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Invert

July 6th, 2025

Charlie Munger says when you're trying to achieve something, that it's always easier to invert the goal.

If I wanted to find peace, if I wanted to find meaning in life, well, those are really hard questions.

But let's say I wanted to never feel at peace. That I wanted to never find anything meaningful in my life. That I wanted to be single and alone for the majority of my life. That I wanted to fail, and that I wanted to never find anything I ever wanted and wallow in my misery until the end of my days. Well, that's a lot easier.

  1. Well, for one, you'd want to lock yourself in your room with your thoughts. You'd not want to come out and share your thoughts with the class. You'd isolate yourself.
  2. You'd never get any sunlight. You wouldn't get enough food or water either. You'd constantly stress yourself out by thinking of it.
  3. You'd never let yourself rest, because you could always be doing something productive with your time. You could always be achieving more, and because of that you'll never let yourself feel peace enough to do things you enjoy.
  4. You'd tell yourself all the bad thoughts and believe it. You would be your worst jailor. All these soft spots? Yeah, you'd poke and prod. You'd tell yourself your shit because you can't change, or that you're a bad person, and all of that.
  5. You'd throw yourself on the streets. You'd keep yourself cold and hungry and alone. You'd make sure of it
  6. You'd just read and consume depressing content. You wouldn't find anything meaningful or positive to surround yourself with. You would only see and view the very brutalities of reality and war and all that, and you'd never pay attention to anything good happening in the world, because you'd convince yourself one way or another that that wasn't the truth or that the good in the world wasn't worth paying attention to.
  7. You wouldn't find any interest groups, hobbies, or religions. You wouldn't join any of them, instead you'd rather lock yourself in your room and doomscroll depressing and negative content because it's simply just so easy.
  8. Don't smile. Don't take time to enjoy the roses. Don't lollygag or play. There's no time to play. There's no time to lollygag.
  9. And definitely, definitely just do nothing. Inaction. Your analytical paralysis is what will be your saving grace. It will guarantee your misery that you did not take a life of action and because of it you will most definitely live a life of regrets and misery.
  10. You wouldn't trust a single person around you to have your back, no matter what they say. You'd tell yourself it's just not worth it.
  11. Every pain or setback you'd take personally, and you would let it scar your consciousness. You'd make sure of it.
  12. You'll let every single piece of noise in your life be a signal to you that you're worthless. You'll repeat the same ad-hoc awful messages to your mind over and over again without any rational thought if whether or not its true, and you'll do it out of sheer habit.
  13. The habits you form will be so anti-productive and you'd have nothing in your arsenal of mental models to break these terrible negative feedback loops. You'll just repeat them ad infinitum until you die a cold and slow death.
  14. Everything is about you. Whether good or bad, it doesn't matter, but everything that happens in life will be about you. You'll choose to believe it and take it personally.
  15. Don't clean up your place. Jack off all the time. Have a cum rag. Just don't fold your clothes. Be really sloppy.
  16. Don't have any goals, dreams, direction, or aspirations. Don't pick it, and don't feel like it either. You'll just sit in the same habits again.
  17. Either believe you have low agency, where nothing you do matters, or believe you can control everything, so anytime anything goes wrong it's your fault.
  18. Blame yourself for not pushing back against any of the above, and then feel worse and spiral down into a further depression because of it. You guarantee your misery by finally closing the final step in the negative misery loop, which is being miserable of your misery.