2025-08-15 18:46:22
There’s a particular kind of mental math we all do, usually without realizing it. We add up achievements, subtract failures, and calculate whether we’re worthy of respect, love, or even basic self-acceptance.
The equation feels logical: land the dream job = valuable person. Write the perfect book = deserve happiness. Get 500 likes = temporarily acceptable human.
In essence, your brain treats self-worth like a balance sheet because of how it learned to navigate social rewards. This is called conditional self-worth and it’s surprisingly destructive. So why does our brain default to this exhausting scorecard system?
In the late 1980s, Psychologist Edward Higgins discovered we carry three versions of ourselves: who we are, who we want to be, and who we think others expect us to be. The bigger the gap between these selves, the worse we feel and the more desperately we chase achievements to close it.
This system gets wired early, with our dopamine circuits connecting external rewards to self-value. As kids, we learned that good grades = proud parents, winning = attention, being helpful = love. Jennifer Crocker and Connie Wolfe called these “contingencies of self-worth”, specific domains where we’ve learned to stake our entire sense of value.
The fear of not being worthy can drive short-term motivation, but research shows it ultimately increases anxiety, depression, and burnout. You become only as good as your last win, trapped in a cycle where the very pressure to prove your worth sabotages your ability to perform.
Fortunately, it’s possible to break free from this toxic form of mental accounting by decoupling your sense of self-worth from your performance.
Rewiring deeply ingrained conditional self-worth patterns isn’t easy, but it can have an outsized positive impact on your mental health. Here are three research-backed approaches that actually work.
1. Notice the self-worth accounting. Most conditional self-worth happens on autopilot. A meeting doesn’t go well and you’re suddenly questioning your entire career. Someone doesn’t text back and you feel fundamentally unlovable. The first step is simply noticing when these calculations start running. When you catch yourself doing the mental math (“If this project fails, I’m worthless”), pause and ask: “Is my worth really contingent on this one thing?”
2. Collect counter-evidence. Your brain learned that worth comes from achievement through years of reinforcement. To update this system, you need consistent examples of moments where you are valued without meeting any conditions. Spend time with people who appreciate you for being you, not for what you accomplish. Join communities built around shared interests. Notice how it feels to be valued for your humor, curiosity, or just your presence.
3. Diversify your self-worth portfolio. Instead of betting everything on one aspect of identity, spread your sense of self-worth across multiple domains. If work is a big part of your self-worth, experiment with creative hobbies. If you’re the “smart one,” try activities that highlight other qualities. Start small: take an improv class, join a hiking group, volunteer somewhere meaningful.
Breaking free from conditional self-worth takes time. You’ve spent years learning that your worth is tied to your performance, and that pattern won’t disappear overnight.
But here’s what happens when you start to separate the two: you take risks without betting your entire identity on the outcome. You stop treating setbacks like a personal crisis. You get back up faster because falling down doesn’t mean you’re fundamentally broken. Your brain stops wasting energy on constant self-evaluation and starts focusing on the work itself.
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2025-08-07 18:55:48
In my book Tiny Experiments, I used Amelia Earhart as an example of a life lived through experimentation and adventure. Her willingness to try new things perfectly captured the spirit I wanted to encourage in readers.
To my surprise, some people pushed back: “She’s a terrible example,” they effectively said. “She was just a publicity puppet and look at the way she died.” (we don’t know for sure but she probably crashed into the Pacific Ocean during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe in 1937)
But I wasn’t asking readers to emulate everything about Earhart’s life, make the same career choices, or even share her particular relationship with risk. I was only drawing inspiration from one specific quality: her experimental mindset.
This got me thinking about how we approach role models. What if we stopped expecting them to be perfect in every area? What if we could take the best parts and ignore the rest?
The myth of the perfect hero creates an impossible standard. When someone we admire shows behavior we disapprove of, we feel disappointed and often throw out valuable lessons along with the flaws.
Philosopher Susan Wolf has written extensively about “moral exemplars” and the problems with expecting too much from role models. Take Martin Luther King Jr. His civil rights leadership remains inspiring despite personal complexities. Should we abandon his dream of equality because he wasn’t perfect in every domain?
Steve Jobs revolutionized product design but his interpersonal relationships were notoriously difficult. We can learn from his design thinking without copying his approach to people. We can admire Pablo Picasso’s creative courage while rejecting his personal behavior. Marie Curie’s scientific dedication can teach us about determination and curiosity, but we wouldn’t look to her as an exemplar for mentorship.
What’s interesting is that research shows we naturally pick and choose behaviors to model, which means we’re already building a patchwork of role models unconsciously. But when we consciously choose role models, we override this natural tendency and somehow demand perfection instead.
When we abandon the myth of the perfect hero, something liberating happens: we stop waiting for perfect moral exemplars and start learning from imperfect humans.
This is what happened with my Earhart example. Her willingness to explore and iterate perfectly embodies an experimental mindset. Her other choices, her relationship with fame, her tragic end… none of that mattered for what I needed to learn.
This is especially important in our social media age. We see curated versions of people’s lives that create unrealistic expectations. A patchwork approach to finding our role models reminds us that real people are complex, and that’s exactly why their strengths can be instructive.
Creating your own patchwork of role models doesn’t have to be complicated, but it does require some intentional thinking. Here are three strategies for curating inspiration without demanding perfection:
1. Identify a specific quality first. Don’t begin with the person and try to admire everything about them. Start with what you want to develop. Creative confidence? Leadership skills? Better boundaries? Once you’re clear on the specific quality, look for people who excel at that trait, regardless of their other areas. (also note, these people don’t have to be famous – a coworker, friend, or family member can be a great role model too!)
2. Set boundaries around your admiration. Be explicit about what you’re learning and what you’re not. You can even use specific language: “I admire Maya Angelou for her courage in writing about difficult experiences, but not necessarily her approach to relationships.” This metacognitive practice will create clarity about what supports your growth.
3. Allow for complexity and change. People evolve, and so does the moral context in which we evaluate them. Historical figures who were progressive for their time might seem problematic by today’s standards. Contemporary figures grow and change. Rather than seeing this as a problem, treat it as useful information, and periodically reevaluate your patchwork of role models.
As a bonus, if the person you admire is still alive, you might even tell them. It’s a great way to connect with others. A simple message like “I really admire X and Y about you / your work” can make someone’s day and maybe lead to a new or deeper connection.
The patchwork approach isn’t about lowering your standards, it’s about creating your own standards. Instead of passively admiring distant heroes, you become an active curator of wisdom. You see people as they are: complex beings with strengths and limitations.
This honors the full humanity of people we learn from rather than turning them into icons.
Most importantly, it makes us kinder to ourselves. If you don’t expect perfection from your role models, you’re less likely to demand it from yourself. You can pursue excellence in areas that matter while accepting you’ll always be a work in progress (see the “Intentional Imperfection” chapter in Tiny Experiments).
Your experimental mindset might be inspired by an aviator, your creative courage by a painter, your scientific rigor by a researcher. There’s no rule saying these qualities must come from one person.
The most inspiring life you can build will be uniquely yours, assembled from lessons learned and wisdom gathered from the imperfect humans who came before you.
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2025-07-31 19:55:38
You’ve probably said it or heard it: “I work better under pressure.”
It feels true because when the deadline looms, your brain kicks into overdrive. That last-minute rush can feel productive (even thrilling!) but it’s not increased performance. It’s rushed performance to compensate for weeks of avoidance and inaction.
Procrastinating then rushing to finish a task isn’t about time management. It’s about emotion regulation. When a task feels uncertain or unpleasant, your brain looks for an escape hatch.
At the core of this dynamic is a conflict between two brain regions. In a simplified way, the limbic system (your emotional, reward-seeking center) wants comfort right now. The prefrontal cortex (your logical, future-planning center) wants long-term success.
But the limbic system can be faster and stronger. So unless you deliberately intervene, the part of your brain that prioritizes scrolling over writing that report will usually win.
What makes this even trickier is that there are long-term costs to procrastination. At first, you feel relief. But studies show that over time, procrastinators experience more stress, worse health, and lower performance.
That deadline high? It’s the trap. It rewards the brain for procrastinating, making you more likely to rely on panic again next time. Over time, this wires your brain to depend on urgency instead of intention.
So, how can you break this cycle without relying on pressure or guilt?
Procrastination isn’t a moral failure. It’s a natural brain bias toward immediate reward, but it comes with long-term costs. Each time you choose action over avoidance, you’re not just checking off a to-do, you’re teaching your brain to not rely on the deadline high. And there’s no need for self-blame in that process – just curiosity.
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2025-07-25 22:50:18
Welcome to our Tools for Thought interview series, where we meet with founders on a mission to help us think better and work smarter. Arun Bahl is the cofounder of Aloe, a tool designed to support human cognition in our information-dense world – an AI computer that acts as a “superhuman attention.”
In this interview, we discussed how information overload hinders deep work and creativity, the power of metacognition, why we should aim to augment human thinking and not automate it away, the importance of mapping a problem space rather than just getting answers, and his plans to continue to develop tools that promote clarity of thought and align with shared human interests. Enjoy the read!
Hi Arun, thanks for agreeing to this interview! You’ve written extensively about the distraction economy and its impact on human cognition. Why do you think we need better tools to handle information overload?
Glad to be here! Absolutely. In short: the distraction economy is a Bad Thing for humanity. We already know that it’s bad for individual mental health, especially social media and its effects on young people. We know that it’s bad for us geopolitically, too – when we monetize the delivery of information independently of whether that information is true or not, we create poor outcomes for any society. Governance needs fact-based discourse.
But there’s a third crucial reason that has slipped under the radar to-date: information overload breaks human thinking. I’ll share an anecdote from our own cognitive science research: we spent a lot of time with Millennial and Gen Z knowledge workers getting to know their experiences and pain points, and across our studies there was a surprisingly unanimous baseline. These individuals all expressed the same emotional state: feeling brittle. Feeling stretched too thin, reacting to the next Slack message or rushing to a Zoom call, squeezing in an errand, never getting into deep work. Feeling like their “real” creativity was always a little out of reach.
The problem is much bigger than productivity, however. Let’s imagine modern human thinking as one app among several, running on our brains. When we overtax that modern thinking piece – overtax our attention – we have other apps that will increase their activity to fill in the gaps. Those other systems are prejudice. They are cognitive bias. They are the poor heuristics that make us more susceptible to mis- and dis-information, for example.
From the data, we find that human cognition didn’t evolve to handle this amount of information saturation. It’s just not the environment human thinking evolved for. This isn’t a personal productivity problem – it’s a civilizational one.
Humans must now adapt to a fundamental shift to our ecology of information. That’s why we started Aloe – to build the tools for human thinking to succeed, even in an information environment we are not evolved to handle. We think it’s the most important problem there is to solve today.
That’s why you decided to build an AI computer to address this fundamental mismatch between human cognition and our information environment.
Exactly. Today’s information world is too large for unassisted human cognition. Our species puts out two and a half quintillion bytes of data per day onto the Internet that we consume again each day. And human working memory is fixed at birth, at seven slots. The collision between these two numbers symbolizes the problem we’re trying to solve: the gap between the volume of information we have to contend with, and the biological limits of our attention. We need a superhuman attention that we can trust to help boost our own.
As an analogy: humans can only see colors from red to violet. That’s a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, but we’ve long had tools that could see other wavelengths. Those tools take information from outside our visual range and change its representation, presenting it to us in the colors that we can see. Similarly, an AI computer must have attention that’s far greater than ours, but that knows how to present information to us when it’s important, and at the level of detail that’s appropriate to what we’re currently trying to achieve.
We call this ‘pinch-to-zoom’ for information. Just like with a map on my phone, Aloe lets us zoom in and out of any website, document, conversation, and know that at this level of zoom, you may not need to see every surface street, but the capital cities and freeways are still there.
Aloe pairs the most capable generalist AI agent with an intuitive graphical experience – an AI desktop, not just a chatbot. It knows how to present information in-context, like how to visualize and animate concepts within a large dataset, present the top-level items from a document, or engage you in a verbal conversation. You choose the right way to interact for your situation, headspace, and learning style.
Aloe also executes tasks on your behalf as you work together, and it understands collaboration and shared information. It uses tools, and even creates its own tools, as it works.
I’ve been an AI researcher for many years, but my background was in cognitive science. My cofounder and I are longtime Vipassana meditators. Aloe was born out of lifelong reflection on what humans need to think well. Not to automate us away, but to augment the thing that makes us human in the first place: our capacity for clear thought and creativity.
Let’s talk about how the Aloe agent actually works. You mentioned that Aloe can create tools when it encounters problems that existing tools can’t solve. How does this capability work in practice?
That’s right. As you work together, Aloe determines what its objective is, and makes a plan to achieve that objective. Just like other generalist agents out there, Aloe uses tools to help along the way. But importantly, when Aloe determines it needs a tool that doesn’t exist in order to accomplish something for you, it stops and creates that tool first. If it works, it keeps that new tool in its toolbox – remixing and growing its capabilities over time. An individual’s data is always kept private and secure – we take privacy very seriously. But as Aloe builds its toolbox, all users benefit simultaneously.
This is a new species of AI – internally, we nicknamed this version Aloe habilis. It’s what has allowed Aloe to already outperform every other generalist agent you’ve heard of on industry measures of intelligence like the GAIA benchmark. And we’re just getting started.
You’ve emphasized that Aloe has metacognition – the ability to think about its own thinking. Can you explain why this is crucial?
Metacognition is strategic skepticism. As smart humans, we all know to apply skepticism to the information we encounter in the world. We also know that the smartest humans don’t just question external sources – they apply that same skepticism internally, too. Why do I think what I’m thinking? Why do I feel this way? Can I bring that initial intuition into my conscious experience to learn something and make a better decision?
Similarly, Aloe is trained to question itself and recognize that it too is susceptible to a kind of cognitive bias. Language models inherit society’s biases from the internet data they’re trained on. Aloe is a neurosymbolic system that engages in symbolic reasoning beyond what LLMs can do. This reflective reasoning is essential because we don’t want an AI that just gives us answers – it must explain how it got there, and understand when it’s unsure.
How does it integrate with someone’s existing information ecosystem?
Aloe sees and understands the same information you do. It can connect to sources like websites, your email, Notion, Linear, Slack, Google Docs – and it can reference, and understand things before you’ve even seen them. We liken it to one smart trusted individual that has access, and you can interact naturally with them without having to manage individual conversations, apps, or agents and context windows.
A lot of the heavy lifting we’ve done is to learn how to make information self-organizing. Imagine that as you work, you’re moving through a map of your own knowledge of the resources, people, and processes that are important to what you’re trying to do. An AI computer like Aloe understands how to illuminate the knowledge neighborhood around where you are so that you can see and understand with clarity the most important questions and get verifiable answers. You become more effective, with less effort.
How did you approach building what you call a “synthetic mind” that can actually help humans think better?
Humans evolved to collaborate with other minds. Dunbar’s work on the evolution of human intelligence suggests that our brain size expanded to manage larger social communities – interacting with other minds is our native interface. It’s why humans anthropomorphize everything – cars, dogs, chatbots. Rather than fighting that, Aloe embraces it. It acts like a single smart individual that you get to bring with you everywhere, both on your desktop and mobile.
But for this to work, you need exceptional privacy and trust. Forget AI for a moment – how does human-to-human delegation work? You wouldn’t trust me with anything important unless you believe three things are true: that I can reason, that I have good information, and that we have aligned interests (I have no ulterior agenda). If any one of those isn’t true, you shouldn’t trust me.
The threshold for trusting an AI is no different. This is why, for example, our business model can never be based on advertising. If my goal is to always be selling you something, our interests aren’t fully aligned and I can’t be trusted. If my goal is to sell your data, absolutely do not trust me. We’ve built this foundation of trust directly into Aloe, but crucially, not in order to automate your thinking. Its job is to show you the concepts behind the information – not just give you answers – so you create understanding. Like showing your work in math class, Aloe reveals its reasoning so your mental map improves through the interaction.
What kind of people are drawn to Aloe, and how do they use it?
There’s a surprising variety. Professionally, they’re executives, consultants, designers, researchers, creators, and students – but they use Aloe in their personal lives just as much. They work in multidisciplinary teams, and sometimes solo. Work happens at a desk or on a smartphone. They don’t have separation between their work and personal lives anymore. They tend to be curious and intentional, and many already practice some form of digital hygiene or social media detox once in a while.
The common thread is that they context switch heavily – and want less time pressure and more spaciousness for the things that matter to them. They want tools that don’t get in the way. They’re aware they’d be better off with less noise. More presence. More creative time. They know they’re the best version of themselves when they have taken back control over their time and attention.
In everyday interactions, Aloe gives them time back by proactively helping them assemble their workspace – an information mise en place – so they don’t have to waste time trying to find relevant bits of data to dive into a project. Aloe shows them the provenance of their information. It helps them stay on top of things despite their back-to-back meeting schedules. It collects relevant information, briefs them on background from both public and private sources, and helps them discern what questions are important to ask. And Aloe helps them get into deep work mode more frequently, for longer – as they have delegated busywork away and freed up time to be goal-focused rather than task-focused.
What about you, how do you use Aloe?
I’m in it all the time – at my desk or out in the world – when I need to think or do. Where I really feel the biggest difference is when I’m working on something but I don’t have clarity yet – and the question I need to answer depends on combining a bunch of different kinds of information – my private notes, my team’s internal docs, prior conversations I’ve had, and public sources on the internet. I use Aloe fundamentally as a tool for visualizing, understanding, and talking through – not just getting an answer, but seeing the landscape of concepts behind the information so I can think clearly and decide where to go next.
And finally… Looking ahead, what’s next for Aloe?
We’re excited to open up Aloe for more people to use. Our earliest users are already shaping its development in big ways and telling us how they want to use Aloe next. We’re also partnering with some amazing teams in astrophysics and health tech, where privacy and advanced reasoning are critical and current solutions simply don’t cut it. And we’re hiring!
We’re just scratching the surface on Aloe. But more broadly, we want to make a case for the kinds of tools humanity deserves. Can we learn from the previous generation of tech and the ill-effects of dopamine mining? Can we steer ourselves away from cognitive offloading and the atrophy of our collective intelligence?
Can we understand the most important challenges we face, and build tools that help nudge us in the right direction?
In a world where anything can be automated, we believe clarity of thought will be a human’s defining trait. Seeing the larger picture, knowing what questions to ask, reclaiming personal agency. And making sure that our tools are deployed in concert with our shared human interests.
Thank you so much for your time, Arun! Where can people learn more about Aloe?
We’d love to have Ness Labs’ community join our priority waitlist to get earlier access. Use the following link. More info on us at our website, and our blog is a place to dig more into these ideas we’ve covered today.
You can also find us occasionally on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn. And if you’d like to see Aloe in action, check out this short video.
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2025-07-23 16:45:00
Have you ever made a decision that looked right on paper but felt wrong in your gut? Or found yourself following rules simply because that’s what you were taught, not because they align with who you are today?
If so, you’ve experienced the tension between external expectations and your own internal compass.
Self-authorship is the ability to navigate that tension by not only making decisions based on your current values rather than external expectations, but also by actively developing those values through conscious reflection.
In more academic terms, educational researcher Baxter Magnolia defines self-authorship as “the capacity to internally define a coherent belief system and identity that coordinates mutual relations with others.”
Research shows that strong self-authorship leads to better performance, stronger critical reasoning, clearer cognitive thinking, and improved motivation. Instead of pursuing goals based on societal expectations, self-authorship allows you to explore ambitions that genuinely matter to you. It’s a powerful skill for living, but it’s challenging to master.
You might be operating from external rather than internal authority if you:
Developing self-authorship allows you to more consistently express your own internal sense of authority. Researchers have identified three main phases to achieve full self-authorship:
1. Trust your internal voice. Instead of reacting automatically to situations based on past conditioning, start by actively listening to your internal voice to shape your response. What this looks like is pausing to ask: “What do I actually think about this?”
2. Build an internal foundation. Consciously combine your identity, relationships, beliefs, and values into a coherent set of internal commitments. This phase involves examining what you truly believe versus what you’ve absorbed from others.
3. Secure internal commitment. When external pressures arise, consistently use your commitments to guide decisions rather than defaulting to others’ expectations. This is the phase where self-authorship becomes a lived practice rather than just an idea.
Be patient. Developing self-authorship can take years to reliably use your internal commitments to guide decisions without automatically reacting to external events.
In addition, several obstacles can make it harder to develop your self-authorship: cultural pressures such as living in environments where conformity is heavily valued over individual expression, fear of judgment such as worrying that others will disapprove if you make choices that don’t align with their expectations, or…
… just plain habits, such as continuing patterns established in childhood without examining whether they still serve you. So, how can you make it a little bit easier to develop your self-authorship?
Studies point to a few different activities that have been shown to help people develop their self-authorship. A good approach is to experiment and see which ones help you best develop and secure your own set of internal commitments.
Developing your self-authorship requires some effort, but the journey itself will help you understand yourself more deeply. The idea isn’t to become completely independent of others’ input, but to develop a strong enough internal foundation that you can genuinely choose which external influences to incorporate into your decision-making.
As you strengthen your self-authorship, you’ll find that your choices now feel more aligned with who you are, your relationships become more authentic, and you develop a greater sense of agency when facing life’s inevitable challenges. That seems worth investing in.
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2025-07-17 15:53:54
When I write knowing someone will read it, something changes. Having readers forces me to think harder about what I’m trying to say. My arguments become sharper and my examples clearer.
Yet I notice the temptation to gravitate toward topics I know will get engagement. Should I explore the philosophy of boredom or write about productivity hacks? I know what kind of content tends to perform better on the internet.
That’s the audience effect at play. The mere presence of others fundamentally changes what we choose to do and who we choose to be, and we become different people when we know we’re being watched.
Our brains evolved to care deeply about social status. When we sense we’re being observed, our neural networks shift into “performance mode,” prioritizing social approval over personal preferences. The regions associated with intrinsic motivation quiet down while areas processing social feedback light up.
This neurological shift explains why an audience changes our decision-making. We start choosing safer options, more impressive goals, more socially acceptable paths.
The question shifts from “What interests me?” to “What will make me look good?” and our external signals start overriding our internal preferences. Once you know about the audience effect, you’ll notice how it plays out everywhere:
What makes the audience effect particularly tricky is the associated feedback loop. As we get positive reinforcement for audience-oriented choices, our preferences gradually shift to match what gets rewarded.
We lose track of what we originally cared about, replacing it with whatever generates the strongest reaction. Over time, we forget what we wanted before we started performing for others.
You can’t eliminate the influence of having an audience, and you actually wouldn’t want to. After all, an audience can provide focus, energy, and clarity that can make our work better. What you want is to make the audience effect conscious and intentional.
1. Conscious audience selection. Not all audiences are worth performing for. Instead of optimizing for the broadest possible appeal, choose whose opinions actually matter. Stay aware of your own thoughts and write for the five people whose judgment you respect rather than the five thousand who might click “like.”
2. The sandboxed approach. Keep both audience-aware and audience-free creative spaces. Share your progress, but also work on projects no one will see. You can also consider a periodic “audience detox” where you deliberately create without any external validation in mind.
3. Strategic audience leverage. Use the audience effect as a tool. Want to learn something new? Run a tiny experiment in public. Curious about a topic? Start a study group. The key is to choose challenges that stretch you toward your own ambitions rather than toward what you think will impress others.
Next time you’re making a decision – whether that’s what to write, what to share, what career move to make – pause and ask: “Am I doing this because I want to, or because I think others want me to?”
When you recognize the audience effect, you get your agency back. That’s why there’s nothing wrong with choosing the audience-pleasing option sometimes as long as you’re making that choice consciously. You can then leverage the increased focus, energy, and clarity without falling prey to the drawbacks of the audience effect.
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