In my psychotherapy practice, I have seen more and more people whom I call “Unhappy Achievers”—people who regularly achieve what they strive for, but still feel anxious, depressed, and empty. Those around them may believe they have it all together—and on the surface they do. But inexplicably, deep down, they often feel miserable. Here’s why:

Unhappy Achievers frequently have great jobs, attractive partners, and lifestyles that are the envy of their friends. They may notch win after win, believing the next achievement will finally allow them to relax. But any satisfaction they feel vanishes quickly, and they feel more compelled than ever to start on the next attempt to impress. Many Unhappy Achievers are socially successful and appear outgoing. They may even be seen as the “life of the party.” But they secretly feel exhausted when they’re surrounded by people and can only truly relax when they’re alone.

On top of this, Unhappy Achievers are often embarrassed to admit that they are struggling. Who could blame them? With so many people striving for material and professional success, who wants to admit that they feel unhappy, even anguished? And because it’s so counterintuitive, I’ve found that almost none of these Unhappy Achievers can make sense of why they feel the way they do. Too often, they feel that there’s simply something shameful and broken about them. And that makes them feel lonelier.

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There is ample evidence that memories are not saved in our brains but reconstructed whenever we need them. This is a very dynamic and highly flawed process and prone to a lot of errors. People can implant false memories in other people with relative ease, particularly if they are trusted members of their social circle. Indeed, our memories are so flawed that the value of eyewitness testimony in court trials is by now much diminished because we know how unreliable such testimonies are. One can influence memories even with perceived friends that one has never met.

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The FTC says spam calls are down 50% since 2021, even though it doesn’t feel like it.

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Piper Sandler’s 2024 Teen Survey:

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Americans spent $186 billion on their pets last year, more than they spent on childcare.

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NBA ratings are down, and some think it has to do with the rising number of threes teams are taking per game.

China’s economy is bigger than the entire rest of Asia’s 30 countries combined:

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As a hospice nurse, Julie McFadden spends her days caring for people near the ends of their lives. The job gives her a window into the regrets people most commonly express on their deathbeds, which she says offers insight into how people can live better, more fulfilling lives. McFadden says she hears these regrets most often from her hospice patients:

• They wish they’d appreciated their health when they had it. “They didn’t understand how lucky they were to have a healthy body,” McFadden says. “That’s the No. 1 thing I hear.”
• They wish they hadn’t worked their life away. Some people worked intensively throughout the years leading up to their retirement, leaving them with limited time to appreciate life.
• They regret how they navigated their relationships. Her patients frequently expressed misgivings over not saying sorry when they should have, not reconnecting sooner to their estranged family member or friends.
• They regret caring too much about what people thought. Not living the life they wanted, but living the life people around them wanted.

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The Reality of Growth in Life and Business:

Life and business growth are often misunderstood. Many people envision progress as a straight, upward trajectory—steady, predictable, and consistent. But in reality, growth is non-linear. It is defined by long periods of minimal change or slow progress, where it may feel like little is happening. These are the periods of preparation, learning, and process—the times when the foundation for future success is quietly being built.

Then come the spikes: the moments of significant wins that redefine everything. In business, it might be a major sale, a breakthrough partnership, or an idea that suddenly scales. In life, it could be the birth of a child, meeting a lifelong partner, or a moment of clarity that changes your path. These “big wins” seem to happen all at once, but they are the result of the groundwork laid during those slower periods.

Understanding this rhythm is key to staying motivated. The quiet times are not wasted; they are essential. And the spikes, while transformative, only come to those who commit to the process. Growth is not linear—it’s a journey of patience, persistence, and faith in the moments that will ultimately reshape your life.

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Data is mounting about the impact our attitudes and beliefs have on our health and longevity.  Examining data from the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement, a survey conducted from 1975 to 1995 that included views on aging; comparing early attitudes with death records, there is a striking correlation: People who reported positive age beliefs early on lived, on average, 7.5 years longer than those who had more negative beliefs. The advantage held even after controlling for age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness and health.

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The average P/E ratio of the top 10 largest companies in the S&P 500 is now almost 50. The historical average trailing P/E ratio for stocks is 17.5 (the higher the number, the more expensive stocks are relative to their earnings).

New research shows that it is specific and salient memories that influence our investment decisions rather than the collective memories (aka ‘experience’) we have. It matters for our investment decisions (in the stock market for example) if we have a memory of a good or bad experience investing in stocks. But it also matters if this memory is of a personal experience or a more distant, impersonal memory. If we have personal experiences, it makes us ‘immune’ or rather less receptive to expert advice. We think we know best because we have first-hand experience with the situation.

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The internet commoditized information, and the widespread availability of information has devalued it because you can now find some data point, anecdote, or statistic to support any possible viewpoint, creating an environment ripe for echo chambers and false signals, which we saw this election cycle. To cut through those false signals, you have to be careful in deciding which information to look for. You have to ask good questions. 

The (Presidential election) polls made the mistake of asking the folks they were surveying who they were voting for, not accounting for inaccurate responses. As a result, they got faulty information. Théo’s method, asking who “your neighbors” are voting for, proved to be more accurate, as it reduced the risk that someone would change their answer to save face (they didn’t want to say they were voting for Trump, even though they were).

If you’re trying to decide if you’re bullish or bearish on a stock, you’ll find a million arguments supporting both stances. If you have a headache, you are only three WebMD searches away from convincing yourself that you’re having an aneurysm. The antidote to this abundance of information is distillation: figuring out which information is important and discarding the rest. But distillation is downstream of interrogation: if you ask the right questions, the information filters itself.

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The average American spends 16 minutes per day reading. Only 46% of Americans read a book in the past year, and only 18% have read ten or more. Meanwhile, we spend nearly three hours watching TV and two hours and fourteen minutes on social media (often while watching TV). The way serious people learn is by reading. The way they share important information is by writing it down. Read, read, read. Rich people read a lot — Forbes asked a while ago, and the modal answer was two hours per day. The science backs this up: reading improves your ability to focus, slows memory deterioration and enhances memory, boosts verbal skills, and improves your ability to connect different pieces of information and ideas. 

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The cost of college is quietly going down. In-state tuition for a public university is down to $11,610 a year, compared to $12,140 a decade ago. After grant aid is applied, the average student would pay $2,480, a decrease from the 2014-2015 school year, when that amount totaled $4,140. For private schools, the net price is $16,510 a year, down from $19,330 back in 2006. Even sticker prices, the cost that is displayed by schools before any aid if applied, have mostly gone down in the last decade. The report said sticker prices in the last decade rose only 4 percent at private, nonprofit schools, decreased 4 percent at public four-year colleges and went down 9 percent at public two-year ones.  The report also showed that student debt overall is down. Those graduating in debt with bachelor’s degrees are down 10 percent, or $5,600, from a decade ago, with the average debt among borrowers now at $27,100.

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The terrifying average cost of weddings, by state, for any of the fathers of daughters out there:

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What does a once-in-a-generation investment opportunity look like? It’s when the dominant investment them of the last 10 to 15 years peaks and new leadership begins to emerge from a new asset class.

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How risky stocks are to a given investor depends upon which part of the life cycle he or she is in. For a younger investor, stocks aren’t as risky as they seem. For the middle-aged, they’re pretty risky. And for a retired person, they can be nuclear-level toxic. The reason why stocks aren’t very risky for a young person is that you have a lot of “human capital” (the ability to make money working) left. On the eve of retirement, you don’t have any of that. Stop playing when you’ve won the game.

Great article from Louis-Vincent Gave discussing why most investors don’t realize how far ahead China has moved ahead of the rest of the world in many industries.

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Young people are not watching sports (live). The average age for broadcast prime-time NFL viewers is 62.5. Younger people have shorter attention spans. And we know for a fact they have infinite choices in terms of how to spend their time. So there’s tons of things vying for their time. And there are ways they can engage with a sport without spending three hours watching a live event. They can follow it on social platforms. They can get highlights as they happen. They can play fantasy. They can engage with individual athletes and immerse themselves in their fashion taste or musician tastes. They can read trade rumors or draft rumors

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Marijuana use among teens is dropping. Biennial data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey from 2011 to 2021 included 88,183 adolescents in grades 9th through 12th showed that the percentage of adolescents who reported current marijuana use dropped significantly from 23.1% in 2011 to 15.8% in 2021. Although current marijuana use declined significantly for both girls and boys over time, in 2021 girls were more likely (17.8%) to currently use marijuana than boys (13.6%). In 2011, the opposite was true, with boys (25.9%) being more likely to use marijuana than girls (20.1%).

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If you want people to respond to your emails, be brief, direct, and vulnerable.

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Do we need to throw out our black plastic spatulas? Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

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The crypto industry accounted for almost half the money contributed by corporations to political action committees in the first half of 2024.

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American politicians are the oldest in the world. The percentage over age 60 looks very different than most other countries:

Six years ago, Kevin Kelly celebrated his 68th birthday by gifting his children 68 bits of advice he wished he had gotten when he was their age. Every birthday after that he added more bits of advice for them until he had a whole book of bits. In a few days he’ll will turn 73, so again on his birthday, he offers an additional set of 101 bits of advice he wished he had known earlier:

• Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.
• Interview your parents while they are still alive. Keep asking questions while you record. You’ll learn amazing things. Or hire someone to make their story into an oral history, or documentary, or book. This will be a tremendous gift to them and to your family. 
• Asking “what-if?” about your past is a waste of time; asking “what-if?” about your future is tremendously productive.
• When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.
• Discover people whom you love doing “nothing” with, and do nothing with them on a regular basis. The longer you can maintain those relationships, the longer you will live.
• Write your own obituary, the one you’d like to have, and then everyday work towards making it true.
• The highest form of wealth is deciding you have enough.
• Very small things accumulate until they define your larger life. Carefully choose your everyday things.
• Humility is mostly about being very honest about how much you owe to luck.

Spotify is paying hundreds of millions on an annualized basis to audiobook publishers, according to internal figures obtained by Axios. The company has also doubled the number of titles available to premium members in the past few months from 150,000 to 300,000. The figures, confirmed by a Spotify spokesperson, suggest Spotify’s entry into the audiobook market is helping to significantly grow the pie for audiobook publishers at large. Without Spotify, the audiobook industry in the U.S. grew 14% in unit sales between Q4 2022 and Q4 2023, according to Bookstat. With Spotify, it grew 28%.

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Research suggests that unearned income is at best inferior as a happiness multiplier and at worst a Faustian bargain. People constantly ask me what they should help their adult kids pay for, if they themselves have been lucky enough to do well in life. The dilemma they have is that they’re proud of having earned their way and feel that their self-reliance, not a handout, is the gift they want to pass on; yet they also feel that it’s stingy to hold out on their nearest and dearest, rather than share their good fortune. Here’s a rule of thumb to help resolve that dilemma: If you can afford to help your adult kids, pay for investment, not consumption. In practice, that means: Education? Absolutely. Vacation? No way. Staking a business? Yes, if it seems a viable proposition (as opposed to mere whim or lifestyle choice). Wine cellar? Don’t be ridiculous. A down payment on a house? Judgment call. In this way, you are giving generously—to help them earn their own success.

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If it feels like the S&P 500 has always outperformed everything else in the world (and always will), you only need to go back to the 2000 – 2009 decade to see that cycles always change:

How expensive stocks are when you buy them (price to earnings ratio) has a direct correlation to the future returns.

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It’s so common for people’s memories about a time to become disconnected from how they actually felt at the time. When thinking about our own lives, we don’t remember how we actually felt in the past; We remember how we think we should have felt, given what we know today. “You should have been happy and calm, given where things ended up,” you say to your past self. But your past self had no idea where things would end up. Uncertainty dictates nearly everything in the current moment, but looking back we pretend it never existed. Understanding why economic nostalgia is so powerful – why it’s almost impossible to remember how uncertain things were in the past when you know how the story ends – helps explain what I think is the most important lesson in economic history, that’s true for most people most of the time: “The past wasn’t as good as you remember. The present isn’t as bad as you think. The future will be better than you anticipate.”

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Success has become overplaybooked. math competitions take naturally very smart kids and focus them entirely on training for specific math tests. The game selects for people who are smart enough and can train the most and learn the best. In the process, it kills polymaths. The problem isn’t that kids are competing or studying hard, but that they’re narrowing. One of the reasons kids can’t (or won’t) read full books any more might be that books contain a lot of superfluous information that won’t be on the test. There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy?, so teachers don’t make kids sit down and read Tolstoy. Or anything long and challenging. The problem isn’t that they don’t know Tolstoy, specifically, but that they might be missing out on the one book that ignites something in them that makes them want to learn.

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College students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. Teachers have noticed this problem everywhere. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. Students tell their college professors that, at their public high school, they have never been required to read an entire book. They have been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover. The anecdote helped explain the change teachers were seeing in their students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.

The percentage of Americans with obesity fell for the first time in 45 years. The Ozempic effect is here:

Overdoses have hopefully peaked as well:

A higher price to earnings ratio means a country’s stock market is more expensive. A lower number is less expensive. It’s the price you are paying for the earnings of the companies.

Average of Foreign Developed Stock Markets: 20
Average of Foreign Emerging Stock Markets: 19

United States Stock Market: 35

h/t: Meb Faber & Cambria Funds

Status leads people to assume something about us that we might otherwise have had to prove. It’s a pattern-matching mechanism that allows us to quickly filter and process information in a world defined by incomplete knowledge. We live in a time-constrained world where don’t have the capacity to evaluate everyone on merit alone, and status is our way of expediting that evaluation process. And let’s not kid ourselves, most of us care a lot about status, to the point that we’ll sacrifice money for it. In a survey of 1,500 office workers, seven out of 10 said they would forego a raise for a higher status job title.

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Probability has no memory. Just because you’ve had a streak of bad days doesn’t mean you’re due for a good one, something known as The Gambler’s Fallacy. However, in real life, many (if not most) events are not, in fact, independent occurrences. In statistical terms, they are governed by the hazard function: what’s the likelihood that something will happen in a given time interval given that it has not happened already? The hundredth railroad car on a passing train portends the caboose with greater likelihood than the third car.

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Buy this, not that: Buy term life insurance, not whole life insurance. Buy retirement accounts, not annuities. Buy individual disability insurance, not group disability insurance. Buy experiences, not stuff.

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There are only 4,300 US stocks, down from 7,300 in 1996. Meanwhile, the number of private companies backed by private equity has ballooned to 11,200 from 1,900 during the past two decades. It’s also no longer necessary for many companies. Private equity is awash with cash, making it easier for businesses to raise capital from private sources. So, why go public? It’s time to consider the real possibility that the stock market has become a dumping ground for businesses too weak to attract capital in private markets.

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The market doesn’t care who is President:

The ultimate success metric is whether you get what you want out of life. But that’s harder than it sounds because it’s easy to try to copy someone who wants something you don’t. It’s possible to be humble and learn from other people while also recognizing that the best strategy for you is the one closest aligned with your unique personality and skills.

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Some thought-provoking examples of our perception of time and why slowing some things down is not only important but may actually make them better. If you give an engineer a train ride and say, “make it better,” they will look for options on how to make the trip shorter, a faster commute. If you give a train ride to Disney, they will say “how can we make this train ride more enjoyable and fun for the passengers?”

The speedometer below shows how many minutes it takes to arrive somewhere based on your speed. You can see that at the beginning, the value of going faster is enormous. As you hit about 65 miles per hour, the value falls off a cliff while the danger of increasing your speed rises exponentially.

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In the digital thunderdome of LinkedIn hustlers, Twitter thread bros, and Instagram “success stories,” there’s a piece of advice I continue to see shared, repackaged in various forms but always carrying the same core message: surround yourself with the most ambitious and successful people you can find.

But following this advice there’s a risk that goes unspoken, especially for people susceptible to gurus in the first place. It’s the danger of losing yourself. In a desperate bid to absorb ambition and catch the same waves as high achievers, you risk becoming a satellite: a small, rotating body constantly reflecting the light of someone else’s star, but never finding the space to let your own light shine. The cult of personality in our world is real, and many are essentially just part of a kind of self-worth Ponzi scheme.

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This poll reads like a group of people that have been on drugs for a long time, know they’re awful, but cannot stop using them:

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People are biased towards solving problems through addition rather than subtraction. The reason? Because adding something makes you feel like you are advancing, while taking something away makes you feel like you are retreating. We see this dynamic across all parts of the economy, and society at large. the case can be made that we live in an era of too much. Too much information, too much stuff, too many choices, and too many distractions. As a result, there is a good chance that the path to happier lives and investment portfolios performance, might start by taking things away.

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Should Europeans put 72% of their portfolios into 1 foreign country? Obviously, the same question should be asked of Americans, even though they live in that country. As of September 2024, the U.S. represents 72% of the MSCI World Index. Many passive investors simply buy into this widely adopted benchmark, but is that a prudent approach?

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A writer that knows he will soon die looks back on the things he is grateful for.

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A look at why work sucks for most people right now, why A.I. will soon take away most of those jobs, and why it could ultimately be a good thing for the world.

1. The primary reason we’re seeing all this disruption in the job market is because we’ve been part of a mass delusion about the very nature of work.
2. We told ourselves that millions of corporate workforce jobs—that pay good salaries, have good benefits, and allow you to save for retirement—were somehow a natural feature of the universe.
3. In fact, that entire paradigm was just a temporary feature of our civilization, caused by builders and creators not being able to do the work required by themselves. And that’s going away.
4. But it’s ok.
5. Most of the jobs sucked anyway, and they took up most of the daily waking hours we were supposed to be spending with family and friends.
6. Plus even if this transition happens really fast, it still won’t be overnight. Big things take a while.
7. And most importantly—what waits for us on the other side is a better way to live. A more human way to live—where we identify as individuals rather than corporate workers and exchange value and meaning as part of a new human-centered economy.

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“A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic.” The reason that tragedies stick with us is because every tragedy represents a story, and stories resonate with us. Stories are undervalued in our world today. As the speed of information continues to accelerate, we rush to “get to the point. We want to lead with numbers, exchange prose for bulleted lists, and replace nuance with formulas. But people aren’t algorithms. We are irrational, emotional, imperfect creatures, and stories are the best medium we have for communicating ideas across our irrationalities, emotions, and imperfections.

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Before we conclude that manifestation (the law of attraction) is a waste of time, or worse, we should note that the studies above tend to look only at manifestation in which a person envisions just an outcome they want. But a person can also envision the process of working toward improvement—and this turns out to have scientifically measurable and different effects. If you believe happiness is not under your control, you generally won’t do the work to get happier; if you believe happiness comes from your personal choices and behaviors, you will probably make an effort to improve your well-being. In other words, manifesting happiness as a destination to which you might gain access is futile, but understanding happiness as a direction based on your habits can work wonders.

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Great newsletter from Lyn Alden walking through the reasons why we will continue to have enormous structural government deficits moving forward and the implications on the global economy and financial assets.

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Ten small actions to improving life today.

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Nobody knows whether stocks will be up or down tomorrow. Occasionally some newsworthy development is the clear driver of stock market movement, but usually daily market watchers are studying randomness, putting themselves at risk of missing the forest through the trees.  Price movement always comes before the narrative. Reality is much more complex.

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OnlyFans now generates $6.3 billion in annual gross revenues, up from $300 million five years earlier. A reason for OnlyFans success is its high revenue share rate (with its content creators) – 80% – which far exceeds that which a creator might get as a performer working for a production company or other agency. OnlyFans creators collected $5.3 billion in 2023, a 19% increase year-over-year. Many OnlyFans creators now treat sites such as Reddit, Imgur, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter as “front doors” for OnlyFans customer acquisition. OnlyFans has paid its two owners $1.1 billion in dividends since 2019, with $472 million paid in 2023 alone.

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While NBA team valuations have soared, revenues have not kept pace–and in the case of at least one of those teams, its EBITDA actually went backwards during the prior tenure. The bulk of the value created in recent years has come as the result of revenue multiple expansion. NBA teams no longer trade at 5-7x revenue, like they did a decade ago. They’re now commanding 10-14x the top line. That may make it increasingly difficult for smart money to justify buying/buying into clubs in the years ahead, at least if they’re underwriting the investment solely on the expectation of growing revenues.

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It’s incredible how few people have air conditioning outside the United States. Only 10% of Europeans have it!

Driving a heavy car makes it much less likely that you will die in an accident, but much more likely the person in the other car will die.