I’ve had to give this advice to a few people now, so I thought I’d write an actual post about it for slightly broader distribution.

How are you feeling? Energy levels doing ok? Or maybe you’re feeling a bit tired. In fact, maybe you’ve been feeling tired for quite a long time. It gets a lot of us.

It’s very easy to accept being constantly tired as just a natural state of being. Maybe you’re overworked, stressed or full on burned out. It really does happen.

But a lot of the time if you are feeling constantly drained of energy it is because there is something physically wrong with you and you should see a doctor about it.

It’s extremely easy to suffer from nutritional deficiencies which can cause this. It is especially easy if you’re vegan, or even just vegetarian.

I’ve had this happen to me twice – once with vitamin B12 deficiency, once with vitamin D deficiency. Iron is another common thing you could be deficient in that would cause a lack of energy, though I’ve not personally experienced it. In the case of the vitamin D it was just completely magical watching the problem go away as soon as I started taking supplements. The B12 I was more borderline so the improvement from fixing it was not as dramatic, but for people who have serious problems with it I’ve heard similar reports of magically returning energy levels.

This isn’t necessarily what’s wrong with you, and I’m not in any way competent to offer you medical advice, but if you are having problems with your energy levels and you haven’t seen your doctor about it I would strongly encourage you to go see them about it an ask for a blood test to check for standard nutritional deficiencies. It’s easy, quick and may completely change your life.

Edit for clarification: There is a lot of bullshit in the vitamin and supplement industry. Do not uncritically read this post and go “I have a deficiency! I will buy pills and it will make everything better!”. My advice is not “You have a deficiency. Take supplements” it is “You might have a deficiency. Go see a doctor and find out”

It’s easy to think of creativity as something inherently chaotic and unconstrained. After all, what you can achieve within constraints is a strict subset of what you can achieve without them (that’s what “constraint” means), so you can achieve more and thus be more creative when not constrained, right?

Surprisingly, the opposite often turns out to be true.

Constraining the problem you’re working on often inspires you to be more creative. It forces you out of ruts. It’s easy to fall into familiar patterns and habits. Constraints will often prevent you from following those and force you to explore new solutions. Additionally, it forces you to think about aspects of the problem that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought about, and these new things can inspire you to think about the problem domain in an entirely new way.

Not all constraints are useful for this of course, but I suspect most are.

There’s more I could say about this, but if I expand too much on this point this post will just end up as draft #65 in my list of unfinished posts. I’ll leave you to draw your own tortuous analogy as to why that’s an instance of the effect I’m describing (it probably isn’t).

I write about a lot of things here. Maths, Programming, Voting Theory, Cooking, Fiction and anything else that amuses me. This post however is about something I’ve never written about before (and will probably never write about again). Shaving.

I really hate shaving. I hate shaving with a passion I normally reserve for homeopaths, inconsiderate pedestrians and J2EE.

Unfortunately I also hate having a beard.

By way of compromise I tend to shave only every 4 or 5 days. After a week I’m verging on beard territory, so that’s really too long. But this only accommodates my hatred of shaving, it doesn’t reduce it.

Part of why I hate shaving is how ridiculously gimmicky it is. The shaving companies will go to increasingly elaborate lengths to get you to buy increasingly expensive products. “This razor has five blades! And they’re really small! And it has a built in vibrator, which will totally make your skin happier really!” (Perhaps there needs to be a realrazororparodyrazor site. I sure can’t be bothered to build it though, it would just depress me).

It’s insulting and it’s expensive and, what’s worse, it gives you a really shitty shave.

But there is a way out of this. A secret that Big Shaving has kept from you.

What if I were to tell you that there was a better way? That it is in fact possible to shave without a vibrator. Perhaps even with only one blade? A way to spend 25p instead of £2.25 every time you have to replace one of those damn razor blades. And that you would even get a better shave out of it. (Spoiler: I’m about to tell you that).

There is! Behold the safety razor:

It’s a classic design, one step up from the cutthroat: Most of the quality of shaving, none of the slicing your throat open and sending you to the emergency room. The cheap ones (I use Boots own brand, which I think is the one in the picture above) are typically as good as the expensive ones (because really all it is is a small semi-disposable blade for running across your face. It’s not rocket science: You make it out of decent metal and you make it sharp. That’s it). It gives you a really close shave for a really low price, the blades clean easily and last well, and it probably won’t insult your intelligence when you’re using it (though Gillette do one, so I can’t guarantee it).

It’s not better in every way of course. TANSTAAFL applies, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something (like the idea that you should give them 10x as much money per razor blade). The cost is that you have to be more careful whilst shaving or you’ll get shaving cuts. Not huge gaping wounds, just normal shaving cuts, and they’re completely avoidable once you’ve got the hang of it, but even then shaving is going to be a more methodical process (though not necessarily slower – I find that with a modern razor I have to make more passes in order to get a viable shave).

I wouldn’t go as far as to say to switch to a safety razor has made me not hate shaving, but it’s definitely gone a long way towards it.

Postscripts

• I also strongly prefer shaving oil to shaving foam or gel. However I think this is less an unambiguous win and more of a personal choice, so my advocacy for it isn’t as strong.
• It’s worth looking up some guides on shaving (though I can’t recommend any good ones as I did this a while ago and don’t remember what I used). Chances are you’re doing it wrong
• Sorry, I have no idea whether this is good advice for shaving legs or other parts of your body. It might be. It works well for armpits. Try it and see if you want, but apologies if it turns out to be awful.