Experimentation is broad; the way I focus my experimentation is by prioritizing what impacts the most important parts of life. This is a living document, growing over time as a backbone to organize Experimentalist Life: # 1) Health There is a saying: the healthy person has 1,000 dreams, and the sick person has only one. Without health almost nothing else in life matters or can be prioritized. There are multiple ways health can crowd out other priorities: being stuck in bed due to physical injury, depression taking away the ability to experience meaning, and fatigue leaving a person without the energy to act on what's meaningful. I have experienced and overcome all three. I see health as a cornerstone in the foundation of a meaningful life for everyone. To be written later: [[Never let a good health crisis go to waste]] # 2) Connection with people I remember hearing about [The Harvard Study of Adult Development](https://www.ted.com/talks/robert_waldinger_what_makes_a_good_life_lessons_from_the_longest_study_on_happiness/transcript?subtitle=en) about a decade ago. The key takeaway is how connections with people consistently ranked as most impactful on quality of life when studied over a whole lifetime. I didn't feel that way at the time, however I now have enough life experience and have asked enough people for their perspective to be highly confident in the importance of connection with people in the many forms it takes: family, friends, community, intimate partner, etc. # 3) Connection with nature Spending time in nature is more essential than people realize. Personally I find time in nature is one of the most reliable ways to reach a 8 to 9 / 10 level of happiness. The list of benefits is incredibly long and far reaching including faster healing, lower stress, better mood, enhanced cognition, etc. I'm looking forward to sharing more. # 4) Wealth Is more than money. Wealth is the full set of resources for living well and the ability to turn resources into experiences rich with meaning. More concisely, enjoying the journey of life. # 5) Spirituality and psychedelics Putting psychedelics at #5 was intentional, surveys of people who used psychedelics consistently find the experience to be in the top 5 most meaningful experiences. That is true for me too, I only explored psychedelics after repeatedly seeing studies showing great potential to solve even challenging issues like depression, ptsd, and more. * The research about psychedelics being in the top 5 for most people also has [promising replications](https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr781003) for further confidence in the findings. * The best way I know to describe how psychedelics work is by amplifying the meaning from other experiences. Therefore it's important to get the most other areas in place first. # 6) Meaningful Work The most common icebreaker question I've heard is: what do you do? Most people work for tens of thousands of hours over a lifetime, clearly work matters. How can we adapt to make work worth doing even as AI is surpassing humans in a growing set of ways? * Flow state provides even more meaning for me than even building software that impacts over a 100 million people. * Creating net+ impact (sum of benefits and harms is overall positive) * Work with people who build each other up and are mostly enjoyable to be around. # 7) Being an informed and active citizen Politics and the causes represented matter greatly. I hope you feel similarly! Democracy and voting requires informed and active citizens to work effectively. However, there is research showing what people most strongly discriminate on and approve of discriminating on is [political views and affiliation](https://books.google.com/books?id=pBhdEAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA399&ots=fpOrq33Wno&dq=Iyengar%20and%20Westwood%20political%20discrimination%20acceptability&lr&pg=PA399#v=onepage&q=Iyengar%20and%20Westwood%20political%20discrimination%20acceptability&f=false). My conclusion is mixing the political with the other aims of Experimentalist Life would detract from the mission. I aim to transcend such divisions and gather methods useful for anyone curious enough to experiment for themselves. * Interestingly one of the earlier uses of the term experimentalist was actually political and one of the inspirations I referenced while developing Experimentalist Life. [Quite a fascinating bit of history where the experimentalist approach was applied even to politics.](https://participedia.net/method/5288)