What is a practical betterment?
Practical betterments is the silly name I came up with to describe one-off actions that result in continuous benifits. (also the dot com was available)
Put another way — practical betterments are small ways to improve your life without the need for sustained willpower.
To really upgrade your existence requires either sustained effort, the creation of good habits, or changes to your circumstances that may be out of your control.
Practical betterments are not a replacement for therapy, surgery, or radical societal change, or just being a reasonable adult. Cutting the end off your toothbrush will not find you true love.
But wouldn't it be easier to find your true love with a lighter toothbrush? If your answer is no, read on, and I'll try to convince you.
Why practical betterments?
Whatever you think makes a better life — growing old with your soulmate, improving the welfare of fish, or crashing supercars into street furniture — to pursue that life requires freedom.
Freedom means having the resources and mental space to decide what a good life looks like to you — and the opportunity to pursue it.
Practical betterments are simple actions you take now, to save you time, attention, conscious effort, mental space, money, or improve your resilience and safety in the future. All benefits that will help you to achieve any reasonable goal.
It's hard to imagine a goal that couldn't be easier achieved with more of these resources — and being dead definitely decreases your opportunities.
If your goal is to be distracted, stressed, and dead, then of course, these don't apply to you.
As marginal as these benefits may be — they are benefits. So I ask you:
Could you more easily improve the welfare of fish if your gas boiler is running more efficiently?
Would you be more or less likely to fulfill your dream of crashing a supercar if you created a space for your keys?
Would you be able to dedicate more of your energy to finding your true love, if you weren't weighed down by
5gof unnessesary toothbrush?
I think so.
The posts on this site may be great advice, or may be garbage, some of them might be attempts at humour — some may even be attempts to sell you things you don't need.
I have personally enacted every one of these practical betterments — and I believe that collectively they have made my life better — and that this way of thinking about problems is a useful one.
This is self-care — a fun way of looking after myself. It doesn't matter how small the action is — if it measurably improves my life and I enjoy doing it, then it's worth doing.
I hope you find them useful too.
Thanks for reading,
— Nathaniel