is literally titled “Trauma Does Not Exist.” This frame needlessly triggers many of the people who could benefit most from it, preventing them from engaging. One clear example is this /r/CPTSD thread: “Do not read the book "The Courage to be Disliked". It contains terrible advice for trauma survivors”. Because the book’s wording is poor and practical advice is lacking, the redditors missed the extreme value of the teleology frame.

In Part II, I’ll discuss how to explain teleology better.

Claim #2: “All problems are interpersonal relationship problems”

I’m unable to steelman why the book says “ALL” problems are interpersonal, but I’ve come to agree that many, maybe even most, human problems relate to social interaction. This gets at the second most important point in the book:

You were so afraid of interpersonal relationships that you came to dislike yourself. You’ve avoided interpersonal relationships by disliking yourself.

This is extremely true. I completely agree.

In the vast majority of cases I’ve seen, the way that people stop disliking themselves is by feeling safe in their interpersonal relationships. When someone dislikes themself, they stoop or take up less space, make fewer requests of others, take fewer social risks, and so on. These all have the effect of minimizing interpersonal conflict and minimizing dislike.

People generally don’t stop disliking themselves until they’re ready to be disliked by others. Disliking oneself often appears strategic.

Teleology strikes again!

Claim #3: Whether you outgrow your bottlenecks is your choice

From the book:

Whether you go on choosing the lifestyle you've had up till now, or you choose a new lifestyle altogether, it's entirely up to you.

✅ Growth follows from the belief in growth.2 Growth is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The inverse is also true: if you believe you can’t grow, you probably won’t. Many people have this. “Learned helplessness,” it’s called. The book’s advice for these people is basically “you gotta choose to grow,” which is odd because… learned helplessness is often serving a function!

Many people feel like outgrowing their bottlenecks is a subtly bad thing. Strangely, the book doesn’t apply the mindset of teleology to the absence of someone’s willingness to grow.

Claim #4: You are autonomous, and so are other adults (Separation of tasks)

The book introduces a concept called “Separation of tasks” to show what healthy interpersonal interaction looks like. However, the description of how to separate tasks is so muddled that I entirely missed it the first four times I read the book. It’s just this line: “Think, Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?” This explanation is difficult to apply to real messy relationships, especially when strong emotions are involved.

Here’s how I would explain the underlying concept instead:

You can’t fully control how other people feel or behave. You can’t fully read others’ minds. Other people can’t fully control how you feel or act. Other people can’t fully read your mind.

Every adult is autonomous: you can only control your own behavior and read your own mind. (For a rigorous explanation of this idea see my posts on Markov blankets and causal distance.) These limits reveal that there are natural boundaries that separate where my “tasks” end and yours begin.

Most interpersonal conflicts involve a failure to acknowledge these natural boundaries: trying to force others to feel differently, presuming we know others’ mental state, expecting others to fix our feelings, or hoping others will read our minds. Meanwhile, healthy interactions are characterised by not trying to do any of these things.

It’s certainly nuanced. I’ve spoken to dozens if not hundreds of people who disagreed with it at first.3 But overall I think it’s a great point.

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Claim #5: Separating tasks will improve your relationships

The book claims separating tasks “is enough to change one’s interpersonal relationships dramatically.” I actually think this is both very wrong and misleading as it reverses causality.

Like, yes, healthy interaction involves separating tasks. But that does not mean that you can just consciously choose to separate tasks.

I know that because I spent six months trying to teach others how to. I believed that if someone could understand separation of tasks, then they’d be able to separate them and stop having so many unnecessary interpersonal conflicts.

Completely wrong. I tried to teach a bunch of smart friends, and they would like the idea, explain it back well, etc., but every time they got into a real conflict, their understanding of how to separate tasks completely fell apart. Huh?

Imagine there was only one person in the world who could give you food. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to prevent them from disliking you, try to read their mind, etc.? Wouldn’t you completely fail at separating tasks?

When you feel like other people have things you can’t go without, then you have extremely strong incentives to manipulate them. Your intellectual understanding of “separation of tasks” is powerless against strong feelings of insecurity.

Once I noticed this, I stopped trying to teach others how to separate tasks. Instead, I helped people unlearn. This worked: they began to separate tasks automatically, without me explaining! (Case study.4) The result is even cooler than what the book says: when you feel secure, separating tasks is effortless.

tl;dr: If you don’t already separate tasks naturally, you probably can’t just choose to start separating tasks.

Claim #6: People need to feel like part of a greater whole

The book calls this idea community feeling: humans thrive when they believe “my effortless existence benefits the group.” (Your group/community could be people, animals, or even the cosmos.)

Crucially, you can’t ever really know whether you’re actually benefiting others — maybe everyone is lying to you, maybe the person you’re helping is actually baby Hitler, etc. — instead you just have to have faith in your own intentions to do good and help others. Having that faith is a choice.

I like this part of the book; I have no additional suggestions. I wrote more about it here.

Claim #7: You can choose to be present

if one is shining a bright spotlight on here and now, one cannot see the past or the future anymore.

Do not treat [life] as a line. Think of life as a series of dots. If you look through a magnifying glass at a solid line drawn with chalk, you will discover that what you thought was a line is actually a series of small dots.

Imo the book makes the same mistake it did with separation of tasks: suggesting that you can choose to be present, when in reality you probably can’t. I haven’t seen this advice work except through extreme brute force (e.g., long meditation retreats) or luck.

I spent 5 months “trying to be present” on my own but kept zoning out and wasted months to suffering, so I have personal disdain for this.

My model now is that presence is natural, but gets blocked by insecurities. Simple teleology: if you have difficulty being present, there’s probably hidden functions! The resolution is not through further conscious mindset or choice, but through unlearning.

Now, with that out of the way…

Part II: How I’d rewrite The Courage to be Disliked

Improvement #1: A less triggering explanation of teleology

Firstly—don’t say “Trauma doesn’t exist”. Instead, focus on what does exist5: emotional bottlenecks with hidden functions. This shift in perspective will also fix the problem of unnecessarily triggering people who feel strongly about trauma.

It’s also possible to explain teleology faster and more intuitively. For example, I’ve found it helpful to drop the term “teleology” entirely and rebrand as “locally optimal” instead.6 For example, back in 2022 when I was burned out from life, the suffering incentive landscape seemed to be:

More here. Next, I would mention how teleology is actually integrated into one’s life.

Improvement #2: Present better skill trees

In general, personal growth has a skill tree: you must progress in a valid order. But some of the advice in this book implies that you should work on Level N skills (separating tasks, being present) before you have Level N-1 skills (having the courage to be disliked, feeling secure about stuff) — ???

If I rewrote the book, I’d flesh out a better skill tree for how to follow advice for different stages of the path.

Improvement #3: Stop “self-help”

Imo, the most harmful idea in The Courage to be Disliked is the idea that you can help yourself. That, ~“If only I think hard enough about how my own behavior might be teleological, then I’ll figure everything out and grow.”

I’ve spoken to dozens of people about this book, and not one has remarked: “I read The Couraged to be Disliked a long time ago. I applied it correctly. I’m doing a lot better now.”

In fact, most people I know who read TCTBD misunderstood it!

Nearly every big success I’ve seen or heard of someone massively increasing their equanimity seems to have involved ≥1 of:

• Stressors or incentives disappearing: Mitigating a health issue, moving away, achieving financial independence, etc. (There’s a reason you’re so afraid of people disliking you!)

• Supportive, loving relationships for years

• Successful 1:1 work

• Getting lucky with psychedelics on one of their first trips (?)

Which is also to say: I haven’t really heard of big success stories involving people who didn’t first have Maslow’s safety, *relied entirely on self-guided approaches*, or exclusively followed advice from people who themselves are destabilized. In general, my “advice” for how to be successful at X is to first make sure you’re not copying failures of X. Then, attempt to copy successes of X. I share a bit more in this podcast.

The kid in the book didn’t even successfully self-help, lol.

Improvement #4: Validate the rewrite on real people

There’s a reason why I had to read The Courage to be Disliked 7+ times (and its sequel The Courage to be Happy 3+ times) over four years: I had to do most of the thinking on my own time!

Everything in this post makes me wonder… Did the authors not test their book? As in: give the draft to representative people with bottlenecks the book aims to address, have the people read it, interview them to see if they correctly understand it, and follow up a few months later to see if those bottlenecks improved.

I would guess they didn’t! (Do you know anyone who deeply applied the philosophy because of reading about it in this book? I don’t!) This is crazy to me.

If I rewrote The Courage to be Disliked, I would test the new instructions to see if they have their intended effect on readers.

Conclusion

While I dislike much of the literal wording in The Courage to be Disliked, I deeply agree with its underlying philosophy. A steelman of its claims reveals many ideas that are both very wise and very unusual. I hope someone writes this steelman because it could help a lot of people.

If you have questions about the contents of the book, you can copy the full text into AI for discussion.

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Setting boundaries used to feel super aversive. Telling people “No”? Asserting my desires? Eek! Even just thinking about asserting myself raised my heart rate and turned my stomach.

I thought I was bad at boundaries because I lacked skill, but really I feared the consequences. When I set boundaries, people often feel bad, get mad, dislike me, get violent, blame me… and I could feel like a bad person, fear retribution, and fear gossip. “Practicing” setting boundaries wasn’t addressing my bottleneck.

After unlearning these insecurities, boundaries became effortless. I can do boundaries, say No, and let others get triggered easily now. Conflict even became fun. Other people report similar effects.

Now it feels less like I’m “setting” boundaries and more like… I am boundaries. I am autonomous: I do things I want, because I want to, only when I want to. It’s even allowed me to become more empathetic and sensitive—I can get closer to others without fear of manipulation. Boundaries became effortless and my life improved.

For more about boundaries, see Claims #4 and #5 in this post.

Transcript available on Substack.

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This podcast extends a recent post:

Related:

Examples of self-fulfilling prophecies in AI alignment