Hey friends,

Welcome to the 10th issue of Thought Caffeine, a weekly newsletter where I share my favourite productivity tips, random party facts, and other interesting finds throughout my week.

📕 Book: Replay

This book had been sitting on my To-Read list for over a year now, and I finally got to finish it this week after I decided to take a short break from the cult of self-help productivity books.

This 1986 fantasy novel by Ken Grimwood laid the foundation for time-tinkering plots that would become a fiction staple for the decades that came. It tells the story of a man who discovered that he went on an endless replay loop from his inevitable death in 1988 back to his teenage college days. Though circumstances didn't change, the memories he had gathered throughout the loops were preserved.

This book properly petrified me as it led to a short rendezvous with my own existential crisis. I find it scary that once a person dies, not taking religion into account, their soul just disappears. Their entire existence is a dot in a vast expanse of matter. We, with respect to the universe, are an insignificant speck of dust. As a Christian, I always imagined after-life to be a series of replays with adjustable conditions — like playing your own game of Sims.

💪🏽 Fun etymologies

I stole this one directly from David Perell's own newsletter, but I found it so mesmerising I thought I had to share it with you.

1. Freelancer translates to "a sword for hire." Originally, it referred to medieval mercenaries who fought for whichever country paid them the most. Today, the sword is a good metaphor for the sharp specialization that defines a freelancer's work.
2. Muscle comes from the Latin word musculus, which translates to "little mouse" because people thought that the shape of muscles looked like mice running under the skin. 
3. The word clue comes from the story of Theseus in Greek mythology. In it, he gets stuck in a maze. To find his way out, he unravels a ball of string called a "clew" which helps him escape. In the same way, we unravel strings of clues to solve mysteries.

🥨 How I stopped myself from snacking

After taking up intermittent fasting last year, I noticed that staving off food was extremely useful in suppressing hunger. My appetite would only start to build up after I had an appetiser, usually in the form of a little piece of fruit of glass of soy milk.

This appetite would continue to build up until I eventually finished my main course, and then I'd almost always crave for something sweet to cleanse my palate with. It is at the end of my meals that my appetite paradoxically reaches its crest.

Not too long ago, out of serendipity, I stumbled upon something that oddly removed all residual post-main-course hunger. It was the simple act of brushing my teeth. Somehow, after I brushed, all desire to eat disappeared. I'm sure that one of the major propelling forces behind this is the completely sound fact that I did not want to begrime my post-brush pearly whites. At that was apparently all it took.

✍️ Article: Why the Stories We Tell As Kids Matter

I took a little break from writing this week amid my final exam in Neurology and general slacking off 😅

But here's an older article I wrote about the stories children like to tell and why they matter and should be taken seriously albeit their sometimes quirky nature.

Click here to read more

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📖 Quote of the Week

“Bite off more than you can chew. You can figure out how to chew later.”

From The Third Door by Alex Banayan. Resurfaced via Readwise.

🐦 Tweet of the Week

@adrnjonathan

Today I realised the amount of time actually wasted watching useless Youtube ads. If you need to watch 5s into an ad before skipping, 12 ads make a minute. A good 10 min video might have 3 ads, so that’s a minute wasted every 4 videos. 240 videos and that’s 1 hour. Wasted on ads.

2:11 PM · Nov 24, 2020

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Have a blast of a week! 🍀

John