Charlie Rogers-Smith

I am very grateful to the following people, in general, and for their helpful feedback on this post: Nick Cammarata, Kaj Sotala, Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg, Sam Clarke, Mrinank Sharma, Matej Vrzala, Vlad Firoiu, Ollie Bray, Alan Taylor, Max Heitmann, Rose Hadshar, and Michelle Hutchinson. I was on a plane to Malta when I realised I had lost something precious. I was struggling to meditate. I knew there was some disposition that made meditation easier for me in the past, something to do with internal harmony and compassion and affection. Alas, these handles failed to impact me. On a whim, I decided to read and meditate on some of my notes. 3h later, I had recovered the precious thing. It was one of the most special experiences of my life. I felt massive relief, but I was also a little scared--I knew that this state would likely pass. I made a promise to myself to not forget what I felt like, then, and to live from that place more. This post is, in part, an attempt to honour that promise. I spent most of my holiday in Malta reading about and meditating on the precious thing, and I now feel like I'm in a place where I can share something useful. This post is about self-love. Until recently, I didn’t know that self-love was something I could aim for; that it was something worth aiming for. My guess is that I thought of self-love as something vaguely Good, a bit boring, a bit of a chore, a bit projection-loaded (I’m lovable; I love me so you can love me too), and lumped together with self-care (e.g. taking a bath). Then I found Nick Cammarata on Twitter and was blown away by the experiences he was describing. Nick tweeted about self-love from Sep 2020 to May 2021, and then moved on to other things. His is the main body of work related to self-love that I’m aware of, and I don't want it to be lost to time. My main intention with this post is to summarise Nick’s work and build on it with my experiences; I want to get the word out on self-love, so that you can figure out wh