Children, NFL Games, Peptides & Net Worth

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

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

_________________________

From Time magazine: The Peptide Rush Has Begun

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

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

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

_________________________

How, exactly, do antidepressants work?

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

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

Chemical Imbalance

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

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

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

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

Environment

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

Neuroplasticity

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

Blunting Emotions

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

Placebo Effect

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

_________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

_________________________

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

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

_________________________

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

_________________________

__________________________

Four families own 69% of the Korean stock market.

_____________________________

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

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

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

The Everywhere Millionaires, Parenting & Psychedelics

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

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

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

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

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

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

___________________________

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

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

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

Law Firm Partnerships
Venture Capital, Private Equity, and Hedge Funds
Independently Owned Auto Dealerships
Professional and Technical Services and Management Consulting
Oil and Gas Extraction
Offices of Physicians
Residential and Nonresidential Builders
Real Estate Activities
Restaurants
Accounting and Bookkeeping

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

Who Are They?

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

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

How Did They Start?

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

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

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

__________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_________________________

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

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

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

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

_________________________

Mahatma Gandhi’s seven deadly sins:

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

_________________________

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

Parenting, Meditation, Stimulants & Yoga

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the 1950s television began keeping kids indoors.
Houses got a lot bigger, and families smaller, so many kids have the option of retreating to their own bedrooms.
Adults took control of kids’ sports, replacing sandlot games with Little League and other organized, competitive, coach-centered endeavors.
Housing developments increasingly omitted sidewalks, favoring drivers over walkers.
The country grew more litigious, making planners wary of playgrounds, which could attract lawsuits when kids got hurt.
School got more intense. Between 1950 and 2015, the average American school year got five weeks longer. Recess shrunk, and time for lunch contracted from an hour (at many schools) to twenty minutes.

___________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

_________________

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

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

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

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

__________________

What happened to Yoga?

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

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

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

Predictive Processing, Dating & End Credits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________

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.

_______________________

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.

_______________________

_______________________

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.

____________________________

_________________________

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.

_________________________

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.

_________________________

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.

__________________________

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:

__________________________

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.

___________________________

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:

___________________________

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.

___________________________

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.

___________________________

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

________________

_________________________

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.

_________________________________

________________________

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

_______________________

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.

_____________________________

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.

_____________________________

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.

________________________

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?

______________________________

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.

Memories, Cash Flow & The Happiness Crash

Your hippocampus doesn’t encode days that feel identical. If this Tuesday looks like last Tuesday, your brain files them as a single compressed memory. The second day never gets its own folder.

This is why decades feel like they disappeared. The hippocampus uses novelty as its filter for “worth storing.” Repetitive routines trigger temporal compression. Same commute, same desk, same dinner, same bedtime: the brain deduplicates the whole sequence into one entry. You lived 365 days. You filed 40.

As people move through continuous experience, the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex fire in discrete bursts at moments the brain flags as “something changed.” Each burst becomes a retrievable memory later. In stretches with no boundaries, the bursts flatten. Participants with more boundaries in a given period remembered more of it afterward. Segmentation literally builds memory.

Sleep is the second mechanism. During slow-wave sleep, the hippocampus replays the day’s episodes and transfers them to the neocortex for long-term storage. This is when memory actually gets filed. Cut sleep short and encoding efficiency drops. Chronic sleep debt means experiences you had never complete the transfer. The memory existed. It just never made it to disk.

The third mechanism is where dopamine meets attention. Novel stimuli trigger the ventral tegmental area to release dopamine into the hippocampus, which gates what gets encoded. Mind-wandering does the opposite. When your default mode network takes over (phone scrolling, rumination, email during dinner), the hippocampus stops tagging the present. You were at the wedding. Your hippocampus was in your inbox.

The fix comes straight out of the mechanism. New locations, new food, new people, new routes home. The brain needs boundaries to build memories. Go to bed earlier so replay actually runs. Put the phone down when something is happening so the dopamine signal can fire.

The more forgettable the day, the shorter the decade.

__________________________

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

Why?

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

Two structural shifts explain the divergence:

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

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

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

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

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

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

__________________________

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

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

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

Status, Procrastination & Hair Transplants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________________________________

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.

______________________________

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.

__________________________

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.

_______________________________

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.

_____________________________

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.

__________________

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

_______________________________

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.

_____________________________

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.

____________________________

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”.

__________________________

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.

__________________________

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