A psychological excuse to change your life
Temporal landmarks, vibe coding, and owls in towels
Last week I celebrated my birthday, which was a nice reminder that time marches on, whether I like it or not.
It also brought to mind something I once read about called temporal landmarks. These are moments that stand out in time: birthdays, New Year’s Day, Monday mornings, Sunday nights, the first day of the month.
They’re all opportunities to hit a mental reset button. Researchers say they help us create “new mental accounting periods”, drawing a distinct line in the sand between our past and future selves. You can thank this phenomenon for the influx of gym sign-ups on January 1st.
But like any psychological trick, they cut both ways. You can use landmarks to procrastinate (“I’ll sort my life out next month”), or to catastrophize (“once I turn 40, I’m officially old”). But you can also hijack them for your own purposes, like setting your own mental milestones and declaring your next Tuesday as the official start of that thing you’ve been putting off.
I haven’t used them in any particularly impressive way, but just being aware of the pattern makes me notice when one of these mental resets is coming up and gives me a chance to plant something new on the other side of it.
As for aging: it’s never really bothered me. Getting older still beats the alternative.
On the pod
No new episode this week, but next week I’m sharing a conversation about fighting the system from the inside vs. walking away to build something better. In the meantime, if you haven’t, you can check out the previous episode with Evelyn about leaving the 9-5 for YouTube:
Weekly gems
📖 This short paper on temporal landmarks is the one I referenced for this post. An interesting and easy read! Also covered in the book When, which I really enjoyed, even if it made me terrified of Black Wednesday.
🖍️ Rick Rubin (author of the Creative Act) has release The Way of Code, a poetic homage to vibe coding. It’s…. something. I genuinely thought this was a parody at first.
🗞️ Scamming Substack: Is Substack already full of generic AI-slop?
🎙️Perfect Person: A chaotic and hilarious call-in advice show that I’ve been binging lately.
💻 Vadim’s Founder Guide: A great free resource if you’ve ever flirted with starting a tech startup (solo or not).
🤖 The Master Prompt Method: you can “seed” Claude with information that it will read before every single prompt, vastly increasing how useful the results are (and saving you time). I had no idea about this!
🧣 I am far too obsessed with the cuteness overload that is OwlsInTowels.org