The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Overthinking Everything

drmaciver.substack.com

Miscellaneous thoughts as I figure out life. Click to read Overthinking Everything, by David R. MacIver, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

Essays / personalGeneral

’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
145 from 11 May 2020 to 24 Feb 2026
Posting
now and then (5 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://drmaciver.substack.com/feed

2026 3

  1. On Mediocrity
  2. The hard problem with hard problems
  3. How to be less box-shaped

2025 10

  1. Making connections
  2. Reduce the need for active stabilisation
  3. How to find things (an intro to binary search)
  4. How pen caps work
  5. COVID is doing the rounds again
  6. Yes you can hum while holding your nose
  7. How to say what you're good at
  8. Have you tried not having the problem?
  9. How I clean my kitchen at the end of the day
  10. Behaving as if you were trying to succeed

2024 21

  1. Setting up my new blogging engine
  2. Meditations on taste
  3. How to read more books
  4. Using what you're given
  5. Losing yourself in an audiobook
  6. Looking for new projects
  7. Creative fury
  8. Larger selves
  9. Nice problems to have
  10. How to rest
  11. Using a list to manage executive function
  12. Words and bodies
  13. Carving up clouds
  14. Aesthetics, identity, and Real objects
  15. This is important
  16. The mundanity of magical practice
  17. Turning paid subscriptions back on
  18. My (no-longer-)secret magical practice
  19. The Manual that solves all your problems
  20. Emotional and physical therapy
  21. Heterogeneity

2023 13

  1. Why to explain things you already know
  2. Decisions depend on the decision maker
  3. Completing completable projects
  4. Two types of work
  5. You can't "solve" procrastination
  6. In praise of turning people into dinosaurs
  7. What's stopping you?
  8. Why do you do the things that you do?
  9. Starting from where you are
  10. Reading philosophy for the examples
  11. How things come to be as they are
  12. The problem shows you how to solve the problem
  13. Cohering and decohering

2022 20

  1. Learning to exercise agency
  2. How to think about estimation strategy
  3. What is it like to read LitRPG?
  4. Estimation is inseparable from planning
  5. How to pick a number for any purpose
  6. How to think about task estimation
  7. Learning and teaching practical wisdom
  8. A good start
  9. Parts of you haven't grown up yet
  10. How do we treat unique talents?
  11. Learning to walk through walls
  12. Learning from others' stories
  13. Delight in the imperfect
  14. Describing imaginary experiences
  15. Education by punishment
  16. Ubj gb ernq EBG13 (How to read ROT13)
  17. Looking for dragons drives progress
  18. How to understand groups of people
  19. People don't work as much as you think
  20. Daily writing in January

2021 45

  1. Labelling Feelings 101
  2. The first hard choice
  3. Discontinuing paid subscriptions
  4. How to make easy decisions
  5. Why is it hard to choose what to do?
  6. Current thinking: Play and self-improvement
  7. Current thinking 2021-08-22
  8. If you're stuck, try something different
  9. How to give good advice
  10. How does good taste work?
  11. Telegraph your moves
  12. Relaxing the newsletter schedule
  13. Unscheduled Hiatus
  14. Some thoughts on ethics and narrative
  15. How to use thought experiments
  16. Ethical decision-making and life patterns
  17. Communities construct a sense of purpose
  18. Parts of you haven't grown up yet
  19. How to teach the local style
  20. Some notes from behind the scenes
  21. How to triage your inboxes
  22. Notes towards planning the future
  23. Record yourself to coach yourself
  24. How do we treat unique talents?
  25. How to do everything
  26. Understanding your health is hard
  27. Life is a Series of Events
  28. How to be weird
  29. Being Disappointed in People
  30. Returning to the World
  31. Stop Telling People What To Do
  32. Choosing what to do
  33. Mathematical Cranks, Information Overload, and Predicting the Pandemic
  34. I Quit my PhD
  35. Difficult Problems and Hard Work
  36. Intellectual DIY
  37. Pandemic Moods
  38. Unplanned Break
  39. A Fractal of Lies
  40. Believing That You Can Stop
  41. Starting Again
  42. Temporary Hiatus
  43. A Few Book Recommendations
  44. The Habit Cycle
  45. Reflections on 2020

2020 33

  1. Life-Complete Problems
  2. Trust
  3. Decoupling
  4. Shameless Self-Promotion
  5. Emotional Health
  6. Have you tried just being good at it?
  7. Costing Up Solutions
  8. Don't just try harder
  9. Common Knowledge of Feelings
  10. How to Become Smarter
  11. Monocropping
  12. Self Curiosity
  13. A Brief Introduction to Shadow Work
  14. Refusing to Learn
  15. In Defence of Half-Arsing
  16. Overthinking Overthinking
  17. Positively Deviant
  18. Distributing blame
  19. The Usefulness of Bad People
  20. Being, Acting, and Feeling Responsible
  21. Here's Some I Made Earlier
  22. Writing to Understand
  23. Fascination Procrastination
  24. Being Deep in an Abstraction Stack
  25. Maintaining Niche Interests
  26. What do you do?
  27. No Newsletter This Week, AMA
  28. Unusual Foundations
  29. You should complain about it
  30. Why am I not working on my PhD?
  31. Burnout as Acedia
  32. Life as Nonproductive Act
  33. How to do hard things