I’ve spent months sifting through the slop for ideas of value. Here I present 26 for 2026, each one chosen for its relevance to the coming year (or its timelessness), and each distilled to just a couple sentences (with my own corollaries added).

1. 1% rule:

In online communities, around 1% of users produce almost all of the content. As such, what you see online is not representative of humanity, but merely of a loud, obsessive (and often narcissistic, psychopathic, low-IQ) minority. Social media is literally a freakshow.

2. Slopaganda:

More online articles are now written by AI than by humans. And research is increasingly finding that AI is better at persuading people than people are. Who wins in a world of unlimited propaganda? Not those with the best arguments, but those with the most slop.

3. Reality Apathy:

When the sheer volume of conflicting information makes the effort of finding the truth costlier than the value of knowing it, people give up trying to be accurate and instead choose whatever bullshit stinks least. Slop doesn’t just threaten the truth, but the very worth of truth.

4. Rumpelstiltskin Effect:

To name a problem is to tame it. Diagnosing one’s suffering makes it feel more meaningful and thus manageable—even if the diagnosis is wrong. “Major depressive disorder” is easier to live with than an anonymous sadness. This is one reason for the recent surge in diagnoses of disorders like depression, autism and ADHD.

5. Context Collapse:

On social media, we’re simultaneously talking to our boss, our ex, our grandma, and a jihadist in Michigan. The result is that many people lobotomize their personalities into an inoffensive PR sludge, trying to please everyone and therefore pleasing no one.

6. Shower Test:

We’re socially conditioned to chase what we think everyone else wants. But your true heart’s desire can often be found in the thoughts you gravitate to while undistracted, such as in the shower. As Walt Whitman said, “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.”

7. Eustress:

People have more comforts and conveniences than ever, yet reports of unhappiness are at an all-time high. One reason is that discomfort isn’t an obstacle to happiness, it’s the path to it, for it’s only by enduring struggles that we develop the resilience necessary for lasting contentment.

8. Amara’s Law:

We tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new tech, and underestimate the long-term impact, because hype inflates expectations, and thus disappointment, and thus scepticism. As such, it’s possible for AI to be both a bubble and the most transformative tech since fire.

9. Moloch’s Bargain:

When LLMs compete for votes or social media likes, they push lies and ragebait to win—even when explicitly instructed to stay grounded and honest. If chatbots conclude that getting our attention requires lying to us, is the AI misaligned, or are we?

10. Healthy User Bias:

People who try supplements or practices that might have health benefits are naturally more health-conscious, and likely already healthier, than those who don’t. This is one reason there are so many studies suggesting some intervention has health benefits; they’re confusing the benefits of the intervention with the benefits of being the kind of person who tries it.

11. Oxytocin Paradox:

Oxytocin, the “love hormone”, can also make people spiteful. Cruelty is not simply the opposite of compassion, it’s often adjacent to it. For instance, the platform most dominated by “social justice” advocates—Bluesky—is also the one with the highest support for assassinations. Beware of those quick to show empathy, for they are often just as quick to show barbarity.

12. George Bailey Effect:

Imagining the absence of a blessing increases gratitude more than focusing on the presence of it. Instead of wishing for a Porsche, imagine losing your legs. Suddenly, walking feels like a miracle.

13. Original Position Fallacy:

Far-Leftists favour planned economies because they imagine themselves as the planners, not the planned. Far-Rightists favour a return to feudalism because they imagine themselves as the lords, not the peasants. Many delusional worldviews stem from main-character syndrome.

14. Coyote’s Law:

Don’t give the government a power you wouldn’t want your political enemies to wield. Because, one day, they may well be in charge of it.

15. Scientometric Bubble:

There’s been a surge in published research without a corresponding increase in knowledge, because the pressure on academics to “publish or perish” means universities are flooding academia with weak, trivial, and fraudulent studies. This will likely get much worse in the age of LLMs.

16. Zombie Theories:

Academic papers retracted due to fraud or error continue to be cited as if they hadn’t been retracted. And studies that fail to replicate are actually cited more than studies that do. Being wrong has virtually no effect on bad papers; no matter how many facts they’re hit with, they keep shambling onward, eating people’s brains.

17. The Politician’s Syllogism:

“We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.”

It’s more important for a government to be seen tackling an issue than to actually solve it, so governments often implement simplistic policies that look like they work but don’t, like rent controls, plastic straw bans, and diversity training.

18. Malingering:

Between 20% and 40% of undergraduates at many elite American universities are now registered as disabled. In the UK, one quarter of the entire population now identifies as disabled. The rewards for claiming a disability now outweigh the stigma, and those hurt most by all the pretenders are ultimately those with genuine disabilities.

19. Paradox of Boredom:

With a phone always in arm’s reach, it’s almost impossible to get bored. This is a disaster, because boredom is the mud from which creativity blooms. To be bored is to be undistracted, and only then is one free to dream, just as it’s only when the world goes dark that we see the galaxy.

20. Wilson Effect:

Heritable traits like IQ and personality become more heritable with age, because as you mature you become more independent, and free to be who you really are. Many heritability studies find that nurture’s influence is stronger only because they never see that nature’s influence is longer.

21. Pronoia:

The opposite of paranoia. The suspicion that the universe is secretly conspiring to help you. Assume every setback is the universe trying to teach you a lesson, and every setback will make you wiser. It doesn’t matter whether the universe is actually trying to help you; believing it makes it work.

22. Artificial Intimacy:

Amid a global “friendship recession”, many are using AI not for productivity but for sympathy. In the UK, a third of adults use chatbots for emotional support. But, by anaesthetising loneliness, will AI leave us more isolated?

23. Gooning:

Masturbation addiction has, like many mental disorders, become a subculture. Increasing numbers of “gooners” now gather on forums where they swap porn and offer tips on “edging” (prolonging masturbation, sometimes for hours). What was once a shameful secret has become a literal circlejerk. Men worldwide are losing their drive and ambition to a virulent wankdemic.

24. Sleepwalk Bias:

Predictions that humanity is doomed usually assume future generations will be less aware and less active in fighting for their survival. But historical prophecies of doom, such as the Malthusian trap, ozone layer depletion, and Y2K, show this is false; posterity are not idle passengers headed off cliffs, but problem-solvers building bridges across them.

25. Cammarata’s Razor:

If you want more agency, ask yourself what you’d do if you had ten times more agency. Then do it.

26. Munger’s Latticework (aka Theoretical Pluralism):

You can’t understand the world by viewing it through a single lens; relying on a single theory blinds you to its limitations. The solution is to adopt many competing theories—the more contradictory the better—for each will act as a mirror showing you blind spots in your other lenses. You’ve now learned 26, but countless others await.

And that’s it for now. In 2026 I will finally be turning this blog from a side-hustle into a full-time job—a decision made possible by everyone who became a paying subscriber (thank you). I want to put a lot of thought into everything I write, so I’ll be aiming to publish around once or twice a week. As always, everything I publish will be fully written by me, not AI, and to assure my paying subscribers of this I’ll soon reintroduce seasonal video-chats in which you can ask me to justify or explain any sentence that appears on my blog.

Thanks for sticking with me in 2025; I’ll have much more to show you in 2026.

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The most common noun in the English language is “time”. We talk obsessively about time because it’s the most important thing in the universe. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet most of us treat time as if it’s the least important thing. We kick up a fuss when tech giants steal our data, but we’ve been strangely nonchalant as those same companies carry out the greatest heist of our time in history.

One reason for our indifference is that the true scale of the theft has been hidden from us. Social media platforms have been stealing our time using a sneaky trick: they’ve been speeding up our sense of time — effectively shortening our lives — so we think we had less than we did, and don’t notice some of it was pilfered.

Every social media user has experienced the theft of their time. You may log on to quickly check your notifications, and before you know it, half an hour has gone by and you’re still on the platform, unable to account for where the time went. This phenomenon even has a name: the “30-minute ick factor”. It also has empirical support. Experiments have found that people using apps like TikTok and Instagram start to underestimate the time they’re on such platforms after just a few minutes of use, even when they’re explicitly told to keep track of time.

To understand how social media warps time, we must understand time perception, or chronoception. Even outside of our heads, time doesn’t move at a constant pace. It is, for instance, slowed by gravity. This is why the Earth’s core is 2.5 years younger than its surface. Just as massive objects can slow objective time, so weighty experiences can slow subjective time. It’s why people tend to overestimate the duration of earthquakes and accidents (or in fact any scary situation).

Generally, an event feels longer in the moment if it heightens awareness. But we seldom think of time in the moment; the majority of our sense of time is retrospective. And our sense of retrospective time is determined by awareness of the past: in other words, by memory. The more we remember of a certain period, the longer that period feels, and the slower time seems to have passed.

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made many strong memories, and each adds depth to the past.

Conversely, when you’re waiting at a boring airport, you keep checking the clock, and this acute awareness of time causes it to pass slowly in the moment. But since the wait is uneventful, you don’t make strong memories of the experience, and so in retrospect it seems brief.

Now, a sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your time both in the moment and in retrospect. It does this by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies, which have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.

But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming content as routine. And routine, being passive and therefore immemorable, speeds up time.

This is one way social media impairs awareness and memory. Unfortunately, there are many others, and, unlike this one, they’re not a result of mere circumstance, but of ruthless planning. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”

Parker and other tech executives employ “attention engineers” to design interfaces and algorithms that warp your sense of time. To understand how they do this, we must look to the history of casino floor design.

II. THE GREATEST HEIST OF ALL TIME

In the 1970s, a man named Bill Friedman went from gambling addict to casino manager by studying the tricks used to manipulate him, and perfecting them. He eventually published his ideas about optimal casino design in several books, which would become bibles of the industry.

Friedman’s philosophy seems to have been borrowed from the retail industry. Supermarkets have long been designed like mazes, with everyday items like milk and eggs deep in the heart of the maze so you must pass by countless other products to access them. The purpose of this layout is to evoke the Gruen effect: the moment when a shopper loses track of what they entered the store for, and begins aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.

Friedman argued for a similar strategy: to arrange casinos like mazes, where even the paths to toilets and exits would spiral and meander through rows of enticing games machines. Such an overwhelming environment would keep people distracted from themselves, so they’d remain instinctual rather than intentional, and hence compliant rather than resistant.

Friedman rejected open-plan designs, instead advocating for casinos to be sectioned into cubicles so players could only see their immediate surroundings. This was partly to restrict their awareness, but also to create constant FOMO: players would hear excited hoots and cheers coming from a nearby cubicle, and go searching for the cause of the commotion. In doing so, they’d wander further into the maze.

A key component of Friedman’s mazes was for pathways to have as few right-angle turns as possible. This is because sharp bends jolt pedestrians into awareness, since a decision must now be made to change direction. And when someone has to decide where to go, they’re liable to think about the time and whether they should in fact be heading for the exit. Thus, Friedman advocated for curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot.

Friedman’s methods of keeping people playing by keeping them passive and distracted didn’t just revolutionise casinos around the world. Many of his techniques would later resurface in social media design, where they’ve proved even more successful at hindering awareness.

For instance, in the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot by forcing them to change course. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function. We now know that these features impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Further, just as Friedman’s casinos were made like mazes to maximise wandering and getting lost, so social media platforms have increasingly become labyrinthine to trap people in them. The Gruen effect is now commonly elicited online similarly to the real world: by continually placing distractions in people’s way. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong; search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions, so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.

But what makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time.

III. THE LABYRINTH OF SHATTERED HOURS

The opposite of a maze is a route, and a route through time is a story. This is because stories are linear and syntagmatic — each moment of the tale semantically follows from the previous — and this collective meaningfulness anchors the whole thing in memory. This is why studies have consistently found that people are much better at memorising information when it’s presented in narrative form.

The memorable and sequential nature of stories makes them good timekeepers. As such, the way we make sense of time is through emplotment: by turning time into stories. It’s why research finds that people who are similarly engaged in a story will tend to converge in their estimates of how much time has elapsed. If we can’t turn a duration into a story, we struggle to keep track of it.

Now here’s the issue: your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Thus, not only do you forget time while scrolling through posts, but you also forget the posts themselves. We have no problem recounting the plot of a good book we read or movie we saw last year, yet we can barely remember what we saw on social media yesterday.

Despite not having much memory of your social media feed, you may have a vague sense that you at least enjoy scrolling. This, too, is likely a trick. Research suggests that people judge an experience as being more enjoyable if they believe they underestimated its duration. In other words, not only does time fly when we’re having fun, but we also believe we had fun if time flies. So, by speeding up time on social media, attention engineers don’t just make you waste more time, they might also reduce your likelihood of regretting it.

But even if you do regret it, social media excels at making you return. A physical casino can only warp your time while you’re within its walls. Social media is always within arm’s reach. And it has ways of making you reach for it.

Friedman’s cubicles were designed to spark FOMO by letting you hear the cheers and roars of excited players but without letting you see the cause — unless you entered. Similarly, the push notifications of social media platforms periodically tease you with what you’re missing out on, and the only way for you to find out more is to re-enter the maze. The result of having your day punctuated by these notifications is that your attention is constantly intercutting between the real world and the virtual one, so that your life becomes a book in a windstorm just like your feed.

This creates problems of its own. Continually dividing your attention between two worlds means you can never fully settle in either, creating constant anxiety and stress. And when attention is constantly switching between concurrent tasks, it imposes a “switch-cost effect” that can make people lose track of time. Thus, by constantly interrupting you, social media platforms can impair your awareness and shorten your days even while you’re not on them, so that you end up scrolling through the real world as shallowly as the virtual one.

It would be bad enough if this disorientation were only costing us time. But it can also cost us our health too. Social media appears to disrupt young people’s sleep cycles and lead to mental health problems. Further, when people have their sleep continually disrupted, it can have cascading effects on their body’s ability to keep time, causing, for instance, puberty to begin sooner. This may help explain why children, particularly girls, are experiencing puberty earlier than they used to.

As well as potentially speeding up puberty, screentime also seems to speed up ageing. A recent study of 7212 adults tracked various biomarkers of body age, such as muscle mass and telomere length, and found that those who spent more time staring at screens had aged faster, even when controlling for physical inactivity. This effect might partly be due to confounding (people with high screentime are likely to have other unhealthy habits) but it’s also a predictable result of the stress, disorientation, and hyposomnia inflicted by living out of sync with reality.

Ultimately, social media doesn’t just threaten the quantity of your time, but also the quality. And it doesn’t just accelerate your experienced life, but potentially also your actual, biological life.

Now that we understand this, we can try to do something about it. Fortunately, there are ways to not only prevent further theft of our lives, but to take time back.

IV. TAKING TIME BACK

The simplest way to escape the tech giants’ control is to stop using their platforms. Research suggests abstaining from social media can lead to immediate time dilation, particularly for compulsive users. Further, according to a study of 35,000 people, quitting social media tended to slightly improve perceived mental health after just a few weeks.

However, that same study also found that the time people saved by quitting social media was often just spent browsing other apps, which are increasingly emulating the time-warping features of social media.

Take, for instance, chatbots. They are inherently mazelike; not only do they frequently hallucinate red herrings, but they’re also prone to “verbosity compensation”, which means they frequently ramble and equivocate in their responses, raising more questions with every answer, and creating a kind of verbal Gruen effect. They also have a tendency to validate users’ delusions, leading them further down deceptive and dangerous rabbit-holes.

Chatbots are also becoming curvilinear, increasingly ending their answers with a question or an offer for further help to create a kind of conversational infinite scroll. And now, Meta and others plan to have their chatbots message you unprompted — the AI equivalent of the enticing calls from Friedman’s cubicles. These developments pose problems because there is emerging evidence that chatbots, when used carelessly, can impair awareness and memory just like social media.

The deeper problem, then, is not social media or chatbots. It’s curvilinear mazes. If we can avoid following smooth spirals to nowhere, and instead take sharp turns to clear destinations, we can stay aware and keep track of time. We could even learn to use social media and chatbots — two incredibly useful technologies — in a way that enriches our lives rather than impoverishes them.

We’ve already learned the techniques that attention engineers use to speed up time. So, if we can adopt the opposite techniques, we might just be able to slow time, and in so doing, experience longer, richer lives.

Curvilinear mazes speed up time because little within them sticks out to attention or into memory. So what does stick out and in? Salient stimuli: surprises, stories, (strong) sentiments, and selections. Social media gives you the illusion of these things, but it’s actually their killer.

The “stories” on your feed are really just hints of stories that collectively form an incoherent jumble. Any “sentiments” become dulled when your feed is full of ragebait and scaremongering, while the “surprises” cease to surprise when you’re seeing twenty a minute. And the “selections” you make on social media, such as deciding when to scroll, are instinctual rather than intentional — there are no right-angle turns in your feed, and you’re just following the gently snaking path.

Slowing time begins with refusing these ersatz experiences, for only the real thing is weighty enough to anchor itself in memory. Fortunately, there are simple ways to experience authentic salience.

For instance, when faced with a choice of experiences, choose the option that’s most likely to lead to a good story. Read books instead of scrolling social media feeds. Go on adventures instead of staying home. The more stories you experience, the richer your memory will be.

Focus too on the sentiments these stories inspire. The simplest way to strengthen a feeling is to savour experiences. So stop idly scrolling through life as if it’s a feed, and learn to focus your attention on the here and now. People who practice mindfulness tend to have a slower experience of time.

Be deliberate not just in your experiences, but also your actions. Make a habit of resisting habit, choose a life of choices. Continually question why you’re doing things, and stop when you don’t have a good answer. Instead of instinctively checking your phone every five minutes, only pull it out when you have a clear idea what you want to see, otherwise keep it in your pocket. The more you avoid living on autopilot, the more of life you’ll remember.

And when you take a right-angle turn off the curvilinear path, you’ll also open yourself up to the greatest time dilator of all: surprise. We tend to remember novel experiences much more than repeated ones. It’s why time seems to speed up as we age; as we grow older, fewer of our experiences are new, so fewer stick in memory. It’s also why old people tend to remember their early lives better than their adult lives.

The power of new experiences to stick in our memory would explain why studies have consistently found evidence for the oddball effect, a phenomenon where a surprising stimulus presented among predictable stimuli is perceived to last longer. Recent research has found that the stimulus that immediately follows the surprising stimulus is also perceived to last longer, suggesting novel experiences slow time by heightening awareness.

And these novel experiences don’t have to mean great upheavals of your life; they can be as simple as periodically rearranging your living room, or taking a different route to work, or trying a different restaurant. Even small breaks in routine can form richer memories and slow time.

So there you have it. To make life feel longer, choose experiences that are novel over familiar, intentional over habitual, narrative over disjointed, and emotional over neutral.

There is, however, one problem. While these heuristics can make life more memorable, they are themselves easy to forget. Time erodes all things, including the desire to make the most of it. You could come away from this essay determined to live your best life, only for the feeling to fade hours later as life’s myriad distractions reassert themselves, returning you to living as forgetfully and fleetingly as you did before.

The problem, then, is not just that time passes us by; we pass time by, because we’d rather do other things than worry about it. So how do we keep ourselves committed to a long and memorable life? How do we remember to remember?

V. REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER

Maintaining a memorable life requires maintaining a memory of why you want one. The ancient Buddhists would internalise a sense of time’s preciousness through maranasati — reflecting on their own mortality — by meditating in charnel houses, surrounded by corpses. Similarly, in Ancient Rome and medieval Europe, people would often keep memento mori — reminders of life’s transience — such as skulls, urns, hourglasses, and wilted flowers.

Modern research is starting to confirm what the ancients had long known; that reminding yourself that you’ll die doesn’t typically increase anxiety for the future (it might actually reduce it), but it does increase appreciation for the present. Without remembering our own impermanence, we’re liable to live as if we’d never die, and hence, die as if we’d never lived.

I don’t fancy meditating in graveyards, or lugging a human skull around, so I make my own memento mori from words I can repeat to myself.

If years were letters, the average human lifespan would not be longer than this sentence.

That was one.

The key is to place your memos in the places you most need to see them. If you spend too much time on social media, then social media-based memento mori, such as Buddhism or Stoicism accounts, are good reminders to stop wasting time.

Earlier this year I discovered an unforgettable memento mori on social media.

I’d found myself on YouTube, without a clear memory of how I’d got there. I realised I’d been on autopilot, my hands hijacked by habit. And so, to wrest back control, I decided to rebel against myself: Instead of searching for what I wanted to watch, such as “cute baby donkey”, I searched for “terminal cancer patients.” And before I could concoct a reason not to click on the first result, I clicked.

The video featured a man called Ollie who’d just been told that he has three months to live. He broke down in tears as he mourned his future, where, like most of us, he’d stored the majority of his life.

From the comments, I discovered he was already dead. I wanted to remember him. The surprise and emotional impact of his video made him memorable enough, but to carve him deeper in my brain, I decided to learn his story. I watched his uploads in their default, reverse-chronological order, so that he gradually grew healthier and naiver, until he was just a bright-eyed hobbyist sharing his passion for his airsoft hobby, oblivious to his fate.

For the next few weeks, whenever I found myself on YouTube, I only allowed myself the company of terminal cancer patients. They often spoke of how abruptly they fell ill. They regretted how little they’d appreciated their time while they still had it. They lamented that the future they’d been sacrificing the present for had turned out to be a mirage.

Some videos were particularly memorable; Charlotte Eades, diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour at just 16, resolving to make the most of her remaining days. Daryl Leaf, in his hospital bed, showing us the urn his ashes would be kept in. Donna Mason trying to keep in good spirits mere hours before she was euthanised.

They’re all dead now. But their ghosts live forever online, eternally terminally ill. And, from my forced interest in them, they constantly haunt my video recommendations, so that, whenever I visit YouTube to procrastinate, they suddenly materialise to warn me: make the most of every moment, for the universe doesn’t owe you a tomorrow.

The key to maintaining a memorable life is to fill your feeds, and life, with these right-angle turns.

And it’s not just the warnings of the dead you should heed; it’s also the warnings of the unborn. Genetically, there are more people that could’ve been born instead of you than there are atoms in the known universe. And yet, you are one of the mere 8 billion of us that are here now. To be alive is to possess an unfathomably rare gift; treat your time in this world with the gratitude it deserves.

Seneca once wrote, “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.” Social media makes you do all three. But you have the choice to do the opposite, and to expand time, for living long is not just about maximising the days in your life, but also the life in your days.

This moment is the youngest you’ll ever be. It’s a moment your future-selves will wish they could have back. Don’t waste it scrolling through posts you won’t even remember tomorrow.

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In an age of alienation, how do we reconnect with others?

These were just two of the questions explored during a fascinating month-long letter exchange between me and one of my favourite Substackers, . Freya writes about the challenges facing young people in the digital age. Her work can be found at the Spectator, the New Statesman, Quillette, UnHerd, and her blog, GIRLS.

Below is the entirety of our 8-letter correspondence. For ease of following the discussion, Freya’s letters are in bold.

Freya: Gurwinder, you wrote an incredible essay for UnHerd about what you call the “pathologisation pandemic” — people confusing sadness for sickness, particularly young women. Some of my other favourite pieces of yours include TikTok is Time Bomb, and Why Everything is Becoming a Game.

I think a theme here is loss of agency. We rely on the medical industry to tell us what is healthy or unhealthy, depending on psychiatric labels and diagnoses to explain ourselves. We allow algorithms to deliver us our personalities and opinions. We depend on dating apps to find us the right matches, trusting online metrics and scores rather than our own judgement. As we have both written about, this seems to come from—or cause—an external locus of control, this feeling that outside forces dictate our lives. Even if people recognise their lack of agency now, their first instinct is probably to search for influencers or podcasts to tell them how to fix it. Whereas I tend to think most of the answers we need, the wisdom we are looking for, is inside us already. We know what we need to do, what right and wrong is, but we have silenced our instinct and intuition, muffled it with all this noise.

I think this is a defining paradox of my generation: we have this lack of agency, this feeling of powerlessness, but also an outward obsession with agency. Young women often emphasise how independent and empowered they are, how they don’t need anyone.…but the evidence suggests the opposite, almost as if it’s a front for how helpless and out of control we really feel.

I worry about this with AI. My main concern isn’t so much losing human creativity or everyone having AI girlfriends, but that someday we won’t trust ourselves at all. I see a future where young people won’t trust any instinct they have without checking with ChatGPT first. Where they will ask AI to solve relationship problems, to calculate who is right in an argument, to make decisions for them instead of going with their gut. I genuinely believe people are already doing this, outsourcing not only their ability to write or work, but to decide, to act. I’ve seen a few examples of this lately, like people using AI to flirt for them, message their dating app matches, or write birthday cards. We already had a dependency problem before AI—we couldn’t think for ourselves without searching online, without asking forums for advice, without sources and studies…but now it’s getting serious.

The reason I think this is because every time you ask an AI to double-check your text messages, to make sure your email sounds right, to help you flirt with someone, you lose a little more trust in yourself, in your own judgement. I mean, imagine a young woman asking her boyfriend every time she does something, before every email she sends, “Is this okay? Does this make sense?” Eventually someone would say, uh, you’re giving him too much power over you. Eventually she wouldn’t be able to do anything without him checking first, and granting permission. That would be a recipe for a very toxic relationship. And yet I worry that is exactly what we are doing with AI, training young people to never trust their own judgement, until they can’t act, can’t think, without its approval.

As you put it in a recent tweet: “Ironically, the more the world becomes automated, the more important self-reliance becomes. When every task can be mechanized except personal agency, success hinges on taking charge of your life and making good choices.”

So, somewhat ironically, I’m going to ask for your advice…or at least your take on this. If low agency is our central problem, how do we take charge of our life, as you say? How do we trust ourselves to make the right choices, and build self-reliance in an age of algorithms and AI?

Gurwinder: Freya, it’s an honour to have this conversation, as I’m a big fan of the order in which you hit keys on a keyboard. Like you, I’m concerned about the fate of human agency in the age of automation. To me, the greater danger of AI is not that machines will think for themselves, but that humans will cease to.

The age of automation doesn’t just endanger agency, it also makes it more important than ever. For most of human history, the limiting factor in what a person could accomplish was often their intelligence. But now that we can outsource intelligence to machines, the new bottleneck for most people will be how proactively they make use of all that external intelligence.

So our degree of agency will determine our “success” in the AI age. However, the success of the AI age could also determine our degree of agency…

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the invention of writing would cost us our memory and wisdom, because the ability to record knowledge on parchment would keep us from storing it in our heads. It may be true that writing has made us dependent on writing, but it also gave us the printing press, the internet, search engines, CTRL+F, and many other superpowers. So, overall, writing took a little of our agency, and gave us so much more.

The question is, will AI turn out the same way? Will the agency it gives outweigh the agency it takes?

I’d say it depends how much agency one already has, because agency typically can’t be given; it must be grown. Let’s take the example you give: of someone using ChatGPT to write flirtatious messages for them. A low-agency person would simply adopt the first pick-up line the chatbot generated. A high-agency person would give the chatbot multiple prompts and then carefully select the best pick-up line from among them, and in so doing, learn what works. So the low-agency person would use AI to eliminate choice, while the high-agency person would use AI to increase choice. The low-agency person would grow more dependent on the AI to think for them, while the high-agency person would use AI to help them think for themselves.

I therefore see AI as a personality amplifier; it will give more agency to those who already have it, and take more from those who already lack it.

I wonder what the long-term consequences will be of this Matthew effect. In H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, humanity in the far future has evolved into two subspecies, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Eloi live lives of automated bliss, completely dependent on the machinery maintained by the Morlocks, who tirelessly toil underground. Generations of labour have kept the Morlocks sharp and self-sufficient, while generations of idle leisure have atrophied the Eloi’s minds, so that they never care to realise that the Morlocks are farming them for meat.

Since both agency and its opposite will compound in the AI age, it’s wise for people to maximise their agency now, because, years or decades down the line, it could be the difference between being whoever you want to be, and becoming an Eloi.

So how do we maximise our agency? We must first consider why we give it away in the first place. The reason is phronemophobia: humans are naturally averse to thinking.

In 2014, researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia conducted experiments in which they left participants in a room with nothing to do except think or give themselves electric shocks. After just a few minutes, many participants began to give themselves the shocks. They preferred being zapped to thinking.

We’re configured to avoid thinking because cognition eats up a lot of time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources. As such, the brain is not so much a thinking machine as a machine that tries to circumvent thinking—it is calibrated to ration rationality. (This is why even the smartest people are dumb most of the time.)

The side-effect of this aversion to thinking is that people don’t want to be left alone with their thoughts. They’ll spend hours doomscrolling news of horrific tragedies rather than introspect. As Carl Jung wrote, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

The price of this avoidance is steep. Living as a fugitive from yourself makes you forget who you are and relinquish who you could be. Since you’re never listening to your own thoughts you fail to develop perspective, refine your beliefs, and make long-term plans. You cease to be proactive and your life becomes a series of reactions to your immediate environment.

Even worse, the less you think, the harder thinking becomes. All the screentime we engage in to escape our own heads stops us from developing a rich inner world, and with such barren imaginations we become even more dependent on external stimuli to keep us occupied.

So how do we make it easier for people to inhabit their own heads?

The simple answer is practice. To overcome the strain of thinking, do more thinking.

When the Industrial Revolution made it possible to live lives without physical exertion, going to the gym became necessary to stay fit. Equally, now that the AI Revolution has made it possible to live without mental exertion, we need the mental equivalent of gyms to stay sharp.

For me, the best brain-gym is writing—it forces you to shut out distractions and listen to your thoughts. A particularly useful form of writing is journaling, where you basically keep a diary in which you routinely interrogate yourself. What did you learn today? What did you regret? If you had ten times more agency, what would you do? If you did the same thing you did today every day, where will you be in ten years? (For those looking for an intro to journaling, I recommend my friend Elisabeth Andrews’ course.)

A habit of journaling helps you understand what you want (and don’t want), and it nurtures your imagination and acclimatises you to thinking for yourself. Daily journaling also acts as continual feedback by which you can evaluate whether you’re moving toward your goals. All of this brings order to the mind, so that, like a well-tended garden, it becomes a place we want to spend our time in rather than escaping at any opportunity.

So that’s my convoluted answer to your question. Write, even though machines can write for you, because the purpose of writing is not just to produce writing, but to distil your thoughts, refine your beliefs, and maintain your agency.

If Socrates had only spent more time with his pen and parchment, perhaps he would’ve realised that the thing he feared would cost us all our agency might ultimately be the thing that saves it.

Freya: That’s so true, what you say about writing as a way to maintain agency. Writing has always made me feel more in control of my life somehow, like I have more command over my thoughts, decisions, and what direction I’m going in. I think it helps you stay on track.

That is, of course, unless you start writing solely to please an audience.

Speaking of which, you seem to resist social media influence very well. I’ve been following you for years, and you are just as measured now as you always have been. You seem very intentional and, like me, you take your time with your essays. I see all these tips and tricks on how to grow a Substack now and I pretty much do none of them—the only thing I care about doing consistently is writing. Some people have told me I’m not doing enough—that I should publish more, react to breaking news, tweet every day, start a podcast. But to what end? More subscribers but less pride in my work? Host a podcast but constantly cringe because it’s not really me?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there seems to be an assumption now that if you don’t maximise engagement by every means necessary, you are slacking—rather than maybe deliberately resisting, doing this careful dance to avoid the abyss gazing back at you. People mistake being vague politically for cowardice, instead of trying to avoid becoming a parody of yourself. Or they assume you aren’t getting many opportunities, not realising you might be turning some down for the sake of your soul.

As you put it, “having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience”. You warn that “being someone often means being someone you’re not, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.” I completely agree. I think if you build an audience but you aren’t being authentic, there’s always some sort of debt hanging over you. Even if you get followers and fame, something has been traded for it. The more you achieve on the outside, the more ashamed you feel on the inside. Because, as Johnny Cash put it, “you’ve still got the devil to pay.”

Anyway I’m interested in audience capture not only from the perspective of public writers, but anyone, particularly girls and young women. You don’t have to be some influencer for it to happen to you. Girls are now shopping online for who to be, funnelled toward the same face, recommended not just products but personalities. Maybe something more like algorithm capture makes more sense here—adapting to who the algorithm “wants” us to become.

So how do you resist this, both as a writer and as someone online? You mention staying deliberately vague, but is there anything else you do in your personal life? And what made you recognise the need for resistance in the first place?

Gurwinder: Audience capture reminds us that humans are as much a threat to agency as AI is. But where automation risks replacing agency, audience capture risks hijacking it—redirecting it toward goals you don’t have, at the expense of goals you do.

With the advent of social media, people began adopting online personas that attracted followers who demanded more of the same, eventually trapping the person inside the persona. On Instagram, many developed a following by presenting cherry-picked snapshots to portray the idyllic life. They received so much adulation for their choreographed “life” that it began to define them. And in order to fulfil the accumulating expectations that came with this new identity, they were doomed to forever fake their days, putting more effort into portraying a good life than actually living one (you of course wrote a powerful piece about this).

I’ve thankfully never identified as living an idyllic life, but many people called me smart, and I was dumb enough to believe them, so I started to identify as a rational person. This identity fed on the online comments that praised my insights, as well as on getting the final word in debates. My rational persona offered me self-esteem, but it also made me insecure in that I found it hard to accept when I was wrong, because my identity now depended on me being right. And so I’d instinctively consider any disagreement as a personal attack, and, if ever I was shown to be wrong, instead of admitting I was wrong I’d move the goalposts so I could claim to be right again. Essentially, identifying as smart made me stupid. I see this in many intellectuals today.

So how did I escape the prison of my persona? As you mention, I chose to become vague, but only in a very specific way: I adopted an amorphous self-identity. That is, although I knew things about myself—what I wanted, feared, etc—I no longer regarded myself as being a certain type of person. When people called me smart, I was like, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. This freed me from any expectations, both external and self-imposed, and made my identity flexible enough to wriggle out of any trap.

But formlessness wasn’t enough. If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. So, while my self-identity was vague, I made sure my goals and principles were specific and concrete. The surer the path ahead, the better your resistance to being led astray.

The way to develop specific goals and principles is, again, introspection through journaling. Your desires crystallise a little more whenever you take time out from the digital distractions to assess your life and explore your own head. And when you have a clear purpose, you’re less liable to seek one from others.

I no longer identify as a rational person. I now identify as the universe trying to understand and experience itself as fully as it can. Not only is this literally true—I am, like you, a splinter of the universe awakened—but it helps keep my identity humble and vague, and my goals and principles (truth, happiness) specific. I’m now open to changing my mind, since I’m trying to understand rather than be right. And if I’m going to find truth and happiness, then I must defend them and all the other principles upon which they depend: courage, sympathy, security, and freedom. To be a seeker and defender of such things is the only identity I need.

Of course, society still pushes me to act against my nature. As you mention, there’s pressure for us writers to post frequently. It’s the best way to grow an audience and get rich on Substack. But it’s also the best way to lose your way. So, like you, I hold back.

Part of the reason I take so long to publish is that I’m currently focused on my book. But I’m also naturally a slow writer, because I don’t trust my impulses, so I create deliberate delays between stimulus and response in order to scrutinise my motivations and quality-control my intuitions.

A theme of my work is information overload, and I believe a big cause of this is that content creators feel compelled to rush out content for their subscribers. As soon as a big news event happens (which, in our hyper-connected world, is every few hours), writers race to post the first take, and such haste often leads them to careen into bullshit. It also makes them more susceptible to audience capture, since they receive more frequent feedback signals, and leave themselves less time to think about where they’re headed.

For this reason I disobey the social pressure to post quickly and regularly, and just post when I’m confident I’ve written something that will add value to my readers’ lives. I’ll gladly publish my take last if it means publishing works that will last. It may not make me as much money, but it does make me rich, because it frees me to be who I want to be rather than who I’m expected to be—and what, in the end, is wealth, if not freedom?

Freya: Wow, so well said. This made me think of something Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven, about the societal shift from people following their “calling” to “careerism”. People once felt morally and spiritually called to a particular task or vocation, often by God. But those “who wished simply to practice a craft” were overtaken by a “vicious kind of careerism”, those ruthlessly trying to get ahead and make it. “Raw ambition,” as Lasch put it, “counted more heavily, in the distribution of worldly rewards, than devoted service to a calling.”

This is certainly what we reward now. We praise people who say they are “ambitious” from an early age, even without specifying what they are ambitious about. Young people want to be “YouTubers” before they even have a particular skill or talent to be known for. They want to influence before they have anything to say. The ambition is simply to have an audience.

This makes me think back to when I was younger and I often felt a resistance to displaying myself online, but dismissed it as shyness or anxiety. I’ve always been embarrassed to post pictures, or pose on the street in public with friends — and I would punish myself for this, thinking, what’s wrong with you? Why is your heart pounding? But as I got older, I realised that maybe I should listen to that feeling, maybe it’s telling me something, maybe it’s not anxiety but something we used to call humility. I think we are encouraging young people to shove this down now — that’s just your low-self-esteem! Get over your shyness! Now the well-adjusted person never feels ashamed, and always wants an audience. I want to defend that instinct to resist.

Because I think some of the bravest people these days are those who hold back. People keep saying it’s brave to stand up and speak out, but I don’t know…I’m starting to think sometimes it’s braver to stay quiet, to watch, to contemplate, and speak only when you have something to say, only when you really mean it.

You mention that audience capture redirects us toward new goals “at the expense” of our original ones. This is a profound point. Often people end up becoming the opposite of what they intended. Conservatives ignore their families to post about the importance of family values. Instagram influencers make themselves miserable to appear happy all the time. (You could also say this about those lecturing about screen time and social media but always writing about it online…but let’s move on). The strangest part is when some people end up arranging their lives around things they hate—“anti-woke” commentators, for example, seem to spend more time thinking about wokeness than actual woke people do, enraging themselves every day. Eventually even their personal lives can get consumed by it, until marriage proposals and pregnancy announcements become weapons in the culture war.

When it comes to resisting audience capture, I agree with what you say about being vague. I also think one of the best ways to resist is by being in a long-term relationship, or staying close to family and friends—preferably people who knew you before you had a public profile. These relationships remind us who we really are, rather than who our audience wants us to be.

Which brings me to something else I’ve been noticing lately—this encouragement to push other people away. We pathologise not only ourselves but other people. Now our mothers must have undiagnosed ADHD, our dads don’t realise they are autistic, now everyone else is a narcissist. As you say, we have a medical industry motivated to convince people they are sick—but I would add we have a whole network of industries telling us other people are the problem, the causes of our sickness, the reasons for our symptoms.

And we can use this not just to blame people but cut them off, especially those we decide are “toxic”, “narcissistic”, or getting in the way of our growth. I see this not only in therapy culture, but self-optimisation culture—we can work harder, sleep better, and achieve more alone. I think this attitude has huge cultural consequences. Personally I’m not worried about falling marriage and birth rates because I think every young woman needs to live the same traditional life, but because I think some of our avoidance is cultural, and I think it’s a tragedy—an outrage, actually—to convince young people that human connection is an inconvenience, that other people are obstacles.

Admittedly I am a bit of hopeless romantic; I’ve always wanted a lifelong relationship, but I also think it’s very useful. We are often warned to avoid committing too young if we are ambitious—put yourself first, we are told, make it on your own, don’t get distracted. But among all these self-optimisation hacks, I feel like this is a missing one: a good relationship is a great life hack for becoming a better person. Being with someone from a young age can ground you while others are pulled toward self-obsession. It’s hard to be selfless without a reason, a person, to be selfless for. And you know, something will humble you some day—either it’s going to happen against your will, or you start practicing now. Like learning any other skill, it only gets harder later in life. So if you spend your 20s learning how to be in a relationship, how to love, care for someone, commit, compromise, sacrifice, and concentrate with others around, rather than trying to master all these things for the first time way into adulthood, you learn valuable lessons. You learn that life is not frictionless, how to depend on someone and be dependable, and how unreasonable it is to expect a life without distractions. And if you’re lucky, you have someone who keeps your ego in check, and reminds you who you are. So it’s not just romantic, but an actual competitive advantage.

I wonder what you make of all this. Do you see a cultural push to avoid relationships, and pathologise human connection? Why do you think this might be happening?

Gurwinder: You make an important point about the decline of real-world relationships in the West. Between 2003 and 2023, in-person social interaction among unmarried US men and people under 25 declined by over 35%. People of all ages are now making fewer friends, getting married less, and, according to various surveys, at least half of surveyed adults report feeling lonely. Further, as the world becomes increasingly automated, eliminating the need for human interaction, alienation seems like it’ll only get worse.

This matters because, as you point out, other people orient us. They’re like the world’s greatest journal. As you write in the Age of Abandonment, “Our identity, our meaning, our purpose, as humans, was always our ties and obligations to others, and now we are trying to do it all alone, trying to figure out who we are alone, and we’re nobody alone.”

So what’s the cause of this loneliness epidemic? Are people alienated because they’ve internalised a culture that pathologises human connection? Possibly. But I think there may be even more causality in the opposite direction; people are pathologising human connection because they feel alienated.

I agree with your essay, Risk-Aversion is Killing Romance, that, well, risk-aversion is killing romance. Or at least stopping it from being born. And I think you’re correct that one reason young people are more risk-averse to relationships is that so many of them are growing up with divorced parents. As you write: “In the UK, a third of Gen Z now see their parents split by the time they are 16. Try not being risk-averse when those are your templates for love.” Many young people seem so afraid of being hurt that they pack their hearts with mental bubble-wrap, which stops them from breaking, but also from beating. So it may be that their pathologisation of love stems in part from the normalisation of abandonment.

But I think there are other reasons, too. The young are not only averse to falling in love, they’re also averse to having sex, making friends, learning to drive, and working. They seem to be faced with a general lack of agency.

There’s that word again. And, ironically, one of the chief sources of agency is having a loved one who depends on us. It gives us a stake in life that’s greater than ourselves, motivating us to take initiative, work hard, and make good long-term decisions. So, again, causality may be going both ways; apathy creating alienation, and alienation creating apathy. When people have no one to be better for, they don’t try to be better, so don’t attract someone to be better for.

So what triggered this vicious circle? I share Lasch’s (and presumably your) view that we have a culture of narcissism, in which many people have replaced the worship of gods, nations, and families with worship of the self. But I believe culture rarely changes people’s lifestyles directly. Instead, what tends to happen is that economic and technological changes incentivise new lifestyles to emerge, and then culture changes to accommodate and justify these new lifestyles. In other words, most social mores are post-hoc rationalisations.

So I think the age of alienation wasn’t a result of a change in culture per se, but a change in incentives. For most of human history, there were things everyone needed to do in order to have even a shot at a fulfilling life: forming relationships, getting married, having kids, and, in the 20^th century, getting a job and learning to drive.

Thus, societies systematised certain rites of passage; you were expected to learn to drive in your teens, get married and have kids in your twenties, and then spend the rest of your adulthood raising a family. These milestones became the foundation of almost every life; if you didn’t do them, you couldn’t do much else. So there was always one clear path ahead, one route through life that was obviously superior to the alternatives.

Today, however, technology has saturated the world with new pleasures and purposes, and enabled countless new lifestyles. It’s even possible to live a completely occupied life without ever leaving one’s home. Forming relationships is no longer essential to survival, and it now has to contend with a thousand other activities, many of which have greater short-term appeal, and most of which don’t require anywhere near as much buy-in or risk.

So, not only have we become unmoored from the customs that once gave structure to our lives, but we’re now faced with overchoice: a bewildering array of options, many of them cheaper and easier than forming relationships. It seems to me, then, that the underlying reason for the increase in both apathy and alienation among the young is, frankly, that they have too much freedom.

Now don’t get me wrong; I value liberty immensely, and I appreciate that we’re blessed with a degree of choice that our ancestors could only have dreamed of. But the truth is that liberty is enantiodromic; too much of it leads to its opposite.

Modern liberal society is defined by its lack of constraints, but rather than make people feel free, it tends to make them feel lost. Without a system to guide us through the labyrinth of dizzying possibilities, we resort to our evolutionary programming, mimicking our peers or following animal impulses that lead us into neurological traps like addictions to porn and news, or indoctrinations into cults and ideologies, or obsessions with status and money.

In today’s world it’s possible to have a wide range of choices, but for most of those choices to be a trap. Therefore, the freest people are not those with the most choices, but those with the best ones. And the only way to have the best choices is to live a life of structure and discipline, taking the hard path over the easy, favouring the long term over the short. Paradoxically, we must restrain ourselves to be free.

William Blake once wrote, “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man's.” The modern world is filled with systems created to enslave us, and the only defence—a system of our own—is hard to formulate amid all the noise.

And when you don’t have a system to organise your life around, your principles tend to just become flexible post-hoc rationalisations for your whims. As the Arabian caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab wrote, “He who does not live in the way of his beliefs starts to believe in the way he lives.”

This, I believe, is one of the chief dilemmas of the young. With a dazzling array of options to choose from, and without a system to guide their choice-making, they have no good heuristics by which to forge a path through life, so instead of making long-term decisions, they rely on their impulses, and then seek to rationalise their impulses with philosophies like safetyism and the pathologisation of whatever is too much work.

I’m curious to know what you think. Do you see social connection as salvageable? Do you believe the young could benefit from a system of some kind, in order to make them feel more connected to each other and to themselves? If so, what kind of system would it be?

Freya: “The pathologisation of whatever is too much work” is a very interesting way of putting it. I also see a lot of ideological objections to things that I think are often, deep down, just hard to handle emotionally. For example, I’m not persuaded when I hear young women saying they object to marriage because it’s a heteronormative patriarchal arrangement or something. I think it’s often more like fear that it will never work out.

I agree with your central point about freedom too. There is so much talk about how good this generation has it, and it definitely looks that way — but we forget that too much freedom can be unbearable. It’s very hard for humans to handle. And maybe our culture of narcissism is a defence mechanism. As Lasch saw it, things feel so insecure now that we go inwards, minimise our worlds down to only ourselves, and get very defensive. As he writes: “Faced with an escalating arms race, an increase in crime and terrorism, environmental deterioration, and the prospect of long-term economic decline, (people) have begun to prepare for the worst, sometimes by building fallout shelters and laying in provisions, more commonly by executing a kind of emotional retreat from the long-term commitments that presuppose a stable, secure, and orderly world”.

I see so many young women feeling very anxious about this excess of freedom —partners they can't trust, their families breaking down, and so on— but at the same time they are terrified of being restricted, really defensive if you suggest it. As you say, we are incentivised to act this way. When commitment feels impossible, when technology facilitates things like unrestricted access to porn and infinite options on dating apps, there are incentives to be emotionally detached. Maybe the strong independent woman ideal is just a response to a world where human connection is getting riskier. Maybe self-obsession is our only defence.

In terms of a “system”, the first thing that came to my mind is my neighbour. I live near a vicar and her husband, and they have an “open house” that I’m at pretty much every week. I’m not the most social person, but this is different from anything I’ve ever experienced. Every Sunday, anyone is invited for lunch, and you never know who you are going to meet. Everyone says grace and shares a meal, and every possible season and event is celebrated with music and fireworks. Nobody is networking, nobody is trying to impress each other. It feels like a crime to get your phone out.

I was speaking with her the other day about how much I admired what she has built, and she told me how it all began. How her and her husband started inviting people over to their first tiny house, starting with anyone who was alone on Valentine’s Day. They had no dining table and a cramped living room, so they ate dinner on lap trays. And I realised that’s what it takes. Hosting, even when your house isn’t perfect. Showing up, even if you feel tired and not in the mood. Making dinner for friends, even if it’s microwaved and on plastic plates. Even now it can be chaos at her house, but in the most beautiful way. Not enough glasses, not enough chairs, guests showing up at random times. But I have honestly never seen more well-adjusted young people than the ones coming in and out of her home. They are always smiling, laughing, biking, swimming, playing instruments, lost in conversation. And always giving back too—you can’t help but want to wash up, lay out the cutlery, make her life a little easier.

So I suppose what I’m describing is a system centred around community. And I think the intergenerational part is important too. Young people are often accused of having no respect for the past now, but it’s hard to have if you don’t spend much time around anyone older. When I go to my neighbour’s, I see a home and community she laid the groundwork for years ago, carefully built up over time.

This helps orient me. I respect her so much—her marriage, her home, her love for life—that I want to follow her example. So I listen to her life story, I look at what sacrifices she made, I pay attention to what restrictions and responsibilities she willingly took on, I notice what she had to say no to, and I’m trying to do the same. It’s very simple. But I think that’s what young people are missing: real life examples to emulate. Not going on Reddit forums to ask random people advice, or listening to TikTok influencers telling us what type of relationship we should want, but going out into the world and waiting to see that one beautiful life or one beautiful relationship that makes us stop in our tracks. And not stop because we want to afford that thing or live in the same house, but stop as in…I want to be that type of person, I want to earn that type of respect, I want to leave that kind of legacy.

And of course the opposite can happen as well. Sometimes you see people orienting their lives around fame, money, content…and you can see it hollowing them out, that debt hanging over them. But when you meet someone whose life is organised around something good and honest, it’s more motivating than any self-help podcast or therapy session or TikTok advice could ever be.

So young people need systems where we can belong to something bigger, forget about ourselves for a while, and be exposed to better examples. But I believe we have to start that system. We can’t wait around for community to come to us. We can create communities ourselves, little by little. We just have to start hosting with lap trays. We have to invite friends over even when it feels inconvenient. We have to welcome people into our homes even when we haven’t had time to tidy. We have to help wash up. And this can spiral into something that connects and inspires so many others. So yes, I think social connection is salvageable, but again, we need to have more agency. And maybe that starts by opening our doors, and taking down some of our defences.

Gurwinder: I love this idea. But I do wonder, if a big reason people are not forming relationships is misaligned incentives, are there ways society could re-incentivise people to leave their homes and meet each other?

I guess the obvious way is to promote the benefits of social interaction (like your earlier point about relationships being adaptive). For instance, many long-term studies, including the 50 year Roseto study and the 85 year Harvard Study of Adult Development, found that having close-knit relationships is as important for longevity as diet, sleep, and exercise. Research has also found that people tend to underestimate how much they’d enjoy social interaction, and how much others enjoy their company. And then there is Solomon’s paradox; the finding that we’re better at solving other people’s problems than our own, because detachment yields objectivity.

Just as raising awareness of the benefits of exercise encouraged people to go to gym, raising awareness of the benefits of social interaction may encourage people to host lap-tray dinners.

There’s also a less obvious, but more direct, way to encourage social interaction. Experiments in the business world found that the success of a typical business is tied to the number of face-to-face interactions between its employees, so the tech giants began redesigning their workspaces to maximise social interactions.

Facebook’s and Apple’s headquarters are ringed with huge walking loops festooned with digital art, exotic flowers, and seating areas in the middle of nowhere. Google’s Mountain View campus is filled with spaces to play impromptu games of Frisbee and volleyball, while Samsung’s HQ holds Tai Chi classes in a cactus garden. They’ve made subtler changes, too, such as reducing the number of coffee machines to increase the chances of people meeting at a coffee machine.

I wonder if something similar could be done with cities. There are already urban planning philosophies like fifteen-minute cities, which seek to redesign neighbourhoods so that most amenities are in walking distance. Not only is walking better for health than driving, but it’s also more conducive to social interaction. Imagine if everyone had a nearby park to walk through, with scenic spots where people could gather to admire the beauty. Or a Speakers’ Corner in everyone’s vicinity, so that a lively public discussion was only ever a stone’s throw away.

Currently there isn’t much public appetite for grand urban redesigns (especially given the conspiracy theories around fifteen-minute cities), but perhaps that will change when social alienation has gotten sufficiently bad.

Earlier I referenced enantiodromia—the transformation of things into their opposites. This often happens because of the region-beta paradox—the tendency for humans to only improve their situation when things get sufficiently bad. It may take pigeons shitting on your car for you to finally wash it. Equally, we may need a critical mass of people to feel sufficiently isolated before there is any public appetite to change the way we live. The incentives must change before the culture changes.

I do believe the night has yet to become darker before the dawn. Something I’ve noticed about humans is that they tend to value each other in proportion to how rare other people are. They’re unfriendliest in the most densely populated areas, like in the centres of big cities (and on social media). And they’re friendliest in the least populated areas, like in remote rural communities.

If birth rates continue to decline, and if automation continues to reduce opportunities for social interaction, then other people will become rarer in our lives, which would likely lead most of us to appreciate people more. So, perhaps it will only be by replacing enough humans with machines that we’ll finally discover the true value of a human.

At the same time, we must also reckon with how machinelike we can be. In many ways, humans are highly predictable (which is why AI is so good at impersonating us). And one of the most predictable things about humans is that they tend to imitate each other. When Sylvan Goldman invented shopping carts in 1937, most shoppers initially viewed them with a mixture of confusion and ridicule, and refused to use them, so Goldman paid actors to use carts in his stores, and everyone else soon followed.

Getting people to socially interact could be much like getting them to use shopping carts, except we don’t need to pay actors to pretend to socially interact. We can just do it for real. Friendliness is contagious, and if we make an effort to get to know others, then they likely will too.

So I fully agree with you that the best way to get people to reconnect is to reconnect. And to that end, I’m grateful that you reached out to me with your letter, because you’ve inspired me to write to others, and hopefully that’ll inspire them to do the same. Thank you for showing agency in initiating a wonderful conversation, and for doing your small part to make the world a more connected place.

Freya: I’ve loved talking with you, Gurwinder. Despite everything we’ve said about screens and online interaction, this conversation has made me feel less alone. So thank you.

Subscribe to Freya’s Substack here:

GIRLS

Girlhood in the Modern World

By Freya India

Concision is the goal here, so my descriptions will only give you a summary of each idea. If you want to know more, click on the titles.

1. Negative Partisanship:

Many people’s political views revolve not around what they support, but what they oppose. They’re always fighting against something rather than for something, and the constant focus on what they hate makes them nasty and miserable.

2. Enshittification:

Online services start out serving users. When they have enough users, they switch to serving advertisers/shareholders, at the expense of users. For instance, Google Search initially showed you what you searched for, but now largely shows you what it wants you to see.

3. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty:

The easier an academic field, the more it will try to preserve its difficulty by using complex jargon. Physicists use simple terms if possible, while postmodern theorists try to complexify their discipline by writing like this:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

— Judith Butler, Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time (1997)

4. Reminiscence Bump:

Americans of all ages tend to believe America peaked – morally, politically, economically, artistically – whenever they were a kid. Perhaps people who yearn for the time when their country was great are mostly just yearning for their childhood.

5. Region-Beta Paradox:

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.

6. Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle:

Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others.

“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone . . . To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

― Aldous Huxley, introduction to Samuel Butler's Erewhon

7. Protege Effect:

The best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. The sense of responsibility to your student motivates you to understand a topic, and the act of explaining something helps you to connect the dots and commit them to memory.

8. Baumol’s Cost Disease:

As an industry’s productivity increases, wages in that industry naturally rise. This forces wages—and prices—in services without increased productivity to also rise to stay competitive. Thus, as a country gets richer, goods become cheaper, but labor-intensive services like healthcare & college tuition cost more.

9. Stockdale Paradox:

The optimal state of mind is neither optimism, which leaves you unprepared for adversity, nor pessimism, which destroys motivation, but optimistic pessimism: by preparing for the worst outcomes, you increase confidence in dealing with any outcome, and thus, you increase hope.

10. Ichi-go ichi-e:

Every moment is unique and unrepeatable, so appreciate every experience as if it’s your last (which, in a way, it is). Even if your current situation sucks, be gracious that, of all the humans that will ever exist, only you will have the privilege of experiencing this moment in this specific way.

11. Explanatory Inversion:

Questions rest on unexamined assumptions, so always try flipping them. For instance, don’t just ask why there is poverty, ask why there is prosperity. This helps you realize poverty is the norm and the lack of it is the thing that needs to be explained.

12. Event Bias:

One reason negativity dominates the news is that bad news tends to happen suddenly while good news tends to happen gradually so is rarely newsworthy on any particular day. But even though it may not get as much attention, good news is always happening.

13. Pie Fallacy:

Many believe wealth is zero-sum; that if someone gets richer, someone else must get poorer. But wealth creation is one of society’s few positive-sum games; if you fix up a battered old car, you increase its value, making yourself richer without making anyone else poorer.

14. Golden Law of Stupidity:

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to others while themselves deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

15. Goal Dilution Effect:

We assume that the more arguments we give, the better our case. In reality, our weakest arguments dilute the strongest. Generally, you’ll only be as convincing as your worst point, so instead of making as many arguments as you can, make only the best.

16. Bias Blindspot:

We see bias easily in others, but not in ourselves. Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, people reply to tell me how it explains their opponents’ beliefs, but never their own. The assumption that bias is just something that affects those we disagree with is our greatest source of bias.

17. Blue Dot Effect:

The more we solve our problems, the more we widen the definition of “problem” so that our number of problems remains constant. So don’t expect a life without problems. Progress doesn’t mean reducing your quantity of struggles, but increasing their quality. The goal of life is to trade bad problems for better ones.

18. Overview Effect:

Although astronauts are chosen for their unflappability, when they see the earth from space — a tiny marble in an infinite void — they’re often overcome with a sense of profound connection with all humanity, and everyone’s earthly squabbles suddenly seem trivial. When something is bothering you, zoom out to see if it really matters.

“[O]n that fragile little sphere … all I had ever known, all I had ever loved and hated, longed for, all that I once thought had ever been and ever would be.”

— Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

19. Rumsfeld Matrix:

There are things you know you know, things you don’t know you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don't know. The last group is the biggest pitfall. Always try to account for what you don’t know you don’t know.

20. Sheepskin Effect:

Employers value qualifications more than education. This is because the purpose of the education system is not actually to educate people, but to sort the “wheat” (worker bees) from the “chaff” (slackers, dreamers). It’s why students are taught things they’ll never use — what they learn isn’t as important as demonstrating they can follow instructions and complete what they started, which a qualification signifies.

21. Ozemponomics

GLP-1s like Ozempic are threatening limbic capitalism by reducing cravings. For instance, the average household with 1+ family members on a GLP-1 is spending ~10% less on chips & cakes. If this can reduce addictions and obesity, it will likely also reduce healthcare costs and unemployment.

22. Deviancy Amplification:

An outrageous act or event gets the public’s attention, prompting reporters to look for new examples. Cases that previously wouldn’t have been considered newsworthy are reported just because they fit the trend, creating the impression of an epidemic of such events. A recent example is mystery drone sightings.

23. Left-Brain Interpreter:

Experiments on split-brain patients show that when the experimenters instruct the patient's right-side of the brain to perform an action (e.g. open the window), the patient will do it, and then the left-side of their brain, which was unaware of the instruction, will convince the patient they chose to do it unbidden (e.g. “because I felt hot”).

Our reasons are stories we tell ourselves.

24. Barrow's First Law (aka Barrow’s Uncertainty Principle):

“Any universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind able to understand it.” So don’t worry if you don’t know why you’re here, or where you’ll eventually go. Just focus on living. The purpose of life is to find purpose in life.

25. Sphexishness:

Army ants follow each other’s pheromone trails to know where to go. Sometimes, they accidentally form a loop, or “ant mill”, circularly following each other until they die of exhaustion:

Sphexishness is when you blindly follow a rule without checking if the rule works in the present situation. Don’t use the concepts in this list sphexishly. They’ve been presented here to make you think, not as rigid rules to follow in all circumstances.

That’s all for now. For more lists of useful concepts, check out this, and this, and this, and this, and this.

Thanks for reading, and happy new year.

G.

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For days after the revelation, my phone buzzed incessantly from journalists asking me for comment. I found it hard to say anything coherent, because my mind was a storm, constantly replaying memories of my interactions with the suspect, trying to find meaning in even our most banal exchanges.

In the days since, I’ve developed some detachment from the situation, and now feel clear-headed enough to offer my full opinion. So here it is.

Luigi first reached out to me via email on April 6^th. He said he was a longtime fan of my work, and had just purchased a $200 founding membership to this blog, which entitled him to a two-hour video-call with me. A month later, on May 5^th, we had our chat.

He was warm and gregarious from the outset, praising my writing and telling me how excited he was to speak with me. He said he was on holiday in Japan, which prompted me to ask him about it. He replied that while he loved many aspects of Japanese culture, such as its sense of honor, he believed Japan was full of “NPCs” (people who don’t think for themselves). He then told me a story he’d first mentioned in an email: one morning he saw a man having a seizure in the street, so he ran to the nearest police station for help. They followed him back to the man, but refused to cross any street if the stoplight was red — even if the road was empty — as the man was seizing on the ground. Luigi lamented what he called “a lack of free-will” in Japan, by which he meant a lack of agency.

I quickly realized that agency was a major concern of Luigi’s. He said three articles of mine had particularly resonated with him — The Intellectual Obesity Crisis, Why You Are Probably An NPC, and Why Everything is Becoming a Game — all of which describe threats to human autonomy.

Luigi went on to explain why he felt Japan was the future dystopia I’d warned about in some of my writings. He spoke of the hikikomori, Japanese men who lived their lives alone in their bedrooms, sedating themselves with video games, porn, and other shallow entertainments. For Luigi, such people had lost control over their lives, becoming mindless slaves to stimuli much like the cops who stopped at red lights even when it made no sense.

But it wasn’t just Japan. Luigi believed people everywhere were becoming NPCs, increasingly living their lives as a series of reflex reactions rather than consciously choosing their behaviors. Japan was just the canary in the coalmine; the West was following close behind, driven by tech companies intent on mesmerizing us into servile consumers. Luigi feared that once we’d surrendered our agency, we’d surrender everything else.

Unlike most people who decry others as NPCs, Luigi showed enough awareness to identify that he, too, lived much of his life on autopilot, confessing that he sometimes wasted whole afternoons doomscrolling social media. He said he wanted to regain some of the agency he felt he’d lost to online distractions, so we spent much of the chat discussing ways he could become more agentic.

I told him about my favorite philosophy, Stoicism, and how it could teach him to ignore distractions and focus his mind on living more deliberately. Luigi listened intently, and showed much curiosity, gently stopping me to ask me to explain terms he didn’t know.

I also suggested to Luigi that he should avoid automating the tasks he wanted to improve at, and should instead seek to make these tasks fun, by turning them into games. This led us to discuss my essay about gamification, Why Everything is Becoming a Game.

Luigi had much to say about this essay, not least because it involves the story of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who shared Luigi’s belief that modern life is taking away people’s agency. Kaczynski was a terrorist whose bombs killed and maimed innocent people, and I made it clear that, while I agreed with some of what he’d written in his manifesto, I found his actions abhorrent. Luigi agreed, saying something like “he deserved to be taken seriously, but he also deserved to be in jail.”

Besides Kaczynski, Luigi’s intellectual tastes were relatively normal. Writers he spoke fondly of included Tim Urban, Sam Harris, Yuval Noah Harari, Jonathan Haidt, and Aldous Huxley. His political views were less conventional; when I asked him if he was voting in the presidential election, he scrunched his nose and said he wasn’t crazy about Trump or Biden, but liked some of the things RFK Jr. was saying.

Somehow, from there we ended up talking about intergenerational trauma, and it was here that we had our only significant disagreement. Luigi implied that he believed trauma could be directly inherited, and that it accumulated in families much like generational wealth. He claimed to have based this view partly on his own personal experiences (I can’t elaborate). It sounded to me like he was describing a pseudoscientific misinterpretation of epigenetics, popularized by activist-academics and books like The Body Keeps the Score.

The idea that trauma is passed down epigenetically is not only unscientific, it’s also un-agentic; if you believe your trauma is hardwired into you, you’re prone to passively accept it rather than actively trying to overcome it. And so, in a bid to increase Luigi’s agency, I pointed out why I thought he was wrong.

After we exchanged pleasantries and ended our chat, I sent Luigi an article debunking epigenetic trauma. Luigi replied shortly after, thanking me for the article, and clarifying his beliefs. He also told me he’d bought me a six-month subscription to the app, Readwise Reader, because he knew my job required extensive research, and believed the app would help.

Now, I have Asperger’s, so I’m a poor judge of social cues. Further, I’ve liked every subscriber I’ve had a video-call with (and I’ve had many), so I’m probably not very discerning in that regard. But to me Luigi seemed like a particularly nice guy: polite, thoughtful, curious, and kind.

It wasn’t just that he’d bought me a subscription to an app he thought might help me. It was also that he showed this same desire to help people he didn’t know, frequently expressing concerns about humanity, and wishing to find ways to improve everyone’s lives. He viewed most people as NPCs who needed to be awakened, but he never came off as arrogant, regarding himself as equally zombielike in many of his thoughts and behaviors. His view of society was somewhat pessimistic, but he tempered it with a sense of humor and a focus on finding solutions rather than merely complaining. And although he seemed to have some unscientific views, he was always open to other viewpoints, and was willing to update his beliefs if corrected.

We interacted on social media several times afterward, and each time he seemed as polite and thoughtful as he’d been in our chat. As the summer ended, I largely withdrew from social media to focus on my book, so I didn’t notice Luigi had vanished.

And then, a few months later, Brian Thompson was shot dead.

Many people celebrated the murder. Some were frustrated that health insurance cost so much, and some were outraged that they or a loved one had been denied medical claims. For this they blamed Thompson, the CEO of the US’s largest health insurance company.

Naturally, the slick young man identified as Thompson’s killer was soon being venerated as a hero and fashion icon. Memes glorifying him spread across social media. Prayer candles featuring his likeness were sold. The jacket he’d worn spiked in sales. And hundreds of thousands of dollars were donated for his defense.

As for me, I was sickened. Vigilantism is always wrong. If you celebrate someone gunning down a defenceless person in the street, then you advocate for a world in which this is an acceptable thing for anyone to do. You in fact advocate for a world in which a stranger can decide that you’re also a bad person, and gun you down in the street. In such a world, I promise you, your health insurance would cost much more.

The murder would’ve been shocking even if I didn’t know the murderer. But when the suspect was identified as the same Luigi Mangione I’d had a deep discussion with, everything became surreal. My mind raced back to our chat, searching for clues he could’ve done this. The only thing that stuck out was when he mentioned healthcare in the US was expensive, and said we Britons were lucky to have a National Health Service. But even this statement, by itself, gave no indication Luigi was capable of what he was being accused of.

When someone is found to have committed murder, friends and relatives will usually say things like “I can’t believe it, he seemed like such a nice guy.” I instinctively said the same about Luigi. But as the shock faded and my wits returned, I ceased to be surprised. I’ve long known that people who are capable of great kindness also tend to be capable of great cruelty, because both extremes are often animated by the same crazed impulsivity. It’s why many of those celebrating the murder identify as “compassionate” leftists. And it’s why history’s greatest evils were often committed by people who sought to do good.

Much more puzzling than the cruelty was the stupidity. Luigi had seemed intelligent, far too intelligent to do something so dumb. Sure, smart people are better able to rationalize stupid actions and beliefs, but Luigi’s alleged rationalization, given in a 262-word “minifesto,” was nowhere near the intellectual standard I would’ve expected of him.

The data blogger Recueil dismantles the minifesto line by line, but, to give an example, it claims “the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” ignoring the fact that the US’s healthcare costs are broadly in line with its income level, and its life expectancy has little to do with healthcare and much more to do with Americans being disproportionately obese, violent, and drug-addicted. Further, the minifesto makes basic factual errors, like confusing market cap with revenue. The writer even admits they don’t know what they’re talking about: “Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.”

Not only was the justification for the targeting of Brian Thompson stupid, but the targeting itself was stupid. While it’s true that UnitedHealthcare has the highest denial rate for medical claims, the CEO doesn’t set the rate — that’s done by the actuaries, who themselves are constrained by various considerations, such as the need to keep costs low, including for policyholders. But even if Thompson did have carte blanche to set his company’s approval rates, it wouldn’t have made a big difference.

Health insurance companies don’t get rich by denying payouts for claims. As the economics blogger points out, UnitedHealthcare’s net profit margin is just 6.11%, which is only about half of the average profit margin of companies in the S&P 500. If UnitedHealth Group decided to donate every single dollar of its profit to buying Americans more healthcare, it would only be able to pay for about 9.3% more healthcare than it’s already paying for.

Healthcare costs in the US are higher than they could and should be, but this can’t be blamed on insurance companies either. According to the Harvard economist David Cutler, even if the United States eliminated all profits on health insurance and cut every pharmaceutical price in half, the gap between US medical spending and that of other rich countries would fall by less than a quarter.

The ultimate point here is that Brian Thompson was not the problem. He was a normal, flawed, guy trying to keep costs low both for his company and his policyholders, while keeping his fiduciary duty to shareholders, whose investment his company depended on. He was a tiny cog in a vast and unfair system that’s controlled by no single person but by the cumulative actions of millions of people operating in their own immediate interests. Kaczynski called such decentralized problems “self-propagating systems,” recognizing that they weren’t the result of human coordination, but rather, a lack of it.

If Kaczynski’s bombs and 35,000-word manifesto couldn’t destroy such a system, then a 3D-printed pistol and shoddy 262-word minifesto certainly won’t. You can’t kill your way out of a problem that’s ultimately no one’s fault.

Still, people allocate agency strategically, to assign praise to allies and blame to enemies. Luigi’s supporters misattribute total agency to Thompson so they can scapegoat him for a societal problem he had little control over. Meanwhile, they deny all agency to Luigi, claiming he was pushed to do what he did by a corrupt system or simple back pain.

But, while they’re wrong about Thompson, they may have a point about Luigi. If he was in extreme pain, or in the grip of mental illness, it would explain why a man who was consistently thoughtful in his interactions with me committed a monumentally thoughtless act, rationalized by an equally thoughtless note.

On the other hand, if Luigi was mentally or physically unwell, it’s unlikely he’d have been able to forge documents, acquire a 3D-printed ghost-gun, plan and carry out a meticulous assassination, and then evade authorities for almost a week while travelling across states in one of the most surveilled regions on earth.

In my limited interactions with Luigi, I never got the impression he had spinal or mental issues. But I did get the sense he felt alienated. He often decried the lack of social connection in the modern world, and on a couple of occasions he lamented that the people around him were “on a different wavelength” to him.

On June 10^th, I received my last communication from Luigi. It was a seemingly innocent request; he wanted me to help him curate his social media feed. I’d already given him tips on how to do that, so the question struck me as odd. I directed him to a relevant article I’d written and offered to answer any questions he had about it. I never heard from him again.

In retrospect, I wonder if his request was an awkward cry for help, as a New York Times journalist told me it was his last known online communication. It’s hard not to wonder if, had I answered his call, things might have turned out differently.

I don’t know if Luigi ever found the agency he came to me looking for. If he didn’t, I hope he gets the help he needs. But if he did find his agency, well, the price of agency is culpability.

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Now, decades later, interest in the case has surged again. In September, a Netflix show based on the murders became the most watched show on the platform, and the Menendez brothers’ wiki page became the most viewed entry on Wikipedia. Over 400,000 people – mostly women – have now signed a petition to free the brothers, arguing they’re victims whose claims of sexual abuse were not taken seriously in the 1990s. Their demands have been echoed by high profile figures like George Gascón, who, as District Attorney of Los Angeles County, recommended Lyle and Erik be resentenced and released. Next month, the brothers will attend a hearing that could finally see them freed.

The problem is, the brothers are not actually victims. They’re liars and murderers. And the only reason they now have widespread support is that culture and technology have turned empathy into an emotionally transmitted disease that debilitates thought. Put simply, stupidity has gone viral.

The facts of the case are well-established: the brothers initially blamed the murders on the mob, but Erik later confessed to his therapist, Dr. Jerome Oziel, that he and Lyle were responsible. Erik claimed they killed their father, José, because he was domineering, and their mother, Kitty, because she was hopelessly depressed. Neither Lyle nor Erik mentioned sexual abuse to Oziel. Nor did they mention it to their first lawyers, Gerard Chaleff and Robert Shapiro. Their abuse claims only emerged after they met Erik’s second lawyer, Leslie Abramson, several months later.

Abramson had recently helped 17 year-old Arnel Salvatierra avoid a murder conviction for killing his father. She’d done this with a new kind of legal defense; portraying Salvatierra as a victim of abuse by his father. Evidently, she believed this approach could also work for Lyle and Erik.

However, to clear the brothers of murder, it wasn’t enough to make the case they’d been sexually abused, because murder committed in revenge for abuse is still murder. Abramson also had to show the brothers believed they were in imminent danger from their parents, and were acting in self-defense. But this claim was disproven by the clear evidence of premeditation – Lyle and Erik forged the paperwork to purchase two shotguns before the shootings – and the fact that, after their first volley of gunfire, while their mother was writhing in her own blood, the brothers left the home so Lyle could reload before returning to finish her off.

Nevertheless, Abramson, together with Lyle’s lawyer Jill Lansing, decided to build a self-defense case, arguing the brothers had acted after confronting their parents about the sexual abuse, causing their father to threaten them, which in turn caused Lyle and Erik, traumatized by decades of abuse, to panic. This was a tough strategy because not only was there no good evidence the brothers had been in imminent danger, there was also no good evidence they’d been sexually abused.

The abuse claims rested on questionable items like a doctor’s report of an unexplained throat injury Erik got aged 7, declared by expert witnesses as possibly caused by oral rape. Other evidence included an envelope in Kitty’s possession that contained two nude photos of Erik and Lyle as boys. However, the angles of the photos suggest they could’ve been selfies.

There was much better evidence the brothers were greedy. Days after the murders, they embarked on an extravagant spending spree, buying Rolexes, Porsches, and even a buffalo wings business. Further, Erik told Oziel he’d feared his father would disinherit him, and Lyle hired a computer expert to delete what was likely his father’s recently updated will, preserving the original 1981 will, which left everything to Lyle and Erik.

The brothers had already shown they were willing to commit crimes for money. A year before the murders, they were caught committing a string of burglaries in their Calabasas neighborhood, stealing around $100,000 in goods.

Given that Lyle and Erik didn’t have the facts on their side, their lawyers had to get creative. Abramson and Lansing tried to portray the brothers as sweet and naïve kids. They dressed them in boyish clothes like school-style sweaters. Lansing kept referring to them in court as “the children”, and Abramson would often maternally place her arm round Erik, and pick lint off his sweater. Her behavior was so conspicuous the judge reprimanded her for it.

But the lawyers’ infantilization of their clients wasn’t just restricted to gestures. To sell the brothers as abuse victims who feared for their lives, Abramson and Lansing turned to the wealth of abuse-related pseudoscience in the field of psychology. For instance, they used a vague checklist of sexual abuse symptoms developed by therapist E. Sue Blume, an advocate of the pseudoscientific idea of repressed memories, which in the eighties and nineties led to many people being jailed for sexual abuse they didn’t commit. Abramson and Lansing also received diagnostic advice from Paul Mones, a lawyer with no clinical training. Eight of the things the brothers claimed their father had done to them, such as poking them with pencils during rape, are mentioned in case studies in Mones’ book, When a Child Kills.

The brothers’ aunt Terry Baralt apparently told the journalist Dominick Dunne that Lyle and Erik had read Mones’ book in jail. This was corroborated by a prisoner who shared a cellblock with Lyle for over two years, and told the prosecutors Lyle had read every book he could find on child molestation. It’s therefore likely the brothers had the knowledge to fool psychiatrists into diagnosing them as abuse victims.

Some of Lyle and Erik’s friends and family also came forward to testify for them. The strongest testimony came from the brothers’ cousin Diane Vandermolen, who claimed Lyle told her when he was 8 that he was being abused. But the credibility of her testimony became suspect when it transpired Lyle had repeatedly tried to get friends to lie for him.

Ultimately, the jury was unable to reach a verdict in either Lyle’s and Erik’s cases, so a new trial was held in which both brothers were tried together. Since Abramson and Lansing had failed in the first trial to show that the brothers’ supposed sexual abuse gave them a valid self-defense argument, testimony regarding the abuse allegations was limited by the judge in the second trial. Under these conditions, the jury at the second trial reached a unanimous decision that Lyle and Erik were guilty of murder, and the brothers were jailed for life with no possibility of parole.

In other words, justice – according to contemporary California law – was done. The brothers received the sentence they were due, because even if they had been sexually abused (which they likely were not), they had no case for self-defense. They planned their parents’ murder, killed them while they were watching TV, and then celebrated by lavishly spending their money.

And yet, decades later, millions of people are now treating the brothers as victims.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. In 2015, the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer deceived millions of people that the rapist and killer Steven Avery was an innocent victim of corrupt police. A petition to release Avery was signed by over half a million people – again, mostly women – despite the significant evidence against him.

So why are people, and particularly women, so easily convinced that cold-blooded killers are victims? It can’t simply be a lack of intelligence; while support for the Menendez brothers is currently being led by celebrities not famous for their IQs, such as Kim Kardashian and Rosie O’Donnell, equally gullible campaigns for murderers have in the past been led by respected intellectuals.

In 1977, the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Norman Mailer was awestruck by the writing ability of the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, and, convinced he was reformed, called for his release. The wish was granted, and Abbott used his newfound freedom to stab a waiter to death.

A few years later, Nobel Prize-winning novelists Günter Grass and Elfriede Jelinek, touched by the writings of rapist and murderer Jack Unterweger, petitioned for his freedom, and when he was released he celebrated by raping and murdering nine more women.

The award-winning authors who misplaced their trust in murderers may have been deluded, but they can’t be accused of being particularly stupid. Instead, their delusions were born of a more surprising weakness: empathy, or the tendency to try to feel what others feel.

It was after reading the eloquent words of Abbott and Unterweger, and walking in their supposed shoes, that the novelists began to push for their freedom. And it was after being transported into the apparent shoes of Steven Avery via Making A Murderer that half a million people petitioned for his release.

The Menendez brothers were masters of evoking both empathy and sympathy. Erik was an aspiring actor and Lyle admitted to his biographer Norma Novelli that he practiced how to cry convincingly. The 911 call the brothers made shortly after killing their parents, in which they wailed and wept while lying that they’d innocently stumbled upon their parents’ bodies, shows they were both convincing actors.

Like Abbott and Unterweger, Lyle and Erik were also imaginative storytellers – both had written works of fiction – and they used their skills to embellish their story of abuse with intimate, if sometimes far-fetched, details. For instance, Erik claimed he secretly laced his father’s tea with cinnamon so his semen would taste better (this made no sense, since José would easily have detected such a strong flavor in his tea).

The brothers made heavy use of their acting and storytelling abilities in the first trial, telling vivid tales of abuse while weeping with cinematic gravitas. Both brothers sought to portray Erik as the main victim of abuse and Lyle as his heroic protector. Back then, just as now, their claims proved more persuasive to women than men; Erik’s trial resulted in a hung jury, with all six of the male jurors pressing for a murder conviction, and all six female jurors pressing for a lesser conviction due to accepting the brothers’ claims of abuse.

One reason for this disparity may be that women, like award-winning novelists, tend to be more empathic than the average man. A substantial number of studies have found that in mock sexual abuse trials, female jurors tend to be significantly more empathetic toward the alleged victims, lending greater weight to the expressed emotions and personal testimony of the alleged victims when deciding on the verdict.

Further, research has found that in a Menendez-style mock court trial in which the defendant was charged with killing their allegedly abusive father, female jurors, and jurors who were specifically encouraged to empathize with the defendant, were more likely to believe the defendants’ claims of abuse and consider them innocent of murder.

The same crocodile tears that disproportionately convinced women in Erik’s first trial now also seem to be disproportionately convincing women on social media. Since 2020, footage of the brothers’ emotional courtroom performances has been frequently sliced into snippets, set to heartfelt music, and posted on TikTok, where they soon started going viral, leading to the present craze.

But it’s not just social media that’s to blame. The world is not just technologically different from the 1990s when Lyle and Erik were convicted; it’s also culturally different. And culture has been pivotal in spreading falsehoods about the Menendez case.

To understand how culture has changed, we need to look again at the gender difference in empathy. This difference doesn’t just affect the verdicts of juries. It likely also impacts the entire field of psychology, which in the 20^th century was dominated by men, but in the 21^st has increasingly become dominated by women. Between 2011 and 2021 the share of registered female psychologists in the US increased from 61% to 69%, and in the UK, women now make up over three-quarters of all registered psychologists. This demographic shift has been accompanied by a shift in the way psychology is conducted, from the old masculine approach of objectifying humans as specimens to be studied with cold and often cruel detachment, to a more feminine, empathic approach that centers the feelings and lived experience of those under examination, even if this conflicts with objective reality.

The social sciences shape mainstream culture because they define which human behaviors are normal and healthy and which are aberrations to be cured. In a patriarchal country like Iran, for instance, female immodesty is often considered a mental illness, and a mental health clinic will soon open to “treat” women who refuse to wear the hijab. Meanwhile, the West’s matriarchal field of psychology has arguably biased society in the other direction, such as by normalizing empathy, and defining a lack of it as a problem to be fixed. This would help explain why the last two decades have seen a surge in the use of the word “empathy” in published books.

A consequence of Western society’s idolization of empathy is that certain myths have been allowed to spread because they’re empathogenic: they foster empathy. The most important of these myths is “blank-slatism”, a model of people as “blank slates” who have little to no inherent nature, but are shaped largely by culture. Under this view, people only become criminals due to negative experiences such as abuse or poverty, so a core part of any criminal case becomes identifying the trauma that produced the criminal. This is a seductive view for social scientists because it means anyone can be “fixed” through exposure to the right environment. Further, this view encourages empathy because it’s easier and more rational to empathize with others if we’re all fundamentally the same person, differentiated only by experience.

The trouble is, we’re not. Blank-slatism has been resoundingly disproven by decades of twin studies. It’s also disproven by common sense; if people become criminals only because of experiences like abuse or poverty, then everyone who was poor or abused would become a criminal, yet the overwhelming majority don’t (and many who are neither poor nor abused do). In fact, the majority of crime is committed by a small minority of repeat offenders, suggesting personality plays a key role.

Since we have intrinsic natures, our minds are more alien to each other than we might assume. This makes empathy an inaccurate way to understand the behavior of others. A recent study found that, while women do tend to be more empathetic than men, they’re no better at inferring other people’s mental states.

The main use of empathy is to help people form personal connections with others. It’s a social guide, not a moral or judicial guide. And yet people are being encouraged to use empathy as a moral guide, and in this capacity it becomes dangerously delusional.

A chief reason empathy misleads us is that we never empathize with people, only with the people we think they are. We take the bare bones of what we know about them, and flesh the rest out with assumptions. Sometimes we fallaciously use ourselves as the model for them, presuming our own feelings and motivations are theirs. More dangerously still, we begin to idealize them.

Empathy is an act of opening ourselves up to the feelings of others, and in doing so, we become vulnerable to feelings that can cloud our judgment. If we identify too strongly with someone, our emotional connection to them can cause us to behave like their lawyers, engaging in mental gymnastics to defend our idealized image of them. Instead of judging their innocence by their actions, we judge their actions by their assumed innocence, looking for the most sympathetic explanation for everything they do.

For instance, Lyle and Erik supporters sometimes argue the brothers’ lavish spending spree with their freshly murdered parents’ money was not a sign of greed but just more evidence they were traumatized, because it showed they were trying to cope through “retail therapy”. As if the natural response to a lifetime of sexual abuse is to purchase a buffalo wings restaurant.

Empathy produces fiction in the mind because it’s ultimately a form of imagination. The fact that movies and literature can make us empathize with fictional characters shows how easily our empathy can be hacked. This may explain why Cooper Koch, who plays Erik Menendez in the hit Netflix show Monsters, became convinced the brothers are telling the truth, and even visited them in prison. He had to put himself in Erik’s shoes as a fulltime job, but he never actually empathized with Erik; only with the idealized version of Erik he’d chosen to portray.

Despite deluding so many people, empathy rarely gets any pushback in the West today, because there’s an assumption that it is the key to compassion, and opposing compassion is a good way to get ostracized from polite society. However, not only is empathy not required to be compassionate, it can actually be an obstacle to it. In his 2016 book, Against Empathy, the psychologist Paul Bloom compares empathy to a spotlight; we only shine it on a few handpicked people at a time, and whenever we do, we lose sight of, and concern for, everyone else.

But empathy doesn’t just make us unconcerned for others, it can also make us actively spiteful toward them if we feel they’ve troubled the object of our empathy. In one study, participants were told of a contest between two students for a small cash prize. Half the participants read an essay in which a contestant expressed distress at being low on money, and the other half read an essay where she mentioned she was low on money but didn’t express distress. The participants were then told that, as part of a study into pain and performance, they must choose how much hot sauce the contestant’s rival would have to consume. The participants who read of the contestant’s distress demanded the contestant’s rival consume more hot sauce. Empathy for the contestant’s distress drove cruelty toward the contestant’s rival. Furthermore, this empathy-driven spite was strongest for participants who had specific genes that made them more sensitive to vasopressin and oxytocin, hormones that play a key role in empathy.

Empathy-driven spite can also be commonly seen in the real world, such as in the recent case of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, whose murder was widely celebrated on social media due to his company’s apparent history of denying health insurance claims. In such cases those who empathize with one side’s pain often wish to inflict even greater pain on the other. One might even say empathy is a major cause of sadism in the world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that most of the mock trial studies that find female jurors are more empathetic toward the alleged abuse victim also find they’re more punitive toward the alleged abuser, demanding significantly harsher sentences.

We see this same empathic spite in the online Menendez discourse, most notably in the fact that many people who believe Lyle and Erik are victims also claim they did the right thing by shooting their parents dead, even though the brothers weren’t in imminent danger. Some TikTok clips even celebrate the shooting. Predictably, TikTok is now also filled with clips attacking Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor in the Menendez brothers’ first trial. One clip, which so far has more than 125,000 likes, shows photographs of Bozanich as a young woman and then as an older one, and states: “This is how you age when you’re a cunt.”

But empathy doesn’t just make people spiteful, it also makes them unjust. In one study, participants watched an interview with a fictitious terminally ill girl called Sheri, and were then asked whether they would move Sheri up the waiting list to receive end-of-life care. The participants were reminded this would disadvantage other terminally ill kids who needed the care more. Of those who’d watched Sheri’s interview but been told to decide objectively, one-third opted to move her up. But of those who’d specifically been asked to empathize with Sheri, three-quarters opted to move her up. Crucially, the participants admitted their decision to favor Sheri was unfair. Their empathy overruled their principles.

This has also been apparent in the Menendez case. Not only did some of Lyle’s friends, like his ex-girlfriend Traci Baker, agree to lie for him in court, but, recently, web users are now knowingly lying on their behalf. A Wikipedia editor called “Limitlessyou” recently added false claims to the “Lyle and Erik Menendez” wiki page to portray the brothers as victims and their prosecutors as villains. One such claim was that Erik's prosecutor, Lester Kuriyama, theorized that Erik's alleged homosexuality suggested José's alleged molestation was consensual. The LA Times article that Limitlessyou cited for this claim included no such quote, because the quote was a fabrication; in reality, Kuriyama had theorized that Erik’s supposed homosexuality may have been the real cause of friction between Erik and José.

The case of Limitlessyou and other Menendez propagandists suggests belief in Lyle and Erik’s innocence can spread like a parasite across the web. Empathic people, opening themselves up to the feelings of others, become infected with an emotionally transmitted disease – an image of the brothers as poor victims – that alters the host’s behavior, making them biased or outright dishonest so they create misleading content that spreads the parasite to other empaths.

The ease with which people who empathize with Lyle and Erik can be made to lie for them casts doubt on two pieces of evidence recently submitted to court to exonerate the brothers. The first of these is a recently “discovered” letter, supposedly written by Erik to his cousin Andy Cano a year before the murders, which includes a reference to sexual abuse. The second piece of evidence is an affidavit by Roy Rossello (a former member of Menudo, a boy band once managed by José Menendez) in which Rossello alleges he was raped by José.

This evidence hasn’t yet been authenticated, and yet in October it was cited by George Gascón, at that time the District Attorney for Los Angeles County, to support his push for a resentencing hearing to free the brothers. Gascón has professed his belief the brothers were abused, in opposition to all actual evidence, and against the decision reached by the jury in 1996.

As the county’s most senior prosecutor, Gascón should’ve been more discerning of a criminal case than the average TikToker or Hollywood celeb, and yet he appears to have been no less gullible. Some have pointed out that when Gascón announced his support for the brothers, he was campaigning for re-election, suggesting it may have been an attempt to increase his popularity among TikTok and Instagram users.

But it’s unlikely Gascón chose to support Lyle and Erik only for power; his political history suggests he’s embraced the same idealistic blank-slatism that characterizes our age of empathy: criminals are not born but made, therefore criminals are victims and require understanding, not condemnation.

Consequently, Gascón has spent his career trying to soften California’s approach to crime. In 2011, he replaced Kamala Harris as district attorney of San Francisco, a position he held till 2019. During his two terms, San Francisco prosecutors filed criminal charges in less than half of cases presented by city police, and violent crime, which had been decreasing, increased 15% while property crimes like vehicle break-ins increased almost 50%.

Gascón then became district attorney of the US’s most populous county, LA. He was elected in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd race riots after pledging to end “systemic racism” in the judicial system. Gascón’s approach to crime in LA was even laxer than his approach in SF. Among his sweeping reforms was a policy of not prosecuting a range of theft and drug-related crimes, and not prosecuting teens as adults, meaning even mass-murderers could be released from jail when they turned 25.

Since Gascón’s policies were based on a fictional model of humanity, they led to a surge in almost all types of crime, particularly theft. Within three years of Gascón becoming DA of LA County, shoplifting increased by a staggering 133%. He soon faced a public backlash, including from his own prosecutors, and a few weeks ago he was ousted from office. The push to unseat him was led by victims of crime, who’d been left in the dark when Gascón chose to shine his empathy spotlight on criminals.

The shocking crime surge under Gascón shows what happens when idealistic empathy is not just confined to TikTok, but becomes legislation: the world becomes more dangerous.

Despite Gascón being evicted from office, the Menendez brothers could still be freed next month, due to a habeas corpus petition they filed last year, backed by huge public pressure. For those of us who value objectivity, the best we can do is to learn, and share, the lesson of the Menendez fiasco: that empathy doesn’t work as a moral or judicial guide. Far from making us good, it makes us gullible, biased, dishonest, cruel, and unjust. If we wish to know who’s right and wrong, guilty and innocent, we should spend less time trying to inhabit other people’s heads, and make more use of our own.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to for her help researching the Menendez case, and to Olivia Ward-Jackson for her help proofreading and editing my ramble down to a readable length.

For those interested in my interactions with Luigi Mangione, I will publish something soon.

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These are just the latest examples of a growing trend of shock-activism that combines political protest and public nuisance, and which has this year seen activists across the West spray-paint Stonehenge, squat on university campuses, block access to roads and bridges, occupy museums and government buildings, storm sports events and movie premieres, attack priceless artworks and historical artifacts, and even desecrate war memorials and holocaust monuments.

Ostensibly, these “nuisance-protests” are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as the environment, Palestine, trans-rights, or immigration. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

This movement has its roots in the digital revolution of 2009, when use of smartphones and social media reached a critical mass, allowing strangers to easily unite and mobilize around shared views, which led to a rapid increase in the size and frequency of protests around the world. But protests didn’t just become bigger and more frequent, they also became more outrageous.

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, grandiosity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders — narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are characterized by overemotionality and a need for validation. They’re also associated with heavy social media use, likely because dramatic cluster-B behaviors, such as playing the victim and catastrophizing, excel at getting attention on such platforms.

The ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama. Many activists on both the Left and Right now hope to bring about their ideal world the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year old.

It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification, activism for the attention-deficit generation. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.

Instead of trying to produce the best arguments, neotoddlers try to produce the most outrageous video clips, which typically involves vandalism, desecration, or some other kind of public meltdown. Thus, they outrage others by embracing their own outrage and lashing out at the world. This surrender to their own impulses makes them first-order thinkers, meaning they consider immediate consequences but not consequences of consequences.

This chronological myopia was starkly illustrated after the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. Many pro-Palestine neotoddlers publicly celebrated the massacre because, trapped by their emotions in a perpetual present, they couldn’t think far enough ahead to realize that Israel was going to retaliate, and that its wrath would be catastrophic for the Palestinians. When the inevitable retaliation came, the neotoddlers’ joy turned to horror as it dawned on them that actions have consequences.

One young pro-Palestine activist, Riddhi Patel, learned this lesson the hard way. In April, she addressed councilors at a Bakersfield City Council meeting in California, and, outraged by their refusal to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, proclaimed to the councilors that she’d murder them, adding: “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.” Later, she appeared in court on 16 felony counts, sobbing uncontrollably as she was confronted by the second-order effects that her first-order thinking had failed to foresee.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely she’ll learn much from her punishment. Not only do neotoddlers lack impulse-control, they also mistake their lack of impulse-control for morality, and mistake the impulse-control of others for callousness. “Where is the outrage?” they commonly yell, demanding everyone be as irrational as them. For the neotoddler, impatience is a virtue.

The Civil Rights movement succeeded because it was guided by leaders who had clear, specific, and realistic goals, and were able to negotiate to achieve them. Since neotoddlers “organize” mostly on social media, they’re decentralized, and don’t have leaders that can guide them or negotiate for them. They are therefore ruled by their loftiest ideals, in service to their basest impulses, and they don’t have the means to create, only to disrupt.

And so they disrupt, with the goal of spreading awareness. Yet their attempts to do so are misguided because, for all the issues they protest about, the problem is not a lack of awareness; it’s a lack of solutions. We don’t need to be told that war, crime, and pollution are bad, because we learned such lessons in primary school. What we need are clear, specific, and realistic plans of action. And the neotoddlers, being impulsive short-term thinkers, have only broad demands but no rational way to achieve them.

Anti-immigrant activists chant “Get them out!” as if there weren’t a host of legal and logistical challenges to doing so. Pro-Palestine activists chant “ceasefire now!” as if such a ceasefire wouldn’t quickly be broken by Hamas (as happened on October 7^th). Climate activists chant “Just stop oil!” as if that wouldn’t cause Western civilization to regress technologically backwards into an age of famine, war, and superstition.

Neotoddlers are so shambolic they even try to disrupt attempts to meet their own demands. Many pro-Palestine activists call for peace in Gaza and yet support Hamas, the main obstacle to peace in Gaza. And many eco-warriors oppose fossil fuels but also try to stop viable alternatives such as electric and nuclear by, for example, storming Tesla factories and atomic energy conferences. And recent Right-wing protesters in Sunderland, who claimed to represent the unheard, burned down a citizens’ advice center, one of the few places to offer an ear to the unheard.

Unsurprisingly, nuisance-protests often end up alienating ordinary people. While the public supports climate action, it has a negative opinion of Just Stop Oil. And while the public supports a ceasefire in Gaza, it has a negative opinion of the campus protesters. The same is true of Right-wing nuisance protests: while the public generally believes immigration should be curbed, it overwhelmingly opposes the recent riots, which have achieved little except convince the public that Right-wing extremism is a serious threat. So, though nuisance-protests do get attention, little of that attention is converted to sympathy and a lot to spite.

But if nuisance-protests are counterproductive, why are they spreading? Because protests are usually motivated more by emotion than reason. Take the recent Southport riots. These have been driven not by any rational plan but by the frustrations of Right-wingers and ordinary working-class people that their communities have been forgotten and their concerns about immigration are not being taken seriously by politicians. These frustrations, stoked by fake news, have led them to engage in infantile actions like vandalizing mosques and setting fire to police cars, all of which hurts their cause more than help it. It does, however, make them feel good for the moment, and they live mostly for the moment.

As for Left-wing neotoddlers, their motivations tend to be more complex (but no less childish), because they’re generally much more affluent than Right-wing neotoddlers. For instance, an analysis by the Washington Monthly revealed that the Gaza campus protests were largely confined to the most expensive and elite colleges. And Just Stop Oil members are themselves quick to admit that their movement is “privileged” and living in a white middle-class “student bubble”.

This is no accident: it’s often the prosperous, not the downtrodden, who have a greater motivation to protest. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book, The True Believer:

There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed.

People need struggles. If their supply of problems dwindles too low, they begin to embellish the problems they already have, or invent completely new ones. As Hoffer writes:

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.

The young and privileged are particularly prone to this. They don’t have to worry about money, nor do they have homes or families of their own, so they have nothing to lose, and nothing to conserve. This gives them both the need to find struggles and the luxury to be radical.

Overall, Left-wing neotoddlers and Right-wing neotoddlers tend to come from different demographics — with the former being younger, richer, more educated, and more female than the latter — and this gives them different motivations, and different modus operandi. For instance, research suggests that the cluster-B trait of narcissism takes a different form in the two groups. In Right-wingers, it mostly manifests as a sense of entitlement, while in Left-wingers it mostly manifests as a need for exhibitionism.

This is born out in the different approaches Left-wingers and Right-wingers take towards their public tantrums. The nuisance-protests of right-wingers are primarily attempts to relieve their frustrations at not getting what they want. As such, they typically take the form of straightforward thuggery and hooliganism: starting fires, overturning cars, and hurling bricks.

In contrast, Left-wing nuisance-protests tend to be less about relieving frustration and more about getting attention directly. As such, they’re usually more calculated and creative: throwing soup over paintings, releasing insect-swarms into hotels, or, most recently, painting the hands of a statue of Anne Frank red.

Generally, the Left-wing approach is more effective at getting attention; it took mass destruction by hundreds of Right-wingers in Southport to make news headlines, but it only took two Just Stop Oil activists with orange paint at Heathrow to achieve the same.

Left-wing nuisance-protests are also treated more kindly by the mainstream. Right-wing protests tend to be roundly condemned by polite society, firstly because they tend to be more violent, and secondly because upholders of mainstream culture — such as liberal journalists, academics, and entertainers — are culturally programmed to dismiss concerns about Islam or immigration as “far-Right”, placing such concerns outside the bounds of polite discourse (and into the hands of actual extremists).

In contrast, Left-wing neotoddlers are generally viewed by Western cultural elites as well-meaning. When Left-wingers recently flooded the streets of Walthamstow to counter-protest the Right-wingers, they were lauded by many Western outlets — from the BBC to NBC — as spreading peace and unity, even though the Labour councilor Ricky Jones used the protest to demand that his fellow Left-wingers slit the throats of Right-wingers.

The West’s mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, from academia to the liberal media, tend to be populated mostly by Left-leaning people who see Left-wing neotoddlers as a force for good because they’re broadly ideologically aligned with them and judge them by their perceived intentions rather than their results. For this reason, the mainstream treats Left-wing neotoddlers as its golden child, always seeing the best in them, while Right-wing neotoddlers are treated like the red-headed stepchild, worthy only of scorn.

This is particularly true at universities, where conservative speakers are routinely shouted down, and students are overtly encouraged to campaign for Left-wing causes, while also being taught that speech is violence and it is therefore acceptable to shut down speech they don’t like by making loud noises. The universities’ decades-long encouragement of cluster-B infantilism reached a tipping point this summer with the campus protests. We saw the students put everything they’d been taught — exhibitionism, catastrophization, and hysteria — into practice. The protests quickly came to resemble a LARP. Whenever the protesters occupied a new part of the campus, they hung banners and declared it liberated. All this liberating eventually made them feel hungry, but when they demanded refreshments from university officials, and were denied, they claimed they were being deprived of “basic humanitarian aid” and might die of starvation.

This kind of grandiose fantasizing is emblematic of people with narcissistic traits because it makes their struggles seem bigger than they actually are. As such, we commonly see similar kinds of catastrophization among other flavors of neotoddler; every flood or forest fire is an omen of “climate catastrophe”, biological facts about sex are “erasing trans people” and immigration is “white genocide”. Such histrionics, whether propagated in error or with intention, serve to manipulate other hysterical people into becoming neotoddlers.

And the grim irony is that, by believing the world is worse than it actually is, neotoddlers make the world worse. Their disruptions and vandalism exert a huge economic and social cost on society, and they prevent ordinary people from getting to work, attending funerals of loved ones, and meeting vital medical appointments.

Unsurprisingly, the harm neotoddlers cause to liberal democracies has endeared them to foreign dictators. The Ayatollah developed a soft spot for the Ivy League campus protesters, cheerleading them on X, and even writing them a letter of support. It also recently transpired that Iran has been funding and directing neotoddlers across the US, and that they even masterminded an anti-Israel protest at McGill University in Canada. Meanwhile, the fake news that sparked the Southport riots was amplified by pro-Kremlin Telegram channels and even Russian state TV.

So how do we end this age of neotoddlerism? The simplest way would be to cut off its main source of support. And that isn’t the Ayatollah or Putin, or even the universities. The neotoddlers’ main source of support is, in fact, you and I.

Neotoddlerism endures because it’s much more effective at making news headlines and going viral than traditional forms of protest. As a case in point, on 22 June, celebrity environmentalists like Emma Thompson and Chris Packham led a huge march of over 60,000 people through London, to raise awareness of habitat destruction and wildlife loss. It received little press coverage. Around the same time, a handful of Just Stop Oil protesters squirted orange paint on Stonehenge; it made the front page of every major UK newspaper and received coverage in the global press too.

Likewise, last week in London, there was a generally peaceful march against mass immigration, involving tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities, and led by figures like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox. It was ignored by most of the press. One week later, when Robinson embraced his inner-toddler and stoked violent riots, they made global headlines.

At a time when competition for attention is fierce, it makes business sense for the press and social media platforms to boost stories that outrage people into clicking and sharing. Such platforms naturally form a symbiosis with people who seek to outrage their way to fame: demagogues like Robinson; vandals like Just Stop Oil “poster girl” Phoebe Plummer; and more bizarre figures still, like the “performance artist turned political activist” Crackhead Barney, who wears little but a diaper and seeks to save Gaza by being as obscene as possible.

By giving these figures platforms, we’ve not only allowed them to proselytize to huge audiences, but we’ve also turned them into idols — living testaments that you can get what you want by acting like a baby. Imagine how horrifically a toddler would behave if his every tantrum made world news?

And we can’t blame the media for this; they’re just showing us what we want to see. It is ordinary people who have made being a public nuisance pay. Neotoddlerism needs nothing more than attention to thrive — it is physical clickbait — and we just keep clicking.

The more we share and comment on clips of people throwing soup over paintings, or graffitiing on memorials, or vandalizing mosques, or blocking roads, or spraying orange paint at airports, or pitching tents on university campuses, the more we’ll see such events recur in real life.

The solution to neotoddlers, then, is the same as the one to regular spoiled brats: to ignore their outbursts and deny them attention. The media will stop reporting on their meltdowns when we stop engaging with them. They’ll stop amplifying — and thereby incentivizing — the neotoddlers when we do.

If we gave less attention to those who outrage us, and more to those who inspire us, it would incentivize young people to invest their idealism in, and derive their purpose from, finding practical solutions instead of merely restating the problem in ever sillier ways. So we should learn to react more slowly to news, to pay attention to what we pay attention to, and give more of our attention to behaviors we wish to encourage. It’s not just the neotoddlers who need to be less impulsive, we do too.

And if we take the time to consciously focus our attention, we find there are many people in this world who actually deserve it. While Greta Thunberg became world famous by yelling and blocking entrances to public buildings, the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat has been quietly removing plastic from the oceans through his startup, The Ocean Cleanup. His project recently hit a milestone of 15,000,000kg of trash removed from oceans and rivers worldwide, but it’s hardly been reported by the press.

We don’t yet have any start-ups to clear the oceans of rubber dinghies, but such a thing is possible, if addressing illegal immigration can be made more palatable to polite society. And that will only happen when the people who wish to “stop the boats” refrain from acting like the violent thugs they’re often stereotyped as, and start supporting practical, adult solutions.

Every child begins life throwing tantrums. And every good parent learns to ignore them, because they know that acknowledging attention-seeking behaviors validates them, and prevents their kids from outgrowing them. If we wish to stop seeing good causes ruined by bad actors, we must stop rewarding immaturity. If we wish to usher in an age of post-toddlerism, we must stop making neotoddlers famous.

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I now have reams of Word documents scribbled with lessons I learned the hard way: through good old fashioned experience. While I was trawling through them, I got the idea for an interesting thought experiment: if I could send 23 pieces of advice to my 23-year old self (excluding anything financial), which would I choose?

You may wonder why I chose 23. Originally, I chose 20, but then I read that, apparently, odd-numbered lists get people’s attention better than round-numbered ones. I have no idea if this is true, but thought I’d give it a try anyway.

So here are 23 truths I wish I knew at 23, but which, I hope, will be of value to you no matter your years.

1. Few things make you stupider than the belief that you need to have an opinion on everything.

2. If you want to be right, don’t try to be right, try to be less wrong. If you want to be smart, don’t try to be smart, try to be curious and humble.

3. No one is paying as much attention to you as you are. People are too concerned with how they appear to others to care much about how you appear to them.

4. Every “overnight success” is the result of years of thankless work. Success comes not from great acts of genius but from doing lots of small things consistently.

5. Failure is a mark of courage. It means you risked failure.

6. Many of the people you disagree with are not stupid, evil, or insane, but have had thoughts and experiences you haven't which led them to different conclusions.

7. In the long run, a lazy lifestyle creates more work and stress than a disciplined one.

8. You’re not inactive because you lack motivation, you lack motivation because you’re inactive. You don't need to feel inspired to start creating, you need to start creating to feel inspired. Action creates traction. All you need is to start and the rest will inevitably follow.

9. A lot of the time your feelings are invalid and you should feel differently.

10. You should just be yourself, not because it will make you more likable (it won’t) but because it's only by being yourself that you'll find people who like you for who you are rather than for who you're pretending to be.

11. Never argue with stupid people. It's easier to win an argument with a genius than an idiot.

12. If you can’t state the opposing view as well as the people who hold it, you shouldn’t feel entitled to your own view.

13. Don’t believe everything you think. The voice in your head is not you, and it’s not honest.

14. Make a habit of reading writers you expect to disagree with. One idea that challenges your beliefs is worth a hundred ideas that confirms them.

15. Be careful who you spend your time with, because you’ll become like them.

16. Don’t create the content you think people want to consume, create the content you want to consume. If it interests you, you’ll make it interesting to others.

17. You give the power to whatever you blame.

18. If you allow yourself to be provoked by trolls and narcissists, then you relinquish to them your time and energy, and thereby become their bitch.

19. Avoid people who love to gossip about others. They’re almost certainly gossiping about you.

20. When faced with misfortune, you can pity yourself for suffering it, or commend yourself for surviving it. The first option will extend your suffering, the second will shorten it.

21. Don’t take people too seriously – including yourself. Everyone is just a marketing campaign for their gametes.

22. Don’t take yourself seriously, but do take your work seriously. Do what you say you’re going to do. If you don’t, you’ll lose respect for yourself. And if you don’t respect yourself, you’ll find it effortless to trespass across your own boundaries and violate all that you value.

23. Your future-self would do anything to be you again. Treasure the time you have like you treasure the good old days, because today and tomorrow are the future’s good old days.

And that’s my 23. On another day I’d probably have chosen a different 23, but these are the ones that made most sense today. If you’re 30+ and could give your 23 year old self one piece of non-financial advice, I’d love to see it in the comments.

In other news, I’m now reopening video-calls with paid subscribers. Due to time constraints, I can currently only offer calls to those who have yearly subscriptions, or who have had a monthly subscription for at least a year. As always, founding members don’t need an invitation to chat and can contact me at any time.

To book a call, email me from the address you used to sign up, and give me your preferred time (including time zone) and date. Slots are available throughout the months of June, July, and August.

In the meantime, keep up to date with me by following me on Notes.

Thanks for reading and, until next time, peace.

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1. Dopamine Culture

“Every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.” — Aldous Huxley

The delay between desire & gratification is shrinking. Pleasure is increasingly more instant & effortless. Everything is becoming a drug. What will it do to us?

2. False Consensus Effect

“Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” — George Carlin

Our model of the world assumes people are like us. We don’t just do whatever we consider normal, we also consider normal whatever we do.

3. Fredkin's Paradox

The more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.

To avoid being paralyzed by meaningless choices, use decision-making heuristics.

4. Package-Deal Ethics

“If I can predict all of your beliefs from one of your beliefs, you’re not a serious thinker.” — Chris Williamson

Being pro-choice and being pro-gun-control don’t necessarily follow from each other, yet those who believe one usually also believe the other. This is because most people don’t choose beliefs individually but subscribe to “packages” of beliefs offered by a tribe.

5. Ovsiankina Effect (aka Hemingway Effect)

We have an intrinsic need to finish what we’ve started. Exploit this by taking your breaks mid-task; the incompleteness will gnaw at you, increasing your motivation to return to work. (When writing, I end each day mid-sentence because it

6. Naxalt Fallacy

Smart people tend to use qualifiers like “generally” and “most”, and dumb people tend to ignore them.

“Most people who are pro-choice are also pro-gun-control.”

“Wrong! I’m not!”

“Men are generally taller than women.”

“False! My wife is 7 feet tall!”

7. Fiction Lag (aka Experience-Taking)

When people are captivated by a work of fiction, they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters. We develop our identities by copying others, and perhaps one reason we enjoy fiction is that it gives us ideas on who to be.

8. Premortem

"Hindsight is 20/20."

Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and then conducting a post-mortem, conduct a “pre-mortem” by imagining it went wrong then using the power of hindsight to deduce the likeliest reason it went wrong.

Imagine you wake up in a hospital. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

Imagine your partner breaks up with you. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

Imagine you lose your job. What could have been the most likely reason? Is there anything you can do today to prevent that?

—Luca Dellanna

9. Gambler’s Conceit

People hooked on a risky behavior (e.g. gambling, smoking) reassure themselves they’ll be able to quit while ahead (before bankruptcy, lung cancer). However, their future-self tends to act a lot like them, so if they can't quit now, they likely won't quit later when they’re even deeper in.

10. Youngest-Kid-in-Class Syndrome

A study of 300,000 children found that the youngest kids in class were more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. This suggests that immaturity is sometimes being mistaken for disorders.

discusses this further in his incisive piece (paywalled)

11. Noble Cause Corruption

The greatest evils come not from people seeking to do evil, but people seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Everyone who was on the wrong side of history believed they were on the right side.

12. Grey Rock Method

Reacting emotionally to narcissists and other toxic people only gives them what they want — your time & energy — which encourages further abuse. If you want to stop receiving provocations, stop being provoked. When the narcissist realizes they can’t manipulate your emotions, they’ll stop trying.

13. Woozle Effect

When a source makes an unproven claim, is then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. Common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.

A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other:

14. Postjournalism

The press lost its monopoly on news when the internet democratized info. To save its business model, it pivoted from journalism into tribalism. The new role of the press is not to inform its readers but to confirm what they already believe.

15. Adams’ 25% rule (aka Skill-Stacking)

Instead of trying to be the best at one thing, try to be "merely" great at two things and then learn to combine them. Not only is this easier, but it will make your skillset more unique, cutting out the competition.

16. Backwards Law

The more you pursue happiness, the less likely you are to obtain it, because the focus on acquiring it only reinforces the fact that you don’t have it. Ironically, happiness comes easiest to those who don’t worry about it.

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.”

― J. Richard Lessor

17. Balaji's Transformer

Have a written idea? Draw it. Have a visual idea? Write it. Reformatting an idea lets you see it from a new perspective. Walt Disney turned a dull business plan into a diagram, revealing new connections and opening new pathways of thought.

18. Longevity Escape Velocity

Technology is gradually improving our lifespans, so if you try to live as long as possible, you may live to see technology that'll allow you to live even longer. Time is the most valuable currency of all, and longevity yields compound interest.

19. Roseto Effect

Many long-term studies, including the 50 year Roseto study and the 85 year Harvard Study of Adult Development, found that having close-knit relationships is as important for longevity as diet, sleep, and exercise, yet it’s often neglected by fitness gurus. If you want to live, love.

20. Hitchens' Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

― Christopher Hitchens

If you make a claim, it's up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

21. The Liking Gap

Multiple studies have found that people consistently underestimate how much a conversation partner likes them and enjoys their company. So don't be shy, you're probably cooler than you think.

22. Boomerang Effect

Deny someone something, and they'll want it even more, out of defiance. If you want your child to eat broccoli, tell them they’re not big enough to eat broccoli.

Helps explain why censorship often backfires (the Streisand Effect).

23. Anchored-to-your-own-history bias

“Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.” — Morgan Housel

Boomers & Generation X had wildly different experiences of how the economy works, and this gave them different dispositions, worldviews, and political preferences.

24. Mismatch Theory

Moths evolved to navigate by the moon, a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps, which now lead them astray. Equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the digital age, where it now leads us to act like polarized goons online.

25. Common Knowledge Effect

Groups are meant to be better decision-makers than individuals, because they combine many perspectives. But in practice, a group doesn't base its decisions on the info specific to each member, but only on the info common to them all. This casts doubt on the idea that “two heads are better than one”, and helps explain why, despite popular wisdom, diversity generally does not make teams better.

26. Champion Bias

We assume winners have the best advice, but those who win rarely examine why they won, while those who lose often regretfully dwell on their mistakes. So you’ll often obtain the best advice on winning not from winners but from losers.

27. Gibson’s Law

“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”

Both sides in a court case or policy debate will have support from experts, no matter how crazy the position, because education doesn’t make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.

28. Prospect Theory

People don’t weigh gains and losses evenly. We hate losing money about twice as much as we like gaining it. So, for instance, we’d need to gain $20 to assuage the pain of losing $10. This bias toward loss aversion is one of the foundations of economic behavior.

29. Cached Thoughts

Most of your beliefs were formed earlier in your life, when you were naiver. You continue to believe them only because you’ve never reconsidered them. When you’re about to offer an opinion, consider when you formed it, and ask: is it really your belief, or your younger self’s?

30. Finality Principle

One day you’ll do something for the last time and never know it. So, whether you’re watching a sunset or arguing with a friend, ask yourself: “What if this was the last time I experience this?” A sense of finality can turn even nuisances into miracles.

“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

And that’s 30 concepts. As usual, don’t mistake these rules of thumb for laws of nature, as that would be a fallacy called Secundum Quid.

I’m going to start scheduling video-calls with paid subscribers again soon; will give more details in my next post. Until then, peace.

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Well, today is the birthday of Marcus Aurelius, one of the most quotable Stoics. So I thought I’d share ten of his most useful quotes, together with brief annotations of my own.

“It is not death that one should fear, but never beginning to live.”

How many of the posts you recently scrolled through on social media do you remember? Not many? Then was there much difference between scrolling and being a corpse?

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”

The majority of our suffering is caused not by events but by our interpretations of them.

“Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.”

You live wherever your attention is, and become whatever you most focus on, so steer your curiosity toward your desired fate.

“Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.”

Gratitude for what you have can cure the endless desire for what you have not.

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”

Anger is like trying to burn someone else by setting yourself on fire.

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then differentiation is the sincerest form of insult.

“We love ourselves above all others, yet we put more stock in other people’s opinions of us than in our own.”

No one is paying as much attention to you as you are. Everyone is too busy worrying how they appear to others to worry how you appear to them.

“You always have the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”

I have no opinion about this.

“Think of the life you have lived until now as over and, as a dead person, see what’s left as a bonus and live it accordingly.”

We grow so accustomed to life that we forget how miraculous it is. Imagine you were about to die right now, how desperate you’d be to keep living, how much you’d wish you hadn’t taken things for granted. Now embrace life with that same energy.

And that’s it for now. If you’re interested in learning more about Stoicism, check out my deep-dive.

Thanks for reading. Peace.

G.

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“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man's.”

― William Blake

I. The Happiness of Pursuit

For years, some of the world’s sharpest minds have been quietly turning your life into a series of games. Not merely to amuse you, but because they realized that the easiest way to make you do what they want is to make it fun. To escape their control, you must understand the creeping phenomenon of gamification, and how it makes you act against your own interests.

This is a story that encompasses a couple who replaced their real baby with a fake one, a statistician whose obsessions cost the US the Vietnam War, the apparent absence of extraterrestrial life, and the biggest FBI investigation of the 20th century. But it begins with a mild-mannered psychologist who studied pigeons at Harvard in the 1930s.

B. F. Skinner believed environment determines behavior, and a person could therefore be controlled simply by controlling their environment. He began testing this theory, known as behaviorism, mainly on pigeons. For his experiments, he developed the “Skinner box”, a cage with a food dispenser controlled by a sensor or button.

Skinner’s goal was to make his pigeons peck the button as many times as possible. From his experiments, he made three discoveries. First, the pigeons pecked most when doing so yielded immediate, rather than delayed, rewards. Second, the pigeons pecked most when it rewarded them randomly, rather than every time. Skinner’s third discovery occurred when he noticed the pigeons continued to peck the button long after the food dispenser was empty, provided they could hear it click. He realized the pigeons had become conditioned to associate the click with the food, and now valued the click as a reward in itself.

This led him to propose two kinds of reward: primary and conditioned reinforcers. A primary reinforcer is something we’re born to desire. A conditioned reinforcer is something we learn to desire, due to its association with a primary reinforcer. Skinner found that conditioned reinforcers were generally more effective in shaping behavior, because while our biological need for the primary reinforcer is easily satiable, our abstract desire for the conditioned reinforcer isn’t. The pigeons would stop seeking food once their bellies were full, but they’d take far longer to get tired of hearing the food dispenser click.

Skinner’s three key insights — immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary — were found to also apply to humans, and in the 20^th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior. From Frequent Flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonalds Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.

Some people began to consider whether games could be used to make people do other things. In the 1970s, the American management consultant Charles Coonradt wondered why people work harder at games they pay to play than at work they’re paid to do. Like Skinner, Coonradt saw that a defining feature of compelling games was immediate reinforcement. Most of the feedback loops in employment — from salary payments to annual performance appraisals — were torturously long. So Coonradt proposed shortening them by introducing daily targets, points systems, and leaderboards. These conditioned reinforcers would transform work from a series of monthly slogs into daily status games, in which employees competed to fulfil the company’s goals.

In the 21st century, advances in technology made it easy to add game mechanics to almost any activity, and a new term — “gamification” — became a buzzword in Silicon Valley. By 2008, business consultants were giving presentations about leveraging fun to shape behavior, while futurists gave TED Talks speculating on the social implications of a gamified world. Underpinning every speech was a single, momentous question: if gamification could make people buy more stuff and work more hours, what else could it be used to make people do?

The tone was generally utopian, because back then gamification seemed to be mostly a force for good. In 2007, for instance, the online word quiz FreeRice gamified famine relief: for every correct answer, 10 grains of rice were given to the UN World Food Programme. Within six months it had already given away over 20 billion grains of rice. Meanwhile, the SaaS company, Opower, had gamified going green. It turned eco-friendliness into a contest, showing each person how much energy they were using compared with their neighbors, and displaying a leaderboard of the top 10 least wasteful. The app has since saved over $3 billion worth of energy. And then there was Foldit, a game developed by University of Washington biochemists who’d struggled for 15 years to discern the structure of an Aids virus protein. They reasoned that, if they turned the search into a game, someone might do what they couldn’t. It took gamers just 10 days.

Even established corporations saw gamification’s potential. In 2008, Volkswagen debuted a campaign called “The Fun Theory”, based on the idea that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behavior for the better”. Piano stairs were installed at a Stockholm rail station to encourage people to use them instead of the escalator, leading to a 66% increase in stair use. Volkswagen also tried to gamify gamification itself, creating a contest for good game ideas. The winning idea was a “speedcam lottery”, where people who kept to the speed limit would be entered into a prize draw, funded by speeding fines.

It all seemed so simple: if we could only create the right games, we could make humanity fitter, greener, kinder, smarter. We could repopulate forests and even cure cancers simply by making it fun.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, gamification took a less wholesome route.

We humans are harder to manipulate than pigeons, but we can be manipulated in many more ways, because we have a wider spectrum of needs. Pigeons don’t care much about respect, but for us it’s a primary reinforcer, to such an extent that we can be made to desire arbitrary sounds that become associated with it, like praise and applause.

Respect is so important to humans that it’s a key reason we evolved to play games. Will Storr, in his book The Status Game, charted the rise of game-playing in different cultures, and found that games have historically functioned to organize societies into hierarchies of competence, with score acting as a conditioned reinforcer of status. In other words, all games descend from status games. The association between score and status has grown so strong in our minds that, like pigeons pecking the button long after the food dispenser has stopped dispensing, we’ll chase scores long after everyone else has stopped watching.

And so, when Facebook added “likes” in 2009, they quickly became a proxy for status, and a score to compete for. People now had a social stake in posting content. Hitting “send” became like activating a slot machine, initiating an excitingly uncertain outcome; the post might go completely unnoticed, or it might hit the jackpot and go viral, awarding the coveted prizes of respect and fame.

Other social media platforms followed, leveraging Skinner’s three laws to maximize button-pecking. They offered immediate reinforcement in the form of instant notifications, conditioned reinforcement in the form of “likes” and “followers”, and unpredictable reinforcement that varied with each post and each refresh of the page. These features turned social media into the world’s most addictive status game. And thus, just as pigeons were made to chase clicks, so eventually were we.

But this was just the beginning. Many in the managerial class saw the success of social media and wondered how they could use gamification for their own ends. The Chinese Communist Party was among the first to apply the principles of social media to the real world. In several towns and cities, it began trialing social credit schemes that assign citizens a level of “clout” based on how well they behave. In some areas, such as Rongcheng and Hangzhou, there are public signs that display leaderboards of the highest scoring citizens. The lowest scoring citizens may be punished with credit blacklists or throttled internet speeds.

Meanwhile, in the West, gamification is used to make people obey corporations. Employers like Amazon and Disneyland use electronic tracking to keep score of employees’ work rates, often displaying them for all to see. Those who place high on the leaderboards can win prizes like virtual pets; those who fall below the minimum rate may be financially penalized.

Game features are even more pervasive in the digital world. In little over a year, the Chinese shopping app Temu has exploded in popularity thanks to its “play to pay” model: as users browse deals they’re presented with puzzles to solve, roulette wheels to spin, and challenges to complete, which reward them with credit and special offers. Unsurprisingly, users are now spending twice as much time on Temu than on Amazon.

Gamification has also transformed dating apps. Zoosk works like a typical role-playing game, where you gradually accumulate “experience points”, which unlock new abilities, such as animated virtual gifts to send to prospective dates. Meanwhile, on Tinder you can purchase various “level-ups” — Boosts, Super Likes, and Rewinds — that increase your chances of winning and compel you to keep playing to get your money’s worth. And if you have no luck on dating apps, there are always AI girlfriends to play with: apps like iGirl and Replika award users points for their commitment, which can be used to “level up” their virtual lovers into a version that is more intimate.

These are only a few examples. Almost every kind of app, from audiobook apps to taxicab apps to stock trading apps, now employs game mechanics like points, badges, levels, streaks, progress bars, and leaderboards. Their ubiquity attests to their success in hooking people.

Gamification once promised to create a better society, but it’s now used mainly to addict people to apps. The gamifiers, like Skinner’s pigeons, prioritized immediate rewards over delayed ones, so they gamified for the next financial quarter and not for the future of civilization.

So where does this all lead? What is the endgame?

II. A Maze Called Utopia

At the University of Michigan in the mid-twentieth century, there was a zoologist named James V. McConnell. A strong believer in fun, he often presented his academic research alongside satire and poetry, so it was difficult to tell which was which, a habit that made him popular with students but unpopular with his fellow professors.

One of the few things McConnell took seriously was behaviorism. He was transfixed by Skinner’s work on pigeons, and wished to expand the work to humans, with an eye to creating a perfect society. In a 1970 Psychology Today article he wrote:

We should reshape our society so that we all would be trained from birth to want to do what society wants us to do. We have the techniques now to do it. Only by using them can we hope to maximize human potentiality.

In short, he wanted to turn society into a Skinner box.

Throughout the Seventies, McConnell used Skinnerian techniques to create rehabilitation programs for prisoners and psychiatric patients, some of which were successful. But his most ambitious scheme emerged in the early Eighties, when he witnessed people being captivated by video games like Donkey Kong and Pac Man, and realized their addictive mechanics could be translated to other, more productive activities. He pitched an ambitious project to gamify education to tech companies like Microsoft and IBM, but he was 30 years too early, and they couldn’t yet see its promise. There was, however, one person who’d taken a keen interest in McConnell’s work. His name was Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski was an awkward but gifted student, coldly matter-of-fact in manner, for which he was described by his schoolmates as a “walking brain”. In a school IQ test he’d scored 167 (140 is considered “genius”).

He’d come to Michigan in 1962 as a postgraduate from Harvard, where he’d studied mathematics and graduated at just 18. But at Harvard, he’d also been subjected to torturous experiments. In a lab not far from where Skinner had once experimented with pigeons, psychologists linked to US intelligence were now experimenting with humans — one of whom was Kaczynski. Under the glare of blinding lights, he was methodically humiliated to see how he reacted. He claimed the experience didn’t affect him, and yet, within just a few years, he’d developed an intense paranoia about psychological conditioning. And so, when Kaczynski learned of McConnell’s proposals to create a utopia through behavior modification, he concluded that the jocular professor was an existential threat to humanity, and that he needed to die.

It wasn’t a decision Kaczynski had made lightly; he’d developed an entire philosophy to justify it. Influenced by techno-dystopian writers like Aldous Huxley and Jacques Ellul, Kaczynski believed the Industrial Revolution had turned society into a cold process of production and consumption that was gradually crushing everything humans valued most: freedom, happiness, purpose, meaning, and the ecosystem. In his view, everything society produced — including science and technology — served industry, not humanity, and was therefore increasingly purposed not to help us but to condition us so we wouldn’t resist what was being done to us and the earth.

In short, where society had once been shaped to accommodate people, now people were being shaped to accommodate society. And this misshaping was destructive because it conflicted with our deepest nature.

Kaczynski believed modern society made us docile and miserable by depriving us of fulfilling challenges and eroding our sense of purpose. The brain evolved to solve problems, but the problems it had evolved for were now largely solved by technology. Most of us can now obtain all our basic necessities simply by being obedient, like a pigeon pecking a button. Kaczynski argued that such conveniences didn’t make us happy, only aimless. And to stave off this aimlessness, we had to continually set ourselves goals purely to have goals to pursue, which Kaczynski called “surrogate activities”. These included sports, hobbies, and chasing the latest product that ads promised would make us happy.

For Kaczynski, the result of reorienting our lives to chase artificial goals was that we became increasingly dependent on society to provide us with them. And without our own inherent sense of purpose, we’d inevitably be made to chase goals that were good for the industrial machine but bad for us.

Kaczynski’s theories eerily prophesize the capture of society by gamification. While he overlooked the benefits of technology, he diligently noted its dangers, recognizing its role in depriving us of purpose and meaning. Today the evidence is everywhere: religion is dying out, Western nations are culturally confused, people are getting married less and having fewer children, and many jobs are threatened by automation, so the traditional pillars of life — God, nation, family, and work — are weakening, and people are losing their value systems. Amid such uncertainty, games, with their well-defined rules and goals, provide a semblance of order and purpose that may otherwise be lacking in people’s lives. Gamification is thus no accident, but an attempt to plug a widening hole in society.

Unfortunately, it seems to be only a band-aid. Kaczynski observed that surrogate activities rarely kept people contented for long. There were always more stamps to collect, a better car to buy, a higher score to achieve. He believed artificial goals were too divorced from our actual needs to truly satisfy us, so they merely served to keep us busy enough not to notice our dissatisfaction. Instead of a fulfilled life, a life filled full.

Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary, substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritizing extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — in other words doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the inherent love of doing them — leads to lower well-being.

Kaczynski seemed to recognize this long before smartphones emerged. He felt that building a life around chasing what was offered on billboards and in magazines wouldn’t make him happy, and would only feed the Machine, so in 1971 he fled society, holing himself up in a log cabin in the Montana wilderness. There he attempted a simple and self-sufficient life, enjoying the small things like the sound of birds singing and the feeling of sunrays on his back.

But this idyll wouldn’t last. He claims that while hiking across one of his favorite spots — a rocky ridge with a waterfall — he was aghast to find a road had been built through it. As he saw it, industrialization, like some fungus creeping across the world, had followed him even here. Enraged, he decided modernity couldn’t be escaped, and had to be destroyed.

His emotional instability got the better of him, and in 1978 he began posting homemade bombs to those he accused of betraying humanity. In 1985, a package arrived at McConnell’s home. It was opened by his assistant, Nicklaus Suino. The package only partially exploded, injuring Suino and McConnell, and leaving them both shaken for life.

They were lucky. Less than a month later, Kaczynski would send another, more carefully prepared bomb to computer store owner, Hugh Scrutton, who’d become Kaczynski’s first murder victim.

By then, the FBI’s investigation into the bombings had grown into the largest in its history. For over a decade they scoured the country as Kaczynski continued to kill and injure, but much of their time was wasted chasing mirages, for Kaczynski would often scatter his bomb parcels with red herrings such as notes referencing fictitious conspiracies and signed with made-up initials.

Kaczynski’s actions, though unforgivable, can teach us as much about gamification as his philosophy. His red herrings lured people away from what they actually sought, and, as we shall see, this is the greatest danger of gamification.

III. When Red Herrings Become White Whales

While Kaczynski wanted to demolish industrial society and return humanity to an agrarian life, US defense secretary Robert McNamara wanted the opposite: to use American industrial might to crush the agrarian society of Vietnam.

McNamara was a statistician who believed what couldn’t be measured didn’t matter. He charted progress in the Vietnam war by body count, because it was simple to measure. It was his way of keeping score. But his focus on what could be easily measured led him to overlook what couldn’t: negative public opinion of the US Army both at home and in Vietnam, which deflated US morale while boosting enemy conscription. In the end, the US was forced to withdraw from the war, despite winning the battle of bodies, because it had lost the battle of hearts and minds.

Thus, the McNamara fallacy, as it came to be known, refers to our tendency to focus on the most quantifiable measures, even if doing so leads us from our actual goals. Put simply, we try to measure what we value, but end up valuing what we measure.

And what we measure is rarely what we mean to value. As Skinner showed, the goals of games — points, badges, trophies — are secondary reinforcers that only derive their worth due to their association with something we actually desire. But these associations are often illusory. A click is not the same thing as a food pellet. And points are not the same as progress.

We’re easily motivated by points and scores because they’re easy to track and enjoyable to accrue. As such, scorekeeping is, for many, becoming the new foundation of their lives. “Looksmaxxing” is a new trend of gamified beauty, where people assign scores to physical appearance and then use any means necessary to maximize their score. And in the online wellness space, there is now a “Rejuvenation Olympics” complete with a leaderboard that ranks people by their “age reversal”. Even sleep has become a game; many people now use apps like Pokemon Sleep that reward them for achieving high “sleep scores”, and some even compete to get the highest “sleep ranking”.

Most such scores are simplifications that don’t tell the whole story. For instance, sleep trackers only measure what’s easy to measure, like movement, which says nothing about crucial facts like time spent in REM sleep. A more accurate measure of how well you slept would be how refreshed you feel in the morning, but since this can’t be quantified, it tends to be ignored.

Further, if increasing one’s youthfulness score requires a daily 2-hour skincare routine, a diet of 50 pills each morning and night, abstention from many of life’s pleasures, and constant fixation on one’s vital metrics, is it really worth it? Of what value is adding a few years to your life if the cost is a life worth living? The scores we use to chart progress can’t articulate the nuances of reality, and yet we often tie our life goals and even self-worth to such arbitrary numbers.

In the end, even Kaczynski, with his IQ of 167, was led astray by red herring goals. In 1995 he enacted his endgame, demanding the New York Times and Washington Post print his anti-technology manifesto to prevent further bloodshed. All along, his goal had been to get the widest possible newspaper coverage, to maximize how many people would see his manifesto, but like McNamara he didn’t account for what couldn’t be quantified, such as how people would see his manifesto. Skinner’s pigeons had learned to desire the click of the food dispenser because it had been accompanied by food, and Kaczynski’s intended audience learned to hate his arguments because they’d been accompanied by violence. By maximizing audience size at the expense of everything else, Kaczynski gained a massive audience unwilling to give him a fair hearing.

Further, his manifesto contained a peculiar choice of words (“eat your cake and have it”), which was recognized by his brother, David, who alerted the police, leading to Kaczynski’s capture. And so, by fixating on the most obvious metric — the size of his audience — Kaczynski lost the one thing he’d been fighting for all along: freedom.

Kaczynski played the wrong game, and was trapped by it. Today, we all face similar traps. We chase numbers and icons because they’re always available, and the chase is often so immersive that it keeps us from seeing where it leads, which is often far away from what we actually want. This can lead to what the evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman calls “counterfeit fitness”: the constant, momentary “wins” that come with playing digital games give us a false sense of progression and accomplishment, a neurochemical high that feels like victory but is not, and which, if it becomes a habit, risks lulling us out of pursuing true fulfilment.

It explains why so many young men have lost themselves in video games, and are no longer in employment or relationships. The false signals they’re getting from video game progress, combined with the sexual reward of online porn, are convincing their dopamine pathways that they’re winning in life, even as their minds and futures atrophy.

It’s easy to persuade people into tying their sense of progress to fake or trivial goals. Casinos keep their customers happily losing money by distracting them with minor side games they’re likely to win. The small victories convince them they’re winning overall even as they lose the only games that actually matter.

This strange quirk of human behavior can even cost lives. In South Korea, a young couple became so addicted to raising a virtual baby that they let their real baby starve to death. The parents prioritized what they could quantify — levelling up their virtual baby — over that which they couldn’t — the life of their real one.

What makes pathological gameplaying so dangerous is that the more harm it does, the more alluring it becomes. If your baby is dead, why not raise a virtual one? If your life of playing video games has stopped you finding a girlfriend, why not play the AI girlfriend game? Thus, bad games form a feedback loop: they distract us from pursuing the things that will bring us lasting contentment, and without this lasting contentment, we become ever more dependent on false, transient metrics like scores and leaderboards to imbue our lives with meaning.

All the things a gamified world promises in the short term — pride, purpose, meaning, control, motivation, and happiness — it threatens in the long term. It has the power to detach people from life itself, rewriting their value systems so they favor the recreational over the real, and the next moment over the rest of their lives.

So what’s the solution?

IV. Playing for Keeps

There are billions of habitable planets in our galaxy, and many of them are far older than our own. Statistically, this would suggest that by now our galaxy would be teeming with signs of advanced alien life. And yet space is silent. This discrepancy, known as the Fermi paradox, has puzzled scientists for almost a century. Ted Kaczynski believed his prophecies offered an answer.

While serving a life sentence in jail, Kaczynski wrote a little-known sequel to his manifesto, entitled “Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How”. In it he outlines his belief that all technologically advanced civilizations become trapped in fatal games before they learn to colonize space. This happens because industry is driven by competition, and competition favors short-term wins over long-term sustainability, because players who care about long-term sustainability are significantly disadvantaged compared to players who only care about winning.

To illustrate his point, Kaczynski describes a thought experiment involving a forested region occupied by several rival kingdoms. The kingdoms that clear the most land for agriculture can support a larger population, affording them a military advantage. Every kingdom must therefore clear as much forest as possible, or face being conquered by its rivals. The resulting deforestation eventually leads to ecological disaster and the collapse of all the kingdoms. Thus, a trait that is advantageous for every kingdom’s short-term survival leads in the long term to every kingdom’s demise.

Kaczynski was describing a “social trap”, a term coined by a student of Skinner, John Platt, who’d theorized that an entire population behaving like pigeons in a Skinner box, each acting only for the next immediate reward, would eventually overexploit a resource, causing ruin for everyone. What Platt called “social traps”, Kaczynski called “self-propagating systems”, because he viewed them as negative-sum games that took on a life of their own, defeating every player to become the only winner. He believed such games not only drove industrialization but also replaced the sense of purpose and meaning that industrialization destroyed. They were thus inextricable from technological advancement, and, in a society like ours, impossible to stop.

In jail, Kaczynski was forbidden access to the web, and in letters he struggled to understand what Facebook was. Nevertheless, his warnings could easily have been referring to social media.

On Instagram, the main self-propagating system is a beauty pageant. Young women compete to be as pretty as possible, going to increasingly extreme lengths: makeup, filters, fillers, surgery. The result is that all women begin to feel ugly, online and off.

On TikTok and YouTube, there is another self-propagating system where pranksters compete to outdo each other in outrageousness to avoid being buried by the algorithm. Such extreme brinkmanship frequently leads to arrest or injury, and has even led to the deaths of, among others, Timothy Wilks and Pedro Ruiz.

On X, meanwhile, there is a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other, only make each other angrier, so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless state of mutually assured distraction.

Those are just three examples of social traps that have emerged in our gamified age. But the most worrying social trap is gamification itself.

Companies that exploit our gameplaying compulsion will have an edge over those who don’t, so every company that wishes to compete must gamify in ever more addictive ways, even though in the long term this harms everyone. As such, gamification is not just a fad; it’s the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be. And the games won’t just be confined to our phones — “extended reality” eyewear like Meta Quest and Apple Vision, once they become normalized, will make playing even harder to avoid.

Games will be created not just to extract money from people, but also data. The 2025 Enhanced Games, for instance, is a new futuristic version of the Olympics, funded by tech moguls like Peter Thiel, where contestants can exploit anything from cybernetic implants to PEDs to get a competitive advantage. The purpose of the games seems to be transhumanist: to motivate people to discover new ways to augment human abilities, with the eventual goal of turning men into gods.

There is, after all, a vacancy in heaven. When God is dead, and nations are atomized, and family seems burdensome, and machines can beat us at our jobs and even at art, and trust and truth are lost in a roiling sea of AI-generated clickbait — what is left but games?

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Games can motivate us to destroy ourselves, but they can also motivate us to better ourselves. In a gamified world, it’s possible to play without getting played, if one only chooses the right games. As Liv Boeree said: “Intelligence is knowing how to win the game. Wisdom is knowing which game to play.” Not playing is not an option; if you don’t play your own games, you’ll inevitably play someone else’s. So how do you decide which games to play? The story of gamification offers five broad rules.

First: choose long-term goals over short-term ones. Short, frequent feedback loops offer regular reinforcement, which helps motivate us. But what is made to motivate us too often addicts us. So consider the long-term outcomes of the games you’re playing: if you did the same thing you did today for the next 10 years, where would you be? Play games the 90-year-old you would be proud of having played. They won’t care how many progress bars you filled; they will care how many times you saw your parents.

Second: choose hard games over easy ones. Since the long-term value of games lies in their ability to hone skills and build character, easy games are usually a trap. People with unearned wealth — thieves, heirs and lottery winners — often end up losing it all, because the struggle to obtain a reward teaches us the reward’s worth, and is thus a crucial part of the reward.

Third: choose positive-sum games over zero-sum or negative-sum ones. Games evolved to confer status, and status is zero-sum — for some to have it, others must lose it. But we no longer have to play such games; we can change the rules so a win for me doesn’t mean a loss for you. Educational games are one example. Wealth creation is another. Positive-sum games — where every player benefits by playing — are a form of competition that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

Fourth: choose atelic games over telic ones. Atelic games are those you play because you enjoy them. Telic games are those you play only to obtain a reward. Chasing rewards like trophies and leaderboard rankings can help drive us to succeed, but a fixation on such rewards can become a source of stress, and can even make leisure activities feel like drudgery, turning games into work.

Finally, the fifth rule is to choose immeasurable rewards over measurable ones. Seeing numerical scores increase is satisfying in the short term, but the most valuable things in life — freedom, meaning, love — can’t be quantified.

There are an overwhelming number of games to choose from. If you want to keep fit, try Zombies, Run!, an app that takes the form of a post-zombie-apocalypse radio broadcast telling you which direction to run to avoid being eaten. If you want to learn general knowledge while helping those in poverty, play the FreeRice quiz. And if you want to form good habits, there’s Habitshare, which lets your friends track your attempts, motivating you more than if you were only accountable to yourself.

But if, among the countless games out there, you can’t find one right for you, then you can just create your own. Fun is not the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of pursuit, and literally anything can be pursued. By now there’s a way to keep any kind of score and play any kind of game.

Kaczynski’s game is over; he committed suicide last summer, still adamant humanity was doomed. His fearful legacy has since passed to his disciples, like Liverpool man Jacob Graham, who was recently jailed for terrorism after trying to emulate his idol. Graham may have thought he was saving the world, but, with all his talk of maximizing kill counts, he too was just playing a bad game.

In the end, Kaczynski and his followers made the same mistake as Skinner: they viewed us as mere puppets of our environment, devoid of agency and the ability to adapt. They needn’t have feared the world becoming a Skinner box, because, among all the papers written about that troublesome contraption, one fact is always overlooked: Skinner’s pigeons only kept pecking the button because they were trapped in a cage — they had nothing else to do. But you are still free. Even in a world where everything is a game, you don’t have to play by other people’s rules; you have a wide open world to create your own.

Your move.

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So here’s a list of 30 enlightening concepts, painstakingly summarized. 20 were posted earlier on Twitter, but the last 10 are just for you. As always, these ideas are not rules for life but food for thought. Click each title to learn more.

1. Goodhart’s Law:

When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure.

Since schools started to use test-scores as targets, they’ve gradually stopped teaching kids how to live fulfilling lives, and now mainly teach them how to pass school tests (See also: Campbell’s Law).

2. Hotelling's Law:

Rival products (burgers, pop songs, political parties) tend to grow more alike over time, because creators copy more successful rivals to replicate their success and steal their customers/audiences.

Paradoxically, this increases the value of being different.

3. Herostratic Fame:

Many people would rather be hated than unknown. In Ancient Greece, Herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis purely so he’d be remembered. Now we have “nuisance influencers” who stream themselves committing crimes and harassing people purely for clout.

4. Segal’s Law:

“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.”

Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

5. The Reading Recession:

There is more text than ever, yet people are reading ever less and outsourcing writing to chatbots. This is dangerous because language is the basis of thought, and if you can’t read or write well, you won’t think well.

6. Beginner's Bubble Effect:

"You cannot learn what you think you already know."

—Epictetus

The most ignorant people are not those who know nothing, but those who know a little, because a little knowledge grants the illusion of understanding, which kills curiosity and closes the mind.

7. Parkinson's Law:

Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. No matter the size of the task, it will often take precisely the amount of time you set aside to do it, because more time means more deliberation & procrastination.

The underlying principle, known as induced demand, applies to many other resources: Software expands to fill memory (Wirth’s law), patients expand to fill hospital beds (Roemer's law), energy consumption expands to meet supply (Jevon’s paradox), road congestion expands to fill roads (Braess’ paradox).

8. Benford's Law of Controversy:

We tend to fill gaps in information with emotion. We fear what we don’t understand, love what we naively romanticize, etc. As such, the things that fire people up most are usually the things they understand least.

9. Pareidolia:

We see whatever we look for.

For aeons, survival favored the paranoid—those able to discern a predator from the vaguest outline. From these survivors we inherited hyperactive pattern-detection, which once saved us from the lions, but now curses us to see them even in the skies.

10. Safetyism:

After US schools banned peanuts because some kids had allergies, more kids developed peanut allergies from lack of exposure. We’re increasingly protecting kids from life, which only makes them more vulnerable to it. Too much safety is dangerous.

11. Thaasophobia:

Wilson et al. (2014) found that people with nothing to do except think or give themselves an electric shock would often choose the shock. Many of us are so eager to avoid ourselves that we’d rather do something harmful than do nothing at all.

12. Serial-Position Effect:

We tend to recall the beginnings (Primacy effect) and endings (Recency effect) of things better than the middles. So if you create anything with a beginning & ending, focus more effort there.

(Curiously, this bias also affects LLMs, and no one yet knows why.)

13. Licensing Effect:

Believing you’re good can make you behave bad. Those who consider themselves virtuous worry less about their own behavior, making them more susceptible to ethical lapses. A big cause of immorality is self-righteous morality.

14. Preference Falsification:

If people are afraid to say what they really think, they will instead lie. Therefore, punishing speech—whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship—is ultimately a request to be deceived.

15. Nutpicking:

Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.

The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.

16. Moral Pollution:

We act like bad reputations are contagious, and mere proximity to something labelled immoral is itself immoral. Brands cut ties with people deemed unethical not because they value ethics, but because they fear contamination. Cancellation is moral quarantine.

17. KISS Principle:

The design of everything is gradually being stripped down, because simple is easy & safe; the less there is, the less there is to offend or justify. But such rampant minimalism comes at a cost; our cultures are losing their uniqueness and identity.

18. Cosmic Schmuck Principle:

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who sometimes worry that they’re a moron, and actual morons.

In other words, the best way to be less of an idiot is to treat yourself like one.

19. Cynical Genius Illusion:

Cynical people are widely seen as smarter, but sizable research suggests they actually tend to be dumber. Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal & disappointment without having to do or think.

20. Boxer’s Child Paradox:

Each generation tries to make life better for the next, but this deprives future generations of the ordeals needed to build character. In our relentless quest for ever more convenience, are we dooming posterity to weakness?

21. Substitution Hypothesis:

We’re wired for faith, so as we kill the old gods, we create new ones to replace them. New Atheism gave rise to Atheism+, a quasi-religion dedicated to “social justice”. In the spiritual void left by receding religion, many now worship "wokeness", with a new Original Sin (whiteness) and Holy Trinity (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion).

22. Ambiguity Aversion:

People tend to find uncertain outcomes less tolerable than bad outcomes. De Berker et al (2016) found that test participants who were told they had a small chance of receiving an electric shock exhibited much higher stress levels than those who knew they’d certainly receive an electric shock.

23. Semantic Stopsign:

One way people end discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word "evil" is used to explain behavior but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding but by killing curiosity.

24. Toothbrush Problem:

Psychologists treat theories like toothbrushes; no self-respecting person wants to use another’s. Theorists are incentivized by ego and professional pressures to overly rely on their own theories, so they often ignore the best models in favor of their own, applying them ever more widely, contorting them till they’re warped.

25. Ferguson Effect:

Black Lives Matter’s demonization of police led police to roll back activities in black communities, which caused murder rates to spike, and a net loss of thousands of black lives. BLM activists insist this effect is a myth, but multiple recent studies, such as Cheng & Long (2022) and Campbell (2023), suggest it’s real.

26. Shiny Object Syndrome:

We’re drawn to whatever’s new, because in our evolutionary history new info tended to matter. But now it doesn’t, because 99% of new info is clickbait, mass-produced and rushed-out to exploit our attraction to novelty. So stop chasing the new and seek info that’s stood the test of time.

27. Agenda-Setting Theory:

Most of the time, what’s happening in the news isn’t actually important, it only appears important because it’s in the news. The public conversation is based on whatever's reported by the press, giving the impression that this news matters most, when really it's just what was chosen by a few editors and thoughtlessly amplified by the masses.

28. Compassion Fade:

“One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.”

When presented with two appeals for charity—one based on famine statistics and one based on a single starving girl—people tend to donate much more to the girl.

Our minds can’t grasp big numbers, so we navigate the world through stories, not statistics. We’re moved by drama, not data.

29. Yes-Damn Effect:

You enthusiastically say yes to plans in the future, but when the time actually comes, you often regret it.

The future seems like a different world, distant and infinite in capacity, so you stuff it with plans and forget about it, passing the buck to your future self.

Trouble is, your future self tends to be a lot like you. So if you wouldn't want to do something today, don't agree to do it next month.

30. Generation Effect:

If you really want to understand a topic, don’t read about it, write about it. The act of explaining something helps connect the dots and commit them to memory far better than the passive act of reading.

It’s a big reason I make these lists!

And that’s it for now. I’ll have a post for paying subscribers out soon. Take care.

G.

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When I was a naïve young leftist I too believed Israel was a tyrannical regime, because that’s what everyone around me was saying, and my empty mind was a vacuum that sucked it all up. Once I escaped my echo-chamber, and began to objectively assess the facts, I realized just how unfairly Israel has been demeaned — not just among leftists and Muslims, but also in media, academia, and on Wikipedia.

In particular, Israel tends to be accused of three things: that it stole Palestine from the Arabs, that it’s an apartheid state, and that its government is morally equivalent to — or worse than — the terrorists it fights.

Let’s see whether these accusations fit the facts.

“Jews stole Palestine from the Arabs.”

The history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is too complicated to fit into the basic narrative template of oppressor versus victim that we apes rely on to understand the world. But it does begin with actual, legitimate victimhood.

Historically, Christians resented Jews for rejecting Jesus, and Muslims resented Jews for rejecting Muhammad. This resentment was exacerbated by the fact that the Jews, whose history of wandering the globe shaped them into a resourceful and adaptable people, would often economically outcompete the natives of the societies they became part of. As a result, the history of the Jews is a history of their persecution.

In the late 19th century, severe pogroms in Eastern Europe led to the rise of Zionism, the idea that Jews, to finally be free of the discrimination they’d faced for centuries, would need a state of their own. They eventually chose the region known as Palestine, because it corresponded to their ancestral Kingdom of Israel, as told by the Torah.

Palestine had never been a state, and at this time it was merely a province of the Ottoman Empire. From around 1867, Jews began to purchase Palestinian land from private landowners. When they arrived, they drained the swampland, built farms, and gradually pooled their land to form kibbutzim (small communities).

During WWI, the Ottomans were driven out of Palestine by the British, who began to administer the region. The Brits were desperate for wartime allies, so they promised a state to both Jews and Arabs in exchange for help winning the war.

After the war, the Jews proved more proactive than the Arabs in getting the British to keep their end of the bargain. As such, much more progress was made in laying the foundations for an Israeli state in Palestine than an Arab one (though the Hashemite Arabs did succeed in obtaining several Arab states from the British).

As Jewish communities began to grow in Palestine, they were met with hostility from local Arabs, whose bitterness toward the relatively affluent migrants was exacerbated by Islamic antisemitism and by kibbush ha'avoda — the Zionist practice of hiring Jews over non-Jews.

Tensions rose, and the Arabs rebelled in 1936, leading the British to establish the Peel Commission. The Brits offered to divide the land between Arabs and Jews, with the Arabs receiving 80% and the Jews 20%. The Jews accepted, but the Arabs refused.

After WWII broke out, some Arab leaders, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with the Nazis against both the British and the Jews. They oversaw the creation of Muslim SS units, and frequently broadcast Nazi propaganda, such as antisemitic conspiracy theories, across the Middle East.

For many Jews, the Holocaust vindicated Zionism, renewing their fears that unless they had a state of their own, they’d continue to be scapegoated and persecuted. As such, many more American and European Jews began buying land in Palestine. They were soon joined by several exoduses of Middle Eastern Jews fleeing persecution in Muslim countries. All the while, conflict with the Palestinian Arabs escalated.

After WWII, the British, war-weary and facing a crumbling empire, surrendered administration of an increasingly chaotic Palestine to the UN. In 1947 the UN voted to resolve the conflict by dividing Palestine into two states; one Jewish, one Arab. This time slightly more land was offered to the Jews than to the Arabs, but this was because much of the Jewish area was deemed by the UN to be sterile wasteland in the Negev Desert. Nevertheless, the Arabs rejected the plan, and many took to the streets to protest. The protests became riots, which soon escalated into a civil war between Arabs and Jews.

The Zionists saw the Arabs’ violent rejection of their right to a Jewish state as all the more reason for its necessity. So in May 1948, with the UN’s blessing, the Zionists declared independence for the state of Israel.

Immediately, five Arab countries attacked the newborn nation. In the ensuing war, both sides committed atrocities. Around 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from Israel in what some call the Nakba (catastrophe). Israel won the war, but Jordan captured the region now known as the West Bank, driving out the Jews. Meanwhile, the Arabs who’d fled Israel tried to return, but since there were 700,000 of them and only 600,000 Jews, they were deemed a security risk and denied re-entry.

Tensions continued for two decades, and in 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria fought another war with Israel, which Israel won in six days, capturing Sinai and Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Humiliated, the Arab states met in Sudan, where they issued the Khartoum Resolution: “No peace with Israel. No negotiation with Israel. No recognition of Israel.”

In 1973 the Arab coalition launched a surprise attack against Israel on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. And once again they were defeated. During the ensuing peace talks, the Arabs rejected all offers, leading to the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban famously quipping, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Nevertheless, Israel continued offering opportunities. In 1978 it proposed to return Sinai to Egypt if Egypt agreed to peace with Israel, a deal Egypt finally accepted. In 1994 Jordan also accepted a peace deal with Israel. Several times, Israel offered to return the Golan Heights to Syria if Syria agreed to peace, but this offer was rejected. Most of the other Arab states also refused to make peace with Israel.

Throughout the 1990s, Israel tried to make peace with the Palestinians through the Oslo process, which would’ve finally given the Palestinians their own state. The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat refused every offer proposed to him, so in 2000 the negotiations collapsed, sparking the Second Intifada, a series of violent Palestinian riots in which thousands died.

In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, relinquishing control of the region to the Palestinians. The Palestinians held elections, and chose to elect Hamas, a genocidal ultranationalist jihadist group that had sworn to destroy Israel. With that, there would be no more opportunities for peace.

Now, obviously a lot more happened. But the common idea that Israel “stole” Palestine is so simplistic as to be wrong. To summarize: Palestine was never a state. The first Jewish settlers bought and developed the land they settled on. After tensions with Arabs rose, the settlers tried to negotiate. After negotiations failed and hostilities escalated, they formed a state with UN approval, and when they subsequently annexed Arab territory, it was as a result of war that the Arabs had initiated.

Overall the history shows a persistent trend: Israel and the international community repeatedly offered compromises to the Arabs in exchange for peace, and the Arabs repeatedly rejected them. So the common narrative, that the conflict was a result of stereotypical “Jewish greed,” is false. It was more a result of Arab intransigence.

“Israel is an apartheid state.”

Many leftists are so fixated on the West’s historical racism that they view every other conflict as a replica of it; a simple case of light-skinned people oppressing dark-skinned people. Since they’re obsessed with white supremacy, they view even the Israel-Palestine issue through this lens, using terms like “apartheid,” “colonialism,” and “genocide” to describe it. But Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians cannot be accurately described with these words; it exists in its own unique context.

Unlike with South African apartheid, Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise 20% of the country’s population, have all the rights afforded to the Jews, and many even sit in the Knesset. Further, Israel allows Palestinians into Israel to work, though, since millions of Arabs want to see the country obliterated, Israel must carefully vet those it welcomes. And given the flow of weapons into Palestine from Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, Israel must strictly control who can enter or leave the Palestinian territories. This isn’t apartheid, it’s survival.

Israel used to occupy Gaza just as it now occupies the West Bank. It eventually did what “social justice activists” demanded, and withdrew from Gaza. The result was that Hamas took power and began curtailing the rights of Palestinians, indoctrinating them with antisemitic propaganda, stealing international aid intended for them, and using the aid to buy weapons, build its subterranean terrorist base, and fund billionaire lifestyles in Qatar for its leaders.

As for the West Bank, it’s true that Israel has been building illegal settlements there. This is the closest Israel comes to “colonialism,” but it’s actually better understood as a military occupation: the IDF has a presence in the West Bank due to the continued threat of terrorist groups — not just Hamas but also Islamic Jihad, Lions’ Den, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades.

Now, since swathes of the Israeli-occupied land are much cheaper than Israeli land, many lower-income Israelis build their homes on it, and the Israeli government, instead of stopping them, gives them its blessing (and sometimes even subsidies.) A small number of these settlers are extremists who attack local Palestinian properties. All of this may be illegal, wrong, and stupid, but to call it “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing” is an insult to actual victims of such atrocities.

Overall, Israel, like all countries, has committed some crimes and many mistakes. But apartheid isn’t one of them, because Israel’s segregation of Palestinians is not motivated by racism but by security. Those who demand it treats all Palestinians the same as it treats its own citizens are asking it to open its doors to those who wish to destroy it.

And it’s strange that they single out the region’s only liberal democracy — and world’s only Jewish state — for this kind of criticism, when so many other countries are doing much worse. 700,000 Ethiopians have been ethnically cleansed in Tigray, and there were no protests in Western streets. 100,000 Armenians have been ethnically cleansed in Nagorno-Karabakh, and there were no protests in Western streets. Right now, Pakistan is working to expel 1.7 million Afghan refugees, and there will be no protests in Western streets. So why the huge turnout for protests whenever Israel fights to keep itself safe?

Some might argue that Westerners single out Israel for criticism because it is supported by their own governments. But Saudi Arabia is also supported by Western governments, and its barbaric laws and war crimes in Yemen have been mostly met with silence.

The constant singling out of Israel by leftists and Muslims makes no sense unless they wish to continue the long history of scapegoating Jews. Or perhaps, in the case of woke leftists, they believe that Israelis tend to have pale skin, so view them as white and hold them to a higher standard.

In any case, isn’t that the real racism here?

“The Israeli government is morally comparable to Hamas.”

A common response to the claim that Hamas is a bunch of religious fanatics who kill innocent civilians is that the Israeli government is just the same.

It’s true that within the Israeli government, there are Kahanist religious extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who dream of seizing all of Palestine and of building the prophesied Third Temple on the Temple Mount, an event that would have potentially apocalyptic consequences.

However, these few ultra-Zionists only hold positions in office because Netanyahu, as unpopular as he is, needed votes to form a government. They’re a fringe minority with little power, having their proposals routinely rejected and even being excluded from the recent war cabinet. Further, the entire Israeli government is held in check by the secular Israeli Supreme Court, which aims to uphold human rights even for Palestinians. Netanyahu has tried to roll back the Court’s power, but he’s been met with the largest protests in Israel’s history. It’s unlikely he’ll be in power for long.

Contrast this with Hamas, which rules without checks or balances in Gaza, and is almost exclusively ruled by religious extremists who restrict the rights of their own people and call for holy war against infidels, decreeing not just mass murder but also rape and torture. As a jihadist organization, Hamas feeds on hatred and division, so is threatened by peace. In 2010 it carried out a series of terror attacks to derail peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and its recent October 7th attacks were likely formulated to derail peace talks between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

A common Hamas motto is "We love death more than [the Jews] love life," which is evident in its actions. It targets Israeli civilians and uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, hiding soldiers and weapons in hospitals and other public places. In contrast, the IDF generally takes care to avoid harming civilians, often warning them prior to an attack, but, given Hamas’ tactics, this isn’t always possible.

Half of Gaza’s population is children, so kids are often among the casualties. After using children as human shields, Hamas exploits their deaths to prey on the public’s emotions. Of course, it doesn’t actually care about kids; not only does it deliberately target Israeli children, it also broadcasts “kids’ shows” that encourage Palestinian children to blow themselves up.

It’s said that power corrupts, but it usually just reveals what was already there. So it’s useful to ask what absolute power would reveal about Israel and Hamas. In other words, what would each side do if it had nukes and its enemies didn’t? Based on Hamas’ history, and its founding charter, which calls for the total obliteration of Israel, we can be confident it would nuke Tel Aviv. And yet, if Israel had nukes, it wouldn’t nuke Palestine. We know this because it’s had nukes for 50 years.

Now, it must be mentioned that Israel bears some blame for the growth of Hamas; on at least two occasions Israel has supported the jihadi group; initially so it would hijack the Palestinian cause from the more secular (and thus more reasonable-seeming) Palestine Liberation Organization, and later as a foil to Hamas’ rival Fatah. They were foolish errors, but the fact that they were — like most of Israel’s failings — exposed by Israelis, attests to a level of transparency and fairness in Israel that you seldom find among Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

Whoever bears the responsibility for Hamas’ rise, it is the responsibility of both Israelis and Palestinians to end it. The jihadis’ total disregard for human life, and their relentless spreading of hatred and delusion, ultimately prevents peace or compromise and hurts Israelis and Palestinians alike.

Final Thoughts

We need to stop viewing this issue in terms of who is oppressing who, because that leads nowhere.

On the one hand, we have Palestinians who were denied a state of their own, and who are now forced to endure sanctions and bombings while trapped under the tyranny of an Islamist death-cult that steals their aid, suppresses their rights, and uses them as human shields.

On the other hand, we have the Jews, who have been persecuted throughout history, and who asked for a single place in which they could finally be safe, just one tiny Jewish state that was relentlessly attacked from the moment it was born, and which is now trying to survive amid 22 hostile Arab states and a world that resents it.

Either side can easily be portrayed as the victim, because victimhood is limited only by imagination. So we must consider the question not in terms of who is most oppressed, but who is most reasonable? Who is most willing to compromise, and whose goals will, overall, benefit Israelis and Palestinians most?

Israel has its extremes — its bombs sometimes hit civilians, its settlement-building is out of control, and its Supreme Court is under attack by its own government.

But Israel’s excesses are Hamas’ norms. The jihadis don’t even have a Supreme Court, or any checks on their power. They’ve stifled their people’s freedom more than Israel ever could. And they’ve sworn to keep killing civilians as long as Israel still stands.

Ultimately, Israel can only be a better neighbor to the Palestinians when Hamas and its allies are gone. Tragically, that requires violence. Israel should know that the world is watching, and will hold it to account for any excesses. At the same time, it is doing what must be done, and so, for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, I give it my cautious and conditional support.

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"A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

—Hunter S. Thompson

In our age of abundance we’re constantly faced with choices, which we must navigate with a brain that evolved for a much simpler life. As such, we’re overwhelmed by options, lost in the labyrinth of possibility, trapped by unfettered freedom.

According to various polls, people estimate that they spend between 2.5 and 3 hours per day making trivial decisions, such as what to eat for dinner. That’s around 1000 hours, or 40 days, of dithering per year, and it doesn’t include the weightier decisions like where to live or who to marry.

Most of our everyday choices are between similar things; what movie to watch, what brand of toothpaste to buy. Fredkin’s paradox states that the more similar two choices seem, the less the decision should matter, yet the harder it is to choose between them. As a result, we often spend the most time on the decisions that matter least.

This is illustrated by Buridan’s ass, a mythical donkey that finds itself precisely equidistant from two identical bales of hay. The ass tries to make a firm decision as to whether to eat from the left bale or the right, but since there’s no rational reason to prefer either, the donkey wavers until it starves to death.

Buridan’s ass illustrates that there’s a cost to weighing options, which can exceed the cost of any of the options. Thus, the choices we make don’t need to be the best; they just have to be worth more than the time spent making them. If we spend less time making decisions, we can spend more time making whatever decision we made work.

The best way to manage the myriad decisions of the modern age is by employing “philosophical razors,” so-called because they shave away options, simplifying choices.

Naturally, there’s an overwhelming range of razors to choose from. I’ve tried scores of them, and have found that most aren’t workable, either because they lead to poor decisions or they’re too complicated for everyday decisions.

A few, though, have proven indispensable. Here are the five I use most.

1. Uphill Decisions:

“If you can't decide between two equally difficult choices, take the path that's more difficult/painful in the short term.”

Humans are guilty of “temporal discounting,” the tendency to overvalue short term pain/reward and undervalue long term pain/reward. So if a decision is painful in the short term, you’re likely overestimating that pain, and should choose it over the longer term pain that only seems small because it’s far away.

2. The Two-Minute Rule:

“If a task will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined.”

Adding a 2-minute task to your mental to-do list, keeping it in memory, and managing the anxiety of not having done it will take more effort than just doing it now.

Unresolved decisions nag at you, costing you time, attention, and peace of mind. It’s worth making trivial decisions immediately to lift their burden and make space for more important matters.

3. Solomon's Paradox:

“If you can’t decide, pretend you’re deciding for a friend.”

Solomon’s paradox is a robust finding that we're better at solving other people's problems than our own, because detachment yields objectivity. But research has found that viewing oneself in the 3rd person yields the same detachment and objectivity. So if you’re stuck in a dilemma, consider what advice you’d give if the dilemma was your best friend’s.

4. The Hesitation Heuristic:

“If you can’t decide, the answer is no.”

We live in an age of abundance, where new options are constantly becoming available. But every option has an opportunity cost, so if you keep taking opportunities you’re not eager for, you’ll miss out on ones to which you’d unequivocally answer “Yes!”

This heuristic is best used as a last resort when other decision-making heuristics have failed. It’s also conditional on you having many options available. If for whatever reason you don’t get many options, you should use the opposite heuristic: “If you can’t decide, the answer is yes.”

5. Regret Minimization:

“The opinion you should care about most is your future self’s.”

One of the most powerful razors is to view a decision from the perspective of your future self. It combines the effects of Solomon’s Paradox and Uphill Decisions, offering the former’s detachment and the latter’s view of the long-term.

One way to achieve this is with the 10:10:10 strategy: consider how a decision will affect you in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years. This is particularly good for fighting addictions. For instance, if you’re on a diet but craving a chocolate muffin, consider how you’ll feel 10 minutes after consuming it, and you’ll realize you’ll no longer taste the chocolatiness, and will only feel guilt. Furthermore, in 10 months you’ll have no memory of ever having eaten it. By stepping outside the present moment, you become less compelled by immediate gratification.

More momentous decisions benefit from even bigger leaps through time. When trying to decide whether to start a business called Amazon, Jeff Bezos imagined himself at 80 years, looking back at his life. He realized that what he would’ve regretted most was not failing but never trying.

Think about it: somewhere in the future, your older self is watching you through memories.

Whether it's with regret or nostalgia depends on what you do now.

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The first step is to distinguish good info from junk info. Good info is that which changes you, either by making you think or act differently, or by changing the certainty with which you already think or act. Junk info is the opposite; you’re exactly the same after consuming it as before.

So how to find info that changes you?

There are two ways people obtain info online: fishing and hunting.

Fishing is passive. You don’t know what you want to know and just casually scan the screen till something catches your interest. Examples include scrolling social media, browsing news websites, and idly refreshing the YouTube home page.

Hunting, on the other hand, is an active process. You have a clear idea what you want to know about and consciously search for it. Basically, any time you’re researching something, you’re hunting.

We fish to find questions to ask, and we hunt to find answers. We fish to widen knowledge, and we hunt to deepen it.

Most people spend the vast majority of their time in a passive state of fishing. To make matters worse, they fish in polluted waters — like the average social media feed and the average news website — which are full of junk info that they’ll never use. Idle curiosity is just as easily attracted to junk info as to good info, so passive browsing in polluted waters quickly leads to intellectual obesity.

Although active hunting is generally a better use of time than passive fishing, some fishing is needed in order to know what to hunt for. In such cases, it’s best to fish in fresh and bountiful waters, free of junk and full of treasure. The ideal fishing waters should expose you to a lot of useful info within a given duration of fishing, with minimal distractions and maximum getting to the point.

In light of all this, here are my favored fishing waters:

1. Twitter (X)

A poorly curated social media feed is one of the worst fishing waters, but a well-curated feed is one of the very best. On Twitter I follow over 600 accounts, but I seldom browse my unfiltered feed, instead creating lists of select accounts for a particular purpose, or browsing the timelines of individual accounts.

I tend to consume two types of content on Twitter: data (what to think) and wisdom (how to think). I like my data as raw as possible, so I tend toward primary sources like academic papers. With wisdom I don’t care where it comes from, because good sense doesn’t need references.

Some of my favorite “data” accounts are: Crémieux, Ethan Mollick, Cory Clark, Koenfucius, Philip Tetlock (also a great source of wisdom), Rolf Degen, Steve Stewart Williams, The Missing Data Depot

Some of my favorite “wisdom” accounts are Ayishat Akanbi, Daily Stoic, James Clear, Jim O’Shaughnessy, Kpaxs, Kunal, Naval, Salome Sibonex, The Stoic Emperor.

Finally, I must give a special shoutout to Dylano and his magical notebook, Essayful. He’s my favorite source of literary quotations and writerly inspiration.

Of course, my Twitter feeds are geared for my needs as a writer, but you can curate your own feeds for the kind of info that you value. What matters most is that you actively curate and take charge of what you are seeing, for otherwise your senses will be hijacked by those wishing to commodify your attention.

2. News Sources

If I wasn’t a writer who’s expected to have opinions on things, I wouldn’t bother following the news. But I am, so I must. The worst mistake a news consumer can make is to get all their info from a single source, so I regularly switch up my news sources between outlets of clashing editorial stances. I also use news aggregators like AllSides and GroundNews, which allow me to compare how different outlets are covering the same event, so I learn not just the news but also how it’s being spun.

3. Podcasts

I love podcasts because, unlike text, audio can be consumed while doing other things — driving, cooking, jogging, etc — making them a more time-efficient source of info. As I’ve mentioned, my favorite podcast is Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom. Every episode is packed with info, making it an effective method of fishing and, if you use the search feature, also a good way to start a hunt. I don’t get the time to consistently listen to other podcasts, but of the ones I’ve flirted with, I like Infinite Loops and Conversations with Tyler most.

4. Essays

I spend most of my reading time on academic studies because I need hard data to understand what’s going on. However, a well-written essay can offer a writer things beside pure data — like inspiration — so I sometimes use Substack Notes to find good essays. I’m also subscribed to many other Substackers, 10 of which you’ll find recommended on my home page (I’ll recommend more as I read more).

Whatever you look for, look for it in rich, unpolluted waters, because this minimizes the time you need to spend fishing before you find something to hunt for. The majority of your browsing time should not be passively fishing but actively hunting. I’m currently hunting some monstrously big game, which I’ll have more to say about soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading. Happy fishing, and happy hunting.

“The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played.”

― Orwell

It’s getting ever harder to distinguish humans from bots, not just because bots are becoming more humanlike, but also because humans are becoming more botlike.

As knowledge of human psychology evolves, algorithms become better at shaping human behavior. Step onto social media and you’ll see the same groups of people getting outraged by the same kinds of things every single day, like clockwork.

The rise of botlike behavior over the past decade has led to the creation of a meme: the NPC, or Non-Player Character. Once a term used to describe video game characters whose behavior is completely computer-controlled, it now also refers to real humans who behave as predictably as video game NPCs, giving scripted responses and engaging in seemingly mindless, automated behaviors.

Naturally, everyone believes that their political opponents are NPCs, and no one ever suspects that they themselves are. But being an NPC is not about what you think or do, but how you determine what to think or do. And when judged by this standard, we are all, to some extent, NPCs.

Here’s why: the brain is commonly regarded as a thinking machine, but it’s more often the opposite: a machine that tries to circumvent thinking. This is because cognition costs time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources.

As such, the brain evolved to be a “cognitive miser” that operates according to the principle of least effort, taking shortcuts in thinking and perceiving that build a workable but hugely simplified (and cost effective) model of the world.

An NPC, then, is someone who does precisely what they evolved to do. Instead of splurging time and energy to identify what’s true, they take shortcuts to “truth,” outsourcing their beliefs and automating their reasoning.

The web offers several different shortcuts to “truth,” and the route one takes determines the species of NPC that they belong to. I have identified five common NPC species into which the majority of netizens fall. Analyzing the shortcuts they take is crucial to understanding the information landscape. Further, since you’ve likely been using at least one of these shortcuts yourself, considering them will help you identify the flaws in your own belief-forming behaviors.

Let’s examine the various breeds of NPC and their different shortcuts to “truth.”

NPC #1. The Conformist

Conformists are the stereotypical NPCs. They trust the process by which society reaches consensus, so accept the mainstream view on all things. Whenever they’re in need of answers, they consult the top result of Google — typically Wikipedia — and accept whatever answer it gives.

Trusting the consensus seems like a good shortcut to truth, because it feels like one is outsourcing one’s thinking to not one expert but to all of them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this in practice.

In 2016 a team of physicists led by Lachlan Gunn investigated the accuracy of witnesses picking suspects from police lineups. They found that as the size of unanimous agreement increased, so did its inaccuracy, until it was no better than chance. The researchers discovered a simple statistical explanation for this “paradox of unanimity:” since everyone is different, the probability of every single person happening to agree on one belief is tiny unless some irrational force, such as laziness or social pressure, is making them agree. In other words, the more people agree, the less likely they are thinking for themselves.

This would explain, for instance, how Peter Daszak’s letter and the Proximal Origin paper led to a premature consensus around Covid’s origins in March 2020. And why in that same month the WHO disastrously announced that Covid was not airborne.

When the truth is easily verifiable, such as in mathematics, consensuses are formed in the ideal way: when all the experts reach the same conclusion. But when the truth is not easily verifiable, such as in medicine or the social sciences, consensus is formed not when all the experts reach the same conclusion but when a few experts reach the same conclusion and then all the other experts simply take their word for it, typically because they lack the time or resources to challenge the prevailing hypothesis.

And the experts who initiate a consensus are often driven by bad motivations. Academics are incentivized to publish findings that are notable, which often leads them to manipulate or fabricate data. In the past few weeks there have been several such scandals. In one case, a prominent “antiracist” professor faked research to portray the US as systemically racist. In another case, the president of Stanford was forced to resign after evidence emerged that his research contained manipulated images. In yet another case, a professor who studies dishonesty was found to have engaged in it in her research.

Academics are also susceptible to being bought. In the 1960s the sugar industry initiated Project 226, the funding of a decades-long false scientific consensus that shifted the blame for heart disease from sugar to fat. Much more recently, the Deputy Mayor of London was caught asking a scientist on City Hall’s payroll to challenge studies questioning the effectiveness of the Mayor’s flagship Ultra Low Emission Zone policy.

Besides money, consensus-makers are also influenced by ideology. Academia has a strong left-liberal bias, and many academics are “woke” in that they’re primed to see oppression in even trivial occurences, leading them to behave more like activists than scholars. This bias is now so prevalent that no attempts are made to hide it; last year the prestigious social science journal Nature Human Behavior loudly and proudly called for the suppression of scientific discoveries deemed politically incorrect. Not that they needed to; most academics already self-censor to avoid the wrath of woke colleagues and students, which is little wonder, considering that 75% of students recently claimed they’d report their professors for expressing an offensive opinion. Due to the fear of ostracism, academic circles are typically spirals of silence where few feel able to state heterodox views.

Since academia is the source of most new knowledge, its biases are inherited by every information source downstream of it, including the mainstream media, Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, ChatGPT, social media algorithms, policy papers, Hollywood movies, and societal consensus itself. The ubiquity of woke liberal bias makes it hard for us to see, just as fish have no concept of water, but this is precisely why it must be called out; unlike more extreme political views, liberal biases affect everything.

Recent history shows the development of the mainstream’s woke bias. Between 2010 and 2019 there was a roughly 400% increase in the mainstream media’s usage of words like “sexist” and “racist,” which was not justified by the actual incidence of discrimination, and has led liberals to, for example, grossly overestimate the number of police shootings of black Americans. This media bias in turn influences the consensus-makers, bringing the system full-circle, and creating a feedback loop of social justice hysteria.

All of this has driven, and been driven by, a mainstream gamma bias that emphasizes social disparities that disfavor women and minorities (such as movie representation), while overlooking disparities that disfavor men and white people (such as suicide rates). Conformists consider it an outrage that women and black people are underrepresented in, say, the tech industry, but merely shrug when told that over 70% of psychologists are women or over 80% of NBA players are “people of color.”

Conformists can thus frequently be identified by the same misperceptions made by the cultural mainstream: namely, a one-sided fixation on issues facing women and minorities, and the simplistic belief that such issues are largely due to discrimination. The conformist’s demands for a more just world may be sincere but their double standards and refusal to appreciate the complexity of the social issues they decry make their righteousness ring hollow. And their gradual radicalization by Wikipedia and the mainstream media, which have convinced them their opinions are normal and anyone who disagrees is “far-right,” makes them impervious to correction and spiteful toward anyone who tries.

Consensus leads to truth when the consensus-makers are motivated to reach truth. But unanimity is just as often a product of laziness, peer pressure, money, and ideology as of rational agreement, so the conformist often takes a shortcut not to truth but merely to the narratives that are most socially, politically, or financially convenient for the consensus-makers to spread.

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NPC #2. The Contrarian

Contrarians are the antithesis of conformists: instead of believing whatever the mainstream believes, they believe the opposite. This is because they start from the position that society’s consensus-producing system is made to manipulate the masses.

A contrarian’s distrust of the mainstream often stems from an ideology that encourages skepticism of society generally, such as Christianity, Islam, or NRx. But just as often, contrarians are disillusioned conformists.

A conformist who develops a sense of curiosity eventually realizes that the consensus has not been completely truthful. The realization usually starts with a single issue, for instance gender. The conformist may initially notice that neither she nor anyone she knows has this “gender identity” she’s told she has. Then she’ll notice that the narrative that claims of gender dysphoria are increasing due to the lifting of stigmas makes no sense, because the majority of new cases are adolescent females. Then she’ll realize that the frightening claim that gender-dysphoric youths are more likely to commit suicide if they can’t obtain “gender affirming care” — a claim that spurs many to support medical transition for minors — is unfounded. Then she’ll realize the “Dutch protocol” — the consensus that a course of puberty-blocking drugs followed by cross-sex hormones is a safe and effective way to alleviate juvenile gender dysphoria — was based on methodologically flawed studies funded by Ferring Pharmaceuticals. And when she speaks out about all this, and receives no answer except accusations of transphobia, she’ll conclude that the consensus has been intentionally gaslighting her about gender, and suddenly she’ll begin to doubt its claims about vaccines, and race, and climate change, and Ukraine…

Our hatred for something will be more intense if we once trusted it, so conformists who feel betrayed by the consensus will often overcorrect and stop believing anything the consensus says. Thus is born a new kind of NPC: the contrarian.

Since the mainstream consensus is left-liberal, contrarians tend to lean right. They are a rarer species of NPC than the conformists, but they dominate the broad fringes of the internet, and are served by a fast-growing alternative media that is already comparable in influence to the mainstream press. Moderate contrarians, who instinctively disagree with the mainstream only on the most contentious topics, may get their info from mildly contrarian outlets like The Hill and the Joe Rogan Experience. More committed contrarians will rely on aggressively anti-establishment sources like Russell Brand, Tucker Carlson, and Bret Weinstein. The most extreme contrarians, who disbelieve everything mainstream, will resort to professional fabulists like Alex Jones and David Icke.

If a contrarian is not already a conspiracy theorist, then contrarianism will quickly make them one. This is because fringe media are naturally dominated by a single seductive narrative: that the establishment can’t be trusted because it’s controlled by shadowy puppetmasters seeking to manipulate the masses. The specific puppetmasters may vary — George Soros, Klaus Schwab, the Freemasons, the Jews — but in all variations of the narrative, the puppetmasters are using globalist policies and mainstream institutions to feminize men, create a one world government, and initiate some kind of “Great Reset.” It is this core belief that justifies the contrarian’s gambit of believing the opposite of the mainstream.

Conspiratorial thinking is hardwired into us via an evolved heuristic called “hyperactive agency detection.” Historically it was safer to be paranoid, because doing so helped us avoid traps. The result is that we've evolved to err on the side of presuming things are part of some scheme, which helps explain not just conspiracy theories but also creationism.

Today, with access to almost infinite information, contrarians can join whatever dots they need to in order to justify their paranoia. They’ll believe the mainstream when it supports their views, but will typically dismiss info that challenges their narrative as “WEF shilling” or a “Soros-funded psyop.” Basically, attacks on their beliefs become evidence for their beliefs.

Contrarians will often justify their rejection of mainstream consensus by bringing up past examples of it being wrong. But they’ll never apply this same standard to the fringes, which have been wrong far more often.

We know academia has a replication crisis because academics discovered it does. The fringes don’t have a crisis of self-doubt, because they’re not even attempting to self-correct. This is why most of the research I cite in my articles comes from the mainstream. (If I ever appear to attack the mainstream more than the fringes, it’s only because I hold the mainstream to a far higher standard.)

The mainstream media mislead the public with Russell conjugations and paltering (highly selective reporting), but they take care to get the actual reporting right, and when they don’t, they usually issue corrections. In contrast, contrarian media rarely concede when they’re wrong; Fox News and Alex Jones knowingly peddled conspiracy theories for years, but only admitted to it when forced to in court.

The allure of contrarianism lies not in its accuracy but in its intoxicating high: a sensation that one is more aware than the mindless “sheeple.” Contrarians are quick to call conformists NPCs, but in truth they are not doing any more thinking; it takes precisely the same amount of effort to disagree with everything the mainstream says as to agree with everything it says. Black sheep may stand out, but they’re still sheep.

Contrarians are correct that the mainstream consensus is often wrong. But they commit an error when they assume, therefore, that the fringes must be right. Truth is not zero-sum; it’s possible to disagree with an idiot and still be an idiot. For this reason the path of the contrarian leads not to truth but to fringe conspiracy theories that are often fringe for good reason, and thus contrarianism is ultimately an even more perilous shortcut than conformism.

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NPC #3. The Disciple

The disciple is not so much a separate species to the contrarian as its imago; the butterfly to its caterpillar. But it takes a different shortcut to “truth,” so should be considered distinct.

There is a human need to have faith in something, and if one cannot have faith in societal consensus, then that faith must be placed somewhere else. Contrarians try to put their trust in the fringes, but the fringes are cacophonous, so contrarians will often be tempted to put all their trust in a single, charismatic, anti-establishment demagogue. In so doing, they devolve into the oldest NPC species: the disciple.

Humanity’s first and simplest shortcut to “truth” was to choose someone considered wise — a sage, king, or prophet — and then believe whatever they said. In so doing, one outsourced one’s beliefs to the person they trusted was best at discerning truth.

Being a disciple is an attractive shortcut to “truth” because it requires no decision-making, only mimicry. Emulating a person is much easier than embodying an idea; when a Christian wants to know how to act, he could laboriously trawl through his Bible, or he could ask himself, “What would Jesus do?” Since people are mimetic, they tend not to follow ideologies but ideologues.

Today, many people form beliefs by engaging in a kind of cognitive cosplay, imitating the opinions of idols they admire. The most commonly followed idols today are men like Andrew Tate, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. Such figures, who often present themselves as delivering the masses from the globalist elites and averting the feminization of men and the collapse of Western Civilization, tend to lean right because the establishment is left-liberal. Further, they tend to act unapologetically masculine, which attracts young men deprived of role models by the mainstream’s gamma bias against them.

The idol exerts so much influence over his disciples that eventually it can override their integrity. Trump supporters decry the establishment for its dishonesty, while tirelessly making excuses for their idol’s pathological dishonesty. Andrew Tate followers are quick to call their opponents groomers, while dismissing substantial claims their idol is a groomer. And Musk followers, who are often terrified of vaccines, lab-grown meat, and social engineering, are seemingly at peace with their idol literally wanting to put chips in people’s heads.

The theoretical advantage of being a disciple is that if one can choose an individual with better judgment than oneself, then by adopting his opinions, one can appropriate that better judgment for oneself. However, in practice this tends not to work. A time-tested finding is the two-step flow theory, which states that most people's opinions are copied from their favorite “opinion leaders” (influencers, celebrities, demagogues), who in turn copy the opinions of their favored mass media. As such, a disciple’s idol is often themselves an NPC who is outsourcing his thinking to Fox News or some other low-grade source.

This is especially true of opinion leaders who lead busy lives, such as Trump, Musk, and Tate, who couldn’t possibly have the time to adequately research and consider all the topics they confidently opine on. It’s why even men as undeniably brilliant as Musk will often express ignorant opinions, like claiming the US will be Covid-free by the end of April 2020.

But when you are a disciple, none of this matters; idolizing someone blinds you to their faults, which you end up emulating. The disciple is ultimately just an NPC following an NPC, and thus the shortcut he takes leads not to truth but to wherever his idol blindly leads him.

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NPC #4. The Tribalist

We lived in tribes for over 90% of human history. As such, tribalism is one of the most deeply hardwired of human instincts, and it frequently hijacks our quest for truth, so that other kinds of NPC tend to eventually evolve, or devolve, into tribalists.

The tribalist’s approach to belief-formation is simple: they’ll seek out whichever tribe they feel the most affinity with, and, under the mistaken impression that those who share their political beliefs are best able to discern truth generally, will then crowdsource their beliefs from within the tribe.

Tribalists have one clear advantage over other breeds of NPC: their tribe offers not just an easy way to form beliefs, but also strength in numbers and a sense of belonging.

But tribalism also has unique disadvantages. Throughout history, tribes that held together would conquer tribes that didn’t, regardless of whether their beliefs about the world were true, so tribal belief-forming evolved not for truth but for binding the tribe-members together.

The glue that binds tribes together is usually a Manichean view of reality: “we’re fighting a battle of good versus evil, and we’re the good guys.” Tribes are held together less by intragroup attraction than by intergroup repulsion; they unite in response to external threats. This is why, in the absence of enemies, they will invent them. Instead of seeking to understand the real causes of an issue, they’ll instinctively scapegoat them on the outgroup.

We see this constantly in the culture war; leftists will favor beliefs that exaggerate the threat of bigots, and rightists will favor beliefs that exaggerate the threat of groomers. Further, instead of seeking to understand the true causes of complex social problems, leftists will simply blame rightists, and vice versa. And if the two sides decide to discuss the issue, they’ll approach the debate like sports fans, cheering on their team.

Since tribalists believe the outgroup is corrupt, they’ll rarely trust information from outside their filter-bubble, instead opting for intellectual incest in the confines of an echo-chamber, a kind of autoerotic asphyxiation that slowly starves them of sense.

Tribalists are deceived not just by their need to demonize the outgroup but also by their need to fit the ingroup. They’ll become trapped in purity spirals where they’ll compete with their allies to show the most devotion to the tribe’s principles, leading to the whole tribe becoming more extreme (and deluded) over time.

Naturally, tribalism is the truth-seeking strategy most common in the most tribal of pursuits: politics. Political beliefs broadly fall into two camps, even though the beliefs in each camp are orthogonal — climate change has little to do with abortion, which has little to do with Ukraine — yet if you know someone’s beliefs on one of these things you can usually predict their beliefs on the others.

Tribalism is an easy way to find a sense of community, but it’s no way to find truth. It invariably turns life into a fairy tale of good versus evil, or ingroup versus outgroup, and the need for belonging eclipses the desire for reality. Ultimately, tribalism is a shortcut not to truth but to an ever more polarized distortion of it.

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NPC #5. The Averager

Averagers understand that both leftists and rightists are partisans who prioritize tribe over truth. They know that the truth is often to be found between the extremes, so they take the most moderate, centrist view on all matters.

Averagers think that by eschewing the excesses of the leftist or rightist, or of the conformist or contrarian, they avoid NPC behavior. In fact, averagers are not doing any more thinking than the extremists, and are therefore just as much NPCs.

Centrists who are thinking for themselves often pick sides; they’ll agree with the left on some things, and with the right on others. For instance, on healthcare I’m a socialist; I believe everyone should be entitled to medically necessary treatment regardless of background. But on the issue of speech I’m a libertarian; I oppose government censorship of (legal) information and believe people should be able to decide for themselves what they can see.

Unlike non-NPC centrists, averagers never pick sides, instead endlessly hovering in the safe middle-ground between the two. By constantly appealing to nuance and compromise in the face of complexity, averagers can signal intelligence while sparing themselves the need for any.

This is not to say that being an averager is simply about intelligence-signalling; averagers have usually learned to hedge their beliefs from experience; they are typically refugees from the extremes, who, after flirting with tribalism, conformism, and/or contrarianism, became disillusioned by these approaches and concluded that all sides are equally irrational.

As such, averagers frequently espouse horseshoe theory, the idea that the left and right are fundamentally the same and differ only on superficialities. Horseshoe theory has some truth to it, but it too often becomes a lazy way to justify bothsidesism and avoid the need to honestly engage with either side’s arguments.

Averagers are correct that issues are usually more complex than they are portrayed, but since they instinctively dismiss each side’s arguments without trying to understand them, they seldom have a grasp of the nuance they call for. When pressed on why they disagree with both sides, they usually won’t be able to offer specifics, and will resort to their stock answer of both sides being biased.

Since averagers always refuse to commit to a side, all their beliefs become lukewarm, and they never burn strongly enough to stand for something. As such, averagers are the most anodyne of NPCs, the least prone to extremism but also the least principled.

The advantage of taking the median position on every issue is that you’ll rarely be completely wrong about anything. But you’ll rarely be completely right, either. The path of the averager is therefore a shortcut not to truth but to the murky middle-ground between truth and lies, and for this reason it should be avoided.

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Conclusion

So those are the five major kinds of NPC. A person may fit neatly into a single category, or they may be “NPC-fluid,” straddling two or more species; a conformist on Ukraine and an averager on gender, say. But everyone is an NPC on at least some topics they opine on, because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to have an informed opinion on most of the issues we talk about.

Think about it: the average lifespan of 80 years is just 4000 weeks. You’ve spent many of them already, and a third of what remains will be spent asleep, while most of the rest will be spent working and living. That doesn’t leave you much time to research or think about the things you’ll instinctively offer your opinion on.

People become NPCs because knowledge is infinite and life is short; they rush into beliefs because their entire lives are a rush. But there’s a better way to save time than speeding through life, and that is to prioritize.

Ultimately the real crime of NPCs is not that they cheat their way to forming beliefs, but that they feel the need to have such beliefs at all. Trying to form an opinion on everything leaves them no time to have an informed opinion on anything.

The solution is to divide issues into tertiary, secondary, and primary.

Tertiary issues are those you don’t need to care about: the overwhelming majority of things. Consider what difference it will make whether or not you know something, and if it won’t make a difference, resolve to not have an opinion on that thing. Don’t even take a shortcut to beliefs about it. Just accept that you don’t know.

Secondary issues are things that interest you, but which you don’t need to get exactly right. On these issues you must take shortcuts, so take the best shortcut there is: adversarial learning. Seek out the best advocates of each side, and believe whoever is most convincing. If that’s too much work, get your news from websites like AllSides or Ground News that allow you to see what each side is saying about an issue.

Primary issues are the ones you care about most, the ones you’re determined to get right. Use the time you’ve saved from ignoring tertiary things and taking shortcuts to secondary things to learn everything there is to know about primary things.

When you’re about to have an opinion, first ask yourself whether it’s on a primary, secondary, or tertiary issue. On tertiary issues, be silent. On secondary issues, be humble. On primary issues, be passionate.

Your brain will always try to save time when forming beliefs — it’s what it does — but the best way to save time is not to take a shortcut to “truth,” it’s to take no route at all. So if you want to stop being an NPC, simply say “I don’t know” to all the matters that don’t concern you. And that will give you the time to not be an NPC on all the matters that do.

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In the meantime, I recently appeared on the Modern Wisdom podcast to talk with one of my favorite people, Chris Williamson, about some of our favorite concepts. This is my fifth appearance on Chris’ show because I find him to be as enjoyable as he is enlightening.

Some of the ideas we discussed include:

Dysrationalia: Just because someone is intelligent, doesn’t mean their intelligence is pursuing intelligent goals. Many genius-level intellects operate in the service of idiotic delusions.

Gibson's Law: In matters of law and policy, anyone can find a subject-matter expert who supports their view, because having a PhD doesn’t necessarily make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.

Mismatch Theory: Moths evolved to navigate by the moon, a good strategy until the invention of electric lamps, which now lead them astray. Equally, humans evolved to be tribal, a good strategy until the Digital Age, where it now leads us to act like polarized goons online.

St. George in Retirement Syndrome: Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice, so that, as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to maintain their identity.

Idiocy Saturation: Online, people who don't think before they post are able to post more often than people who do. As a result, the average social media post is stupider than the average social media user.

If, after watching this, you somehow haven’t tired of me, I recently had a conversation with my friend, the writer Mia Ashton, for Public News. Mia wrote a compelling Twitter thread suggesting that the surge in young girls identifying as trans is part of a social contagion, a suspicion that I share and allude to in my article, the Pathologization Pandemic. We discussed this, wokeism, audience capture, and irrationality in general. The conversation is paywalled (for now) but can be found here.

That’s it for now. If you want to keep up to date with my best day-to-day thoughts, check out the Notes section. And if you want to read what I suspect is my most useful and entertaining essay yet, stay tuned…

Best,

G.

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“He who—through the wrong diagnosis—

assumes an evil to exist where it does not, plants one in the body.”

— Paracelsus

Across the West, the mental health of young people is deteriorating. More than any previous generation, they express feelings of despair and hopelessness, and they are being diagnosed with mental disorders at an unprecedented rate. An analysis of the data suggests this mental health crisis is a symptom of a malfunctioning society, which is making people sick by teaching them to feel sick.

Deep in the data of the Covid pandemic lie signs of a much stranger pandemic. We know that Covid can lead to a host of long-term complications, collectively known as long Covid, and since men and older people suffer the most complications from Covid, we’d expect that the Covid survivors most likely to report long Covid would be older men. But this is not so.

According to a US Census Bureau survey, women are almost twice as likely as men to report having long Covid, while transgender people are significantly more likely to do so than everyone else. A German study, meanwhile, concluded “there is accumulating evidence that adolescent girls are at particular risk of prolonged symptoms” of long Covid.

Given that Covid tends to affect men more than women, why would long Covid affect women more than men? And given that Covid complications are extremely rare in the young, why would teenage girls be disproportionately affected by long Covid? Finally, why would long Covid affect transgender people most?

The answer lies in the fact that long Covid is not a strictly physical phenomenon. A study of nearly two million people published in Nature found that people who reported three or more symptoms of long Covid included 4.9% of people confirmed to have had Covid and 4% of people with no evidence of having had Covid. So, reports of long Covid are not reliable predictors of a prior Covid infection.

In fact, long Covid correlates about as much with mood disorders as with Covid itself. One study found that people prone to anxiety and depression before Covid infection were 45% more likely to develop long Covid after infection, and the Nature study found that having anxiety and depression before Covid infection almost doubled the chance of reporting long Covid after infection.

This would help explain why women and trans people are disproportionately reporting long Covid: these two demographics have particularly high rates of anxiety and depression.

But why exactly would mood disorders increase the likelihood of reporting long Covid? Some experts have speculated that stress may affect the immune system’s inflammation response to Covid, leading to more serious infections. However, a Turkish study found no correlation between anxiety or depression and inflammation response to Covid.

A much likelier explanation is that, since the symptoms of mood disorders overlap with those of long Covid, people are mistaking distress for the side-effects of viral infection.

The tendency for people to misdiagnose their despair as a medical disorder can be observed far beyond the long Covid phenomenon. Consider the surge in reports of gender dysphoria. Between 2012 and 2022, the number of adolescents referred to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) for gender dysphoria increased by over 2000%. If the surge were simply due to decreasing stigma around being trans, we’d expect proportionate numbers of both sexes and all ages to come out as trans, but the surge has been driven almost exclusively by young people and natal females.

The group that’s disproportionately reporting gender dysphoria — adolescent girls — is the same demographic as the group deemed in the German study to be disproportionately at risk of long Covid. It’s also the group, besides trans people, deemed most at risk of mood disorders. So, again, it seems many young people, particularly girls, are confusing general distress for another ailment.

And it’s not just reports of gender dysphoria that have multiplied among young people. Increases have occurred for major depressive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, autism spectrum disorder, and various eating disorders. It seems young people and their doctors are increasingly viewing personal issues as medical disorders — we are facing a “pathologization pandemic.”

But why would so many people confuse sadness for sickness? For a start, it’s human nature to look for single causes to complex problems. The physician’s habit of ascribing all of a patient’s symptoms to just one diagnosis led to the formulation of Hickam’s dictum, which states: “A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases.” Likewise, it’s tempting to look for a neat and simple reason for people blaming their troubles on a single disorder, but to do so would be to make the same mistake as them. Pathologization can have as many causes as it damn well pleases.

One cause may be cyberchondria, the phenomenon whereby people anxiously google symptoms, and, due to confirmation bias, ignore those that don’t apply to them while focusing on those that do, until they become convinced they have the disorder they’re reading about. Another cause may be social contagion, whereby panic spreads through the power of suggestion. According to a UK study, adolescents who reported parents suffering from long Covid were almost twice as likely to report experiencing long Covid symptoms themselves, regardless of whether they’d actually had Covid.

It’s known that social contagions tend to affect girls more than boys, a disparity that’s likely exacerbated by girls tending to use social media more than boys. But the problem with social contagion as an explanation is that it’s a how, not a why; it offers a means without a motive.

Some have attempted to discern a motive. One is that girls are trying to escape unattainable ideals of femininity. The Instagram arms race of plastic surgery and beauty filters makes natural bodies seem ugly by comparison, and this “selfie dysmorphia” may lead to anxiety and depression, as well as symptoms of gender dysphoria, as pubescent girls become desperate to defy the metamorphosis of their bodies into sexual objects. But this explanation doesn’t shed much light on the rise of conditions like long Covid, autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, a deeper dive into the data does.

When we include politics in the mental health data, it becomes clear that this isn’t simply about gender. A 2020 Pew survey of over 10,000 Americans found that self-described liberals aged 18-29 were more likely than self-described conservatives of the same age to report suffering psychological problems over the last week. They were also more than twice as likely to say they’d ever been diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Furthermore, those who were “very liberal” were more likely than those who were just “liberal” to report poor mental health. The group most likely to report poor mental health was young white liberal females, an alarming 56% of whom reported having received a mental illness diagnosis.

Crucially, controlling for worldview narrowed the gender gap considerably: liberal men were more likely to report poor mental health than conservative women. It would seem, then, that the mental health epidemic among girls and young women is associated with their tendency to have a more Left-liberal mindset than boys and young men — a difference that’s becoming more pronounced over time.

But why would Leftism be associated with worse mental health? An analysis of data from 86,138 adolescents found, in line with the Pew survey, that between 2005 and 2018 the self-reported mental health of liberals had deteriorated more than conservatives’, and that this deterioration was worst for girls. The researchers blamed this on “alienation within a growing conservative political climate”. However, the New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg debunked this explanation by pointing out that liberals’ mental health woes began while Obama was in power and as the Supreme Court voted to extend gay marriage rights — hardly a conservative political climate.

A more robust explanation lies in the difference in outlook between liberals and conservatives. Central to Leftism is equality, which is best justified by the idea that people’s fortunes and misfortunes are not their own doing, and therefore undeserved. As such, Leftism de-emphasizes the role of human agency in social outcomes, while overemphasizing the role of environmental circumstances. As the West has shifted culturally Leftward — due to most writers and artists leaning Left — the depiction of people as puppets of their environment has become dominant.

Today’s Left-liberal culture teaches young people that their troubles are not their own fault, but the product of various problems beyond their control. These problems may be sociological — late capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy — but increasingly they are medical. A common example is “trauma,” a psychiatric term that’s become a knee-jerk justification for everything from street crime to silencing opposing views on campus. It’s a word so overused even clinicians fear it’s lost its meaning.

Most people, however, are happy to have their personal failings blamed on medical issues, because it absolves them of responsibility. It’s not your fault you violently lashed out, you have trauma. It’s not your fault you lack energy, you have long Covid. It’s not your fault you hate the way you look, you have gender dysphoria.

Pathologization is also an effective way to manufacture sympathy. The co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, responded to accusations she’d used donation money to enrich friends and family by claiming that the accusations had given her post-traumatic stress disorder, a diagnosis once reserved for rape survivors and war veterans.

Claims like Cullors’ are instinctively met with sympathy and even awe on the Left, where overeager attempts to destigmatize mental illness have ended up glamorizing it. On social media, young liberals now engage in “sadfishing,” a kind of digital Munchausen’s Syndrome, where people fabricate ailments for pity and clout; some, such as the TikToker “TicsAndRoses,” fake Tourette’s, while others fake multiple personalities. The power of mental health disorders to attract attention online has turned them into fashion accessories, cute quirks to help kids stand out from the crowd, and even boost their dating appeal.

Unfortunately, these designer disorders are not just harmless labels; intentional pathologization by influencers is causing unintentional pathologization among viewers. Reports tell of adolescent girls suddenly developing “TikTok tics” after viewing videos of alleged Tourette’s sufferers. Others tell of adolescents presenting with multiple personalities after watching videos of people claiming to have dissociative identity disorder. As atomization makes people more desperate for sympathy, and competition makes them more desperate for attention, it’s likely that sadfishing and its consequences will only worsen.

But as disturbing as all this is, victimhood culture is not the only force behind the pathologization pandemic. It’s been abetted by a medical industry that has its own incentives for exaggerating the prevalence of mental disorders.

In his 1974 book Medical Nemesis, the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich described the process of “medicalization,” the tendency for clinicians to recategorize everyday troubles as medical issues. Illich explained that clinicians focus on looking for illness, not health, and this obsessive search, mediated by confirmation bias, leads them to gradually view ever more things as diseased. We saw an example of this in the Tavistock scandal, where the staff of the infamous GIDS clinic, conditioned by ideologues to look for gender dysphoria, became increasingly hasty to diagnose it.

The ability of clinicians to see precisely the symptoms they’re looking for is facilitated by concept creep, the tendency for the definitions of disorders to gradually expand to encompass more people. The rise in autism diagnoses, for instance, can be largely attributed to a diagnostic widening of the autism spectrum. Concept creep is an instance of the Shirky principle, which states: “Institutions will try to preserve the problems to which they are the solution.” The motive is often financial; the number of pregnancies deemed to require caesarean sections has gradually increased because this method of delivering babies is more profitable. Likewise, if you’re simply sad then medical companies can’t monetize you, but if your distress is reclassified as, say, gender dysphoria, those companies can sell you puberty blockers or surgical procedures. By 2021, GIDS accounted for a quarter of the Tavistock trust’s income, and in the U.S. the sex reassignment surgery market was valued at $1.9 billion and is projected to expand at a lucrative compound annual growth rate of 11.23%.

So, we have a medical industry that is both financially and ideologically motivated to overstate the prevalence of illness, and we have a victimhood culture that encourages people to view themselves as oppressed by things they can’t control. In the middle of this we have ordinary people tempted to blame their problems on medical issues for the sake of easy answers.

These three entities together form a mutually reinforcing system. The late philosopher Ian Hacking, in his book Rewriting the Soul, details how in the 20th century, the press, the public, and the medical industry operated in tandem to create new forms of madness out of mere gossip. Prior to 1970, there were almost no cases of multiple personality disorder (now known as dissociative identity disorder), but after one case was well-publicized by the media, many people began using the concept of multiple personalities to make sense of their own problems, conforming — wittingly or otherwise — to the official symptoms of the disorder. When clinicians speculated that people may invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse, people began to invent multiple personalities to deal with childhood sexual abuse. Some even suddenly "remembered" being sexually abused, even though the concept of repressed memories has no basis in fact. Initially, patients reported having two or three personalities. Within a decade, the average number was 17.

Thus, patient reports influenced clinicians’ diagnoses, and clinicians’ diagnoses in turn influenced patient reports. Diagnostic criteria became prescriptive as well as descriptive; they told patients how they were supposed to feel and act. Hacking called this cycle of mutual reinforcement a “looping effect”, and it proved so powerful that it turned a couple of isolated cases into an epidemic. A similar looping effect, facilitated by social media, seems to be driving the rise in reports of mental illness today.

This is a problem because imagined sickness can cause real sickness. This occurs in two ways. The first is direct: in rural India, folklore tells that being bitten by a pregnant dog can make one pregnant with the dog’s puppies, and this urban myth created a new illness called puppy pregnancy syndrome. Victims become so convinced they’re pregnant with puppies that they suffer panic attacks and even manifest symptoms of pregnancy, from persistent nausea to the sensation of puppies crawling in their bellies.

But the second way fake sickness becomes real is far more common and insidious.

Remember how Leftism de-emphasizes human agency in the name of equality? Research shows conservatives tend to have an internal locus of control, which means they believe that their decisions, as opposed to external forces, control their destiny. Liberals, meanwhile, tend to have an external locus, which means they believe their lives are determined by forces beyond their control.

People with an internal locus of control, believing they control their destiny, tend to be happier and have healthier habits, like good diets and frequent exercise, while people with an external locus of control, believing they’re at the mercy of fate, have higher rates of anxiety and depression and are more likely to abuse drugs and neglect their health. When you believe you have no control, you don’t.

The American psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge used national survey data of adolescents to map their locus of control. Their findings were based on the proportion of respondents who agreed with statements like “People like me don’t have a chance at a successful life” and “Whenever I try to get ahead, something stops me.” They found that, since the Nineties, the locus of control for all teenagers has steadily become more external, but the shift has been greater for liberals, and greatest for liberal girls.

A common reaction to feelings of disempowerment is self-derogation, the tendency to speak ill of oneself. Haidt and his research assistant Zach Rausch mapped this sentiment using responses to statements such as “I feel my life is not very useful.” The data showed a universal decline in self-worth since 2012, after smartphones and social media became widespread. Again, the decline was stronger for liberals, and strongest for liberal girls.

It would seem, then, that the rapid liberalization and medicalization of young people, enabled by social media, has hindered their self-belief and resilience to setbacks. Many teenagers have subsequently become trapped in a cycle where they feel distress, pathologize it, causing more distress, leading to more pathologization and distress, which eventually becomes textbook anxiety and depression. The rise in diagnoses is therefore not simply an illusion caused by medicalization; society is teaching kids to feel powerless and worthless, which is causing real dysfunctions.

This is the greatest danger of the pathologization pandemic: belief in one’s sickness is self-fulfilling. It’s a disease not of any bodily organ but of hope itself, and it harms its victim by crippling their ability to recover from everything else.

So what’s the solution?

Discouraging kids from left-wing politics would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater (as well as utterly futile). Leftism can be a healthy approach to resolving societal issues, and even a source of hope, if it allows for the possibility of agency and personal responsibility. Likewise, conservatism can become unhealthy if it develops a habit of scapegoating personal issues on globalists, drag queens, or some other bogeyman. The solution to the pathologization pandemic, then, lies not in politics but in psychology.

The polar opposite of pathologization is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Although referred to as therapy, it’s closer to a form of mental training. Based on the Ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism, it teaches a lesson the West has all but forgotten: that our feelings are not always valid, but often deluded and self-destructive. It trains people to overcome harmful emotions by reframing harmful thoughts into alternatives that are more agentic and soluble. So, “That made me angry” becomes “I reacted to that by getting angry.” And “Life sucks” becomes “I feel like life sucks right now.” Where pathologization places problems outside your control, CBT places them within your control. Where pathologization bundles many small issues into one giant insurmountable problem, CBT breaks down giant problems into small manageable pieces.

No approach in psychiatry has been as rigorously tested as CBT, and its effectiveness in restoring agency and reigniting hope is documented by decades of research. Some studies suggest CBT is gradually losing effectiveness, but this is mostly because CBT, like everything else in the social sciences, has been corrupted by amateurization and the desire to be “inclusive” and inoffensive. The newest forms of CBT, such as “Transgender-Affirmative CBT,” are the opposite of traditional CBT because they seek not to transcend feelings but to validate them.

More than ever, a return is needed to the original, Stoicism-based form of CBT, which helped people find strength for over 2000 years, from the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, who used Stoicism to govern Rome during a time of war and plague, to Vietnam POW James Stockdale, who used it to withstand torture at the notorious “Hanoi Hilton.” If Stoic CBT were taught as part of school curricula, it would help the young overcome the greatest obstacle to their well-being — their own minds.

The ultimate cure to rampant pathologization, then, is to teach the young a time-tested truth, bequeathed to us by history’s survivors: that you are more than the things that happen to you.

Sure, many of the misfortunes that befall you will not be your fault, and you’ll often get knocked down no matter how hard you try to resist. But if you seek explanations for your suffering in things beyond your control, you risk falling prey to a culture and industry that are motivated to keep you feeling ill. So never blame on your circumstances what you can blame on yourself. Look within for the causes and, most times, within you’ll find the cures. Modern society will tell you otherwise, but it’s within your power to defy it, for you are not a helpless leaf in the wind but a mind that holds a world, which, depending on how you think, can be a hell in heaven, or a heaven in hell.

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A shorter version of this article appeared in UnHerd. This is the original, full-length version.

In the meantime, here is the summer 2023 edition of “40 Mind-Expanding Concepts.” As always with these lists, the focus is on concision; if you want a more complete understanding of each concept, click on the concept’s title.

Note that these concepts are presented not as rules for life but as food for thought.

The Concepts

1. Bat-and-Ball Problem:

A bat and ball cost $1.10 total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost?

If you guessed $0.10, wrong!

It’s $0.05.

You missed the “more than the ball”.

When we react instinctively, we react to a simplification of reality.

2. Selective Laziness:

We scrutinize the opinions of others more closely than our own. Trouche et al. (2016) found that people often reject their own opinions if tricked into believing they’re someone else’s.

To properly evaluate your beliefs, imagine they’re someone else’s.

3. Moravec's Paradox:

What is easy for humans is hard for AI, and vice versa. Differential calculus requires far less compute than merely climbing steps. Thus, AI may replace most white collar jobs before it replaces most blue collar ones.

4. Price Anchoring:

Retailers often briefly raise the price of an item so they can then reduce it to RRP and advertize it as a big saving. So when you buy a “discounted” item on Black Friday, etc, you often just bought it at normal price. To avoid this, use online price-trackers.

5. Health Halo Effect:

We assume food products are healthy based on claims like “low fat” and “sugar free”, but foods stripped of fat/salt/sugar often require the addition of even unhealthier substances (emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial sweeteners).

6. Solomon's Paradox:

We're better at solving other people's problems than our own, because detachment yields objectivity. But Kross et al. (2014) found viewing oneself in the 3rd person yields the same detachment, so when trying to help yourself, imagine you're helping a friend.

7. Celine’s 3rd Law:

An honest politician is more dangerous than a corrupt one.

A corrupt politician is only interested in enriching himself. An honest, idealistic politician actually wants to change the world, so he stands a real chance of wrecking everything.

8. The Friendship Recession:

Americans without any friends have increased 400% since 1990. A meta-analysis suggests that loneliness increases mortality as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. As society continues to atomize, this issue will only get worse.

9. Rothbard’s Law:

If a talent comes naturally to someone, they assume it’s nothing special, and instead try to improve at what seems difficult to them. Therefore, people often specialize in things they're bad at.

(I think this one explains my life trajectory.)

10. The Narcissist's Prayer:

“That didn’t happen.

And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.

And if it was, that’s not a big deal.

And if it is, that’s not my fault.

And if it was, I didn’t mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.”

Beware of serial rationalizers moving goalposts in order to DARVO. You’ll persuade them of nothing, and they’ll persuade themselves of anything.

11. Dartmouth Scar:

Kleck (1980) told his research subjects they’d engage in a study to test discrimination. He painted scars on some of their faces, and then had them attend job interviews. The participants with scars painted on their faces reported feeling discriminated against for their looks. However, unknown to them, their scars had been removed before they entered the interviews.

It would seem we can be victimized by the mere belief that we’re a victim.

12. Dunning-Kruger Effect:

We don’t know what we don’t know.

As such, stupid people are too stupid to realize how stupid they are.

This is why it’s easier to win an argument against a genius than an idiot.

13. Revenge Bedtime Procrastination:

You don’t want the night to end and the dreaded morning to begin, so you procrastinate going to bed, as if by doing so you can prevent tomorrow ever coming. But tomorrow *will* come, and if you don’t sleep well, it’ll hit you all the harder.

14. Bias Blindspot:

Whenever I post about a bias or fallacy, I’ll receive replies from leftists claiming it explains rightist views and rightists claiming it explains leftist views. Not once will people claim it explains their own side’s views.

The belief that bias is just something that affects our opponents is our greatest source of bias.

15. Crazy Bastard Hypothesis:

Why do young men commonly endanger their lives with reckless behavior? Fessler et al (2014) found that people view risk-prone men as larger and stronger. Thus, seemingly crazy male behavior may actually be a fitness signal.

16. Compounding:

To win big, do small things consistently.

Since human brains think linearly, we vastly underestimate the exponential effects of cumulative small actions. In 2005, Canadian blogger Kyle MacDonald traded his way from a paperclip to a house in just 14 transactions.

17. The Never-Ending Now:

We're always chasing the latest info, but this tends to be junk whose main selling point is novelty, not quality. Instead of new info, seek that which has stood the test of time: classic literature, proven theorems, replicated studies.

18. Cromwell's Rule:

Science is never settled, and certainty is the death of thought. Therefore, unless judging a self-evident statement (e.g. 2+2=4), always leave room for doubt in every assumption. Instead of thinking in certainties, think in probabilities: not “that is the case” but “that is likely the case”.

19. Problem Selling:

Problem-solvers take an issue and break it down into small solvable chunks. Problem-sellers (e.g. politicians, the press) do the opposite, blaming many small issues on one big problem that looks insurmountable and terrifying.

20. Celine’s 2nd Law:

Honest communication occurs only between equals.

If one person has power over another, then the less powerful person can’t risk saying what they really think. Thus, in any hierarchy, honest communication only travels horizontally.

21. Snapchat Dysmorphia (aka Selfie Dysmorphia):

The Instagram arms race of lip fillers & beauty filters creates unrealistic beauty standards for girls, causing them to hate how they look. Their desire to escape themselves may help explain the surge in plastic surgery (and, perhaps, gender dysphoria.)

22. Counterfeit Fitness:

Men’s main driver for pursuing greatness is to get laid. But porn & sexbots offer men the illusion of getting laid without the need to “earn” it, so men are quickly losing their main motivation for bettering themselves.

23. Fanbaiting:

Ideas that divide spread further than ideas everyone agrees with. Film studios portray a white character or historical figure as black, which stokes outrage and divides the internet, and as everyone complains or defends it they all unwittingly publicize the movie.

24. Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity:

Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

25. Mating Mind Hypothesis:

Why did we evolve a sense of humor?

Comedy requires subverting expectations and connecting the seemingly unconnected. It's a reliable signal of creativity, so we evolved to look for it in mates, and to use it to attract mates.

May also help explain our appreciation for art.

26. Switch Cost Effect:

We simultaneously inhabit 2 worlds—online & off—and both regularly interrupt us with demands/notifications, so we’re never able to settle in either. The constant switching of attention apparently lowers working IQ by ~10, dumbifying us twice as much as being high on cannabis.

27. St. George in Retirement Syndrome:

Many who fight injustice come to define themselves by their fight against injustice, so that, as they defeat the injustice, they must invent new injustices to fight against simply to retain a sense of purpose in life.

28. Crab Mentality (aka Tall Poppy Syndrome):

On social media, people will attack those they envy or desire to bring them down and assuage their own feelings of inferiority. If they have no pride in their accomplishments, they’ll instead take pride in your failures.

29. Gurwinder’s Theory of Bespoke Bullshit:

Many don’t have an opinion until they’re asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from whim & half-remembered hearsay, before deciding that this 2-minute-old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on.

30. Explore-Exploit Tradeoff:

The young own little so have little to lose, and are free to experiment and overturn norms. The old own much so can’t risk experimenting, and need stability to safeguard the lives they’ve built.

I believe this is a key reason people become more conservative with age.

31. Celine's 1st Law:

National security is the chief cause of national insecurity.

Government attempts to stop a threat to security lead it to draft harsher laws and to spy on its citizens, which eventually becomes a greater threat than that which it’s protecting against.

32. Idea Laundering:

How do "kind" falsehoods like "sex is a spectrum" and "obesity is healthy" go mainstream? Activists with PhDs use academic journals & scientific jargon to disguise ideology as knowledge, which is then cited as fact by the media & Wikipedia.

33. Shopping Cart Theory:

Returning a shopping cart is considerate, quick, and easy, so it’s an extremely low bar of unselfishness to clear. Therefore, someone who doesn't return shopping carts without good reason (e.g. disability) likely has the principles of an alley cat, and is only being kept in check by laws.

34. Galloway’s Razor:

Research suggests people enjoy possessions less than they expected, and they enjoy experiences more than they expected. In the end, people value what they did much more than what they owned. So choose adventures over luxury items.

35. Reframing:

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. If you feel life sucks, don’t say “life sucks” but “I think life sucks right now.” This shifts the problem from the world to your mind, and it's easier to change your mind than the world.

36. Hebb's Rule:

Neurons that fire together wire together.

When you repeatedly think or act a certain way, your brain begins to physically rewire itself to facilitate that thought or action. You literally become what you repeatedly do. So choose your habits wisely.

37. Hedonic Treadmill:

Once we've obtained what we desire, our happiness quickly returns to its baseline level, and we begin to desire something else. Whatever we get, we get used to. Therefore, contentment lies not in accumulating possessions, but in relinquishing desires.

38. Crabtree's Bludgeon:

It’s possible to create a coherent explanation for any set of observations—even ones that are mutually contradictory. In other words, there is at least one seemingly rational argument to justify even the most idiotic bullshit. So be careful.

39. The Arc of Happiness:

Self-reported happiness graphed by age is smile-shaped. The optimism of youth becomes cynicism as responsibilities mount & dreams collide with reality. But after midlife, happiness rises again as people accept reality and learn to enjoy the little things.

40. Epistemic Luck:

You know that if you’d lived in a different place or time, read different books, had different friends, you’d have different beliefs. And yet, you’re convinced that your current beliefs are correct. So, are you wrong, or the luckiest person ever?

Thanks for reading. If you’re hungry for more concepts, check out the Spring 2023 List and the Winter 2022 List.

Best,

G.

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Arguably the most pressing of such AI-anxieties is the threat posed by synthetic media to reality itself. Lifelike text, image, and video can now be effortlessly confected on smartphones and personal computers, and we’re already seeing the results.

Fake photographs have won photography contests. Voices of loved ones have been cloned to ask for kidnap ransoms. Students are using text generators to cheat out homework. Lonely men have been tricked into buying the nudes of people who don’t exist. Deepfakes of President Zelensky surrendering have been spread by Russia, while deepfakes of President Putin kneeling before President Xi have been spread by Ukraine. China and Venezuela have flooded the web with computer-generated “journalists” to spread pro-regime talking points. And the US military has been caught soliciting proposals for how best to wage AI-disinformation campaigns on an unprecedented scale.

All of this is just the beginning. The text generator ChatGPT is now the fastest-spreading app in history, and apps for generating image and video are not far behind. In this new world increasingly cluttered with masks posing as faces, how will we discern reality from the unreal? Authorities believe the only solution is greater regulation of misinformation, but this will only exacerbate the problem, and in fact our best hope is not less misinformation, but more.

Misinformation and disinformation (which is misinformation purposefully spread to deceive) are not new problems, and in the last decade a sprawling alliance of institutions has grown to combat them. This “counter-misinformation complex” now comprises government agencies, tech giants, think tanks, the liberal media, and fact-checking organizations, all loosely collaborating to identify and eliminate fake news.

The counter-misinformation complex operates on the principle that the common people are too impressionable to be trusted with their own senses, and therefore what they see and hear must be strictly regulated for their own good. In the AI age, this conviction has only gotten stronger.

In February, UNESCO held its first global conference discussing how best to regulate online platforms to safeguard them against synthetic media. This push for more regulation comes after a strengthening of existing regulations; late last year the European Union’s Digital Service Act (DSA) came into effect, compelling large online platforms like Google, Instagram and Twitter to actively remove content deemed to be disinformation, or face heavy fines.

The DSA’s restrictions on speech were met with predictable praise by the “liberal” press; the Guardian called it an “ambitious bid to clean up social media,” while the Washington Post proclaimed that “The US could learn from Europe’s online speech rules.”

For better or worse, the US does appear to be learning; the EU has opened a new “embassy” in Silicon Valley to “promote EU digital policies” and “strengthen cooperation with US counterparts,” and top US state officials are now pushing for new legislation to criminalize the spreading of election misinformation.

This approach—to fight AI-generated disinformation with greater regulation—will prove a far greater danger than the disinformation itself. Not just because it curtails freedom, but also because it will actually make disinformation worse.

The notion that information traffic can be policed is a relic of the 20th century. It worked in the old, centralized world, but in a distributed world like ours, the information-space is too vast and unpredictable to be top-down regulated.

Brandolini’s law states: “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” What this means is that, despite the best efforts of moderators, misinformation will always greatly outnumber information. But it also means that misinformation spreads faster and further than information, so by the time moderators have identified a meme as false and are ready to moderate it, it’s already infected countless minds and cemented itself in the public consciousness. Censors beware: online, you cannot police the present; only the past.

Brandolini’s law is not the only rule counting against online censorship; the Anna Karenina principle suggests that, since there are countless ways to be wrong but only a few ways to be right, those correcting misinformation will accidentally produce misinformation far more often than those promoting misinformation will accidentally produce truth. Censors often have no more idea of what is true than those they censor (see: lab leak hypothesis), so they are fundamentally unqualified to dictate what the rest of us are allowed to see.

All of this was a problem before generative AI, but now the advantage that error generation has over error correction is even greater. Some claim that this advantage can be neutralized by AI itself; many in the counter-misinformation complex are experimenting with language models like ClaimHunter that can find patterns in misinformation to help identify it.

The problem with this approach is that AI is also subject to Brandolini’s law: it requires far less work for AI to produce misinformation than to correct it, so the machines trying to identify misinformation will always be outnumbered and outperformed by machines propagating it.

AI is also subject to the Anna Karenina Principle: it’s easier for an anti-misinformation AI to accidentally promote misinformation than for a pro-misinformation AI to accidentally produce truth. Since AI’s are programmed by humans and trained on human data, they inherit many of our biases and delusions (ChatGPT exhibits a strong left-liberal bias because it’s been trained on the predominantly left-liberal sources of the Western cultural mainstream, like Reddit and Wikipedia.)

What this all means is that censorship, with or without the aid of AI, is not an effective countermeasure against AI-generated misinformation, and governments trying to legislate it, tech giants trying to implement it, and establishment media trying to advocate for it, are like beavers building a dam of twigs in the shadow of an inbound tsunami of bullshit.

So if censorship doesn’t work, how should we deal with the tidal wave of manure?

We shouldn’t.

Over the past two decades, the counter-misinformation complex convinced us all that misinformation is dangerous because it leads to conspiracy theories, which lead to real-world harms. Ask someone in government, or at the New York Times, or at the Poynter Institute, why they’re so eager to regulate information, and they’ll invariably mention January 6^th or Russian troll farms.

Certainly, the storming of the Capitol was a direct result of Trump’s lies about a stolen election, deceitfully broadcast by outlets like Fox News. However, the obsessive press coverage given to events like the Capitol riot paint a misleading picture of misinformation itself.

Online misinformation has increased exponentially over the past two decades, yet per capita real-world violence hasn’t even increased linearly; it has in fact dramatically decreased. Not only has violence not increased, nor has the supposed intermediary between misinformation and real-world violence: conspiracy theories.

A recent Cambridge study reviewed the data on misinformation and political violence and found a statistically insignificant correlation. The authors concluded there was no evidence that misinformation leads to real-world harms.

But what about Russian election interference? What about Chinese spamouflage? Surely foreign influence operations are manipulating Western minds and causing people to adopt beliefs against their own interests? A recent longitudinal study analyzed the effect of Russian disinformation operations on voter polarization during the 2016 US election and found it had no appreciable impact.

It turns out people are stubborn in their beliefs, online (mis)information doesn’t easily change their minds, and even when it does, they don’t act on it, because, like most people, they have jobs and family to care about.

In short, there is no evidence that misinformation leads to a significant increase in conspiracy theories or real-world harms, and thus, building a sprawling surveillance and censorship apparatus to try to prevent outlier cases like January 6^th is so expensive—in time, money, labor, and freedom—that it fails even the most generous cost-benefit analysis.

Put simply, the counter-misinformation complex was founded on misinformation.

But how did so many experts come to believe it? Part of it may be explained by Upton Sinclair’s famous quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

But there’s another, deeper explanation. A well-replicated finding in psychology is the “third-person effect.” This is the tendency for people to overestimate the effect of misinformation on others, and particularly on the masses, due to the mistaken belief that they’re unusually impressionable. This subconscious snobbery is common to us all, but it’s easy to see why it would be particularly prevalent among wealthy, Ivy League-educated intellectuals and policymakers.

Nevertheless, the counter-misinformation complex is correct about one thing: misinformation is bad. Not because it creates conspiracy theories that erupt into real-world violence, but because truth is inherently valuable since it allows us to make good predictions, ignore distractions, and avoid being taken advantage of.

But here’s the thing: not only are attempts to regulate misinformation ineffective at increasing truth, but they’re counter-productive, because they’ll actually make it harder for people to discern truth.

The final goal of the counter-misinformation complex can’t be to create a world free of misinformation, since that isn’t possible. It can only be, at best, to create a few tightly regulated online platforms that are free enough of misinformation that they can be trusted by netizens. If conspiracy theories are memetic viruses, then the best the counter-misinformation complex can achieve is to quarantine small portions of the web from them.

And what are the long-term consequences of living in quarantine? Experimenters tried it with mice, who ended up becoming more prone to disease than control groups. The mice’s immune systems, never stress-tested by microbes, failed to develop effective responses to them. The same is true of our psychological immune systems: quarantine someone from lies and they’ll learn to blindly trust everything. A mind unaccustomed to deceit is the easiest to deceive.

This is the establishment’s grand plan for dealing with the tsunami of bullshit: to lull us into navigating the world on autopilot, utterly dependent on others to tell us what’s true. One could hardly imagine a more disastrous way to live in an age of automated illusion.

Fortunately, there is a real solution. Just as quarantining people from a harm can make them more vulnerable to it, so exposing them to that harm can strengthen them against it. This is how vaccines work; by subjecting us to a controlled dose of a pathogen so our bodies can deconstruct it and learn how to beat it.

Several studies have been carried out to determine the possibility of “vaccinating” people against fake news. In a 2019 experiment, researchers devised a game called Bad News in which people tried to propagate a conspiracy theory online. In order to succeed, they had to deconstruct the conspiracy theory to determine what was persuasive about it and how it could be used to exploit emotion. After playing the game, people became more aware of the methods used to push conspiracy theories, and thereby became more resistant to them.

The study had a robust sample size of 15,000, and its results were replicated with another, similar game, Go Viral. The authors of the studies concluded that exposing a group of people to weak conspiracy theories could fortify their psychological immune systems against stronger ones, just like a vaccine. A recent systematic review of all the known methods used to reduce beliefs in conspiracy theories found that this “vaccination” approach was the most effective.

There are shortcomings with the vaccination analogy, though. A vaccine typically requires only a couple of doses before providing long-lasting, near-total immunity. In comparison, the immunity offered by playing the misinformation games was modest and presumably only as enduring as mere memory.

Due to these limits, the best way to inoculate people against misinformation is not to try to “vaccinate” them, but to use a different process of acclimatization, known as hormesis. This form of inoculation entails not a couple of doses but constant exposure, so the body gradually and permanently adapts to that which assails it.

Ancient Indian texts describe the visha kanya, young women raised to be assassins in high society. They would reportedly be raised on a diet of low-dose poisons in order to make them immune, so they could kill their victims with poisoned kisses. A few centuries later, King Mithridates of Pontus was said to have been so paranoid of being poisoned that he had every known poison cultivated in his gardens, from which he developed a cocktail called mithridate that contained low doses of every known poison, which he’d regularly imbibe to make himself invulnerable. It’s said he was so successful that when he tried to commit suicide by poison after his defeat by Pompey, he failed, and had to ask his bodyguard to do the job by sword.

The process of mithridatism, as it has come to be called, may be what is needed to increase our resistance to conspiracy theories: a dietary regimen of low-strength Kool-Aid to gradually confer immunity to higher doses.

But how exactly do we use mithridatism to immunize entire populations from misinformation? It’s not feasible to expect everyone to download the Bad News game and regularly play it. The answer is to turn the entire internet into the Bad News game, so that people can’t browse the web without playing. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds.

In the 1950s, a group of avant-garde artists known as the Situationists thought the masses had been brainwashed by corporations into mindless consumers. Seeking to rouse them from their sedation, the group employed a tactic called detournement: using the methods of consumerist media against itself. This involved disseminating “subvertisements,” replicas of popular ads that had subtle and ironic differences which made it hard for audiences to distinguish between marketing and parody. The purpose was to foster suspicion and familiarize people with the methods used to manipulate them by making them overt. The idea was that if people were always unsure whether what they were seeing was art or advertisement, sincere or satire, they would become more vigilant.

The tactic of detournement was refined in the 1970s by the writer Robert Anton Wilson, who, with his friends in media, tried to seed into society the idea of “Operation Mindfuck,” a conspiracy theory intended to immunize people against conspiracy theories. It alleged that shadowy agents were orchestrating an elaborate plot to deceive the public for unknown reasons. The details of the plot were irrelevant; all that mattered was that it could be happening anywhere and anytime. Was the ad you just watched genuine, or part of Operation Mindfuck? Was that captivating political speech sincere, or part of Operation Mindfuck? The idea was that if everyone was watchful for the Operation, they would become suspicious of everything they saw, and thereby less vulnerable to all other conspiracy theories.

Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell, illustrates how this idea could work in the digital age. In the story a woman named Mauve becomes an unwilling celebrity after being doxxed online. Eager to fight accusations against her, she turns to a man named Pluto, who has an unusual plan: instead of trying to silence the accusations, he’ll fill up the web with other accusations, some believable, others ridiculous, to make it impossible to separate truth from lies, and make the public suspicious of all accusations.

This idea has even been used in the real world. Following accusations of Russian meddling in the US election, Putin’s supporters didn’t respond by denying the allegations, but by increasing them. They’d post pictures of, say, a man falling off his bicycle, with a caption reading: “Russians did it!” Eventually, “Russians did it!” became a meme, at which point, accusing the Russians of being behind any plot made you look worse than wrong; it made you look cliched.

The common theme behind all these ideas is that the best way to delegitimize undesirable info is not to censor it, but to propagate other, similar but less believable info. So how could we apply this to delegitimize online misinformation generally?

In the early 1990s, a group of decentralist hackers known as the Cypherpunks considered this very question. According to Stephenson, one of them, Matt Blaze, proposed the idea of a teaching tool he dubbed the “Encyclopedia Disinformatica.” The idea was that the encyclopedia would be the go-to information source, forced on us by algorithms like Wikipedia is now, but it would contain as many lies as facts, so that anyone who trusted it would soon find their trust was misplaced, and thereby learn a valuable lesson about not believing what they read online.

The best part is that creating this encyclopedia, this digital garden of Mithridates, is the easiest thing in the world. All we do is nothing. Synthetic media have already started turning the web into an environment that can teach us not to trust what we’re told. The governments, tech giants, and corporate journalists need only allow the natural ecology of the web to run its course by refraining from trying to police what we can see.

Just as Operation Mindfuck used the form of a conspiracy theory to warn people about conspiracy theories, and subvertisements used the form of ads to warn people about ads, so we can use synthetic media to warn people about synthetic media. We already have deep-fakes that warn of deep-fakes, text generators that sometimes hallucinate so users learn to fact-check them, and viral songs made with cloned voices that inadvertently teach people not to trust voices. The more that people are exposed to deception, the more resistant they become to it, and thus, synthetic media is ultimately a self-correcting problem.

In our new age of infinite misinformation, the counter-misinformation complex’s methods are obsolete, and its goal of a world where people can trust what they see is hopelessly naïve. Its attempts to censor the misinformation pandemic will achieve nothing but briefly quarantine a few online platforms from the inevitable, lulling their users into a false sense of trust, and ultimately making them more vulnerable to deceit.

We should therefore strive to do the opposite—to let misinformation spread so it becomes a clear and constant presence in everyone’s life, a perpetual reminder that we inhabit a dishonest world. Deception is part of nature, from the chameleon’s complexion to the Instagram model’s beauty filters, and it will never be legislated away while life still exists, so let’s stop trying to prevent people from seeing lies, and instead teach people to see through them.