Braeden Crabtree

E-Commerce Enthusiast | Event Rental Business | Former O&G maintenance electrician.

[Degen CPA @drewvento]

Apple is 100% messing with the IPhone keypads. I know for a fact I’m not making this many typos.

[James | PlagueTV @PlagueTV]

I was just thinking that airports would be 10x better if we added a bunch of people that dont need to be there.

[DAN KOE @thedankoe]

The paradox of life is that everything is a disaster and everything is just fine. The difference is where you put your attention.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

A peak life advice from James Clear:

“You are not your grand plans. You are your daily patterns.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“Pressure is a privilege. It means things are expected of you.”

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

I’m in love with this sentence:

“The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get home.”

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

WARNING: Longer post (but worth reading or bookmarking for later).

Your life has seasons.

Each one is unique. Characterized by its own distinct desires, struggles, opportunities, and identity.

But one reflection I've had recently is just how easy it is to completely disassociate with the present season.

To give all your time and energy toward a longing for some nostalgic memory of a prior season or an anticipation for some beautiful state of a future season.

You look back at the past and all you see is sunshine. Because it all worked out. You forget (or glaze over) the struggle you endured. You're here today. You made it. You're alive. You're doing fine.

You look forward at the future and dream on what could be. You'll have so much more. More freedom. More purpose. More health. More deep connection. More everything.

The past is beautiful and the future feels limitless. So, logically, you slowly start to treat everything about the present as the bridge. A dash connecting your past and your future. A gap to be crossed as quickly as possible.

Everything you do today is in anticipation of some eventual end state.

I'm doing this now, so that I can have that later.

Unfortunately, the danger of that dissociation with the present is significant. You may spend your entire life living for a future that has a decidedly mirage-like property. You inch closer, but when it's right in front of you, it disappears and reappears on the horizon.

You may spend your entire life skipping through the present, deferring your presence, your joy, and your very humanity to a future that never comes.

In a classic French fable, a young boy is gifted with a magic ball of golden thread. He's told that if he simply pulls on the thread, time will leap forward. The catch, of course, is that once it's pulled, it can never be put back.

The young boy takes advantage of the newfound powers. Each time he's faced with a boring day at school, a frustrating set of chores, or a scolding from his parents, he pulls the thread, skipping through to the good parts.

As an adult, he continues, leaping through mundane struggles in his marriage, the friction of having a newborn, and the boredom at work. He finds himself pulling on the thread more and more, avoiding even the most minor inconveniences of his life.

But when he wakes up one day and sees an old man looking back at him in the mirror, he's filled with regret. He realizes in that moment that as he chose to skip through the boredom, struggles, and friction, so too did he miss the real texture of being alive.

How often do we all do the same? How easily do we default into this disassociation? Disconnecting from the present in anticipation of some future.

A mentor recently asked me this:

"Where are you going and why are you in such a rush?"

It hit me hard.

And to be honest, I haven't stopped replaying those words since he said them.

Why are you in such a rush?

The world wants you to rush into everything. Rushed decisions. Rushed conversations. Rushed relationships. Rushed timelines.

In doing so, you slowly relinquish your agency. You give up your claim on your own life. Surrender authorship to a pen that was never even yours.

In a world that wants you to rush, the ultimate act of rebellion is presence.

Be in the season you're in. Don't romanticize the past, don't fantasize the future. Be here. Be now. Be in this. All of its texture, depth, and struggle. All of its joy, tension, and pain. Sit with the uncertainty. Become friends with it. Fall in love with it.

Because every single thing you do today is something your younger self dreamed of and something your older self will wish they could go back and do.

The good old days are happening, right now.

And the next time you find yourself skipping through the present, remember these words:

Where are you going and why are you in such a rush?

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: Have more hobbies and fewer opinions. Learn an instrument. Plant a garden. Build something with your hands. Cook. Paint. Run. The happiest people I know spend less time debating life and more time actually living it.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your hippocampus doesn't encode days that feel identical. If this Tuesday looks like last Tuesday, your brain files them as a single compressed memory. The second day never gets its own folder.

This is why decades feel like they disappeared. The hippocampus uses novelty as its filter for "worth storing." Repetitive routines trigger temporal compression. Same commute, same desk, same dinner, same bedtime: the brain deduplicates the whole sequence into one entry. You lived 365 days. You filed 40.

Research from Jeffrey Zacks at Washington University has tracked this with fMRI. As people move through continuous experience, the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex fire in discrete bursts at moments the brain flags as "something changed." Each burst becomes a retrievable memory later. In stretches with no boundaries, the bursts flatten. Participants with more boundaries in a given period remembered more of it afterward. Segmentation literally builds memory.

Sleep is the second mechanism. During slow-wave sleep, the hippocampus replays the day's episodes and transfers them to the neocortex for long-term storage. This is when memory actually gets filed. Cut sleep short and encoding efficiency drops. Chronic sleep debt means experiences you had never complete the transfer. The memory existed. It just never made it to disk.

The third mechanism is where dopamine meets attention. Novel stimuli trigger the ventral tegmental area to release dopamine into the hippocampus, which gates what gets encoded. Mind-wandering does the opposite. When your default mode network takes over (phone scrolling, rumination, email during dinner), the hippocampus stops tagging the present. You were at the wedding. Your hippocampus was in your inbox.

Three independent systems working against you. Novelty collapse compressing repetitive days into single entries. Sleep debt blocking consolidation. Default mode network swallowing attention before encoding completes.

The fix comes straight out of the mechanism. New locations, new food, new people, new routes home. The brain needs boundaries to build memories. Go to bed earlier so replay actually runs. Put the phone down when something is happening so the dopamine signal can fire.

The more forgettable the day, the shorter the decade.

[INFOSEC F0X 🔥 @infosec_fox]

OneDrive: “your file is saved”
Me: “oh cool where is it?”
Onedrive: “where’s what?”

[Braeden Crabtree @braedencrabtree]

We must be able to end the “put your phones on airplane mode” charade by now.

[Jett ♛ @iky_fwjett]

i just found out the older British woman who’s been looking after my children is actually my EX-HUSBAND IN A COSTUME ?????

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

There's always a tweet.

[Braeden Crabtree @braedencrabtree]

I’m once again begging Apple to let me turn off people’s reactions in a group chat. “Wow 12 new messages? Oh nm, 12 people gave a thumbs up to someone saying K”.

[Your Best Version @YourPrimePath]

I'm in love with this quote :

"If you can overthink the worst, why can't you overthink the best."

[Braeden Crabtree @braedencrabtree]

@X_FINALBOSS HOW

[Braeden Crabtree @braedencrabtree]

@GlobalEdmonton That’s a BB gun. Can be bought at Canadian Tire with no PAL by anyone.

[Oren John @orenmeetsworld]

everything you've done in your life has culminated in this amazing moment in time where every desire you've ever had can be fulfilled by information on the internet + insane bias for action

ignore noise, lock in

[Dear Son. @DearS_o_n]

Dear son,

[Brooks Otterlake @i_zzzzzz]

I have learned there's a person on the current season of Love Island who keeps using the term "escape goat" to refer to a kind of exit strategy, like a goat that you hop on and ride out of a difficult situation. Not sure why everyone isn't talking about this