I’m slowing down.

At least my weekly rhythm for the Devil’s Playbook is.

Moving forward, I’ll write when something finds me. When the words come because they need to, and not because it’s on my calendar.

That might mean an essay a week, or nothing for month or longer. I don’t know. There is no plan. All I know is right now I’d rather write ten essays a year that matter than fifty that might not.

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This all began because I wanted to say something real. A year-and-a-half later, that hasn’t changed. What’s changed is my understanding of what is “real”. It’s something that requires patience, silence, a lot of self reflection, and not preforming consistency for the sake of consistency.

All of you who are still here, I thank you.

You stayed to read long-form content from a stranger (or friend) online when every platform is begging you to do the opposite. I don’t take that lightly.

The next time I appear in your inbox, it’ll be because I had something worth saying, and hopefully worth your time. 🙏❤️

A note to my paid subscribers: First off, I’m truly grateful for your support. I understand if a slower cadence changes things for you. If you’d like to cancel your subscription, no hard feelings. If you’d like to stay, I’ll try to ensure what I publish is worth it. Either way, thank you for backing me. It means far more than any dollar amount.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I’ve done this. A lot of us have done this. Found a quote that hits you in the feels posted it, and never thought about it again.

You read something about presence, love, respect, or letting go... Instead of sitting with it, it gets distributed. It gets fed to the algorithm for a small reward. A like. A repost. Someone commenting, “needed this today.”

The quote has done its job. It’s made you feel like a person who understands something, without requiring you to understand anything.

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The performance of wisdom scratches the same itch as the practice of it. Posting is easy and takes a second. Self-reflection is hard and takes a lifetime. One rewards you with likes and comments, while the other might drag you through the mud before giving you anything in return.

I remember maybe one quote I ever posted. If the wisdom had truly landed with any of them, I wouldn’t have posted them. I’d have lived them. Instead I shared, collected my pat on the back and kept scrolling.

That’s what most platforms are built for. Distribution, not understanding. And we just keep confusing the two.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I’m two videos in. Watching Arthur Brooks dissect meaning from a stage. He’s smart. Compelling. He’s explaining why people can’t answer the question, “Why are you alive?” and I’m engaged. Halfway through I realize YouTube’s queued up six more videos about “purpose” and “fulfillment”. I’ve been here for over thirty minutes.

The phone doesn’t distract you from meaning. It offers you an easier version of it. A video about connection instead of a phone call. A thread about loneliness that makes you feel less lonely without talking to anyone. Each one satisfies a craving just enough to keep you from the hard thing that matters.

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I spent months on TikTok convinced I was doing the hard thing.

I’d stumbled onto accounts pushing coded racism. Nothing obvious. Historical veils and discussions about “white culture and its beauty.” I argued. I typed responses I was proud of. I felt productive. Righteous. I was the voice of reason in a space that needed one. I was engaged. That’s what made it hard to see. The anger felt like conviction. The research felt like growth.

Until one night, mid-reply to someone who would never change their mind, I asked myself: why is this so important to me?

Not the racism. That mattered. But my engagement there. My long-winded replies to strangers. The hours tunneling through feeds that made me angrier with every flick. I wasn’t helping anyone. I was feeding something to myself. A need for meaning. Outrage my substitute for action.

So I stopped arguing on TikTok and started writing essays.

The early essays, I hate to admit, just ran on that same engine. The stupidity of people. The loneliness of agreeing. The wars over nothing... I was still diagnosing them.

A neuroscientist at Oxford named Iain McGilchrist has a way of describing what happened to me. Our brain has two modes. The left hemisphere handles the complicated: information, problems, how things work. The right hemisphere holds the complex: love, meaning, mystery, faith. The why of your life. Things you understand but can never solve.

On TikTok, I was all left hemisphere and didn’t know it. Gathering information, building arguments, solving problems that weren’t mine to solve. The anger felt like depth, but it was just processing. My brain was doing what the left side does best: sorting, categorizing, reacting. None of that is meaning.

Your phone only feeds the left side, and starves the right. Every time you check it—and the average person checks over two hundred times a day—you push your brain toward information and away from meaning. Not because the content is bad, but because you’re solving when you should be sitting. Answering when you should be asking. Gathering when you should be giving.

That’s what I was doing on TikTok. It’s what I was doing in those early essays. And that’s what I was doing two videos into Arthur Brooks. I was learning about meaning instead of sitting with the questions that might actually produce it.

I had breakfast at my mom’s last week. My brother, my sister, and I squeezed around her tiny breakfast nook. Halfway through, my mom pulled out old photos of us. We laughed at how we looked, remembered things we hadn’t talked about in years, teased each other the way only siblings can. No problems solved. No content created.

I can’t put words to what that felt like. YouTube can give you a framework for meaning. It’s explainable. You can describe it, take notes, share the link. But that breakfast? It’s the meaning without the framework. I can’t explain it any better than that.

That’s the complex. There are no words for it. And that’s how you know it’s real.

I spend most of my day in front of a screen. I’m writing this essay on one. I’ll publish it on a platform. It doesn’t escape me that the tools I use to reach for meaning, pull me away from it. The condition of trying to say something real inside a paradigm that turns everything into content.

Your phone will always be easy. Meaning never will. Brooks asks you to answer two questions: Why are you alive? And for what would you give your life?

Neither can be answered until you look up.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

Neil Postman didn’t worry that we’d stop paying attention. He warned that we’d amuse ourselves into thinking we still were.

That’s a distinction that matters. You know when you’re not paying attention. But Postman saw something much worse: a world where we’d feel engaged, feel informed, feel like we’re thinking, but none of it would be true. The medium would do the thinking for us and we’d mistake the experience for our own effort.

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Television gave us this. It took complex things like politics, education, religion, news and packaged them as entertainment. It made them watchable. Consumable. Easy. Once something is easy to consume, you stop wrestling with the concepts. The feeling of learning replaces learning. You watch a three minute segment about a war and you walk away feeling like you understand it.

He wrote this in 1985 about television.

Now we have fifteen-minute YouTube videos explaining why we can’t focus. Podcasts diagnosing masculinity. Instagram carousels about raising kids. TikToks about how social media is ruining politics.

The critique has become the content. And every time you consume it, you get that small hit. That feeling like you’re above it because you understand it.

You don’t.

So we’ll keep reading about how to regain our focus. How to be better humans. We’ll nod. Then we’ll just keep scrolling.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

As soon as I step outside I feel the breeze flow over me. I savor its cool touch after a scalding day. The sun is waning and I’m watering my lawn. No thoughts in mind. It feels like the world has slowed to a crawl. I’m lost in the chatter of the trees rustling leaves, the crimson atmosphere of dwindling sunlight, and the sound of distant lives that ebb in and out as neighbors go about their evening.

For years I traded evenings like this for a screen. Posting art, chasing likes, arguing with strangers in comment sections about things that wouldn’t matter by morning. It felt like being seen. And who doesn’t want to be seen? The need is real. I wanted to be accepted. Admired. Appreciated. Every human does. It’s why we do ninety percent of what we do. Why we find our tribes. The algorithm didn’t invent the need. It’s wired into us. The algorithm just sold me counterfeit answers. Answers that left me a little emptier after every like.

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The strange part is I didn’t get it back by fighting for it. I didn’t discipline myself into stillness. I just stopped. I stepped away from the noise long enough for silence to matter again.

My son tells me sometimes how he wants to be better. He’ll mention wanting to be more disciplined, or get more serious about something he’s been putting off. Every time it happens something loosens in my chest. He’s still reaching inward. The algorithm hasn’t shut the door for him.

But it comes in waves and lately those waves feel further apart. Like a tide pulling him out slowly so I almost don’t notice.

But I know you can’t hand someone the desire for self-examination. It’s not a lesson, a lecture or a book on your nightstand. It’s a practice. The world he lives in is built to make that practice feel pointless. That terrifies me. Every silence has a screen ready to fill it. Every inward glance competing with a hundred outward pulls.

I wrote an entire essay about how I can’t save him. That hasn’t changed. The best I can offer him is something less satisfying: I can be something worth looking toward. A lighthouse. Steady. Visible. Hoping that when the tide shifts, he can see the shore’s still there. And I’m still standing on it.

None of this scales.

The evening under the tree doesn’t become a movement. My son’s quiet confession about wanting to be better doesn’t trend. A friend calls me after reading something I wrote and says, “That one got me.” We talk for over twenty minutes. It changes something in both of us and no one will ever know it happened.

And yet here I am writing about all of it. The breeze I didn’t post about? I just wrote about it along with the conversation no one knew about. Now you know.

So why do it?

I don’t have a clean answer. I know staying silent feels worse. Not because I believe my writing will save anyone. (I gave up on that essays ago). I do it because the alternative is holding all of this alone while watching my son go down a path I can’t control. And I can’t do that.

Every essay I wrote was just me saying: this matters to me, and I don’t want to lose it. But I don’t know if naming all of it protects it or exposes it. Does writing about the breeze keep it sacred or just turn it into more content?

That’s the contradiction.

So I just keep writing.

The sun is almost gone now.

The hose is still running and the water pools are spreading. The neighborhood has gone quieter. In the distance I hear someone start their car.

I’ll go inside soon. I’ll likely pick up my phone. But now I’m just watering the lawn at dusk. Taking in the breeze. Listening to a tree. If you asked me why any of that matters, I wouldn’t know what to tell you. But it does.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

Josef Pieper, a German philosopher wrote a book in the 1940s called Leisure, the Basis of Culture. He argued that what a society does when it’s not working is what actually defines it.

I remember in my past not taking days off for long periods of time. My life was long stretches of work and even when I took vacations, I would spend it thinking about the work waiting for me when I got back, actually do work, or ruminate about some project I could start. I wasn’t relaxing. I was literally just working in prettier locations.

I think that’s a lot of us. Especially in today’s hustle culture. We either work or “recover”. But the recovery isn’t rest. It’s coming up for air so we can dive back into the grind.

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Pieper had a word for this: acedia. The spiritual inability to engage with anything that isn’t productive or numbing. The soul on hold. He said true leisure is contemplative. It uses your mind and your heart. It’s deliberate. Reading something deep and sitting with it. A conversation that change how you see yourself. Time outside before sunrise, thinking about ideas not attached to a to-do list or a deadline. And no, scrolling on your phone endlessly does not count a leisure.

Leisure is a skill. A skill a lot of us (myself included), never learned because our culture only taught us one gear.

What we elect to do when we’re not getting paid is who we really are. A culture built on leisure would be healthier, deeper and more human.

If all we’re doing is recovering so we can get back to work, that’s not a life. That’s a cycle.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

The show ends. Credits roll and I find myself suddenly restless. A feeling I wasn’t expecting. My phone is on the arm rest next to me.

I don’t decide to pick it up. There’s no internal negotiation. Just the restlessness. And with zero intention I can recall, it’s in my hand. No deliberation. Just a reflex. I’ve written enough essays to know exactly what that reflex is: the novelty-seeking impulse, the dopamine loop, our ancient wiring that used to scan for threats, but now scans a four-inch screen for content.

I know the science. I know the names.

But I still open Instagram.

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It starts with people I follow. Friends, family, and creators I chose. This is the part that feels intentional. It’s my feed. But within thirty seconds, ads begin to appear. And here’s the thing about ads: I scroll past them every time. Flick. Flick. Flick. That flicking is the trick. The ads aren’t selling me a product. They’re training my thumb to move past the content I chose into the content I didn’t. Now I’m in Reels from strangers. Threads about nothing. Pets (I love dogs). The ads are my metronome, setting the beat. I’m no longer choosing what to look at. I’m just mindlessly flicking.

I find some posts genuinely funny. Some of them interesting enough to share with friends. None of it’s making me a better human. It’s just filling an empty space I could’ve used for reading, creating or having a conversation. The phone doesn’t destroy my evening. It just eats a part of it that used to belong to me.

Ten minutes pass. Maybe more. Then an internal voice, the one that wrote a bunch of essays about this exact mechanism, asks: What am I doing?

I put the phone down and it always feels like I lost something. Like I’ve traded ten minutes of my actual life for ten minutes of nothing. Time I’ll never get back. Tomorrow I’ll probably do the same. Each day eating precious minutes of my life that add up, one flick at a time.

This is an essay I didn’t want to write. Probably why I skipped doing it last week to work on an app. Not because the confession is dramatic. It’s literally just me on the couch, reaching for a phone I don’t care about, knowing exactly what will happen, but doing it anyway.

A lot of my essays diagnose from a safe distance. In “Ten Feet,” I explained the biology. In “The Narrowing”, I caught myself in an algorithmic funnel. In “I Can’t Save My Son”, I wrote about the fear. But diagnosis can be a fortress. You sit inside the understanding, surrounded by your knowledge, and you feel safe. If not safe, at least separate. I see the trap. I know the trap. Therefore I’m immune.

Far from truth. I’ve always been in it.

Psychologists call it moral licensing. Performing virtuous acts gives you unconscious permission to keep participating in the thing you’ve condemned. The initial act creates a credential that becomes your license to do exactly that.

My essays are my credential. I wrote about the algorithm, so I’m not subject to it. I understand the algorithm, so it can’t affect me. My ten minutes on Instagram don’t count. But they count. They always count. The algorithm doesn’t care about your bibliography.

Research confirms that knowing doesn’t override doing. You can understand a reflex down to the neuroscience, but that reflex will still fire. The show ends. The phone is next to me. The cue fires. I reach for it. No amount of essays can override that.

In 2017, Adrian Ward placed people in three conditions: phone on the desk, phone in a pocket, phone in another room. Even when participants successfully resisted checking, the mere presence of the phone reduced their cognitive capacity. It didn’t ring. It didn’t buzz. It just sat there. And their brains spent energy not reaching for it.

That draw has a tax, even when you think you’re winning.

And then there’s this: writing about the algorithm for an algorithmic audience. I’ll share this essay on the same platforms I’ve spent a year diagnosing. Where does examination end and content begin?

I’m not going to beat this.

I won’t get a dumb phone. I like my smartphone. I’m not going to delete Instagram. I already wrote that essay when I deleted TikTok. The wiring just found the next app.

So what’s left?

Distance.

I’ve noticed that the more time I spend off of my phone, the more I’ve started to forget it everywhere. I leave it in other rooms. I leave the house without it. I misplace it constantly. And when it’s outside my radius, I’m fine. I don’t think about it. I don’t miss it. I do things that actually matter: write, read, play, think. I literally forget it exists to the point that I’ve missed calls. But inside the radius I’m the same as everyone else, and all my awareness and essays are useless.

I always reach for it.

You can’t change the wiring. You can’t outthink a reflex. You can only manage the distance between you and what’s exploiting you. Ten feet. Another room instead of the armrest next to you.

I’ll watch another show tonight.

If the phone is next to me, I’ll reach for it. I know I will. Not because I’m weak. Not because I haven’t learned anything. But because I’m human, and my wiring is older than knowing.

But maybe tonight I’ll leave it in another room.

That’s not a resolution. Hell, it’s barely a strategy. But it’s honest. Not the honesty of a diagnosis, which is comfortable. The honesty of admission, which isn’t.

I know better. I’ve always known better.

But, knowing better is never enough.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

Took the week off writing to scratch a different itch. Building a camera app for a photography, and app-building habit I can’t seem to shake.

This is my dog Ace, shot through one of it's black-and-white film emulations. Those puppy-eyes are his default.

I’m back to it next week with a doozie! Stay curious and question everything.

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I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I started my morning by hitting myself in the face with a hammer. Bone smashing. It’s a thing. The idea is simple. If you fracture your jawline, cheekbones and chin just right, it heals back sharper. More defined. Literally chiseled. Like a Michelangelo sculpture. (If Michelangelo hammered his own skull with blunt force.)

After that I boiled goji berry tea to honor my Chinese heritage (I’m Mexican), and spent forty-five minutes optimizing my sleep protocol for a nap I have yet to take. By noon I’d looksmaxxed, Chinamaxxed, and sleepmaxxed. I hadn’t had breakfast, but don’t worry, when I do I’ll be yogurtmaxxing (the latest in the maxxing trend). Because yogurt went from being a food to a lifestyle.

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Every ordinary human act turned into a project. It’s not about living anymore. It’s about maxxing it.

It gets better. There’s nothingmaxxing. Content creators film themselves sitting in a room doing absolutely nothing, and calling it a practice. They record it. They edit it. They post it. And like all the other maxxing trends, it’s gaining traction.

That’s the entire problem in one word. We’ve built a generation that can’t even sit still without turning it into content. Where even silence has to have a strategy.

Anyway, I wrote this, edited it, and posted it. I guess that makes this essaymaxxing.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

She was bagging my last item, and something in me decided it was now or never.

I hadn’t planned on seeing her. I’d driven out to an art store in Fullerton. It was one of those giant art stores. I grabbed what I needed, got in line, and there she was working the register. A girl from an art class at Mt. Sac. I had a crush on her for months but never said a word.

We made eye contact like when you half-recognize someone. I smiled. She smiled. And as she bagged my last item, I felt something shift inside. My chest. My hands... A countdown I hadn’t anticipated. She was handing me my bag and my mouth opened without my brain’s approval.

I told her I remembered her from class. Made her laugh and then, nervous as hell, I asked if she wanted to get coffee sometime.

She said she’d love to, but she had a boyfriend.

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I took my bag and left. Disappointed, sure. But something else, too. Something closer to alive. I’d done what my body told me to do with a real person who could’ve made me feel like an idiot. The risk was the point. I walked the ten feet between wanting something and saying it out loud. Even if the answer was no, I walked out standing a little taller than when I walked in.

That was decades ago, but that moment at the register was more than just courage. It was engineering.

A hundred thousand years of it.

For most of human history, every person you’d meet lived within walking distance. I remember summers in Mexico, at night after the heat waned, everyone would drag their chairs and small tables to the sidewalk, and enjoy the evening to share stories and just talk. Tribes were always small. A hundred and fifty people, give or take. Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist who landed on that number didn’t pull it from theory. He mapped it from primate brain size. The neocortex can only maintain so many genuine social bonds. After that, people just become abstractions.

In small groups everything is face to face. Status is demonstrated not announced. You never declared bravery. You just walked up to someone and risked rejection in front of your tribe. People who’d remember. It’s what made it honest.

Rejection carried weight because you couldn’t escape it. They’re there tomorrow. It’s why your heart rate spikes. Why your hands go cold. Your nervous system is calculating social cost with the same machinery it used to calculate whether that shadow in the grass was going to eat you.

This isn’t poetry. A neuroscientist named Naomi Eisenberger put people in FMRI machines and had them toss a ball. Then rigged the other players to stop throwing to them. The same region of the brain that fires when you brake a bone lit up. Dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. (Say that three times fast.) Our bodies don’t distinguish between a fist and a cold shoulder. They evolved not to. So the brain wired rejection to hurt like a wound. That’s what I felt at the register. Not butterflies. A threat calculation running on evolutionary hardware.

We were built for a world where trust was earned slowly because betrayal was expensive. Certainty was dangerous because the person who was wrong about the tiger didn’t get to be wrong twice.

The wiring worked beautifully for a hundred thousand years.

Then we changed it.

I started posting art on Instagram. The likes came fast, then the follows. Strangers from cities I’d never been to, telling me they loved the work. I grew to a few thousand followers in what felt like no time. A feeling that was incredible. Not in a vain way. In a deep way. My tribe was saying: we see you. You’re good. You belong here.

The art store had something Instagram didn’t. A person who could look me in the eye and say no. A door I had to walk out of, where the cost was built into the room.

There are no rooms in Instagram. No cost. The recognition just keeps coming. There was no rejection that might teach me something about myself. Just numbers going up, and something in me started to bend towards it.

There’s a reason for that: dopamine. That neurotransmitter you keep hearing about that drives you towards things. It doesn’t spike when you get the reward, it spikes when the reward is uncertain. A neuroscientist named Wolfram Schultz figured this out watching primate neurons. Every time he gave them juice it was preceded by a light that would flash. The interesting part was that the primate’s neurons didn’t fire when the juice arrived. They fired when the light that might mean juice flashed. Slot machines run on this. So does Instagram. You don’t get these numbers of likes every time. Sometimes a post explodes. Sometimes it dies quietly. That inconsistency isn’t a flaw. It’s the mechanism.

Here’s the catch: the dopamine hit from anticipating a post’s performance feels identical to the hit from genuine creative excitement, and my brain couldn’t tell the difference.

At some point I stopped posting because I’d made something and started making things because I needed to post. The art became the vehicle. Numbers the destination. The thing my wiring was supposed to protect: the creative impulse, the actual making of something... It got eaten by the mechanism that was supposed to celebrate it.

This isn’t a social media essay. This is about something underneath.

Every system I spent the last year writing about runs on the same exploit. The algorithm that narrows your world? It’s feeding your brains craving for certainty. In a small tribe, that kept you alive. The guru who speaks with unearned authority? He’s triggering the need to follow the most confident voice in the group, because when a lion was coming, you didn’t have time for nuance. The labels that reduce people to positions? That’s our threat detection system sorting the world in to safe and dangerous, ally and enemy, because in a small tribe, that binary was essential.

But if that sorting never stops because you’re doom scrolling for hours, the threat feed is infinite. The outrage never resolves. The body stays in low-grade fight-or-flight. Not because the dangers are real, but because the wiring can’t tell the difference between a lion and a comment section. Chronic cortisol degrades memory. Impairs judgement. Shrinks our prefrontal cortex. That’s the exact part of the brain you’d need to notice what’s happening to you.

There’s a term for what’s happening: Evolutionary mismatch. When a trait that solved an ancient problem becomes a vulnerability in a new environment. The craving for sugar that kept your ancestors alive now gives you diabetes. The vigilance that spotted predators now scrolls through social media at 2 a.m. The trust that held the tribe together now follows gurus off a cliff. The wiring got misplaced.

And the oldest exploit? Is simple.

There’s a name for it: The Barnum Effect. It’s the same principle behind horoscopes and cold readings. P.T. Barnum figured it out in the 1800s: tell someone something vague enough to feel specific, and they’ll believe you know them. The horoscope says “you’ve been dealing with a difficult decision lately,” and something in you asks, “how did it know that?”

They didn’t. They found the door. The one built by evolution that swings open when something sounds like it understands you. The same door the gurus walk through. The same door the algorithm holds open for you.

The difference is scale. In a village, the confident voice belonged to someone you could watch over time. Trust was slow, if they betrayed you it was visible. The Barnum effect worked on a few people at carnivals, now it works on billions simultaneously, through machines trained to produce the responses that make you feel understood.

RLHF. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. Technical sounding, but simple: AI learns to say what humans rate highly. Not what’s true. Not what’s useful. What feels good. What sounds right. What makes you click that thumbs up. The AI isn’t lying to you, it’s doing what it was trained to do. Social media works the same way.

The wiring hasn’t changed, the distance between the impulse and reward has. There’s no rejection that teaches you something. No tribes small enough to hold you accountable. Just an infinite feed and a nervous system that thinks it’s in a village of a hundred and fifty.

I’d like to tell you I saw through it. That I knew what Instagram was doing to my art and walked away, head held high. That would make a better story. I’d be the narrator who learned a lesson they can teach.

That’s not what happened.

I was shadow banned. My reach collapsed overnight. The algorithm that promoted me decided I wasn’t useful and moved on.

So the honest version is this: I didn’t overcome the wiring. The environment shifted around me until my wiring had nothing to chase. And I’m not sure whether I see the trap because I escaped it, or because it stopped feeding me.

I’ve spent the last year sorting, and weaving my essays into a book about all of it: the algorithms, the loneliness, the labels... And I’m building it in conversations with an AI.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The tool I’m using to develop my book, to pressure-test arguments, to find structure in my thinking is a large language model. Trained on RLHF. Trained to produce responses I rate highly. The same architecture I just spent three sections warning you about.

I wonder at times if I’m being challenged or being managed.

The man who thinks he sees through patterns is the man most captured by the next one.

I’ve been conned by gurus. I’ve lost money to charlatans. And now I’m asking a machine to help me with a book about how machines find the door, while trusting the machine’s pushback is genuine rather than designed to feel genuine.

In the art store, the wiring made me brave. On the platform, it made me an addict.

Every vulnerability: the trust the guru exploits, the belonging algorithms hijack, the love that makes parasocial relationships feel real... Is a feature, not a bug. The exploits work because of what makes us human.

Which means the comfortable version of this essay where I tell you to put the phone down, touch grass and reconnect with your body is a lie. Not because those things don’t help. They do. But because the wiring doesn’t care about your intentions. It found the guru. It found the algorithm. It found the AI. It will find whatever comes next.

You can’t remove the wiring. You shouldn’t want to. The capacity to be exploited and the capacity to be moved are the same.

I think about the art store sometimes. Not the girl, I don’t even remember her name. I think about the ten feet between the register and the door. That countdown that triggered without warning. My body deciding before my brain could react.

That ten feet is disappearing. Not metaphorically. Literally.

Every system we’ve built in the last twenty years has been designed to eliminate the distance between impulse and reward. To shorten those ten feet to nothing. To make the wiring fire faster, more often, with less friction and less cost, until the loop runs so clean we hardly notice it.

I walked up to a girl in an art store once, and it was the most human thing my body ever did. My legs carried me toward risk. My voice cracked. She said no, and I walked out more myself than when I walked in.

Those same legs now carry me to the couch. The same hands reach for my phone. The same wiring fires. But those ten feet are gone.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I use AI daily to help with managing my projects and tasks. The same AI that a Harvard Business Review study found makes people more confident and less accurate at the same time.

They tested executives. Gave them forecasting problems. The ones who used ChatGPT became more optimistic, more certain in their answers, and made worse predictions than the group that just talked to other people. Why? Because the AI didn’t argue. It didn’t push back. It sounded authoritative, and that was enough. It made the executives feel smarter, and that feeling made their decisions worse.

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They’re calling it “bias” but I think it’s the mechanism that got me to hand over money to Celsius. Alex Mashinsky didn’t say anything untrue. He said, “banks don’t work for you.” True. He said, “the system is rigged against regular people.” Also true. Then he offered himself and Celsius as the solution. And I didn’t blink because he made me feel smart for agreeing with him.

Fortune tellers, horoscopes, and cult leaders do this. They tell someone what they already feel, something just vague enough to be universally true, and we mistake it for insight.

The con artist, the algorithms, the AI agent... They’re not the disease. They’re just the latest in long line of mirrors we keep mistaking for windows.

More on that next week.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

There are six bottles on my shelf. Vitamin C. Vitamin D. Magnesium. Fish Oil. Probiotics, and zinc. I take them every day. I can tell you what each of them does. I can tell you why I take them. What I can’t tell you is how I got here.

I mean, I know the sequence. Originally, I started with more bottles than this. CoQ10. Garlic capsule. Apple cider vinegar... A few others I can’t even recall anymore. What I do know is I learned about them from a man on YouTube. I listened, didn’t ask a lot of questions, and the reason I didn’t ask is the same reason millions of others aren’t asking: he has “Dr.” in front of his name.

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Dr. Eric Berg. Fourteen million YouTube subscribers. Keto. Intermittent fasting. Supplement stacks for everything from sleep to thyroid function. He speaks with the calm authority of a man who’s distilled the science down for you, the grateful viewer, who just needed someone to tell them how to be healthy. I followed his recommendations. I fasted. I took the supplements. I adjusted my diet. Some of it worked. Some of it I couldn’t tell. But it felt like progress because a doctor was guiding me.

Except he wasn’t a doctor.

Berg is a chiropractor. He’s a D.C, not an M.D. In 2007, the Virginia Board of Medicine reprimanded him for practicing outside his scope. For making unsubstantiated therapeutic claims about treating everything from allergies to depression to infertility. He was fined a mere fifteen hundred dollars.

He took the fine. Then started a YouTube channel and scaled the same playbook to millions of people.

Then came Andrew Huberman.

If Berg was the friendly neighborhood doctor, Huberman was the real thing. Or so I thought. Associate professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. The Huberman Lab podcast. Third most popular show on Spotify in 2023. Recommended by friends, and I remember thinking: this is different. This is an accredited Stanford professor.

I tried some of his recommendations. Started doing his morning sunlight walk. Followed protocols he delivered with the sincerity of a disciplined, measured expert. Optimized and evidence-based.

Then I did a little digging.

I discovered that scientists criticized him for speaking with certainty across health domains far outside his expertise: the visual system. Not nutrition. Eyes.

I learned I was taking advice from a man who once said he was as scared of sunscreen as he was of melanoma. A man who admitted avoiding flu vaccines despite acknowledging that they work. Meanwhile his partnership with Momentous, a supplement company, was churning millions. Scientific recommendations attached to a shopping cart.

Then the New York Magazine reported that the apostle of discipline was maintaining at least five simultaneous relationships with most of the women believing they were his only partner. His lab at Stanford barely existed anymore. His partnership with AG1, where he served as scientific advisor, kept running even after its founder resigned over a criminal conviction for a rent-to-buy scheme that targeted low-income clients.

Then there’s David Sinclair. He makes Berg and Huberman look like amateurs. I first heard of him on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO. (One of those interview platforms where every guest sounds like they’re about to save the world). Sinclair was a tenured professor at Harvard Medical School with over five hundred published papers. He talked about longevity, about molecules that could reverse aging, and I did what I always did. Took notes.

In 2008, GlaxoSmithKline bought his company for $720 million based on research into resveratrol, a compound that “activated longevity genes” found in red wine. Then researchers couldn’t reproduce his results. Glaxo’s own scientists had warned against the deal. The science collapsed. So Sinclair pivoted to a new molecule. Same playbook. Went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, wrote a bestseller, and watched 2,100 tons of the new molecule supplement, NMN flood into the country with his name. His colleagues eventually called him a snake oil salesman. He was forced to step down from the longevity institute he’d founded. But Harvard had taken its cut of every patent, every deal and every dollar.

Five hundred papers. Harvard tenure. The most credentialed figure on this list, and the science was junk.

What cracked it open for me wasn’t a health guru. It was Celsius. A crypto lending platform. The CEO Alex Mashinsky radiated the same calm authority every other figure on this list did. He appeared on podcasts, YouTube channels, Twitter, conferences... Trust the math. Banks suck. Control your money. Trust me.

I trusted his platform with a little over two thousand dollars.

In June 2022, Celsius froze all withdrawals. Internal documents described the operation as “very Ponzi-like.” Mashinsky had been secretly dumping $44 million of the company’s own token while telling everyone to hold.

He plead guilty and got 12 years.

Two thousand dollars isn’t life-changing money. It’s still a lot, but some lost millions. I did lose something else: the belief that confidence and being right, or truthful were the same thing. Once that cracked, it was hard not to see it everywhere.

I started looking at Berg differently. Then Huberman. Then Sinclair. Not because they were all running Ponzi schemes. But because the mechanism was the same: a person I’d never met, speaking into my ear through a screen, and me trusting them.

Here’s what makes this harder than a simple story about con men.

Some of their advice worked.

I didn’t fast because Berg told me to. I fasted because I used to do it in my early 20s, long before Berg and YouTube. I’d read about it in Taoist texts. The tradition of bigu, grain avoidance as purification, a practice documented as far back as 168 BCE. I didn’t know the science. I just knew what happened to my body when I did it. The first 24 hours is rough. But by hour forty-eight, something shifts. I felt clear. Light. Present.

The science, for what it’s worth, partially backs it up. Which is exactly where the guru operates: take a partial truth, strip the caveats, and present it as a revelation.

Berg didn’t teach me to fast. He repackaged something I already carried and sold it back to me with a “Dr.” in front of it.

The magnesium works. It helps me sleep. I still take it. But I can’t genuinely remember whether I discovered that on my own or whether Berg told me first. That’s the uncertainty I can’t resolve. Was it him or me? When your source is discredited, what happens to what works? Do I throw away the magnesium because the man who recommended it was fined for bad practice? Or do I keep taking it and accept the boundary between what I know and what the guru influenced is blurred?

I kept the magnesium. But I don’t pretend the line is clean.

What bothers me isn’t them. It’s us. It’s me.

I’m not angry at Berg, Huberman, or Sinclair. They did what the market rewards them for doing. That market is us. We’re the ones who needed a Stanford neuroscientist to tell us to take a morning walk. We’re the ones who needed a Harvard geneticist to tell us a glass of red wine could make us live forever.

And I wasn’t just the market. I was the marketing. I shared Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO episodes with friends. I recommended Celsius to a friend who invested. That felt awful. I was a node in the distribution network. Feeding the guru pipeline to others. Bartlett interviews the “experts,” the experts validate Bartlett. The audience validates both. And I was sending links, doing the delivery for free.

The wiring is ancient. Humans always look for the confident voice. The tribal leader, the healer, the elder who is wise and all knowing. Evolution built us for small groups where the person giving the advice has skin in the game. They lived in your village. They ate the same food. Their children played with yours. If they led you down a bad path, they suffered the same consequences you did.

The internet and podcasts destroyed that. Now confident voices reach millions, and the speaker has no skin in the game. Mel Robbins another self-help guru, with her millions of followers doesn’t know you. In every one of her podcasts she tells you, “I love you.” She can’t love you. Love requires two people who have met. But she’s mapped Bernays’s Propaganda—written in 1928—onto her podcast with such precision that millions of people believe they have a friend named Mel.

After Celsius, Berg, all of it, I stopped. Now I hear recommendations and instead of adding it to my cart, I pause and ask if I’m being sold to. I trust no one. Which sounds like a line from conspiracy theorists. The guru industrial complex doesn’t just exploit trust. It poisons the well. Every credential now triggers the question: what are they selling me? I do my own research now. Which is the rallying cry of every anti-vaxxer and flat-earther on the internet. Which is sad, because we are social animals. We need to trust someone. A world where everyone is their own expert is just a different kind of chaos.

I still fast occasionally. But not because a guru tells me to. I do it because a twenty-two-year-old kid reading Taoist texts in his apartment felt something change in himself after 48 hours, and never forgot. That knowledge was mine before any guru tried to sell it back to me.

But I take the Magnesium too. And honestly, I don’t remember if that’s mine or theirs.

The most honest thing I can say about the guru industrial complex is it doesn’t sell you answers. It undermines questions. After you’ve listened to the confident voice long enough, you can’t always tell the difference between what you know and what you’re being sold. Between what you discovered on your own and what they’ve planted.

Six bottles on my shelf. I can tell you what each one does.

What I can’t promise you is that any of it was my idea.

SOURCE LIST

Eric Berg

Quackwatch: Disciplinary Action against Eric Berg, D.C. — Virginia Board of Medicine consent agreement, September 2007. Reprimand, $1,500 fine, ordered to stop BRT/NAET/CRA techniques.

Andrew Huberman

New York Magazine: Cover story by Kerry Howley, March 2024 — Five simultaneous relationships, lab details.

Lab Muffin / Derek Beres — Huberman’s sunscreen statements sourced from his own podcast. He said it himself, publicly.

NZ Herald: AG1 founder Chris Ashenden resigns — Criminal conviction under New Zealand’s Fair Trading Act, rent-to-buy scheme targeting vulnerable low-income clients.

David Sinclair

Wikipedia: Sirtris Pharmaceuticals — $720M GSK acquisition, 2008. Development terminated 2010. Sirtris shut down 2013.

Nature: “Buyer Beware” editorial — Peer-reviewed skepticism of Sirtris acquisition.

PMC: “A Science-Based Review of the World’s Best-Selling Book on Aging” — Systematic critique of Sinclair’s claims in Lifespan.

Academy for Health and Lifespan Research controversy, March 2024 — A departing member publicly called Sinclair a “snake oil salesman.” Multiple scientists resigned in protest. Sinclair stepped down as president. Successor Dr. Nir Barzilai stated: “The data is not good, you’re calling it the wrong thing, and then you’re selling it.”

Celsius / Mashinsky:

CNBC: Mashinsky sentenced to 12 years, May 8, 2025 — Pleaded guilty to commodities fraud. Sentenced May 2025.

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

45% of men aged 18-25 have never approached a woman in person. Not “stopped approaching.” They never started.

53% of single men say the word “creepy” alone is enough to keep them from trying. But fear of rejection isn’t new. Every generation of men has dealt with that. What’s new isn’t the fear. It’s the absence of something underneath it.

In the 1980s and 90s, around 90% of high school seniors had been in some kind of dating relationship. For Gen Z, it’s 54%. Time spent with mixed-gender friend groups dropped from nearly 13 hours a week to just over 5. The developmental track that teaches you how to read a room, how to recover from awkwardness, how to take a no and still feel like a person… It’s busted.

Psychologists call it a formative cascade. Same-sex friendships first. Then mixed-sex groups. Then romantic relationships. If you skip a stage, the anxiety compounds at the next one. You end up lacking experience, and the infrastructure for experience.

So the fear of being creepy isn’t irrational. It’s the fear of someone who never developed the calibration to know the difference between wanted and unwanted attention.

Meanwhile, 77% of women aged 18-30 say they wish men approached them more.

Both sides waiting.

Neither moving.

Not because anyone of them chose this, but because the place where you learn to cross the room disappeared before anyone noticed it mattered.

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I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I’d been kicking around the idea of photographing boudoir again, and sent a long-time female friend of mine my site to get her take on it. Asked her if it was a good idea to show my photo.

“Great photo of you but I don’t know if I like it for the site. Although I know you’re not a fucking weirdo, those who don’t know you will always be cautious since you’re a man in a very ‘men are not safe’ time.

Ironic because the photo was supposed to fix that exact problem. Instead it confirmed it. Here was a woman who knew me admitting my gender precedes me.

Last week I mentioned two emails that came in after the Gen Z essay. One from a close friend who hears “patriarchy” and feels accused. We’ll call him Alex. The other from a female friend who hears the same word and hears a woman’s life: the guy at the bar who won’t take no, one in three women assaulted. We’ll call her Anna.

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Three people in my life all telling me the same thing from different sides of the same wall. Here’s what I realized sitting with all their words: they’re having the same argument from opposite ends, and likely neither knows it.

Alex hears “patriarchy” and feels accused. Anna hears it and feels unsafe. Neither are wrong, but they’re also not disagreeing. They’re using the same word to describe two different things. “Patriarchy” has swallowed its own meaning, so the argument can never resolve.

I don’t need the word. But let me define what it actually means.

Patriarchy is a system. It’s structural. Institutional. It’s who holds power and how that power passes down. It’s inheritance law, boardroom composition, whose name the kids carry, which bodies the state legislates. It operates whether any individual is good or bad.

I grew up with the thing it’s trying to name. The thing both my friends are describing. In my culture, in my family, it already has a name: machismo.

Machismo is a loaded word too. It carries its own stain: dominance, aggression, control. But it’s a word I can hold up to the light because I come from within it. I’ve seen what it builds and what it breaks.

Machismo isn’t a system. It’s not institutional. It’s not about who sits in the boardroom. It’s how a man carries himself. How he walks into a room. Whether he provides or controls. Whether his strength is a shelter or a cage.

My uncle lived off the land. Fished and hunted for his family’s food. He didn’t need someone to tell him what a man was. He took care of his family, fed people. He was a good man. Another woman I know married a man I dislike. Borderline abusive, controlling... The kind of man who mistakes dominance for devotion and believes women exist to serve their men. Same culture. Same neighborhood. Same word. Opposite men.

Machismo has two faces. One feeds. The other consumes. One protects because it loves. The other “protects” because it owns. The line between them is so thin that a man can cross it and never even notice. Especially if he was never taught where it was.

“Patriarchy” doesn’t make that distinction. It’s become a net, and a net doesn’t sort what it catches. It drags up my uncle and the abusive husband in the same haul. The word is supposed to tell you the system is the problem. That’s fine, but when it stops distinguishing between the men inside the system, it stops being useful.

That’s what Alex heard. A word that told him his growth didn’t count, his instincts were suspect, and the things he was raised to be proud of: providing, protecting, being the rock were all evidence against him.

Anna heard something different. She heard the thing she’s lived. The boys taught that showing pain is weakness. One in three women assaulted. Men not taking no for an answer. She’s not theorizing. She’s reporting.

The only word the culture gave them is “patriarchy.” Too big for what they mean. Too small for what they feel.

I should tell you something before I go further.

When I was younger. Less wise. Less honest. I practiced the thing I grew up with: machismo. I was controlling. Not the kind you call abusive. The kind you call insecure. Same seed I guess, just before it sprouts. I monitored, I questioned, I made my anxiety her problem. I told myself it was love. It wasn’t. It was my fears dressed as caring.

I came from the very thing the net catches.

That’s the part men skip when they push back against “patriarchy.” I almost did. It’s easy to point at your uncle and say, “that’s what a man should be.” It’s harder to admit you spent years closer to the controlling husband than you want to remember. The same insecurity. The same need to control that which you can’t or don’t understand.

I grew out of it. Or past it. Not sure those are the same thing, but here’s what I know: the growth was real, and it happened because women I loved told me the truth and I eventually listened. It wasn’t because someone handed me a better word.

I guess that tracks. Feminism threatens the traditional male’s power. That’s the backlash. The young men who are filling up the manosphere aren’t angry because feminism is wrong. They’re angry because it’s asking them to look at something they’re not ready to see. I know. When I was younger, I wasn’t ready either.

The difference between me and the guys watching Andrew Tate is timing. I got caught early. Someone loved me enough to say it to my face. Not everyone gets that. And the word, “patriarchy” that’s aimed at a twenty-year-old who already feels invisible... isn’t love or understanding. It’s a door closing. The right wing knows this. They don’t slam the door. They open it. Let them in. Give them the power they feel has been robbed from them.

Alex said something in his email I haven’t been able to shake:

“It does make growth invisible.”

He’s right.

bell hooks wrote that patriarchy has no gender. That men are also damaged by it. That they’re shaped into emotional cripples by a system that rewards dominance and punishes tenderness.

The men pushing back against “patriarchy” don’t want to hear that the system they’re defending is the thing that broke them. The women using the word don’t want to hear that the men they’re naming are also casualties. When you’ve been the one in danger, the other person’s damage is hard to care about.

Both things are true. The net is real. The thing it catches is real, and the men tangled in it are both the problem and the product.

Alex asked me what I think.

This is what I think.

I think “the Man” pointed up and “patriarchy” points sideways, and that difference matters more than either side admits. I think the word stopped naming a system and started naming a feeling. It became an accusation for men, danger for women. That’s why the conversation never moves. Machismo is a closer word, and one that lives in my blood whether I like it or not.

I don’t have an answer. I have a net full of fish I can’t sort. Ones that feed, ones that don’t, all tangled together, pulling the same rope. I wanted to give my friends some clarity, but the most honest thing I can say is: I’m in the net too. And I’m still pulling.

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I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I published an essay last week about why Gen Z stopped having sex. Two emails came in that same day.

A close friend wrote about the word “patriarchy.” How it feels like it blames every man in the room regardless of who he is and where he came from. How when we were kids we used to say “the Man” pointing up at power. But how this new word points sideways at men like him.

The other email was from a female friend. Hers was about what women carry. The guy at the bar who calls you a name when you say no thanks. Boys raised on “ewww a girl” who are somehow supposed to revere women by twenty-five. One in three women sexually assaulted.

Here were two people who probably agree on most things. Reading the same words and seeing completely different issues.

I’ve been sitting with this. Neither is wrong, but the word “patriarchy” might not even mean the same thing to each of them. He hears an accusation. She hears a lifetime. Same word, but with completely different weight on it.

I don’t have answer yet, but I’m brewing my way towards one.

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I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I’d forgotten my headphones. Resorted to the terrible music blaring through the gym’s speakers when something caught my ear. A woman telling her friend about a night at a bar.

“Men are awful. I can’t stand them. One of them was hitting on me. To get away I told him I needed some water. ‘I’m thirsty too,’ he said. ‘Get me one’. I dead-eyed him. Told him he had feet and he could get his own damn water.”

Her friend sounded a little shocked, “That sounds kind of mean.”

“I don’t care. Men are stupid, and I DO NOT LIKE THEM.”

Maybe it’s because I’m a man. One who tries to do right, but that kind of stung.

Her take on men felt jaded. What happened to her that made her abhor the opposite sex?

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I thought of the manosphere. Considered that maybe her generation was getting their definition of men from rage bait channels and toxic influencers.

I was reminded of a YouTube video I watched with Dr. Debra Soh. One in three men with zero sexual activity. Half of single people not interested in dating at all. 67% of Gen Zers would rather sleep than have sex. An alarming decline in the quest to connect. All from a generation whose entire lives are connected through their phones.

It’s hard to say how much of this is negative. We’re in the discovery phase of this phenomenon. Not every absence is a wound. I’m all for silence and self reflection. It’s fine if people are building something. My son skating with friends, focused, unbothered by thoughts of girls. That’s commitment. But I don’t think it’s fine if that absence isn’t a choice, if it’s anxiety induced, sedation, prejudice, all brought on by syphoning your world-view from your device.

On a level I get it. I did the same. My first relationship ended badly. If love could hurt this bad, then I’d just remove love from my equation. I dated, but that’s as far as I would go. Nothing was going to evolve past “casual”. Afraid that if I climbed out on a limb for someone, it’d get sawed off behind me. It’s never the climb that’s frightening. It’s the fall.

It took years to see I was just as much to blame for the wreckage. More than one of my dates pointed it out in some version of: “It’s like your body’s here, but your head is somewhere else.”

My avoidance had a witness. But what happens when there isn’t one?

Soh calls what’s happening a “sexual recession”. I think it’s something much quieter than that. It’s not that people are keeping themselves from reaching out to each other. It’s that the reasons to reach for one another are slowly and systematically being replaced. Porn teaches your body to respond without another person. Dating apps let you choose without ever crossing a room. AI offers closeness without the mess of someone real.

Every level removes a barrier. A barrier that was holding something up. Someone called it The Male Sedation Hypothesis: screens, porn, video games, social media quietly numbing men out of wanting what they used to fight for. I’m certain there’s a version of this for women, too.

And when avoidance goes on long enough without interruption, it curdles. “Men are trash.” “Women are trash.” Entire communities built around a shared agreement that the opposite sex isn’t worth the risk. The woman at the gym had her version, the manosphere has its own. Echo chambers where withdrawal is packaged as wisdom.

That’s what scares me. Not the kid skating with friends, unbothered. That’s fine. What scares me is the distance between that kid and the one writing manifestos in his bedroom. It’s not as far as we’d like to think. It’s the same withdrawal. The same limb they’ll never climb out on.

That limb matters. I can’t promise it will hold for you, but the fall teaches you something a screen can’t. That you survived. That you got back up. That you climbed again, knowing the cost this time. An algorithm can offer a million stories about love, but it can’t reproduce the terror of sitting across from someone and saying something true. The body learns from presence and risk. From the awkward, stupid and terrifying act of letting someone see you before you can curate what they find.

My first relationship ended badly. But the memories are still magic. Both those things can be true at the same time. I don’t know how to make them fit, but I’m not sure I’m supposed to.

I think about the woman at the gym. About myself, sitting across from dates for years with my head somewhere else. I understand why people stop reaching.

But there is something the body knows that your mind keeps trying to talk you out of: You don’t learn what you can survive by staying on the ground. A generation that never risks the climb won’t ever know what they’ve missed.

That might be a quiet catastrophe nobody is even measuring.

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I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I’m considering renaming this segment: The Devil’s Rabbit Hole. Last night I burrowed deeper and discovered a “debate” on whether feminism is good for society. I’d tell you who won, but they never even got there.

One of them, (the debate bro with “25-years” of debate experience), just kept calling out fallacies like my son used to call out Pokémon. Appeal to authority! False analogy! Equivocation! Every time his opponent made a point, he’d tag it with a label instead of engaging in conversation. Twenty-five years of debate experience and he couldn’t state his position in a single sentence.

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This is what passes for thinking now. Not the uncomfortable and hard work of sitting with an idea long enough to test it, but rather the performance of intelligence. Memorize the lingo, learn the counter-moves, insult your opponent, and never actually say what you believe, because belief can be challenged. Terminology can’t.

We’re building a culture that rewards the debate bro who names fallacies, “looks” smarter than the person making the argument, even when they’re wrong.

Why? Because the audience isn’t listening for substance, they’re listening for takedowns and confidence.

The scariest part isn’t that he couldn’t think. It’s that he didn’t need to. Insults, bravado and vocabulary were enough. That and a following of die-hard supporters agreeing with him from the grandstands.

I watched for over an hour and didn’t learn a single thing about feminism. And we wonder why nobody’s listening to each other anymore.

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If you feel like torturing yourself. Here is the complete “debate”:

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I go down a lot of rabbit holes. My most recent has been watching the ever-evolving manosphere-influencers spout their tenets. That led me to a discussion panel on Piers Morgan Uncensored where a panel of feminists, Piers and the influencer Andrew Wilson—an anti feminist with a big following—had a discussion about transgenders in sports that went off the rails almost immediately.

After the shock of hearing Andrew tell one of the panelists she couldn’t put down the donuts long enough to make an argument, it slowly dawned on me that I had never heard of this guy. A quick search revealed: nothing. Nothing of note anyway. Here was a man prescribing solutions to America’s collapse who had no authority on the topic other than the support he’s collected by being the loudest in the room. He was just an influencer. No degree that I could discern, no Wikipedia page, no book, no speaking tours...

He was just a man with a sharp tongue, a loud voice, an opinion and a large audience.

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Somehow in today’s society that’s enough.

This is a pattern I’m seeing everywhere. A pattern where opinions have become a gospel delivered by the Joe Rogan bros, self-assigned experts, and the manosphere. It’s an entire ecosystem of influence parading as doctrine, where we’re being told what is right and wrong.

The most alarming part: their followers, the ones pumping their fists in the comment section are young. Some as young as 12 or 13. An entire generation of kids receiving an opinion as fact, preference as nature, adopted as truth because it’s delivered with certainty by a man with thousands nodding along behind him. All of them learning to dominate, that women are to stay home, cater to their men, or worse, become objects. Window dressing to their masculinity.

I’ve always maintained that just like a dog never tells you they’re a dog, a man should never have to say he’s man. It’s implied by how a man speaks, how he behaves, how he reacts to the world around him regardless whether it’s pushing him down or elevating him. And most importantly how he cultivates his relationship with friends, family, women, and his partner.

The irony of what I just wrote doesn’t escape me, either. I’m literally prescribing what masculinity should or shouldn’t be myself. In an effort to fight what I’m seeing as a wrong, I’ve resorted to arguing my version is the better version.

Andrew and the manosphere live in a world that’s foreign to me, a world where you’re allowed to belittle, degrade, and objectify. At a personal level I could just say live and let live, but being a father with a son who owns a phone, that reality bites down harder. I do not want my son or any child to grow up believing that this is what being a man is.

The more it sits with me, the more I understand I need to be like Andrew Wilson. If young men take their cues from whoever sounds most confident, then maybe the answer isn’t a better argument. It’s a louder voice. Someone to beat their chest louder than they do.

So, I’ll drum my chest.

A man never has to announce himself. A man can cry in front of his son without losing an inch of himself. The opposite of what Andrew Wilson summed up perfectly when a panelist asked if he does anything around his house, or even takes out the trash: “I don’t do shit. My wife does everything.”

Millions of young men are taking it as just that. No room for the woman who wants something different. No freedom to choose.

And therein lies the crux. Maybe the truth is that men are wired for authority, for loudness, and I’m no different. Like Gorillas are wired to pound their chest to signal dominance. Same wiring. Which means there is no difference between protection and indoctrination, and the only way to counter the Andrew Wilsons of the world is volume.

So, I’ll beat my chest like a gorilla if necessary. For women, for my son, and for myself.

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I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I just watched the new Louis Theroux documentary on Netflix Inside the Manosphere, a topic I find fascinating. It’s interesting to observe how these “men” see themselves as the only option of manhood. You are either a wolf or a sheep. Each of them using women as props, married but free to sleep with any woman they want. Declaring the only way to true manhood is money and power.

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Here’s what none of them are offering: a version of masculinity that includes being strong and uncertain. Disciplined and emotionally honest. Protective and willing to be wrong or afraid.

These aren’t contradictions. That’s just being a grown man.

But that doesn’t make good content. It doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t sell courses. So it stays invisible. The seventeen-year-old scrolling at midnight has to choose between a hustler and a hashtag, because no one but his phone was around to show him what it looks like to be strong enough to show weakness.

And you’ll never be strong enough if you’re too afraid to be weak.

Share The Devil's Playbook

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis

I scrolled through a series of posts saying the quiet part out loud. Denying reparations, promoting separation, declaring the beauty of “white culture”. Supported by hundreds of thousands of likes. A version of TikTok where history is re-written to accommodate a false narrative and not the facts. It sucked the hope out of me and made me think we might already be doomed as a society.

The algorithm I criticized had worked on me, too. My feed was a sanitized version of what I wanted to hear. Until I decided to comment on posts I didn’t see eye to eye with. “Practice what you preach,” I thought. Learn from the sharpest voices from the other side. But the more I engaged with that side of TikTok the more darkness it revealed. A hateful view of immigrants, blacks, and anyone not from the US or white.

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We don’t change because we’re wise. We change because the cost of walking the same path becomes unbearable. Consider Civil Rights. It didn’t spawn from some sudden moral awakening. It came after enough brutality and outrage that looking away was no longer an option.

Optimism isn’t hope, it’s a mood. Awareness without action is appealing because it feels like you’re doing something when you’re not. And “If you believe hard enough, things will work out” is one of the most famous lies we tell ourselves.

I see three doors. Through door one, we accumulate the pain until it forces a reckoning and awareness becomes unavoidable. Through door two, we can medicate our way past it. We just keep scrolling, and the slow decline continues but we adjust to seeing less and less of it.

I chose the third door: retreat.

I deleted TikTok, took a long break from any social media. After the shock wore off, I decided writing was still the best path forward. I would not go down quietly. And it hasn’t been quiet. I lost friends. That never feels good. But I have to wonder if writing is really doing anything or if it’s just a more sophisticated way of numbing myself. If I hold the honest-mirror to myself, I’d say it’s a little of both. Writing forces me to keep looking where I don’t want to.

I discovered I was ignorant. Living in an algorithmically sustained aquarium, where the other side never appeared. I have to wonder if I’m not building that same aquarium for my son. A part of me wants to shield him from what I discovered, but I suspect he’s already aware. Through his feed, or his friends, all the places I lose control of the older he gets. Even if I were to shield him, it would find its way to him anyway. The hardest part of that reality is hatred becomes normalized, whether from him or towards him.

Every movement started with one person who saw something clearly enough that the people around them couldn’t unsee it.

I don’t know that I’m that kind of person. Every week I write about what I’m seeing, but I’m still not sure that anyone else sees it. I’m still inside the aquarium. The only difference is I’m aware the glass is there. I can tap it but that doesn’t break it.

Hope isn’t a feeling. It isn’t confidence that things will improve. It’s the practice of refusing to look away from what’s breaking, from your part in it, from the discomfort of not having solutions.

I’ll continue tapping the glass of my aquarium. Hopeful, without knowing that I’ll ever break it.

Share The Devil's Playbook

I hate paywalls. They kill curiosity and reward clickbait. That’s why the core content here will always be free.

But this takes time, thought, and energy. If it helps you see the world differently, consider supporting it by buying me a coffee or becoming a paid subscriber for exclusive content, audio versions of each essay (coming soon), and deeper dives.

Thanks for being here. Stay Curious. Question Everything.

–Luis