Tag: writing

Pre-Date Sleuthing, Cancer & New Homes

A lot of people in tech believe that if we build a smart enough AI, it will simply figure out cures for cancer and every other disease. This assumes we already understand human biology well enough that a clever reasoner could find the answers hiding in our data. We don’t. We’ve barely measured most of what goes on in the human body.

Making a drug has three steps:

  1. Figure out which biological mechanism to target
  2. Design a molecule that hits it
  3. Test it in patients

Nearly all the AI excitement is around step 2 (designing molecules, thanks to breakthroughs like AlphaFold). But that’s not where drugs fail. Over 90% of drugs that reach clinical trials flop, and usually it’s because the target was wrong, not because the molecule was badly made.

We’re getting great at cutting keys, but we keep cutting them for the wrong locks. Meanwhile, the industry keeps piling onto the same few “safe” targets (dozens of GLP-1 copycats) while the number of genuinely new targets pursued each year has collapsed.

Biology is enormous, messy, and idiosyncratic. Even the biggest cell datasets are orders of magnitude too small, and they mostly lack the kind of “what happens if we poke this?” data that matters for drugs. Worse, the diseases we understand least (Alzheimer’s, ALS) are the most human-specific, so animal studies don’t help and human data is scarce, expensive, and ethically constrained.

Self-driving AI systems work great when there’s a fast, cheap way to check if they’re right (like a compiler for code). In drug development, the only real test is a human clinical trial, which takes years and costs millions. Automating the lab just means you produce wrong answers faster.

AI can trim paperwork and logistics, but most trial time is spent waiting to see how a disease progresses in real people. That clock can’t be compressed by compute. The only way to shorten it is deeper understanding of the disease itself, which lets you pick the right patients and detect early whether a drug is working.

All these AI tools are useful, but they’re side improvements. The hard, unglamorous, essential problem is understanding disease mechanisms, which requires measuring human biology the right way and using AI to draw insights from those measurements.

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A new online platform called Stud or Dud, which launched by public-records company PeopleFinders, lets interested parties do a simple, free background check on their wannabe dates; including address history, bankruptcies and other publicly available records.

The site aims to simplify the pre-date sleuthing ritual familiar to most singles by putting all public records in one place, by also adding context to the material like compatibility read outs and color coding information with red and green flags. It’s your own little black book.

Before a first date, the standard vetting process for a potential romantic partner typically went as follows: send his dating profile to the group chat, where your best friend deploys the finsta for career-level private investigator work.

Comb through tagged photos. Check LinkedIn for employment. Search Facebook forums like “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” — all in an attempt to verify that your 7:00 pm drinks aren’t the beginning of an elaborate dating scam.

A recent survey found that 1 in 4 Americans reported interacting with a fake profile or AI bot, while 15% reported losing money to an online dating or romance scam. And 21% of men and 10% of women surveyed reported losing money to an online romance scam.

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The Nonfiction Book Market is Collapsing:

  • In 2015, 18 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books were nonfiction.
  • In 2025, only 7 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction. Fiction now dominates.

Reading habits are extremely gendered, with 80% of women making up the fiction market, and nonfiction being a more 50-50 proposition.

The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality.

The tide going out on nonfiction sales and reading is entirely reshaping the power balance in the industry. Not overnight, but slowly, the money is flowing to fiction and away from nonfiction. It is causing quite a scramble.

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Every three years the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, releases the results of international school tests sat by 15-year-olds all across the world. There were reasons to hope that the latest data, published on September 8th, would bring good news. It did not.

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Historically, a new home has sold for about $40,000 more than an existing home. The obvious reasons: lower maintenance costs, warranties, and the appeal of living in a home that no one has ever lived in before. New homes are also bigger (2,200 square feet for the average new home vs. 1,800 square feet for existing).

New home prices are down 15% in the last four years, and for the first time, new builds are cheaper than existing homes. The average new home is selling at $40,000 less than an existing one, a 9.3% discount.

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The past 10 years through this summer has been the worst decade for 15-year+ treasuries since 1803.

In 223 years, a negative 10-year return has happened in only 25 months. 24 of them just happened. The only other month was Dec 1959, at -0.08%.

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Stock market concentration of the top 10 largest stocks by country. There are only two stock markets with less concentration than the United States; Japan and India. Everywhere else the concentration in the top 10 names is way higher.

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The College Wage Premium in the Generative AI Era

After expanding for four decades, the U.S. college wage premium is experiencing a sustained contraction, dropping sharply from 0.626 in 2022 to 0.575 in 2026.

Using Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group data through 2026, standard market-clearing supply-and demand accounting implies an unprecedented drop in relative demand for college labor-the first sustained negative relative demand growth in a series spanning back to 1914.

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For U.S. workers without college degrees, this is one of the best job markets in decades. The unemployment rate for workers ages 22 to 34 who never graduated from college has rarely been lower in the past two decades.

Just as job hunters without degrees are having one of their best runs, those with college educations are having one of their worst. And those with advanced degrees or in fields such as science and technology are having an even harder time than usual.

That divergence of fortunes is a departure from what the U.S. economy has seen for years, and much of it boils down to supply and demand: There aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to go around as older generations retire and immigration drops.

Meanwhile, more Americans have college degrees than ever, just as artificial intelligence is doing more of the entry-level work companies typically hire young graduates for.

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Predictive Processing, Dating & End Credits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why Walking Gets Tougher When You Age:

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

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

Childhood Amnesia, Testosterone & Blue Zones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mimetic Desire, Move 37 & Magic Mushrooms

We need to have a little talk about René Girard. He didn’t study psychology. He made his name in literature, the place where humans reveal themselves by pretending to be fictional.

He read Proust, Cervantes, Stendahl, Dostoevsky, all those dusty classics about European folks having feelings in carriages. And in those books, he saw the same wiring under the floorboards every time: people wanted the stuff everybody else wanted. They all copied each other relentlessly and were so very sure that what they wanted was totally original.

We spend a lot of time worrying we won’t get what we desire. But that’s not the worst outcome. The worst outcome is spending your whole life chasing (and maybe even getting) something you never really wanted in the first place.

Girard has this concept he calls The Romantic Lie. You experience it as saying, “I’ve always appreciated vintage ceramics.” (Oh c’mon. You only started caring about them twenty-four seconds after seeing one in an Instagram reel.)

His other big idea was The Novelistic Truth. Simply put: our desires are usually borrowed.

Why do we do this? Psychologist Leon Festinger realized that humans don’t have an objective way to know how they’re doing. Nobody gets an Adulthood Report Card. With no objective metric, we look to others to learn what defines success, which is why happiness often seems so slippery.

We’re social creatures. It’s through other people that we learn to work, love, play and eat non-poisonous fruit. The problem is unconscious imitation. When we unknowingly mimic others and lead ourselves astray. 

We think we’re just hustling after things, but Girard says, nope, we’re usually chasing people. We don’t actually want the career as much as we want to feel successful like the person we saw with it. Girard calls these people “models.”

That’s why we often feel let down when we get something we want. Getting the car gets you a car. It doesn’t turn you into the person in the Super Bowl ad who seems to have solved all their problems by driving through the mountains at dawn.

We laugh at young people because they’re always copying each other’s slang and clothes. Then we turn into adults and copy each other’s cars and homes.

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The first glimmer of our AI future revealed itself a decade ago in the form of a single black stone. 

It happened during a historic match between one of the world’s best Go players and AlphaGo, a computer program developed by Google’s DeepMind lab to conquer this ancient board game. The artificial-intelligence system stunned everyone by winning their opening showdown. In their next encounter, with millions of people watching online all over the world, Lee Sedol took a midgame smoke break to calm his nerves.

When he came back, he looked at the 37th move. He couldn’t believe his eyes. 

Go, like chess, is a strategy game with black and white pieces that unfolds one move at a time. As he stared at the black stone that AlphaGo dropped on the board, Lee saw a move that no professional Go player would have made. In fact, the DeepMind team calculated the chances of a human playing it at one in 10,000.

The novel move was so unconventional and counterintuitive that nobody could be sure what to make of it. At first, commentators believed it was a strategic blunder. They soon realized it was a masterstroke.

“This move,” Lee said, “made me think about Go in a new light.” 

Ten years after that illuminating Move 37, the entire world is suddenly beginning to feel like one massive Go board.

Back in the prehistoric days of 2023, AI struggled with elementary math. In 2024, it was considered a landmark achievement when DeepMind earned a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. By 2025, DeepMind and OpenAI were taking gold. And in 2026, IMO success is so unremarkable that Anthropic announced its perfect score on page 153 of a technical document.

Why is math so vulnerable to AI? Because math is unusually verifiable. 

The field is governed by precise logical rules, which allow proofs to be checked step by step. In verifiable domains like math and coding, AI systems can follow a simple formula: try an idea, test it, learn from the results, try again and keep trying until it works.

But for all the advances in group theory, quantum complexity and theoretical computer science, AI hasn’t gotten as far in the less theoretical sciences. We’re still waiting for AI-generated miracle drugs, AI-invented consumer products, AI that’s smart enough to crack the economics of AI.

After IBM’s Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, chess began experimenting with a format that allowed human players to consult computer engines. The result was a new breed of centaur: half-man, half-machine. For a time, the best human players with AI were better than AI alone. Demis Hassabis, the creator of DeepMind, believes we are now entering that centaur era of science. 

“I don’t know how long that period will last,” he said. “But for very complex domains, it could be a very long time. Like drug discovery, biology, chemistry—they’re very messy, very emergent and you can’t verify everything. You need the human intuition and the human vision of which direction to go.” 

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If someone asked you in a questionnaire whether you’re afraid of snakes, you might say no. If they threw a live snake in your lap and then asked whether you’re afraid of snakes, you’d probably say yes, and never talk to them again. The gap between believing something as an outsider and experiencing real uncertainty and risk and fear in the moment can be a mile wide.

You can apply this to very big things, too. There’s a theory that we get major events like world wars every sixty to eighty years, because that’s how long it takes for the generation that experienced the last one and said “never again” to die off. Then you have a new generation that’s never experienced that kind of trauma, and they think maybe we should give it another shot.

So if you go out of your way to see the world through other people’s eyes, two things happen. You become less cynical about other people’s bad decisions and their apparent irrationality. And you become a little more humble about your own beliefs.

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Question to Morgan Housel: “If you were someone that saved a lot of money when you were young, if you could go back to your twenties or thirties, would you dedicate a much larger portion of your income to fun and memory dividends?

Answer: “The question is whether it was a mistake to make sacrifices when I was young to save an amount that means far less to me now? I think the answer is no, and here’s why. Learning to save at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen built up the muscle memory of how to make sacrifices. So when my income went up in my thirties and early forties, saving was no issue. I’d been doing this forever. The value of saving when you’re young isn’t necessarily the money you save. It’s building the muscle memory so that saving is easy when you’re earning more later on.

A lot of amazing experiences don’t cost much, and a lot of hollow experiences cost a great deal. To some extent, the more you try to force money into having a good time, the less fun it becomes. If you ask a lot of adults when they have their best memories, when life was most enjoyable, many will say high school or college; so much fun with friends, so many funny stories, so many road trips. The common denominator of that phase of life is that most people have no money at all and are having a blast.

And when are people saddest? Statistically, from all the surveys, it’s midlife: the forties and fifties, when you’re probably earning more money than you ever will again. It’s not that there’s a negative correlation between money and happiness, but the more we try to force it, the harder it gets.“

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Research from Science Daily showing Magic mushrooms may reshape the brain long after the trip ends:

  • A single dose of psilocybin produces measurable changes in brain activity and possible changes in brain structure that lasts for up to a month.
  • Participants who experience the greatest increase in flexible, varied brain activity also reported more personal insight and later improvements in well-being.
  • Findings suggest that the psychedelic experience itself may help people break free from entrenched patterns of thinking.

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Data-center capex added 1.7 percentage points in just two years, from 1.4% of GDP in 2025 to 3.1% in 2027, or roughly 0.85 percentage points a year. Housing’s quickest phase, from 5.1% of GDP in 2002 to 6.6% in 2005, increased at only 0.5 percentage points a year, and telecom’s at only 0.15. 

The AI cycle is building at close to twice the pace of the housing boom at its fastest. The same arithmetic runs in reverse: housing’s unwind, from 6.2% of GDP in early 2006 to 3.0% by the end of 2008, is what made that recession severe, while telecom’s much smaller reversal produced the mildest one. 

A cycle that builds at 0.85 percentage points a year can unwind at a similar pace, and that, rather than the buildout itself, is the macro risk if AI demand disappoints.

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While 91% of Japanese and 88% of American households have air conditioning, just 4% of UK homes do.

Polymarket Fakes, Eighth Graders & Reliable Cars

Michael Cancelleri, an entrepreneur in San Clemente, Calif., has poured tens of thousands of dollars into his son’s baseball career—club team fees, tournament travel and top-of-the-line equipment. As high school approached, Cancelleri decided that wasn’t enough. He paid about $20,000 for his son, a straight-A student, to repeat a grade at a private middle school sports academy.

Sixty other boys are repeating a grade at the same academy, The Togethership, where coursework includes throwing mechanics, game film review and nutrition along with traditional subjects such as Algebra and English. Holding kids back in school for an athletic edge has existed for decades on the elite fringe of prep sports. In recent years, it has exploded in popularity for middle school boys. 

Fueled by the lure of Name, Image and Likeness money in college, families are delaying high school so their sons can get bigger, stronger and more recruitable. The practice, known as “reclassifying,” “reclassing,” “bridge year” or “gap year,” is spreading fast in football, basketball, baseball, lacrosse and other sports where height and strength are key.

The demand has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry. For-profit sports academies, some focusing on a single sport, are popping up from Virginia to San Diego, while private schools, home-school programs and even a public school district are adding—and aggressively marketing—holdback years. For many athletes, eighth grade is the last chance to repeat a year and still compete for a full high school career. Interscholastic rules generally limit high-school students to four years of athletic eligibility and cap participation at age 19. 

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In his videos, George Makihara appears to have a lucrative side hustle making bets on Polymarket. In January, the college student posted a video that showed him winning $100,000 on a wager that President Trump would publicly say the word “McDonald’s” that month.  

The bet was one of 145 that Makihara appeared to place on Polymarket’s website between January and mid-May, based on his videos—bets adding up to almost $410,000.  But none of those bets were real, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation.

Makihara is one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film themselves making fake trades and sometimes scoring fake wins, according to an analysis of more than 1,100 videos by the Journal, along with instructional materials and interviews with creators who have worked with the company. On Polymarket’s actual site, more than 50 accounts made the McDonald’s bet in January, public data shows. All of them lost.

In its push to draw users to its unregulated platform, Polymarket has flooded social media with videos like Makihara’s, which appear genuine at first glance. In reality, Polymarket built near-perfect copies of its website, then instructed creators to make simulated trades on those dummy sites and hide that they were being paid by Polymarket. To get the videos to go viral, Polymarket has recruited a social-media army to copy and re-post creators’ footage.

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As recently as 2015 the 10 largest US stocks represented just 17% of the S&P 500 market cap. That was also the level that prevailed during the mid-1990’s. Now this figure has risen to about 40%.

However, relative to the rest of the world, the US has one of the lowest concentrations for its top 10 largest stocks:

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This graphic ranks the car brands with the fewest reported problems in 2026 based on J.D. Power’s Problems Per 100 Vehicles metric. Lower scores indicate fewer owner-reported issues and better long-term dependability.

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Healthmaxxing, Marriage & Stock Valuations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temporal Chauvinism, Attractiveness & Germs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(1) Less Quality Time with Parents

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

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

(2) Germs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Luck, Loneliness & Drones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Status, Procrastination & Hair Transplants

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Removing Burden, Parent Goals & Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIER 3: PROBABLY NOT HELPING

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

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

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

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

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

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

TIER 2: WORKS SOMETIMES (MAYBE/DEPENDS):

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

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

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

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

TIER 1: LEGITIMATELY WORKS

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

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

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

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

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

Full Discussion Here: Self Help, Solved

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