Tag: mental-health

The Zone Of Scarcity & Global Developments

Vikram Mansharamani published his global developments to watch from 2026 to 2031. These were a few that I found interesting:

  • Bio-fabrication technologies advance rapidly enabling human organs to be printed on demand. A new industry of “body mechanics” emerges and utilizes AI-driven prediction models to pre-emptively replace joints, bones, and organs before they fail. The expected lifespan of a child born in 2030 rises to 151 years.
  •  Advancements in quantum computing lead to a geopolitical crisis as all formerly- secure communications become instantaneously vulnerable. Each breakthrough leads to a bump in gold prices as investors fear the possibility of quantum-enabled theft of cryptocurrency. Cybersecurity re-emerges as an area of top concern for corporate boardrooms, nation states, and individuals.
  • Deepfake technologies become indistinguishable from real life, leading to mass human confusion and cognitive dissonance. Reality Defender emerges as the world’s hottest company as it secures elections by providing voters assurance of authentic messaging from candidates, thereby saving democracy from being hijacked by technologically-savvy foreign actors.
  •  A boom in next generation nuclear technologies combines with improved hydrocarbon extraction efficiency to keep energy prices contained in the face of exploding demand from technology applications and data centers. As copper emerges as the world’s most strategic resource, the Great Powers shift their focus from the Middle East to the Andean region.
  • The insatiable consumer appetite for protein continues indefinitely. Restaurants start disclosing the protein content of menu items, and Coke introduces a high-protein soda. Public health deteriorates as Americans’ religious focus on protein leads to elevated consumption of sugars and artificial sweeteners.
  • The global use of GLP-1 drugs skyrockets as an oral pill becomes readily available and is covered by most health insurance plans or government health offices. 
  • Artificial intelligence generates deflation, leading to structurally rising unemployment and elevated debt levels.

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We are drowning in information and data. So much so that we’re obese in the mind. The same way the human body was not prepared for a world of abundant food, and we thus transformed our cities into feeding zones full of fat people, the human mind is not prepared for a world with infinite content and information. Less than two decades into social media and the world is already full of morbidly obese minds that cannot think or focus, let alone produce anything novel anymore.

Even the best of us are mentally overweight! There are few, if any, original ideas anywhere. Everyone, everywhere is in a constant, social-media induced mimetic trance, mistaking repetition for thought while parroting the same words as those in our little echo chamber.

The only solution is to shut it all out. I’ve come to the realization that selective ignorance on the other hand; I’m talking actual willful, intentional ignorance, is not only blissful, but is a holy virtue.

It’s the kind of ignorance that is deliberately oblivious to what is going on in the world because none of it matters an iota in the grand scheme of one’s life. It’s the kind of noble, savage and ruthless ignorance that doesn’t even waste energy saying: “I don’t care.” It’s just blissfully above to the noise, present only with what matters, here and now.

As the pace of things accelerates and the never ending cycle of hysteria continues, it’s dawned on me that none of it really matters. Sure, individual events may matter to some people, but because of how we’re wired and how the internet and social media have connected us all, the number of events that can (a) happen and also (b) be brought to our attention is infinite.

Which in short means that everything matters all the time. But when everything matters all of the time, then the only reaction for the mind and body is to become numb. In other words, nothing means anything or matters any more. This is not a way to live.

Attention, at the end of the day, is all we really have. It’s finite. It’s super super super finite. We have so little time. We have only so much energy. It’s hard to focus at the best of times, and here we are, on a daily basis, being either:

  1. Distracted by things inside of a phone-size shopfront that most of us will either never have (picture-perfect women, hotels, cars, etc), or
  2. Inflamed by things on that same stupid screen which we have no relationship to or influence over, happening in other parts of the world, thousands of miles away.

The end result of all this stupidity (for 99.9999% of people) is just a LOSS of attention. I’m sure some of you have found inspiration or motivation from these screens (this can happen), but if we’re all being TRULY honest with ourselves here, we can admit the truth: we can be just as inspired by a walk on the beach or a conversation with a loved one too.

When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t remember wtf I saw on Twitter or Instagram from all those endless hours of looking at the screen. But I will remember the time I spent with the people who I truly loved. To find a solution, one must first understand the problem, and the problem is twofold:

  1. Nobody is entirely immune to the siren call of dopamine. These platforms hack your biology in such a way that they hook you. Thus you are not fighting the platform, but your own biology – and this consumes energy. Energy that could be much better spent elsewhere.
  2. Our cups are already full. Those of use who are strong learners have already had our fill, especially if you’ve been online for the last 5 – 10 years. We’re well past the point of diminishing returns. We have all the information we could possibly need to live and lead meaningful lives. Stuffing our minds with more stuff won’t improve anything, and at this point is just a distraction from living in the real world and implementing the things we’ve already learned or know.

The beautiful thing about value is that it always migrates to the zone of greatest scarcity. As a zone attracts more attention (and thus value), it begins to lose scarcity, until it gets saturated, and then one day, the value migrates away to a zone where scarcity prevails. People are starting to realize that being online is quickly becoming uncouth and that they need to run away. But where?

The answer: offline. 

Loneliness, Purpose & Cash Flow Forecasts

With 23,000 responses to survey questions distributed over more than 4,500 respondents, we found there is a youth loneliness crisis, not just a male loneliness crisis like many believe. Younger people — both male and female — are increasingly paralyzed by anxiety and fear, and they are finding it harder and harder to socialize.

In fact, when you look at the data, the “antisocial crisis” is actually most pronounced among young women, who experience the highest rates of social isolation.

It’s true that young men are facing a loneliness crisis, but it’s part of a broader loneliness crisis that young people are facing in general, and the numbers suggest that young women might actually be hit even harder, even though that story hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention.

Looking at the results from our study on the questions concerning emotional distress the gender split is striking, but it is age, rather than gender, which marks the determining axis once again.

For instance, young men (18 to 29) are more distressed than almost every other demographic, including women 45 to 64 and women over 65. But young women are hit even harder, and they actually have the worst scores among any age-based gender cohort in our entire dataset.

In another axis of our study, social disengagement, young people once again emerged as the age group most likely to feel lonely, isolated, or conversationally stunted with people they don’t know, and there is a striking gap between the “internet generations” (people under 45) and everyone else.

While both young men and young women suffer from a loneliness and socialization crisis, young women actually seem to be hit significantly harder by it. In particular, they seem to find it much harder to make new friends or converse with strangers, especially when it comes to the opposite gender — and they’re much more likely to be introverted and alienated.

The results of this study lined up quite well with the existing research on this topic. A study conducted by Public Opinion Strategies found that young women are the cohort of Americans most likely to feel lonely and left out. And it doesn’t seem to be limited to just America — a study done by the United Kingdom’s Campaign to End Loneliness found that women and young people were two of the cohorts most affected by loneliness.

Young people are spending less and less time socializing with each other. The American Time Use Survey estimated a nearly 50% decline in face-to-face interactions among teenagers over the last two decades.

Time that used to be spent with friends is now spent online. When it comes to the “female loneliness crisis,” I’m not even convinced that most people know it exists. You can find column after column on the male loneliness epidemic. But when it comes to the female loneliness epidemic? Crickets.

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Growing up, I spent every French school holiday in the U.S. with my dad — the more career-driven of my parents (which tracks, since my mom is Belgian and my dad is a pure-bred American from Michigan). So I grew up with both models: French and American.

I don’t think most French people think about purpose the way Americans do. What’s your purpose? What are you building? What are you here for?

They’re good questions. But in France, they’re not humming in the background of every conversation. Most people I know don’t define themselves by what they do for a living. And if they work in a corporate setting, there’s often this quiet trust that things will evolve over time. No need to panic about your life path. Just do your job — and enjoy your life. Work is one part of the equation. So is your social life, your hobbies, your weekends away.

In the U.S., the idea of having purpose is everywhere: in books, on podcasts, in LinkedIn bios, even in casual brunch conversations. There’s this constant pressure to align your job with your passion, your calendar with your goals, your time with your values.

But what if your purpose is simply to build a good life? To raise kind children. To cook a little better each year. To read a few excellent books. To notice the seasons. To build meaningful relationships. Isn’t that what people will remember anyway?

In France, there’s no guilt in doing a job because it pays the bills. Or because it gives you your evenings. You can be excellent at what you do and still have no desire to talk about it over dinner — which is very much the case with my French husband, who bans work talk at the table. At first it felt strange. Now I love it. We talk about where we want to go next weekend. What we’re reading. What to cook.

When I moved back to Paris as an adult, I was struck by how much people here were just… living. They weren’t building personal brands. They weren’t trying to optimize themselves into more perfect versions. They worked, they took real holidays, they cooked, they went to the theater. They had long conversations about everything and nothing. And they rarely used the word productive.

What they value instead is curiosity. Culture. Taste. The art of paying attention. Of being present, not just purposeful. That doesn’t mean people are passive. But the energy is different. Life is more about living well or profiter de la vie.

It took me time to unlearn the habit of measuring everything by what it might lead to. What goal it served. What version of myself it might create. I still have ambition, but I no longer believe every moment needs to be part of some upward trajectory. Some days, it’s enough to spend the weekend with my family — visiting an exhibition, taking the kids to a play.

I don’t know that I’ll ever stop caring about meaning. But I’ve stopped needing to declare it. What I want now is to live with intention, even when there’s no obvious reward. To build a life that’s full, not optimized.

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There’s a strange comfort in believing someone out there knows what the market will do next. Don’t fall for it. People who make predictions on the financial markets for a living are about as accurate as a 50/50 coin toss.

By early spring 2025, when President Trump’s tariff wars started, over half of the forecasters were calling for the market to decline.  The below graph shows the level of the S&P 500 at the beginning of the year (orange bar), the actual price level at year end (green bar) and the wide range of estimates published in April (blue bars).  If you’d been reading all their research reports, you might have started selling.

Maybe you’re thinking “Fine. Experts may be clueless, but vibes are easy to read.” You know all about employment numbers, and inflation, and the usual talking points from CNBC.

Well, here’s a great chart from JP Morgan Asset Management that begs to differ. It looks at  S&P 500 performance after peaks and troughs in the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey. Interestingly, the weakest moments in how people are feeling  tend to precede strong equity returns while peaks in sentiment do not see as much upside. Turns out that getting out of the market when things feel bad can be a poor investment strategy.

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The defining feature of every bubble is the same: a growing inconsistency between the long-term returns that investors expect in their heads – based on extrapolation of the past, and the long-term returns that properly relate prices to likely future cash flows – based on valuations.

Each speculative episode encourages a certain stubbornness – because humans are adaptive creatures, we base our expectations for the future on the experience of the recent past. We respond far less to those things that are painful but distant in our memory than to those things that are rewarding in real-time.

This feature of investor behavior – what Galbraith called “the extreme brevity of the financial memory” – is complicated by the crowd psychology that accompanies speculation. Independence of thought requires one “to resist two compelling forces: one, the powerful personal interest that develops in the euphoric belief, and the other, the seemingly superior financial opinion that is brought to bear on behalf of such belief. As long as they are in, they have a strong pecuniary commitment to the belief in the unique personal intelligence that tells them there will be yet more. Speculation buys up, in a very practical way, the intelligence of those involved.”

A related, and I think equally challenging complication is that, in the short run, market prices will be whatever the consensus of the crowd chooses them to be. Nothing that we can measure affects market prices – whether earnings, GDP, employment, interest rates, monetary policy, or any other factor – except through the expectations and risk-preferences in the heads of investors at any moment in time. As the Buddha said, “With our thoughts we create our world.”

A financial “security” is nothing more than a claim on some stream of cash flows that investors expect to be delivered into their hands in the future. For any stream of future cash flows, and some long-term rate of expected return, we can always calculate the “present value” of the cash flows expected at each point in the future. Likewise, once we have a reasonable estimate of likely future cash flows, then the moment we know the market price, it’s just arithmetic to calculate the expected long-term rate of return on the investment.

Over the short-run, however, nothing prevents investors from imagining whatever long-term rate of return they like, and paying whatever price they wish, even if the two are mathematically incompatible with likely future cash flows. Even then, we can make everything compatible by imagining whatever future cash flows we like. Only time imposes any discipline on those choices, and sometimes time is unforgiving.

Over the short run, all that matters is the return in people’s heads. It’s only over time that the cash flows arrive and reliably teach investors that valuations matter. That’s why Ben Graham wrote “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.”

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Will LLM models run out of data to train on? In its 2025 AI Index Report, Stanford concluded that this is unlikely before 2030. Common Crawl, an open repository of web crawl data frequently used in AI training, is estimated to contain a median of 130 trillion tokens. The indexed web holds approximately 510 trillion tokens, while the entire web contains around 3,100 trillion. Additionally, the total stock of images is estimated at 300 trillion tokens, and video at 1,350 trillion tokens.

Assume that 5 billion people end up using AI by the 2030’s (compared to 6 billion current internet users). Each user consumes about 1.6 mm tokens per day for search, coding assistance, other agents, background
assistants and creative purposes. That would be a LOT of demand vs current levels and assumes a paradigm
shift in how AI is used in daily life. Across all users, that would be 8 quadrillion tokens per day

How much capacity would be needed to handle 8 quadrillion tokens per day? 23 – 92 Gigawatts of active
inference capacity. While there are 125 Gigawatts of data centers around the world, only about 20 Gigawatts are currently estimated to be capable of handling AI workloads.

What is the constraint to grow toward the Gigawatts needed? Energy.

Loneliness, Doctors & Notes From Books

What afflicts America’s young today can’t be properly called a loneliness crisis. It seems more to me like an absence-of-loneliness crisis. It is a being-constantly-alone-and-not-even-thinking-that’s-a-problem crisis. Americans—and young men, especially—are choosing to spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people, because it has simply gotten too pleasurable to exist without them. The problem is not loneliness. The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to feel lonely in the first place.

Since the 1970s, America has over-regulated the physical world and under-regulated the digital space. To open a daycare, build an apartment, or start a factory requires lawyers, permits, and years of compliance. To open a casino app or launch a speculative token requires a credit card and a few clicks. We made it hard to build physical-world communities and easy to build online casinos. The state that once poured concrete for public parks now licenses gambling platforms. The country that regulates a lemonade stand will let an 18-year-old day-trade options on his phone.

In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.

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As part of a larger project, an author read 102 books over the past twelve-and-a-half months. Here were some of the insights he took away:

  • Exercising regularly is probably the single best thing you can do for your health. (Outside of quitting smoking.)
  • Happiness, not stress, leads to productivity.
  • Despite our preconceptions, we may be happier at work than at home. People experience more flow at work than in leisure.
  • Energy, not time, is the limited resource in our ability to be productive.
  • You can’t beat the market. Nearly everyone is better off simply buying a diversified low-cost index fund. Neither can any fund you invest in. The percentage of funds that beat the market after fees is so low that you can round it to zero.
  • You can’t time the market. Frequent trades expose you to taxes and whittle away your capital on fees. Buy and hold is better.
  • If you need an advisor, find someone who charges hourly. Paying a percentage of your assets seems cheaper, but the cost is enormous in the long-run.
  • We’re overweight because we eat too much. The increase in calories consumed is enough to entirely explain the change in body mass. Successful weight loss requires you to stick to a dietary pattern forever. The weight will always come back the moment you stop.
  • Loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking cigarettes. The stress of loneliness weakens our immune system.
  • There are numerous explanations for the increase in time alone, but a simple one is just better entertainment options available. 
  • Sleep serves many important functions. It flushes the brain of metabolic byproducts, consolidates memories, reinforces the immune system and recalibrates synaptic connections.
  • If you have insomnia, don’t worry, you probably are sleeping enough. If you’re sleep deprived you will fall asleep, so despite feeling cranky and low energy, most insomniacs are not actually sleep deprived.
  • Asking yourself “what went well?” at the end of the day can give you a big boost to your happiness.
  • ADHD is about as heritable as height, is not caused by parenting style, doesn’t go away as you age and, despite popular disbelief, medication works pretty well.

102 Lessons From Reading 102 Books

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Why do doctors now seem so rushed and dismissive? You wait 45 minutes in the exam room when the doctor finally walks in. They seem rushed. A few questions, a quick exam, a glance at the clock and then a rapid-fire plan with little time for discussion – and you leave feeling unheard, hurried and frustrated.

Increasingly, health care organizations and physician groups face intense financial pressures. Many doctors can no longer sustain their private practice due to declining reimbursements, rising costs and increasing administrative burdens; instead, they’ve become employees of larger health care systems. In some cases, their practices have been acquired by private equity groups.

With this shift, doctors have less control over their workloads and the time they get with their patients. More and more, payment models fail to cover the true cost of care. The default solution is often for doctors to see more patients with less time for each, and to squeeze in additional work after hours.

That negative, impolite tone you may have experienced might be because the doctor has many patients waiting and a full evening ahead just to catch up on writing visit notes, reviewing medical records and completing other required documentation. During the work day, they’re often fielding over 100 messages and alerts daily, including referrals and coordinating care, all while trying to focus on the patient in front of them.

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200 years of data across 56 countries, showing 25-year and 5-year returns from different starting P/E ratios (the price of a stock dividend by its earnings). The takeaway? Even over relatively short periods like five years, valuations matter a lot. If you buy when stocks are expensive they tend to do worse than when you buy them cheap.

Here are the forecasts for different categories of stocks over the coming decade based on their current valuations:

Consciousness, Being Present & The Fragile Gift Of Life

The night before my brain surgery, my wife and I sat across from each other in wordless stillness. Hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To my wife’s eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window. Even to our cat, oblivious, licking her paws in perfect peace.

Upstairs, in a crib painted white, our 18-month-old daughter lay sleeping. I imagined her face at 5, at 15, at 40. I hoped she would know how deeply I loved her. And in that moment — that unbearable, radiant moment — I was, for perhaps the first time ever, conscious.

Not in the neurological sense. Not in the academic or philosophical sense. But in the raw, elemental sense of being awake to the miracle and the absurdity of existence. Alive to the texture of being. 

Leading up to surgery the world had never looked so alive. Every detail sharpened, sacred. Time no longer moved. It hovered. Held. The future dissolved. The past let go. All that remained was one long, luminous moment. And in that moment, I was tethered — to my wife’s hand, to the stars, to everything. I was, finally, conscious.

I considered the paradox of being most awake at the edge of unconsciousness. The strange intimacy of being stripped down to nothing: no ego, no schedule, no ambition.  Just breath. Presence. And the knowledge that everything is about to change—or end. 

At that moment, I was not thinking about business plans or unread emails. I was not anxious about the past. I was not hungry for the future. I was only there, suspended, waiting. And in that waiting, I was more myself than I’d ever been.

I laughed to myself in the hours before the anesthesia took hold: This is what it means to be fully human. This is what it means to be conscious.

I lived, and in the weeks following surgery, I experienced what doctors call “survivor’s euphoria.” A clinical term, woefully inadequate. It wasn’t just euphoria. It was revelation. It was a reawakening. It was a second birth.

The world opened itself to me like a wound and a gift. I smelled color. I tasted air. I watched dust motes floating in the light and felt tears rise. My daughter’s laugh shattered something inside me, and I let it. I held my wife in the dark, listening to her breath, feeling the hum of her life, and I cried because I could.

I no longer chase productivity the way I once did. I no longer confuse urgency with meaning. I try, imperfectly, to pay attention. To listen more than I speak. To feel what I feel, even when it hurts.

There is a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought but in presence. It asks nothing of us but awareness. It demands no degree, no ideology, no spiritual badge. Only that we pay attention. Only that we look — at our children, our lovers, our trees, our coffee, our clocks — and see them as if for the first time.

Schopenhauer, Colleges & Pickleball

Schopenhauer believed that all of human experience runs along a pendulum that swings from two poles: one of desire, and the other of satisfaction. We strive when we have desire, so the only way to alleviate this is to experience the pleasure that comes with satisfaction. But once you’re satisfied, boredom ensues, and desire inevitably arises yet again. Hence the pendulum.

The pace in which the pendulum swings between desire and satisfaction is what matters most. If it swings rapidly between the two, you get happiness. If it swings slowly between them, you get suffering.

To Schopenhauer, one could only be happy if desire is quickly offset by satisfaction, and this satisfaction could then be quickly offset by another desire. If it’s in our nature to restlessly strive for something, the only way to be happy is to feed that nature what it wants. Suppressing the existence of a desire only prolongs the suffering, which is why he didn’t believe that an ascetic life was the answer.

I think this does a good job explaining the phenomenon of busyness, and its existential utility for people. Ultimately, being busy is you continually swinging between desire and satisfaction. Anytime you create an item on a To Do list and proceed to check it off, that’s you making one round on this continuum. Multiply this by however many times you do it over the course of a week, and you get the feeling of busyness.

 If your mind always has something to check off, then there’s no room to ask yourself if you’re deriving meaning or purpose in what you’re doing. You just move from one cycle of desire / satisfaction to the next, and that in itself is where you dedicate your attention to.

This is where Schopenhauer’s take breaks down. Simply going from one pole to the next in a rapid manner is not happiness. Oftentimes, it’s just distraction. And when the pace of the pendulum slows in a manner where your desire takes a long time to satisfy, then you’ll see through the illusion that your busyness has created. Anytime there’s a lull or silence in your day-to-day life, this void may be filled with the angst that what you’re doing isn’t the answer, and that’s when an existential crisis takes hold.

This is why true happiness cannot be contingent upon any notion of satisfaction. Because to be satisfied is to imply an endpoint. A goal. And as the hedonic treadmill illustrates, once there is a goal, the logical conclusion is to create another chase to distract you. This distraction may keep you amused and busy, but once you’re faced with silence, you will be afraid of what you may feel.

The answer here is that happiness cannot be pursued, nor can it ever be achieved. Because the moment you’re aware that you’re happy, then paradoxically, you no longer are because you’ve called it out. Once you name a positive feeling, you become attached to it, and you long to feel it again.

The moment you pursue happiness, it is nullified. Paradoxically, understanding this is the only way one can truly be happy.

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America is about to tumble off the edge of a massive demographic cliff. The timing is no coincidence. The US birth rate peaked in 2007, with just over 4.3 million babies born that year. That number has dropped almost every year since, reaching a 30-year low of 3.8 million births in 2017. Last year, the rate was down to 3.6 million.

Now, those 2007 babies are turning 18 (ugh, I know). As they prepare to start college and enter the workforce, their transition to adulthood signals a new reality for universities, employers, and the whole of America’s economy. Every year from here on out — at least for the foreseeable future — colleges will face a smaller and smaller pool of prospective students.

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To give you some context for pickleball’s pre-pandemic popularity, think about badminton. And now think about something half as popular as badminton. That was pickleball in 2019. Total pickleball players in the U.S. were outnumbered by participants in archery, bow hunting, fly fishing, indoor climbing, snorkeling, and sledding. Now it’s more popular than all of those pastimes … and America’s pastime. Yes, more Americans played pickleball last year than baseball.

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I’ve taught the same course to a class of undergraduate, M.B.A., medical and nursing students every year for over a decade. While I didn’t change my lectures or teaching style, somehow the students’ evaluations of last year’s class were better than ever before.

What changed? I banned all cellphones and computer-based note taking in the classroom.

To help sell this policy, I presented in the first lecture of the course a study showing that students who were required to take class notes by hand retained significantly more information than students who used computers. The reason is that with computers, students can type as fast as I speak and strive for verbatim transcripts, but there is almost no mental processing of the class’s content.

Handwritten notes require simultaneous mental processing to determine the important points that need recording. This processing encodes the material in the brain differently and facilitates longer-term retention.

Repeated studies show students perform worst on tests when phones are on desks, next worse when they’re placed in bags or pockets, and best when they’re stored in another room. The presence of smartphones also undermines the quality of in-person social interactions.

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A recently published paper looked at twin studies to see if heavy social media users have innate tendencies toward lower social well-being. After looking at info on the amount of use, the number of posts, the number of social media accounts, etc., they found only a modest correlation between social media use and well-being (including anxious-depressive symptoms).

What they did find, which many studies have found in the past, is that those symptoms correlated heavily to genetic influences.

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Today, I’m going after a sacred modern virtue. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: “Freedom is the highest form of wealth.” After 2 years of freedom, I’d like to disagree. I don’t have issue with freedom as a form of wealth. Or that it’s a better form of wealth than money (it is). I only take issue with the “highest” or “greatest” part of this argument.

I now believe that meaning is the highest form of wealth. The ability to continually have and make meaning, every day. To feel a deep sense of fulfillment and purpose in our actions; emphasizing what we do more than who we are. The good news is you don’t need money for meaning (though it can help). There’s plenty who never find freedom, but still find purpose. So wait, does that make them free? And having freedom without meaning is its own kind of prison.

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Howard Marks’ newsletter this month provides an in depth analysis that lays out where investment value comes from and how they should be assessed. The TDLR jumping to his conclusion at the end on where we are with U.S. stocks today:

“Fundamentals appear to me to be less good overall than they were seven months ago, but at the same time, asset prices are high relative to earnings, higher than they were at the end of 2024, and at high valuations relative to history.”

Instead of DEFCONs like the Pentagon uses for war scenarios, he laid out levels of INVESTCONs investors can move through to protect investments in the face of above average market valuations and optimistic investor behavior:

6. Stop buying
5. Reduce aggressive holdings and increase defensive holdings
4. Sell off the remaining aggressive holdings
3. Trim defensive holdings as well
2. Eliminate all holdings
1. Go short

From Marks: “In my view, it’s essentially impossible to reasonably reach the degree of certainty needed to implement INVESTCON 3, 2, or 1. Because “overvaluation” is never synonymous with “sure to go down soon,” it’s rarely wise to go to those extremes. I know I never have. But I have no problem thinking right now it’s time for INVESTCON 5. 

Productivity, Jobs, Rates & Zyn Pouches

Here’s a surprising truth it took me ages to grasp: by far the best way to spend more of your life doing meaningful, rewarding and difference-making things is to really feel the deep sense in which you don’t need to do any of that stuff at all.

At public events, people sometimes ask what advice I’d give my fourteen, sixteen or eighteen-year-old self – which is a ticklish question, partly since I’m sure my teenage self would have scoffed at being lectured at by the late-forties version. And he might have been right to do so; I think you probably have to just go through a certain amount of experience, in order to learn about life, instead of having wisdom dispensed by your elders.

Still, the honest answer is that I’d say something like this: “You do realise you don’t absolutely have to do any of this, right – the good grades, the praiseworthy accomplishments, ‘fulfilling your potential’ and all the rest? It’s all great, and it matters, but do you understand that it doesn’t matter matter? That the sky won’t fall in if you chill out a bit, and that people who don’t always ‘do their best’ or ‘fulfill their potential’ are allowed to enjoy life, too?”

The spiritual teacher Michael Singer says somewhere that the basic stance most of us take toward the world is that we try to use life to make ourselves feel OK. And this is certainly true of the type psychologists label ‘insecure overachievers’, who often accomplish plenty of impressive things, but who do so, deep down, because we don’t believe we’d have earned the right to feel good about ourselves, or to relax into life, if we didn’t.

It’s a soul-crushing way to live, not least because it turns each success into a new source of oppression, since now that’s the minimum standard you feel obliged to meet next time. A hugely successful author once told me he knew something was amiss when the experience of reaching the upper echelons of the bestseller list, previously a cause of excited disbelief, instead brought only relief that he hadn’t failed to replicate his prior achievement.

Most productivity advice, I think, caters to people mired in this mindset. It promises ways to help you take so much action, so efficiently, that you might one day get to feel good about yourself at last. Which isn’t going to work – because the real problem isn’t that you haven’t yet done enough things, or got good enough at doing them. The real problem is the fact that for whatever combination of reasons in your childhood, culture or genes, your sense of self-worth and psychological safety got tethered to your productivity or accomplishments in the first place.

But there exists another, very different sort of productive action: the kind you take not because you feel you have to, in order to feel OK, but precisely because you understand that you don’t have to – because you already feel basically OK about yourself, so now of course you want to take action, because action is how you express your enjoyment in being alive, being good at a few things, and being able to use your talents to make some kind of difference in the world, alongside other people.

One of the most important consequences of all this, for me, has been the realisation that when you begin to outgrow action-from-insecurity, you don’t have to give up on being ambitious. On the contrary: you get to be much more effectively and enjoyably ambitious, if that’s the way you’re inclined.

I’ve long been allergic to the notion, prevalent in self-help circles, that if you truly managed to liberate yourself from your issues, you’d ideally spend your days just sort of passively floating around, smiling at everyone, maybe attending the occasional yoga retreat, but not much more. “The more I heal, the less ambitious I become” is a phrase I’ve encountered multiple times online in recent months. And yes, sure, if your ambition was only ever a function of anxiety, becoming less ambitious would be an excellent development. Then again, the desire to create remarkable outcomes in your creative work, relationships or community – or even just in your bank balance – might just be an authentic part of who you are, once the clouds of insecurity begin to clear.

So you don’t need to choose between peace of mind and the thrill of pursuing ambitious goals. You just need to understand those goals less as vehicles to get you to a future place of sanity and good feeling, and more as things that unfold from an existing place of sanity and good feeling. (Besides, I’ve got to believe that ambition pursued in this spirit is far likelier to make a positive difference in the world.)

Obviously, if you’re deeply stuck on insecure-overachiever mode, merely reading about the alternative in a newsletter isn’t going to solve everything. Nor do I mean to suggest that every task becomes an undiluted joy when you re-frame action in this way – or that there aren’t plenty of things you “need to do” for reasons other than feeling OK about yourself, such as keeping food on the table.

But it can be strikingly liberating just to begin, however gingerly, to experiment with the idea that, actually, you could just do the minimum. You really could. You could not try to impress, or be extraordinary, or do your best, or fulfill your potential (whatever that even means). And you would still be fully entitled to a relaxed and enjoyable life.

And then you might begin to feel, in that newly peaceful state of mind, the stirrings of a different kind of action: one that’s no less energetic or productive or effective; far more alive; and much, much easier to enjoy.

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I went into my conversations with college career executives expecting to hear about AI replacing work. What I heard instead is that AI is transforming everything around work. The transition from college to the workforce is fully drenched in artificial intelligence. AI is automating homework, obliterating the meaning of much testing, disrupting the labor-market signal of college achievement and grades, distorting the job hunt by normalizing 500+ annual applications per person, turning first-round interviews into creepy surveillance experiences or straight-up conversations with robots, and, oh, after all that, maybe kinda beginning to saw off the bottom of the corporate ladder by automating some entry-level jobs during a period of economic uncertainty. This really is a hard time to be a young person.

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Even if Trump’s tactics improbably succeed in changing Jerome Powell’s mind, they would change only one vote out of 12 on the Federal Open Market Committee. The FOMC’s decision at its June 18 meeting to leave the Fed funds rate unchanged was unanimous. Furthermore, seven of the 19 officials who are eligible for the 12 voting positions predicted there will be no rate cuts for the remainder of 2025, up from four in March.

Surely, you might say, the FOMC would never go against its chair if he altered his position on rates? If that were to happen it would not be unprecedented. In June 1978, Miller was in the minority as the full FOMC voted to raise rates.

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U.S. shipments of Zyn pouches rose 177% from the first quarter of 2023 to the first quarter of 2025.

Flow, Stories, Mastery & Bad Advice

A boy once asked Charlie Munger, “What advice do you have for someone like me to succeed in life?” Munger replied: “Don’t do cocaine. Don’t race trains to the track. And avoid all AIDS situations.” It’s often hard to know what will bring joy but easy to spot what will bring misery. When trying to get ahead it can be helpful to flip things around, focusing on how to not fall back. Here are a few pieces of very bad advice:

  • Allow your expectations to grow faster than your income
  • Envy others’ success without having a full picture of their lives.
  • Mimic the strategy of people who want something different than you do.
  • Automatically associate wealth with wisdom.
  • Assume a new dopamine hit is a good indication of long-term joy.
  • Assume people care where you went to school after age 25.
  • Assume that what people can communicate is 100% of what they know or believe.

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Progress often happens in leaps, not steps. Most of us assume that learning happens in a nice, steady curve: put in effort, get results. We think:

  • More effort = more reward
  • More time = more progress

But real learning doesn’t usually follow that path. Instead, we often hit long plateaus, followed by sudden breakthroughs.

If we’re expecting constant progress, those plateaus can feel like failure. But they’re not failure. They’re part of the process.

This is where a lot of people give up. When you’ve been practicing, trying, doing the work, and it feels like nothing’s happening, it’s tempting to walk away.

But you may be much closer to a breakthrough than you think. Sometimes, just around the corner, something clicks—and you’re suddenly at the next level.

It’s not always a flat line before a breakthrough. Sometimes you make slow, steady gains. Sometimes it feels like you’re backsliding. Sometimes it gets messier before it gets clearer. But underneath the surface, your brain is making connections. Your understanding is deepening. The dots are starting to line up. Eventually, that invisible progress becomes visible.

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There is a reason why people find the financial markets endlessly fascinating. They haven’t been solved. The complexity of markets is dizzying, and in complex situations even the iron laws of physics can produce surprising, unstable results (think of airplane turbulence). More important still, finance is ultimately driven by people, not particles, and they do not always respond to similar stimuli in similar ways. They look at what happened last time, try to do better, anticipate what other traders will do and seek to outfox them. The absence of fundamental laws in markets is frustrating, disorientating—and what makes them so interesting.

There is certainly plenty to learn about the markets. But there is a case for learning as much as you can about finance and the markets and then easing back. There’s this weird dynamic in personal finance where you have to go deep at first. You need to learn enough to protect yourself. To build a plan. To avoid getting fleeced. But once that plan is in place, ideally you should be able to step back.

Check in once a year. Rebalance when necessary. And focus on everything else in life that matters more than your asset allocation. But here’s the problem: after doing all that work, learning all those concepts, following all those market narratives… can you actually let go?

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One of the main reasons people make behavioral mistakes when investing: the power of stories. Humans interpret the world through stories, and financial markets are narrative generating machines. When we make poor investment decisions, they are inevitably deeply intwined with a story we are using to interpret a complex and chaotic environment. It is easy to look at historic financial market events with equanimity because we know how these stories unfolded; it is an entirely different proposition when we are in the midst of an event – because we don’t know how the story will end.  So, we make up our own ending and invest accordingly.

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Modern neuroscience distinguishes between two mental states: one of striving, where a surge of dopamine keeps us laser-focused on external goals like winning, perfection or achievement – and another of serene presence, where we hover in the moment, simply being. In this latter state, our neural chemistry shifts; endogenous opioids and endocannabinoids fill the brain, bringing feelings of deep satisfaction, fulfillment and joy in the now.

Motivation psychologists distinguish these two states as extrinsic and intrinsic motivation for what we’re doing. The former takes hard work and discipline to keep us going. The latter propels us forward, as by magic: flow.

Repetition: the repeated movements of our craft – the physical routines we practice over and over – follow us everywhere. Whether we call it practice or technique, these repeated actions shape our brains in powerful ways, often without us even realizing it.

They form unique connections in the brain – linking movement, memory and emotion. These connections stretch across the parts of the brain that control movement, wrap around the areas responsible for memory, and reach deep into the emotional core of the brain – the limbic system. That includes the insula, a region that helps manage both our physical health and our inner sense of self.

‘Muscle memory’ doesn’t live in our hands or legs. The real control centre is in the brain. This is where movement begins, guided by systems that plan and initiate what we do. From there, messages travel through long chains of nerve cells – from the brain down the spine and out to the rest of the body. Millions of tiny electrical signals, known as action potentials, move back and forth, telling our muscles, organs and even the tips of our fingers what to do next.

The idea is to ‘program’ the right moves in our brain so they become so automatic we can use them to, yes, feel, and to find flow. The prefrontal cortex part of our brain matures last in our individual development, with restructuring continuing well into our 20s. These parts of the brain are very ‘plastic’, meaning that they are easily shaped by experience and learning. So they are also key to the development of technique in our craft – be that in science, the arts or other fields – because they are suited to rule-based learning.

Neuroplasticity is our brain’s capacity to learn; to forge new connections between neural systems, as we practice something with our body. Professional singers and actors do daily vocal exercises, dancers do daily barre exercises – the same moves over and again – and musicians are known for their never-ending scales practice that drives neighbors up the wall. What may seem a strange, repetitive, even boring activity that artists, scientists and other creatives engage in daily is in fact doing magic to their brains.

Repeating something consciously – in this context meaning exercising those prefrontal systems of the brain – is quite effortful, and it needs a lot of energy and attentional resources. Therefore, our brain starts to forge connections that let the movements we’re practicing pass from explicit, effortful memory systems into implicit, almost automatic memory systems.

This works a bit like learning a new language. First, we learn the words, the basic grammar, and we make many mistakes. It is effortful and we have to think before uttering any sentence at all. But as we repeat the words, practice verbal tenses and vocabulary over and over, our brain realizes the repetition and transports the skill of that new language from explicit to implicit memory systems. 

That’s why the advice to ‘just let go’, ‘be in the present’ and ‘feel it’ are unhelpful to find flow. When flow happens to you, it may well feel magical, it might feel like you’re ‘letting go’. You feel a strange fusion of your movements and your awareness, and you’re somehow entirely entrapped in the present. It’s still early days to say exactly how this works, but it has to do with those low-level, implicit memory systems that encode movements that we internalize with technique practice. Then, the prefrontal systems deactivate while we let the implicit motor memory systems do their job. That’s when you use that skill to express and find flow.

But this is a neural process that happens outside of your conscious awareness, you can’t do this at will. Repetitive movement practices have a wonderful side-effect if used well: they remove uncertainty from our brain. Uncertainty is part of all our lives to a larger or lesser extent; and it is among the chief killers of our calm. Being in flow makes us escape from the unpredictability of life.

Life is unpredictable, and our senses can’t always find something recognizable to cling to. When our ability to predict is weakened and our brain is put on alert, this mind-absorbing state can make us feel miserable. We can regain our footing by controlling our surroundings or other people, but if flow is what we seek, we’ll fail. What we need instead are routines in our day to create habits of well-being in our mind, because our brain will, during those periods of routine, know exactly what’s going to happen next.

Place the pathway prompts strategically in your surroundings – and off you go, flow.

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The age-adjusted death rate in the US for cancer has declined by about a third since 1991, meaning people of a given age have about a third lower risk of dying from cancer than people of the same age more than three decades ago. That adds up to over 4 million fewer cancer deaths over that time period. Thanks to breakthroughs in treatments like autologous stem-cell harvesting and CAR-T therapy, cancer isn’t the death sentence it once was. The dramatic bend in the curve of cancer deaths didn’t happen by accident — it’s the compound interest of three revolutions:

  1. While anti-smoking policy has been the single biggest lifesaver, other interventions have helped reduce people’s cancer risk. One of the biggest successes is the HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer deaths in US women under 25 fell about 62 percent, a decline researchers attribute largely to the HPV vaccine.
  2. The next revolution is better and earlier screening. It’s generally true that the earlier cancer is caught, the better the chances of survival.
  3. Most exciting of all are frontier developments in treating cancer. From drugs like lenalidomide and bortezomib in the 2000s, which helped double median myeloma survival, to the spread of monoclonal antibodies, real breakthroughs in treatments have meaningfully extended people’s lives — not just by months, but years. Perhaps the most promising development is CAR-T therapy, a form of immunotherapy. Rather than attempting to kill the cancer directly, immunotherapies turn a patient’s own T-cells into guided missiles. 

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There is so much we don’t know about the deep ocean, but what we do know is astonishing. The ocean’s deepest point extends approximately 36,000 feet below the surface. Beyond 600 feet, light no longer penetrates, making photosynthesis impossible, yet 98% of marine life resides on or near the sea floor. Life at these depths depends almost entirely on “marine snow”—organic matter drifting down from the ocean’s upper layers.

When a whale dies, its massive body sinks to the seabed and sets off an extraordinary chain of events. A single whale fall can blanket an area of 50 square meters, roughly 538 square feet, on the ocean floor. In that single moment, it delivers a bounty of food equivalent to what small particles would provide over 200 to 2,000 years. It’s an enormous input of organic matter that sticks around for centuries.

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The math and odds are against you to be able to make enough money to survive as a professional tennis player. Employing a bottom-up analysis of the top 100 junior players from 2008, research examines their career trajectories, rankings, and financial outcomes. The findings reveal that you need to be ranked in the top 150 in the world in order to break-even financially. It’s even tougher for females because male players tend to sustain longer careers, potentially due to higher earnings in the ATP circuit outside Grand Slam events.

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U.S. small cap stocks are much less expensive relative to U.S. large medium and large cap stocks, but they are still more expensive relative to almost all foreign stocks:

The U.S. as a whole remains much more expensive than all foreign markets:

The gap in price to earnings from the U.S. vs. the rest of the world has narrowed slightly in 2025 but remains enormous:

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Only a third of five-to-10-year-old kids frequently read for fun, compared to over half in 2012. This could be in part because their parents are less likely to read to them before they turn five: 41% of parents of all ages reported doing so, a steep drop from the 64% in 2012.

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Barry Ritholtz and Paul Krugman interview: On Art as an investment: If you go back to the old masters in the 15, 1600s and buy one of their paintings for $100 and it sells centuries later for tens of millions, it’s about a 3% return rate. It’s just the magic of compounding over centuries that are just outside our comprehension.

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The largest stocks dominate market caps in most countries, not just the U.S. (with the Mag 7):

Success Addicts, Individual Stocks & Best Places To Work

Imagine reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Booze.” You would likely expect a depressing story about a person in a downward alcoholic spiral. Now imagine instead reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Success.” That would be an inspiring story, wouldn’t it? Maybe—but maybe not. It might well be the story of someone whose never-ending quest for more and more success leaves them perpetually unsatisfied and incapable of happiness.

Though it isn’t a conventional medical addiction, for many people success has addictive properties. To a certain extent, I mean that literally—praise stimulates the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is implicated in all addictive behaviors. success also resembles addiction in its effect on human relationships. People sacrifice their links with others for their true love, success. They travel for business on anniversaries; they miss Little League games and recitals while working long hours. Some forgo marriage for their careers.

People willingly sacrifice their own well-being through overwork to keep getting hits of success. I know a thing or two about this: As I once found myself confessing to a close friend, “I would prefer to be special than happy.” He asked why. “Anyone can do the things it takes to be happy; going on vacation with family, relaxing with friends … but not everyone can accomplish great things.” My friend scoffed at this, but I started asking other people in my circles and found that I wasn’t unusual. Many of them had made the success addict’s choice of specialness over happiness. They (and sometimes I) would put off ordinary delights of relaxation and time with loved ones until after this project, or that promotion, when finally, it would be time to rest. But, of course, that day never seemed to arrive.

We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. And success makes us attractive to others (that is, until we ruin our marriages).

Unfortunately, success is Sisyphean (to mix my Greek myths). The goal can’t be satisfied; most people never feel “successful enough.” The high only lasts a day or two, and then it’s on to the next goal. Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill, in which satisfaction wears off almost immediately and we must run on to the next reward to avoid the feeling of falling behind. This is why so many studies show that successful people are almost invariably jealous of people who are more successful.

They should get off the treadmill. But quitting isn’t easy for addicts. For people hooked on substances, withdrawal can be an agonizing experience, both physically and psychologically. Anxiety and depression are very common after one quits alcoholic drinking. Success addicts giving up their habit experience a kind of withdrawal as well. Research finds that depression and anxiety are common among elite athletes after their careers end.

American culture valorizes overwork, which makes it easy to slip into a mindset that can breed success addiction. What can you do to retrain yourself to chase happiness instead of success, no matter where you are in your life’s journey?

  1. Admit that as successful as you are, were, or hope to be in your life and work, you are not going to find true happiness on the hedonic treadmill of your professional life. You’ll find it in things that are deeply ordinary: enjoying a walk or a conversation with a loved one, instead of working that extra hour. This is extremely difficult for many people. It feels almost like an admission of defeat for those who have spent their lives worshipping hard work and striving to outperform others. Social comparison is a big part of how people measure worldly success, but the research is clear that it strips us of life satisfaction.
  2. Start showing up and being present for relationships you’ve compromised in the pursuit of success.
  3. Find the right metrics of success. If you only measure yourself by the worldly rewards of money, power, and prestige, you’ll spend your life running on the hedonic treadmill and comparing yourself to others. Better metrics include faith, family, and friendship. I also include work—but not work for the sake of outward achievement. Rather, it should be work that serves others and gives you a sense of personal meaning.

Success in and of itself is not a bad thing, any more than wine is a bad thing. Both can bring fun and sweetness to life. But both become tyrannical when they are a substitute for—instead of a complement to—the relationships and love that should be at the center of our lives.

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I stopped buying active investments (individual stocks, etc.) a few years ago. I’ve gone through different justifications for why too. Originally, I stopped buying active investments because of the performance argument. If 85% of active stock managers can’t beat the market over 10 years, what makes you think you can? It’s also too hard to know if you’re actually good. Because there is so much luck involved (especially over shorter time periods), you are better off not wasting your time trying to figure it out.

But there’s an even better argument:  I don’t make active investments now because you can’t put a price on mental freedom. What I’ve realized about myself (and many others I’ve spoken to) is that when you buy an active investment like an individual stock, that investment consumes a lot of your attention.

I don’t identify with the S&P 500. I don’t identify with index funds. When they drop by 10% or 20%, it’s no big deal because it’s out of my control. But that not true with individual stocks. It’s a personal decision that you’ll likely start watching much closer. If you log in to check your pick (or picks) multiple times per day, that is time you could be doing more valuable things like focusing on work, friends and family.

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The antisocial century, in three parts:

1. 1960-2000: Robert Putnam sees associations and club membership plummeting, writes “Bowling Alone”

2. 2000 – 2020s: Face to face socializing falls another 25%, as coupling rates plunge

3. Now this…

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Forbes surveyed more than 217,000 employees working at companies within the U.S. that employ more than 1,000 people. The organizations were stratified so that companies with 1,000 to 5,000 employees were deemed midsize, while companies with more than 5,000 employees were considered large employers.

Survey respondents (who remained anonymous so they could answer freely) were asked if they would recommend their employer to others and to rate it based on a range of criteria, including salary, work environment, training programs and opportunities to advance. Participants were also asked if they would recommend their previous employers (within the past two years) and the employers they knew through their industry experience or through friends or family who worked there.

Ultimately, each employer was given a score, and the 1,199 organizations with the highest scores landed on one of the two final lists—498 companies on America’s Best Midsize Employers 2025, and 701 organizations on America’s Best Large Employers 2025. The top 50 large employers are below:

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Inversion, Eudaimonia & Workplace Skills

Happiness, it turns out, is more Rorschach than road map. Is it found in the ultraluxe wellness center or the austere monastery? Does it come from getting what you want or wanting less?

By the early 20th century, utility maximization — happiness writ small — emerged as a linchpin of economic analysis. Public happiness, in turn, became a matter of optimizing the sum of individual welfare. The mathematics could be complex, but the premise was simple: Getting what you want in life — that’s happiness, bro.

The notion of happiness as choice-making swiftly migrated from economic models into the marrow of the broader culture. What was once a lifelong project shrank into a sequence of transactions. As the midcentury economy boomed, it didn’t just build wealth; it reconstructed desire. The good life, formerly the province of philosophers, was now a mainstay of the marketers: happiness packaged as the perfect lawn, the gleaming automobile, the immaculate kitchen with its humming refrigerator. We became, almost without noticing, what we bought.

And if you still felt empty? That’s where the therapy culture of the 1970s and 1980s came in — not as a remedy for consumerism but as an extension of it. The older vocabulary of life-defining commitments and meaning-making projects continued to wither while a new lexicon took hold: self-acceptance, self-esteem, self-love.

By the 1990s, happiness had acquired a personal brand. Oprah Winfrey presided over a daytime academy of self-care, empowerment and curated aspiration. Then came the next wave: the life-hacking, self-quantifying, habit-stacking era of optimization gurus like Tim Ferriss, whose first book, published in 2007, was “The 4-Hour Workweek” — “a toolkit,” in his words, “for maximizing per-hour output.”

Excitement is the more practical synonym for happiness, and it is precisely what you should strive to chase,” Ferriss wrote. “It is the cure-all.” Amid the excitement, the happiness concept kept getting miniaturized. With the rise of the algorithms, decision-making became a series of bite-size transactions. If you liked this, you’ll like that. Every swipe, click and purchase was an act of preference revelation, the digital cookie crumbs of personal identity.

In today’s social media ecosystem, happiness even threatens to become a ring-lighted aesthetic: matcha lattes, artisanal candles, sage-smudging, captioned reminders to just breathe. Once again, happiness is work — but now the work of packaging moods and moments for validation, with a tiny dopamine hit for each “like.”

“So long as you’re happy,” parents tell their kids. In reality, they want to see their children engaged in something worthwhile, contributing to something beyond their own fleeting satisfactions. 

If you’ll indulge the philosophers’ habit of conjuring characters to illustrate their abstractions, imagine a young person — let’s call her Julia — who left community college after a semester and has bounced between gigs ever since: dog-walking, cafe shifts, warehouse nights. Her life is messy, but she has learned how to show up for people. When her neighbor’s mother gets sick, Julia brings groceries. When her cousin gets out of rehab, she’s the one who texts every day. She doesn’t have a wellness routine or a five-year plan. But people trust her. She holds lives together in small, invisible ways.

Or imagine a middle-aged man named Daniel, a product manager with a smart fridge and an Optimal Morning Routine. For years, he has chased happiness through upgrades — to his apps, his appliances, himself. But lately, the returns feel thin. When his niece’s soccer team needs a coach, he volunteers, awkwardly at first, then with growing investment. Daniel has started showing up at town meetings, fighting to save the field from developers. Now his calendar includes something he cares deeply about that doesn’t come with a progress bar.

Daniel still wears a Whoop band. Julia hasn’t found her “calling.” But they’re living into a broader idea of happiness — less about what they have, more about what they give, who they’re with, what they’re part of.

Is it possible that happiness stayed big, and it’s only our way of talking about it that got small? Surely the old understanding, in which the pursuit of happiness is inseparable from shared commitments, hasn’t gone anywhere. On some level, we still know the difference between feeling good and flourishing, between the hedonic and the eudaemonic, between the algorithm’s next suggestion and the difficult and uncertain path toward a meaningful existence. Yes, we often speak as if feelings are all that count, but maybe that’s because the language of the “good life” has been hollowed out.

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Inversion is a mental model that flips the script on traditional problem-solving. Rather than look at a problem in a linear, forward, logical manner, you think about it in reverse. Well, there is one complex, foundational problem that is truly universal: How do you live a good life? Using inversion to address it: Here are some ways to live a miserable life…

  • Allow idleness to dominate your life – Stress and anxiety feed on idleness. They take hold while you sit and scroll on your phone, while you overthink your situation, while you compare yourself to others, while you try to create the perfect plan. When you take action, you starve them of the oxygen they need to survive. 
  • Allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial – Ambitious people have a bad tendency to think like this: “I don’t have an hour to work out, so I just won’t go. I don’t have two hours for deep work, so I’ll do email instead. I don’t have 30 minutes to call my mom, so I won’t call at all.” When you allow optimal to get in the way of beneficial, you ignore the most powerful principle in life: Anything above zero compounds. A little bit is always better than nothing. Tiny wins stack over long periods of time. Small things become big things.
  • Obsess over speed – Life is about direction, not speed. It’s much better to climb slowly up the right mountain than to climb fast up the wrong one.

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More police officers kill themselves every year than are killed by suspects. At least 184 public-safety officers die by suicide each year, while an average of about 57 officers are killed by suspects. Law-enforcement officers are 54 percent more likely to die by suicide than the average American worker.

Most officers are required to pass psychological and physical screenings before they are hired. But many struggle after chronic exposure to trauma. Police officers have higher rates of depression than other American workers. Shift work, which disrupts sleep, and alcohol use, long the profession’s culturally accepted method of blowing off steam and managing stress, further compound health issues. 

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A survey of 1,000 managers across America revealed the reasons that 8 in 10 managers said newly hired college graduates did not work out during their first year on the job:

  • 78%: Excessive use of cell phones – the top pet peeve of managers
  • 61%: Entitled or easily offended
  • 57%: Unprepared for the workplace
  • 54%: Lack of a work ethic
  • 47%: Poor communication skills
  • 27%: Lack of technical skills

Other concerns managers had about the graduates included lateness, failure to turn in assignments on time, unprofessional behavior, and inappropriate dress and language.

Colleges don’t teach students how to behave in the workplace, and there is a lack of transitional support from both universities and employers. Most students graduate with little exposure to professional environments, so when they arrive at their first job, they’re often learning basic workplace norms for the first time.

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Where the number of homes for sale is growing. Fast.

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The Russell 1000 is a stock market index that represents the 1,000 largest companies in the U.S. by market value (also called market capitalization). The graph below shows the number of stocks within that 1,000 that fall by a certain percentage over a 1, 3 and 5-year time frame. While over time most major indices like The Russell 1000 go up, the odds are very high that any individual stock is going to fall by a lot.

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Lead characters were far more likely to die in the 1960s and 1970s than they are today. Across the 1970s, almost one in three protagonists died by the end of the film. That rate has steadily declined since. The drop has been particularly sharp since 2010. In the last five years, the share of lead characters who die has averaged just 17%. This is one of the lowest rates in almost a century of film history.

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Only 21% of American college revenues come from tuition:

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The average age of the global population is up from 26.5 years in 1980 to 33.6 years in 2025. Meanwhile, the average growth rate of the global population has also halved, from 1.8% in 1980 to 0.9% in 2025. The growth rate is expected to hit zero by 2084, and the world’s population is expected to begin declining by 2085, with the average age rising to 42. At the end of the 21st century, the average age is projected to be 43 years.

Sleep, Forecasting & Life Stages

Life can be divided into three stages:

  • Stage 1: Youth – You have time and health, but not much money (unless you have a trust fund).
  • Stage 2: Mid-Life – You have money and health, but little time, career/family consume most of it.
  • Stage 3: Old Age – You have time and money (hopefully), but your health begins to deteriorate.

But there’s a magical stage between Stage 2 and Stage 3 where you have all three: time, health, and money. Some people extend Stage 2 for too long, chasing promotions, accumulating wealth, and missing this precious window to live fully and intentionally.

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Six common sleep myths:

  • “You need 8 hours of sleep every night” (7 hours is ideal)
  • “We sleep to rest our bodies” (Sleep restores your brain much more than your body)
  • “Waking up in the middle of the night is bad”
  • “Light and sound will ruin your sleep”
  • “Sleeping pills will help you”
  • “You need to time your sleep cycles to leverage REM”

There are two ways sleep helps the brain:

(1) Sleep helps us learn and remember important things. When we’re awake, our memories seem to go into a sort of short-term bank. Then, when we’re in certain stages of sleep, our brain culls through these memories. It puts the most important memories in long-term storage and deletes the useless ones.

(2) Sleep “cleans” our brain. The brain is like an engine that does a lot of work during the day. Engines emit smog—in the case of the brain, this smog is called “metabolites.” But because our brain is tightly sealed off, it can’t seem to get rid of these metabolites as it’s up and running while we’re awake.

Picture this as a car running idle in a garage. But pretend the car’s engine can’t run with the garage door open. So across the day, the engine runs in the closed garage, and smog builds and builds in the brain. Run the engine too long with the garage door closed, and you get a dangerous smog buildup. As we sleep, it’s like the engine turns down and the garage door opens. During certain sleep phases, some areas of our brain expand by 60 percent, which allows the previous day’s metabolites to clear. This also lets in enzymes that repair and rejuvenate receptors in the brain. Sort of like having a mechanic come in to tune the engine while the garage is open and the engine is “off.”

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When Do People Want Their Inheritance (And When Do They Get It)? When you ask people whether they would prefer $250,000 at age 30, $500,000 at age 40, or $1 million at age 50, people overwhelmingly wanted the lower amount earlier in life. 70% of respondents who answered this question chose $250,000 at age 30.

The average age at which someone receives an inheritance has been increasing over time. In 1989, the average age of inheritance was 41 and today it’s around 51.

You can provide up to $19,000 per year to each of your children tax-free (as of 2025). While the IRS allows you to gift $19,000 per child per year tax-free, technically you can gift far more than this without paying federal taxes. The catch is that any gift above $19,000 counts against your lifetime gift limit, which is $13.99 million (as of 2025). In other words, you can give away $13.99 million across your lifetime without having to pay the federal gift tax.

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Why Macro Forecasting Is Impossible. Think about global trade — large, complex interrelated economies, driven by everything from policy to consumer sentiment, geography, innovation, employment, inflation, natural resources, etc. Besides all of those massive complexities, everything affects everything else. You have initial acts, second-order effects, 3rd, 4th, 5th order effects, reflexivity, and dynamic interactions. It quickly scales up to billions of incalculable odds.

This is why forecasting market prices or macroeconomic data is so challenging: There are simply too many variables, each dependent on and reflecting even more variables, to pretend we truly know what will happen next.

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Modern-day cannabis is simply not the same as the plant used in the 1960s through the 1980s or even as recently as 10 years ago. New strains of cannabis are highly potent, making them more addictive and potentially more dangerous, and we are still trying to understand what the drug does to developing adolescent brains.

All cannabis products contain a mix of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the intoxicating component of the cannabis plant, and cannabidiol (CBD), which may have anxiety-reducing properties. In the 1990s the marijuana in a typical joint contained about 5 percent THC.

But genetic modification has drastically increased THC potency; from 1995 to 2022 its content in the average cannabis plant increased by 307 percent. And it’s not just joints or pot brownies; with the expanding legalization and commercialization of cannabis, there are few limits on the levels of THC in products such as fast-acting vape pens and edibles. What teens can buy today is nothing like what their parents used in college.

Higher-potency THC, marijuana use starting at a young age and more frequent use all increase the risk of psychosis.