I have seen some of the smartest people on the planet wrestle with the global decline of fertility as a research issue, and come up inconclusive. They can’t seem to pin down the problem to any one cause. Every time they suggest a primary cause — whether it be health, social policy, economic policy, lack of religion, technology, access to food, wealth inequality, GDP, or any other measurable factor which can be tested — they find counterexamples and therefore they can’t draw a solid conclusion. On every podcast and in every article about collapsing fertility, we offer statistic after statistic and can’t find a unifying theory that explains the fertility decline in Iraq with an explanation that also holds in South Korea and Argentina.

I think the answer, as with most of the biggest human problems, is a soft idea, not a hard idea. It’s not something you can measure, it’s not something amenable to academicization. It’s an idea without a name or a chart. It’s Modern World Syndrome, or Advanced Human Syndrome, or the globalization of the human consciousness, or the un-animaling of the human being, or something like that. It’s all of those things.

We as humans have advanced far enough into the future that we no longer live quaint, simple lives based on survival and reproduction. Survival is a solved problem in most of the world now, so our lives no longer have this innate sense of emergency and organic cohesion with nature. Reproduction is no longer a matter of course; it’s a luxurious personal choice which must be considered carefully as part of one’s master life plan. In short, we no longer feel or behave like animals. We feel more like computing brains who live in giant cities that have, frankly, nothing to do with nature. We have become safe and cerebral — earth is merely a place that we can choose to visit.

And we’re strangely obsessed with the whole world and with ourselves at the same time, which makes it hard for us to focus on having kids. The Future is an actual time, which we now live in, and it’s making it very hard for us to build simple lives — because it’s complex. It’s too complex. It’s not a time that is easy for us to live in. Think about how people now say post-modern to describe our current era. “After the modern age.” And what is after the modern age? Well, an age that is apparently not modern. Meaning maybe it is “after full advancement, after anything that makes sense.”

Un-animals

Even if you have religious reasons not to see humans as “animals” per se, you must admit that it is useful to look at humans as being very, very similar to animals because that’s a framing that seems to work well across time. We have nearly all of the same instincts and drives as animals, and when those instincts and drives are interfered with, we become despondent and ill like animals. And as Connor Leahy said, “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” You need to break the animal, break their environment, or give them a button to press for endless free cocaine. Just one of those is enough, and could ruin the population growth of any given country, and we seem to have done all three.

Most of us are disconnected from our nature — that is, our animal nature. Nothing about our lives is natural anymore. Everything is artificial and sped up and FDA-approved and decided by committee and sold at retail markup. Everything is in a building. And the walls are always painted with neutral greys and harmless blues that don’t exist anywhere except Sherwin-Williams. Everything is purchased via the abstraction of money instead of caught or hunted. We no longer wake up in the morning with natural longings or natural sounds; we don’t even give a damn about birds or trees anymore. We no longer feel a connection to Mother Earth, or to our animal side, or to our own loins.

I suspect the reason testosterone has been decreasing throughout the West is because men simply are not in touch with their deepest and most animalistic masculine urges and strengths anymore. Why? Because they don’t need to be. Life no longer asks it of them. Testosterone is the hormone of eating, killing, protecting, building, and fucking. Life no longer puts us in situations where we have to do those things, where we need high testosterone just to survive the day. And the result is that our bodies don’t produce it. And the result of low testosterone is a low drive to reproduce.

In other words, the easier your life is, the less likely you are to have kids. Because the hormone that enables you to handle a difficult life is the same hormone that indirectly causes children via repeated, compulsive bedroom visits.

A couple of years ago, I started working out. If I had to guess what my testosterone level was before I started working out, I would say it was around 200 ng/dL. Medically, I was barely a man. I had very limited sexual desire in my body (I had plenty in my mind, but those are two different things). My body didn’t pulse with the need to touch and squeeze and take. My muscles were weak. My fat distribution was nil: when I gained weight, it went exclusively to my belly. In short, I was neither attractive nor healthy. I didn’t feel like an animal, and I knew it, and I hated it.

After about 6 months of working out, I got some blood work done. My testosterone was at 537. I felt better. I was gaining weight, very slowly, in the right places. I remember asking my younger brother, who also worked out a lot, “Is this normal? I just want to fuck, all the time.” He said yes.

I’ve continued to do strength training with more and more weight, and if I had to guess I would say my natural testosterone production puts me around 700 now.12 My legs are thick. My body gains weight everywhere, not just in my belly. I enjoy food more greedily, with more saliva and more urgency. I have all of the right needs and my wife knows it (and likes it). I wish I could tell you a bit more about all of the changes in my body, using hilarious details and stories, but out of respect for my wife and our privacy I won’t. Suffice it to say I feel much healthier than I ever did before. I feel, in the simplest words, like an animal — instead of like a lightly pulsating brain looking for the next situation to mull over idly. (That’s also probably why I’ve been writing less.) I feel more vital and useful and I’m enjoying life more. Two separate people have told me how happy I look. And I have a kid on the way, which, I’m lucky to say, happened pretty much immediately, even in our middle age. Because she is fertile and I am motile.

If I could say the crudest possible sentence to describe how humans ought to live, it would be this: humans should wake up in the morning wanting to eat and fuck, and everything they do should be leading directly to those two things. Humans should more or less go throughout their whole day working towards the satisfaction of the most basic instincts. Men should also have a desire to work (which I have now more than ever). The more like animals we feel, the more productive we seem to be. The people with the lowest need to indulge in base instincts are also the people getting the least done. As many podcast guests have said, men ought to avoid masturbating for one very good reason even if no others: because you can direct your erotic energy, your productive and creative energy, into other things. But to begin with, you have to have that energy. And you get more of that energy by doing things with that energy.

Funny how life works, isn’t it? The way to get the thing you want is by doing the thing that you want it for. The way to feel more like a man is to start doing manly things that you’re not in the mood to do.

I can guarantee you one thing: if you and your male friends woke up in the morning and did outdoor chores that involved touching battle axes and killing animals and lifting heavy things, your natural testosterone would be higher. If your wife told you every day, “Take what you want from me,” and you did, your natural testosterone would be higher. And I can guarantee you another thing: if you have an office job and don’t do any of the other things above to compensate, your testosterone is actively falling.

That’s the first thing that modern, survival-free life has inflicted upon us: it has un-animaled the human being. We feel less like bodies now and more like brains, because our brains are all we use most of the time now. We’re cerebral and safe, and that is profoundly unsexy.

I would assume that most of what I just said about men would apply in similar shapes to women and estrogen. Or at least if might if I understood estrogen or women, which I don’t. Perhaps women come to feel more womanly by being with a man with high testosterone — a man who handles battle axes and kills animals — and by doing nurturing activities. Yes, I know you aren’t in the mood to cook food for your boyfriend. But you’re never going to be if you don’t start. Right?

And the bigger problem is, the world isn’t getting any harder for our physical bodies. It’s instead getting easier by the day. So the only people retaining this kind of health — physical health which transmutes directly into mental health — are the people who choose to. You have to a) be fortunate enough to have social circles, parents, friends, or mentors which encourage it and foster it, or b) have the discipline to do it on your own. Discipline and social patterns are wonderful adaptive forces, but they’re not going to save all of us. The future is a place where fewer people work out, not more. The future is a place where fewer people know how to have great sex lives, not more. So this problem is likely to get worse, not better.

Unless of course all of the people who can’t adapt die and their bloodlines fall away. Which is also possible. But even then, it gets harder and harder for those of us left to keep nurturing the drives and instincts required to reproduce. This problem, in my view, does not fix itself. We are un-animaled, more or less permanently. As I’ve written before, we’re on a one-way path to being little grey brain stems hooked up to a bunch of machines that just do our living for us. Resisting that requires active control over your own life — it requires you to choose to be an animal. It requires you to choose what is inconvenient but ultimately fruitful, what is hard but ultimately makes you wildly attractive to the opposite sex. Remember, if your goal is to have children and then a healthy marriage, perhaps the biggest factor should be compulsive and repeated bedroom visits.

World-Too-Big Syndrome

And then there’s World-Too-Big Syndrome, or Big World Syndrome, or what have you. The world is too big, and we are aware of the whole thing like a person on acid who can feel his toenails growing. We are too aware, of everything, all the time. It’s almost psychedelic in nature; it’s overwhelming to our senses and our psychology. Which in turn contributes to the above problem and turns us less into bodies that feel and more into brains that ruminate.

When you see yourself as part of a huge world of infinite populations and infinite troubles and infinite possibilities, it’s hard to narrow your focus down to your own small life and your own community. The moral gravity of our lives is spread across too many things — having kids just looks small in comparison. It doesn’t have enough gravity. It doesn’t pull on your head, your heart, and your loins enough to overcome the constant waves of anxiety and what-iffing.

And I don’t mean moral as in “right or wrong,” as in, it’s right to have kids and wrong not to have kids. I mean moral in a more classical sense, as in “that which calls to you; that which demands your attention.” When the whole world calls to you all of the time, whether that’s through a phone screen or merely through the news or the overheard conversations of your local public, it’s hard to tune yourself to just one frequency — let alone a boring but important frequency. When you feel like your neighbors have an opinion about Palestine and that you ought to probably have one too, that’s one more neurotic roadblock to you being focused on the dishes or your husband (and it’s also one more opportunity to argue with your husband, or with other people, about something which flatly does not affect your life and you can do nothing about). When you’re 22 and you feel like there are job opportunities in San Francisco that could be life-changingly good and you’re wondering whether you could make it out there, it’s hard to say to yourself, “I should probably give all that up and start a family, here and now.” There are too many what-ifs that are too consuming. Your attention suffers the gravity of too many different thinking patterns, both good and bad.

And you might think, well what about people with no internet? What about people in small villages in India? What about people who probably aren’t thinking about the whole world all of the time?

Well, first, those people are probably still suffering from the general malaise that is contagious from everyone else they come into contact with. Even if you yourself aren’t depressed, but most of the people you see on a daily basis are, their patterns of thinking will become your patterns of thinking. You can’t help it; it’s what humans do. We fall into the patterns of what goes on around us. Therefore, even people who aren’t scrolling social media all day are a) aware of all the evils and opportunities of the world, and b) infected with the general behavioral malaise that everyone else suffers from. If no one around you is hurrying to get married and have kids, you won’t either. If everyone around you laments the state of the world and worries themselves over geopolitics and capitalism, you will too. Culture is every bit as contagious as the common cold, and you don’t even have to sneeze on people. You just have to exist near them and be whatever you currently are.

And more importantly, we’re not going to individual villages in India and surveying each family to see how many kids they’re having. If we did, we’d probably find that those people are having more kids than average. But that fits the idea anyway: the people who don’t have access to the whole world are having the most kids, and being more than offset by those who do. That’s more or less my whole point. The amount of people suffering from World-Too-Big Syndrome is so large that it more than offsets those who aren’t. Ergo, there is a falling overall fertility rate in almost every place we can get to by car or plane. The problem seems to be, obviously, the globalization of the human consciousness.

Everyone knows at this point that fertility is correlated with class. The higher-income and more educated you are, the fewer kids you have. Single white women who get good jobs and move to comfortable lives in the suburbs are having approximately no kids, and families in the thick of urban urgency and the struggle of survival are actually having most of the kids. It seems education comes with a trade-off: those who know the most about the world are the least fertile.

(I was going to say those who care most about the world, but most of these people only care so far as it lets them perform compassion for an audience while doing nothing to solve actual problems, and is rewarded with academic and political and social clout. So the issue doesn’t seem to be caring, it seems to be knowing.)

Also fertile: Mormons. But that’s because they’re just, as much as I hate to say it, generally good at a lot of things. I don’t agree with their transparently made-up-by-a-cult-leader version of Christianity, but they have some of the happiest and healthiest communities on the planet, and most of their women give birth approximately every five minutes. So they’re clearly doing something right. And the biggest thing they’re doing right, it seems to me, is keeping people out of their own heads. They’ve eliminated, or perhaps inoculated against, the obsession with the self, and with the entire world, that afflicts everyone around them. When you’re busy working and preparing to raise kids, and helping raise your own siblings and playing with your cousins and doing useful chores, you don’t have time to be obsessed with yourself or with Russia or San Francisco. Your what-ifs are focused on your own, actual life, not the mountain of horrors which is the world beyond your own community.

One of my most core beliefs is: if happy people agree with you, you said something smart. If unhappy people agree with you, you said something stupid. And if Mormons are in fact generally happy, and educated white people are in fact generally not happy, then I want to start living, and thinking, a little less like the latter and a little more like the former. I’m probably not going to move to Utah, but I have found a wife and am actively having kids. I’m letting the gravity of a small life pull me closer, because that’s the life where I’m actually useful (and happy).

This would also explain why liberal people are having significantly fewer kids than conservative people: most liberal- and progressive-minded people take it upon themselves to be a steward of the world’s problems, as a matter of principle. This directly interferes with their ability to live a Small Life, and focus on things like having great intimacy and kids.

Working class life and urban life offer the same gift, in a general sense, that religion always gave to us: they keep you busy. They put you inside a problem that you must solve. And when you have actual problems, counterintuitively, you tend to have more children.

Big Self Syndrome

The seeming inverse problem, which is actually just the opposite side of the same coin, is an obsession with the self. Again there are remote places in India or Bangladesh or central Africa or China where people are still in survival-and-family mode, and don’t obsess over their Selves. But those people are a relatively small portion of the global population now, and they’re probably having many kids, and the birth rate is falling anyway.

Most of us can’t stop thinking about ourselves. That’s the other thing the advancement of our species into the future has done to us.

People are timid. We have become toe-dippers. We have all become the kind of people who stand at the edge of the pool considering whether to ease ourselves in, not looking up from our own feet to realize that the people who jumped into the pool, temperature be damned, are actually way, way happier than we are. It’s a feedback loop: they jumped in because they’re happier and more resilient people, and they also became happier more quickly because they jumped in earlier and didn’t sit around thinking about themselves.

America is the great exporter of culture, and what we have exported is a culture of the Self. We all want to make posts and videos for The Internet showing our place in the world. We’re viral, we’re pretty, we’re memorable, we’re up to date on issues, we’re worth hiring, we’re quirky, we’re oppressed, we’re neurodivergent, we’re here and we’re important.

And when we don’t feel seen or important or special or rare, we suffer depression and anxiety.

“A panic attack is when you’re white and you don’t get what you want, so your body starts trembling.” - Luz Pazos

This is entirely self-inflicted. Our lives are too easy, so we ruminate about our place in the world. Because, due to our having won the lottery of birth time and place, we literally have nothing better to do than think about our place in the world. And we never stop to think that feeling pretty, important, special, and rare can all be replaced by feeling useful. It’s very hard to be sad and useful at the same time. And by the way, being useful to other people has a way of making you pretty.

The problem is, we’ve created a world where nobody actually needs us. The solution to that is, you guessed it, having children. You can voluntarily inflict a fifty-year emergency upon yourself — an emergency so severe and so consuming that it becomes your world. It replaces, to some extent, your “Self.” Instead of trying to Actualize Yourself™, you actually actualize yourself.

And when you think you’re an important person, or that you have the potential to be, it raises your standards for what a spouse should be, too. People who are aware of the Self are no longer satisfied with the oldest call to action from the mythology of our species: to just try really hard to be the best man or woman you can be, and to use that to love someone deeply and build a life together. That’s too local; that’s not enough for the Self. That lacks ambition, that’s small potatoes. We’ll either find an amazing spouse or stay single. There are so many options, I must have just the right one. And on dating apps, many people have found the best way to make themselves as undateable as possible: they have combined World-Too-Big Syndrome with Big Self Syndrome. Their matches must not be politically undesirable, and yet must be personally extremely desirable. To which I say: very good luck.

So we have a catch-22. The thing that could save you from the nothing that is your current life, is precisely the thing you cannot do because of your current life. Namely, finding a spouse and reproducing.

And this cultural phenomenon is distributed like a virus through American memorabilia, American music, American social media, and American movies throughout the entire world. Anybody with the power to import goods and media has the power to become infected with this obsession and the corresponding malaise. Even people in small towns in India make ridiculous social media videos to make themselves look cool and large. And often they are better at acting American than Americans are: they use camera angles and slow motion and visual style to make the main character of the video seem extremely important. People in countries whose names you don’t even know have imported the Self.

And I would guess that the young man in the video, performing skinny Indian badassery and cleverness with his perfectly coiffed hair, does not have kids. Because only someone without kids could expend that much energy being a clown for a camera lens without actually accomplishing anything. And he’s not going to have them anytime soon, because he wants to keep impressing the lens. He wants to keep being the guy. The guy who might someday be able to do something other than submit to being a human animal. He wants to keep being the Self, instead of a real person.

There is no happy ending to this piece

To be clear, there are many issues contributing to the fertility crisis in a giant spiderweb of feedback loops and broken systems. Young adults really are saying they can’t have kids because it’s too expensive. And they’re not being silly and nihilistic; they mean it. They are locked out of home ownership, and basically adulthood itself, by wealth inequality and the astronomical prices of housing and healthcare and education. People really are struggling with a horrible dating landscape, and lack of social opportunities, and the lack of social outlet due to less alcohol consumption, and low-trust societies, and incentive structures that reward people for contributing nothing to society while punishing those trying to start legitimate family lives. And these broken systems exist in many countries in various combinations, making it impossible to isolate the problem to one issue on a graph.

But we don’t need a graph; we need a story. And the story is, people don’t know how to live happy lives anymore. Because the person has been broken, the environment has been broken, and because there is a giant button that dispenses endless free cocaine. The story is, humans are animals, and animals can’t live like this — and they certainly can’t reproduce like this. Life is too easy, and people don’t have the self control to live it urgently. Life is too distracting, and people have lost the ability to focus on what is boring yet important.

So my conclusion is this: the global fertility decline is mostly caused by the interconnectedness of the world. Technology is aiding and abetting, but is not the culprit; technology is a symptom in the feedback loop. The real culprit is the globalizing of our species. This is the only explanation I can see that would explain why nearly every culture, all at once, is struggling with fertility despite every other measurable factor being different across cultures. Globalization itself, although not a measurable force, although not a nice and neat mathematical proof, must be the cause, because it’s almost definitionally correct. It almost defines itself as the problem, because it means the everything-ification of everything. It’s hard to have a narrow, specific, focused life when everything is everything-ified. It’s hard to be a person who takes accountability for one small thing when all of the world’s problems and all of the world’s opportunities have been put onto one spoon and shoved into your mouth. Even the most big-mouthed American woman can’t chew that much.

There’s a party going on and you must not miss it. There are life-changingly good employment opportunities and you must be ready for them. There are oppressed persons in some faraway location that you simply must have a moral opinion about and screech at strangers on the internet about. There are things to be thought and you must think them.

Everyone wants to think of himself as part of Everything, All The Time. I think this is particularly a feminine trait, but it’s afflicting men too. Men, in reality, have a need to hunker down and focus. It raises their T and makes them feel more like men. Which, in turn, makes them act more like men, and makes women want to have kids with them.

And we’re not doing that.

The advancement of humans into the future is the issue itself. Low testosterone, the un-animaling of the human being, World-Too-Big Syndrome, the obsession with the Self, and the fertility decline are the results. The Future is the thing, and these other issues are the shadows it casts on the wall.

I’m a firm believer in cycles. I believe almost anything you can name in life, any phenomenon worth panicking over or being excited about, moves in cycles. The exuberance of one chapter causes the decay in the next, the over-doing of something leads directly to its under-doing in the next phase, and so forth. And so I do believe the birth rate will recover somewhat, by humans simply reacting to the fall.

But my worry and my hypothesis is that the birth rate will never be as healthy as it once was, because the problem isn’t just cyclical this time. It’s the advancement of humans into structurally unnatural circumstances, and it’s globalization. Those two genies are un-re-bottleable. So unless humans find a way to naturally stoke their head, heart, and loins again and learn how to eat and work and fuck again, I don’t think the birth rate is going to fully recover. The world is actively hostile to all of the instincts and behaviors that lead to kids, and it’s not going to become less hostile anytime soon. Every piece of technology and media around you is designed to hijack all of the instincts in you which are reproductive and fruitful and good.

Having said that, humans are adaptive creatures. Maybe we’ll surprise myself.

“A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.” - Hunter S. Thompson

Something funny happened. To both me and my friend Brent, at exactly the same time. We got tired of essays. We’re both tired of them. Both as readers, and as writers.

Brent has always been a writer, and has recently been invited into a serial writing project with our friend Ben Hunt on panoptica.com. The goal is to produce an essay every few weeks, taking turns with the other contributors to the project. After writing a few essays, Brent realized something: if I keep doing this, they’re all just going to be the same essay. Because every time I try to write something about the modern world or modern finance or modern culture, the same thing comes out.

Ben’s project, as with anything Ben touches, is full of excellent people, is well-designed, and is exceedingly thoughtful. But Brent realized his heart just isn’t in it. And it’s not because he has fallen out of love with writing. In fact the older he gets, and the older I get, the more we both love the process and the craft of writing. Our problem is that all nonfiction writing seems to be converging on a single format: point out how the modern age is ruining us, and make memes out of it. Nonfiction writing, like movies and social culture, is flattening. Now that everyone has access to all the same cultural touchstones all of the time, everyone writes the same things all of the time. Culture used to be lumpy, full of surprises. Now it’s all same-y, full of none.

I don’t know how we got so burned out at precisely the same time, but we did. And Brent is 17 years older than I, so his reading and writing journey has been significantly longer than mine. Which makes me think this isn’t a coincidence. I think we’re just in an environment that has so saturated us with written material that it’s no longer novel or interesting to be a constant reader of nonfiction. All of the low-hanging fruit is already in our basket, and most of the moderate-height fruit is too. Sometimes I feel like the only thing I haven’t read is the most abstract and useless of the field of philosophy.

It’s pretty rare that I read an essay these days and actually learn something. And that breaks my poor corazón1. What usually happens instead is that I hear an argument for or against a thing (usually against, because being against things is more fun) that I’ve already heard before, in slightly new words. And it usually includes words like “but actually,” “but in the modern age,” and “historically, this is not how humans lived.”

For just about any topic you can think of, I’ve read twenty or more essays, all worded differently, all saying basically the same four or five things in various levels of detail and pain. Things like “Technology bad,” or “Feminism bad,” or “Marriage good, actually,” or “Trust in our society is at an all-time low,” or “We live in a society where everything you do is surveilled, turned into a financial product, and sold back to you for profit.” Or there’s a response essay to a response essay to an original essay. And then you have to go back and read all three if you want to grasp the context, and I sort of just don’t care anymore. Because the ideas in there I’ve probably heard before, and it’s going to be another 45 minutes where I could have been outside walking or I could have been reading fiction.

It just feels like every time I read an essay now, I come away feeling empty. Like I noticed a little harder that the world as it is sucks, and that technology is making it harder to be a whole and unified human with a whole and unified family. Yes, I know that our culture is falling apart and that kids don’t play outside anymore. I know that. I honestly just don’t want to keep reading this stuff, because it depresses me just for the sake of depressing me. It puts me back on the carousel of “What if life were not like it currently is?” and imagining that all of the things that are broken were not in fact broken. It’s a ride that I don’t want to get on anymore. We just keep meme-ing cultural misery at each other and it doesn’t seem to me that we’re fixing anything.

I mean, think about it. Everything moves in cycles. Good times create weak men, et cetera. For anyone who has studied the history of any domain, this is patently obvious and unavoidable and, in some way, comforting. It means that none of our problems are unprecedented, and that there are natural consequences of where things currently are, and those consequences are what come next pretty much no matter what anyone does.

Do you think that if Substack didn’t exist, our culture would be any different at all than it is right now? If we didn’t have all these essays pointing out how our culture went too far one direction, would that impact how we’re now turning and heading back the other direction? I’m not sure it would. I’m not sure these essays are making a difference, really. And I wonder if other people can feel this thing in the air too. This over-essaying everything to death.

And so it wouldn’t surprise me if other people are reaching the same point Brent and I have reached.

I’m tired of the same old takes, spiels, rants, corrections, and actuallies. I’m tired of exciting titles on articles that say nothing. I’m tired of people getting famous for saying what ten thousand other people have already said, and getting told they are “brilliantly insightful” and “absolutely incredible” as writers. Contrary to how I felt when I first started writing, pointing out once again the things that suck about capitalism and technology and relationships is not heroic. A hero is someone who does something, not someone who describes something. I’m tired of seeing people with 50,000 paid subscribers say little more than “Hey, I noticed this broken thing about our society.” Yes, it makes me jealous, but mostly I’m tired of it because it’s stupid. It’s stupid to pay somebody $600,000 a year to keep saying that.

I’m tired of the fact that there’s a formula for essays just as much as there is a formula for the short-form video algorithm. All it takes to be successful on Substack is the Cultural Despair Gambit. You mention a problem that we’re collectively facing in society, you round up the usual suspects (technology, hyper-liberalism, government, the Sexual Revolution, the economy, women, men) and pin the blame on one of them, but then you turn and offer a vague way forward. “Our culture is going to shit, but wait! We can do something. If we would only just.” And after reading 5,000 of these essays and writing about 200 of them myself, I have come to realize that we will never just. No culture has ever just, and they’re not going to start now.

A few people will just. But most of us won’t. And perhaps that’s what I find so depressing. A few of us have the (or an) actual answer to most of our problems. For instance, the sexual revolution did ruin dating. Teenagers having smartphones is bad, actually. Feminism did go too far, actually. Wokeness did ruin higher education, actually. And men being men is a good thing, actually. And so a few readers will try harder to date smarter. A few readers will work harder to re-socialize their small worlds. A few readers will in fact log off and spend more time in the sun, saying hi to their neighbors. A few men will in fact read the essay and then embrace what makes them masculine and become better men for it. A few people will start pushing back against radicals in politics and culture and technology.

But most won’t. Most will just stay online and continue arguing about these things in more essays.

Cultural despair followed by a vague sense of cultural optimism. That’s the formula. That’s what 90% of essays are, and there are people getting totally rich writing them. And I’ve read some truly outstanding prose in these essays. Memorable and gorgeous prose that is genuinely enjoyable to read. But no matter how clever they are, no matter how beautiful the imagery is or how rereadable the prose, that’s more or less what they all say. And I’ve realized, at the same time as Brent, that I’m just tired of reading them. They don’t offer solutions. Or, they do, but those solutions are pipe dreams. Because society isn’t going to fix itself on the basis that the 500 of us who read a great essay are suddenly a little more enlightened. Society isn’t going to fix itself on the basis that a few of us now understand something utterly clearly. Because the other 349,999,500 of us still don’t get it and aren’t going to make any changes.

The incentive structures of our government are not going to change because a few people on Substack snapped and pointed at the computer screen like Leonardo Dicaprio and said “Yes! That’s it! That’s what’s broken!” Young men around the country are not going to stop watching porn and ruining their brains because 500 of us realize how bad it is. We can’t un-crank their hogs for them or magically grant them self-control. We can’t expect single twenty-somethings to stop having premarital sex or get back into church just because a few of us over here realized that they ought to. No matter how compelling our case against the sexual revolution is, it’s over. It’s done. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, no matter how cleverly we notice the problem, no matter how hard we describe it.

And if we do move back towards a culture of conservatism and continence (which I think is already happening), it won’t be because we all reposted each other’s essays. It will be because that’s the natural consequence of living in a society where everybody, all the time, is having terrible sex with people they don’t even like and most kids are raised by single mothers and nobody can trust their partner because everyone is cheating on each other. The human population is a very large organism, and it has a will of its own, and the only solution to its own behavior is its own behavior. As they say in finance, the cure for high prices is high prices.

The only thing that can fix all of these issues is the healing of culture. And that’s not accomplished with internet posts, it’s accomplished by neighbors sitting in each other’s living rooms and taking an active interest in helping raise each other’s kids. It’s accomplished by couples staying together and loving each other, and putting their phones down during family time. It’s accomplished by sisters in the United States refusing to disown each other over what’s going on in Israel and Palestine.

To make matters worse, I’ve also realized that I have become addicted to these essays. And so is most of the audience on Substack. We scroll our feeds, sniffing for the next cultural despair essay like dope fiends looking under the stove for a forgotten pill or a crumb of crack. We can’t help it. Because, in the age of endless media, we have even turned reading into empty calories. I mean sure, there have always been rag tabloids and silly books and horrible manifestos, but those were read almost exclusively by lunatics. Now we all read nonsense all of the time. Not because we actively choose to read nonsense, but because we have an appetite to read and we brute force the algorithm to deliver. This is the material that keeps coming up, because this is the material that exists. Because we keep writing it, because we keep reading it.

We no longer await the serendipity of a great essay recommended to us by a friend or the hush-hush handoff of forbidden ideas after school. We no longer wait for great. We scroll for reading material and find a feeding trough. Myself included. And I’ve already been through addiction once, and I know what it feels like. It feels like this. I’m not having fun. I’m just injecting a bunch of nonsense into my body to stave off the boredom and withdrawal.

And it’s not like we’re treading new ground or playing with forbidden ideas here. If we were part of some underground society, that would be noble, that would be sexy. But we talk about all of the worst and most controversial things all the time, out in the open, because we have taken everything to its most extreme limit, including writing. At least we’re adult enough to openly talk about complicated things like sex and how to raise a healthy family in an extremely hostile technological environment. But that doesn’t necessarily butter any parsnips. Just because we notice doesn’t mean the problems are getting fixed. We’re just sitting around basking in the knowing — as if the knowing is worth something in and of itself. All the while, we’re getting more depressed and so are our kids, if we even have any, which half of us don’t.

We can’t stop reading how the world is going to shit but wait. It’s like an infomercial for our own futures — the ones you used to watch at 2 am when you couldn’t sleep, completely enthralled but knowing you were never going to buy the advertised product.

I’m tired of writing these essays, too. Sometimes I feel the only people we’re impacting are other writers. In other words, people who are already interested in being impacted. People who are interested in changing their minds and learning a new skill to actually put into practice. Substack, or writers’ circles in general, are sort of like a walled garden of ambitious caring. We desperately want to fix the ills of the world — we really do — but we can’t make the rest of the world care the way that we do. We’re participating in a self-contained Noticing Apparatus which doesn’t seem to have enough power to impact the outside world. So we just continue typing and scribbling and publishing all of the things we notice, and point them out to each other. Look at us noticing.

I’ve just grown tired of it; it’s not interesting anymore. I’m tired of reading that feminism and dating apps ruined relationships, even though they did. I’m tired of reading that smartphones ruined teenagers’ minds, even though they did. And I’m tired of reading that we live in a surveillance world where everything you do amounts to a performance and we’d all be happier without that, even though we do and we would.

I don’t know what this means for my writing, moving forward. I generally try to write practical essays anyway, not idle think pieces. So maybe this won’t affect my writing much. Perhaps this is a mood, like when Camus asked, “Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”

I’m back to reading fiction. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a writer of fiction — although I have stumbled ass-over-teakettle into a book idea which is something that has never happened to me before. All I can say is, nonfiction has just about expired for me. And I suspect that may start happening to many more people as we reach maximum capacity for realizations and noticings. I have swallowed so many hard-to-swallow realizations that I may need to have my stomach pumped.

“I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win ‘cause you’ll play against you.” - Dr. Seuss

—

Thanks to Brent Donnelly for reading a draft of this, and for being a Professional Noticer.

I’m going to assume you’ve heard of System 1 and System 2 by now. I’ll save us both three paragraphs and just summarize like this: System 1 is fast, reactive and instinctive thinking, often even subconscious thinking; System 2 is slow, deliberate thinking. They’re very different kinds of thinking and are used for different things in your life.

As I have spent years reading and learning on my own for my own reasons, there is a feeling I have about all of the knowledge and wisdom that I touch. And it is this: system 1 and system 2 aren’t diametrically opposed, or simply two separate things that ought to be treated and considered separately. Rather, the whole point of system 2 is system 1. Let me explain.

Underneath my conscious mind is a filing cabinet of responses and instincts that I access very quickly and usually without thinking. This is the bag of tricks I have with which I respond to the various situations in my life — whether ordinary or less ordinary. For a professional, this might be the set of accumulated responses one has to particular problems in their field: for instance an attorney might respond to a meddlesome opponent by suggesting a Temporary Restraining Order, or a dietician might respond to chest pain by citing a reflux issue and suggesting more Tums and less tomato-based sauces. They won’t even have to look up from what they’re doing to ask you any further questions; they’ve encountered these situations before. These are tried-and-true responses that have become second-nature. This is simply the first and most obvious response to the issue at hand.

Everyone has this bag of tricks, this filing cabinet, because everyone you know typically has a very small and fairly predictable set of responses to most everything in everyday life. These responses, these reactions and instincts, constitute someone’s personality in some sense. They constitute the mental image you have of someone when you think about them in the shower or you imagine telling them good or bad news.

When you think of your brother Ted, the easygoing, stoic blue-collar guy, you don’t just picture him working or walking down the street or something. You picture yourself telling him something and him warmly saying “Well alright then” to good news or “That’s not right and you know it” to a questionable decision. You picture his responses to things — you picture his personality in action, even if that action is small. In some sense, someone’s bag of tricks, someone’s filing cabinet of responses, represents who they are to you. Or, less personally, it represents who they are. It represents their personality. This is what I think of as system 1. It’s how a person responds to the things of life.

And the contents of this filing cabinet change very slowly, but they do change. And there are really only 3 things that change them: conflict and resolution in relationships, deep conversation (which is rarer now than ever before in our lives), and reading.1

Every time I have an issue with the woman who recently became my wife, and then solve it, and every time I’ve ever resolved an issue with a past girlfriend or even a friend, I learn a bit more about how to be a good human — or at least how to be more effective. About how to respond wisely and responsibly to various things that can happen between two people: miscommunication, insecurity-turned-anger, slights, and failures to love a person the way they need to be loved. I mess one of these things up, and then (if the other person is a good communicator, which my wife is) they offer a correction. There’s a better way to handle the thing you just messed up. There’s a better way to love me, here’s how I wish you would greet me at the door every day, here’s how I wish you’d respond to me when I need some affection from you.

These might seem like small changes, and a particularly miserable person might say “I don’t owe anything to my spouse,” but they’re not and you do. These changes on a long enough time horizon are your life. These are the little things that constitute your day, and therefore your life. If you don’t learn how to love each other in a way that actually works, there’s no point in being married at all. Similarly, if you’re in business with someone who always does things that piss you off and undermine you, there’s no point in being in business with them.

I need to be able to give my wife feedback about how I want love to feel, and she needs to be able to give me the same thing. And then we talk about these things, often slowly and deliberately, in a system 2 dialogue. In a dialogue that weighs pros and cons, balance, trade-offs, and emotions we usually either communicate shorthand or don’t communicate at all.

Then, if I’ve learned my lesson, I slowly start to automate the correction. It might take a few instances of me stepping on my wife’s toes or failing to love her properly — but after a while, I start to automatically react in the correct way. As long as I’m not tired or hungry or grumpy or being a smartass, anyway. That’s what learning is, and it’s also what makes relationships into good relationships. I have imported the correct response procedure from system 2 directly into system 1. I have automated the process of being a better husband, a better and wiser person. And my life is going to compound in a better direction for it.

This can also happen with insights you get from deep conversation: you spend minutes or even an hour or more bouncing around in the abstract space that a human issue exists in, and then you arrive at an insight, either because of someone else’s words or because of your own. In other words, you spend minutes or hours in system 2 with a partner. And these insights, from deep conversation, are particularly sticky because you had to spend time with the idea to earn them. You had opened up the trunk in your mind where everything about this idea lives, and had strewn the contents of that idea all over the floor. And only once you had made a mess of the idea and put all of its contents in view did you arrive at something new. That’s a lot different than merely reading a quote and thinking, “Hmm, that sounds like a useful idea,” and then immediately distracting your mind with something else. No unpacking, no dirty floor, no stickiness.

And that’s also why we write essays, not quotes. My job as a writer is to keep your attention engaged long enough to take a typically dead-simple idea and make enough of a mess around it that it sticks to you.

This is one of the things that makes our phone culture so tragic. When I was younger, my brothers and I would get stoned and have conversations for hours. We would go out to the garage to smoke — after our parents went to bed of course, they were good parents and certainly did not allow this — and then we would just stay there. We would get so deep into conversation that it felt ridiculous to walk away from it. So we would talk for an hour, and smoke again. And then we’d keep talking, and then smoke again and talk some more. We discovered a lot of the things we had mutually but separately noticed about the world, and our family, and people this way. These are some of the most meaningful conversations I’ve ever had, and they were transformative for all three of us. They helped us identify ourselves in the world, and helped us learn lessons through system 2 that we then imported into system 1. We became better, more stoic, more emotional, more reasonable, and better-prepared men by these conversations.

Kids these days, regardless of whether they smoke pot or drink or partake in any substance use, don’t have the luxury of being incredibly bored. My brothers and I talked for hours into the night for one reason: because we were present enough to do so. We weren’t getting high and then rushing back to the lights-and-sounds circus of our phones. Because we didn’t have those yet. What we had was each other. Sure, we had TV, but that isn’t nearly as mind-hijacking as the circus. TV could wait.

College kids these days have fewer opportunities to unpack their psyches late into the night with a few friends, because everyone has a phone and three other rectangles of various sizes now. They simply don’t have to anymore, because they’re no longer bored. They’re no longer discovering the world through conversation and through each other — and that also means they’re not building the kinds of bonds that come with those conversations, either. Couples who used to sit on the couch long past bedtime, telling yet-untold stories and yet-unheard feelings, are now probably scrolling more often and going to bed without actually loving each other. And their systems 2 aren’t getting activated as often anymore, and their systems 1 aren’t changing as often anymore. They’re stuck. Their relationship isn’t evolving, and they’re not becoming wiser and more automatically-good people. Not for each other, maybe not at all.

And this is also why reading, and especially reading fiction, is the single most important activity a person can engage in to become wiser and more effective as a participant in the world. It’s because it brings your entire unconscious mind out into the open and lets ideas pinball around haphazardly. It unpacks your unconscious mind and just lets you sit with its contents in view on the floor. When you’re reading To Kill a Mockingbird, you have moments where Atticus Finch’s personality deeply connects with your own — even if at a right angle. You can’t learn how to be patient and wise like Atticus Finch by just hearing someone describe him; you have to actually spend time looking at him through Scout’s eyes and see just how important, how essential, his patience and fairness are. Only then will your unconscious mind find it important enough to be like him, to actually make those neurological changes and slowly turn you into him. Only when you spend time down inside the conflict around Atticus will you connect his patience and wisdom with parts of your own personality.

You certainly can’t get that by just reading a list of quotes from the book.

Reading is the best way to spend time with personalities that are bigger, better, and more interesting than yours. It’s the best way to spend time with personalities that make you want to be somebody different. It’s like having a long conversation through the night with someone who is excellent at making ideas sticky. Because when you read great fiction, you do not forget it. Ever. It’s the scenic route, and yet also the shortcut, to system 1.

When a person is getting sober, they’re often taught something like “first thought wrong.” In other words, the first response that comes to your mind is wrong because it’s probably either angry, selfish, jealous, narcissistic, or otherwise destructive. Over the course of a year, and then two years, and then ten years, you slowly build the ability to have your first thought be something useful and selfless and healthy and purposeful. That’s a skill that has to be earned — and people who never earn it generally don’t stay sober. Because if you spend your whole life at the whims of a system 1 that is programmed to make you a selfish, binge-drinking jerk, it’s only a matter of time until you do in fact act like a selfish, binge-drinking jerk. The point isn’t to white-knuckle sobriety, it’s to learn how to think in a way that makes sobriety tenable.

The goal of all — okay, let’s be fair and say “most” — learning is to take system 2 ideas and turn them into system 1 instincts and potential responses. It is my opinion that any other learning, any learning that is merely “the accumulation of knowledge,” is mostly pointless unless you’re a physicist or somebody whose actual livelihood revolves around that knowledge. Learning wisdom is our first job as adults; learning knowledge is merely play, an activity we have the luxury of participating in because there aren’t any animals trying to kill us and because there isn’t any firewood that needs chopped. It’s not completely useless, but it’s not as useful as improving system 1.

I’ve had three separate people tell me I seem happier and more calm in the last year. I can tell you for sure that change isn’t because I accumulated more knowledge. It’s because I’ve had a lot of conflict and resolution, a lot of serious conversations, and I’ve been reading fiction.

“People will tell you anything, but what they do is always the truth.” - P.J. O’Rourke

Here’s something humans all have in common: We compete in the sexual marketplace.

Here’s something else humans have in common: We usually don’t enjoy this.

I have heard it said that women don’t really enjoy having to do the whole makeup thing. And they don’t enjoy having to constantly buy new clothes, and have a new dress for every occasion, and always worry about their hair, and such and such and so on. They feel locked in a game that they don’t enjoy, and there doesn’t seem to be any winning this competition. It’s never really “over.” Not once you have a boyfriend, not once you’re married, not necessarily even if you come out as lesbian.

It’s also been said that this is men’s fault — a common feminist line of reasoning is that our society is patriarchal because women have to compete under the male gaze, and that this competition was imposed upon them by men. A common rebuttal to this line of reasoning is, no, women aren’t even doing this for men. They’re doing it for other women. For instance, no man, ever, said “I saw you in that dress before and now I think less of you. You should have bought a new one.” It’s women who will say that to you, not men (or, more accurately, they’ll say it to other women behind your back). It’s women you’re putting on layers of makeup for, not men. And it’s women you’re wearing a $9,000 diamond engagement ring for, not men. Not even your husband. And he’s the one who bought it.

The signal of that dress or of that diamond ring is about femininity. It’s a signal that says, “I’m feminine, and I value my femininity enough to display it, and I’m going to use my femininity to outcompete you in the sexual marketplace.” (And, if I’m currently in a relationship, the extra layer added to this signal is “My boyfriend/fiancée/husband values my femininity enough to invest in it. I’m solid, and he thinks I’m solid, and he spends money on me because I’m solid, so don’t even bother trying to take him away from me.”) It’s a signal of feminine value and feminine standing in the pyramid of feminine.

Here’s one more thing humans have in common: None of us signed up for this. We have to play these ridiculous games because, you know, them’s the rules. This isn’t cultural, it’s biological. The subset of rules varies from culture to culture, and from place-and-time to place-and-time, but the game never goes away. The reason we know this is because everywhere on Earth people want to have sex with each other, and therefore everywhere on Earth people have to make decisions about whom to have sex with. Ergo, competition. That’s not a cultural artifact, it’s a logistical necessity for sex to occur at all. I think it goes without saying that you wouldn’t want to live in a world where the least physically desirable men think they have a chance to be inside you (or actually do get to be inside you). We don’t compete because we want to, we do it because there’s no other way to make decisions.

And I think some women would find it surprising that most men feel the same way about masculinity. There are infinite ways to slice and dice the data about yourself (especially in the age of male-self-optimization podcasts and swiping apps where you have approximately 0.4 seconds to catch someone’s attention), infinite ways to “improve” yourself, to be more intellectual or more charming or chest-beatingly masculine, and all of it ultimately feels sort of pointless. It’s like you’re competing against some imagined foe that never actually grants you a victory. You’re never done being self-conscious; you can always keep improving along some other axis, and you can always make your dating profile a little bit better by some arbitrary metric for some imagined stereotypical woman… but then, of course, you’ll be making yourself less attractive to this other type of woman. C’est la masculinity.

And none of us signed up for this; we feel we have no choice (because we don’t). Most men, apart from those riddled with medically-anomalous amounts of testosterone, don’t enjoy being locked in a perpetual competition each hour of each day. It’s sort of a drag. It makes us self-conscious in a way that can be not only ceaseless but psychologically debilitating. It makes us do stupid things like spend 5 straight minutes thinking about the way we walk while we walk.

Now here’s the good news. You don’t really have to do all of this. Not only because that’s impossible from an energy and time perspective, but because in your quest to compete on every possible metric, you’re failing to compete in any meaningful way anyway.

Any business worth its salt knows that you can’t compete on price, quality, brand, innovation, social impact, environmental impact, and battery life all at the same time. Not only will you fail to do any of them perfectly, you won’t end up doing any of them right at all. Because you’re spreading yourself too thin, like butter over too much bread. You’re better off having two bites of good bread and then two with butter, than four bites of bread where the butter didn’t make a difference and was full of scraped holes.

Both sexes would be better off just choosing, like, 3 things that their head, heart, and loins can all get on board with to be more feminine/masculine, and give up on trying to outcompete everybody on everything else. You find the things you can live with competing on, and you just worry about those. For instance a man might just choose to 1) work out, 2) learn how to speak two more languages, and 3) play the guitar. He can leave sports, perfect style, perfect haircuts, perfect cologne, sexual dominance, and fighting to the men who would rather compete on those metrics, and just “compete” on these 3. In other words, get good enough at these 3 to be attention-grabbingly attractive. Which isn’t actually that difficult when most people aren’t focused enough to be good at anything.

A woman might wake up in the morning and, instead of worrying about her hair, her makeup, her nails, her top, her bottom, her jacket, her shoes, her warmth, her smile, her other bottom, her other top, her jewelry, and the amount of hobbies she can talk to people about, she might just choose her hair, her pants, and her books. Or her makeup, her workout routine, and her hobbies. I can assure you of one thing right now: there are men alive who, upon meeting you and seeing that you have a gorgeous long ponytail and are currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo, will literally lie down and die for you on the spot. You don’t even need a third thing. It doesn’t even matter what your teeth look like. So don’t trick yourself out of competing for that man by trying to compete for every man.

And keep in mind who you’re competing for and against. If you’re 34 years old and single, like almost all of us are at this point for Christ’s sakes, don’t waste your time signaling to other women. Signal to men. Wake up in the morning and do your hair nicely and give warm, inviting smiles to men. Carry your journal or a cute book with you, not a cute bag. Focus your time signaling to men, not women.

And if you’re a man and you’re taking testosterone injections and going to the gym to build your body, remember that it’s not women you’re attracting to come up and talk to you. It’s dudes. It’s other men. Women like a man who works out, not a man who is obsessed to the point of mental illness and doesn’t have anything going on in his life other than weights and boiled chicken. In fact you’d have more success attracting women if you were seen speaking to other women, being a trusted member of a community, not if you were seen having big muscles. Status isn’t about visual displays of theatrical qualities, it’s about displays of actual status.

There are very few proxies that work as well as actual status. And by status here, we don’t mean something like “dominance in public.” That’s a seventeen-year-old’s definition. We mean having other people know you and respect you on pretty much any level. That’s more status than most people have these days, and it’s not proxy-able. And having big biceps isn’t even a proxy, it’s a total avoidance of the thing you claim to be competing on.1

The signal you’re looking for is not in preparing to be a sexy man, it’s in being a sexy man. It’s not in preparing to be masculine, it’s in sending out a couple of reliable signals that you are masculine, and that you can be trusted to remain masculine without collapsing from the weight of the competition. The signal you’re looking for as a woman is not that you are adorned, but that you are adorable. Not that you spend your whole paycheck on bullshit, but that you can be trusted to be cute and sexy for a man if he comes into your life. And the best way to show that, is to stop spending your whole paycheck on bullshit and instead just show that you are cute and sexy, right now, today. And that’s 90% personality and 10% accessories, not the other way around.

None of us signed up for this competition, and we don’t really have to do it anyway. Not the way we feel pressured to, at least. Just pick a few things and do those well enough to attract someone who would in fact be attracted to those few things. If you can live without a man who likes nice earrings, stop wasting your money on nice earrings. If you can live without a woman who likes perfect haircuts, stop getting them. In fact as long as you keep getting them, you keep interrupting the flow of options to you with the ones you don’t want anyway. You’re trying to drown yourself in options that you don’t even consider options.

The point isn’t to just “be yourself” or anything quite so cheesy and useless. If you want a worthy mate, you do in fact have to be worthy of a worthy mate — and that means trying. It means you do have to compete on some of these things. The point is more like, if you try to do everything well, you’ll never be the best at what you’re the best at. You water down what would have attracted the right person to you in the first place. I like a feminine woman just as much as the next guy, but I’d much rather have my wife be extremely feminine in 3 ways I adore the most, than go broke and look silly trying to be feminine and attractive in every possible way. It’s just unnecessary.

Enjoy your life and limit yourself to sending just a few really strong indications of why someone should be attracted to you, instead of drowning in competition and not being happy and not attracting a mate anyway. When you’re attracting a mate, you shouldn’t be doing false advertising or “branding.” What you should be saying is, “Here’s who I am, and here’s an ordinary day-to-day approximation of what I will be for you. If that sounds good, say hello to me.”

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The internet keeps inventing memes for words and concepts that already exist. Some of the most popular “writers” on Twitter and Substack are basically just paid curators of other people’s ideas: they come up with a meme-able name for something that someone else already wrote, or put 25 meme-able ideas together in one post, and suddenly they’re a mover-and-shaker.

Sometimes it seems like people are incapable of doing anything unless it’s a viral concept. People can’t seem to commit to a lifestyle mode or a fitness routine or a self-discipline idea unless it’s decidedly popular, right now, today. In fact we even saw this in the ‘90s and ‘00s, before the internet ran our lives, with Taebo, then P90X, and South Beach and Keto — it seems people can only get behind a self-improvement thing if others are also using it to improve their respective selves.

This mostly applies to people under 25, but applies sadly to my own generation as well, the Millennials. We keep falling victim to internet trends that encapsulate ideas that can be found in books written hundreds of years ago. And the internet trends, although they sometimes contain the same information, are decidedly worse for a very specific reason. That reason is irony. Memes.

In the 2010s, the suffix “-maxxing” was added to the word “looks” by incels (men who self-fulfillingly can’t get laid) to describe men who focused hard on their looks to optimize their perceived mate value. This is approximately the point where the internet began its now-ubiquitous tendency to ascribe exciting new labels to very old ideas.

Looksmaxxing used to just be called “being vain” or “optimizing for looks” or “trying a little too hard to be hot.” But those phrases don’t tickle the limbic system; they don’t hijack the senses enough; they aren’t funny enough or ironic enough. So they got repackaged into the linguistic consumer product “looksmaxxing.” Ah, what a delightfully ironic word. So deliciously subversive, so novel and irreverent. Two X’s and a compound form made of a noun and the verbing of that noun: a junglegym of a word. This is what we must call it when people are vain now, because it’s more fun to say and type. It shows others that you’re tuned into Internet Dot F M. That you’re in the club of people who get the new vocabulary. That you’re ironic.

Then there was statusmaxxing (optimizing your life for status), careermaxxing, sleepmaxxing… at one point, the Twitter account of the United States Department of Defense used the word “lethalitymaxxing.” Because we must have a government that uses language we can understand. We must have irony. We must all know that, if we do take anything seriously, it’s also kind of a joke. Like, come on, I’m not that serious. I’m only as serious as you want to take me taking me. We live in a country where even the government is afraid to be completely serious.

Irony has turned us all into cowards and fools, ever giving each other looks of desperate uncertainty that say something like:

So like… how serious do you take me? No, I’m just kidding. I don’t care that much, it’s no big deal, I’m just maxxing to the extent I casually can. I mean, I’m not like… SICK or OBSESSED.

Unless, maybe, you’d tell me how seriously you take me, so I can recalibrate…?

No, I kid, I don’t take your answer seriously enough to even ask for it because I don’t take any of this that seriously.

Unless, perchance…?

No, forget it.

The internet is good at a lot of wholesome things and can vastly improve your life. It contains the sum total of human wisdom, and that is amazing. Like, amazing, as in the classical definition of amazing. Worthy of being amazed at.

But the internet is also very good at turning the best human wisdom into plastic products like those Chinese Amazon imitators. You know, you log onto the garbage store and buy something that’s worth even less than the parts and labor it’s made with, and then you pay them to ship it to you knowing that you’ll be disappointed and hoping you won’t anyway. Those stores sell bullshit, and it’s all they sell, and people keep buying it. Because those people can’t stop buying shit they don’t need, and they can’t be bothered to buy anything real or hand-crafted or with any actual value. They want the thrill of purchasing without the long satisfaction of quality.

There’s an entire economy of Chinese bullshit, and viral productivity/wisdom trends are the spiritual equivalent. So when you pick up one of these “maxxing” ideas or one of these productivity hacks from the internet, you and everyone else already knows it’s not going to be a sustainable lifestyle transformation; you’re just picking up a fad while it’s fresh and thrilling. You throw them away as quickly as you found them, because they didn’t cost you anything to acquire. They’re plastic imitations of lessons you should be spending time with in books. They’re lessons you can acquire from the comfort of a brand-new couch, instead of rolling around in the muck and the mud with difficult ideas and deep parts of yourself. If you did that, you might accidentally find a sustainable lifestyle transformation.

And you must not be seen taking yourself too seriously in any of these self-improvement trends, because that’s just as likely to get you laughed at as not knowing the words for them in the first place. It’s an endless guessing game of how seriously you’re allowed to take yourself with a bunch of words that are designed to be jokes anyway.

As our lives become more and more fast-paced, more secular, and more driven by technology, we will replace more and more virtue with fads and filler. Here’s something I bet you didn’t want to hear about your own children: kids that are constantly at the cutting edge of trends don’t stand for anything. They don’t have any virtues. Because if they did, they wouldn’t be at the cutting edge of linguistic and behavioral trends. Virtues and values supercede trends, always. That’s what virtue means: it means “more important than fickle bullshit.” If your kid walks around saying words that sound like toys, you need to ask yourself how much he actually cares about anything other than slick irony and shoes.

More and more of young kids’ lives, their vocabularies, and their very thought patterns are determined by viral trends. Their brains, instead of being molded patiently by long-standing and sturdy values, are being hijacked by sounds and colors and linguistic playthings. Every passing month brings new vocabulary tricks to their toybox, every new trend brings new ways to be a complete retard in public. And every passing month without any virtues that they stand for absolutely, is a month of their life where they didn’t practice anything that actually matters. You know how you feel dirty and disappointed with yourself after scrolling your phone for 2 hours, and can’t remember any of what you saw? There’s this shallow pit of despair in your gut, making you think of all the things you wish you could discipline yourself enough to spend time on. There are children growing up right now who are going to feel that way about their entire childhoods. And it’s going to be, frankly, your fault. Not theirs.

If parents don’t take back control over their kids’ thought patterns, they’re going to grow up without imagery and language for things like “deep work” and “bravery” and “steadfastness” and “loving sacrifice.” They’re not going to know what those things even mean, because they haven’t spent any time thinking about them or talking about them. They’ve spent their wholes lives in a theme park in utter safety. They haven’t felt what it’s like to deeply want something, because anytime the thought pattern for “want” crept into their heads and hearts, they picked their phones back up and interrupted it. Nothing has deep roots inside your children other than a need for entertainment.

Now there’s this new trend called retardmaxxing, which is basically an attempt at making viral the simple concept of contentment. The idea is that you need to be “dumber” — to stop chasing knowledge and preparedness, thinking it will make your life better, and instead just take swift and decisive action and be a little more loose. Stop yourself from having analysis paralysis by becoming more assertive and adaptive and present. I have written about this very concept no less than three times, alongside thousands of other writers; it’s not a new concept at all. And the shame is, turning it into a “radical” trend with a stupid name actually ruins what it’s trying to accomplish in the first place. Retardmaxxing is going to be over as quickly as it began, because it’s rooted in funniness and subversion. The kids could have called it presence or stoicism, and there’s already a book for those words. In fact there are dozens. But the moment there stop being Retardmaxxing videos on these kids’ For You page, they’re going to forget about it entirely.

Not everything needs an exciting name. Not everything needs to be a meme. If you spend your whole life giving things ironic names, you’ll never treat anything with the seriousness it deserves. And if you’re a parent and you let your kids grow up with the vocabulary of retards, what you’re really doing is letting them grow up with the thought patterns and the fickleness of retards. And what that means is that they’re going to grow up to be actual retards.

Jordan Peterson said one time, “Don’t let your kids do anything that makes you dislike them.” And I think it’s about time parents start following that advice. Because this TikTok generation is a giant pain in everyone’s ass and nobody other than themselves likes them. Sure it might be silly and funny to watch them talk, but you can’t raise a generation that doesn’t take anything seriously. You can’t raise a generation whose entire naming system for the things of the world is jokes. At some point, they’re going to have to be serious — and they might not know how.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” - Henry David Thoreau

Most things don’t really piss me off. I may sound cynical or negative sometimes, but I’m a pretty optimistic person. I just have a very strong bullshit sensor, and very little patience for it.

But what they’re doing to our cars, that pisses me off. And there are several reasons for this.

First of all, if it’s illegal to text and drive, which it should be, then under only the stupidest circumstances imaginable should it be legal for the whole car to be operated from a touch screen. And apparently those are the circumstances we’re in, because that’s apparently not only legal but standard now. Someone in the government, some regulator, must have been paid a very handsome “personal gift” to allow such a comically irresponsible idea through the regulatory apparatus. Or, more likely, many someones. Because someones simply are not doing their jobs. They have utterly abdicated their responsibility to do what is best for the driver and the road.

Another reason is that a car shouldn’t have to have software to be driven. Every new model car is a computer now. And I don’t mean that figuratively or as a matter of illustrative exaggeration, I mean every car is an iPad now. That’s what it is. The vehicle is installed onto the computer as an accessory, the way Microsoft Excel runs on the Windows operating system. So when you buy a new car, what you’re buying is a computer with a hard device grafted onto it. And that’s just… not what a car is supposed to be. A car is supposed to be a car. Your car’s operating system is supposed to be gasoline and an alternator, not a software shell.

Third, software, as we all know quite intimately by now, is merely a platform for advertising. You can be sure that if there’s a screen in your life, there will soon be ads on that screen. Your car is about to become a mobile platform for harvesting data about you and then selling that data, and simultaneously selling ad space to show you ads at stop lights. In your own car, which you paid for.

Fourth, you can also be sure that your car will come with subscriptions and bloat. More and more features of the vehicle you purchased, and allegedly own, will be locked behind either a paywall or a bunch of feature bloat in what is effectively product ransom. You want a car? Well, you’re gonna have to go ahead and sign these terms and agree that most of the “product” you want is behind a bunch of bullshit you don’t. You’re gonna have to go ahead and let our product into a permanent sexual relationship with your bank account. Because that’s what “owning” something means now. It means not owning it.

It doesn’t matter that you still have eyes that see and a neck that turns; we’re going to put blind spot cameras and backup cameras and lane assist into your car and make you pay for the tech required to make them work. And you’re also going to have to go ahead and deal with the bugs that these systems can sometimes have down the line. It doesn’t matter that you’re not the kind of person who wants a menu full of playful and whimsical features in your car. We’re putting them in, along with the necessary software and electrical systems, and making you pay for them anyway. The fact that you just want a car doesn’t matter; that car comes in a bundle with many things that are not car. We all know how much it pisses us off that dealerships try to throw a bunch of accessories and adds on every car they sell — well, that’s no longer something you can negotiate your way out of. They’re built in. Innovation is no longer something you go searching for as a personal choice.

A few other things piss me off. Things like Your Key Is Your Phone, software updates (which make your car inoperable at precisely the most inconvenient time, just like a computer), no buttons, no knobs, no door handles (which has killed people already), slow and lagging screens (just as an iPad ages and gets slow, your car will too), software issues rendering your car inoperable, connectivity issues rendering your car inoperable, and the fact that your car will no longer be serviceable by simple mechanics and mechanical parts but will require specialized labor (and probably sending your car back to the manufacturer for weeks).

Yes, I’ve thought about these problems a lot. Because they amount to a circus.

And finally, the one I haven’t seen anyone talking about: computer-based cars are going to destroy the used car market. Let me explain.

Most people, it seems, are actually against these modern changes in cars. The “Teslafication of everything” and the replacement of buttons and knobs with screens. The move in car manufacture from hardware to software; the nonstop shoving of novelty and menus into every new make and model. The innovation as a replacement for craftsmanship; the toy-ness as a replacement for seriousness. Nobody seems to want this, as I’ve seen quite a lot of backlash over it online. Not only because it’s nonsensical from a safety standpoint, or because someone is clearly asleep at the regulatory wheel, but because it just makes the whole user experience gross. Futuristic in a way that is cumbersome. Simplistic in a way that makes mechanically-able people dry heave.

However. There is a massive portion of the population that either doesn’t care that much, or is willing to look past these deficiencies in favor of novelty and status — the desire to have something new and cool regardless of how effective or good it is. Let’s just call these people, oh I don’t know, idiots.

The problem is, these idiots are exactly the kind of people who will be buying these cars new. That’s who we buy used cars from: people who bought them new. In other words, idiots. People who are willing to waste money, overextend themselves financially, and buy objectively bad things in order to pursue trends or achieve status or entertain themselves. So what that means is, despite the fact that most people don’t want these new cars with these screen-based interfaces, these are the cars that will be available anyway.

In ten years, the used car market will be made up of cars we don’t want.

Usually when you buy a used car, you have to worry about a few things. How many owners it has had; how well it’s been maintained; the reputation of that make, model, and year; how much maintenance you can expect in the first couple of years; how easy it is to service, etc.

Now, you’ll have to worry about the age of the screens and the electrical systems, and how you think they might deteriorate over time. It’s not just a single new part to worry about, it’s another entire layer of complexity. And it’s going to take the used car market a very long time to price that complexity in and come up with workable solutions for it. Not to mention the maintenance and repair market: our auto shop infrastructure is not prepared to service a country of wheeled computers full of sensors and proprietary software.

Every time you replace your windshield or window or door, you’re going to have to recalibrate a bunch of sensors. When your infotainment system (the screen and the computer behind the screen) need to be replaced, they’re going to have to rip out the dashboard of your car. And it’s going to be very very expensive, and it’s going to cause electrical problems, and it’s going to require specialized labor, and it’s going to be a gigantic pain in the ass for you. Over the next ten or more years, insurance companies are going to start totaling out cars with bad touch screens and computers. Because the cost to replace them is going to be more than the value of the car. And then you’re going to have to go buy a car that’s even worse with your inadequate payout.

And another thing you can bet money on, is that the same way Apple throttles their phones after a few years to make you buy the new one, car manufacturers are going to carefully plan the obsolescence of their software-based vehicles. So the same way using your phone becomes a slow and miserable experience, your car will frustrate you so much that you’ll have to just go buy a new one.

Yes, sure, this sounds cynical. But tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that’s not going to happen. Especially in the U.S. where even the most basic corporate decency is not legislated because nobody cares anymore.

Now here’s the good news (see, I told you I’m an optimist). You can still do something about this. For yourself, at least, even if you can’t change the direction of the market.

What I propose to every person of lower middle class capacities (or upper middle class capacities) is this: buy a car from 2015 or before, right now, with as few miles on it as you can possibly find. And when I say a car, I mean a Toyota or a Honda. Because everything else is a waste of money. Japanese people might be suspiciously orderly, but the upside of that orderliness is that they know how to build a god damn car. Or at least they did over the last 30 years, even if they have forgotten how in this decade.

Your goal should be to coast for the next 8 or 10 years and ignore the used car market completely. Because the used car market is about to be not a very good time. And in ten years, we will all be bidding for mechanical cars with moderate mileage and one previous owner. The used car market will be more expensive in ten years than the new car market is now. For desirable cars, at least.

In 2015, luxury was owning an unnecessarily, comically large truck and doing zero truck things with it. Luxury was a BMW, or a Mercedes, or a nice trim package. Luxury was showing off a bit of your wealth with a car you didn’t need.

In 2025, luxury was a new electric vehicle or a car with a jarringly simple infotainment system. Luxury was novelty. Luxury was showing that you’re trendy.

In 2035, luxury is going to be having a car that works. Luxury is going to be having a car that isn’t a laggy iPad running the Car app. Luxury is going to be peace of mind.

So get one of them now, or soon, and hold onto it. If I could make a recommendation, it would be Lexus. Lexus is what people drive when they value their own time and money, and feel no need to impress anyone. And that, counterintuitively, is what makes the brand and its buyers impressive. And what else is impressive is having a thing that just works. Over the next ten or more years, that’s going to matter to you a whole lot more than you realize. In cars, and in everything else you “own.”

“For every new car, there’s an idiot. Let someone else be the idiot.” - me

I’ve become bored with people arguing over what is morally correct. Because the truth is, I think they’re all pretty much wrong. Even the ones I agree with.

I, like any good semi-educated white man, have spent many years wondering and philosophizing over what “correct” morality is and where I can find it. That’s pretty much what white people do — we get comfortable and then we sit around and think. And when it comes to answers, we can’t tell if they come from philosophy, or religion, or mathematics, or what. And I guess I’ve stopped asking. Or, in a way, I’ve stopped caring. Because this search of ours is endless and, like string theory physics, doesn’t even seem to be making progress.

I get irritated when I see Christians argue that something is “morally right” without a real, practical reason. What I mean by that is, “The Bible says so” is not a good enough reason. If you can’t map your Bible lesson onto a real-life example or story, your citation doesn’t hold much water — it’s just a claim that makes you feel good. But I get equally, or actually way more, irritated with progressive-minded people who claim ridiculous things like “housing is a human right.” It’s like, okay, surely you aren’t going to cite the Bible, but please at least tell me where that idea came from.
Tell me how you plan to pay for that human right in dollars. Because most human rights don’t require anyone else to actively provide something to you. In fact that’s not what a right is.

You can’t just make a moral claim as if it’s self-evidently correct and the obvious solution to all of our troubles. You have to be able to explain why it works, not just why it feels good. What these people have in common, I realize, is that neither of them understands that medication has side effects. Moral concerns have real-life concerns attached to them; you can’t fix something without breaking something else, and you can’t just say “them’s the rules” without naming the consequences of the rules. If you claim that something is good, you have to prove that it’s good by showing your work. If you don’t have any work, you shouldn’t be making any claims.

And what else I realize, is that the reason I’m so unsatisfied in my quest for correct morality is that it doesn’t seem to exist. There is no ultimate authority on what is Good and Correct, and there never will be. But that’s not satisfying either. So I’ve come to a very simple understanding of morality that I think scales across time and circumstance.

Consider the trespasser. People aren’t allowed to go onto other people’s land uninvited, particularly if there is signage indicating such a rule.

If you’re a left-minded person, you might think, well, property is an overrated concept, and what exactly are you so jealously guarding your land from, and isn’t that stolen land anyway? And the answer to all of those concerns is, yes, you’re correct. At least in some sense.

But one also has to consider other questions. Questions like, would you want to live in a world with no property laws? Are you also aware that without property laws, we would all just kill each other over land? Are you also aware that, without the concept of private property, you and your children are always one angry tribe leader away from being raped and killed on any given day of any given year? Because that’s how the world sans property laws works. The strong take from those who can’t hold off the strong. Land belongs to whoever wants it more; resources belong to those who will kill for them.

And I don’t think you’d particularly care to live that way, now would you. There’s a reason that “post-apocalyptic” is the genre that describes stories in those kinds of settings. Property laws are a solution to the problem of endless death and suffering in the human wilderness. Humans have reached a consensus, across time, and property laws are that consensus. They are not necessarily a declaration that property is some capital-lettered thing, like an Inherent Human Right or that it’s Inherently “Good” by some nebulous God-given definition carved in stone that Moses brought down from the mountain. They are merely a system that human beings have come up with that keeps us from murdering each other over the best trees and bushes and streams.

In fact that’s an essential point: our most important laws don’t work because they are carved into stone; they were carved into stone because they work. When something is declared a human right, what’s really being said is “this seems to work, based on experience.” Which, again, is why people with no experience shouldn’t be declaring human rights. I wrote a series of ramblings during adolescence about various human issues that, only a few years later, disgusted me in how pathetically stupid and short-sighted they were.

I think this is the fundamental truth of morality: it’s practical thinking, distilled over millennia by very wise people through trial and error, and parlayed into stories that resonate with us. And the reason they resonate with us is because there’s something inside us that says, yes, that feels true. That feels like how life actually is and how the human experience actually works. In other words, morality is practicality disguised as morality. Or at least, good morality is. Bad morality is just wishful thinking or selfishness disguised as good morality.

And if that paragraph made sense to you, you could be a very wise and fair thinker and probably a leader.

Good morality, in other words, is that which works across time to foster human civilization and cooperation. It can change and adapt based on time, circumstance, culture, and technology. But given that most flourishing cultures agree on a lot of big issues, there seems to be no escaping the notion that there are big moral ideas that, based on how practical they are, can be considered good. Universally good, you might say. But again, not in some abstract, “God literally said so” way, but in a “this clearly works, so we would be idiots not to keep doing it” way.

If you strip away all of the posturing, politics, and self-righteousness, if you strip away all of the belief systems that people defend as part of their own identity, you find that every moral issue just becomes a practical issue. The real question isn’t what’s “correct,” because that has no provable answer. That information isn’t located anywhere. The real question is what we, a group of people, can live with across time. That’s really the only question that matters or has ever mattered. If we, as a people, reached a consensus that we could live with rape and its consequences, we would just make it legal. But we can’t. The repercussions are too messy, too severe, and too painful to witness. Rape ruins people’s lives and offers upside for only one person. So it remains illegal.

Loitering remains illegal in many places because it infringes upon people’s desire to have peace of mind and peaceable assembly — and we have reached a consensus that people, including business owners, want those things more often than they don’t want them. Jaywalking was outlawed not to punish you for being efficient, but because we have reached a consensus that people prefer order on public roads more than they prefer disorder. These laws are morality codified — or, in other words, they are practicality codified. They keep an amount of order and happiness that people can live with, and are willing to accept the tradeoffs for.

And when the consensus changes, we touch the wheel gently and steer the ship.

Now you might say, well if morality is merely a practical concern, then why do religious people, for example the quintessential punching bag of Christian Conservatives, so adamantly defend their views? In fact they defend them so staunchly that it looks like blind obedience — unthinking, naive obedience.

Well, let me answer that question with a question. Has there ever been any moral system that you’ve read about that produced more stable civilizations across time than Christianity? I don’t think there has. The most stable countries you can think of were literally founded with a quill in one hand and a Bible in the other. And I suspect that even Jefferson and Franklin saw religion for what it was: even if not true, a straightforwardly useful moral system for organizing a people. They saw in Christianity the wisdom of the elders — the elders being the people who wrote the stories that, true or not, became the single most canonical communication device in the history of our species.

Even Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most secular-minded person you could possibly imagine, considers himself a cultural Christian. Why does he do that? Because it works. It works better than believing in nothing and making up rules based on what sounds good to you personally.

So when Christian Conservatives, a group that is easy to revile and make fun of, defend their precious book, sure it may be partially out of ignorance and the laziness of not really thinking for themselves. But it also comes from a sense of faith. People who trust the Bible might seem naive, but at least they’re humble enough to accept that someone, either their ancestors or God, is smarter than they are. There’s a humility in that, even if that humility is combined with intellectual laziness.

And besides, that staunch and unthinking defense of morality can be applied to other groups, too. I’ve never been attacked so ruthlessly as I have been by brainwashed Wokesters after saying things they disagreed with. They were outright hateful, and couldn’t even defend why they believed what they believed other than by saying “these are the rules now because they’re the ones we like.” They, on the other hand, were arrogant enough to think you can rewrite the entire Western code of conduct and End User License Agreement on a whim. They aren’t humble enough to admit someone might know better than them. They don’t care what works, they care what sounds good.

Immigration, for another example, shouldn’t be treated as a moral issue. Because that imposes unrealistic high-minded standards and expectations upon it that reality simply cannot meet. You would love to give refuge to all of the world’s lost and needy, you’d love to feed and clothe all of those escaping from persecution in a third-world country. Most human beings agree on that. Yes, most human beings agree on that. But, as Konstantin Kisin says, if ten thousand people break into your house seeking refuge, it’s no longer a moral issue. You simply cannot help that many people without destroying the very system those people are escaping to.

We shouldn’t reconsider sexual modesty because it’s “correct” in the abstract. We should reconsider it because, without it, our young people and their relationships have become worse in almost every measurable way. Near-total sexual liberation has been an absolute disaster for the civilization that you claim to care about — whether you have religious or philosophical reasons to like that or not. Just like letting a child have sweets and make his own meal plans does not produce a well-nourished and healthy teenager.

As much as they may be fun to read, the moral philosophers like Nietzsche just aren’t really that important. Nietzsche’s ideas are titillating, but they’re moral parlor tricks — clever but not useful. And in fact they are so dangerously, cleverly self-serving that they are actively misinterpreted by people who think of themselves as the center of the world. These ideas are mere intellectual play; they don’t actually make any attempt to be a practical moral system. They might give some individual somewhere a new moral idea to follow, but they aren’t scalable. Mostly because they make the average person feel awful about himself. Or they would, if the average person knew he was the average person.

A few years ago I read a large portion of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, his attempt at the practical application of utilitarianism, and I couldn’t even finish it. His sentences are 176 words long with 15 commas and 4 semicolons; they’re so complicated that you can’t explain them. And if you can’t explain something or show it in stories, you can’t use it. If something requires endless reconsiderations and what-ifs, you can’t use it. No matter how good it sounds.

Which is why I’ve given up on the whole “philosophy of morality” thing. If you can’t use an idea to tell stories, it isn’t transmissible at scale and therefore isn’t really worth pursuing in the first place. Stories are the best transmission mechanism we have for human wisdom, and there is nothing in second place.

And the history of a given country is a story. The history of the world is a story. And only a fool, an absolute fool, would ignore such an available and clear story. Only a fool would ignore the history of what has worked and what hasn’t.

The problem civilized humans are faced with is how to remain civilized. And that question can only be answered by a moral system that is practicality disguised as morality. Something practicable at the individual level and infinitely scalable. I think Christian principles are the best thing we’ve ever come up with, but I’ll settle for anything that does the job equally well or better. There are no complicated intersectional questions or ever-changing criteria, like with Wokeness, and there are no absurd calculations to perform like with utilitarianism. There is just a collection of stories that feel accurate to what the human experience is like, and function as an actual recipe for making yourself and others happier.

A moral idea is something that gets humans to cooperate across time; that which humans can live with. And we have enough of those tested at this point that we should probably slow down on trying to invent new ones.

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” - C.S. Lewis

Most people know what it’s like to want something. But do most people know what it’s like to be the kind of person who always wants something? Those are two different things.

I was discussing my addiction with my mother recently, and she asked me why I chose drugs over the clearly better option of not drugs. She has asked me this question at least six hundred times over the 13 years of my sobriety, because she’s a good mother. But every time she does I discuss it earnestly, because sometimes we come up with ideas that we haven’t thought of before. Not only does she care about the answers, but the answers are just fascinating for their own sake.

I told her that one of the things I’ve been contemplating recently was that I had a weak sense of personal desire. When I was a young man, I was passive. I flapped in the winds of whatever was going on around me, only responding with yea or nay to things I did or didn’t like. But I was never really the guy to propose something. I was never really the guy to make a plan, with specific chronological steps, for no reason other than “because I want us to do this.” If I played basketball, or went to a movie, or had sex, it was someone else’s idea.

And it’s because I wasn’t in tune with my own sense of personal desire. Or perhaps, I didn’t really have one at all. I turned to drugs to make me feel something because I, the person, didn’t make me, the person, feel much of anything. I was a passenger in my own life. There were no strong desires in me to mosey through the world and experience anything, and I didn’t have any ambitions which made me directionally certain of my travel. I just sort of existed around whoever happened to tolerate me or enjoy my irreverent and dry sense of humor. Or whoever happened to use the same catalogue of drugs that I used, which was all of them.

In other words, I told my mother, I didn’t have a strong sense of personhood. It’s not just that I “didn’t know who I was,” because I’ve told her that part before. It’s that I felt almost no desire to do anything here on this planet. I had a weak sense of human nature, of curiosity, of desire to do. You know how you scroll through Netflix for 15 minutes while your dinner is getting cold, and can’t pick something to watch? I spent my entire life in that pathetic state of desirelessness.

One way to think about personhood is how much one is felt in the world around him (including how much he is felt in himself). How much his existence “matters,” including to himself. As a young man, I left myself profoundly unfelt. I was an ornament. I looked around at other people having this active, rich human experience, of feeling themselves in the world, of having a list of things they desperately wanted to do and feel and try, and I didn’t relate. I felt like I was merely observing the human experience as a spectacle. I didn’t want anything enough to make myself feel like living was worth it at all.

What I’m describing is different from agency — the ability to move the world and figure out solutions to things. Agency is when you can make a thing happen once you know what you want to do. My problem was that I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

To some people, the world feels like a playground. I dated this hippie girl in high school who always had ideas about what she wanted to do that day. Let’s go here, she’d say. Let’s get some vague, almost-doesn’t-matter amount of weed, get in a car, and go to this location. What are we going to do there? Who cares. I want to go there and just be. But I want to be, there.

Of course I was neurotic enough to be like, no, it absolutely does matter how much weed we have, because what if it’s not enough? If we go there without enough weed, I might pass away. But that wasn’t the point.

This girl always had a sense of desire about the world. Toward the world. This sense that there are things to be participated in, and what I want to do today is participate. One time she took me to the front lawn of an apartment complex and told me we should have sex. Lying there in the grass. I felt a strong desire to not go to jail, and declined. But she had a certain aliveness that comes with being someone who wants to do things like that.

I remember Stephen King once describing a man as something like a “stubborn, headstrong penis.” What I pictured, of course, was the stereotypical jock from my high school or the 34 year old from my local gym who happens to be of the same phenotype. The guy who walks with his shoulders prison-tense, a wide neck, and whose arms never swing behind him but only out in front of the vertical plane of his torso. The kind of guy who, no matter where or when he is, looks like he wants pussy. He’s the kind of man a certain woman is helplessly attracted to, because he looks and carries himself like a bull whose only goal is to impress and impregnate. For some women, that’s the pinnacle of sexiness; in fact it’s the only element of sexiness there is. It’s a ruthless towards-ness; a constant single-mindedness of action and purpose to the point of aggression.

That guy, although I don’t care for his phenotype and he’s not an interesting person, has an undeniable sense of personhood. You look at him and know that he wants something, and that he’s currently walking towards it. He’s having a rich, active human experience. He is directionally certain of himself; he matters to himself. He has woken up and thought of things he’d like to participate in, and he’s either doing them by himself or inviting you with him. And even if he’s wrong about something or makes a mistake, he’ll simply turn his foot a few degrees and try the next thing. Either way, he’s all in; he’s not going to sit at home and imagine he’s someone else, someone who participates.

I think one of the things that has happened to young men (I don’t think the effect has been as strong on women, although I can’t test or prove this) is a general lowering in personhood. Over the last 100 years, maybe the last 50, maybe since Covid, we seem to have become un-personed. We seem to have collectively and sharply become passengers in our own lives, afraid to want much of anything, or not knowing how to want. We “want” in the vague and abstract, as in we want a relationship or sexual satisfaction or some amount of status or money, but we don’t always want in a way that feels personal and meaningful. We want something way off over there, but we don’t want it right here, in our bones and guts. If you ask the average young man what he wants to be when he grows up, where he wants to live, and what kind of national park he’d most like to visit, you’ll probably get three I don’t knows. Because he hasn’t spent any time wrestling with those incredibly old, incredibly meaningful questions. He’s been too busy entertaining himself with cheap dopamine and stupid words.

And he probably hasn’t been asked by his uncles how many women he’s slept with, and he probably hasn’t been asked by his grandfather what he’d like to sacrifice himself for. He probably hasn’t been reminded that he’s part of the male sex, and that he has not only the right but the responsibility to desire something enough to be a better man for it. That’s what classic masculinity is all about: mythical sacrifice and epic personhood. Erotic desire for life, beyond what is merely “easy and pleasant.”

I think one of the many reasons that the fertility rate is declining is that young men have forgotten how to desire like men, and their elders have stopped reminding them. And, although the feminist message is that this is a good thing, you can’t deny that most women do in fact want sexy men. And a total absence of desire or self-certainty, well, that’s pretty un-sexy. Maybe that’s why I’m just now getting married at 36 years old.

The first TED Talk I ever watched was Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, where he discusses how hyper-optionality overwhelms and paralyzes us into indecisiveness and perpetual dissatisfaction. I think that plays into our lack of ability to desire: when young men feel like they could be or do or experience anything, they have trouble deciding what is worth wanting in the first place. They have no ability to be directionally certain of themselves or their decisions. Most people aren’t born with a genetically-provided sense of desire; it has to come from life experiences and bumping a limited set of options up against one’s natural personality. But when the whole world is options all of the time, in flashes of color on a screen, maybe there’s too much desire noise to pick out the signal. A young man can’t even focus on something long enough to desire it. He can’t miss something long enough for the missing to move him.

It took me a long time, but I have learned, over the 18 years of my adult life thus far, how to desire things more honestly and to embrace that want enough to just go after them. This has made the bedroom a dramatically better place: when you find a woman who wants to see your desire, wants you to be selfish because she trusts you, sex gets better than it’s ever been. But it also applies to things like going for a walk at the park. Going on a spontaneous road trip. Going to see a thing at a place for no better reason than because I want to.

So when I spent those years entertaining my personality with drugs, I think that’s part of the reason. The drugs served as a surrogate for my actual desires in life. As long as I had the drugs to chase, I didn’t have to do any thinking beyond “I sure would like to feel high again” and then chasing that next bag. It allowed me to be directionally certain of myself on my way to nowhere.

Now, there are all kinds of things I want. Some of them revolve around sitting outside on my balcony or doing work with my hands to feel useful and proud. Very few of them revolve around travel. Many of them involve doing something intimate with my fiancée, something memorable and warm. And I allow those desires to penetrate my guts — deeply enough that I’m actually willing to make them happen. And now my personhood is felt. I, the person, matter to me. It matters that I have a good experience, and it matters that I want things, no matter how simple.

I remember eating a piece of steak a couple of weeks ago and thinking, “My god, this steak is delicious.” And, for this brief but intense moment, all I could think about was the juices of the meat and how much I was salivating. I wanted what was in my mouth; I wanted to devour and digest it, greedily. It was succulent and divine. I was having an incredible moment of human experience, and I thought to myself, I wonder if this is what people with strong personal desire feel like all the time.

“Your brain is wired to keep you alive, not happy. It’s on you to do what makes you happy.” - Lisha Shi

I used to blame corporations and the government for extractive behavior. But then I realized we’re guilty of it too.

You’ve probably read about this idea by now: the extraction economy. The idea is that companies are no longer interested in making sacrifices for long-term customer benefit (or their own long-term benefit, for that matter, or the benefit of the very markets they do business with). We once had an economy where most companies were proud to make good products. They were proud to deliver something to the customer that the customer could be proud to own. The U.S. has always been a place where money was a, or the, ultimate goal, but on the way to that goal were still the mile markers of “pride” and “excellence.” In the same way that Japanese institutions are proud of their products, American institutions wanted to make something great for its own sake. But that sadly seems to have changed.

Companies are no longer interested in making better products or creating a better culture or creating better jobs for more people. They no longer seem interested in “creating” much of anything, other than more revenue. They’re interested in extracting, milking, as much money as possible from as many customers as possible as quickly as possible with cavalier disregard for the long-term functioning of markets. And they’re interested in doing this using the infrastructure we already have and the ideas they’ve already got in their portfolios. That’s why everything is a subscription now, prices are going up, quality is going down, and your entire life is filled with advertisements. It’s because those are the things that are profitable in the current month or the current quarter. It’s less profitable to create; it’s more profitable to milk. At least, in the short-term, which is where our entire economy lives now.

Companies have become completely enslaved to shareholders and quarterly earnings reports — all else be damned. Morals, culture, and good products be damned. Pride be damned; all progress markers other than profit be damned to hell.

And the more I’ve thought about this idea, the more I realized that it wasn’t just the companies, or politicians and government, engaging in this short-sighted behavior. We the people have been essentially doing the same thing. To each other and to ourselves. We have developed a very short-sighted culture. We have developed a culture where no one can really be trusted to look after the long-term functioning of much of anything.

Let me ask you a question. When’s the last time you stopped on the side of the road to help a car with its hazard lights on? If you’re like the average American, not only is the answer probably “Never,” but if you’re under 25, you’re probably now thinking, “Wait, I’m supposed to help those people?”

Yes, yes you are. Or at least once upon a time you were supposed to. Maybe that person needs something simple like a bit of help jacking their car up to put on the spare tire. Maybe they’re having a minor medical emergency. Maybe they just need someone with a good heart to go pick up a can of gas for them, because they played chicken with the E and the E won. But you’ll never know, because we generally don’t stop anymore. We observe that person’s problem as a spectacle through the windshield and then the rear view mirror, rather than as a problem that exists in our own, our very own, community.

We have done the same thing with hazard lights that we’ve done to everything else in our lives: we just assume that person has some sort of capitalist relationship, some service agency, that’s responsible for helping them. “The tow truck is probably on its way,” we think. Or “Hopefully they’ve got AAA.” We no longer seem to ask the question, “How can I help?” Because we no longer think of helping as our responsibility. We have outsourced the basic functions of community to a network of agencies and service providers. And yes, the economy nudged us that direction and made that the path of least resistance, but we didn’t have to go along with it. That was a choice.

We have every right to complain that childcare in this country is exploitatively expensive. Because it is. But here’s the harsh truth of the situation: the reason you’ve outsourced childcare to the market is because no one gives a shit about your kids. And the reason is going to hurt: because you don’t care about theirs either.

The average American is two things: delusional, and selfish. I’m proud of living in this country, but anyone who’s honest with himself will immediately know what I mean.

The average American wants to work his job, come home, and do exactly what he wants, all of the time. He wants time to himself. He wants the comfiness of his couch and the predictability of his routine. He doesn’t want to be bothered; he doesn’t want to have much asked of him by his town or his city. In this way, the average American is selfish. He sees his own time as inherently and extremely valuable. His time is a precious resource to be spent wisely and carefully. And he doesn’t understand that this is not baseline human behavior. He has been culturally trained to see his own time as valuable, without knowing he’s been trained.

The American Dream, we’ve always been told, was basically to buy a house and make a good life for oneself. But let me rephrase that in more honest terms. The real American Dream was always to buy a house in the suburbs, and to separate oneself completely from other people’s problems. To sequester oneself off into a perfect little nuclear family that owed nothing to anyone, that didn’t have to suffer the disaster of inconvenience. That sounds judgmental and negative, but please… tell me I’m wrong.

The other peculiarity about the American is that he is also living in a fantasy world where one day he’s going to hit it big. He’s going to get rich in the stock market, or real estate, or by getting promoted to a cake management position, or by figuring out the correct answer to the cryptocurrency question, or by being in the right place at the right time to milk some cultural trend. The average American swims in a sea of personal ambition, and, not unlike David Foster Wallace’s fish, doesn’t see or recognize the water he’s swimming in. He’s been trained to think of himself not as a regular, everyday, somewhat poor person on Planet Earth, but as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. He simply cannot imagine a world where he himself is totally run-of-the-mill and mediocre. Even though, by definition, he is. Because he’s the average American. To the average person in this country, one’s low income and lack of amazing opportunities feel like a slight, an insult against his inherent value — which is higher than other people’s. One’s low station in life feels like a temporary setback that must be corrected by karma, rather than one’s actual station in life.

This undercurrent of self-importance is the driving force behind American ambition, and yet produces more unhappy souls per capita than any other cultural trait on Earth. It humiliates us that we’re not millionaires.

So given this combination of self-centeredness and delusional self-importance, the average man or woman in advanced capitalism, if he’s not careful, becomes somewhat of a miserable recluse. He doesn’t see the affairs of his community as worthy of his Very Valuable Time, because he has forgotten one very important thing: that in caring for those community affairs, he’s actually caring for his family’s affairs, his children’s affairs, his own affairs. He has stopped caring about a community that, consequently, will stop caring about him.

And what else is our time too valuable for? To take care of our own parents, of course. Ask yourself honestly: does the idea of letting your mom and dad move into your house as seniors disgust you? Does it make you immediately lament all of the inconvenience they’ll put you through, all of the appointments you’ll have to take them to, and all of the minutes you’ll have to spend dealing with their stubborn nonsense? Well, fair enough. But that’s how everyone else feels too, and it’s why nursing homes are now as much as fifteen grand a month. It’s because nursing homes will charge us whatever they can get away with, because we insist on having our homes to ourselves. There’s always a tax on selfishness.

It’s sad, really, that we won’t even spend a few years living with the inconvenience of our own parents. And not only because they gave life to us and did the same for us, but because that refusal is probably even more impractical than the alternative. If we were willing to take in our parents when they got old, they’d also watch our kids for free. Everything’s a tradeoff.

And our parents know, by the way, that we’re not going to let them live with us unless we absolutely have to. They know that. Which is why they spoil the grandkids and judge us. They have no reason to put effort into a blossoming relationship with us, because they know we plan on casting them aside like nuisances when they need us most. Our relationships are laced with premeditated resentment.

Millennials still remember the days when the 15-year-old girl from our neighborhood would stop by and babysit us for a pittance. And why did she do that? Because she felt a sense of civic pride and neighborly responsibility. She was happy to walk over in her jean shorts and tank top and help out her neighborhood by being a steward of its children. She still had the value of “community” swimming in her blood. So did the little old lady down the street, and our own siblings whether or not they had kids.

Those times were so much simpler for parents, because you didn’t have to turn to “the market” for something as essential as childcare. It was provided by your own family and your own community. And it didn’t cost twenty five thousand dollars a year. But those days are over, for most of us. We turn to the market because we don’t have anybody nearby who wants to watch our kids for us. It’s no longer anyone’s responsibility. No one cares. So you have to pay someone to care. And the price of paying someone to care is going up faster than our wages are.

And this is what I mean by extractive behavior. Without realizing it, we have become just as bad as the companies we so righteously hate. We wish to extract all of the benefits of capitalism, and of community, without doing anything to replenish them. We want more money and nice houses and more promotions. We want the security of a community that protects us. We wish to have people to call on when we need them, who won’t charge us a minimum fee per emergency. And many of us are doing nothing to contribute to any of those things for others. In generations past, you spent a little bit of time each week enjoying the benefits of a healthy community, while spending a little time building those benefits back up. You created, and you extracted, all in balance. You drank from the fountain while also making sure it didn’t run dry.

Imagine a poor, third-world country and what life is like there. Those people have to provide everything for each other. Childcare, food, basic services, community-building, physical security, all of these things are either provided incredibly cheaply or shared free of charge — simply because there is no other choice. You can’t outsource things to the market when nobody has any money. You have to just do it all yourself, and do it all for each other. For free, every week, whenever it needs done, until you die. And then your kids will continue that cycle, because they must.

Contrast that with where we are now in advanced capitalism. At one end of the spectrum, you have a life where all problems are solved socially through cooperative effort, where any one person’s problem is also the problem of all of those who live in his vicinity. At the other end of the spectrum is a civilization where nobody does anything for anybody: all personal and family needs are mediated through the market. Every single bit of food, service, or help you need is purchased at market value. At one end, a high-trust society; at the other end, a low-trust society. And on the way from one end to the other, you start replacing more of one with more of the other. We may not be quite to the far right end of the spectrum, but we’re close.

And now imagine a world where you’ve created the latter civilization, but nobody has enough money for all of those purchases anymore. That’s where we are now. We’re not close, we’re there. There is no middle class in this country anymore; there are those who are rich, and those who can no longer afford to use the market for all of their needs. Through a combination of globalism, wealth imbalance, government failure, and the total collapse of cooperative trust in our society, we can no longer afford to purchase all of the lifestyle and survival mechanisms that we need from the market. Just as trust has exponentially broken down, prices have exponentially risen. And now the gap between the two is insurmountable. We can no longer make up the difference between trust and needs with money.

And I don’t believe this is merely a “recession” — because a recession is a temporary coalescing of factors to create a hiccup in an otherwise functional economy. What I’m trying to say is, our economy doesn’t work anymore. Our economy and our culture, which are part of the same puzzle and feedback loop, are at a point of complete dysfunction, and it feels less temporary and more structural. I worry that a Depression is coming. Not because of any purely mathematical reason, but because our economy simply does not work anymore.

What I propose is that we get back to using trust to make up that difference. What I suggest is that we get back to giving a shit about each other’s kids. That we start un-training ourselves as selfish, delusional Americans and that we stop seeing our own time as inherently and extremely valuable. Because I see no other way for us to move forward. And besides, it’s not. My time is not too valuable to raise and clean up after other people’s kids, and neither is yours. My time is not too valuable to chat with the neighbor by the fence, and neither is yours.

In the 1910s and the Roaring Twenties, I suspect that the younger generations felt the same way ours have for the past 15 years. They saw the economy as a playground, their own time as incredibly valuable, and their ambitions as all-but-assured. It’s just a matter of waiting for them to come true, is what they were probably telling themselves.

And then the stock market crashed, there were runs on banks, and the music came to a deafening halt. In the silence, everybody realized what they had not realized for the past two decades: that they had been unaware of the water they were swimming in. They didn’t realize they had been at a party. That their exorbitant lifestyles were not sustainable, but were merely the result of a profoundly prosperous, a temporarily prosperous, state of affairs.

Consider the way young people have been living recently: everybody wants to get rich in the “creator economy,” by doing generic, low-effort creative work and getting paid uber-handsomely for it. That’s not real life. That kind of thinking could only take place at a party.

Their party ended with the Great Depression. For the next ten-plus years, nobody was doing anything exorbitantly. There were no parties, there were no hats. Everybody’s priorities shifted, almost overnight, back to those of survival. They got used to a quality of life that we, these days, can only have nightmares about.

There are already a number of parallels between the early 20th century and the early 21st. Big changes (loosening) in monetary/fiscal/central bank policy. A pandemic. An exorbitant economy. A stock market that just will not stop going up on extremely questionable fundamentals. A middle class with an invincibility complex. A culture that had gotten away from basic living and was instead trying to get rich, quick. And then… ten years of unimaginable misery and squalor. There are so many parallels exactly one hundred years apart that it almost feels ominous. I almost feel like I can start counting down to October 2029 right now.

But maybe you don’t believe in such ominous signals. Maybe this isn’t a magical pattern that’s repeating itself. Either way, it’s worth being a little worried about the problem at hand and what it means for us.

I think Millennials, Gen Z, and possibly even Gen Alpha have to get used to a very unpleasant and disturbing idea: that our lot in life may not improve from here, at least not for a while. And it may yet get much, much worse. There was a generation of people who lived through the 1930s, whose weeks were consumed by keeping their kids alive and outrunning poverty. If you’d like, you could call them a Survival Generation: their whole purpose was to forgo their own success and happiness on the off-chance that their kids might have some, at some indefinite time in the future. Their whole lot in life was sacrifice for the future.

Things may not get quite that bad for us, but I think we need to get used to living a little closer to that end of the realm of possibilities. We seem to think of ourselves as the whole point of ourselves. We seem to have forgotten that part of our job is to be stewards of the next generation. Our great-great-grandparents lived a life that was entirely about being stewards of the next generation. We’re the opposite. We can’t even bring ourselves to nourish the culture that our kids have to live with. We’re too focused on our own happiness. Or, seemingly more often, our own misery. We’re at a party and we’re miserable. Classic.

I worry that, whether we like it or not, we’re on our way back toward an economy where we do have our parents living with us, out of necessity. Where we do have to cooperatively raise children with other people, out of necessity. I believe we’re on our way back to an economy of necessity.

The truth of the matter is, there is no economy on Earth that can scale the dreams of this many people. You can’t scale the dreams of tens of millions of people. Especially when that dream, held by all those people, has become inflated with each passing year. Our biggest problem in America is that the desire to get rich and live an above-average life has outstripped our desire to build the infrastructure that would even make that possible. We all want exceptionally good lives, and yet we’ve stopped treating the people and things around us with exceptional respect and care. We want to live in a great and helpful culture, but we aren’t willing to put in the long, slow, instantly-ungratifying work of building and nurturing one. We’re too focused on ourselves.

James Taylor Foreman wrote a beautiful article about his move away from Silicon Valley (the American Dream™) and back towards what, in my eyes, is more general and better: the Human Dream. Living in a time and a place that cares about itself. For Foreman, that’s his hometown in Louisiana. There is a sense of life and purpose in his article, and in his town, that is missing from most of our lives. And after reading it, I thought… I believe his town represents a desperate un-drearying of the American spirit.

Over the next 30 years I think we’ll un-city ourselves and get back to living simple, Christian lives where we’re no longer focused on living out our imagined destinies as millionaires but instead as content souls who find joy in being part of a community. The pendulum has gone too far and it must swing back. We can’t keep living these empty, isolated, secular, tech-based lives. We can’t keep being this unbothered and selfish. We can’t keep forsaking relationships for personal ambition.

Besides, none of us are getting rich anyway. We’re living miserable, busy lives in pursuit of a dream that isn’t even coming true. We might as well just go back to being happy. I think the way for us to do that is to self-inflict a depression, even if the real one doesn’t come. To go back to creating, instead of extracting. The fountain is just about dry, and we need to spend some time refilling it.

“Modern man’s misfortune lies not in having to live a mediocre life, but in believing that he could live one that is not mediocre.” - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Thanks to James Taylor Foreman for reading a draft of this.

Every time I’ve ever heard “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” by Paul Simon, I’ve thought the same thing: this song is such a missed opportunity.

I realize I’m taking a significant risk by criticizing someone as legendary as Paul Simon, because I have yet to do anything important or influential with my life. But this song is the perfect example of something I’ve always found both artistically irritating and almost cosmically offensive. It’s when someone takes something that could have, or should have, been timelessly artistically gorgeous and ruins it.

The marching snare and the soft, simple chords that play through the intro and the verse are beautiful. They’re earnest. As are Paul’s voice and his lyrics. It’s a beautiful song, and you feel it’s taking you somewhere… until you get to the chorus. Everyone’s taste is different and I may not be speaking for you, but the chorus is just ridiculous and silly. It could have been something that continued the prettiness of the song, and instead it’s just a punch line. The whole chorus is a punch line. The lyrics are no longer beautiful, they’re merely clever.

That, to me, is anti-music. On a multiple-choice test, that was the incorrect answer. The great idea, the real piece of art, was right there, and he threw it away for something playful. The chorus could have said something, and instead it says nothing. That especially bothers me with music, as I think music is the most serious thing that human beings have ever done or will ever do.

And my point isn’t that music shouldn’t be fun. It’s that if you’re going to write a song that’s beautiful, don’t jack it up with something that isn’t.

This lyrical observation of mine fits in with a larger gripe I have, which is songs that feel like missed opportunities generally. For instance, look at Tina Turner. All of her songs feel like little reward programs. I spend the whole song waiting for the chorus to come back. Because her verses are incredibly boring and her choruses (or is it cacti?) are earth-shakingly, testicle-droppingly powerful. She spends the verse whispering lyrical nothings to an almost melody-less track, and then the chorus finally comes back and takes my breath away with how moving it is.

It’s a weird contrast, and to me feels like a total missed opportunity in songwriting. The whole song could have had more melody, more of her singing voice, and a little more consistency: the peaks of the song’s intensity could be just as high, but the valleys didn’t have to be so low. I feel the same way about Céline Dion. Most of the time when I listen to her, I feel like I’m listening to a bunch of bullshit to get to the real song.

But at least Turner didn’t make the same mistake that Simon did: turning the lyrics into a joke. And, thankfully, that’s not a mistake Paul Simon repeated very often. Most of his songs are timeless and are not clever at the expense of beauty. They don’t say something playful at the expense of something meaningful. He was an extremely earnest songwriter, and he took the time to find the right words otherwise.

An example of a song which does have perfect lyrics is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It doesn’t try to do anything clever with its words, it doesn’t use juvenile themes or cheesy verbs that make it feel like an adolescent love song. It uses timeless phrases and timeless verbs. As art, it’s mature. Cohen took the time, allegedly five years in fact, to get the lyrics right because he took the song seriously. And because he took the time, the song became holy. He made sure none of his words said nothing.

I recently saw a video online of harmonized singing between three young women. (I can only find it again on TikTok, so I’m going to commit a foul I never thought I would and link a TikTok video to you: here.) They stood in some underground place, maybe a subway, and harmonized a song I’d never heard before. The lyrics sounded beautiful. They are beautiful. So is the melody, and not just because of the echoes. It’s a melody unlike anything I’ve ever quite heard before. And so I went and found the song they were singing, and it’s called “Mary on a Cross” by the hard rock band Ghost. I’ve listened to the song approximately several million times since then. Because every time I listen to it, not only am I having fun with the upbeat rock version, but I’m imagining those ladies singing their slower, more divine version. I’m noticing the harmonies in a way that most rock songs don’t allow you to do.1

But here’s my problem: the lyrics that end the chorus are just stupid.

The lyrics of the song are good: they’re reminiscent of any classic rock song. They’re about specific feelings, and rushing past the scenery of city nights, and being in a time and a place. That’s all Springsteen and Petty and Seger ever sang about: feelings, and times, and places. They used universal imagery and timeless nouns and verbs and adjectives, and therefore made timeless music. They weren’t trying to be clever, or trendy, or do anything but capture a feeling. The chorus begins:

You go down just like Holy Mary
Mary on a, Mary on a cross
Not just another Bloody Mary
Mary on a, Mary on a cross

If you choose to run away with me

Now even if you don’t know what these lyrics are “saying”, that’s not the point. They invoke something holy and emotional. They are universal imagery. There’s beauty there because of the word choice. And then Ghost takes their gorgeous chorus, with beautifully symbolic lyrics and a lovely melody, and ends it with the following two lines:

I will tickle you internally
And I see nothing wrong with that

“And I see nothing wrong with that?” Really? That’s how you’re going to end a chorus about Holy Mary, and crosses, and choosing to run away with me? With a throwaway, emotionally empty line that is brute-forced into the hole left by the absence of an actual line?

And what is this about tickling you internally? I mean, come on. You just took a chorus with the symbolism and emotional vision to be timeless and turned it into a sex joke and the kind of line a 12-year-old would write.2

Here’s my frustration: this song, originally recorded in 2019, could have been not only a timeless rock song but could have gone on to be one of the most covered songs in all of pop music… if the ending lyrics of the chorus weren’t stupid. There is enormous potential in this song, and it was squandered by two lines. Because who wants to sing “I will tickle you internally” (and “I see nothing wrong with that” in a forced, un-rhythmic way) every time they sing your song? They’re just going to choose not to.

And I have to admit, I’m frustrated on a personal level because I would love to walk around singing this song, or sing it to my children one day, because sung slowly and deliberately it’s a gorgeous tune. I adore the imagery and the rhythm. But now I can’t because the lyrics are stupid. Something has been given to me and then taken away.

There have been times when I could not publish an essay for days, or even weeks, until I fixed one single paragraph, or buttoned up one transition between sections, or found the right words for one specific idea I wanted to communicate. When that’s what it takes, that’s what it takes. I refuse to publish something for which I have not yet found the right words.

And, although it’s debatably none of my business and I’m being an ass by making someone else’s song about me, I can’t help it. Because they did not respect this gorgeous thing they wrote enough to finish it properly. With lyrics that matter. I find that artistically irritating and cosmically offensive. It’s a missed opportunity — not just for the artists, but for everyone who would ever hear their song.3

My point here is about music, but I take language this seriously in every domain of life. And I think everyone should. That’s what this song reminded me of. People are too casual with language, and it ruins conversations. People are too casual with their conversations, and it’s ruining our language. In the same way that a great song can be ruined by bad lyrics, a great life or a great personality can be made stupid.

Every time someone says “I literally died” instead of “I was shocked,” we become a little dumber as a society. Every time someone says “Bro that’s mid for real, you’re cooked” instead of “That’s dumb and unimpressive,” an angel has its wings ripped off by Satan.

Those lazy lyrics from “Mary on a Cross” remind me of how lazy people have gotten in their speech. How they don’t even make a basic effort to make serious statements, and instead resort to their handy cabinet of stock phrases that say nothing. They say things like “That’s crazy” or “That’s amazing” or “I can’t even” or “He’s a narcissist.” They don’t even try to find words that actually mean something. Or worse yet, they take internet slang and use that instead of real language. Like a bunch of schoolkids trying to seem like they’re “in.”

The truth is this: I’ve never met a wise person who uses trendy words, or who uses lazy, throwaway phrases. I’ve never met someone who uses language stupidly whose opinion I respected. If someone turns 30 years old and still talks like they’re trying to sound cool to urban 17-year-olds, all I can think is “Wow dawg, it’s time to grow up.” If the only people impressed with you are 17 years old, you are doing something extremely wrong with your life.

The thing that all of these examples have in common — the bad song lyrics, the TikTokified voices, and the lazy vocabularies — is that they’re careless with language. They’re either saying nothing or they’re actively making what they say dumb and worthless.

Our language is evolving into yet another mechanism that keeps us trapped in the present. Every cute phrase and trendy motto that comes from TikTok is yet another brain worm to infect us. Every bit of linguistic slop we collect from the internet keeps us remarking on the silly, unimportant current moment. Because these are linguistic toys and we want to play with them. We’re kids. We’re acting like kids with toys. We’re trying to look cool instead of trying to communicate real ideas or emotions. The internet has opened us up to the whole world and all of its trends. It’s a wide channel through which bad ideas flow copiously to us, and those ideas include language and the way we use it. Our kids (and pathetically even some of our adults) are having their brains infected more and more with the virus of stupid language that serves only to entertain ourselves in the present moment.

Language itself is a consumer product now, if you allow it to be. Stupid words are sold to you by the internet, and you use those words instead of the better, more durable, longer-lasting ones. It’s a consumer choice to pursue what is expedient instead of what is meaningful. It’s a consumer choice to eat empty calories instead of linguistic nutrition.

It’s a missed opportunity, the same way those songs were: in our laziness, we miss what is unbelievably useful and beautiful. In trying to sound cool, like children, we miss the opportunity to be timeless and wise, like adults. We miss the opportunity to grow into the wise grandparents we all secretly wish to be. We miss the opportunity to connect with people, and instead just end up using language — our single most powerful tool — as entertainment.

Here is my goal, with my own writing: If my grandchildren found my writing, they would understand it and like it. Obviously they probably won’t — I’m not the kind of person who cares much about legacy or has any hopes of being remembered after I die. But the point is, I want the writing to communicate something that lasts. I don’t want it to be merely “fun to read.” I’ve got better things to do than entertain. And, frankly, so do you. We are the stewards of our children’s culture. We are the stewards of the entire human project… for now. For a little while.

I want to write in a timeless way. I don’t want my writing to be held hostage to a specific time period by word selection, references, or memes. I don’t want to participate in the whims of discourse when I could instead be using that mental real estate on longer-term ideas.

And the key to long-term ideas is long-term language.

When something is worth communicating, it’s worth communicating in the right words. Whether that’s a song, an article, or a conversation. If you’re going to write a song, get the words right. And if you’re going to open your mouth, actually say something.

“If you choose to run away with me
I’ll be gifted with your memory
And if you end me, I’m fine with that, Mary”
- one possible rewrite of the end of the chorus

Aside from the clearest and largest problem with Ozempic, namely the fact that its users are crash-dieting their way out of actual nutrition — avoiding all the good and necessary aspects of food by eating little or none of it — there is another which I’d consider the “real” cost.

You’re supposed to have a relationship with your body. Just as the smoker coughs and the sloth feels restless, you’re supposed to have an intimate relationship with your body and its signals. Life is the process of negotiating with those signals. You wake up in the morning and you feel your body and what it wants, lacks, and needs, and then you go through your day attending to those signals. That’s what it means to live. Your body wants food, and touch, and nourishment, and enrichment, and toil, and music, and rest. And your job as a member of the living is to earn the things that will satisfy those signals — relationships, food, love, housing, and steady employment.

If we had a magic medication that removed all of the obvious negative side effects of smoking, we’d all smoke 4 packs a day and die in agony at 45. And if we didn’t have to overcome the immediate side effects of sugar, we’d sit around eating corn syrup and die limbless of diabetes at 35. The signals are there to guide our behavior, not to be hand-waved away.

GLP-1 receptor agonists like Ozempic don’t remove your need to have a healthy relationship with food; they merely disguise temporarily the fact that you don’t. They’re pretending you don’t smoke 4 packs a day, laughing meanwhile about how they’re going to kill you anyway. The costs of your own behavior and the causes of your own body’s signals will eventually resurface, because you can’t run from your own shortcomings forever. Just ask an expert, like me.

I was born to be skinny-fat. I was born to have arms like twigs and gain weight exclusively in my stomach. I have had to work very hard to gain weight in other parts of my body while also not becoming obese — by doing weight training, increasing my body’s natural hormone production, and changing my diet completely. So I have no pity for anyone else’s weight struggles. They aren’t something pitiable — they’re a natural part of life. I certainly wasn’t born with the body I want, and very few people are.

So some people are born to be fat. No problem. You have the same tasks ahead of you that I have — working out, making your body healthier, and changing your relationship with food. Taking back control over your body will not only make you feel incredibly fulfilled and good about yourself, but it’s also the very definition of being alive. And it’s the same thing with addicts and alcoholics, which is a club I’m also a member of. And with angry people, or with egomaniacs, or with people who are born to be selfish in their sexual relations — which are three more clubs I belong to. Frankly, I was born to be a god damned mess. I have to work every day not to be. We all do. It is neither unusual nor pitiable to have to work on these things. They are precisely what life is.

The cost of Ozempic is that you are cutting off your very own life at the knees. You are forgoing the very act of living, of being alive to negotiate with signals from your own body. Whether you use it to control your food intake, or to lull your addictive urges to sleep, or to control other unhealthy impulses, you are removing the side effects of the problem without learning how to handle the problem. You are attacking symptom, not disease.

When you get sober in a 12 Step program, before you do anything else you surrender to the fact that drugs are stronger than you. You cannot control their impact on you and your body and your life (and your family). You admit to yourself that you can’t wrestle them into submission, that you can’t dictate how much control they get to have over you. They have all the control, and you have none. They are constantly doing push-ups to wreck your life even harder, and you will never become strong enough in your willpower to defeat them.

You have to instead learn how to live with the fact that, if you hand them the keys, you are now the passenger. Some people can take drugs and still drive, so to speak. Addicts can’t. The drugs will always have the power if you give it to them, and when you enter that wrestling match, you are a passenger and they will take you wherever they take you. So what do you do? You simply don’t enter that wrestling match anymore. You adopt an entire program of behavior that keeps you from doing one thing: entering that match. Trying to control them.

And that is the same step you must follow if you want to have the life you want in any domain: you surrender. You confess that your own actions are responsible for the outcomes you get, and that if food or sex or anger or work are causing you problems, that it’s your job to surrender to those things and admit that your relationship with them is the problem. You can’t succumb to every meal that tempts you and still expect to have a healthy body. You can’t follow every impulse of anger or sexuality and still expect to have good relationships.

I don’t take the first drink. Ever. Because if I do, it’ll lead to the second drink and then the third and then crack cocaine and then heroin and then prison or death. People who are struggling against food must not take the first tempting meal, the first succulent, over-salted and over-sugared nonsense that pops into the imagination of their taste buds. Because that will lead to the second and the third and the hospital and perpetual healthcare and no romance or sex. The angry man must not obey the first desire to hit or yell, because it will lead to the defilement of his entire personality and all of his relationships.

As with all of the toughest foes in life, it’s not a willpower problem, it’s a relationship problem. The angry man can’t just decide to give in to his impulses only 20% of the time. He either has a healthy relationship with his anger, or he’s completely unpredictable and dangerous. There is no in-between. Just ask his wife and his kids. Just ask his wife how it feels when he’s “80%” in control of himself. It feels exactly the same as when he’s completely out of control. She still lives in total fear, she still has black eyes, and she’s still afraid to divorce him.

Instead he learns how to live with that anger, to live with that temptation, and say no to it. No thanks. Because I’ve seen where you lead, and I’m not interested in going there again. You might be stronger than I am, but I will always have the right to just not fight with you. And I’m not going to medicate you away, because it is my responsibility to live with you. If I medicate you, the side effect is that I’m less alive. The side effect is that my personality is muted in other ways, my experience of the other parts of my life are greyer and duller, and I become a weaker and more helpless person.

That’s the problem with a medicalized life — the side effects are often more crippling than the thing you could have just worked on in the first place. And that’s also the problem with a medicalized society as a whole. The longer you rescue symptoms, the more unhealthy the underlying organism gets. Our society is falling apart because we shortcut everything and earn nothing.

So what does our solution look like, with regards to food? Food and sex are tricky, because those are things that a healthy, functioning adult should be having — just not in excess. Again, it looks like a change in your relationship to the thing. You don’t decide what to eat based on temptation, and you don’t decide who to sleep with or when based on temptation. You do it based on decisions. If the meal is healthy for you and is something your sponsor would be glad you ate, or you-in-five-years would be glad you ate, then you eat it. The key is that you recognize when a temptation is knocking, and as with a vampire, you simply don’t invite it in. You don’t invite that problem, you don’t enter the ring. You eat something that is somewhat satisfying, as a healthy meal should be, but not something grotesquely satisfying. You know the difference. Not something so satisfying that it’s addictive, not something that tickles impulses instead of goals.

Your relationship with food, or sex, or anger should be the same as any other relationship in your life: when it does something bad for you, you ignore it for a moment and think of what you ought to do. You think of what, one year from now, you’ll wish you’d have done. You don’t invite the temptation into bed with you immediately, and you also don’t stand up and smack it. You learn to live with it, and to be the one in charge of its place in your life.

And that need to exercise continual self-control is not a bad thing. If none of your impulses ever challenge you for the keys, you’re really not even alive. You’re merely existing. You’re merely a motor inside of a skull putt-putting its way through life. We are dangerously close to being passengers of our own minds, while screens and medications and hijacked impulses do all of our living for us. We are dangerously close to being renters of real estate inside our own skulls, never struggling against the real friction of being a fucked-up, but functioning, human being. The life is in the fucked-up. The life is in the struggle and the friction. If we keep finding ways to mute, quell, ignore, medicate, and abdicate all of the things that makes us feel alive, we might as well just kill ourselves. Like, logically.

Ask any profoundly happy person why they’re so happy — and they’ll say because life is fucked up. Life is so hard, and so sad, and so trying, that the only way they can make any sense of it is to be happy. To embrace that friction and say, “Yea, I guess this is the point. It’s to be happy despite this. It’s to have this, and to see that overcoming it is the actually valuable part.”

You can’t just sit around eating cake, metaphorically, all the time and expect to be a happy individual. That’s a dull and pointless life.

That is the cost of Ozempic. It’s living death. It’s losing touch with your body, your mind, and eventually your soul.

“Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.” - William Ruckelshaus

I think I finally understand why zombie-themed movies and TV shows became so obnoxiously popular over the last 2 decades. And I think it’s the same reason that Lost was one of the most popular TV shows of all time, and The Lord of the Rings is one of the most universally valued works of fiction ever created. It’s because those works strip away all of the technology, conveniences, and faux-urgency of the modern world, and leave one thing: relationships. All of these works are about people and nothing else.

A zombie apocalypse is a predictable and played-out backdrop for a TV show. But it’s also an excellent one, because it is an excellent way to set up a high-stakes world in which people are all that people have. It’s an excellent way to focus on a story of a relationship or several relationships that you want to tell.

In this case, the zombie apocalypse is more of a focus device rather than an essential plot point. The zombie apocalypse could be replaced by a war, a starvation event, a Dust Bowl, a series of hurricanes, a huge crime wave, or basically any other catastrophe that leaves huge amounts of people bereft of safety and convenience. And smartphones.1 We have simply chosen zombies over and over because that’s easily legible for modern audiences. Eventually it will be some other trope — it’s popular until it isn’t.

Fantasy, as a genre, is a better storytelling vehicle than sci-fi for exactly this reason. Star Wars, if you strip it all the way down to its essentials, is a story about faith (the Force), betrayal, and complicated relationships. The battle scenes and starships are impressive, but not important. To the extent that it’s a story about space, it could be a story about anything. If Star Wars didn’t have a timeless component of the struggles of trust, kinship, morality, and love, it would be no story at all. And I believe that at certain points the space component, the cacophony that is technology, is merely a distraction. Special effects meant to tickle the senses while not advancing the story.

If it wasn’t for Star Wars, there would be very little real estate for sci-fi in the halls of classic mainstream culture. Think about it: for every ten pieces of “classic” media you know about — Casablanca, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sopranos, Lost, The Catcher in the Rye, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, Brave New World, and Star Trek — only one or two have technology as part of the story.

Technology is an integral part of the human experience and part of our mythos: we know that humans will always struggle to put technology in its proper place, and will always be on the cusp of becoming enslaved to it. The story of man’s struggle against technology, convenience, and hubris is timeless and will always be relevant all the way down to the very core of our beings. The Tower of Babel is the oldest story we have about technology and hubris, and it’s in the Bible for God’s sakes. It’s such an important story that it’s holy.

But stories about heroes, relationships, and personalities are even more timeless, and go even deeper down to our core. They outweigh stories about technology at least ten-to-one. And in the modern world, even if that number is shifting lower, very few of our sci-fi novels are becoming classics. Very few of our movies are becoming classics. And they’re certainly not usurping Pride and Prejudice. They’re certainly not going to replace The Count of Monte Cristo.

The Lord of the Rings has no problem of distractions. The story is never hijacked by technology or trite plot-thickening accoutrements. Every sentence of every book is about people. Every scene is about cost, sacrifice, betrayal, love, and selflessness. Every scene is about what masculinity is capable of when it’s not distracted with bullshit.

And the battle scenes will always be more impressive than those in, for instance, Star Wars or some other modern war movie because the stakes aren’t hijacked by machines.

I recently watched The Last of Us for the, I think, fourth time. It’s one of the best TV shows ever made, and it’s based on one of the greatest games ever made. For one simple reason: because the story of the people and the relationships is amazing. And by amazing, I mean incredibly painful. That’s what makes it amazing. It’s endless suffering in the filth of human mistakes, with bits of redemption and sacrifice sprinkled in. That’s a story.

In this show, there is a battle scene where the town of Jackson defends itself from an assaulting horde of infected (yes, it’s a zombie apocalypse backdrop, but it’s by far the best one yet). At the wall of the town, a firefight takes place not only with guns but with barrels of gasoline and torches. The defenders drop barrels onto the infected from the top of the wall, puncture the barrels with bullets, and then ignite the liquid to kill a massive chunk of the attacking horde.

The reason this battle scene is so impressive and feels so tense is because this strategy still relies on human ingenuity. These barricades, implements, and walls had to be built by human hands over the course of years, and the strategy is rehearsed and carried out by humans. Humans with facial expressions. Humans whose own children are mere yards away in hiding, moments from being ripped apart by human teeth. The defense is low-tech, hard-earned, and high-stakes. There is no robot doing any fighting for them. There are no laser guns, no armor suits, no drones, no automatic turrets. Every single bullet matters. Every second of the defense is human beings facing not just death but unimaginably horrific injury and insult.

It’s the same thing with The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson did an outstanding job of making the battle of Helm’s Deep feel profoundly personal. Every sword matters, and every sword is carried by a son or a father whose face we actually see. I recently read a breakdown of The Charge of the Rohirrim, one of the final battle scenes in the trilogy, and it’s every bit as brilliant as it is funny. No responsibility is handed off to machines, no distractions are introduced by tactical airstrikes or communications with commanders 600 miles away. It’s the horse and the rider, and his quivering lips. It’s heartbreakingly important. It arouses an erotic meaningfulness in every young man who watches it.

Every time I watch a TV show or movie where some sudden twist of fate depends on technology, it just feels silly and breaks my immersion. The bad guy suddenly gains an unfair advantage because of his special gun, or his huge killer machine with drills for arms, or some other invention that he didn’t even earn. It just feels cheap. It’s plot sludge. It’s a low-cost way to turn the narrative and further raise the stakes that has nothing to do with the people involved or the choices they’ve made. It’s a device used by bad writers who have little actual story to tell.

If the plot turns, I want it to be because the main characters, whom I love, made some sort of mistake or overlooked something. Because there’s actually something to be learned from that. That’s a story that makes me feel something as a human, not as a mere “audience member.” I don’t want to be fucking entertained.

A couple of years ago I played a game called Cyberpunk 2077. Great experience, gameplay wise. Fun, engaging, immersive. But the story was a nightmare. I spent so much time trying to keep up with new technological terms, convoluted networks of devices, and muddled relationships between characters that literally hinged on their relationship with technology, that I couldn’t even tell what was going on. In a game rife with betrayal, I literally could not tell who was betraying whom. Because I spent so much time trying to peer through the veil of unnecessary technological complications that did not make the story any more interesting. Again, that’s just bad writing. It actively makes the story worse by making it less transparently about people and their decisions and the various shades of grey in their morality.

I don’t know if there will ever be a classic movie that contains an iPad. Which is why I don’t have any respect for Steve Jobs. Genius? Sure, if that’s your definition of genius. Good person? He didn’t let his own kids have them.

I suspect that, in order to produce a classic movie these days, you first have to take technology away from humans. You first have to introduce some sort of apocalypse so that you can re-introduce humans to each other. So that you can focus all of our attention on the quibbles, foibles, betrayals and love of totally naked and afraid people.

Because that’s what a story is. At the end of the day, stories are about us. Not about events, not about technology. They’re about us. And how we keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and yet we’re the only ones who can save us from the resulting pain. We are all we have — which is a truth that every great movie or book understands. Everything else is decoration.

“All the most terrifying Ifs involve people. All the good ones do as well.” - Hanya Yanagihara

One of the most fascinating lessons I’ve learned in life is about forgiveness and accountability. It’s hard to even put into words, but makes perfect sense once you feel it — which is one of the things that makes it so fascinating.

When I was getting sober in a treatment program and the rooms of AA, my sponsor and my counselor went over all of my resentments with me. That’s a standard part of the program, a required step. For each person who had done me wrong, or who I in my piggish self-centeredness thought had done me wrong, I had to do this thing which was like a yes-but version of forgiveness. A two-sided, unfair, tragic version of forgiveness.

I had to assume the other person’s behavior had an explanation, and forgive them for it, while also doing almost the opposite with my own behavior. They were hurt. They were lashing out, they were unhealthy. They, like I, were a victim of their environment or of their problems. I had to explain, almost even excuse, their behavior and, even if my similar behavior was under almost identical circumstances, take complete accountability for mine and admit there was no excuse for it. Because I’m the patient. I am, for the purposes of the resentment-cleansing exercise, the bad guy.

It’s a contradiction: I have to allow for the idea that everyone else is kind-of sort-of not responsible for their behavior, but I am for mine. And what I notice is, if the whole world worked this way, it would be a better world. We’d forgive each other often while being appropriately hard on ourselves. We would swim in a sea of accountability and love. We could learn how to get rid of resentment, which, when it comes to things that make alcoholics and addicts relapse, is the number one offender. In fact I’d generalize that further and say that when it comes to living an unhappy life in any capacity, resentment is the number one offender.

If this lesson makes sense, you are either a wise person or you’ve probably had to clean up your life at some point like I have. If not, maybe the rest of this piece will make more sense of it. Now we have to take that lesson and apply it not to ourselves but to a civilization. To others, to human behavior as a whole. And here the excuses become much more fragile, because getting one person sober is a whole lot different from getting a whole society sober.

In the modern, hyper-liberal world we have allowed pop psychology, in other words bullshit psychology, to do to us the opposite of what AA did to me: we have allowed ourselves to be taught that our own behavior is excusable and that other people’s is not. I am perfect even when I yell at my boyfriend, and my boyfriend is a cheating manipulative asshole; I am a result of my past, and he is a result of his decisions; I can do whatever I want, and society owes me a free pass for whatever that might be because I’m a hurt person. And when someone infringes upon these ideas, they’re “uneducated about trauma,” they’re “insensitive,” they’re “victim blaming.”

We have allowed the idea of “victim blaming,” like many of our most closely held stuffed-animal psychology phrases, to turn into a total caricature of itself and a deflection of basic accountability for actions. “Victim blaming,” like “gaslighting” or “narcissist” or “trauma,” has come to cover far more than its definitional breadth of situations and is kind of a bullshit idea in most of those situations.

Everyone has trauma. Everyone had something in their childhood that shaped and molded them for the worse. Some people were bullied. Some people felt like they had to perform for the attention of their parents or their peers. Some people were old souls trapped in young bodies and were never able to make any friends. Some people were beaten by their fathers. Some people had all four of these things happen to them. Most people, if you ask enough questions, have something that would fall under the (modern, incredibly loose) definition of trauma. And we often use these questions to understand and explain people’s behavior as they turn into adults with issues. Issues with blast radii which in turn affect everyone around them.

In AA or any other recovery program, you’ll often hear about people who were sexually abused as children. And what you’re taught, as hard as it is to hear or process, is that you must forgive the offenders because what they did, to some extent, has an explanation. An explanation other than “evil.” They abused children because they themselves were abused as children, and they could never escape from the ghost of that abuse. They repeated a pattern because they were too foolish, or too incompetent, or too bereft of help, to break it. And this goes all the way down to less heinous crimes like “he robbed from me because he was robbed” or “he cheated on me because he was cheated on” or “he failed to show up for me because he was never taught how to be in loving, reciprocal relationships.”

But there’s a difference between explanation and excuse. When I was cleaning up my own life, I had to learn how to understand and forgive others’ actions even if I didn’t excuse them. If the consequence was total forgiveness and keeping that person in my life, all the better. And if the consequence was that I could understand their behavior but not excuse it, then so be it. Even the sobriety seeker, the ultimate student of forgiveness and anti-resentment, is allowed to give people the ultimate consequence for their behavior: cutting them out of his life. Even the sobriety seeker, the ultimate forgiver, is allowed to not forget. If the offense against him was egregious enough or if no effort has been made, on the part of the offender, to fix it.

In AA, the name of the game is forgive and worry about yourself. But it’s a self-help program. AA is in the business of the individual; it doesn’t try to govern, or enforce, or punish. Things are different when it comes to a society. Society is in the business of the collective.

For society to function in any sort of healthy way, people must be assumed accountable for their actions. Because the alternative, endless tolerance, an explanation for everything, excuses people all the way out of the direct consequences of their own behavior. And, eventually, out of the very concept of free will or choice. Everything is a natural consequence of trauma, which was caused by previous multi-generational trauma, ad infinitum, until nobody is responsible for anything other than our fucked-up ancestors off at some vague distance in the past.

In a functioning family, group, or society, there is a basic physics of consequence: you do behavior X, you get consequence Y. If the circumstances are extenuating, an exception may be made. But the excuse should be the exception, not the rule. You can’t have the tolerance of a recovering addict when you have an entire civilization’s worth of people relying on your ability to enforce rules and etiquette. In fact, your goal should be to make each person more like the recovering addict, and not the society as a whole more like the recovering addict.

That’s the difference. We have flipped accountability on its head in the modern age: vague collectives like “men” and “women” and “this group of people with X stereotype” are somehow responsible for everything that someone finds distasteful, and yet individuals are rarely held to account for the choices that they actually get out of bed and make every day. I am responsible for the crimes of my ancestors and people who by pure happenstance look like me, and yet people are not responsible for the way they talk, dress, or behave in public on a daily basis. Even if their behavior is totally disruptive and outright irresponsible.

Men have been taught incessantly over the past few decades not to sexually harass women, and the consequence is that a man could lose his career and everything else if he’s accused or found guilty of it. And, although it has probably gone a little too far, it’s a good change overall.

But women are not held responsible for the way they dress in gyms, or the way they advertise their sexual assets in public either. Public is where the entire collection of human behavior and instincts live — it seems pretty unwise, and borderline sociopathically irresponsible, to wear pants that literally go up your ass in a public gym. It seems pretty irresponsible to dress sexy if you don’t want to be treated sexy at the bar or club — or even at work. You don’t walk into a lion’s den and then insist on justice against the lion for being hungry. You did something that anyone over the age of 50 would have told you you shouldn’t do.

Runaway feminism is a perfect example of what we’re talking about here, because it has taught women, especially young and impressionable women, that their restitution is due. Men have oppressed them for thousands of years, and now it’s time for them to do whatever they want, all of the time, completely unencumbered by anything resembling social norms or cultural accountability. It’s revenge behavior; it’s the kind of reckless freedom only a child would want as a way to establish his dominance. No sane adult, and certainly nobody who understands the principles of getting sober, would want to put gym pants up her ass and make things wrong again after things finally became right.

Now, if a man sexually harasses you, he should have his ass kicked. That is also part of the physics of consequence. A man who cannot control himself should be punished for his lack, until he no longer lacks. But you’re not a victim if you also victimized other people. And it’s about time we admit that when a woman turns a public place into a pornographic circus, and invites male sexuality directly into the air, she’s victimizing not only the children nearby but every other person there who has an intention of being in a respectable place. If you present your lips, your hair, and your breasts like you’re selling something, you don’t get to complain when someone buys. That’s the natural result of your choices.

And that’s the crux of the issue: your actions either do, or don’t, make the world a better, more loving, more respectable place. Exceptions can be made, but only a foolish society would allow emotional context to be a determining factor in every decision. The addict either does or doesn’t stay sober. And if he didn’t stay sober, he did something wrong full stop. It doesn’t matter if he’s “justified” in resenting someone — he’s the one who’s going to die at the bottom of the next bottle. Anyone who encourages him to resent, to avoid forgiveness or accountability, is merely ushering him to his death. People who use “trauma” or “feminism” as an excuse for every bad decision young people make are doing the same to our whole culture.

I’ve known several people who chronically underperform at work because of their apparent bouts with anxiety and depression: two more words we cling to like stuffed animals. But at some point you have to just say to that employee, “Your right to be anxious and depressed must not interfere with everyone else’s right to have an accountable coworker.” At some point you have to admit that this is an untenable way to have a functioning company or a good work culture.

I have seen countless videos online about teachers quitting the profession they worked so long to get into, because the students at their schools simply do not have respect anymore. They talk openly in class, texting or scrolling on their phones, utterly refusing to participate in their lessons or to dignify the teacher with attention. And I completely understand why the teachers are quitting. This isn’t about hurt feelings — although that is a significant part of it: the teachers simply don’t like being treated like that, because who would? It’s about giving up on something that is clearly not working and which is being actively allowed to get worse. If an entire classroom full of students refuses to participate in the learning process, then there is no learning process. It’s a waste; it’s frankly not worth the teacher’s time to try to teach in such an environment. They’d be better off going to be a receptionist somewhere or work in a factory. And that’s heartbreaking, because teachers are some of the most noble people we have.

There is a genuine literacy crisis going on right now with Generation Alpha, because they’re not being made to learn to read. No one is making them, so they can’t. Parents used to read books with their children — now they just let them scroll braindead anti-cultural slop on iPads so they can scroll on their own phones. And inside the classroom, teachers have been neutered of their ability to force respect and participation. Teachers can’t make them read either.

And our education system will continue to fail, and get worse yet, as long as parents refuse to teach their kids how to close their mouths, put down their phones, and be part of real life, and as long as teachers are unable to take back control. Forget the switch or the paddle — teachers these days aren’t even allowed to humiliate students for poor behavior. They aren’t allowed to pick up a student and place him outside the classroom if he won’t stop talking, because that is now child abuse somehow and a fireable offense. They aren’t even taken seriously by many of these parents when they call home. Because guess what kinds of people the parents are? The kinds of people who watch TikTok videos about how their child is so very special and needs to be treated with the endless tolerance of Gentle Parenting. Their child needs to have their excuses cast in perfect bronze and left untouched by the harshness of actual consequence.

The fact that kids have been raised with phones and iPads is not an excuse; it’s precisely the problem. You can’t give them a free pass for the fact that they’re addicted to devices and stimulation; rather, the solution is to actively do things that punish them for that behavior and reward them for changing it. The fact that kids are bad at being present in classrooms does not mean that classrooms are the problem. It means that the kids are the problem.

And, by obvious extension, it also means that the parents are the problem. But you can’t do anything about the parents, and you can make progress anyway. You can address problem behavior directly at the level of the individual, regardless of what the cause is. That’s the basic socialization mechanism, to which we don’t give enough credit anymore: your behavior gets reward and correction based on the norms of social etiquette, and it’s your job to adhere to those corrections and rewards lest you never have any friends or any trust. That’s how adult life works, and it also starts with children. Society comes from socialization, which includes the physics of consequence. Regardless of context.

I have sympathy for these kids. They have grown up in an environment that actively batters and terrorizes the concept of agency. They are growing up in a world that actively wants to make them helpless and stupid, and to give them excuses for poor, antisocial behavior. They absolutely are victims. But the fact that they are victims doesn’t really matter all that much; we still have to do something about it. Because they will be the stewards of our whole society in twenty years. And that’s the point. The world has always offered temptations and stimulation and distractions. And yet we have reached the ripe age of Christ plus 2000 years and have consistently found ways to make education work and to make kids behave.

We have found ways to make addicts take responsibility for their own actions. We have found ways to make them change and apologize. They call that making amends — fixing, making right. I did that, and it saved my life and probably saved a couple of relationships that were very important to me.

We have found ways to incorporate forgiveness for extenuating circumstances into our justice system while also upholding the basic principles of a society that has real, enforceable rules for the good of everyone.

The fact that someone claims to be traumatized or dealt a bad hand does not dismiss these rules or expectations. Especially if that person’s idea of an excuse is “I was bullied a little bit or felt like I had to perform for attention.” Those two categories alone comprise about 80% of human beings. I would argue that if these things are common, they’re not trauma. By, you know, definition. They’re opportunities to examine yourself and grow up. They’re opportunities to participate in the basic difficulty of being an adult.

So most of the time when I hear someone whine or crusade against the oppression of “victim blaming,” I just think to myself “bullshit. This person just doesn’t appreciate the physics of consequence.” And we should, because our society is teetering on the edge of forgiving everything and standing for nothing.

“Modesty is always beautiful.” - G.K. Chesterton

One of the things that troubles me most in life is how unprepared young adults are for the gigantic and terrifying world of finance. I see it all the time and it makes me sad and frustrated.

Debts, mortgages, repairs, maintenance, leases, student loans, and budgeting are all things you need to understand as you begin building a life for yourself, and most of us end up learning those things the hard way: by getting burned making financial decisions we cannot take back. Some high schools teach basic personal finance courses, and that’s wonderful. But it’s also totally inadequate.

Many young adults learn about finance by committing themselves, for years, to contracts and debts that cause them immense suffering. And there’s just no reason for that. We can do better than that. We need to do a better job of educating our young men and women on what it means to be smart with money.

In this article are some lessons that I wish someone had taught me as a young man about money, personal budgeting, and the cruel world of hyper-financialization we now live in. Share this with someone between 18 and 25 years old. Hell, maybe share it with someone who is 35 years old.

These lessons are particularly relevant right now in early 2026, when we are clearly in a recession that the government has yet to fess up to. The economy, for the average person, is as bad as it’s been in 20 years. Money is exceptionally tight. Many young adults are about to finish high school or get their college degrees, and now is a great time to offer them some wisdom. Things are about to get much harder for a while before they get any easier, and it’s absolutely essential to be smart with money at this moment.

1. Money is a tool for buying two things: more time, and more money.

“Money is a thing I spend to get what I want” is an elementary view, a Level 1 view, a view that will keep you trapped in vicious cycles of poverty and want your whole life. My philosophy on money can be boiled down to this: you can either have what you kind of want today, or you can have what you truly want later. Pick one.

If you’re the kind of person who eats fast food 6 days a week and can’t say no to impulse spending at department stores, I’m here to tell you that you’ll never achieve your long term goals. You might as well not have any, because you’re never going to reach them.

Money is a thing you spend, yes. But far more importantly than that, it’s a thing that you can use to buy your own time back and to invest for the biggest things you want. I used some of my spare money a few years ago to hire a house cleaner, and I spent the time I saved reading and writing. I bought back my time to invest it into something else with a higher potential return. I was short cleaning and long reading and writing, which is a good trade. And even if I would have just been buying back my time to go on dates or something, that still would have been worth it. Because I would have been investing in something. I wasn’t just spending to make myself feel good.

Money is the tool with which you buy all the other tools you want to have in life: more time, more freedom, more time with loved ones (i.e. better relationships), and more money later. You have to look at money as a tool, not as a pile of one-dimensional resources. Not as a pile of paper that you trade for single-use objects.

The sooner you can start investing in yourself, your time, and real assets for your future, the exponentially better off you’re going to be in the long run.

2. Do what you’re good at, not what you’re passionate about.

Don’t listen to people who tell you to do what you’re passionate about. It’s too easy to misinterpret that in some zen, mystical way that suggests lifestyle nirvana. Like you’re in for a lifetime of uninterrupted prosperity if you just follow what it is that feels most pleasing to you, that the money will come naturally.

That is true if you’re lucky. You can do what you’re passionate about and get paid well for it, if you’re lucky. But most people are not. Most people are average. You should assume this includes you.

Try a bunch of things while you’re young, take different jobs, ask for work experience and training from different people you know, and figure out some things you do and don’t like. Do some research on what fields are hiring and growing. Consider the very strong possibility of not getting a college degree, since those no longer even remotely guarantee success in the modern economy. In fact they often just make your life worse because they pigeon-hole you into a certain kind of job that you must get in order to start paying off your loans, and yet you can’t get that job. So you end up tending a bar, which is what you’d have done if you hadn’t gone to college in the first place. And now instead of enjoying or investing your tips, you have to pay off debt for a degree you aren’t even using. (If you’re not sure whether I’m exaggerating, no, this is happening to millions of people right now.)

Your passion might not be hiring. So find one thing you’re good at and just do that for a while. If you build up some work experience, and some great relationships, and a network of older adults and mentors who want to help you, and a financial safety net using the rest of the tips in this list, you will be able to pivot later. You don’t have to get the answer right now. I’m 36 years old, and I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I just keep finding things I’m good at, and doing those. And sometimes I try something I’m not good at or sort of totally hate. And then I just go try something else.

The stakes of taking any single job or starting any single career are not as high as you think. You have one enormous advantage in the modern economy that your parents didn’t have: trying numerous different jobs is no longer considered weird. You shouldn’t overdo it, because that will make you seem untrustworthy, but taking a single job opportunity is very unlikely to ruin your life. The stakes are low.

Give yourself enough credit to know that, as long as you keep developing advantages and networks and resources for yourself, you’ll figure it out as you go. That’s all you need to know. You need to trust yourself, and be smart with money. Speaking of which:

3. Cars are not assets.

Never assume that your car is going to go up in value, and never think of your car as an “investment.” Calling your car an “investment” is what car salesmen do to trick you into thinking of a liability as an asset, of long-term debt as a helpful thing. It’s not. It’s just debt.

Your car does not produce any cash flows and it is not going to do anything for you other than move your physical shape to other locations.

Now sure, you can get lucky and sell your old Toyota into a very tight market and get a decent return on it. You can buy a used Toyota Corolla for $16,000 and sell it for $16,000 years later, meaning your transportation for the last few years was “free.” But that’s not skill, it’s luck. You cannot and should not count on that happening. Your car is a subscription you pay for transportation, minus the retained value of the machine itself. If you’re smart, you’ll simply buy a machine that retains its value decently well so you end up paying less for it over time.

4. When buying a car, assume you’re going to lose 40% of the value the second you drive it off the lot.

Related to the above point, your car does not gain value over time. It loses value, and you’re stuck paying a subscription to your own vehicle. Which is fine — that’s just what it takes to own a vehicle. Very few people have enough liquid cash to buy a car, even an old one.

But this loss of value is why you should never, ever, ever pay over the sticker price (or Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) for a vehicle. Not even a millionaire should do that, because it produces negative equity: it’s a straight-up waste of money. Equity is when you have $10,000 worth of debt for a thing and it’s currently worth $13,000 on the open market. You have $3,000 worth of equity — if you were to sell the thing right now, you’d pay off the remaining debt you used to buy it and have 3 grand left over.

So if you buy a thing for $25,000 and it’s currently worth $18,000, that’s what we call being upside down. It’s negative equity — you’re on the wrong side of breakeven if you were to sell the car. You would owe more money just to pay off the loan you used to buy it, which means it would actually cost you money to sell the car. You’re stuck.

Many people, whom we’ll here call idiots, roll negative equity into car after car by buying a new one every couple of years. Trade in a vehicle at a loss, take on a bigger debt to cover the negative equity of the old loan plus the value of the new loan, and before they know it they have $92,000 of debt for a car worth 60 grand. At some point, lenders will stop dealing with these people and they will be stuck with a mountain of debt over a car that is still actively losing value.

Not a good idea. When you buy a car, you inherently have negative equity, for a little while. But the point is to pay off the loan a) on an affordable car, b), which doesn’t lose a ton of its value (like a sports car), c) aggressively. There is no car worth being upside down for.

Which is why people still, after years of the same old cliché advice, keep buying Toyotas and Hondas. New cars are a whole world of trouble all their own, because they’re giant computers that are very costly to repair. But if you’re young, my advice is to buy pre-2015 Toyotas and Hondas and nothing else until you’re ten years older. Because those cars are very reliable, they’re easy to repair, and they hold their value well. You’re going to get the most for your money, and spend the least time upside down, on these cars.

You’ll have 50 years to look cool later. For now, avoid the flashy, impressive car. Be smart. Buy what makes sense. It can take you ten years to recover from a bad car purchase, so don’t do that to yourself. Do your damned research.

5. When buying a car, assume that at some point your monthly income will go down 40%.

Many older folks will rightly tell you, “If you can’t buy it twice, you can’t afford it.” This is excellent advice and applies very much to cars. If you’re making less than 100 grand a year, you have no business having a car with a monthly payment over $500.

Because at some point you’re going to run into a house fire, medical bills, a layoff, a sick family member, or some other expensive catastrophe that shifts your financial health window to the left. And at that time you’re going to be very thankful that you’re driving something cheap and that you have some savings.

6. Electric vehicles sound great, and fun, and they are. But they’re a trap.

Something I deeply, deeply believe in is that the average person should not live anywhere close to the frontier of technology. I am an average person. I don’t ever buy the newest computer, the newest smartphone, or the newest vehicle. Ever, under any circumstances. If you’re not rich, you have no business owning the latest of anything. (And if you’re a parent, you have no business giving your child the latest of anything. The blast radius of spoiled, entitled children is enormous: we all have to deal with them, not just you. Teaching your kids how to properly value things is your job. “Giving them what they want” is the opposite of your job.)

I wait for the market to organize itself. I wait for second-hand purchases. I wait for the guinea pigs, the people who have money to burn, to get burned first. And then I come in later once the video game has been reviewed or the car has had a few years of customer feedback and maintenance records. A lot of people are getting their financial lives all but ruined by insisting on having the latest (which they think means greatest) — the Tesla, the newest iPhone, the latest prototype vehicle from an already questionable auto manufacturer like Ford or Dodge. And those are the people who get hurt when the product turns out not to work as expected, or their charge times at Tesla Superchargers are four times as long as they expected (and have queues), or they can’t resell their Teslas for a decent price because the life of the batteries decreases over time along with the inherent price of the car.

The infrastructure to support a full nation of electric vehicles won’t be here for another 20 years. Everything is still in its infancy — the maintenance and repair market, the parts market, the resale market, the charging infrastructure, and the batteries. My fiancée has a Tesla (and is probably going to hit me when she reads this), and it’s a ridiculously fun car. She told me it was fun, and she was right. But fun does not mean good. It’s not something I would buy. We disagree at volume.

Plenty of people are having good experiences with electric cars. But most of those people can afford frivolous problems. The rest of us can’t. And either way, you should do a lot of research before you commit your life, including your financial life and the financial life of anyone who depends on you, to new technology. It hasn’t had time to prove itself or develop yet.

Exciting does not mean good. And you can commit yourself to years of financial obligations under the duress of excitement. The sooner you can train yourself out of that behavior, the better your life is going to be.

7. Every company wants to have an intimate relationship with your bank account.

This is one more place where I get to talk bad about Tesla. In order to fully utilize the Full Self Driving mode on Tesla vehicles, you have to pay a subscription fee. And you shouldn’t, because that’s bullshit.

The modern economy is made up of things that you pay for but do not own. Your whole life is now made of things that aren’t yours, and that you pay rent on. Which is why I like buying old things, things with buttons, things with no software. Things that, once I pay for them, are mine and they just work. There has been a lot of pushback from the consumer public on our economy’s shift to Subscription Everything, and that might help correct the problem. But for now, we’re stuck with this attitude that companies have that you owe them money even after you purchase a thing. Every company wants to be in a romantic relationship with your bank account. And you shouldn’t let them. Your bank account, like a good woman, should be hard to get.

8. Your house is not an asset, unless you’re rich.

Here is perhaps the biggest lie ever told in America: your house is an asset. And the reasoning is simple: because it goes up in price, reliably, over time. Ah, yes, an asset. That must be all it takes to meet the definition of asset.

No.

If your house goes up in price by 100%, and then you sell it, you didn’t actually make any money. Because now you have to go buy a new house — and that one did too. That’s the tricky thing about value: it’s relative. If fruits cost a dollar apiece and a market develops among the schoolchildren to sell them back and forth, and all of the fruits go up in price, that doesn’t make anybody any richer. Nobody has any more fruits, and nobody has any more money. They just have to exchange more dollars to get them from each other. That’s not an increase in value, it’s inflation. It’s only an increase in value if oranges go up in price more than apples.

Anyone who tells you that houses are an asset is either a gifted investor or trying to sell you something. In order for your house to be an “investment,” it has to be bought with the explicit intention of increasing its value: by 1) doing work on the house to increase its market value, or 2) buying in a developing area and watching it go up in value relative to other areas. Which means it can’t just go up in value by 2% a year — it has to go up by 5% a year. And that’s exceptionally difficult to manage.

You can build equity in your house by paying down the principal of the loan, and that’s great. And you do get an advantage by having financed it with 2026 dollars and paying it back, over time, with 2030 dollars and then 2035 dollars (because those dollars have been inflated and therefore don’t cost you as much value per dollar). But, as I said, everyone else has that advantage too. So it’s kind of a wash.

Treat your house the same way you treat a car: assume it’ll depreciate as it falls apart slowly, and try to get one that retains its value decently well. If you can afford to buy in an area that’s getting popular, and you are gifted enough to know one of those areas when you see it, great. But don’t count on that.

9. Eating out at restaurants is for special occasions, for 2 reasons.

The first reason is that you can save a significant amount of money by just learning how to cook for yourself. If you can eat chicken, rice, vegetables, and tuna 6 days a week for a few years, you can save a stunning amount of money on food. I recently put a down payment on the condo I currently live in with money I saved by eating cheap food for the last several years. That’s not an exaggeration.

The second reason is that restaurants these days (or maybe they’ve always been this way) serve incredibly mediocre food. It’s not good. It’s not impressive or special. Every time you consider going out, ask yourself the question, “Is the food going to be good enough to be worth $40 plus a tip?” If the answer is no, it’s not a great restaurant. And if it’s not worth going to a great restaurant, it’s not a special enough occasion to go out. Despite how good it feels to reward yourself with the impulsivity and dopamine of going out, your food will be just as good, probably better, if you just eat at home.

Don’t waste your time, or your money, or your dopamine, spending $40 for food that looks and tastes like it was made for $4. As we said above, if you’re in the habit of overpaying for cheap pleasure, you’re never going to save enough money for the things you want most.

10. Here’s an investment: tools.

I don’t know how I got so lucky, but I had several adults buy or give me tools as I was growing up. And, I’m not sure if this is hilariously coincidental or exactly what they intended, but I’ve used all of them. A new socket set for my car with jumper cables, an old toolbox full of rusty sundries, a very old screwdriver set with various attachments, and even a bucket full of old trash bags and electrical cords. I used the bucket, too.

If you are going to have your own place for the first time, ask a father, an uncle, an aunt, or even a neighbor if they have any old tools. If you can get yourself a hammer, a few wrenches, a socket set, and some slip-joint pliers, you can fix most of the issues you’ll have around the house by yourself. As well as many in your car. These tools pay for themselves after one use, because then you don’t have to call someone to come to your house just to change your damned shower head.

Tools are as close as you can get to cash-flowing assets without actually flowing cash. But you have to actually put in the effort to use them. With which YouTube can help.

11. Remember that most of our economy is hyper-financialized.

I like that scene from the movie The Founder where some young professional teaches Ray Kroc, the mastermind behind McDonald’s, a lesson. “You don’t seem to realize what business you’re in. You’re not in the burger business. You’re in the real estate business.” Kroc begins approaching the McDonald’s enterprise as a business of selling locations for franchises, rather than a business of building new grills to make burgers.

This is also why McDonald’s buildings are no longer cheerful and red and they no longer have any personality: because each McDonald’s location is ultimately a real estate asset, not a burger asset. It’s a building which will eventually be sold or leased to another business, so in keeping the buildings grey and dull and utilitarian they maximize their market value and minimize the work required for turnover. McDonald’s, the restaurant, sells burgers. McDonald’s, the company, is in the business of asset-based cash flows.

When you go to buy a car, you’re not buying a car. Not really. And the circus performer selling you the car isn’t selling you a car. Not really. What you’re buying, and what he’s selling, is debt. A package of financial obligations with your name on them. Many car dealerships won’t do business with you unless you use their financing — because that’s where they make most of their money. By making you pay far more than the car is worth, by paying for it over a long period of time in monthly installments which are comprised largely of interest.

And when you buy a $20,000 car and agree to $30,000 worth of debt for it, you’re paying for the salesman’s salary. And you’re paying for the salary of the finance department of that dealership.

When you buy a home worth $200,000 and you agree to pay $300,000 for it over the course of 30 years, you’re paying your real estate agent. And you’re paying your mortgage company. And then your mortgage company turns around and gives a cut to the broker who introduced you and prepared the loan. And then the mortgage is purchased by a mortgage servicing company. And you’re paying for that too — because if you weren’t, the price of the mortgage simply would have been lower. And then you’re paying for the agent at that mortgage servicing company to be trained in how to service mortgages, and you’re paying for their HR software, and you’re paying for that servicing company to have administrative employees to take care of paperwork and spreadsheets so they can keep servicing purchased mortgages which they didn’t even write. And then those mortgages might even be sold further on down the line to some asset-bundling bank who makes something called Mortgage Backed Securities which are sold with leverage on financial markets and eventually cause a crash that ruins the entire global economy.

You’re paying for all of that.1 Because most of the modern economy is a series of financial assets that exist on top of the business of actually buying and selling goods and services. Most of the economy is an abstraction, a derivative of actual commerce.

A whole economy of bullshit jobs comes out of every debt you have. So be careful with how you value the things you buy. Just because somebody tells you something is worth 5 years of payments at a given price, doesn’t mean it’s worth that to you. It means that’s what it’s worth to them, or to the global economy. And the global economy is not your friend, and it is not your responsibility. If the price isn’t right for you, don’t buy it.

12. If it seems like easy money, it’s a trap. The only easy money is a job.

What we are witnessing right now is the fall of the Airbnb market. Because over the last 6 years, everyone and their mother thought it would be a good idea to get a house and rent it out as an Airbnb. The market became saturated, and then became shittier due to inflation, greed, and the influx of surprise charges and over-the-top fees, and now travelers prefer hotels again. Because with hotels, you know what you’re getting. People are finally seeing again that that’s more valuable than novelty.

Airbnb was only a competitive place, both for renters and for owners, for about 2 years. It took almost no time for it to get saturated and ruined. If you were one of the early owners, you probably made a killing. If you were a trend chaser, you probably got waxed and are possibly now upside down on the house you bought specifically to rent out at exorbitant, unrealistic rates.

If everyone’s doing something, it’s already too late for you to do it. You need to get used to the idea that there is only one way to make easy money in this world, and it’s by showing up to work. If you’re remarkably creative and ambitious, you’ll find another way to make money and you don’t need my advice. If you aren’t, which is perfectly fine, you should get used to the idea of always missing out on money-making trends and being okay with that. Missing out sucks, but it also keeps you from ruining your life.

There is risk everywhere in life, and the easier something looks, the more risk there generally is. Because average people don’t have the balls to take risks that feel genuinely novel — therefore, the most high-paying risks are things few are doing.

13. How to negotiate in one step: “I can’t do it.”

We’ve all been there, and you will be there many more times in your life. Someone is trying to get you into a financial contract that you can’t afford or aren’t comfortable with.

Many people get nervous when thinking about situations like this, because they feel pressure to be some dangerous, cool personality who is excellent at negotiating. But you don’t have to be Harvey Specter or Barbara Corcoran to negotiate. All you have to say is something simple.

“I’m sorry, that price is just higher than I can go. I can’t do it.”

“I appreciate your working with me. If you can get me down around $XYZ, I can afford it. If not, I guess I’ll have to keep shopping.”

“Is there something I can remove to get me closer to my budget? I love [thing you’re shopping for], but I can’t do it at this price, it would break my finances.”

If you can say things like this while also smiling, giving good handshakes, and overall making people feel comfortable, you’ll do okay. People will generally work with you to the extent they can.

Bonus tip: Interest rates

Your interest rate should probably never be higher than 10% on anything. If someone offers you an interest rate higher than 10%, either your credit is horrible or someone is trying to scam you. Walk away.

If your credit is excellent — and one of your priorities as a young adult is to make it excellent — your interest rates should probably never be much above 7% on anything. Interest rates don’t just make your purchase a few percentage points more expensive. They make it exponentially more expensive, because that interest compounds upon itself year after year.

Get familiar with the interest rates of the current market, and don’t get scammed.

Conclusion

Our economy is about to get worse before it gets any better. If you’re a young person who’s still unsure about what it’s like to manage your own finances as an adult, revisit this piece, do some research, and watch some lectures online. If you’re not sure about something, step away from the situation and ask an adult you trust to help you. If you don’t have an adult you can rely on for good financial advice, find one. You’re inheriting a bad job market and an oppressive economy. And that’s not fair, because life is not fair. But you can still have a good life if you don’t waste your money.

Here’s the hard truth: you’re probably not going to be rich. Despite America’s best and most aggressive promises, we are not a bunch of temporarily embarrassed future millionaires. We are average people. And the best we can hope for, perhaps especially in such tumultuous times, is to have stable lives. If we can keep from doing anything incredibly stupid, we can have everything we need: stability, love, and the opportunity to do some of the things we want.

If you can learn how to entertain yourself without spending money, you’re already 90% of the way to having a good, stable financial life. Say no to almost all of the small things now so you can say yes to the biggest things you truly want later. Short-term sacrifice for long-term benefit is the name of the personal finance game.

You will not achieve your biggest dreams in life if you spend all of your money on the pleasures of the day. Most days should be relatively boring to you, until you earn the opportunities you truly want and then you have the money to go after them.

“Spending money is how people apologize to themselves for not living.” - Omar Najjarine

One of the hallmark traits of Millennials is a certain learned helplessness. I don’t know how we got this way, but we did.

Maybe it’s because our parents didn’t talk to us about hard things, because they were too busy enjoying suburban life. Maybe it’s because they didn’t teach us how to change our oil. And maybe that’s because their parents didn’t teach them.

And maybe it’s because we were the first generation exposed to the entire world, and when you’re up against the entire world everything seems impossible. Too many options, too many people to compare yourself to.

There are many interlacing causes for everything, and I’m not laying all the blame at the feet of the people I’m talking about. But something I’ve noticed in my generation, and almost certainly even worse in Gen Z, is this idea that “society has.” Society has this, society has that. Society has taught us this, period, and this is what we must do about it. Society has taught us that, full stop. And as I’ve written before, no, society hasn’t. Whatever you’re about to say about society is a gross oversimplification and is not a useful statement. Society has told us lots of things — as many things as there are people. Reducing all of that noise down to one single cultural narrative is not only dangerous, it’s factually incorrect. People who oversimplify cultural narratives are trying to sell you something.

There are influences of every kind in every person’s life. Every person has family members, neighbors, friends, and classmates. Every person has probably 15 churches within walking distance of their house.1 Every person has community centers and social events they could sign up for. Most people have two grandmothers, at least until they’re old enough for them to die.

And the best part of being a citizen of a free country is, you get to choose who your influences are. There is nothing anyone can do to stop you. If you’re not taking advantage of that, you’re squandering the biggest gift you have. A gift that most of the human population would have, and often has, killed and died for.

I had an exchange the other day with a young writer (whom I otherwise respect) that went as follows. She posted a note on Substack and I responded.

Her:

Your choices as a newlywed wife to learn about sexuality are:

-medical textbooks

-kooky sex gurus

-pornography

-experimentation

-smut

-degenerate women’s magazines

Call me crazy, but I don’t think we should have to live like this.

Me:

You don’t have to live like this.

You can ask older couples, or family members you feel safe talking to. Or you can ask questions to a priest or other church member. You can ask your friend who is in a happy marriage. You can ask your cousin. You can ask friends of the opposite sex what their sex wants and needs. You can see a sex counselor.

There are many ways to learn about sexuality in a healthy way. You have to put in a basic effort before you begin blaming society.

Her:

Who on earth is going to go to a Priest or Pastor for tips on the married bed? Get real people. It’s good to go to them for theological encouragement regarding the married bed, but that’s about it… Also, no married woman should be going to a male spiritual superior for techniques on how to please herself or her husband sexually. That is actually way out of line.

This is foolishness.2

Me:

Well for almost the entirety of human history, talking to people is how people learned about sex, so… not sure what you’re expecting here. There is no better solution than talking to people.

Needless to say, she stopped responding. And her post as well as her response to me have garnered way more attention than my responses to her. And the reason for that is simple: because people eat up powerlessness like a delicious meal. People, specifically Millennials and Gen Z, eat up any message, post, article, or narrative that says society is holding them down and that the reason their lives suck is because of “society.” The more miserably incompetent you are, the more morally admirable and artistically interesting. The more you can blame society for your problems, the more your forays into political commentary seem like they have heft. She has cultivated an audience that likes to be told that its problems are because of other people. So… what she gets is positive feedback on ideas that are bad. Ideas that celebrate perpetual infancy.

Such is the story of anyone who is reckless about what they share online. The internet is a place that rewards incorrect opinions with much greater force than it rewards correct ones. And if you’re not careful, you’ll start to think you’re smart when in fact you’re just making the intellectual equivalent of modern country music.

Now, the harsh version of what I have to say is this: if you’re learning about sex from kooks and porn, that is your fault. Not society’s. The data are in; the experiment is over. Everybody knows that porn is a bad place to learn about sex. You can no longer plead ignorance about these things. Everybody at the age of even considering sex as a regular part of their life knows that “the internet” is a bad place to learn about anything. Because that’s no longer a contrarian opinion. It’s consensus. It’s mainstream. It’s common knowledge and common sense.

So if you’re still learning about sex from kooks, and taking beauty advice from girls made of various plastics, and taking dating advice from miserable, grunting New York Times feminists, you are the problem in your life. The problem is not society, it’s the fact that you are bad at finding information. It’s that you refuse to do even a basic amount of research for constructing your own life.

In other places in the Comments section of that note, the author and various other people wrote things like “you underestimate how uncomfortable older women are talking to younger women about sex.”

Okay, maybe so. That is a perfectly fair thing to say. But is that it? Is that your whole response? You’re not even going to try to move past that 3rd-grade-level obstacle to try to get what you want?

If you ask three older women to talk to you about sex, and they all say no, ask a fourth. And if she says no, ask a fifth. Again, the problem is not that “literally no one will talk to you about sex because society.” The problem is that you haven’t even made an elementary effort at getting what you need.

Besides, if someone tells you you can’t do a thing, prove them wrong and do it anyway. We love proving people wrong, right? That’s the most American thing there is. If some old lady doesn’t want to talk to you about sex, just tell her “fine, you old prude” and strut away with your hips. Find someone who will talk to you, just because to hell with her.

I have recently had to do some home repairs and some car repairs, because both my condo and my fiancée’s duplex, as well as my car needed some work. I worry that the general Gen Z/Millennial approach to things like this is to:

1. Take the car to the shop or call a tradesman to the house, and then

2. Bitch and moan about how expensive it is.

But doing these kinds of things yourself is not only very fulfilling but ultimately cheap and relatively easy. Besides, it makes you sexy. Anything that can be done with screwdrivers and wrenches, I do myself, period. Putting a new faucet on the tub, replacing doorknobs and kitchen hardware, cleaning the heat sensor in my furnace, installing a new microwave, or fixing the essentials on my car. I contend that anyone who possibly can, should be following the same principle. I had to buy extensions for my socket wrench two weeks ago and wiggle my way down into the engine to take apart the whole air intake system on my car. And it was a pain.

But it was better than paying someone else $400 to put in new headlight bulbs and then bitching about how society is broken and takes advantage of me. All it took was 45 minutes of research online to make sure I understood the tools I would need and the parts I’d be moving. In the grand scheme of things, it took almost no effort from me. The biggest tool I had to use was a desire to actually go out in the cold and do it.

I’m trying to do a better job of writing from a positive and encouraging place, and I hope there is some of that here. But I have no more patience for people who celebrate incompetence, or who teach others to do so. Yes, society is unfair. Yes, society will rip you off if you have no skills. And yes, society has plenty of bad things to teach you. But you do not have to listen.

If you are genuinely interested in cultivating a great sex life, there are people who want to help you do so. Knock and be answered, or what have you. There are a couple of people in my world who I have talked to extensively about my sex life, and it has been an unalloyed good thing. And there are probably ten others I can think of, both sexes included, who’d be happy to talk if I asked for their help. It’s only as weird as you make it. And it’s only unavailable if you don’t look in the first place.

And if you don’t want to talk to people in your own life about sex, fine. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. Find a sex counselor. In fact, send me a message and I will pay for your first session. You are not helpless nor hopeless. You have far more control over your life than “society” tells you you do, and I’ll prove it to you.

“It is somehow never the flaws of human nature that stand in the way of utopia. It is the workings of evil forces.” - John Gray

Imagine you’re at a café and there’s a protest going on outside. You’re just there trying to have a coffee or whatever, but the protest is going on and you aren’t participating but you also have no interest in stopping it. As you watch through the coffee shop windows, some man shows up and starts attacking a young protestor. The crowd is infuriated and four people respond by beating the man up. The police are called.

(This is based on a true story, or maybe several.)

When the police show up, they notice that the man has a broken nose and blood all over his grey t-shirt. He is lying on the ground, clearly having lost the fight. There is only one young protestor who has any visible damage, a welt on her forehead from a punch the man landed. The four protestors are still menacing the guy, with one particularly loud-mouthed youngster still taunting him and yelling obscenities at him.

The police are trying to figure out what happened and who needs to be arrested. Now in a situation like this, the police are trained to identify aggressors immediately. Aggressive body language, yelling, and taunting are all things you absolutely do not want to be doing when the cops show up. So, at least for now, the young protestor yelling is going to be placed in handcuffs and walked back to a cruiser to be questioned.

The other three participants are also likely to be pulled aside, possibly placed in cuffs, and questioned. Why? Because the police are assholes? Because police are crooked and corrupt and need to be trained better? No. Because of taunting, yelling, and body language. Because when the police show up, the sum total of the information they have about you is your personality. And the man on the ground has yet to show one. All he has done since the cops showed up is bleed.

As an innocent bystander, you take your cup of coffee outside, raise your other hand in a sort of palm-open wave (the universal indication of friendliness and harmlessness), and say, “Officer, pardon me, I don’t think these kids ought to be in trouble. They were defending the one who was attacked.” Maybe the cop will tell you to back up (which he has a right to), or maybe he’ll ask you to continue with your witness testimony. In any case, you have an opportunity here to be useful because you are an unbiased-but-interested bystander.

What will most likely happen is that the cops will eventually use you as a resource. Even if they tell you to back up while they finish with a suspect, they will likely eventually come over to ask you what happened. Why? Because your personality makes you easy to talk to and makes you immediately seem trustworthy. You are calm. You are interested in the truth. They make a number of assumptions about you because your body language shows two things: A) no threat, and B) wise (or at least fair).

Now imagine if the four participants in the counter-battery displayed this same level of self-control. It is unlikely they’d be in handcuffs right now. Even if they had gone just as far, and broken the guy’s nose, and left him on the ground just as they have, they probably would have been greeted not with suspicion but with understanding. They could have opened their palms, given a brief wave, and said “that’s the guy, officer. We were defending her from him.” And the guy would likely have been lifted and cuffed as he yet bled.

I have learned a whole lot about cops in my life (not from books, but from having their undivided attention). And one thing I know about cops is that they want you to let them have control of the situation. Whether that’s probation officers or patrol cops. Not because their egos need it or because they’re on a power trip, but because their job requires predictability and stability. Their job requires entering frying pans and trying not to get burnt. The more you can show them that you will let them control the situation, the less likely you are to provoke a fear response in them and get yourself hurt. Or arrested, or even questioned.1

This doesn’t mean you have to be “submissive” or “a pussy” or “a bootlicker” or any such words that can feel bad for your own ego. It just means you have to be the two things we mentioned above: “no threat,” and “wise or at least fair.” Because one thing that you don’t want is for the cops to show up to a situation where you were a victim, and instead treat you like a suspect. But if you make cops feel threatened and try to sic them on other people like attack dogs, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. And it’s going to be your fault, not theirs.

On the contrary, if you are able to “direct traffic,” so to speak, in tense situations, you will be a hero. You will be a person the community relies on to get things done. If authorities show up to a situation and immediately trust you as a source of truth, you are doing something very right with your personality.

When I got sober 13 years ago, I was in a drug court program. That is, in fact, why I got sober: because I was legally required to. Every week we had check-ins in front of a court magistrate where he would review our actions and behaviors for the week which were reported to him by the treatment team. And I cannot tell you how many times I saw that a person’s personality can outright change their fate. Even more so, sometimes, than their actions.

The magistrate was an endlessly kind and fair person — as were all of the employees of the program. But my goodness, could he be harsh if you earned it. There was one thing the magistrate was looking for above all else: accountability. You could take a bad weekly report and make it much worse by trying to defend your own actions or look like a hard-ass in front of your peers. He would tear you apart. And I saw a number of people get dismissed out of the program directly to prison when they tried to downplay their own actions. When they tried to talk back to a magistrate of the court.

There was one time when I was seconds away from being kicked out of the program myself, and being sent to prison. He aggressively questioned me about my poor behavior report that week, and instead of trying to add context or defend myself I simply said, “Yes sir, I did.” And he let me stay in the program.

Ideally you’re not in a drug court program to begin with. But life is not an ideal place.

Even in a program full of criminals, or maybe especially there, a good attitude and some fairness can make all the difference. Your behavior, and your response to your own behavior, are two separate things and one is even more important.

And the fate-deciding importance of personality applies many places in life. Asking for help from an airline. Getting customer service from your insurance company. Hitting on a woman in public. Negotiating with a contractor. Communicating with your spouse. If you can make other people feel safe while also showing that you’re interested in truth and fairness, people will be perfectly willing to cooperate with you. Even if they have to reject you, they’ll sometimes offer an alternative or make a suggestion for you to get what you need. This goes a lot further than “I demand to speak to your supervisor, now” or “Well, you’re ugly anyway.”

I used to get nervous when trying to negotiate or ask questions of, for instance, a contractor. But I know now, from the feedback of other people, that I tend to be a fair person and a good communicator. So when I have questions, I just ask. My fiancée and I were recently hiring a guy to renovate her attic. And he was making some questionable decisions. And instead of sitting there stewing and resenting him for it, I just asked things like, “Wait, why did you do that? Is there something I’m not understanding here?” And even though I kind of put him on the spot, he answered me honestly and we had a good conversation. Because he knew I wasn’t going to attack him, I just wanted things to get done correctly.

People can read someone who is explosive, people can sense in a person’s body language that they are looking for opportunities to get angry. And in that case, you end up like the young protestor who continued menacing and taunting: you end up the bad guy even when you weren’t the bad guy. You end up with a wife who no longer feels comfortable talking to you. You end up with some of the consequences even if you weren’t the one who initially messed up. Because you did mess up in how you responded.

You can be a person who is right 90% of the time (which no one is), and make it so that people still won’t want to give you credit. How? By being a pain in the ass to deal with. There are people who approach every police encounter, or every customer service interaction, or every negotiation with a contractor as an opportunity to show how smart (or angry) they are. And even when those people are right, they still lose. They still get arrested, they still fail to get their problems solved, and they still fail to get a discount.

Because being right is not just about being right. Being right is about having good ideas and making other people want to be on your side about those ideas. You know, the whole “it’s not me versus you, it’s you and me versus the thing” thing. If you’re right and no one wants to be seen agreeing with you, it’s even less valuable than being wrong. You end up on an island somewhere off in the ocean, celebrating how right you are alone.

If you pop champagne and no one is there to toast you, it’s not a party. It’s alcoholism. And then you’ll probably end up in a drug court program, which is not ideal.

“When you’re born, you look like your parents. When you die, you look like your decisions.” - Unknown

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting as much. I’ve been planning my wedding, which is quite a distracting affair.

As I said in the previous sentence, I’ve been planning my wedding. We just hired our photographer, and we received our invoice digitally, as one does. At the bottom of the invoice page where your payment options are, there is a clever little trick of industry: an up-to-$85 “Online Payment” fee.

Now, let’s just get the obvious part out of the way: this is bullshit.

I shouldn’t have to pay a fee for using a payment system when that is the only payment system available. That’s like putting me on a game show and telling me to choose a door, and behind the incorrect door there is a pit of snakes and needles, but there’s only one door and it’s incorrect.

One thing you ought to keep in mind, now that we are past the age of checks and cash, is that you can still ask most businesses if you can pay by cashier’s check. Because most businesses will still accept this. Obviously this is more of a pain because it requires you to go to a bank and purchase one. But most of us no longer carry checkbooks, and this is a better option than paying fees on everything we buy. Especially for the larger purchases where a 5% payment fee could amount to a couple hundred dollars.

But the biggest problem here isn’t the inconvenience, or the fee itself. It’s the redistribution of economic infrastructure to the consumer.

20 years ago, payment fees were considered a cost of doing business. If you couldn’t find a way to accept credit card payments, and handle checks, you as a company simply couldn’t do business. If you couldn’t find 19-year-olds who were willing to count out paper money and coins, you couldn’t do transactions. It was incumbent upon the business to handle the infrastructure of payments — the consumer never saw that side of the business. The consumer didn’t have to worry about it; it wasn’t the consumer’s problem. The consumer gave you money, you gave the consumer thing. And the receipt had two line items on it: thing, and taxes on thing.

Now it seems everywhere I go, there is a surcharge for services rendered, an inflation fee, a payment processing fee, a convenience tax for the very act of making a payment to the business I’m doing business with. The cost of payment infrastructure is being offloaded to the consumer. We have to pay for the privilege of buying things, so that companies can recoup the losses they tragically suffer by… doing business.

There are many reasons this is happening. One is that the whole economy is suffering a recessionary effect from inflation right now. No matter what graphs and charts economists place on your screen to convince you the consumer is fine, the consumer is not. Those graphs and charts make blatantly dishonest assumptions like poorly-constructed weighted indexes, ignoring exponentially increasing healthcare costs, ignoring the fact that homes are three times as expensive as they should be, and ignoring the consumer experience of being one emergency away from catastrophic financial straits. “The consumer is fine” is a very, very loose usage of English words by a class of people who are in fact fine and pay no cost for being so loose with English words.

Another reason is that businesses are essentially just seeing what they can get away with. It has become apparent in recent years that the U.S., at least, has lost its backbone. Consumers aren’t willing to boycott companies that treat them poorly, because we’ve forgotten how to do the act of going without. We want, we need, and we won’t wait.

That’s one thing I love about the stereotypical, or at least the historical, Texas or Boston attitude. Those people always had the backbone to tell you to fuck off when you tried to pull one over on them. There are plenty of negative things about those cultures as well — everything’s a trade-off — but at least they had the spine that we always thought of as inherently American. Businesses at this point, as well as universities (which are for-profit businesses) and every other institution in our lives, are basically just seeing how much they can get away with. They’re seeing how much of the economy they can make us, the consumer, pay for. So they can keep making the top 1% wealthier and keep hiring bureaucrats at inflated salaries to go to endless committee meetings and send 4 emails a week.

Which leads us to one final reason: that everyone in the U.S. thinks their business ought to make them wealthy. Most business owners have historically been looking for one thing: autonomy. That is, for instance, the desire of most U.S. immigrants. The ability to work for oneself, to follow one’s own orders, to not rely on some incompetent boss or some dictator to determine our work experience. Say what you will about immigrants, but sometimes they display more American attributes than Americans. And that attitude does not just exist in entrepreneurs — it’s also people with high degrees and very specialized jobs. These people wanted to escape the horrors and trivialities of corporate desk life and move onto something more alive. To work on something that allows them to exercise agency.

But we have become ungrateful for autonomy. We have looked over the shoulder of autonomy and seen the younger and prettier wealth. It seems every business owner thinks they ought to be able to take home an absolutely maximized profit margin. Every boss, every manager, every owner thinks they ought to be getting rich whether it makes financial sense for the enterprise or not. The American north star is no longer autonomy, it’s competitive wealth. It’s number-go-up. Even when that does not lead at all to an increase in happiness or prosperity on a personal basis. We can’t help ourselves. We want number to go up.

Look at executives of video game developers. Every year, they want to take home higher and higher pay packages. And what I want to say to those people is, Dude, you get to make video games for a living. That IS the compensation.

But no. It seems everybody wants to pinch their pennies and underpay their workers as much as possible, because they want the security and status that comes with more money for themselves. But their logic is backwards — when you adopt an extraction mindset, rather than a growth one (as we as an entire country have), your business will start going downhill immediately and almost invariably. The best businesses I know of overpay their employees and those employees produce outstanding results. Why? Because they want to. Because those outstanding results bring more and more customers. Because those outstanding results and those eager customers bring the security and status that bad owners try to extract through nuanceless brute force. Either everybody is getting rich, or only the CEO is getting rich. There is no in-between.

And this represents the larger trend across our country: the consumer is expected to bear the costs of economic vitality for far more than his own household.

I’m not an economic specialist (though I do work in finance), I’m a generalist. I’m not the guy who attaches 46 sources to an article. What I am is a person with common sense and an ability to see the output of systems. And our system right now places more and more of the weight of keeping the economy going on the shoulders of average people. People who not only can no longer access the American Dream, but are forced to subsidize it for those who can.

“But the average person today has a better quality of life than the kings of 400 years ago.” Yes, that is true. But the average person today is also, as we said before, one emergency away from having his life completely ruined by systems that he actively subsidizes. That has never happened before in this country. The biggest risks to your financial health are the very systems that were supposed to ensure your security in the first place. Education, healthcare, home ownership, and childcare.

Getting by today is not a test of skill, but of luck. If you get unlucky in the United States, you lose. You can spend 20 years dutifully paying into health insurance, suddenly have $190,000 of medical debt that you cannot pay off, and still be asked for tips everywhere you go.

And then you have to do the legwork of trying to put your doctors, your specialists, and your insurance adjusters in touch with each other to figure out whether someone is going to pay the bill. The runaround of getting medical bills paid is, again, outsourced to the free labor of the consumer. It’s comedy at a Shakespearean level that we can pay the salaries of all of these desk jockeys and still have to do their jobs for them.

The output of this system is a few wealthy people and a whole lot of very, very unlucky people. It’s hotels on Boardwalk with 200 million pieces on the board. That doesn’t seem like a very good system to me. That doesn’t seem like a system that any country should be jealous of. (Which is why they’re not, and they actively make fun of us.)

Every time someone turns an iPad to you at a checkout counter and asks if you’d like to tip, what they’re really asking is “please redistribute some of your wages to our employees, so we can have higher profit margins.” There doesn’t even have to be a moral reason to say no. You say no because that’s a bullshit thing to ask. You say no because it’s not your job to make sure the entire economy pays all of its employees enough money. You are a strong and special person, but you’re not that strong.

In Denmark or New Zealand, taxes are a cinch. The government informs you of how much you owe, they tell you “if everything here looks correct you don’t need to do anything,” and then you don’t do anything. In the United States, we subsidize an entire industry of tax preparers every year simply because those companies lobbied the U.S. government to make us. Tax preparation in the U.S. is little more than a jobs program that the citizen pays for.

It just seems like, as the U.S. gets older, government is growing bigger while simultaneously doing less and less for the citizen. Corporations are growing bigger and more powerful, and yet the consumer is somehow responsible for making sure they get by. The 24-year-old barista is reduced to the theatrics of turning away from the payment screen when it asks other struggling Americans to tip them — and neither of them can afford a home. Neither of them.

I’m not really sure what we can do about this, other than opting out of systems that no longer work where possible. For instance, don’t tell your kids to go to an $80,000-a-year school if they don’t have a pretty clear idea of what their career looks like. Tell them to go into plumbing instead. You can opt your way into debt later — but you can’t opt out once you have it. Not without bankruptcy, anyway.

Don’t tip people whose entire contribution to your meal was to turn around and hand it to you. Companies with an extraction mindset, or who aren’t good enough to grow, need to be allowed to fail. That’s the entire point of the free market. Hell is what gives Christianity its value, and failure is what gives the free market its value.

Opt into more community friendships, maybe a church, where you can share childcare responsibilities instead of paying the Childcare Economy most of your paycheck. Write to your Congressperson and say “Dear sir or madam, please help, because this is kinda bullshit. This doesn’t really work anymore.”

“You’ll miss the American, who deals sharply but cheats no one, who is tougher than the thugs and cleverer than the tricksters, who says ‘I can do it’ when others shrug, and who respects learning but is suspicious of those claiming to be learned, when the last one dies.” - a Twitter user named Kendric Tonn

Yesterday I re-watched that video with Jimmy Fallon and Jack Black. The one from The Tonight Show where they did a goofy-yet-earnest remake of Extreme’s “More Than Words” music video. I adore that video. I adore it.

What I love about music is that it can turn even the most irreverent people into beautiful personalities. It doesn’t matter that it’s by accident; you can’t ruin great music with irreverence. Even Will Ferrell, when he did that ridiculous skit with Ryan Reynolds singing “Grace Kelly,” showed something beautiful. Because he hit the notes. Even his goofy face couldn’t ruin it; even the fact that it was gratingly exaggerated didn’t make it un-beautiful. You can’t ruin great music by not respecting it, because the respect is in the music itself. The respect is in the fact that you found it worthwhile to actually hit the notes.

I used to have a friend who liked when I played guitar. One of the things I would do all the time was play the chords of “Eight Days a Week” by the Beatles, while singing filthy nonsense and punch lines instead of the real lyrics. And I think the reason she enjoyed it so much wasn’t because it was funny, but because that’s a beautiful song. That’s also why artists like Weird Al and the quintessential Bo Burnham are so great at their craft — because they give funny somewhere beautiful to live. Bo Burnham’s “Can’t Handle This” is made even funnier because it so tries to mock its own medium. He is actively trying to make the medium of his performance look ridiculous, and it remains uncorrupted. Because the sounds and vibrations are genuinely moving, even though it’s about burritos and Pringles cans. When I watch that video, it brings me to chills and tears. Because there’s something so otherworldly about it. Even though it was Kanye West’s idea, and Kanye is the human equivalent of a screeching seagull.

You can mock literature. You can mock bad paintings. You can mock any other medium of art, because those require the active participation of the audience or viewer. Those media require you to want them to be beautiful, to actively scan the beauty with your eyes and to open your heart to it.

Music is not like that. Music defies mockery. If you’re making actual music, you cannot mock it into not being music. This is why you occasionally detest yourself for tapping your foot or singing the words to songs you desperately want to hate. Even something you have a moral reason to hate, you can’t. Because music cannot be lied to. You can’t trick yourself out of loving music. It’s the most powerful impulse a human being has, other than that which resides in the loins.

So when Jimmy Fallon and Jack Black, two of the least serious people in our species, performed an authentically in-key and on-time version of “More Than Words”, it stuck with me. Even when Black held his hand and his eyes up to the heavens as if to mock the holy note he was hitting, it remained holy. Because he hit it. These two jokesters, for three minutes and forty-one seconds, are holy. They did a thing that is incredibly meaningful. And the way the audience cheers embodies the celebration that they did something serious. They made music. They made that which is moving.

I bought an electric piano a couple of years ago and started teaching myself to play it. I learn songs, slowly and painfully, by watching others play them on YouTube. (I don’t know how to read music, despite playing 3 instruments… and I don’t plan on learning. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m a difficult person. Maybe because I’m a Struggle Puritan.)

Every time I learn a new song, or finally get the hang of a new lick that uses both hands, I just sit there laughing at my piano. Laughing out loud, alone in my spare bedroom, like a lunatic. Because I cannot believe it’s real. I cannot believe that I can play this instrument. It’s so beautiful that it amazes me. It feels like the greatest privilege in the world to be able to play music on this instrument. It makes the guitar, my first love, look like a Fisher Price toy.

There’s a song from the video game Cyberpunk 2077 that I find hauntingly beautiful. And as far as I can tell, it was made specifically for that game by a band that came together specifically to make that song. It’s not a song that will randomly appear on your music streaming services — like Jack Dawson, it exists only for people who played that game. It’s such a simple, low-fidelity song that was probably recorded in one take, and yet it haunts me. A few guitar chords, and some vague lyrics that leave your mind the privilege of interpreting them, of mapping your own emotional experiences onto them. As good music does. As I’ve written before, great music doesn’t just come out and tell you what it wants to say. It plays with mystique and emotional vagueness. It points you in the general direction of an emotional experience, and trusts you to go there yourself.

Every new song I hear that I think I can learn on the piano fills me up with excitement. I know it’s going to be hard. It’s very hard to learn new songs without being able to read music. But it’s a challenge I want. I want to play that beautiful thing. I want that to be mine to share. I want to feel the notes in my legs and my skull with my electric piano turned all the way up. Sometimes I even fantasize that my neighbors hear it and think “damn that’s loud, but damn is he good at the piano.”

And yet…

As I learn a song, the magic of it fades away. It no longer exists in the abstract; it exists in my own fingers. And then it feels too real, too easy. Once I collect it and possess it, it’s no longer quite so magical. Even what is holy, it seems, is capable of disappointing. Even the most good and pure thing in life, it seems, can let me down. This is why Radiohead won’t play Creep, and Beck always hated playing Loser. Those songs are adored so much by the audience, and have required so much “giving away,” that there’s nothing but a chore left in them for the creators.

Maybe that’s the sacrifice of the musician: as he unearths something he gets to share it, but in giving that magic away, he loses it for himself. In giving away the purest and most loving thing in life, he must then seek that love somewhere else. And the cycle starts over again. He learns a piece of music, he shares it, it empties him, he discovers a new one.

But that’s fine, and I can’t stop anyway. There is always a new song to discover, and to be amazed by. Especially in the world of classical music. I can endlessly chase the high and, unlike with drugs, actually find my reward. I can experience that thing all over again.

When I listen to this music, this thing… just for a moment, it doesn’t matter what hurts. It doesn’t matter how many people I loved have left me. It doesn’t matter that the headlights on my car need fixed or that I’m anxious about work. For a moment, all I can experience is something so alarmingly gorgeous that it makes all of that seem worth it. But not just worth it — utterly immaterial. Nonsensical. Temporary, unhurtful.

There’s some holy space that I enter, when I listen to music in the shower with my mind free to wander. Some space that’s better than real life. As both the hot water and Einaudi’s “Nuvole Bianche” wash over me, I recognize something other. This thing, this composition... there’s something here. There’s something here that isn’t me. There’s something here that’s better than me. Maybe that’s a religious thought.

Maybe we invented God because we had to have an explanation for what music does to us. Or maybe that’s backwards. I don’t know. But it’s the only thing I’ve encountered in life that feels super-natural: better than natural. I just can’t shake the feeling that music is too overpowering to be merely an animal instinct. Too disarming to be merely “evolutionarily adaptive.” There’s no way this thing arose inside of us merely because it helps us get along better and pass along genes. That feels like an inadequate explanation to me.

There are some pieces of music, like that one I listen to in the shower, that feel inevitable. Every note Beethoven ever wrote feels inevitable. Not like something written, but like something excavated intact. Like something that was there, waiting to be discovered, that lines up perfectly with what humans need to hear. Every subsequent note feels like home. Neil Young was melodically clumsy; Beethoven was not. Beethoven dug up things we genuinely needed to hear.

That thing inside me that recognizes music, I don’t know whether it’s magical or it isn’t. I don’t know whether it will live on after my body begins to fester and clot. But it makes life seem like it’s for something. That’s the impression that I get. I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s more real than my life. And it’s so beautiful that it makes me ache.

Music contains that thing. And I haven’t found it anywhere else.

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Thanks to Brent Donnelly for reading a draft of this.

One of the most common conversations in the modern media landscape is the masculine versus feminine thing. You know, topics like what it means to be masculine/feminine, and whose jobs which chores are, and why. It might be the most overcooked, beaten-to-hell conversation I’ve ever seen.

So, naturally, in my revulsion at how over-discussed it is, I’ve posted about it several times. Because I can’t help myself but to attempt to write something so definitive that it convinces everyone to stop talking about it. Right? Such is the feeling of every writer. “My essay is the last that will ever need to be published on this topic.”

Sarcasm and self-denigration aside, I’d like to take an opportunity to do what has essentially become my specialty as a writer: to take you outside of the conversation and make you look at the conversation itself.

As a parallel example, my biggest contribution to political discussions isn’t usually to make actual political comments, to state actual political opinions; rather, it’s to get people to look at the conversation they’re having and realize how unproductive it tends to be. To step outside of the specifics and the opinions, and realize the game you’re actually playing. For one simple reason: because to sit at your own dinner table with your own family and scream spit and slobber across the table at the people you’re supposed to love — that’s not politics, that’s an utter failure to have priorities in life. Politics isn’t that big a deal. It just isn’t. It’s an angry team game disguised as having principles. It’s a game imposed upon you by your superiors that you are expected to play with the tenacity of a zealot, at the expense of your own sanity and relationships.

And if you obey that edict, you’re a fool. Because you just don’t have to. You simply do not have to. You can have opinions, sure. That’s useful. But you don’t have to allow the conversation itself, the nonstop quibbling and hatred over those opinions, to consume your life. You can instead just live out those opinions in your own behavior, and achieve the corresponding results.

And I’ve come to see this whole conversation about men and women the same way. It’s something we distract ourselves with because we’re not busy enough actually being men and women. Only someone with nothing to do could possibly sit around and intellectualize masculine and feminine this much. And that’s our problem. We don’t have enough to do.

You know who I don’t see discussing masculine and feminine? Happy married couples who have kids. They don’t have the luxury of intellectualizing the work that needs done, because the time they would take to intellectualize it, they’re spending actually doing it. You can sit around and argue all you want about whose emotional archetype most aligns with doing dishes — unless you live in an actual house where there is an actual sink full of actual dishes that need done. You can sit around chin-scratching over what kind of leader you’d be as a man, far off in some imagined future, unless you have an actual house of actual people that need led.

And that word, actual, is the crux of the problem. We over-intellectualize everything because we’re failing to live out the story we’re trying to tell. We all connect with biblical levels of masculine and feminine divinity — we deeply want that to be our story. Everybody wants to be Abraham, or Sarah, or Job. Everybody wants to be the Count of Monte Cristo, Beyoncé, a biblical bearer of suffering and a legendary example of humanity. And those are wonderful stories to be informed by. You should read those stories. But Abraham only became the Abraham we know about after he was, like, 150 years old and finally got out of his father’s basement.

We’re trying very hard to tell ourselves a story about who we are. But we’ve got that backwards. Good stories are not thought up in advance and lived out like a premeditated crime; they happen to us, they show us what we’re made of, and we tell them fondly in retrospect. Your story isn’t who you intellectually plan to be from the safety of your sofa; it’s who you are as life continues to beat the hell out of you with surprises. The story is what comes later as you tell others about what happened. And more importantly, your story is the way others talk about you when they recall how you responded to the events of your life. Your story is not really yours to tell; it is the privilege of those who know you. If no one knows you, you have no story.

If you’re not exposing yourself to actual surprises, if you’re not having actual events in your life, there is no story. There is only preparation for what you one day hope to do with yourself.

There is an enormous circuit of podcasts that every semi-popular author goes on after they write a book or a blog post about men. These male podcast hosts will ask them the same tired old questions about “what it means to be a man,” and “how can you embody your masculine energy,” and “how to be successful in dating.” Most of them give roughly the same answers, and most of them give those answers 15 times on all the different podcasts. They all talk about how young men are struggling to identify themselves in the world and struggling to live happy, productive lives. They all talk about how wokeness destroyed masculinity and vilified the most helpless class of people in modern life: young men. And then they all have to smuggle in their favorite line:

“And no one is talking about this.”

Oh, but you are. We all are. In fact that seems to be all we’re doing anymore.

And there’s something I find ironic about the whole thing: most of these podcast hosts aren’t married and don’t have kids. Their podcast is their baby; their entrepreneurial spirit, which leads them directly to isolation and workaholism, is their single defining purpose in life. They are the posterchildren of the very problem they’re asking about. They are the perfect example of how young men are embarking from high school upon this long journey of becoming men — but purely in the land of theory. By making and listening to podcasts, by studying what it means in the abstract to Be A Man.

Now, I can’t just point-and-laugh at young men themselves. They have been handed a pretty rotten piece of fruit. They inherited a dating landscape that can only be described as hellish, with its depersonalizing face-shopping apps and its post-MeToo distrust. They inherited a generation of young women who have been raised to compare themselves with cartoons. A generation of young women who throw the word “narcissist” around about exes because they’ve been trained to think of themselves as the emotional center of the universe. A landscape where “trauma” is a constant trail of eggshells that everyone must walk on, because we have medicalized even the most ordinary occurrences of a human life.

I don’t blame men for not being able to find purpose in marriage and kids, because it’s very hard to get married and have kids when this is the romantic backdrop of your world.

So it’s understandable — men are bickering about what it means to be manly, because they don’t currently have the opportunity to raise a family and love a wife. In other words, to prove their manliness, mostly to themselves. They don’t currently have the opportunity to get their hands filthy maintaining a home, because they can’t afford one. Or at least that’s how they feel. We have abstracted out the story that isn’t taking place in our real life, and are quibbling about the best version of that story in mere theory with our podcast questions and our horn-locking over definitions. We argue about what chores a man ought to do, knowing that none of the people in this conversation are doing them because we don’t have girlfriends or wives to do them for. We celebrate Instagram personalities who are outright toxic but can give us a glimpse of that which we cannot give ourselves.

And the further into these conversations we go, the easier it is to hate and distrust the opposite sex. For two reasons: 1) the longer you go without something, the easier it is to feel that it’s being conspiratorially being withheld from you (sex and healthy relationships), and 2) because the deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the more polarizing voices you find. Some of the male podcast circuit is basically a class in how to be unattractive. A self-fulfilling prophecy of men who think they’re better than women, and therefore can’t find dates, and therefore get ever angrier at the world.

And the same is largely happening with women. They can’t find healthy relationships, they struggle to trust both themselves and men, and they’re just not really… growing up. They’re stuck in this adolescent limbo of sitting around talking about femininity without having any place to put it or use it. Although women are forced to grow up in certain ways that men aren’t. Women have bodies that are weapons, and they have to learn how to contain and operate those weapons whether they’re “ready to live in practical reality” or not.

Most young (and even middle-aged) women I know who want kids, can’t have any. Because they can’t seem to find a man they trust and respect and then build a relationship with him. They’re trapped in the cycle of thinking about who they’d like to be as mothers and wives, without getting the chance to take on that task. (And part of it, as with men, is their own fault. Unrealistic standards, too quick to make judgments after a single date, etc. Nobody is totally innocent here.)

Neutered of our ability to feel masculine or feminine through lifestyle, trials, matrimony or parenthood, we sit around talking about it in the hopes that we can speak it into existence. People desperately want to fix this problem, because people do want to grow up. People do want to live out a story more interesting than listening to podcasts and going to the gym for a vague journey of self-improvement. Some of the conversation is about personal accountability.

And yet some of it is also a blame game. Part of this is the grand narrative that someone somewhere has stolen your masculinity and that you must storm the castle to retake it. Any good redemption story needs a villain.

But the way you capture your masculine or your feminine isn’t by rescuing it from the clutches of some foe. You don’t need to take back your permission to grow up; you just decide to. In order to be masculine, all you have to do is — are you ready for this? — do adult things that are masculine. Or, more generally, do adult things that provide security, safety, and resources for others. No matter what anyone’s political affiliations demand they tell you about masculinity, that’s what masculinity is right there. It’s using your strength, cunning, muscles, and mind to provide for others. And, of course, wanting to copulate. In the words of many a podcast guest, a man’s job is to Procreate, Protect, and Provide. (And here’s the part you may find rough, funny, or totally adorable: it’s in that order.)

And by the way, if you’re with a healthy woman, she will allow you to express masculine urges and desires. If she doesn’t, she’s not healthy and she perhaps has some growing up to do herself. And that’s not to criticize her; she probably has been captured by the same grand abstracted narrative that you have, and is simply unable to live with the reality of what an imperfect man says, feels, and does. It’s very hard to live with someone who has almost childishly repetitive needs when you have learned everything you know about relationships from Sex and the City, romcoms, and entrepreneurial feminists. (And by the way, you girls are no picnic yourselves. Having to spend money, or apologize for things we didn’t do, to keep you happy isn’t a joy for us, either.)

I wrote a piece a couple of years ago about men and their sexual desire, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The happiest responses, somewhat surprisingly, were from older/middle-aged women. They said things like “yes, this is what young women need to understand about men” or “yes, I know my husband’s needs and I don’t mind, because he also knows mine.” The vast majority of responses were from happy people in happy relationships, or at least happy people generally. People who were willing to have a practical relationship instead of living by some nebulous principles of what a relationship “should” be like.

I had a few angry feminists and outright hateful people respond to that post, but I noticed two things about those people:

1. Those people are terribly unlikely to be in happy relationships, so their opinions are moot, and

2. Their sense of femininity had clearly been abstracted out of their lives and sold back to them as a political product. Those people don’t live in reality with real men. In fact, some of them would like to kill all of us.

In keeping with the theme of this essay, the best way to build a great sex life isn’t to read books or listen to podcasts or read articles from the New York Times. It’s to find someone who wants to try things with you, and then try them. In messy, embarrassing reality. A good sex life is earned by trying to have fun and please both yourselves and each other. It has almost nothing to do with theory. Theory is a dark, lonely place where no one is getting laid.

Masculinity, just like anything else, just like outdoor beauty and productivity and mental health, has now been abstracted out of your life and sold back to you as a product. That’s what the modern economy does — it separates out pieces of your life and sells them back to you. Because it knows that you’re willing to defer to someone else, or to pay someone else, for things you ought to be learning yourself through the distinctly personal journey of living. So now when you work out or watch podcasts, you’re Becoming Masculine™. Never mind volunteering at your church, mowing the lawn on time, or doing difficult, grueling manual labor that truly tests your will — you are now the proud graduate of a course on what it theoretically means to be a man.1 In the same way that when you buy beauty products, you are paying someone else to give you what you could have gotten by just learning how to smile more.

The internet wants to teach you these things. You have tour guides who show you specific movements that make you manly, specific archetypes that make you worthy of female attention, and certain kinds of attitudes you must embody if you want to be a modern man. Not to mention porn giving you a wholesale unrealistic version of what sex looks like, feels like, or even is. You’re a tourist in your own sexuality. You have bought tickets to masculinity and are looking at exhibits.

We don’t have enough role models for young men, enough mentors or even fathers, who are willing to grab you by the shoulders and say, “That idea of manliness is stupid. If you want to be a man, go outside and rake the god damned leaves.”

You may have heard of Victor Frankl’s law: “When a man can’t find a sense of meaning, he distracts himself with pleasure.” Well, I’ve also heard the opposite2, and I think that’s where we’re at now: When young men can’t find a sense of pleasure in the world, they distract themselves with meaning. I think this also applies to young women, and explains why they are now going to university in greater numbers than they’re dating. Everybody’s single and educated.

We aren’t enjoying our lives as they are — we aren’t having fun, or engaging in enough relationship-building or adventure or sex — so we instead resort to hope. We hope, in almost a religious, prayerful way, that if we keep at it, one day we’ll pass some exam for which we have dutifully studied and then we’ll fall into a life where now we can be happy; now we can have fun. Now we can stop studying masculinity. We’re stuck in this perpetual state of planning to have a good life. We feel our job is to study what it means to be a good man or a good woman, rather than finding ways to just be one now. We have academicized the very nature of our lives.

I think this problem has its roots in the materialist ‘90s, and the fact that we came out of that decade and into the rapid isolation of the late 2000s and the 2010s. I mean, if you think about it, it’s absolutely staggering how quickly our society transformed from the “let’s hang outside” ‘90s to the “nobody even goes anywhere anymore” 2010s. It only took 20 years for our culture to go from exuberantly social to stunningly isolationist — and that was even before Covid. That might be one of the quickest and most dramatic cultural changes in the history of our species.

And the issue really became a central concern and a very tangible cultural moment with the rise of Jordan Peterson. He finally offered “meaning” as an actual journey to embark on — and also, alas, a consumer product. Again, meaning itself can be turned into a consumer product. There are several reasons I will always be fond of Dr. Peterson, and several reasons I think he lacks credibility. But you can’t ignore the impact he had on our culture. He was the avuncular meaning-slinger; the stranger who came to town, drew his pistols, and shook things up. He got young men to see themselves as worthy of a good story. Because apparently their fathers hadn’t taught them that.

Unfortunately, for many young men, a good story in their heads is as far as they got. Because Dr. Peterson, along with so many others, mixed practical signals in with a flurry of totally useless psychoanalysis and abstraction. Things that sound very meaningful but do nothing to solve practical problems. Meaningless meaningness. We would have been better off if he had given us toolboxes, not philosophy lectures. I mean, the best way to make girls love their own maternal instinct was always to buy them baby dolls, not to put them in lectures about modern motherhood. Right?

And let’s just be honest, from a capitalist perspective: the people who make Instagram reels, YouTube videos, and online courses about Becoming Manly are profiting more by your staying the same than by your getting better. They make money by extracting out your masculinity and offering it back to you as an ongoing consumer journey. Their profit is in your inability to live and cooperate, in real life, with yourself or with the opposite sex. They profit by your incompetence.

Maybe a rule of thumb is this: if they’re giving you practical, real advice, and they’re telling you to do uncomfortable things in the real world, they probably want what’s best for you. Example: Professor Scott Galloway. His entire schtick is “Go out and hurt yourself badly so you can hurry up and find a woman who laughs and has sex with you about it.” Or, in less crude terms, “Go out and do risky things in the real world, so that a real woman notices you and marries you.” And, like him or not, that’s useful. Because it’s creating more real relationships in the real world than sitting around telling men “you’re too strong to do dishes.”

Yes, some of these male podcasts really are that pathetically superficial. Luckily, not all of them. Some of them really are trying. Some of them really do want men to have a story to live up to, and then to hurry up and go out and live it out. It’s good to think of yourself as biblically male, or female, and then to try to live up to that. It’s not podcast hosts’ fault that men are having trouble launching. It’s a combination of different problems coalescing into one economic, political, cultural ball of goo that we’re all stuck in.

But. People have lived in harder times and still found ways to make more of themselves. We don’t have to stay trapped in ridiculous conversations our whole lives. We don’t have to be single and educated. We can go old-school and be stupid and married. Reckless and homeowners. Incompetent but trying. After all, you discover yourself as a sexually and socially worthwhile person by doing things. Not by thinking about yourself. My fiancée is more attracted to me when I fix a pipe than when I write an essay for you. And my fiancée is a very feminine woman, so I believe her view is consistent with that of many others.

We don’t have a crisis of sexual identity meaning. We have a crisis of people not growing up. And here’s my solution: if you just try very hard to do what is most adult, the meanings of masculinity and femininity will mostly take care of themselves. They will spring forth naturally in your actions, your preferences, and the way you care for others. Most of life is not in what you think you’ll do, or what you ought to do, off in some abstract future. It’s what you do in the monotony and the occasional incredible excitement of an actual day-to-day life.

“Great poetry exists at the level of intuition, and it’s the same intuition that academic education tries to suppress. With great poems, like great songs, you feel before you understand.” - Dana Gioia

America is known as the place where people spend. We have our nice houses, we buy our nice things, we like to have the best. Every day is Christmas, and actual Christmas is Super Christmas. As George Carlin said, we turned this place into one big shopping mall, and we all started trying to impress each other.

But that’s changing. Americans can no longer afford the best — and, as far as I can tell, people are no longer really interested in the best. We want what works. Our priorities are changing.

Modern America was built on the aspiration towards the newest and most exciting; the innovative. Whether that was the newest design in home refrigeration (see 1950s ads), the fanciest new features on a car (power windows, brother!), or the newest smartphone. Our attitude towards luxuries was “more,” and our attitude towards “more” was “yes please.” But I’m seeing a shift in people’s attitudes. With two different cultural and economic forces in flux, people’s attitude of keeping up with the Joneses is moving towards an attitude of “to hell with the Joneses, I have to pay my rent.”

Those two things, the two big things that are changing, are the affordability crisis (a new-yet-already-overused term), and the train of “innovation” going way past the station.

For about 15 years, from the first iPhone in 2007 through the Covid era of 2020-2022, people were positively enthralled by iPhone features. Or, more generally, smartphone features… although the most likely culprits in all of these snobby conversations were in fact iPhone users, because that’s how iPhone users are. Android users aren’t nearly as tech-snobby, because their personal identities aren’t linked to their phones.

With each new generation of the Apple Rectangle, the status-thirsty Spending Class would covet the latest features and race their friends to be the first to own it. Look how many megapixels my camera has. Does yours? Ohh, no, I’m sorry, yours doesn’t, because you’re a piece of human garbage. This was most visibly a Millennial trend because we grew up inseparable from our phones, although Boomers and Gen X were equally guilty. It wasn’t generational, it was just deeply American. It’s how we were.

Apple became synonymous with consumer attitudes; Apple became synonymous with being a Spending-Class American. The number of megapixels on your selfie camera became your status indicator, your signal of participation, your directly-quantifiable value as a human being. If you’re not American you may think I’m exaggerating, but this really is how people treated each other. People, including me, actually got criticized — like, earnestly and non-ironically criticized — for not having the latest iPhones. I never paid it much attention because I have better things to do than impress zealots, but it did happen.

Oh, what luxury we had. How magnificently unencumbered by worry and self-respect we were. This was also the era of phrases like “first-world problems,” a term used accusatorily and pejoratively to describe spoiled Americans complaining about problems that folks from less fortunate countries would have to win the lottery to have. To the rest of the world, Americans are simultaneously cultural leaders and trust fund babies. They love us, hate us, love-hate to hate-love us.

But things have changed. Both because we can no longer afford to be so snobby, and because I think we’ve become unimpressed by the concept of “innovation in and of itself is a good thing, no further questions thank you Your Honor.” And not only have Americans’ attitudes about technology become less high-minded and self-righteous, but they’ve actually become actively jaded and annoyed. In a few short years, most people seem to have gone from tech-obsessed to tech-annoyed; from “innovative please” to “functional please.”

And to me it’s the natural consequence of where we are. Everything moves in cycles. Since the 1990s, we have been absurdly fortunate and theatrically prosperous. Apart from the post-war period of the 1950s, we just lived through possibly the most optimistic time in all of world history. (We didn’t feel like it while we were there, but that’s because we’re negative, not because it wasn’t.) Every year, your iPhone was more feature-rich and your home went up in value.

And all of that prosperity is, for lack of a better word, ending. This is the part of the cycle we call necessity. Where people can’t afford to be decadent about technology, because they’re too busy trying to get a job on Indeed. It’s hard to be a snob about your megapixels when you’ve applied for 400 jobs in the last 3 weeks and gotten 2 emails and no interviews. It’s hard to be grateful for your iPhone when you’re still paying it off after 3 years and the screen is cracked and the first chill of winter crept into your furnace and ruined it to a sum of $1,700. It’s hard to enjoy luxuries like electronic devices when the entire country just found out that our insurance rates are going up by a percentage so high that it feels like a prank.

The economy has gotten not just worse, and not just dramatically worse, but comically worse for the average person in the last 10 years, and especially in the last 5. Other people have covered the Affordability Crisis at length so I won’t go too deep into it, but let it be sufficient to say that things are just absurdly more expensive than they were before Covid. Homes, rent, cars, food, services, and just about everything the working class spends on. $150 used to buy me three weeks’ worth of groceries, easily. Now it buys me 8 or 9 days’ worth — and that’s only if I’m not buying meat. Homes have gone up in price, but not in value. (Because everyone else’s have, too. That’s the tricky thing about value: it’s relative.) And guess how many of your friends and acquaintances got raises to match this enormous inflation? Not most of them.

(Oh, and now everybody wants a tip, which is just big service chains asking us to redistribute some of our stagnant wages to their employees.)

Old people and bad economists like to point out how “your technology is so much better, you’re so privileged, you don’t know how good you have it.” Yes, old person who likes to accuse his youngers of perpetual ingratitude, our technology is better. Yes, we have a supercomputer in our pockets. Yes, my TV is better than my father’s was. Yes, we have more high-quality devices in our homes these days, and our cars can jerk the steering wheel this-a-way if we miss someone in our blind spot. Yes, our technology is “better.”

But, as Michael Green said, “You cannot pay your rent with ‘better.’”

That’s the headline of the affordability crisis, and that’s where most Americans are at: we’re back to worrying about paying rent. We didn’t grow up like this, and we’re not used to it. We’ve gone from being the Spending Class to the “What the fuck am I going to do” Class. Over the course of one or two generations, our economy has gone from a luxury economy to a participation economy. In other words, your quality of life is no longer measured by what you can afford extra of, but what you can afford.

Your financial outlook is no longer dependent on having the discipline to save more than you spend, but on hoping and praying that none of many possible financial disasters will befall you and your loved ones. In the U.S., your financial outlook is now based more on luck than it is on skill. Breaking an arm in this country can now be financially ruinous. Having diabetes is financially ruinous.

This is what eludes those pretentious economists and prosperity grifters. Health insurance is not a luxury we afford ourselves with, it’s not a self-bestowed pat on the back. It’s a necessity for avoiding financial catastrophe — which is ironic, because sometimes the insurance itself is worse than the emergency. Health insurance in this country is little more than Mafia-style protection money: if you don’t pay it, you’re outright fucked; if you do pay it, you might not be, but you’re going to go broke anyway. Slowly instead of quickly.

Having home internet, a smartphone, and gasoline are not luxuries, as someone from the 1970s might look down their old nose and think. They are the toll you pay to get on the road. They are how you run your life; they are participation costs. Another thing bad economists like to say is that “young people, in real dollar terms, are wealthier than their grandparents.” Not realizing, or not caring and actively being deceptive about the fact, that Millennials have many, many more bills than their grandparents had, and that those bills are not optional. You used to run a five-person home through a single landline telephone. That’s not at all the case anymore. Our lives are overrun with technology that is great, but oppressive. Awesome, but required.

Now. Why have I said all of this? To get to my point, which is changing attitudes and changing definitions.

For a long time, “innovation” in the American dialect has been taken to mean “progress,” as in progress towards the satiated desires of the individual consumer. But the turning point we find ourselves at comes with a redefinition of terms: progress is no longer about desires, it’s about affordability. It’s about the freedom to participate. Progress now means “getting more Americans into homes,” which is a problem we thought we solved 60 years ago. Alas, cycles. We think we solved a problem, and we set right to work forgetting the solution. That’s just how we are. It’s the fundamental weakness of our species.

Innovation no longer serves the unawakened desires of the eager consumer; innovation now only serves the goal of increased prices. Tech companies want to increase the amount of features in your device so they can increase the rent you pay for it, happily ignoring the fact that you didn’t ask for any new features. And almost all of those features, people are finding, are not only unnecessary but actively hostile to our best interests.

As Brent said when he was reading this, tech is now just a bunch of solutions in search of a problem. The new stuff that comes out is not necessary, it’s just cool and dumb. And we’re now trading quality away for features, function for novelty, the lifetime of the object for the thrill of the purchase. Many people’s fathers (e.g. Brent’s) had washing machines that lasted 25 years. Now most of us have owned 3 in the last 20. I don’t know if we forgot how to make great stuff, or if we just stopped trying.

The horror stories we’ve all heard about printers are now coming for every piece of technology you own. “My printer won’t print,” someone says online. “My printer won’t connect to WiFi,” someone complains on the manufacturer’s support forum. “My printer requires a subscription, my printer requires me to pay high, high prices for ink and won’t print in black and white unless I refill my magenta.”

All of these horror stories are true, and entirely too common. Home printing is a needlessly oppressive industry. When you own a printer, you are a slave to HP and their fees. Which is why most people stopped buying printers; they simply aren’t worth the hassle anymore. I’d rather put on my scarf and go downtown to the library than be enslaved to a piece of technology that only ever had one fucking job to begin with.

And what I fear, and what I’m seeing, is that this same attitude is going to start applying to many more devices in our lives. We no longer look at our devices as consumer privileges; we look at them as attention attack dogs and extortion mechanisms.

People who bought the Cybertruck, the most embarrassing consumer product ever released to the public, are finding to their horror that when the vehicle is out of battery charge, it can’t even be unlocked. Because that process is electronic, and the supergeniuses over at Tesla failed to account for something that was absolutely going to happen. Or that taking it through a car wash voids the warranty. Or that an automatic software update at a bad time can make you tardy for work where you already have two strikes at the job you hate. Or that, in order to go fast in your futuristic vehicle, you have to pay a Subscription Fee™.

Ah, there it is. The latest innovation in our modern economy. The Subscription Fee. The sexually violent relationship that every company wants to have with your wallet now. The agreement that you have no choice but to make with each and every company you do business with, just to get access to a product that used to be your own property.

Everything in modern American life is a subscription. A home isn’t an asset that you live in, it’s a subscription to a roof. A liability. The cars being built today aren’t assets that you drive, they’re subscriptions to transportation. And you can bet your shiny little ass that if you fail to make a payment, they will shut down and lock out your vehicle while you’re on the highway. The fees you pay for Amazon Prime TV don’t unlock a premium service, they’re a subscription to your own time. You’re paying Amazon not to waste your time with ads (and then they advertise to you anyway, because fuck you). Netflix, Google, same thing. These companies now own every part of your life, and they sell it back to you via monthly renewal. You no longer have property. Not really. You rent the things you need from the people who really own them. Which at this point is basically just Silicon Valley. Your entire life is an ecosystem of things that aren’t yours.

The refrigerator you buy 10 years from now might be WiFi only, and won’t work at all unless you log into the manufacturer’s website and register your account. And you have to enable AI and turn notifications on, so that your refrigerator can alert you about new ideas it has about how to keep your produce cold. If you don’t enable these features, they will lock you out of your refrigerator. After all, you signed the 8-book series that is the Terms and Conditions. You agreed that in order to keep your account from being Delinquent, you had to enable all the latest features.

I already hate smart TVs with every fiber of my being. I don’t need my TV making decisions. When I buy a TV, I’m buying a machine that turns on when I tell it to turn on, and plays the program that I tell it to play. That is the entire list of features that I want on my TV. People don’t want a $2,300 fridge that makes decisions for them. They want a $300 fridge that keeps food cold. The only people who disagree with me probably have far too much money to be reading my blog.

And sure, people are excited about self-driving cars. That might be the one thing we’re all still pretty excited about. (Except me — driving isn’t that hard, people are just terribly lazy.) But everything else is going to be AI-enabled, subscription-based, and customer-unfriendly. And people are starting to realize exactly how cumbersome that’s going to be, both to our household budgets and to our overall well-being.

In the same way that old-school dudes have always paid a premium for classic cars, there will come a time soon when consumers will pay a premium for electronic devices that have tactile buttons. The kind of device that has mechanical features, no AI, and simply does what you tell it to do. I’m one of those. I will pay extra money for my devices to be my actual property and actually listen to me. No notifications, no WiFi, no subscription. I give you money, you give me thing that works.

All in all, innovation is played out. I don’t think that’s permanent — I think that’s just the part of the cycle we’re in. People are tired of innovation. People want good products that they can trust and that they can afford. People are already skeptical of washing machines with smart features; they’re going to be even more skeptical when AI slams through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and yells at them about how to manage their daily lives. And that is definitely what’s coming, because the companies overinvesting in AI are forcing its features upon the public so they can tell shareholders they’re “increasing screen time and profitability with AI-first initiatives.”

I think we’re at a cultural moment — and inextricably an economic moment — where people just want what works. We’ve not only become emotionally and spiritually saturated with toys and social competition, but we have to get back to basics economically. We have to simplify. We’re on the cusp of a very weird period in our species’s story: we’re about to get, allegedly, the biggest productivity boom in recorded history, along with perhaps the biggest birth rate collapse in that very same lookback period.

Things are about to get weird. But for now, all I know is that people are tired of Apple and Google and Frigidaire injecting new features into our lives and then charging us money for them. We need to log off and worry about our god damned rent. Which is probably going up 10% next month.

The good news is, necessity is usually what brings people together. And we sure could use some of that.

“As we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.” - Michael Easter

Thank you to Brent Donnelly for reading a draft of this.