There’s a lot of small things I think are valuable to do in life, but aren’t big enough to warrant a blog post (yet). So, I’ve collected them here. Here’s some things you just gotta do.

Normally I like to acknowledge where I could be wrong, or the myriad of things that could make what I’m saying not apply to other people: ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic situation, interests, career, other things. I’ll get that out of the way here rather than doing so below. Below, I’m going to just say things as if they’re hardcoded truths. I could be wrong, for you. Oh well.

Table of Contents

De-Google / De-Apple

The vast majority of us are depending on some combination of Google and/or Apple to keep our photos, videos, emails, notes, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, and any number of other things safe for us. As one method, this is probably fine (excluding their inevitable use of that information to surveil you and then try to sell you things based on that information). However, depending wholly on these companies risks catastrophe. It probably won’t happen, but if it does - your Google or Apple account getting permabanned, or hacked - the fallout is potentially life ruining. At minimum it’ll be an absolutely awful month, or perhaps year. Imagine if you suddenly lost the last 15 years of family photos, or every website you ever bookmarked, or the last decade of tax documents and paystubs you have saved in Google Drive. It’s rare, but it has happened enough to justify having an alternative backup solution.

If you just search “de-google,” you’ll find everything you need to know. Some quick tips from me:

  • Backup your Google Maps Location History
  • Backup your Google Authenticator
  • Backup your photos and documents: use a service like Backblaze, they have a very simple PC backup tool with a flat monthly fee that will backup your Pictures and Documents folder. Regularly download your Google Drive or Apple Notes to your PC and let Backblaze back it up.
  • Backup your emails: Use Thunderbird and set all your email accounts as “offline available” in it, and set the number of emails it can download to infinite. Point Backblaze or similar at your Mail directory that Thunderbird uses. Even better: Get an alternative email provider. I won’t recommend any here because that warrants its own blog post. I personally use Bluehost and don’t recommend it.
  • Backup your Contacts: Very simple, just use the export function in your phone to save your contacts as a text file, CardDAV, vCard, or whatever, and save it to your Documents folder. Let Backblaze back it up.
  • Backup your various phone app data: Use each apps’ Export or Backup functionality to get out a CSV, JSON, ZIP, or whatever, and chuck them in your Documents folder. Again, let Backblaze back it up.
  • Backup your passwords: Export your passwords from Firefox, Chrome, Android/Apple password manager, whatever. Import into 1password or similar. Also, if you’re using Firefox to manage your passwords, be sure to set a “Master Password,” else your passwords are saved plaintext somewhere on your PC.

Handwrite a Journal

There’s all sorts of studies about the benefits of handwriting, I won’t bother linking. Personally I find handwriting superior to all other means of notetaking, but even if you aren’t taking notes on things, just jotting down some thoughts at the end of every day, and jotting down some kind of plan for your day at the beginning of every day, has been a useful exercise for everyone I’ve ever talked to that’s tried it. You could also look into structured journals like “Hobonichi.” Personally I say nothing beats the nearest notebook to you and the nearest pen that still has ink. Like any hobby you can overcomplicate it, but there’s just no need, Paper and Pen are both 100% solved problems.

Keep a TODO System

Of ANY kind. Whatever system, so long as you have some way of keeping the myriad of things you need to remember to do outside of your head and in a structured system. Human intelligence is good at vibe-based things and bad at keeping hard facts in working memory. If you try to keep things like TODOs in working memory, you’re limiting your human intelligence capacity, for no reason. For me, keeping a TODO system drastically reduces my anxiety: Not out of sight, but out of mind until it needs to be, and thus one less burden for my brain.

Read “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

By Dale Carnegie. Every self help book I’ve read seems to just restate some portion of this book. Furthermore, when I was a young man in the USA, I was raised on a mythology of the sociopathic alpha male as a role model - Dale Carnegie convincingly pitches an alternative model, even to those that are looking for a way to succeed under capitalism with western capitalist values, that centers around empathy. I meet too many people that think that empathy means sympathy and fail to understand that they’re sabotaging their own position by not taking the critical step of understanding the mindset of whoever they’re up against.

Get Out of the House

If you already do because you go to the office every day, then, do something at least once a week that’s not “being in the house” or “being at the office.” In the 15 years of me paying attention to my mental health, this has been one of the few most consistent mood-elevators. Even if just a short walk around the block, getting out of the house is a reset of context, enough to shake me loose from a funk enough to dig in with other tools I’ve picked up over the years.

Be Around People Sometimes

Similar to getting out of the house, being around people seems to be a consistently critical thing to good mental health. I think family and/or coworkers might count for this, but probably having friends separate from both are important. Humans are social animals, the core evolutionary advantage we have that makes us dominate this planet is the fact that we’re so social, we developed language so we could communicate complex ideas. Even for introverts, we simply need to be around other humans at least a couple times a week. I also have a vague theory that we think as a group, as in, our ideas are developed in a sort of shared-psuedo-consciousness, and so talking with other people is crucial to develop meaningful ideas.

Travel

Someone once suggested to me two things: First, that the strongest predictor for future behavior is past behavior, and Second, that the only thing that consistently seems to change this fact is traveling. Personally I can’t think of anything more impactful to nearly every aspect of my personality than the fact that I tried living in the PRC, Japan, Taiwan, and traveled to a couple other countries as well. Just the simplest little things - seeing how people eat differently, eat different food, live in a place with tens of millions of people that speak a language incomprehensible to you - I don’t think it can be truly internalized without witnessing it in person. Chatting online doesn’t seem to be a substitute, I spent the entirety of my adolescence on the internet learning Russian slurs in Counterstrike, and I still began a life changing journey within just a few moments of landing in the PRC (my first time out of the country).

Avoid Drinking a lot of Alcohol

I’m no teetotaler, alcohol is a drug that has been consistently formulated by basically every society on Earth since forever. It’s fun to partake, and done correctly, yummy. Even some animals seem to enjoy getting drunk. However the fact of the matter is that alcohol is a carcinogen and so drinking regularly strongly increases your risk of getting cancer. Also, all the other reasons D.A.R.E banged into our heads as kids are pretty valid reasons to limit drinking.

Be Bored Sometimes

I believe a lot of us are trapped deep within dopamine holes and addicted to dopamine candy, actively harming our reward system with every scroll through Instagram. I’m going to write more about this one day soon, but the pithy suggestion of “just be bored sometimes” is good enough for now.

Americans: Leave the USA

I’m going to ignore all the reasons you have for being there and instead be very obnoxious about this. When I left the USA for the first time, it was to a country I had no interest, and continue to have no interest, living in: the PRC. Still, just one peek outside the curtain, and I immediately understood that as an American, I had been sold a lie. Our country sucks ass to live in. We have no public transit, no public healthcare, you have to drive to get anywhere, our schools are constantly being shot up, people are barely scraping by a living (and even if you aren’t, you’re surrounded by people who are, which is a bad feeling and also contributes to the degradation of societal trust), the country is incredibly unsafe, the food is atrocious unless you’re willing to spend shitloads on boutique restaurants, and on that note, small businesses and mom-and-pop restaurants are becoming impossible to find as the entire country is franchised. Every American intersection looks the same and has the same parking lots for the same businesses. Even the best places in the USA - NYC and SF - are mostly filled with chain franchises: Fast casuals, fast food, fucking Applebee’s. Our taxes are spent on piracy of oil, blockading of oil, and bombing schoolchildren. America is privatized to shit and descending into a fascist theocracy. It probably already had its last presidential election for the next two decades. Give up hope for it becoming better. You owe it nothing.

If you haven’t tried living abroad yet, do it. It’s lifechanging. It’s easier than you might imagine. It might be your only feasible path to retirement, at this point. You can do easily “incorrectly” and not bother learning the local language and you’ll still have a 10x better life - do it right, pick up a new language, integrate to a new society, and you’ll 100x your life.

Just do it bro just leave. Take advantage of that passport while it’s still powerful - the window is probably closing.

Exercise

You know this is true. A walk counts. Just a walk, every other day, at least do that.

Have a Personal Website

You can have ChatGPT make it for you and tell you how to deploy it for free on Github, and then how to buy a yourname.com domain. It’s worth the 9 bucks a year for the URL. At a party, “what’s your linkedin?” Just go to calebjay.com and hit the link. “You’re into photography, can I see pics?” Yeah hit my website, click Photography. “You do a lot of random FOSS stuff, like what?” Website, check out the mapillary or freesound links. Easy. It’s a bit of real estate on the internet that’s fully mine, that nobody needs to have a facebook account to see. I could make it nothing other than some pictures I like, a flag, a political slogan, a portfolio, whatever I want.

Stop Paying, Just Pirate

Fuck it man. The streaming promise was good at first, now it’s just a cable subscription and pay-per-view. Nothing can be owned anymore. If the corpos are going to strip away the illusion of private property, let’s just throw it all out. Don’t buy books on Amazon, see if you can find Ana’s library. Don’t stream on Netflix, just look for YTS rips (not the first hit for your search, btw, use torrenting). Spotify, bah, look into Nicotine++ and Soulseek. If you want to support creators, buy a t-shirt or album directly off their website. That’s 1000x the revenue they would have made from a lifetime of you buying their stuff from the big tech companies or watching / listening to streams.

Install an Adblocker

Ads are a form of psychic assault. Chrome is probably blocking adblocker plugins by the time you read this - switch to Firefox or Brave and install Ublock Origin. Keep Chrome installed for the .01% of websites that break in Firefox. Firefox with an adblocker even blocks ads in Youtube. To support creators, subscribe to them on Patreon or buy a t-shirt on their merch site. Again, that’s 1000x the revenue they’d make from you watching their streams all day, every day.

Get a cal.com Account

It’s free. Cal.com is like Calendly but FOSS and just better overall. Tired of people asking when you’re free? Send’m a cal.com link, if you set it up right it’s pulling from all the calendars you wired in to live-update your availability. Easy.

Get Enough, Good, Sleep

You’ve heard it before, you know it’s true. I was lucky enough to learn a lot about sleep early in my life. Sleep quality should be near the top of everyone’s priority list - only the most dire of emergencies should justify getting less than 8 hours of sleep. Sleep quality correlates positively with everything you could possibly be doing: mental work like studying, learning, programming, creating; physical work like lifting weights, losing weight, playing sports; mental health, mood, attitude, pleasantness to be around, discipline.

So, 8 hours. No screens 1 hour before bed. Try making the last thing you do before sleep reading (fiction) on a paper book or warm-lit ereader (advice ripped from Tim Ferris) - old detective novels are nice for this. Get a pair of “sleep headphones” and play white noise on them, or Headspace sleep meditations, or old audiobook recordings. Wear an eye mask to block out random external lights. If you sleep with a partner, try sleeping apart for them a bit; if it’s a huge difference, replace the large bed with two smaller ones that take up the same overall size (can be a HUGE difference maker in terms of sleep quality).

On that note, one thing that helped me a lot with sleep quality was:

Treat Your Allergies, if you Have Them

By taking Fexofenadine probably. I wrote about this more than a decade ago and it’s still one of the top 10 things improvements in life quality I’ve had.

Take Fish Oil

Edward M. Hallowell strongly recommends this in all his various ADHD books, and it did seem to make a noticeable difference for me when I started exploring more deeply my ADHD. It’s at worse completely harmless, at best a major boost for memory, mood, creativity, fatigue.

Personally I also recommend b12 but the fish oil is the one I see most consistently recommended by dietitians and psychiatrists.

Travel with Just One Bag

Again, a thing I’ve written about. Get a big backpack - the onebag used community on reddit is a great source for affordable but very high quality bags from the usual recommended brands - and only bring that on trips. Last time we landed in Taipei we were on the train home 18 minutes after getting off the plane, impossible if you need to sit around a bag carousel. I remember recently in Japan walking next to my friend after landing, him endlessly shattering the silence on the nighttime suburb road with this wheeled luggage.

It’s just the best way to travel. Trust, try it on your next trip.

Runners: Try Barefoot

Vibram 5 fingers, Xero Sandals, or just rawdogging those dogs right on the grass. I’ve been doing it for 20 years and I think that’s why I never got knee issues like all my other friends who’ve been running did.

Backcountry Backpackers: Go Ultralight, and Bring Hiking Poles

I was a Boy Scout. “Be Prepared” really means “carry 25kg of bullshit up and down a mountain.” Look into “ultralight” communities, focus on the affordable things you can do rather than spending a ton on ultra high tech ultralight gear. “A gram is a kilo, a kilo is pain.” I don’t go super crazy with it anymore, but maintaining basic ultralight principles makes my backpacking trips much more enjoyable.

Also, hiking poles significantly increase your range, or, your comfort when you arrive at camp. Just use them.

Stretch Every Day

Everyone should be able to touch their toes. I’m not crazy in shape, and so I think the main reason I don’t have all the aches and pains my friends complain of as we all get older is because I just do a simple 5 minute stretch every morning, and I’ve been doing it for 20 years. Just find a quick stretch on Youtube, and do it every single day.

Buy Secondhand

In 2025 I went a year trying to only buy things secondhand, minus obvious things like batteries or underwear. It was a revelation. Not only did it severely limit the consumerism I and I’m sure many of us are infected with, it also led to me getting some really cool and interesting alternatives to stuff I would have normally bought new. It’s cheaper and better for the environment. It promotes a healthier local economy, and combats consumerism and planned obsolescence (forcing you to buy products that were built to last). Next time you need something, check Ebay. I don’t think there’s a good reason to buy a new phone ever again considering how much high quality, good condition secondhand phones are available - or at least old unsold stock of some previous generation. What’s the new one got, a slightly better chip? Slightly better cameras? Come on.

Meet Your Neighbors

Many practical reasons to do this: it’s good to have someone to call in a semi-emergency to feed your fish if you can’t make it home unexpectedly, or let your dog out or whatever. It’s good to have everyone keeping an eye on eachother’s places for strange activity that warrants sending you a quick text about, or worse case, notice you haven’t been out of the house early enough to get the fire department to show up before your cats eat your corpse. Also I’m pretty sure the global economic system will collapse in our lifetime in which case you’ll need to work with your local community to survive.

Just bake something, bring it over with a piece of paper with your phone number and email address on it, say hey, then say bye. Sneaky trick: they’ll have to give you the plate back eventually, which means contacting you or coming over and knocking over on your door - once they do it once they’ll be more comfortable with doing it in the future. Pro mode: “Oh just bring the plate back this weekend if you have time, we’re having a BBQ.”

Men: Wash Your Butthole

I’ve had two separate doctor friends tell me that a shocking number of men they do prostate exams on have shit in their ass crack, especially older men. Apparently there was this homophobic fear of butthole touching among American men the last few generations. I’ve heard similar from veteran friends - lots of kids coming into bootcamp getting reamed for having skidmarks on their underwear. So, apparently this is a thing that needs to be told to some men: when you shower, you gotta wash your butthole. Washing means touching it, not vaguely letting water run on it. Soap on the hand, hand on the butthole. Do it. You’ll smell better and, apparently, it reduces the chance you’ll get hemorrhoids. While you’re at it, wash your balls, I hear tell that a lot of guys got rank ass balls. The expectations for hygiene among western men has been too low for too long, we can’t keep getting away with it.