Tag: life

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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Healthmaxxing, Marriage & Stock Valuations

At its best, having an Oura ring makes you fitter, happier, and, sure, even more productive. You may walk more, lift more, sleep more, and drink less. You will be hard-pressed to find a physician who thinks there’s anything amiss in the previous sentence.

However, the obsession with winning the measurable games of health can encroach on the less measurable games of life. The best way to sleep more is to see fewer friends in the evening. The best way to lift more during the week is to eliminate social lunches to protect your midday gym time. To become a measurably enhanced self often means eliminating your less quantifiable sources of meaning and happiness.

The ring can improve your life. But its form of self-improvement often pulls you away from other people. This left me with a nagging question. At what point is it unhealthy for me—for anyone, for all of us—to be this obsessed with health?

The share of people who drink hit an all-time low last year, according to Gallup, whose data go back to 1939.  While many social changes happen slowly, the attitude shift against alcohol has been quite sudden. The decline of drinking is one part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the rise of the Enhanced Self.

The Enhanced Self is the evolution of medicine, technology, and consumer culture from an emphasis on curing illness to an obsession with optimizing normal, healthy life. We see this with the rise of GLP-1s, the explosion in biohacking with peptides, and the continued growth of supplements.

More Americans are using therapies not only to cure what is wrong with them but also to improve what is not wrong with them. At the layer of leisure, the tendrils of the Enhanced Self touch the white-hot rise of fitness in American life.

At the layer of biology, the Enhanced Self incorporates the belief that the human body is akin to a single-issue hardware device, whose owner should obsessively seek to extend its operating life beyond its scheduled date of obsolescence through relentless work and eagle-eyed neuroticism.

At the layer of sociology, the Enhanced Self is inseparable from the decline of socialization. While running clubs and morning workouts are booming, nightclubs are closing and parties are withering. Young Americans spend about 35 percent less time socializing and 70 percent less time attending or hosting parties than they did at the beginning of the century.

The age of the Enhanced Self is different from health movements of the past, not only because many of its elements are distinctly of the 2020s, including peptide shots, social media, and biometric scanners, but also because it does not particularly seek to build anything outside of the self.

For a long time, abstinence was associated with religion or personal histories, such as addiction recovery or pregnancy. But in the new health culture, abstinence is not about faith or addiction; it is about bodily perfection. On health podcasts and videos, influencers and science communicators talk about alcohol’s association with sleep scores, skin clarity, energy levels, cardiometabolic biometrics, and executive function.

The fruits of the Enhanced Self movement will include fitter people, with less disease, who live longer lives. But what are the costs? Young people, who are seeing the highest increases in exercise time, also say they have fewer friends than any cohort ever; that they spend more time alone than any generation on record; and that they are more anxious and depressed than previous groups. 

Our bodies want us to be social. Research finds that “super-agers” (individuals over 80 with the cognitive function of people decades younger) shared little in common except for an unusually robust history of friendship and other social connections. A 2025 analysis of 500,000 participants in the UK reported that living with a partner and frequently visiting family had roughly the same relationship with longevity as exercise.

While the pursuit of health does not have to cleave us away from others, the project of delaying mortality is often a solitary undertaking.

Adam Mastroianni notes that over the past few decades, high schoolers have steadily drunk less, smoked less, and fought less. In the same period, serial killers have all but vanished, blockbusters have grown less original, design has grown less distinctive, and cars have gone monochrome. Mastroianni ties these together with a theory he calls “the decline of deviance.” As people get richer and the world gets safer, deviance falls, because “life is worth more now.” When people think that they might live to be 100, the strategy for every life-game is the same: play it safe.

Bryan Johnson’s wellness company, book, and Netflix documentary are not called “Live Better” or even “Live Forever.” It’s called “Don’t Die.” The moment-by-moment obsession with death may extend our lives, but when we cannot stop practicing this lifespan arithmetic, many of us will slip out of the thick appreciation of the here and now and approach life with all the verve of a lonely risk-assessment officer at a life insurance firm.

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In general, women tend to live longer and healthier lives than men for a variety of reasons, including greater health consciousness and a tendency to avoid risky behaviors, but also genetic and hormonal factors. At 65 years old, U.S. women are expected to live for an additional 19 to 21 years, while for U.S. men, this number only stood at around 16 to 18.5 years. 

However, married men aged 65 gain almost 2.5 years of life expectancy over their unmarried counterparts of the same age, boosting their outlook on life significantly. The role women play in marriages as planners and facilitators of medical care as well as advocates for healthy habits becomes clear when looking at divorced and widowed men’s life expectancy. 

Married and never-married women, on the other hand, have a more similar expected lifespan. But even if a women is divorced or widowed, her life expectancy is still somewhat above that of a never-married woman, highlighting how women benefit from the overall advantages of marriage rather than just their spouse. These come in the form of so-called marriage protections, like adopting better habits, better mental health outcomes and better social connectedness. They are also often explained by so-called marriage selection, the idea that those individuals who manage to get married are already starting out with a better outlook on life.

Of course, this data depends on the quality of a marriage. A poor marriage has the opposite effect on lifespans due to increased stress and burdens.

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Some insights about the wealthy, from 20 years working in wealth management with high-net-worth clients:

  • Money doesn’t really change people. It magnifies what’s already there. Anxious people become more anxious. Generous people become philanthropists. Spenders ramp up spending on a never-ending hedonic treadmill of delights. Sibling disputes become expensive multi-year legal battles.
  • The children of successful, wealthy families often internalize enormous pressure to excel and perform at high levels. They know they have no excuse to fail and every opportunity to succeed. They also learn that no one will ever extend them a lick of sympathy.
  • Wealthy people aren’t better at managing money. They struggle to save; they get scammed; they don’t stick to a budget or know how much they spend. They have no special investing prowess.
  • They still worry about money – about running out, about spoiling their kids, about making the wrong investments, about not making the most of it. Wealth does not alleviate money anxiety; in fact it can exacerbate it.
  • They are very susceptible to peer pressure and groupthink. This applies to lifestyle choices and investing trends. The most popular conversations and think pieces were inevitably along the lines of “what our other clients are doing.”
  • Rich people mostly own the same ETFs and index funds as the rest of us. There are no inside investing secrets. They don’t time the market or trade actively – if they listen to their advisors. Some love a flashy PE fund or venture capital stake to talk about on the golf course, but alternatives are generally more status flex than return enhancement.
  • Wealthy parents worry unnecessarily about hammering a “strong work ethic” into their kids. Whether childhood is rough or smooth, some people develop it, and others just don’t. Similarly, some kids have a tendency to over-save, while others spend or give too much. This happens in poor and rich families alike.

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Almost every metric of U.S. stock valuations are at or above their 2000 bubble high peak:

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The price to earnings ratio of emerging market stocks were over 100% higher than U.S. stocks in 2006-2007. Today emerging market p/e ratios are almost 50% lower than the U.S.

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index captures large and mid-cap representation across 24 emerging-markets countries, with roughly 1,200 constituents, and covers about 85% of the free-float-adjusted market capitalization in each country. The country roster includes places like China, India, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and South Africa, among others.

It’s “free-float-adjusted market-cap weighted,” meaning constituents are weighted by the share value actually available to public investors, and larger companies carry more weight.

Korea and Taiwan now account for nearly half of the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, roughly double their 2020 weight, making the index increasingly sensitive to U.S. tech dynamics. As a result, EM equities have become more correlated with the U.S. AI cycle, diminishing their role as a portfolio diversifier.

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AI summaries are the likely driver of search’s decline as an online traffic source and the recent uptick in zero-click searches.

An increasing share of searches ends in no links being clicked.

Temporal Chauvinism, Attractiveness & Germs

It’s difficult to escape “temporal chauvinism,” which is the feeling that the time we’re living in now is the most significant or terrifying one ever, simply because it’s the one we happen to be around to experience.

Everything about our situation as humans pushes us to overrate the importance of our own era. Apart from anything else, present-day unknowns feel the scariest, because all previous unknowns eventually resolved themselves into knowns (every prior prediction of the end of the world turned out to be wrong) while future ones haven’t occurred to us yet. 

It is very, very, very, very unlikely that the literal apocalypse is coming anytime soon. We’re almost certainly not living at the end of human civilization. Frankly, it’s pretty unlikely we’re even on the cusp of unprecedented levels of disruptive change. The truth is that we’re probably living through times that future historians will think of as broadly normal.

The point is not that life is safer and more secure than the heralds of the apocalypse would have us believe. It’s the opposite: that human existence is intrinsically unsafe and insecure, all the time. Anything could happen at any moment, the future is unknowable, one day you’ll die, and some people end up having vastly more traumatic encounters with these realities than others.

Yet there’s a stunning bit of good news hiding in all this, because if radical insecurity about the future is just how life is, then by definition, we’re already coping with it. Look back at your life to date, and you might even conclude that, so far, you’re handling it all rather brilliantly.

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The graph below shows what people say they want or what is important to them in a partner (red line). The “X” marks show how much each trait correlated with people’s actual romantic evaluations or how important it was in real life.

The biggest discrepancies were in (1) being attractive, (2) being a good lover, (3) being sexy, (4) having a nice body, and (5) smelling good. Perhaps people are simpler than we realized once we look beyond surveys.

The discrepancies run the other way too. Being (1) a good listener, (2) patient, and (3) calm and emotionally stable were all overrated in stated preferences.

It’s a little confusing that the red line rises from left to right, suggesting increasing importance, but since these are rankings, a higher number actually means less important (1 = most important).

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Research has consistently shown that younger siblings fare worse than firstborns on lifetime earnings, educational achievement, mental health and, for women, teen pregnancy. The later the birth order, the worse the stats get. Why?

(1) Less Quality Time with Parents

First-born children average 20 to 30 more quality minutes each day with parents compared with a second-born child of the same age. The deficit amounts to about 3,000 fewer hours spent on reading, playing, talking or other activities with at least one parent for younger siblings. That’s roughly comparable to more than a year of schooling between the ages of 4 and 13.

The gap only widens as more kids enter the picture. That means the youngest siblings get far less quality time overall because whatever is available gets split among more children.

(2) Germs

Studies find that the tiniest organisms have a profound impact on a child’s future. Exposure to respiratory viruses before a baby’s first birthday, when immune systems are immature and before most childhood vaccinations, consistently predict reduced earnings, education and health decades later.

Researchers estimate that half or more of the gap in life outcomes between older and younger siblings can be attributed to pathogens inadvertently brought home by older siblings.

The disparity is stark: Younger siblings are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized for acute respiratory conditions than their older siblings during their first year of life. After that, when younger children generally begin attending group child care, the hospitalization gap disappears. Older siblings, the data suggested, bring home viruses to vulnerable infants with no other significant sources of exposure.

To show that higher disease exposure causes harm later in life required more work for researchers. They had to control for parental income, education and employment across municipalities with higher and lower infection rates. Yet the pattern was clear: earnings, education and mental health outcomes all declined as community disease exposure rose.

In the first months of life, roughly 85 percent of an infant’s calorie intake goes toward neural development. A serious infection can reduce how much a baby eats and divert calories away building a brain. If a child is very ill during that time, it might impact brain development by diverting biological resources to fighting an illness.

RSV was singled out as a key pathogen. It caused roughly one-third of all respiratory hospitalizations among second-born children with no protective immunity from first-year exposure against RSV hospitalization during later childhood.

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Luck, Loneliness & Drones

Loneliness as we think about it today is a new phenomenon. In the past, people often talked about being alone, but there were lots of benefits to it : spiritual connection, getting to know yourself, emotion regulation. For most of human history, there was a sense that you were never truly alone; God was around, or you were one with nature. Our modern notion of loneliness is a 19th century concept that emerged as culture became more secular and more individualist.

In Robinson Crusoe, from the early 1800s, being stranded was a moment of spiritual enlightenment, a chance to find yourself. In Cast Away with Tom Hanks, the whole point is that Hanks went crazy because he had no one to talk to. There’s a real difference in what we think alone time does.

Psychologists have started asking whether our construal of loneliness is actually creating the feelings associated with it, and people talking about the loneliness crisis could be making them more lonely. Studies have been run where some people read a typical news article about the loneliness crisis and others read about the benefits of solitude. That simple intervention changes how people experience being alone. Your perception of how bad it is to be alone is making loneliness worse when you actually find yourself alone.

Some people’s deepest moments of loneliness can be at a party where they felt disconnected, physically surrounded by people but experiencing real loneliness. So being physically alone or with other people doesn’t map cleanly onto whether you feel connected. But how we think about it matters enormously. If you’re excited to be alone, if you frame it as solitude rather than aloneness, research shows even those linguistic choices make a difference.

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Two years ago, it was clear that in a direct confrontation, the U.S. military would walk all over Russia’s clumsy, outdated post-Soviet army. Now, the reverse is probably true; the Ukraine War has forced the Russian army to learn how to fight with drones, while America is still mostly inexperienced with the new kind of warfare. Russia may not be quite as good at drone war as the Ukrainians, but the U.S. has so far made only incremental changes to how it fights. If the U.S. were to fight Russia today, it would be in for a rude surprise.

Of course, the same is true of China. Its military, like America’s, is still focused mainly on expensive high-performance platforms — aircraft carriers, hypersonic missiles, submarines, and so on. But there’s one big difference between China and the U.S. here — China’s peerless industrial base would give it the ability to construct an overwhelming drone-based force very quickly, while America’s withered industrial base would make it impossible to adapt in time.

Interestingly, the U.S. is still #2 here — albeit a distant second. But worryingly, the U.S.’ traditional allies — Germany, Japan, France, Korea, etc. — make very few drones at all.

Even if they want to, the U.S. and its allies will have an incredibly hard time scaling up indigenous drone production. The reason is that drones are built using a set of technologies that the U.S. and its allies have mostly decided to forfeit to China. Drones use lithium-ion batteries and rare earth electric motors, both of which are almost entirely manufactured in China.

China is now capable of manufacturing a drone armada that can easily outmatch that of every other country on the planet combined, if it wants to. And except for Ukraine, Russia is now the only country on Earth that has first-hand experience of how to fight a modern drone war.

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If you want to find the smartest person in the room, find the nicest person in the room.

The smartest person in the room is probably fighting back against the natural tribal urge so many of us have to compete, suppress, and insert ourselves above other people. It takes a lot of mental horsepower to suppress those emotions and realize that if you’re actually nice to people, you can get ahead.

The smartest people in the world know what they don’t know, or they know how little they know. They’re much more likely to say, “Hey, that idea you just talked about, maybe it’s right. I don’t know. I know how uncertain and difficult and complicated the world is.”

The smartest people know the world is not zero-sum. They know that I can get ahead and you can get ahead and we can both win. It takes much less intelligence to think every debate and every interaction is zero-sum, where there is one winner and one loser.

The luckier you are, the nicer you should be. Whether it’s finance, career, relationships, where you’re born, whatever it might be. There are elements of your life that make you lucky. One of the ways to deal with that—the sign of higher intelligence—is that the luckier you are, the nicer you should be to other people, particularly people you know were not as lucky as you were.

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Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs were initially understood as a metabolism breakthrough: medicines that act like hormones to control hunger, blood sugar and weight. But as researchers probe deeper into how the drugs work, early evidence suggests that GLP-1s may also be reshaping parts of the brain.

Tens of millions of people are now taking the medications worldwide, turning what began as an obesity and diabetes treatment into what could bemodern medicine’s largest unplanned neuroscience experiments.

Some users have reported a type of brain fog and others something broader and harder to define:a strange emotional flattening. People describe less pleasure, less motivation, diminished interest in hobbies and even reduced sexual desire.

Those accounts are beginning to raise deeper questions about what, exactly, these drugs are changing. If GLP-1s alter the brain systems involved in reward, craving and motivation, researchers wonder, where is the line between quieting a person’s destructive impulses and reshaping personality itself?

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The chart below shows the relationship between starting valuations and subsequent 10 to 15 year real equity market returns across 16 countries, with U.S. data going back to 1881.

At a Shiller CAPE of 39 or above, there is no historical period since 1881 that was followed by attractive long-term real returns.

The CAPE ratio in the United States moved above 42 this week, inching closer to the all-time peak of the tech bubble high in March 2000 when it hit 44.

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:

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.

Removing Burden, Parent Goals & Happiness

The British-born Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett said her teaching style wasn’t to lighten the burden of the student, but to make it so heavy that he or she would put it down. I had a full-body reaction the first time I encountered that. To me, the phrase meant this: you can slog through life trying to ‘get on top of things’, trying to reach the point at which you feel like you know what you’re doing, trying to fix your flaws, or make yourself emotionally invulnerable… All of that is an attempt to ‘lighten the burden’, and there are a thousand self-help gurus on standby, promising to aid you in the effort.

But making the burden heavier? That means seeing that as a finite human you’ll never get on top of everything, never fully understand what makes others tick, never immunize yourself from distress. The burden of reaching that goal is an impossibly heavy one. And so you put it down. You let your shoulders drop and your muscles unclench. And then – crucially – you’re free to actually be here, actually do stuff, actually show up. You get to climb life’s mountains without lugging a huge rucksack full of steel ingots on your back the whole way, which is both easier and much more fun.

The spiritual writer Michael Singer points out: reality doesn’t need you to help operate it. It gets along just fine without your worrying.

Who knew? I don’t think of myself as an obscenely self-centered narcissist, yet I have to admit that when I heard those words, I suddenly perceived the subtle sense in which my thoughts and actions – and especially the background muscular tension I instinctively bring to them – were indeed somehow premised on the notion that reality itself would be badly affected were I to relax my guard.

I seem to imagine that my worrying is effective – that there’s something about the very act of fretting about the future that helps keep everything on track. This is, rather obviously, false. All I really need to do is to show up for what’s happening, appreciate the spectacle of it, and go with the flow.

Life is not a problem to be solved. Or else that life is nothing but a never-ending stream of problems to be solved, which in fact amounts to the same thing. Grasping this is both an enormous relief and tremendously energizing – because now you get to pour your finite time and energy into something infinitely more absorbing than trying to keep life under control, which is actually living it.

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I had a conversation with a guy a few months ago whose immigrant parents came to America and worked tirelessly in low-wage jobs to make ends meet. Those kids are now adults, and this guy felt a sense of shame that as a college-educated white-collar worker he would not have to suffer the same way his parents did for him. His parents instilled in him the lessons of frugality and grit. Would his own children learn the same from him if they watched their father live a comparatively easy life?

He gave an example: when he was a kid, all books were borrowed from the library. Now his young daughter demands (and gets) to purchase $15 Taylor Swift books that pile up in her room.

My response was that if we talked to his immigrant parents, I would bet they would say: that was the goal. To put it differently: The goal of some parents is to work so hard that their kids and grandkids get to live a life that appears spoiled by the standards of previous generations.

What’s common to miss here is that when one generation’s life becomes comparatively easier than before, their life does not become objectively easy; they just move on to worrying about higher-order problems that were previously deemed not urgent enough to worry about.

I hope my kids and grandkids won’t have to worry about cancer in the ways we do. I hope they have incredible technology that makes their jobs easier than ours. I hope that everyday frictions we deal with today disappear. I hope their energy is so abundant they consider it unlimited.

Is that spoiled? I suppose, but when you frame it like that you might think of a different word – perhaps “lucky,” or, “fortunate.” Or perhaps, “beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems.” Which is what you and I are today.

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Mark Manson reviewed over 2,600 studies to rank 19 of the most common self-improvement techniques based on their effectiveness. He sorted them into four tiers: (1) legitimately works, (2) works sometimes, (3) probably not helping, and (4) straight up bullshit. Here were the results:

TIER 4: STRAIGHT UP BULLSHIT (AND MAY ACTUALLY HURT YOU):

19. Suppressing Negative Thoughts — The “ironic process” means trying not to think about something makes you think about it more. It can work for very smart people in very short-term, high-pressure moments, but the rebound effect makes things worse over time for everyone.

18. Microdosing Psychedelics — No consistent measurable benefit beyond mood improvement (i.e., you’re just getting a little high). Studies show a decline in cognitive function and executive reasoning, and long-term microdosing may carry adverse health effects from chronic exposure to psychoactive compounds.

17. Intuitive Decision-Making (“Trust Your Gut”) — Your gut doesn’t make better decisions; it just makes you feel better about your decisions. The exception is domain experts with decades of pattern-matching experience, but for most life choices, it’s self-serving and often detached from reality.

16. Catharsis / Venting Anger — Screaming into a pillow or punching a wall doesn’t release anger — it trains you to indulge it. The small effect sizes that exist are negative, meaning it makes you angrier more often.

TIER 3: PROBABLY NOT HELPING

15. Crystal Healing — Pure placebo effect. If you believe it works, you might get a small something, but there’s essentially zero evidence of any mechanism. Mostly it just harms your bank account.

14. Willpower / Ego Depletion — The concept of willpower as a finite tank you drain throughout the day is highly contested and probably not real. Believing you have limited willpower tends to make you underperform, and productivity problems are usually emotional problems in disguise.

13. Power Posing — Any mood boost is extremely transient, and the early hormonal claims (testosterone increases) have been debunked. It’s essentially a tiny placebo triggered by becoming momentarily aware of your posture.

12. Learning Styles (Visual/Auditory/Kinesthetic) — Over 90% of U.S. teachers still believe in this, but research consistently shows no real effect. The benefit people report is simply from having a choice in how they learn, not from matching a “style.”

11. Positive Affirmations — A “win more” strategy: people who already feel good get a small boost, but people with low self-esteem often feel worse because it highlights the gap between the affirmation and their actual beliefs.

10. Morning Routines — Extremely personality-dependent and mostly a placebo driven by a sense of control. Forcing a routine that mismatches your chronotype or becoming rigidly dependent on it can actually backfire.

TIER 2: WORKS SOMETIMES (MAYBE/DEPENDS):

9. Positive Visualization — Works well for physical/athletic performance and when paired with concrete planning. Without a plan, it’s just daydreaming — and pure outcome-based visualization actually decreases motivation.

8. Energy Healing — Surprisingly landed in the top half with a medium effect size (0.53), though only 56% of studies found any effect. The benefit likely comes from human touch, the ritual, and a strong placebo/expectancy effect rather than anything metaphysical.

7. Cold Water Immersion (for Mental Health) — Fairly consistent mood and stress benefits, likely driven by a big dopamine release. However, it’s a “win more” strategy — helpful if you’re already mentally healthy, potentially destabilizing if you’re fragile.

6. Speed Reading — You can realistically go from ~200 to 300–400 words per minute, which is meaningful, but the 1,000 wpm promises are nonsense. The trade-off is reduced retention, and much of reading speed turns out to be genetic.

TIER 1: LEGITIMATELY WORKS

5. Gratitude Interventions — The most consistent finding in the entire list: 98% of 166 studies showed a positive effect. The effect size is small, though, and compared to other positive interventions like acts of kindness, the unique “gratitude mechanism” mostly disappears.

4. Meditation — Consistently effective for stress and anxiety reduction, roughly equivalent to SSRIs for depression in some studies. The deeper benefit is knowing your own mind better, though compared to other active positive interventions, the unique advantage narrows.

3. Eat the Frog (Hardest Task First) — 95% of the benefit comes from the prioritization process itself, not the timing. Figuring out what matters most creates clarity and reduces anxiety, and ending the day on easier tasks boosts self-efficacy.

2. Bibliotherapy (Reading Self-Help Books) — 93% of 188 studies found positive effects, with a decent effect size approaching some therapy modalities. The key is the right book at the right time, and structured recommendations from a therapist boost the hit rate significantly.

1.Behavioral Activation (“Do Something”) — The most robust finding across all 19 techniques. Simply taking action, even small action, generates motivation rather than waiting for motivation to strike. It’s on par with CBT for depression and costs nothing.

Full Discussion Here: Self Help, Solved

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From the World Happiness Report (2026 was just released). The country rankings below are based on three-year averages, so the 2023 result captures responses from 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Brain Hemispheres, Meaning & The Placebo Effect

We are living at a time of profound unhappiness.

But here’s the really weird part: The ones suffering most are not just the down-and-out types—the addicts, the impoverished, the failsons. Those for whom there are obvious things gone wrong in their lives. On the contrary, it is also those who seem to have everything going right for them—in other words, our young and most successful strivers.

I’ve spent my life surrounded by that very group. As a longtime college professor, I have been privileged to teach hundreds of wonderful students—ambitious strivers just starting out on what promised to be terrific careers and lives. I have met countless young people who were so inspired by ideas, so purpose-driven, and so enthusiastic.

But in 2009, I left academia to run a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. And when I returned to campus a decade later, the atmosphere was dark. Larger and larger percentages of students were suffering from depression and anxiety. At some schools, more than half of students were receiving mental health treatment. My office hours were more like counseling sessions than tutoring. Hope and optimism had been replaced by anger and sadness.

Most of the younger generation is online a lot: scrolling social media, watching videos. To simulate a social life, they spend hours listening to podcasts of other people having interesting conversations. You could call it “social pornography.” Most of the time, there’s nothing better to do. They crave a big, meaningful project and immersing themselves in it. But they can’t come up with any ideas for what that project might be . . . so it’s back online.

They don’t fit the traditional résumé of unhappy people. They’re not addicted to drugs, nor struggling financially. In fact, their life looks enviable from the outside. But like so many young people I’ve spoken to over the years, they feel empty.

What these young strivers describe to me is something akin to waiting in an airport terminal for a delayed flight that never leaves. They try to stay occupied to keep themselves from going mad, always in the hope that boarding will finally be called and the flight will take off. And their distraction tactics—which invariably involve technology—keep them from thinking too much but make their sense of emptiness worse.

One of the young strivers I talked to was telling me about his virtual job, dating apps, social media friends, and video gaming. Then, out of the blue, he said something fundamental.

“I feel like I’m living in a simulation.”

Others said the same thing. Life felt unreal: full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences, all curated to pass the time as painlessly as possible.

Again and again, people said that life was busy but not meaningful. That experiences and relationships felt meaningless. Or that they didn’t know what they were meant to do in work and life. And it’s worse for the strivers than anyone else: The richer, more technologically advanced the country, the greater the percentage of the population that answers “no” to the question “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?”

Here’s why: Strivers are great at solving technical problems and answering specific, hard questions. They have been educated and trained to believe that, while the world is incredibly complicated, with enough knowledge and hard work, every problem can be solved.

The truth is, many big, complicated problems can be solved with sheer intellectual horsepower. But meaning is not one of them. “What is the meaning of my life?” is a question that cannot be answered like “How do I build an app for finding concert tickets?” or “How do I create an effective six-month weight-loss program?” Meaning is a question that must be lived, not solved with a Google search or simulated using artificial intelligence. It requires deep contemplation and a commitment to living a real life, full of unsolvable secrets, puzzling riddles, unexplainable bliss, and terrible suffering.

But in all their technical excellence, strivers trivialize their humanness by reducing life’s magnificent inscrutability to a series of complicated but solvable problems. They aren’t just living in a simulation; they are also creating the simulation they are living in.

In his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Ian McGilchrist argued our brains have two hemispheres that deal with everything, but they do so in consistently different ways. The right side of the brain is the “master,” which asks big, transcendent questions such as “Why am I alive?” The left side—which he calls the “emissary”—addresses such practical questions as “How do I get food so I can keep being alive?”

In other words, in the right hemisphere we ask the lofty why questions about life. On the left side, we ask, earthbound, what to do now and how to do it.

Hemispheric lateralization explains the acute crisis of meaning today. In our increasingly complicated, technology-dominated, and endlessly distracting world, people are shoved to the left side of their brains. They are stuck in a complicated simulation where there is a lot going on, but which is bereft of mystery and meaning.

Older people remember the before times, when meeting a potential mate for the first time involved a real-life conversation, and a big question of life’s meaning couldn’t be reduced to a Google search. But most young adults today have never known any domain other than Left Brain Land. And this is especially true for the strivers. They know every complicated nook and cranny of that technical dystopia, but the mysterious realm of meaning seems mythical, like the lost kingdom of Atlantis.

Stuck outside the realm of the numinous right hemisphere, life becomes just an endless loop of complicated left-brain routines and habits—a simulation of a life that is deep, mysterious, and authentic. It’s frustrating and empty.

Worse: It’s boring. And humans absolutely despise boredom. 

Why are we so bored? Because life feels repetitive and meaningless, and even a minute here or there with nothing to do feels like an hour. So out comes the phone, every few minutes, all day long, changing our brain chemistry in dangerous ways.

And what side of our brains are we on as we do all this? The mundane left, of course, not the mysterious right. The remedy we’ve created to avoid the boredom of modern life—this app, that video—reinforces our inability to ponder the abstractions necessary to formulate any concept of our lives’ meaning.

This asymmetry explains why we’re bombarded with ingenious solutions to age-old problems but never seem to make progress toward greater happiness. In fact, it’s the reverse: We are losing our sense of life’s meaning faster and faster.

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The famous origin story of Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, is that Andrew Carnegie commissioned Hill in 1908 to interview 500 successful people over 20 years.

That origin story is fabrication.

In reality, in 1908 Hill was fleeing police in Alabama under a fake name after committing fraud, facing domestic violence accusations, and abandoning his family. The book’s real author was his wife. She took Hill’s rambling, failed manuscripts and refined them into Think and Grow Rich.

The book contains a mix of genuinely good advice:

  • Specific goal-setting with deadlines
  • Persistence and grit
  • The “mastermind” concept of surrounding yourself with sharp people
  • The value of specialized knowledge

It also contains psuedoscienctific nonsense like:

  • “Sex transmutation” or redirecting sexual energy toward business
  • The idea that brains communicate through vibrations
  • A “sixth sense” chapter about receiving messages from infinite intelligence

If Think & Grow Rich is a fabrication from a con man, how has it sold over 100 million copies and helped millions of people since it was published?

The answer lies in the placebo effect.

Most of the advice from self-help gurus works not because it’s scientifically accurate, but because believing in it changes people’s behavior, which then changes their outcomes. Believing they can accomplish something makes them more likely to try it and then more likely to try hard and persist.

Is his book Useful, Not True, Derek Sivers says most things are hard to know for certain, so you might as well believe whatever is most helpful for you and others. The criticism that self-help is pseudoscience misses the point. Due to the placebo effect, even if something is not scientifically true, it can be useful for many people.

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Key findings from chapter 3 of the 2026 World Happiness Report: Social media is harming adolescents at a scale large enough to cause changes at the population level:

Is social media use reasonably safe for children and adolescents? We call this the “product safety question”, and we present seven lines of evidence showing that the answer is no.

The evidence of harm is found in: 1) surveys of young people; 2) surveys of parents, teachers, and clinicians; 3) contents from corporate documents; 4) findings from cross-sectional studies; 5) findings from longitudinal studies; 6) findings from social media reduction experiments; and 7) findings from natural experiments.

We show there is now overwhelming evidence of severe and widespread direct harms (such as sextortion and cyberbullying), and compelling evidence of troubling indirect harms (such as depression and anxiety). Furthermore, we show that the harms and risks to individual users are so diverse and vast in scope that they justify the view that social media is causing harm at a population level.

We further argue that when these lines of evidence are considered alongside the timing, scope, and cross-national trends in adolescent wellbeing and mental health, they can help answer a second question: was the rapid adoption of always-available social media by adolescents in the early 2010s a substantial contributor to the population-level increases in mental illness that emerged by the mid 2010s in many Western nations? We call this the “historical trends question”. We draw on our findings about the vast scale of harm uncovered while answering the product safety question to argue that the answer to the historical trends question is “yes”.

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The graph below shows the percentage of each country’s total stock market cap made up by its top 10 largest stocks. While people worry about the concentration of the largest stocks in the U.S., it is a global phenomenon.

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Is this finally the moment when the jaws begin to close and U.S. value stocks (red line) outperform growth (blue line)?

Death, Pessimism & Frontier Markets

Contemplating death is the New Year’s resolution to end all resolutions. Why? Because it sharpens our focus, allows us to clarify what truly matters—and to craft our goals and priorities around that—anchors us in the present moment, and deepens our appreciation for all that life has to offer, right here and now.

Remembering that we are going to die goes hand-in-hand with another key realization: we have no way of knowing how much time we have left. We might die in three years, or 38 years, or a few months from now. So, what should we do with the time we have—with our one wild and precious life?

Humans have long known of the power of this practice. We’ve been contemplating death for over 100,000 years, from the earliest archeological burial artifacts to Buddhist maraṇasati, from Stoic philosophy to ancient Egyptian funerary texts.

It’s only in the modern Western world that we began to see this practice as depressing or morbid. We lost our relationship with death, and somewhere along the way, we stopped living fully too.

Here are 11 science-backed benefits of taking the time to think about death:

  • Cut through your own bullshit – helps you overcome excuses and stop wasting time on what’s not serving you
  • Clarify your values – less bullshit = more clarity
  • Motivation to act – gives you permission to stop living on autopilot or within societal expectations and start living in alignment with what actually feels true
  • Find a deeper purpose – research shows that being reminded of our mortality triggers a psychological drive to seek or restore meaning in life.
  • Be more present – when you fully accept that everything, and I mean everything, will ultimately be taken from you, the present moment suddenly becomes sacred
  • Gratitude –  like anything else rare and precious, when we remember that life is fleeting, we value it more
  • Stronger relationships – when you remember that one day, everyone you love will die, and so will you, your relationships change
  • Empathy and compassion – death is the great equalizer
  • Unlocks creativity – gives rise to an intense drive to make your own little dent on the universe, to leave something behind to say that you were here. 
  • Keep your ego in check – it’s a reminder that you’re not the center of the universe, the desire to impress starts to dwindle, liberating you from feeling like you need to be the smartest, best, most admired person in the room – instead, you start to show up as a real person: flawed, fleeting, and free
  • Take more risks –  the only thing scarier than dying is never having really lived, so you’re more likely to pursue the life you’ve been dreaming of.

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Interest rates have begun to come down. Inflation has mostly subsided, and the real economy is still doing decently well.  So why are American consumers more pessimistic than they were during the depths of the Great Recession or the inflation of the late 1970s?

It’s possible to spin all sorts of ad hoc hypotheses about why consumer sentiment has diverged from its traditional determinants. Perhaps Americans are upset about social issues and politics, and expressing this as dissatisfaction about the economy. Perhaps they’re mad that Trump seems to be trying to hurt the economy. Perhaps they’re scared that AI will take their jobs. And so on.

Here’s another hypothesis: Maybe Americans are down in the dumps because their perception of the “good life” is being warped by TikTok and Instagram.

I’ve been reading for many years about how social media would make Americans unhappier by prompting them to engage in more frequent social comparisons. In the 2010s, as happiness plummeted among young people, the standard story was that Facebook and Instagram were shoving our friends’ happiest moments in our faces — their smiling babies, their beautiful weddings, their exciting vacations — and instilling a sense of envy and inadequacy.

However, note that during the 2010s, consumer confidence was high. Even if people were comparing their babies and vacations and boyfriends, this was not yet causing them to seethe with dissatisfaction over their material lifestyles. But social media today is very different than social media in the 2010s. It’s a lot more like television — young people nowadays spend very little time viewing content posted by their friends. Instead, they’re watching an algorithmic feed of strangers.

There were rich people like that in 1920, or 1960, or 1990. But you almost never saw them. Maybe you could read about them in People magazine or watch a TV show about them. But most people simply didn’t have contact with the super-rich. Now, thanks to social media, they do. 

But even more subtle might be the influencers who are merely upper class rather than spectacularly rich. These people aren’t living the lifestyle of a ultra-rich influencer, yet most of what you’re seeing in these photos and videos is economically out of reach for the average American. 

These are not obviously rich people — they’re more like the 5% or the 1% than the 0.01%. Their lifestyles are out of reach for most, but not obviously out of reach. Looking at any of their videos, you might unconsciously wonder “Why don’t I live like that?”.

Americans were always shown examples of aspirational lifestyles on TV shows. Yet on some level, Americans might have realized that that was fiction; when you see a lifestyle influencer on TikTok or Instagram, you feel like you’re seeing simple, bare-bones reality.

The rise of social media influencers has scrambled our social reference points. Humans have always compared ourselves to others, but before social media, we compared ourselves to the people around us — our coworkers, friends, family, and neighbors.

Those classic reference points tended to be people who were roughly similar to us in income — maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but usually not hugely different.

But perhaps even more importantly — we were able to explain the differences we saw. In 1995, if you knew a rich guy who owned a car dealership, you knew how he made his money. If you envied his big house and his nice car, you could tell yourself that he had those things because of hard work, natural ability, willingness to accept risk, and maybe luck. The “luck” part would rankle, but it was only one factor among many. And you knew that if you, too, opened a successful car dealership, you could have all of those same things.

But now consider looking at an upper-class social media influencer. It’s not immediately obvious what they do for work, or how they could afford all those nice things.

Not only can you not explain the wealth you’re seeing on social media, but you probably don’t even think about explaining it. It’s just floating there, delocalized, in front of you — something that other people have that you don’t. Perhaps you make it your reference point by default, unconsciously and automatically.

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Frontier markets represent the world’s least developed investable economies,
offering exposure to countries with young populations and high economic growth
potential, yet smaller, less liquid markets. Over time, the composition of the MSCI
Frontier Markets Index has shifted meaningfully, with Gulf countries like Kuwait and
Qatar having “graduated” to emerging status and Asian and European nations now
taking greater prominence. Frontier markets remain dominated by financial services,
with larger weights to real estate, energy, and materials, reflecting other structural
differences compared with emerging and developed markets.

The MSCI Frontier Markets index is one of the most widely used indices related to
frontier markets. It contains approximately 238 stocks spread across 28 countries.1
The top three countries in the benchmark were Vietnam, Morocco, and Romania,
which collectively accounted for just over 50% of the index.

To better understand how growth expectations within frontier markets compare
with growth across the world, it is helpful to compare their GDP growth rate
expectations to developed and emerging markets.


Despite their strong expected GDP growth rates, frontier markets have not translated
that economic momentum into equivalent corporate earnings performance. Earnings
per share growth has stagnated even as valuations have remained low relative to
developed and emerging markets. This combination presents both opportunities
and risks. Value-oriented investors may find attractive entry points, but persistent
structural inefficiencies and volatility underscore the need for careful analysis.

Frontier markets have historically traded at lower valuations compared to developed
markets and similar-to-lower valuations than emerging markets.

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We compiled a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. 

Our main insight is that, as in equity markets, the returns on external sovereign bonds have been sufficiently high to compensate for risk. Real ex-post returns average more than 6 percent annually across two centuries, including default episodes, major wars, and global crises. 

This represents an excess return of 3-4 percent above US or UK government bonds, which is comparable to stocks and outperforms corporate bonds. Central to this finding are the high average coupons offered on external sovereign bonds.

1815 – 2016:

1995 – 2016: