Tag: health

Children, NFL Games, Peptides & Net Worth

What’s the biggest status symbol for the 1%? What if it’s having a third kid?

Is this about a third kid becoming a new cultural symbol for the 1%? A third kid isn’t new for them; what’s new is that it has become rarer for everyone else.

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From Time magazine: The Peptide Rush Has Begun

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) essentially banned peptides in 2023 because of safety concerns. But an FDA committee met in July to review the evidence on peptides and recommend whether or not to take the highly unusual step of allowing pharmacies to dispense them absent scientific review.

It recommended allowing specialty pharmacies to dispense six peptides, despite FDA staff advising against the move. The peptides listed in Appendix A were BPC-157, Epitalon, KPV, MOTS-c, Semax, and TB-500.

Shortly after the new notice was published, a number of telehealth websites were already marketing the six peptides, each for a price of anywhere from $199 to $249 a month.

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How, exactly, do antidepressants work?

For decades, the public understanding of antidepressants has been stuck in a narrative popularized by pharmaceutical advertising in the 1990s: that they work by correcting a chemical deficiency in the brain.

But evidence from research studies has been clear since at least the early 2000s, if not earlier, that this is not how antidepressants work. Doctors prescribe the drugs because decades of study data and patient reports show they can relieve people’s mental health problems. But doctors and scientists don’t have a clear understanding of how they do that. That may be surprising, but it’s the case for many kinds of medications, such as acetaminophen and general anesthetics.

Chemical Imbalance

Let’s start with the grain of truth in the chemical imbalance story. Antidepressants such as S.S.R.I.s (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and others do increase levels of certain brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. But as far as we can tell, they aren’t correcting a chemical deficiency. Instead, their beneficial effects seem to arise from a cascade of changes they set off within the nerve cells that then alter the activity of brain circuits and our thought patterns.

Depression and anxiety appear to involve a shift in how a person processes emotionally significant information. Neutral facial expressions take on a more disapproving and critical vibe. Negative memories are recalled more readily than positive ones. Rewards feel muted, while criticism feels overly painful. It is common for people with depression or anxiety to feel stuck in a persistent loop of negativity.

Antidepressants shift this negative emotional information processing in a positive direction. This effect becomes evident fairly quickly after a person starts taking antidepressants — within days, sometimes after a single dose.

But this change in how emotional information is processed isn’t enough to lift people out of a state of depression or anxiety. What follows is typically a period during which people relearn how to see themselves and the world. Once they are no longer filtering everything through negative lenses, their brains can gradually accumulate more neutral or positive experiences of themselves and the world around them.

Environment

The environment of a medicated person plays a crucial role in this relearning. People with more social support and positive interpersonal relationships, including psychotherapy, tend to gain more from the medications.

Neuroplasticity

Another way in which antidepressants may work involves the enhancement of neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to reorganize its structure and connections. Continued treatment with antidepressants may bolster brain chemicals and processes that promote neuroplasticity. (Psychedelics are thought to work as a treatment for depression and anxiety, in part, for a similar reason.) The hypothesis is that the drugs open a “window” of plasticity through which the brain has a renewed ability to change the way it is wired. Patients treated with antidepressants often feel more mentally malleable and better able to move away from unhelpful thinking patterns. We should think about antidepressants as relieving a kind of cognitive constipation.

Blunting Emotions

Antidepressants can flatten emotions as a side effect. Some argue that this emotional blunting is how antidepressants work, and that the drugs don’t treat mental health problems so much as dampen feelings, both positive and negative.

Placebo Effect

Any discussion of how antidepressants work also needs to acknowledge that research shows factors such as optimism about treatment, expectancy of relief, a positive relationship with the doctor, the passage of time and regular contact with medical staff contribute to a substantial proportion of people’s improvement. While antidepressants do outperform placebos and have specific effects, the difference from placebo for the average patient is modest. Good clinicians are aware of this and pay attention to how they prescribe the drugs. They gain the trust of their patients, work collaboratively, encourage realistic hope, proactively address possible concerns and communicate frequently and empathetically during treatment.

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The average NFL game has been 3 hours 11 minutes, or 7 minutes longer than the last several years. By comparison, Major League Baseball games this year typically took 2 hours 45 minutes, a dramatic improvement since it introduced the pitch clock to address its pace-of-play crisis in 2023.

The NFL has historically maintained a tight grip on game duration and kept them brisker than college contests. The six college football games between two top-25 teams last weekend averaged 3 hours 26 minutes.

Back in 2017, after two seasons in which NFL games were 3 hours 10 minutes or longer, the league reduced its number of commercial breaks per game and saw the action speed up again. Other innovations, such as expedited reviews, have also helped move proceedings along.

But as game length returns to those levels, one possible explanation is the yellow laundry littering fields everywhere. This season, there have been 15 penalties per game, which would be the most in a season in the Super Bowl era. While the frequency of flags tend to decline deeper into a season, certain holding calls shouldn’t necessarily be whistled when they’re away from the ball and not affecting play.

Games can take longer for the right reasons, too. During the closing stages of a nail-biter, teams call timeouts, run out of bounds and do everything they can to stop the clock. And this season, games have been about as tight as ever with an average margin of victory of 9.8 points per game.

Already this season, 31 games have seen game-winning scores in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, the most through six weeks in NFL history. Fifty-seven out of 93 games, meanwhile, have been decided by one score, tied for the most ever. There have also been eight overtime games so far, which puts this season on an unusually high pace.

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The graph below shows the median net worth by age, based on the Federal Reserve’s recently released 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances:

For the typical household 35 and older, home equity makes up between 55% and 70% of their net worth. The graph below shows the median net worth by age, both with and without home equity:

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The percentage of US adults who say they drink alcohol has plummeted to 54%, the lowest in the history of a Gallup poll that goes back nearly 90 years.

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Four families own 69% of the Korean stock market.

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A great visual of the “home country bias” below, which is the tendency of investors to put most of their money into stocks from their own country instead of diversifying globally.

In many other countries it is their own country + the U.S. as their dominant combined position, largely because the U.S. stock market has performed much better than other countries around the world over the last 17 years.

That brings in “recency bias,” where people give more importance and weight to recent experience than to older or historical data.

The Everywhere Millionaires, Parenting & Psychedelics

On every measure of life success ever studied (income, education, longevity, marital stability, mental health), four inputs from parents swamp almost everything else:

  1. Do you give your kid deep love and warmth?
  2. Do you have a loving relationship with your partner?
  3. Did you read to your kid when they were young?
  4. Do you try to be healthy?

If you can answer yes to those four, your kid is in the top 1%.

Is it possible that the right school takes your kid from the 99th percentile to the 99.8th? Maybe. But many parents treat education like it’s 30%, instead of the 0.8% it actually is.

It’s all the rage among the wealthy to get their children into elite kindergarten programs. In reality, these schools spend an inordinate amount of time screening out the kids whose parents replied “No” to the four items listed above (love, marriage, reading, health).

These kids then go on to an elite K-12 school and college, and the schools are given all the credit. It’s like hand-picking a roster of All-Star baseball players, then attributing every victory entirely to the coaches.

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The authors of the new book, The Everywhere Millionaire, finished an enormous project for the government where they did specialized research on how much tax American business owners pay. Because of this, they were able to provide insight into the wealth of the upper class and the super-rich.

They focused on households with a net worth above $5 million (the top 4%), but the average net worth in their data is $25 million. This provided an incredible glimpse into what they call America’s “Main Street Millionaires.”

This group almost always owns their own business and uses pass-through entities (like LLCs and S-corps). The top industries are:

  1. Law Firm Partnerships
  2. Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Hedge Funds
  3. Independently Owned Auto Dealerships
  4. Professional and Technical Services and Management Consulting
  5. Oil and Gas Extraction
  6. Offices of Physicians
  7. Residential and Nonresidential Builders
  8. Real Estate Activities
  9. Restaurants
  10. Accounting and Bookkeeping

There are a few things to note about these industries. First, these businesses exist across the nation. You might need a lawyer, a car, or a consultant whether you’re in Nebraska or New York. Second, these industries aren’t dominated by a few mega-firms. There’s no Amazon or Walmart of law firms or auto dealers. Instead, each has thousands of independently owned businesses that tend to make their owners wealthy.

Who Are They?

The typical main street millionaire is older, male, married, and White. Men are twice as likely to start a business as women, and Asian and White individuals are 7x and 5x more likely than Black individuals. 90% of business owners with over $10 million are married, and their median age is 62.

80% of business owners with over $10 million (decamillionaires) have a college degree, and 40% have a postgraduate degree. They’re twice as likely to attend college and postgraduate school as the general population.

How Did They Start?

Even when gifts and other family transfers are counted, the overall inheritance rate for their businesses is only about 25%. In other words, the vast majority of these businesses (75%) were not inherited.

But not inheriting a business isn’t the same as starting from zero. Statistically, founders are more likely to come from wealthy families. People from families in the top 1% of income are 2.4 times more likely to found a firm than those from families at the 90th percentile, and 4.1 times more likely than those at the median. Yet most founders don’t come from wealthy families. 70% come from families outside the top 10% of income, and a third come from families in the bottom half. How so? There are far more people in the bottom 90% than the top 10%. So while coming from a wealthy family increases the odds of starting a business, most founders are not from the wealthiest families.

If your first job is in an industry that produces more entrepreneurs, then you’re more likely to become an entrepreneur. And if your first job is more entrepreneurial in nature (e.g., computer systems design, accounting, building equipment contracting), then you’re more likely to succeed as an entrepreneur. That’s because your first job teaches you how an industry works and can help you develop a professional network that is valuable when starting a business.

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Found naturally in more than 200 species of mushrooms, psilocybin has been used for centuries by Indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Central and South America for healing, spiritual and ceremonial purposes.

More than 300 human studies of psilocybin are in the works, according to the government database where clinical trials must be registered. Researchers are testing it for a striking range of conditions: anxiety, depression, anorexia, alcohol, cannabis, opioid and cocaine addiction, borderline personality disorder, OCD, PTSD, ALS and Parkinson’s disease.

Other psychedelics (including MDMA, LSD and ibogaine) are undergoing their own transformation into potential treatments. But many scientists have identified psilocybin, which is considered safer than many of the alternatives when used under controlled conditions, as the leading candidate for mainstream medicine.

That prospect is especially alluring because psychedelics promise something conventional psychiatric drugs often cannot: speed. Their effects can emerge within hours rather than weeks, and some studies suggest the benefits can persist long after the drug has worn off. For conditions affecting millions of Americans, that raises the possibility of a radical departure from taking a pill every day.

Scientists know that psilocybin acts on serotonin receptors involved in perception, mood and cognition. What happens next has been harder to explain.

The first wave of brain-imaging studies between 2012 and 2014 seemed to show something resembling disorder. The brain is organized into roughly 10 to 14 major networks (visual, auditory and others) that ordinarily maintain relatively stable patterns of activity.

Under the influence of psilocybin, some of that organization appears to loosen. A collection of regions associated with our sense of self and internally directed thought becomes less synchronized, while parts of the brain that do not ordinarily communicate as much begin talking to one another.

Then, this summer, researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, complicated that picture. Using machine learning to analyze brain scans in greater detail, they found a previously hidden structure within the apparent disorder. As established networks loosened, other patterns of brain activity emerged.

This is important because in people suffering from mental struggles, a pattern of thinking can become so deeply worn that the mind keeps traveling down the same path, like getting stuck in a trench. Researchers say that can happen in the case of depression, for example.

Now imagine that trench inside a snow globe. Shaking the globe unsettles the entire landscape. When the snow settles, it does not necessarily fall back into exactly the same grooves.

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There’s newly popular college drinking trend; BORGs. Prevalent in the drinking culture at many U.S. colleges and universities since around 2020, BORGs are one-gallon plastic jugs filled with alcohol and a choice of mixings and flavorings.

Preparation for a BORG event, which is often a daytime gathering such as a tailgate or festival, typically involves decorating one’s personal BORG with a clever phrase or social-media-ready pun–for example, “It’s BORG o’clock somewhere” or “BORG to be wild.”

The gallon-sized drink can contain up to a fifth of liquor, or about 17 standard drinks. Nearly one third of respondents said they experienced a blackout from a BORG event.

BORG use was fueled on social media during the pandemic as a way to reduce virus transmission and drink contamination, but BORG use has remained popular at special events, day drinking parties, or tailgating before sporting games.

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Mahatma Gandhi’s seven deadly sins:

  • Wealth Without Work
  • Pleasure Without Conscience
  • Knowledge Without Character
  • Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)
  • Science Without Humanity
  • Religion Without Sacrifice
  • Politics Without Principle

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The scientific way to predict which way interest rates will move. Kevin Warsh is 6’1” which is not a good sign.

Parenting, Meditation, Stimulants & Yoga

Early in the psychologist Peter Gray’s new book, “Restoring Childhood: How to Set Kids Free in the Age of Anxiety” he proposes a thought experiment:

Imagine that your spouse or your closest friend had the same power over you that parents typically have over children. Although you’re an adult, this loving person insists that you never leave the house without an accompanying guardian or a G.P.S. tracker. When you return, they demand a full account of what you did. Frequently, they communicate with your boss, who controls you the way a teacher controls children at school. This boss reprimands you for arriving even a minute late, and prohibits you from talking with your co-workers without permission; you must even ask, publicly, to use the bathroom. Everything you do is judged and ranked in comparison to the work of your coworkers. And, when you wrap up at the office, your employer also requires you to do more work at home, and encourages your loving spouse (or friend) to be sure you do that work.

This doesn’t sound like a very nice life, does it? It’s an existence in which you’re micromanaged and surveilled, given almost no freedom or privacy, and put under constant pressure while, at the same time, being seen as incompetent and lazy.

And yet, it’s how many children live in the United States. Now eighty-two, Gray has spent decades studying kids, particularly how they spend their free time. In “Restoring Childhood,” he warns that they now have none, in both senses: they have no time, because they are over-scheduled and over-schooled, and their time isn’t free, because adults are neither willing nor able to leave even older kids unsupervised.

Child-protective services used to intervene mainly in cases of child abuse; over the decades, however, their remit grew to include not just neglect but “supervisory neglect,” a new parental offense that might involve leaving children briefly unattended in benign circumstances. 38% of children will be at the center of a C.P.S. investigation at some point in their lives. If you let your children play at the park by themselves, you could be reported by your neighbors and led away in handcuffs: it’s no wonder that many of today’s parents keep their kids on a short leash. 

The ultimate goal of childhood is to break away from dependence on parents and establish oneself as one’s own person. But adults, increasingly, are building a world in which this is impossible, and the result has been an ongoing decline in the happiness and mental health of young people.

Many intertwined changes have eroded children’s freedom to play and move about independent of adult control.

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In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep.

But when she reviewed the results, she was dismayed to find they were the opposite of what she had predicted. The participants in the meditation group slept more fitfully, with more frequent awakenings, than those who didn’t meditate. They spent more time in “Stage 1,” the lightest sleep phase, from which people are easily roused. Graph after graph after graph, no matter how you looked at it, number of awakenings, number of micro arousals, number of Stage 1 minutes, the amount of meditation that the subjects practiced was directly correlated with worse sleep quality.

Because most kinds of meditation aim to enhance concentration, the practice can act like a stimulant. And just as chemical stimulants such as caffeine and Adderall can interfere with sleep, so, too, can excessive meditation.

What else, she wondered, did meditation teachers know that they weren’t telling people? Gradually, starting with that sleep study, the tiers of thought propping up Britton’s worldview, that Buddhism is a cure-all, and that meditation was always beneficial, and could never cause harm, would collapse.

Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis.

Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people, a lot of them, as it turns out, who believe that meditation has harmed them.

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Millions of Americans are doing the same thing, swallowing down gallons of “energy” every month. Around 30 percent of the U.S. population consumes at least one energy drink per day. Among the under-35 crowd, it’s 60 percent. The older demographic still prefers coffee, and 66 percent of Americans drink that every day, too.

The deceptive part is that “energy drinks” don’t actually provide “energy,” beyond what you’d normally get by digesting a bunch of liquid sugar. Instead, they block your capacity to feel how tired you are. To severely oversimplify, all that caffeine functions as an antagonist for adenosine, the chemical that builds up in your brain during the day and makes you feel sleepy. The caffeine molecules fit into your adenosine receptors, blocking the “time to sleep” signal your brain would normally be getting. 

Taurine, meanwhile, is an amino acid that has some health benefits for nerve cells, and L-Carnitine promotes burning fat cells, but neither can create “energy” as such. So when you drink a few Monsters or Red Bulls, you’re still getting physically and mentally fatigued; your brain just doesn’t know it yet. It’s as if, instead of using an oven mitt, you just shot your hand full of Novocaine before grabbing a hot pan. 

Forbes reports that we’re currently in a new energy drink boom, with a global market for the neon-colored liquids estimated at $85.25 billion in 2025 projected to reach $158.53 billion by 2033. The Red Bull company alone is valued at $20-25 billion.

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What happened to Yoga?

Fitness trends come and go. But the workouts people choose also reflect the contemporary understanding of what it means to be well. For years, that meant yoga and its promise of stress reduction and mindfulness. In today’s world of fitness-maxxing and social-media-driven obsession over image, though, the cultural ideal seems to have shifted from inner peace to outward perfection.

Simply exercising and eating well is no longer enough;“biohacking” has become hot. Some of today’s wellness devotees wear continuous glucose monitors to clock blood-sugar spikes in real time as well as $400 titanium rings to track heart-rate variability and REM sleep. The goal: 24/7 self-improvement.

Although people surely sign up for yoga to better themselves, the practice typically encourages them to do so slowly, with humility. Yoga tends to be about letting go of ego and striving, and about surrender, principles that don’t quite fit into a culture obsessed with optimization.

Predictive Processing, Dating & End Credits

Most of us assume that our senses collect data, send it to the brain, and then we react. But a large body of research suggests that’s not how it works.

Your brain is a gambling addict that bets on reality. It doesn’t wait for information. It guesses what should happen and adjusts when surprised. Most bets win. But when they don’t, you run into walls.

You start with a prediction, a top-down expectation of what your brain thinks it’s about to see. Then bottom-up incoming sensory data either confirms this prediction or updates it if things don’t fit. This is known as the predictive processing theory.

Higher-order areas of the brain were first making predictions about what they expected to see, and then sending them down the hierarchy. Only when something didn’t match the prediction, what they called a “prediction error,” did the lower levels sound the alarm and send information back up the hierarchy.

When the brain guesses correctly, there’s no need to notice anything. When it guesses wrong, like mistaking a wall for an aisle in a dark theater, the system lights up. It’s not that you didn’t see the wall with your eyes when you walked into it. It’s that your brain never expected it to be there in the first place.

This happens all the time with people when trying to solve problems, having conversations, and making decisions. The inner propagandist, the inner double agent, runs the show. The truth is whatever prediction doesn’t get proven wrong.

The brain deals with a world full of data and ambiguous messages. It makes the best possible predictions in moments of uncertainty. We don’t realize we’re making guesses, of course. The brain fills in the gaps using past experiences and context to figure out what should be there. You’re able to understand that sentence even though it’s painful to read:

Tahts wyh yuo cna uesndratnd tihs snetecne eevn thuogh teh wrods aer jbmlued pu. Oh, nda I klei yuro silme.

You don’t just see, then believe. You believe, then you see. Most of the time, it works great. But now and then, there’s a glitch.

Have you ever waved at someone who wasn’t there? Maybe you were walking down the street, and you saw a friend. So you smiled. Maybe you even raised your hand. And then you realized … it wasn’t them. This is an example of what feels like a positive hallucination, a moment when your brain sees something that isn’t there because it expects it to be. When you add to the scene around you.

There are also negative hallucinations, when you don’t see what is there. When your brain has removed things from in front of you. It’s asking your spouse where the keys are, when they’re sitting on the table right in front of you.

Our inner propagandists work 24/7, filling in blanks, removing things, and selling us the illusion that we are, in fact, seeing the world as it is. But we are, in fact, not.

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LinkedIn has accidentally become a dating site, despite its no-romance rules.

A deepening exhaustion with dating apps has pushed many to look beyond swiping. Singles are trying speed dating, connecting through shared real-world interests and even using spreadsheets to break their dating algorithm. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a public-facing platform with clear headshots and ample information about a person’s path in life, everything dating apps today seem to lack, has become a go-to tool in the modern search for love.

Just don’t expect to fly under the radar while you’re checking someone out. The site alerts users when someone has viewed their profile, which can either help or hurt your dating plans.

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In 2014, Bumble launched to solve a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type, content waiting patiently to be chosen.

This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.

When Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure. And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away. Bestowed with a very important responsibility, women wanted to toss the hot potato right back to the men.

In reporting on singlehood, you don’t tend to hear women complain about getting bombarded with messages or vigorously hit on. They say they do want to feel sought after. The women are constantly seeking, only to be met with a big, apathetic shrug.

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For most of cinema’s first seventy years, the end of a film was exactly that; it ended. A typical film of the 1930s, 40s or 50s ended with a cast reprise or a simple “The End” card. The median credits length didn’t shift much over forty years, going from 25 seconds in the 1930s to just 34 seconds by the 1960s.

Something weird happened to cinema in the 1970s. End credits changed dramatically, more than doubling in length within the decade, and then doubling again over the 1980s. By the 1990s, end credits were 4 minutes long, and they’ve kept climbing ever since, reaching 5:43 for films released in the 2020s. Current movie credits are almost thirteen times longer than those of the 1950s.

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Why Walking Gets Tougher When You Age:

As we age, the body appears to sacrifice walking efficiency in exchange for stability. Older adults stiffen the ankle more with each step, which may help prevent falls but also forces the muscles to work harder while producing less forward motion. This leads to shorter strides, slower walking, and faster fatigue. Exercises targeting balance, coordination, and lower-leg strength could help preserve mobility.

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Seventeen percent of American adults say they smoke marijuana, tied with the high notched in 2023. That’s a big shift from 2013, the year Gallup started polling the question, when just 7% said they used pot. A record 15% of US adults also say they use edibles.

Childhood Amnesia, Testosterone & Blue Zones

Childhood amnesia, coined by Sigmund Freud in 1910, describes the lack of recall adults have of their first three or four years and our paucity of solid memories until around the age of seven. Research suggests that the memories we form in these early years simply disappear.

To form long-term memories, an array of biological and psychological stars must align, and most children lack the machinery for this alignment. The raw material of memory (the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and tactile sensations of our life experiences) arrive and register across the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition. For these to become memory, they must undergo bundling in the hippocampus, but some parts of the hippocampus aren’t fully developed until we’re adolescents, making it hard for a child’s brain to complete this process.

Young children have a tenuous grip on chronology. They are years from mastering clocks and calendars, and thus have a hard time nailing an event to a specific time and place. They also don’t have the vocabulary to describe an event, and without that vocabulary, they can’t create the kind of causal narrative that’s found at the root of a solid memory. And they don’t have a greatly elaborated sense of self, which would encourage them to hoard and reconsider chunks of experience as part of a growing life-narrative.

Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. This process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.

Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on.

If we can’t remember much of anything from our early years, does it matter what actually happened? If a tree fell in the forest of our early development and we didn’t have the brains and cognitive tools to stash the event in memory, did it still help shape who we are?

Yes. Even if we don’t remember early events, they leave an imprint on the way we understand and feel about ourselves, other people, and the greater world, for better or worse. We have elaborate concepts about birds, dogs, lakes and mountains, for example, even if we can’t recall the experiences that created those concepts.

We are not the sum of our memories, or at least, not entirely. We are also the story we construct about ourselves, our personal narrative that interprets and assigns meaning to the things we do remember and the things other people tell us about ourselves.

These narratives guide our behavior and help chart our path into the future. Especially lucky are those of us with redemptive stories, in which we find good fortune even in past adversity.

Our stories are not bald facts etched on stone tablets. They are narratives that move and morph, and that’s the underpinning to much of talk therapy. Here is one uplifting aspect of ageing: our stories of self get better. For whatever reason, we tend to accentuate the positive things more as we age. We have a greater willingness or motivation to see the world in brighter terms. We develop a positivity bias regarding our memories.

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Average testosterone has been declining among men for the past several decades. A recent review of studies involving more than a million men all over the world found that average testosterone levels in blood have dropped by about 20 percent over the past half century. A new, unpublished study put the decrease during that basic time period at closer to 50 percent.

Medical researchers aren’t certain what’s causing the drop. One theory is that the environment is playing a role: endocrine-disrupting “forever chemicals,” such as the phthalates in our plastic kitchen utensils and the PFAS in our nonstick pans are chemicals that can interrupt both the creation and the activity of testosterone in the body.

Men who are very physically active are less likely to have clinically low testosterone. Obesity, a condition that about 14 percent of men around the world have, can suppress the hormone. Fat tissue contains high amounts of an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, and excess fat can overheat the testes. Obesity can’t explain the entire decrease, however. Even among normal-weight men, there is the same decline.

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There’s a website called Series Graph that allows you to see the ratings for an entire television series episode by episode. It can show you if a series fell off in later seasons or if it stuck the landing through the finale.

Game of Thrones is a famous example of a show falling apart at the very end after 7.5 incredible seasons:

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The Blue Zones are places on earth where people supposedly reach exceptionally old ages, often beyond 100. The pitch is this: if we copy the habits of Blue Zones people, we’ll also live to over 100.

The problem: No one ever really checked whether the people in these places are as old as they say they are. When someone did, they found that people in the Blue Zones weren’t living to extremely old ages. Instead, these locations just had terrible record-keeping.

The man who did the research was asked what the real secret to longevity is. “Be born in a rich place that has free health care. That’s what the data suggests, anyway.”

Nobody can act on that. So the Blue Zone health market fills with things you can buy and act on, whether or not they work. What does work? See a doctor. Exercise. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t eat too much junk. Have some friends.

It’s free. It’s boring. You can find it anywhere on the map.

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Gen Z is moving money from stocks to sports betting in wealth plans, 52% of them have redirected investment funds to sports betting and a quarter of them treat sports betting as a deliberate part of their long-term financial plan:

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One of the best reasons to study history is that it’s a constant reminder about how uncomfortable life have been for the majority of human existence.

In 1870, food, rent, and clothing took 91 cents of every dollar made (today it’s under 40 cents). The typical American owned just one and a half shirts. That is an actual historical statistic. To make money to buy this expensive food and the other half of that shirt, the typical man worked sixty hours per week. Women worked more. And the dollars people were paid in could lose their value overnight, making them no more stable than cryptocurrency today.

Financial life was mind bogglingly complex throughout the 1700-1800s. There just wasn’t enough money. To fill the gap, nearly anything counted as cash, sometimes even counterfeits. The values of “real” currency changed regularly. If you could manage to find money, know it was legit, and discern its worth, there was still next to nowhere to safely keep it. Every citizen tracked hundreds of variables. A mistake could cost your life’s savings.

By the Civil War in 1861, there were 10,000 unique notes in circulation. Some were worth more than others. You had to redeem a dollar with the bank that printed it. Many of those banks went under, making the money worthless.

In the late-19th century, three-quarters of men 65 or older were still in the labor force. Half of the people who were able to retire lived with their children or other relatives.

In the 1920s, 60% of the elderly had a net worth of $80k or less (in today’s dollars). Nearly two-thirds of American households lived below the poverty line in 1929, before the Great Depression began.

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The number of small-cap public companies has declined sharply since the peak in 2000, and the number of private equity–backed private companies has surged to take their place.

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Europe’s GDP was larger than the U.S. until 2015:

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The U.S. violent crime rate plunged 9.7% last year, the largest annual drop since the FBI’s national estimates began in 1936. The decline in crime was unusually broad, touching every population group in the FBI’s violent-crime data, from the largest cities to small cities, suburbs and rural counties.

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Why hold risk-free cash at 4% interest when stocks always go up 15% or more, right?

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Ovarian Cancer, Padel & Shorting Stocks

Ovarian cancer is a misnomer. Nearly all ovarian cancers, and nearly all fatal ovarian cancers, are actually cancers of the fallopian tubes. The 20 percent or so that start in the ovaries are different, and usually can be cured.

Women who have their tubes (the gummy worm-shaped ducts that carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus) removed reduce their chances of getting ovarian cancer by nearly 80 percent. It’s a five-minute operation that can be done as part of nearly any abdominal surgery, including a hysterectomy, tubal ligation, gallbladder surgery and hernia repair.

Most doctors (and the public) do not know about this new approach, even though professional groups like the American Cancer Society, the American College of Surgeons and the European Society of Gynaecological Oncology have recently issued statements encouraging doctors to offer tube removal at the time of other abdominal surgeries.

The American Cancer Society is now working on a national campaign to make more women and doctors aware that tube removal can help prevent most ovarian cancers. 

Women have, on average, a 1.1 percent risk of being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, among the most deadly of all cancers. Screening to find it early does not work (death rates do not budge). Ultrasound, blood tests and advanced imaging have all failed. And most of the 20,000 women a year who receive a diagnosis of ovarian cancer have no known risk factors. By the time they find out why they have vague symptoms like bloating and abdominal pain, the cancer has spread throughout their bodies. Surgery and chemotherapy, the standard treatments, are unlikely to cure them.

The tumors start as microscopic specks of cancer cells that spill out of the wide end of the fallopian tube that is nestled against an ovary. They seed the ovary and abdomen, where they grow and become lethal. You can liken these tiny cancer cells to dust coming up from a rug and floating through a room. They’re like dandruff drifting down to a person’s shoulders.

It explains why early diagnosis so often fails: Those tiny cells do not show up on ultrasound or other imaging.

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Padel is the new pickleball.

There are now 1,000+ publicly accessible padel courts in the U.S., up from about 227 three years ago. Last year, padel drew one million players domestically and, padel club and individual memberships grew by about 50 percent year-over-year.

Padel is mostly played as doubles, and courts are smaller than tennis courts, making it more social and easier to get to know other players.

Across the country, entrepreneurs are capitalizing on the interest by retrofitting unconventional spaces, from parking lots to distribution warehouses, with padel courts. On the sidelines of some are saunas and bars where players can mingle between matches.

Last year, over 24 million Americans played pickleball, up from about 4 million in 2020. Investors believe padel has the potential to grow like pickleball, but the cost to install one padel court can be around $50,000 because of the glass and other materials for the walls. Pickleball courts are much cheaper to build.

Instead of strings, padel rackets have holes in their dense heads. Padel balls share a color with tennis balls, but are less bouncy. The sport’s rectangular courts are 66-feet long by 33-feet wide, divided by a net and surrounded by four walls made of glass panels and mesh.

Playing singles tennis is still the best exercise, but padel doubles provides more exercise than tennis doubles.

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Of the 233 countries and territories in the dataset, men outnumber women in just 33%. Despite the smaller number of male-majority countries, there are roughly 42 million more men than women worldwide.

There are two main reasons for this.

  1. The Gulf states are the clearest outliers. Countries such as Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and Kuwait rely heavily on temporary migrant workers employed in construction, energy, and infrastructure, industries dominated by men. Because many of these workers arrive without their families, national gender balances become unusually skewed.
  2. Three of the world’s most populous countries, China, India, and the United States, all have more men than women. Although their ratios are less extreme, their large populations magnify the difference. In India alone, a ratio of 106.3 men per 100 women translates into a male surplus of more than 40 million.

Countries with more women:

Russia offers one of the region’s most prominent examples. Higher male mortality, shorter male life expectancy, historical wartime losses, and alcohol-related deaths all contribute to its ratio of 86.4 men per 100 women.

Sex ratios at birth naturally favor boys by a small margin, but populations rarely maintain that balance. Migration, life expectancy, war, public health, and economic opportunity can all reshape a country’s demographic profile over decades.

As these forces evolve, the map represents a snapshot rather than a permanent reality. Countries experiencing rapid immigration, population aging, conflict, or major improvements in healthcare may see their gender balance shift substantially from one generation to the next.

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Hedge funds that are short-biased or short-only surged after the 2008 downturn, and they are slowly disappearing as the U.S. bull market in stocks extends toward its 18th year.

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Shareholder Yield = the total cash a company returns to its investors (stockholders).

This occurs through three main factors: (1) dividends (2) net stock buybacks; repurchases minus newly issues shares (3) net debt reduction.

Looksmaxxing, Calf Injuries & The Passage Of Time

Welcome to the weird and twisted philosophy of looksmaxxing, the online subculture devoted to optimizing male appearance through gym routines, skin care, jawline exercises and surgery. They advocate bonesmashing, or hitting one’s face repeatedly with a hammer to change the face shape. 

Looksmaxxers may not be aware of it, but they are optimizing themselves not for attraction from women, but for respect from men. That is the hidden logic of “looksmaxxing”. Men respect signs of dominance and toughness. A heavy jaw, sharp cheekbones, a hard stare. These features impress other men because they signal strength. So when a young man imagines an attractive male face, he tends to imagine an exaggerated version of those traits. He then sets out to build it.

Women, generally speaking, want something different. They tend to prefer a face that is softer than men assume. When masculine features get too extreme, they stop registering as attractive and begin to appear bizarre or even frightening. The looksmaxxer who has carved himself into a comic book caricature has pushed past the point where most women find him appealing. (Relatedly, some women make a parallel mistake, assuming men prefer extreme thinness when many men actually prefer healthier, curvier female bodies.)

A man who spends hours every day fine-tuning his face and body exudes qualities women tend to dislike. He can come across as vain, high-maintenance and self-absorbed — less like a secure partner than someone perpetually scanning for the next option.

The basic version of looksmaxxing is good for almost everyone: exercise, a decent haircut, clothes that fit, better posture, a reasonable diet. The looksmaxxing protocol the manosphere tells them to adopt gives women the ick.

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In 2010-11, there were 18 documented calf injuries across the entire NBA season. Last season, there were 60. This season, 86. Why?

Basketball used to be a two-footed sport. Nowadays, the game is a one-footed sport. Most players are making every move off of one foot. The modern NBA is a pace-and-space machine—100-plus possessions a night, built on rapid ball movement, floor spacing, and the core principle that any player must be able to create offense off the dribble from anywhere. The epicenter of NBA offense has migrated from the low block to the perimeter, where endless drive-and-kick sequences stack on top of one another. 

Today’s game of relentless one-on-one creation; guards, wings, and increasingly centers attacking closeouts; and transition offense requires a different kind of movement. It requires rapid changes of speed and direction. And almost all of it happens off one foot.

Muscle damage isn’t caused by how hard a muscle works, but rather by how far it stretches while it’s working. The muscle almost always has to be activated to really be injured, and it almost always has to be stretched. When both of those things happen at once, that’s when injuries can happen.

The calf is particularly vulnerable to that combination because of our anatomy. The calf muscle has short fibers, and when the ankle rotates and the knee extends at the same time, it puts immense strain on the muscle.

That strain is amplified for taller people. The fibers don’t scale with the body. The bones—the levers—do. So a bigger person, when they rotate their knee joint or their ankle joint 20 degrees, they stretch their muscles relatively more. The same move, performed by a larger body, is more dangerous. Not because the player is weaker, but because the geometry is worse.

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I recently tuned into an episode of “The Diary of a CEO” podcast. The guest was an Irish comedian by the name of Jimmy Carr. The host asked Jimmy a pointed question: “What is the meaning of life?” Jimmy responded, “I’ll do it in five words.” What were the five words?

“Enjoying the passage of time”

Remember that trip you took with your friends to that warm weather destination? You enjoyed each other’s company and the days were filled with friendship, camaraderie, and wonderful moments of joy and happiness? You were absolutely enjoying the passage of time, and it had nothing to do with money or the state of the stock market and the world. You were living your best life.

All of this is to say, if we constantly worry about the national debt, the dollar, politics, how much money we have, or what someone on the news is saying, we are trapped in a prison of our own design. Now I know this isn’t a black or white thing; there are times when we won’t be enjoying the passage of time. We might be sick, or a family member may be struggling, or something is really impacting us.

Build for the long-term. Be thoughtful and patient. Have a plan. But enjoy the passage of time. Focus less on the things that can make us miserable. This life is all we’ll ever get.

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Three companies — SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — are expected to go public in mega-IPOs in the second half of 2026. The posited numbers are simply staggering compared to the largest IPOs in recent history, as the following figure shows.

In inflation-adjusted terms, SpaceX alone would rank as the second-largest IPO in history, just behind Saudi Aramco. All three together would exceed the entire dot-com IPO wave of 1995–2000. They will be at least half the value, inflation-adjusted, of all US IPOs since WWII.

But people aren’t focused on the right things. That much new equity supply hitting in a few months creates a math problem: the money has to come from somewhere. Most of it will come from existing holdings. Passive funds will be forced buyers once these names join the indexes, which will happen much faster than usual, given recent index rule changes. That means mechanical selling pressure on whatever many funds currently own, which is mostly the same large-cap tech stocks everyone else owns.

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Taiwan and Korea are close to overtaking China’s stock market in size, largely due to only three stocks:

The gap between the United States (blue) and the rest of the world (green) based on their Price To Earnings ratios remains enormous: which means the U.S. is far more expensive.

Small cap stocks continue to become less expensive relative to large cap stocks around the world:

Price’s Law, Colon Cancer & Nike’s Strategy

In 1963, a physicist named Derek Price was studying scientific publications, trying to understand why some researchers dominated their fields while others published and got zero attention. He found that the square root of the number of people in a domain does 50% of the work. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

  • In a company with 100 employees, 10 people produce half the output
  • In a field with 10,000 scientists, 100 produce half the meaningful research
  • On a team of 25, 5 people carry the entire operation

It wasn’t exclusive to research papers—this pattern showed up everywhere he looked.

  • Of the 30 million businesses in the United States, about 5,500 (the square root) generate half the total economic output.
  • Spotify has about 11 million artists, but 50% of all streams are generated by only 3,300 artists. 
  • In astrophysics, the square root of stars in a galaxy produce half the light.
  • In creative fields like YouTube, very few channels account for the vast majority of both views and ad revenue.

Price’s Law violates our egalitarian instincts. We want to believe everyone contributes equally, that effort equals outcome, that hard work is the great equalizer, but reality is far from it.

You need (1) skill, (2) consistency, (3) opportunity, and (4) luck all compounding in the same direction. Most people have one or two of those ingredients. The square root has all four.

Price’s Law reveals that equality of outcome and equality of opportunity cannot coexist in complex systems. Even if you give everyone the same resources, the same training, the same chance, outcomes will still stratify eventually. Some people will compound their advantages. Most won’t.

What does this mean in practice?

  1. You have dozens of skills, but √n of them drive half your value in the marketplace. The reason why we spend so much time trying to be “well-rounded” is because we’ve been lied to.
  2. If you work 40 hours a week, about 6 of those hours actually matter. The other 34 are maintenance, “busywork,” meetings that could’ve been emails, and a whole lot of goofing around.

The paradox (why we still need to do the other 90%): you can’t know which skills are your multipliers without trying a bunch of skills. You can’t know which relationships matter without meeting a lot of people.

  1. The early game is exploration. You’re planting seeds everywhere, seeing what grows. Price’s Law hasn’t kicked in yet because you don’t have enough data.
  2. The middle game is identification. Patterns are emerging. “Oh, this is what works.” That’s your √n.
  3. The late game is exploitation. You double down on the winners. You cut out the losers. You focus your energy towards the best bets.

Explore the noise until you have signal. Then exploit that.

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As of April 2026, Nike stock sat below US$45 – a market capitalisation of US$68 billion, its lowest level in over a decade, and a fall of more than 75% from the US$280 billion the company commanded at its 2021 peak.

How does what was once considered one of the widest consumer brand moats in the world, built over half a century, erode over the course of a few short years?

A good starting point is January 2020, when John Donahoe took over as Nike’s new CEO. The board wanted a digital-first operator, and Donahoe had the résumé – ServiceNow, eBay, and Bain – even if he was one of the few leaders in Nike’s history not to have risen through its operating ranks.

Several major strategic shifts followed, each departing from what had worked for Nike for decades – yet each looked like a logical transformational move to take Nike into the 2020s. The financial pay-offs were immediate: gross margins expanded, SGA came down, and return on ad spend looked sharper quarter by quarter. Wall Street loved it.

Yet each of these moves shared a common mechanism: they improved short-term financial metrics by drawing down assets that had taken decades to build. In effect, Nike was not just transforming its business – it was monetising its moat. We will examine each in turn.

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The number of patients in their 30s and 40s with late-stage cancer in their lower digestive tract is surgin. It’s not just that these patients are decades younger than what had been typical for colorectal cancer; the tumors themselves are also more stubborn to treat.

Even though young patients are treated with more aggressive chemo or more surgery, patients’ outcomes are not necessarily better. The disease has become the top cancer killer among people under 50, even as death rates decline in older age groups.

Doctors suspect that the gut’s microbiome is a key actor behind these forms of cancer in particular. Patient advocates say it’s critical that more people, especially young adults with a family history of these cancers, get diagnostic testing.Genetics plays some role in colorectal cancers; as many as a fifth of patients have hereditary markers. But genetics do not explain what drives the vast majority (80%) of cases.

Thirty-plus years ago almost zero patients were in clinics under the age of 50 with colon cancer. Now it is almost half. There are other changes in disease pattern with earlier onset tumors that tend to show up differently; more tumors are found near the rectum, lower in the tract.

Experts suspect several factors may be leading to these more frequent, virulent cancers:

  • Ultra-processed foods
  • Plastics and chemicals that can leach into water and our bodies
  • As a population, we are not as active as we used to be.

All of these factors act on our gut, the composition of our microbiomes, and the bacteria and myriad microorganisms living there. 

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This, of course, has consequences. Here are six:

  1. Monetary policy transmission is direct. When the Fed lowers (raises) rates, US households buy (sell) stocks. No other central bank has this much control over consumer sentiment and spending via markets. The wealth effect makes policy both more powerful and harder to control.
  2. Markets and politics. When 60% of households own stocks, markets drive elections. Politicians and central bankers in the US hate crashes almost as much as they hate high gas prices. This holds down volatility and encourages wacky risk-taking.
  3. Passive indexing makes it worse. Most of that 60% own stocks through 401(k)s and IRAs invested in index funds. This means a huge share of American household wealth is concentrated in the same ~500 companies, weighted by market cap. Diversification is an illusion at the aggregate level. Everyone is long NVIDIA, whether they know it (or want it) or not.
  4. Retirement security is market performance. The US shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions over the last 40 years. A sustained bear market is no longer just a financial event — it’s a retirement crisis.
  5. Inequality is amplified. The 60% figure is misleading because the bottom half of that cohort owns virtually no stock. The top 10% hold ~90% of equity wealth.
  6. Contagion from US markets is a virus. Because US households are so deeply exposed, a domestic equity crisis hits consumer spending, which then spreads worldwide through trade. The US market is the world’s risk-off/risk-on switch, and the household exposure ratio is part of why.

Memories, Cash Flow & The Happiness Crash

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.

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.

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.

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Traditional valuation metrics like the Shiller CAPE (price-to-earnings) ratio have been screaming “overvalued” for most of this century, but there has been almost no mean reversion since 2008 for U.S. stocks:

Why?

When you swap earnings for free cash flow (sales minus input costs, labor, taxes, and capex — basically what’s actually available to pay owners), the picture changes dramatically. Until recently, the price-to-free-cash-flow ratio bounced around but had no long-term upward drift:

Two structural shifts explain the divergence:

  1. Labor share has declined ~8 percentage points of GDP since 1980. Less of the pie goes to workers, more goes to firm owners. This boosted earnings.
  2. Capex has been relatively weak as a share of firm value. Firms (especially big tech) generated massive earnings without heavy reinvestment, so cash flow grew even faster than earnings.

However, that clean free-cash-flow story is under pressure right now. Some of these companies have gone from huge positive FCF to zero or negative FCF, taking on debt to fund it. Big tech has flipped from cash-generating machines to massive spenders on AI data centers, chips, and energy infrastructure.

The chart below is the same as above, but extends the data adding the last few years:

Bullish case: This is 1-2 years of heavy investment that will produce a new plateau of even higher cash flows, and AI further reduces labor share.

Bearish case: AI isn’t “free money” — even adopter firms (not just the hyperscalers) will need serious capex to implement it, and the payoff is uncertain.

Full podcast discussion on this topic on an episode of Odd Lots this week.

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There was a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. 

This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. 

The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy.

Status, Procrastination & Hair Transplants

Your brain is running status calculations all the time — looking for who is capitulating to whom, who commands attention, who has the nicest stuff, who seems confident, who people want to be around, etc, etc. This is un-installable software in your brain.

Every time you feel a pang of envy scrolling through someone’s engagement photos, every time you adjust how you describe your job depending on who’s asking, every time you feel a flush of pride when someone important remembers your name — that’s the program running. You can intellectually reject status games all you want — your brain is unconsciously still playing them.

The important thing is that status is completely relative. It’s not calculated against some universal benchmark. It’s calculated against whoever else is in the room. A surgeon has high status in a hospital but not necessarily at a skate park. Which is why status is so deeply entangled with money. Money is the most legible, most portable status signal we have. Every financial decision you make is shaped, consciously or not, by where you think you stand relative to the people around you.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of status. The first is the respect and admiration you get from people who actually know you — your friends, your coworkers, your community. Your standing on the local ladder. It’s earned through relationships, rooted in a specific place and a specific group of people. And it’s the kind that actually predicts whether you’re happy. When your local standing goes up, your well-being goes up. When it drops, it drops. The effect is stronger than income, education, or job. Having money only really feels good insofar as it makes the people around you respect you more.

The second is what most people mean when they say “status” — wealth, income, job title, clothes, etc. The stuff people can more readily see (and quantify). It’s much easier to compare your salary to someone else than it is to determine if you’re a better partner/friend/daughter.

This kind of status barely moves the needle when it comes to happiness. People adapt to new income levels almost immediately (hello, hedonic adaptation). You get the raise, you feel good for a month, your reference group shifts, and you need more.

 The pursuit of status has less to do with material comfort than with love — that what we’re really chasing when we chase rank is the assurance that we matter to someone. That we won’t be abandoned. That we’re worthy of attention and care. Which makes the whole status economy feel even crueler, because the version of status our current system sells — the one made of metrics and money and things that scale digitally — is the one least likely to deliver the thing we actually want.

The whole system runs on a kind of collective amnesia about what actually matters. We build the metrics. We optimize for the metrics. We forget why we built the metrics. We assume the metrics are the thing instead of a proxy for the thing. And then we wonder why we feel empty.

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There’s one piece of advice I’m confident applies to basically everyone: you should make sure your psychological center of gravity your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies.

This will make you happier. It will make you more meaningfully productive.

Keeping your center of gravity immediate and local means treating the world of national and international events as a place that you visit – to campaign or persuade, donate or volunteer, to do whatever you feel is demanded of you – and that you then return from, in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about.

One very good way to tell that your center of gravity is out of whack is when it feels like you spend a lot of time inside the minds of far-off strangers. To follow the news isn’t merely to follow the activities of Elon Musk, but to feel overly familiar with his twitchy and emotionally reactive inner life as well. This isn’t healthy.

We need a certain psychological distance, some cognitive privacy. There’s some appropriate level of such privacy between me and my wife, for goodness’s sake, so you’d better believe there’s one between me and Musk.

Returning your center of gravity to your immediate world means remembering that “the way you want the world to be” is something you can live, here and now, not just something for which you advocate or argue. Your immediate world isn’t only somewhere you come to recharge, before heading back to the arena. It is the arena.

I’ve found one tried-and-tested mindfulness exercise to be helpful here. Become consciously aware of your feet – of their position in space and their temperature, their contact with your footwear or the ground. Come out of your head for a moment, and especially out of other people’s heads. Here you are. Here. On the ground.

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A two-minute trick to outsmarting procrastination, from a new book titled How A Little Becomes A Lot:

Choose something you’ve been putting off and commit to doing it for exactly two minutes. Set a timer: When it goes off, you can stop – no guilt, no pushing through. You’re not changing your life overnight – you’re just proving that beginning doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

The limits of our willpower and the importance of structuring our environment to help us accomplish what we want. To change our behavior, we need to change out surroundings. Instead of saying “I’m going to refrain from eating Fig Newtons today,” it’s better to put the Fig Newtons on the top shelf behind a box of rice crackers.

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The men who can afford it are shelling out up to $20,000 to get hair transplants, which have become harder to detect and ever more precise.

Men with more modest means can find packages that fly them to Turkey and deliver the same procedure for around $3,000 — or they can start with the cheapest option of all, which is going on finasteride. Prescriptions for the drug in the United States tripled between 2017 and 2024, a time when telehealth companies were taking off, just as men started spending hours a day staring at their hairlines on Zoom.

Feeding that anxiety is a mass-marketing campaign teaching men the same brutal self-scrutiny that women have long been trained to perform. A typical male in his 20s or 30s is likely to receive a flood of ads and shout-outs on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and the livestreaming platform Twitch for hair-growth products that appeal to men their age.

Young men who have come of age in the time of the manosphere are prime audiences for endless reels from influencers — some of them exceptionally buff, some of them funny, some of them with millions of followers, who are trying various treatments in the hope of regaining a full head of hair. The hair-loss influencer Zeph Sanders has over one million TikTok followers tracking his “hair journey.” The ubiquity of this kind of content makes losing one’s hair no longer seem inevitable; going bald can now feel like a choice — a conscious decision.

The advertising and those influencers are conveying the message to young men that they should start taking finasteride young; in their early 20s. The approach fits into the broader “prejuvenation” trend, in which young men and women are using lasers, fillers and products like Botox to fend off signs of aging before they start, rather than doing damage control when degradation is already well underway.

Parents come in asking about finasteride for their teenage sons, looking to make sure they get “all the best they can have in order to succeed in life.” Young men are also coming in on their own for help keeping their hair. There’s no new epidemic of hair loss, but there is an epidemic of men freaking out about it.

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Here’s a number that should change how you think about retirement: 12.

That’s how long the average healthy 60-year-old has before their mobility, energy, and independence start to significantly decline. Not before they die… before life gets noticeably harder. You have more time than you have energy. More years than you have vitality. And if you don’t understand that distinction, you’ll waste the good years preparing for the declining ones.

The cruel irony is that most people spend the first decade of retirement living as they did in the last decade of work—carefully. You saved for 40 years. You delayed gratification. You were prudent, responsible, cautious. And that got you here. It built the nest egg. It secured your future. But if you keep living that way, you’ll waste the very years you saved for.

Your 60s are not a rehearsal for your 80s. They’re the main event. And if you don’t spend (not recklessly, but intentionally) during the years when you can still fully enjoy it, you’ll reach 78 with a big bank balance and a long list of regrets.

If you’re reading this in your 60s, you’re in the window. You still have your good years ahead of you. You haven’t missed it. But the window is finite, and it’s closing.

If you’re in your 50s, you have even more time, but you also have a chance to shift how you think about retirement before you get there. To plan not just financially, but experientially. To design a retirement that front-loads the living, not the saving.