26 Useful Concepts for 2026
We’ve entered the Age of Slop, and are adrift in an ocean of thoughtless content that’s diluted all truth and meaning. And yet, hidden in that ocean are more pearls of wisdom than ever.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
If you want more agency, ask yourself what you’d do if you had ten times more agency. Then do it.
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.
Congrats on going full time! What do you think of a corollary to Hanlon’s Razor? Always attribute to malice what has gone on too long to be explained by stupidity.
Wonderful. Thanks for this! And congratulations on being able to focus full-time on your wonderful work here. I think you were the first Substack I ever followed! A much-needed salve for the probably far-too-online, but who remembers a pre-digital world and rather misses it.