A companion article to "The Paradox of Connection"

In my earlier Substack article called "The Paradox of Connection," I wrote about how we have become the most digitally connected generation in human history while somehow feeling more alone than any generation before us. That piece was about the quantity of connection and how having access to everyone, all the time, does not guarantee closeness to anyone.

This article is about something more specific and, in some ways, more corrosive. It is about what happens after we log on and start looking around. I want to take a deep dive into our comparison to others, and why I feel it quietly killing our joy.

The Feature That Was Not Supposed To Be A Bug

To be fair to social media platforms, the sharing part still works. People do use social media to celebrate each other: to cheer on a friend’s child, to laugh. That part of the original design intent has not disappeared. But it now runs alongside something the designers may not have fully anticipated, or may have simply decided was good for business: an algorithmically optimized feed of other people’s highlight reels, curated for maximum emotional impact.

The mechanism is simple, and it is one psychologists have understood since long before smartphones existed. In the 1950s, the social psychologist Leon Festinger described what he called social comparison theory : the idea that human beings determine their own worth largely by measuring themselves against others. This is how we have always calibrated. Am I doing okay? Is everyone else struggling too, or is it just me?

The trouble is that “looking around” used to mean your street, your office, or your extended family. Now “looking around” means an endless stream of the most photogenic, curated, and polished moments from thousands of lives at once. We are not comparing ourselves to reality anymore. Instead, we are comparing ourselves to the best everyone else has to offer.

The Trip You Did Not Take, The Life You Did Not Choose

You know the scroll. The influencer at the Eiffel Tower. The old classmate whose kitchen renovation looks like a magazine spread. The acquaintance whose “weekend getaway” is a resort you have never been able to justify.

I do not think any of this is inherently bad. People are allowed to share their lives publicly. But the accumulation of comparison matters. When the good news of so many people arrives on your feed every day, it stops functioning as inspiration and starts functioning as an indictment of your own life.

This is where the psychological damage tends to concentrate: not in any single post, but in the sheer, relentless volume of comparison . Researchers have a name for the resulting feeling: relative deprivation, the sense that you are lacking something simply because someone else appears to have it. It does not require you to actually be worse off. It only requires you to believe you are, repeatedly, every day.

What is notable to me is that this is not just a teenage phenomenon, even though teenagers get most of the headlines. Researchers at Oregon State University, studying adults between the ages of 30 and 70, found that people in the top quarter of social media usage were more than twice as likely to report feeling lonely than lighter users. This conclusion held up even after accounting for age, income, education, and marital status.

The comparison trap, it turns out, does not age out. Forty-year-olds compare their careers. Fifty-year-olds compare their retirements. Sixty-year-olds compare their grandchildren's achievements. The targets shift. The mechanism does not.

The Compare-and-Despair Cycle

There is a phrase researchers use for what happens next: the compare-and-despair cycle. You see something that triggers a feeling of inadequacy. That feeling is uncomfortable, so counterintuitively you scroll further, looking for either reassurance or another hit of aspiration. Sometimes you find a post that makes you feel briefly better by comparison. More often you find another reason to feel behind. The cycle does not resolve. It just repeats, feed after feed, night after night, each pass leaving a slightly heavier feeling of “not enough” behind.

This is where the loneliness of “The Paradox of Connection” and the comparison of this article meet. It is not a coincidence that platforms optimized for passive scrolling and social comparison show up in the research as consistently corrosive to well-being, while platforms built around genuine two-way interaction do not carry the same cost.

The 2026 World Happiness Report, compiled by Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre with Gallup and the UN, made this distinction explicit: it is not social media itself that erodes happiness. Rather, it is the specific design choice to maximize the kind of engagement that comparison produces. Envy, it turns out, is extremely good for time-on-app. It is considerably less good for the person doing the scrolling.

When Comparison Compounds

A single scroll session of comparison rarely does lasting damage. The problem is what happens when it is not a single session. The damage compounds when the same low-grade feeling of falling short gets triggered dozens of times a day, for months or years.

Psychologically, this is where comparison stops being an occasional sting and starts behaving like an accumulating debt. Each moment of “everyone else is doing better than me” is small on its own. Compounded daily, it becomes something else entirely: a baseline mood.

The research on this has become harder to dismiss. A 2025 study out of UT Southwestern Medical Center found that 40% of youth being treated for depression or suicidal ideation also showed signs of problematic social media use. This is defined not by how much time they spent on it, but by the distress they felt when they could not access it.

That is a meaningful distinction. It suggests the platforms are not just occupying idle time. For a meaningful share of struggling young people, they have become entangled with the anxiety and depression itself, each reinforcing the other.

The effect is not confined to people who are already vulnerable. A longitudinal study tracking 9- and 10-year-olds found that as their daily social media use grew from roughly seven minutes to well over an hour, depressive symptoms climbed by 35% over the following three years. Nothing dramatic happened in any single day of that study. The damage was cumulative; small, repeated doses of comparison and passive scrolling, compounding quietly in the background of childhood.

What makes this noteworthy is the direction the causality tends to run. Researchers are careful to point out that correlation is not proof; lonelier or more anxious people may simply be drawn to more time on these platforms in the first place. But the studies that have tried to isolate the effect, including randomized trials that had participants deliberately cut their social media use, have found real and measurable improvements in mood and loneliness as a result.

This is a meaningful clue. If reducing exposure to the comparison feed reliably improves how people feel, I think it stands to reason the feed itself is likely doing some of the damage.

This is the part that concerns me most as someone who thinks about human behaviour. Anxiety and depression rarely exist as the result of one bad night of scrolling. They tend to build over time the way sediment settles: one thin layer at a time, so gradual that you do not notice the weight until you are already carrying it. Comparison, taken in small daily doses over years, is exactly the kind of thing that builds that weight without ever feeling like the moment it happened.

What The Feed Does Not Show You

Here is something else worth considering: almost none of what triggers the comparison is complete information. You do not see the credit card bill behind the vacation photo. You do not see the argument that happened twenty minutes before the smiling family portrait. We are comparing our full, complicated, three-dimensional life against a two-dimensional highlight reel that was never meant to be a fair comparison in the first place.

I am not suggesting to delete your social media accounts or swear off sharing your own good news. Research suggests that active, genuine engagement with people you actually care about still carries real value. The concern is narrower and, I think, more useful: notice when you have slipped from participating in your own life to auditing everyone else’s. Notice when scrolling has stopped feeling like connection and started feeling like a performance review.

Comparison is the killer of joy not because other people's happiness is a threat, but because it was never the right measuring stick to begin with.

Joy, in its most durable form, tends to be quiet and internally focused. It comes from noticing what is actually good in your own life rather than what is missing relative to someone else’s.

Comparison offers the opposite transaction: it trades your specific, real experience for an abstract ranking against strangers. Comparison almost never lets you win, because the game was designed to keep you playing, not to let you finish satisfied.

The platforms will keep optimizing for engagement, because that is what they are built to do. But the choice of what to do with the feed remains, ours.

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I have heard the same conversation over the years, in particular around the work lunch table. People in their early 30s and older who are smart, personable, and responsible, wondering why it feels so hard to meet someone. They have been on several dates that did not go anywhere. Maybe you have experienced the same.

I decided to examine this issue from the perspective that made the most sense to the numbers geek in me: the math. Strip away the feelings and look at the cold, hard arithmetic of finding a long-term partner as you move through your 30s.

Here is what the math says: if you are past 30 and still looking for someone to build a life with, the odds are not exactly in your favour. The chances narrow significantly as you advance in years. Not a surprise. The calculations lay out the story in stark terms. The numbers hit you in the face with what you are up against if you want to find a long-term relationship after 30 years of age.

The Pool Problem

I want to start with the most basic variable: how many eligible people are actually available to you at any given time in your adult life?

When you are in your twenties, that pool is enormous. In university or college there is a large collection of age-appropriate single people with similar ambitions, interest, and availability. You are surrounded by them daily. The world is practically handing you candidates.

By your mid-30s, that pool shrinks enormously. A significant chunk of your peer group is married or in long-term partnerships. Another chunk is divorced, which comes with its own complexity and minefields. A third cohort has simply disappeared into their careers or routines. The pool has not just shrunk; it has been filtered through ten years of life happening to people.

The last statistic should grab your attention. It is not just about who is single and available. This number is about who you are even meeting, regardless of relationship status. Social networks calcify as we age. We stop going to house parties. We stop making new friends at the rate we once did. Our world gets smaller. Adult life naturally narrows the bandwidth for new relationships of any kind.

Less exposure means fewer chances. Fewer chances means the bar you apply to each opportunity needs to drop. Or, your timing on the ones you do encounter needs to get sharper.

The Secretary Problem (No, Really)

There is a well-known model in mathematics called the Optimal Stopping Problem, sometimes called the Secretary Problem. This model helps predict the best time to take a specific action to maximize an outcome, or minimize risk. As it pertains to the dating scene, the Optimal Stopping Problem helps determine the optimal period to date before settling down in a long-term relationship.

The model works like this: you interview a sequence of candidates for a position, one at a time. In this case, the candidates are a potential life partner. You must decide on the spot whether to hire or pass. Once you decide to hire, the process stops and you cannot see the other candidates. If you decide to pass, that person is removed from the candidate pool and you cannot go back.

If you hire too early, you have a risk of “settling” and leaving the best candidate unchosen. If you pass too often, you run the risk of waiting for a better candidate who does not exist.

How do you maximize your odds of picking the best person?

To avoid going down the rabbit hole of the calculations, I will just provide the conclusion. The mathematically optimal answer in this model is to observe and automatically reject the first 37% of your candidates, then commit to the first person who is better than everyone you have seen so far.

The optimal strategy is not to wait for too long. It is to spend a defined period observing. Commit the moment someone clears the bar, because going back is not an option.

Applied to the search for a long-term relationship, if you assume your ideal “romantic window” runs from ages 18-40, the 37% mark lands at roughly age 26. The math is suggesting this: spend your early and mid-20s learning what you actually want, through dating and observation. After that, act decisively when someone clears the bar you have set. Stop waiting for someone better. The next candidate is not guaranteed to be better, and time keeps moving.

I see many people do the opposite. They treat their late 20s as a time to keep exploring. They treat their 30s as the time they will finally get serious. Unfortunately, by then the model suggests they have burned through their statistical edge. The math I am presenting becomes very daunting as you move through the decade.

The Compounding Cost Of Waiting

Let me illustrate with actual numbers. The math involves three variables working against you simultaneously, and they compound. This is the part that catches people off guard.

Variable 1: New eligible people encountered per year. This is the raw pool of appropriate, single people you actually meet and have a meaningful interaction with. At 26, that number can be reasonably estimated around 20 per year. By 32, the social calcification described above cuts the number down greatly. I think it is fair to say 5 or 6 per year. By 38, research on adult social networks puts it at 2 to 3 per year for many people. This is a reduction of 85-90% of what it was at 26.

Variable 2: Your selectivity rate. You are not going to be genuinely interested in everyone you meet. For a thoughtful person with a certain list of criteria and standards, I estimate the selectivity rate is roughly 1 in 5, or 20%. That is not being too picky in my opinion.

Variable 3: Mutual interest and timing rate. Even when you like someone, the feeling has to be mutual. They also have to have the same feelings towards you, and be at the right point in their own life to act on it. That alignment, being generous, happens maybe 50% of the time.

Now multiply them together. The formula is simple:

Take note of the last row. At 38, you can anticipate one meaningful mutual connection every three years on average. Further, there is nothing guaranteed about whether that person is actually right for you, or whether the relationship takes root if you pursue it.

The math table below shows this more precisely in your 30s:

At 26, a real shot comes along every six months. By 36, you can anticipate waiting roughly two years between opportunities that go both ways. You may be fortunate and have a shorter wait. Or, you may end up in a worse situation. Nobody can predict what will actually happen in the future.

We can have a conversation about whether the numbers I used are too conservative. Even if you want to use more optimistic numbers, the math is clear: the prospects of finding a long-term relationship after 30 quickly diminish each year.

The difference between 26 and 36 years of age is not small. That is a fundamentally different kind of problem requiring a fundamentally different kind of strategy.

What Should You Do?

The point of understanding the numbers is not to panic; it is to be strategic given the reality of finding love in your 30s and beyond. This is where I want to borrow from a different domain entirely: the business world and business development.

Here are my thoughts. I believe the best framework for beating these odds does not come from a relationship counselor. It comes from my career working as a senior business leader. I have observed how the best leaders in business build relationships that impact sales and profits. I have also spent my career building relationships within an organization, and with current and future customers.

Networking at a senior level is not just about collecting business cards. It is about deliberately engineering the conditions under which meaningful relationships can form, then moving decisively. Strip away the professional context and that is, almost exactly, what the dating math is demanding of you in your 30s. The pool is smaller. The stakes per interaction are higher. Passivity is not a strategy. These are the same problems.

Here is what business development and networking looks like when applied to your pursuit of love:

1. Expand your network and structure it. In business, executives who rely on their existing network to generate all their opportunities quickly hit a ceiling. You have to create new points of contact, and you have to do it in environments designed for repeat exposure.

The same logic applies here. Your natural social circle is probably not enough anymore. You have to engineer new contexts: a cooking class, a volunteer commitment, a community board. Not because these are romantic settings, but because repeated exposure over time is how all meaningful relationships form, whether professional or personal.

2. Use dating apps as lead generation, not as the relationship itself. In a business development context, no serious executive closes a deal over email or endless text messages. You may use LinkedIn to get in the room, but the real work happens in person. Dating apps are exactly the same and should be treated that way. They are a lead generation tool, with a terribly low conversion rate. Use them to get to a first conversation, a foot in the door. After that, focus on in-person relationship building.

3. Activate your existing network explicitly. One of the most underutilized tools in executive networking is also the most obvious: telling people directly what you are looking for. Seasoned executives do not assume their contacts will think of them for opportunities; they say it out loud. The same principle should apply in dating. Tell three or four people that you are genuinely open to being set up. Then actually follow through when they try. This means not cancelling, not half-hearting it, and reporting back. Treat the introduction like the professional courtesy it is.

4. Say yes to the things you normally decline. Every senior leader I know who built a strong network has one habit in common: they show up. The conference they did not need to attend. The dinner that was not directly useful. Those occasions are where adjacency happens. You meet a person who knows a person, or occasionally, the person themselves. The math we looked at earlier is essentially a function of exposure. More exposure shifts the numbers. Saying yes more often is the simplest way to do that.

5. Be willing to put in the time. Business building and networking requires much time and effort to be successful. Evenings, weekends, in a very structured and organized manner. Repeated follow-up to build trust and exposure. Building a business relationship requires patience and tenacity. The same is true for finding true love. Be prepared to treat the search for a partner like a second career, or a focused job search. The search requires dedicated and structured time to talk with and meet people. Casually scrolling on a dating app is unlikely to yield the type of results that will change the math in any meaningful way.

When You Meet Someone Worth Keeping

The numbers tell you something important about those moments when you meet someone who seems genuinely nice. A person who holds their own in conversation, has their priorities in order, and makes you feel something real is hard to find. Those moments become far less common each year, and they are not guaranteed to repeat.

If a person makes you feel something real and they seem to have their life together, that is not ordinary. The math says so. Act accordingly.

What I see too often is people talking themselves out of pursuing something good. Perhaps the other person was not exactly who they want, or the timing felt slightly off. Maybe they wanted to keep their options open a little longer. I understand the instinct; commitment is real and being wrong is painful.

However, the Optimal Stopping Problem is relevant here. The longer you wait past the model’s recommended observation window, the more you are gambling on candidates that may never come. A connection with a really good person is a high-value outcome. Treating it casually because you are holding out for someone better is just ignoring the math.

Ignore the math at your own peril.

Move. Move with intention.

Express interest. Make the call. Be flexible with your criteria. Be honest about what you want.

As we say in business: ask for the sale.

If there are mutual feelings: close the deal.

If it does not work out, you will have learned something. If it does, you will have beaten odds that are stacking against you each year.

I understand this makes love feel transactional. The best relationships are anything but transactional. But getting to those relationships in the first place is a problem that operates in the real world, with real math behind it.

I believe the people who understand this tend to put themselves in better positions to find what they are looking for. They also tend to quickly recognize a good person and opportunity when it shows up.

The clock is ticking and time waits for nobody.

Best wishes in finding true love. May the math be with you.

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Angus Young is 71 years old. He is still wearing the schoolboy uniform. He is still doing the duck walk across a stadium stage, tie loosened, one sock slipping, sweat soaking through a shirt built for a teenager’s body he no longer has. Brian Johnson is 78 years old. His voice, by his own bandmates’ admission, has limits it did not used to have. And yet this year, on the AC/DC Power Up tour, tens of thousands of people per night are paying big money to stand in a stadium and watch these two men do a version of what they did fifty years ago.

I was there for it. I saw AC/DC on this very Power Up tour, the second time in my life I have seen them live. Standing in that crowd, watching Angus run through the same moves I remembered from the first time I saw him, I found myself doing math I had not planned on doing. How much did I just pay for this? How many times can a man his age realistically still do this? And, why did I say yes to this again the second time around?

I find this fascinating, not because it is unusual, but because it is completely normal. The Rolling Stones. Bruce Springsteen. KISS. There is an entire concert industry built around watching artists who peaked, by any honest measure, decades ago. And it is not a small or shrinking concert sector. It is, if anything, one of the more durable sectors in live music.

So the numbers-oriented part of me asks the obvious question: what, exactly, are we buying?

The Music Genuinely Holds Up

I will do away with the easy answer first, that this is simply nostalgia. I do not think this is true on its own. Songs like “Back in Black,” “Highway to Hell,” and “Thunderstruck” are not merely old songs we have been conditioned to like. They are excellent songs! The riffs are simple yet brilliant. There is nothing to hide behind; no synthesizer, no vocal enhancing. Just guitar, drums, bass, and a voice, arranged so well that the arrangement has survived unchanged for four and five decades.

Highway To Hell

Most music from any era does not survive five years, let alone fifty. The fact that a nineteen-year-old today can hear “Thunderstruck” for the first time and feel something is real evidence of quality, not just a product of clever marketing.

Consider the numbers: Back in Black, released in 1980, has sold an estimated 50 million copies worldwide, making it the second-highest-selling album in history, trailing only Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

That is not a fluke of nostalgia. Back in Black is an excellent album that simply works, decade after decade, in a market that owes it nothing.

So yes, the music transcends time. That part of the equation is not in dispute.

However it is not the whole equation. If it were, we would all be perfectly happy listening to the albums at home, at a fraction of the cost, with better sound quality. We are not. Instead we are paying hundreds of dollars per ticket to watch it performed live by people who are visibly, audibly older than the recordings we love. That gap between what we could get and what we choose to pay for is where I think the real story lives.

What We Are Actually Paying For

Here is my theory, and it is a personal one as much as an analytical one: we are not really buying a concert. We are buying chance to return to a version of ourselves that no longer exists.

We are not just nostalgic for the music. We are nostalgic for who we were while we were listening to it.

Think about when most of us actually fell in love with these songs. It was in a car with the windows down, or at a party we were not supposed to be at. Or, we listened to these songs during some stretch of our early twenties when the future still felt unwritten.

The song and the moment fused together. Now, years later, you cannot fully separate them. Play “Highway to Hell” and you are not just hearing a guitar riff; you are briefly back in a life that had fewer obligations, fewer people depending on you, and fewer mornings that start with a check of your email before you get out of bed.

The ticket price is not really for an evening of live music. It is for an evening of temporary re-entry into a self you used to be. A self that was, by most accounts, freer. With fewer wrinkles, more hair, and fewer pounds around the midsection.

The music itself was less synthesized back then, and so were we. Fewer inputs. Just a car stereo, a road, and a song loud enough to drown out whatever you were supposed to be worrying about.

The Math Of A Shrinking Window

There is also something more specific going on with a band like AC/DC, and it has to do with mortality: theirs and, by extension, ours. Malcolm Young died in 2017. Bon Scott died in 1980. Every tour now carries the unspoken reality that it might the last one.

I think that is part of what draws people in who might otherwise sit this tour out. It is not simply “I want to hear the hits.” Instead, this is “I want to watch them before the window closes”. While this refers to the band, I think this quietly, uncomfortably, refers to our own window too. We are watching men in their seventies do something demanding and joyful in public. A part of us is watching how to do the same thing with whatever time we have left.

The Self-implicating Part

The fact that I have seen AC/DC twice tells me something. The first time, I could make a case that I was there partly out of completeness, a box to check. I had seen their concert clips on YouTube, and I wanted to experience the rush and electricity. The second time was a chance for me to to return to the young boy I was the first time I heard Highway To Hell, and the quiet hope that some of him is still reachable if the volume gets loud enough.

The appeal of a band like AC/DC, for me, is not really just about the band. It is about permission to be, for one night, less calculated. Less measured. A little closer to whoever I was before I started running organizations for a living.

That is a want worth being honest about instead of dismissing as mere nostalgia. Nostalgia implies we are fooling ourselves about the past. I do not think we are. I think we know exactly what we are doing: paying alot of hard earned money for something you will not see on any spreadsheet: a few hours of feeling like time has not fully caught up with us yet.

Angus is still running. Brian is still singing, cracks and all. All of us in that crowd is quietly running alongside them, back toward someone we used to be.

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I wrote an article on Substack titled “AI Can Help Writers, And That Is Fine”, where I stated how I use AI to support my work: the graphics, charts, and pullout quotes as needed. I braced for pushback. I have seen how this topic gets played out from the anti-AI crowd, and I assumed my inbox and comments would fill up with some version of “AI slop”. I anticipated being called a fraud or not being a legitimate writer.

Nothing happened! What I got instead was general support without the confrontation I had prepared for.

I will admit this surprised me. However, it did not take long for me to find the reaction I was expecting. Scroll through Notes and the comment sections, and the debate is very much alive: writers accusing other writers of outsourcing their thinking, arguments about what “real” authorship even means, and the dreaded “AI slop” term hung on the neck of those writers.

The recent decision by Substack to integrate Pangram to estimate the degree to which a piece is AI-supported has poured gasoline onto this already hotly contested debate.

My own experience may have been calm. The broader conversation is not. The AI supporters and anti-AI groups are squaring off in a very public scrap. The gloves are off. The literary punches are being thrown by both sides. This huge gap is what got me thinking more about what is happening, and why there is such a strong, vocal anti-AI pushback here.

The reality of human behaviour is that the intensity of the broader reaction is often mismatched with the size of the issue. Nobody is accusing anyone of murdering a person. Instead, a writer honestly said a tool helped format a paragraph, clarify an idea, or supported the draft of an article.

The response from the anti-AI cohort and the self-appointed literary gatekeepers carries the weight of a betrayal, as if something sacred had been violated. The term “AI slop” is being hurled to fellow writers with increasing regularity on Substack.

This mismatch is telling to me. When the reaction to a relatively small activity in the grand scheme of things is enormous, the small thing usually is not the real thing.

The Surface Argument

On the surface, the writing-and-AI debate is about the craft. To my eyes, the objection goes something like: writing is a human act, and effort and originality are what make it legitimate. If AI assists with any part of that process, it cheapens the result. The writer is not a true writer, and publishes crap essays. Using this logic, a writer who uses AI has not written anything real and legitimate; they have relied on a technology platform that wrote for them.

This seems to be a coherent argument. It is also, in my opinion, not the argument that is actually driving the anger. Craft complaints are usually specific: they may point to a flat sentence, a lazy paragraph structure, or the overuse of clichés.

This complaint is not specific. It is categorical. It does not ask “is this good?” but rather “should this be allowed to exist?” This is not a craft question. This is a legitimacy question. I believe legitimacy questions are almost always proxies for something else. There is something deeper going on in the minds of those firing the complaints and accusations at other writers.

The Fear Underneath

Here is what I think is actually underneath all of this: relevance, not quality. The real question is not “is this writing good?” The underlying question seems to be “can I still compete?”

Many of the loudest critics have probably spent years building writing expertise. That expertise used to be a moat, a competitive advantage. AI narrows and arguably eliminates the advantage. I can see how this is frightening and threatening in a way that has nothing to do with how good the writing actually is.

Writing also carries a more personal identity than most tools ever will. It is taken as proof that a person articulated a thought and rendered it organically in their writing. To those experienced writers, it feels different because we see words as a window into their mind. Threatening that window produces a reaction that is existential, not practical.

This Is Not Just About Writing

Once you see the pattern, you start seeing it everywhere beyond the literary world. Computer programmers debating whether code generated with AI assistance is “real” code. Artists arguing about AI-assisted art. Customer service reps watching AI chatbots absorb their workload and their jobs. AI is THE topic in business, and the subject of intense conversation in corporate boardrooms around the globe.

The common thread across all of the debate is not just quality. It is speed and scale that no human can match. Technology that can draft, code, or design faster than any of us can individually.

More honestly, the AI generated output is “good enough” and in many cases “better” more often than we want to admit.

AI output competes with your reason for being useful at all. I believe this is the real anxiety underneath every AI debate right now, regardless of the industry.

Why Writing Became The Flashpoint

Writing did not become the flashpoint because it is uniquely threatened. I believe it became the flashpoint because writing is uniquely personal. We see writing as a part of our identity, not just output for someone to read. This point makes it the most emotionally legible place to stage a much bigger argument. Arguing about AI and writing is, in some sense, easier and safer than arguing directly about AI and human relevance. As a result the fight happens, even though the fight is never really contained to just the page.

The Anxiety Is Real, And The Argument Is Already Lost

I want to be fair to the people on the anti-AI side, especially those who have been the most vocal and made the harshest comments against AI-assisted writing. Their fear is not manufactured, nor is it silly. Many of them have spent years and careers earning a kind of authority that suddenly is threatened. That is a real loss for them, and it deserves to be named honestly rather than being mocked.

But the numbers paint a stark picture. The data makes it hard to treat AI as a fringe experiment by writers; it is in fact a permanent shift. A late-2023 survey by the Authors Guild and Gotham Ghostbusters of published authors found the vast majority using no AI at all in their work. By 2025, another survey of nearly 1,500 working writers found that 61 percent now use AI tools in some capacity, with those writers reporting meaningfully faster output. Among writers producing business content specifically, AI adoption is even higher. Two years is not a long time for a habit to go from relatively rare to the majority.

Nobody can say with confidence what share of new books, articles, or essays involve some AI assistance today. Disclosure is inconsistent. The threat of being ridiculed probably results in an underreporting of true AI usage.

But make no mistake: the direction is no longer in dispute. Whatever the true number is, it is higher in 2026 than it was last year, and it will be even higher two years from now. I would bet big money on this to be the future outcome.

I will say this directly because it needs saying: the legitimacy debate is one that AI haters will not win. They will lose not because the naysayers are wrong to feel what they feel. They will lose because they are arguing against a fact rather than an opinion.

AI is now permanently woven into how people draft, edit, and publish. The horse is out of the barn, and no amount of protest at the barn door brings it back in. Calling AI supported work shoddy will fall on deaf ears by the majority of people.

The AI naysayers who are vocal and public with their vitriol do not appear to want to acknowledge this reality. Instead, they are clinging to to their internal sense of relevancy. It manifests itself in the criticism and bitter comments towards others they think rely on AI to support their writing. Discrediting others seems to be their last-ditch effort to preserve their own sense of legitimacy and purpose in the literary world.

The harsh truth? They are steadily being left in the dust. They can call out writers for using AI. They can shout into the room, but while they do the audience is steadily walking out. In time, they will be stumping to a vacant room.

No point in sugarcoating the conclusion. It is what it is. AI usage in writing will become the norm even more than it is now. People will migrate to its usage even more completely than we see now. Just like people moved on from using pencil and paper for math, left their typewriters for word processing software, and transitioned from CDs to music streaming platforms.

No amount of criticism, snarly comments, or accusations of “AI slop” will change this.

This brings me back to where I started, in my first article on AI usage. In the article, my core message was that the purpose of writing is to communicate: to leave a reader more informed, more moved, or more entertained than they were before they started reading the work.

That standard has never asked how the words got assembled. It only asks whether they landed.

Seen that way, AI should not be seen as a threat to that standard. AI is a tool that can help meet the standard more consistently. Sharper editing. Better execution and more clear prose. A cleaner path from a half-formed idea to a finished piece that communicates something emotive. Used well, it does not replace the writer’s judgment or voice. Instead it clears the friction between an idea and expressing it clearly.

The writers still litigating whether AI-assisted work “counts” will lose that argument by default. They will lose not because their fear was foolish, but because the world will have moved on without waiting for the verdict.

The rest of us would do better spending that energy on the only question that ever really mattered: not whether AI supported the writing, but whether what we wrote was worth someone’s time to read.

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I have never had a dog. This is because I have never had a schedule or lifestyle conducive enough to promise a dog any consistency. I do not feel it would be fair to a dog. So I have not had one. But it has left me on the outside of something I have spent a long time watching from just close enough to feel it.

What I have watched is this: people who have dogs talk about them differently than they talk about almost anything else in their lives. Not with the performative enthusiasm reserved for a new restaurant or a good flight upgrade. With something quieter and more important.

I have seen grown men who do not show emotions choke up describing a dog getting old. I have seen friends structure jobs, relationships, and home choices around whether a place would work “for him” or “for her” . The dog is always spoken of like a member of the household whose vote counts. I do not have the first hand knowledge to describe what that closeness feels like from the inside. I can only tell you what it looks like from the outside: it looks like the realest thing in the room.

Here is what I think I have figured out, watching from the outside for this long: the bond is not really about the dog being smart, or loyal in some trainable, transactional sense, I feel it runs deeper than behaviour. It is about the fact that a dog is the only relationship most of us will ever have that comes with no conditions attached.

A dog does not care what you do for a living. Will not care if you got the promotion at work, or if you made the right comment in the meeting. Your dog is just excited to see you walk through the door. Every time. The love is unconditional, every day. This is an almost impossible bar for a human relationship to clear.

I think about how rare that actually is. Nearly every other relationship in life is conditional in some way, even the good ones. Especially the good ones, because the people who love us the most are the most entitled to have opinions about us. A spouse loves you and also notices when you are being difficult. A parent loves you and also remembers the mean thing you said two years ago.

None of that is a flaw in people. We are all constantly being assessed. We also constantly assess. That is real life.

A dog is, functionally, the only close relationship in most lives that carries no evaluation at all. No comparison to who you used to be, no accounting for what you have done lately.

A dog does not do that. A dog will not withhold affection until you have proven something this week. There is no version of you the dog liked better before. The younger you, the thinner you. It makes no difference. There is just you, today, walking through the door.

That alone is sufficient. Not sufficient in the grudging way we sometimes accept people "as they are." Sufficient in the sense that there was never a bar to clear in the first place. This is love in its rawest, most pure form. This is the kind of love many people never go through with careers, marriage, or friends.

I do not say any of this to romanticize something I have never had the pleasure of experiencing. There is a less poetic version too: vet bills, ruined furniture, 6 a.m. walks in the rain. There is also the heartbreaking grief of losing a dog that I understand, again, only secondhand.

I am not naive about the cost side of having a dog. What I am saying is that the people who have this bond have something most of us are quietly starving for: one relationship in a crowded, performance-based life that asks nothing of us except to come home each day.

So no, I have not been able to describe the feeling of a dog’s head on your knee after a bad day, or the specific silence of a house that used to have one and does not anymore. But I have spent enough years standing just outside that world to know what I am looking at. In the end, it is not really just about the dog. It is about the one door in a demanding life where nothing is being asked of you, and you are loved regardless.

I do not have that door. I have a genuine admiration and respect for the people who do.

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For each of my last 4 birthdays I have felt two things at once: grateful for the year ahead, and quietly aware of the year just passed. That split is the core of this article.

Every birthday is like two events in one. The first is a celebration of arrival: the day you were born, marked with cake and the people who love you. The second is a quieter reflection: another year, another mile marker on the road. Most years, the second event stays behind the first. Some years, it steps forward with a vengeance.

I have had both kinds. I suspect you have as well.

Same Day, Two Different Verdicts

A 1st birthday for a baby is a joyous celebration. Pictures, videos, a mountain of presents. The parents may cry a little. Nobody in that room is thinking about mortality. They are thinking about how fast 12 months went, and the feeling is gratitude and happiness.

Fast forward to age 35. For a woman who has wanted children and does not have them, the birthday can feel entirely different. Same celebration with cake and candles. But the number carries very different information: a plan that has not unfolded the way she pictured it, a version of herself she thought she would be living by now. Nobody at that party is doing anything wrong. The friends mean well. Yet for her, the day can be upsetting.

Birthdays are neutral days that we load with meaning. The meaning depends entirely on what we were hoping the year would bring us.

What The Number Measures Depends On Which Direction You Are Facing

Birthdays to celebrate ages 16 and 18 are important in many cultures. I remember my 16th birthday, mostly because of a car. I had wanted a Chevrolet Camaro for a year. Turning 16 meant one thing: A driver’s license! That birthday looked forward. My excitement was about what was coming. The sense is that this car represents your dreams. The feeling that the rest of your life is full of opportunity. The world is your oyster.

Having your 65th birthday faces the other way. It does not have to; plenty of people I know are very engaged and active in their 60s. But the number carries pre-conceived cultural norms about slowing down, and being closer to the end of the story than the beginning. Even people who feel nowhere near finished can feel our society handing them an ending anyway. This notion hits harder than the age itself.

Not the age. The gap. Age 35 is not sad and 65 is not an ending. The feeling lives in the distance between the plan we made and the life we are actually living.

What I think produces the feelings we have on our birthday is this comparison of where you thought you would be at any particular age, relative to where you actually are. If the gap is large, it is easy to feel in the dumps. Should the gap be small or even non-existent, the day can be great. Our birthday is the conduit for each of us to have an opportunity to look at the gap, whether we want to or not.

This is why the same age can be hard on one person and a non-issue for another. I believe this is why the feeling on our birthday varies yearly. While the date does not change, the size of the gap can be different.

The Room Matters More Than The Number

There is a second variable, and it might be the bigger one: who is in the room with you.

A birthday surrounded by people who love you is proof that you matter to more people than you sometimes believe.

A birthday spent alone, whether by choice or circumstance, can become the loneliest day of the year. Not because being alone is inherently sad. But a birthday is not an ordinary day. It is a day our culture insists should be celebrated, so silence does not read as peace. Instead, being alone on your birthday reads as absence. The day amplifies whatever is already true in our lives: connected or isolated, secure or uncertain.

Both Things At Once

A birthday can be a testament to both having survived another year, and a reminder of the clock. It is proof of love in the years someone throws you a party. A birthday is also proof of its absence, in the years no one does. It can be the best day of one person’s year and the worst day of another’s.

If it feels heavy this year, that is not you being ungrateful or dramatic. That is you believing the day is carrying real weight.

The day is not lying to you. That weight is worth acknowledging, rather than performing gratitude you do not feel because it is your birthday and the culture expects a smile.

I have had birthdays I wanted to hurry past, and birthdays where I wanted to stop time. In recent years, I have felt a bit of both. That does not make me inconsistent. It simply makes the day as complicated as it has always been.

Many happy birthdays to me and you. I hope your next birthday is filled with joy and happiness. May your wishes come true!

However if this year's birthday is not a joyous occasion, that is OK too.

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In an earlier article called “You Are Paying More For Less” I wrote about shrinkflation, a business practice of making a product smaller while keeping the price the same. Companies are betting that you are tracking the price tag and not the size and weight. Airlines figured out a version of that trick, and they have taken it somewhere snack companies never could. The airlines shrunk the seat, kept raising the price, and then built an entire second product line out of the inches they took away.

I have flown extensively in my life, and literally have an uncomfortable relationship with this problem. You know the moment. The seatback in front of you eases backward, and there is a brief, almost comic calculation of where your knees are supposed to go. That moment used to be occasional. Now it is the norm.

The Numbers Behind The Squeeze

We should start with what has actually been removed, because the scale of it is easy to lose once you are already used to it. Standard economy seat pitch is the distance from a point on your seat to the same point on the seat in front of you. The seat pitch has fallen from roughly 35 inches in the 1970s to about 31 inches today, with plenty of carriers running 28 to 29 inches on top of that. Seat width has dropped right alongside it, down by as much as four inches over the past three decades on some carriers, leaving many economy seats around 16 to 17 inches wide.

Run those two numbers together and you get the real story: less legroom and a narrower seat, for more money than the wider and roomier seat cost twenty years ago.

That figure of over $6,000 in added revenue per-flight is the one that matters most, because it is the whole motive in a single sentence. Every inch an airline reclaims from the cabin floor is ultimately turned into extra seats to sell. An extra row on a single narrow-body jet, multiplied across hundreds of flights a day is not a rounding error. It is the business model.

The Body The Seat Was Built For No Longer Exists

The dimensions used to engineer airline seating were from decades ago, modeled on a male passenger about 5’10”, 180 pounds. Our body has changed substantially since then. A quarter of men today weigh more than 225 pounds. A quarter of women weigh more than 195 pounds. A sixth of American men are over six feet tall.

The seat got smaller at the exact moment the average person got larger. It is a decision to optimize for airline profits rather than the passenger's body.

For anyone above average in height, width, or both, this is no longer a comfort question. Rather, it is a question of whether sitting next to a stranger means hours of contorting your body to take up less space than your body actually occupies. There is a real dignity cost buried in those inches, and it falls disproportionately on people who already spend a lot of their lives being made to feel like they are taking up too much room.

The Tighter The Box, The Easier The Upsell

This is the part of the story that makes it a true companion to my shrinkflation piece, rather than just an airline-specific complaint. Shrinking the chip bag only saves the manufacturer money. Shrinking the airline seat not only cuts costs, it actively manufactures demand for the upgraded seats at the front of the cabin.

Every inch taken out of standard economy makes “extra legroom” economy, premium economy, and business class look and feel more valuable. The discomfort is not a side effect of the business strategy. I would say it is the business strategy. A coach seat that was merely adequate would never create the same urgency to pay more for an exit row seat.

The further up the cabin you go, the more that bet pays off. Lufthansa has reportedly described premium economy internally as a “money-generating machine,” with revenue per square foot of cabin space running roughly a third higher than standard economy. American Airlines has called premium economy the most profitable use of square footage on its wide-body jets, with fares running close to double basic economy.

Business class, unsurprisingly, takes that further. Industry average fare markups over economy run around 250%. On a carrier like Etihad, business class fares have run as high as 600% over economy on the same route.

This chart is the part most passengers never see, and it complicates the easy story. The normal assumption is that business class is the real prize. On a per-passenger basis, it is, since those flat-bed suites can sell for four to six times an economy fare.

However, premium economy is nearly as efficient as business class. This is because a business class seat is roughly three times the floor space of an economy seat to deliver that fare premium. Premium economy seats take up much less space and still return most of the upside. It is, quite literally, the best use of square footage on the plane. This is why it is the fastest-growing seat class in the industry, expanding from 42 airlines offering it in 2017 to 63 by 2022 and climbing since.

The last number tells the true story. The entire industry nets about $7 of profit per passenger on average. This is a profit margin so thin it explains why every spare inch of cabin space is so valuable to airlines.

Economy class is not unprofitable. It is the volume engine that fills the plane and spreads the fixed costs of fuel, crew, and the aircraft itself across hundreds of passengers. Economy class is also, deliberately, the least comfortable way to fly. Comfort is no longer a central part of the ticket. Instead, it is unbundled, priced, and stacked into different tiers designed to make the tier above look like it is worth the extra charge.

What Gets Alienated Along The Way

The part that feels most worth examining is what this structure does to the experience of being a passenger. Flying economy used to mean you got a smaller version of the same trip everyone else was on. Now it increasingly means you are sitting in the deliberately downgraded tier, a curtain away from a version of the same flight engineered to feel like relief.

This is a strange thing to sell people repeatedly and still expect loyalty in return. It tells the economy passenger that the airline knows exactly how uncomfortable this seat is. Their solution? Offering, for a price, to undo the discomfort it created. There is a particular kind of resentment that builds in passengers. We can see the airlines understand our frustration, and are monetizing it rather than trying to find a solution.

For larger passengers, taller passengers, or anyone whose body does not fit the 1960s template the seat was built around, that resentment comes with an added layer. The message is that comfortable travel is not designed with you in mind, and that the dignity of a seat that fits is now a premium product.

None of this means flying is getting worse in every dimension. Fares, adjusted for inflation, are historically low. This relative affordability is real and worth crediting. But it is worth naming what is occurring every time you book an economy fare: you are not just buying a value seat. You are buying a seat that was engineered to make you want a more expensive one.

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All of us have done it, thought about doing it, or had it done to us: a long honk that lasted just a bit too long. Maybe it was the slow, deliberate creep forward to cut someone off, a power move disguised as a merge into their lane. Or you gave the middle finger to a stranger on the highway. Have you rolled down the window and screamed obscenities at the other driver? Road rage is not a fringe behavior; it is a near-universal one. And that, right there, is worth examining.

We talk about road rage as if this is a character flaw in other drivers. But if you have ever felt that surge of anger behind the wheel, then you are the other driver in someone else’s story. We are all starring in a villain’s role we would never accept off the road.

You are not a bad person. But behind the wheel, you sometimes behave like one. That gap is the story.

The Anonymity Equation

In a previous piece I wrote called “The Rise Of The Keyboard Warrior”, I explored how the internet gives ordinary people a license to be their worst selves. Shielded by a screen name and a profile photo, people say things they would never consider to someone’s face. The mechanism is anonymity, the removal of social consequence.

Road rage works the same way, with one critical difference: you are not behind a screen. You are behind two thousand pounds of steel moving at high speed. The anonymity is physical. You are a license plate, a person through tinted glass. A car make and color that will be forgotten in sixty seconds. The stranger you just cut off will never see you again. There is no accountability. No reputation to protect. No eye contact to endure.

When consequence disappears, behavior changes and not for the better. The road strips away the social consequences that keeps us civil in every other context.

You would not lean on your horn at someone who bumped into you at the grocery store. Nor would you tail a coworker down a hallway because they were walking too slowly. Put a person inside a car, add traffic and a bad day, and suddenly the rules of human decency can disappear.

A Life Running Too Fast

Road rage is also a symptom. Not just of anonymity, but of pace. Of a life that has been scheduled so tightly that the three-minute delay caused by a slow left-lane driver feels like a genuine emergency. When you genuinely feel that a slow car is ruining your day, your day was already too fragile. You had no margin for the ordinary imperfections of sharing space with other human beings.

We have engineered our lives around the assumption of frictionless flow. The GPS tells us it takes 22 minutes. The meeting starts at 9. The coffee order is already paid for. Any variable that disrupts the equation feels like a personal offense. It is not. That man doing the speed limit in the left lane is not attacking you. He is just living his own life at his own pace, completely indifferent to yours. That indifference enrages us more than malice would.

What It Says About Respect

There is something else embedded in road rage that we do not talk about enough: the quiet belief that your time matters more than theirs. Every act of road aggression carries that assumption. When you lay on your horn at the car ahead of you, you are not just expressing frustration. You are making a statement: your destination is more important, your schedule more worthy of protection, your right to the road more legitimate than theirs.

We would never say that out loud. It sounds awful. But the horn says it. The middle finger says it. The dangerous pass at 80 miles per hour says it loudly and with conviction.

In those moments, the other driver stops being a person with a family, a job, a reason to be on this road at this time. They become an obstacle. An inconvenience in your story. Dehumanization does not require hatred. It only requires not seeing someone as fully real. The car, like the screen, makes that very easy to do.

The keyboard warrior types things they would never say in person because the screen makes others feel less real. The road rager does things they never do in person because the windshield does the same. Different medium. Same psychology. Same erosion of the empathy that makes shared spaces livable.

The difference is that the keyboard warrior’s weapon is words. Yours, behind the wheel, is the car itself. The stakes are not the same.

Every act of road aggression carries an assumption we would never say out loud: that your time matters more than theirs.

So the next time you feel that heat rise in your chest on the highway, sit with it for a second before you act on it. Not because the other driver deserves your patience. But because you deserve to understand why you lost it so quickly. That is usually the more interesting question. What kind of day, what kind of life, produces a person who is one slow driver away from becoming someone they do not recognize?

The road does not create who you are. It reveals it. If you do not like what you see in the rearview mirror, that is not a traffic problem.

That is a you problem. And it is a problem actually worth examining.

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The fanbase for these groups was almost entirely teenage girls. Everyone understood that. As a male fan, you learned fast to keep your enthusiasm to yourself. That is its own story, and I will get to it.

But the embarrassment I felt was not just about being a boy in a girl’s fandom. It was something broader, the way we are all conditioned to treat pop music obsession as a phase to get through, rather than something worth taking seriously. These groups were not just music. For millions of teenagers, they were the first time the world felt like it was speaking directly to them.

The Teenage Brain Is Looking For A Mirror

Being a teenager is fundamentally a crisis of identity. You are not a child anymore, not yet an adult, and the person you were a year ago already feels foreign. Your body is changing, your social place is shifting, and you are not sure what you are worth or who you are supposed to be.

What you need more than anything in that moment is to know you are not alone. That someone gets it. You want to know the confusion and the wanting are normal, maybe even meaningful.

A great pop group does not just entertain teenagers. It reflects them back to themselves at the exact moment they are trying to figure out who they are.

The best pop groups understood this. Destiny's Child sang about self-worth and survival. The Backstreet Boys performed a kind of emotional vulnerability that teenage boys were not allowed to show anywhere else. These songs gave young people permission to feel things they did not yet have words for. That is not trivial, but rather formative.

Being a fan was not a solo experience. It was a community. Without realizing it, you were practicing belonging. Learning how to be part of something, how to share enthusiasm without apology. For kids who did not fit in anywhere else, fandom was sometimes the only place they felt seen. That matters.

Hope With A Melody

Pop groups sold something most teenagers desperately needed: the idea that life was going to get better. That what you were feeling right now was pointing toward something: love, freedom, a version of yourself you had not met yet.

When you are sixteen and the same hallways and faces are closing in on you, a song that promises something more feels like oxygen. It says: hang on. You get bigger than this.

Pop music at its best is a form of hope delivery. Teenagers, more than anyone, needed something to hope for.

That is why the nostalgia runs so deep. Adults do not just remember the music; they remember the version of themselves who needed it. The kid who was still figuring it out. The one who sang along in their bedroom and meant every word.

A Different Kind Of Embarrassment

There is a tradition of dismissing pop fandom, especially when the fans are teenage girls. The screaming crowds at Beatles concerts were a cultural joke. The BTS Army was looked on with bemusement by many. The assumption is always the same: these girls are hysterical, their taste is shallow, their feelings do not count.

I have a complicated relationship with that. By secretly liking New Kids On The Block and 98 Degrees, I benefited from it. I stayed quiet. I let people assume I had better taste. Females who loved these groups out loud got laughed at. I loved the same music in private and got away clean. I am not proud of that.

Looking back, those girls were braver than I was. Loving something fully and publicly takes real courage. I did not have it. I was too concerned with how I looked.

The Thing About Leaving It Behind

Even now, when “Because Of You” by 98 Degrees comes on, I feel something that is not quite nostalgia. It is more like a quiet regret.

Not regret for having loved the song or the band. Regret for having stopped. There is a specific moment in maturing when you decide, consciously or not, that caring about something like this is not allowed anymore. You just stop playing the songs where anyone can hear.

Maturity asks you to trade certainty for sophistication. Sometimes, without meaning to, you hand over something you did not want to let go of.

What I did not see then is that moving on was not maturity. It was performance. The feelings those songs carried did not disappear. They just lost their importance and relevance. Adulthood asks you to be a little less alive to things like that. Sometimes, when those songs finds you at the right moment, you feel what you gave up.

We tend to judge music by how complex it is, or what critics said about it. But a simpler measure works better: did the music make someone feel less alone when loneliness was hard to bear? Did a song give them words for something they could not say out loud? Did it make them believe the world was bigger than what they could see from where they were standing?

For millions of people, the answer is yes. That is not fluff. That is important.

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In the 1980s, a billion-dollar weather disaster occurred every 82 days. Today it happens every 10 days. Hotter air holds more moisture, which means bigger floods. Warmer oceans feed stronger storms. Drier soil burns faster and longer. None of this should be contested anymore. This is the reality of climate change.

Yet if I take a step back, I see and react to information the way most of us probably do: with a brief wince, a small headshake, and then I carry on with my day. I am not writing this from a place of moral superiority. I am writing this because I noticed my own wince and wanted to understand it.

We can see the iceberg from a long way off. The ship has time to turn. And we are, mostly, still arguing about the deck chairs.

The Thermometer Tells The Story

Disasters get the headlines, but the thermometer is the indicator that is harder to argue with. The last 11 years are the 11 warmest ever directly recorded, going back to 1850. Not the 11 most newsworthy. The 11 hottest.

The period of 2023-2025 marked the first three-year stretch in recorded history averaging above 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, the line the Paris Agreement was built around as a danger threshold. We did not tip past it with a single freak year. We did it for three years in a row. La Niña conditions, which usually cool the planet down, were actively working against the warming. The brakes were on, and the temperature still climbed.

That last figure matters more than it sounds. The ocean has been absorbing the vast majority of the heat we have trapped, which is part of why the air above our heads has not felt as catastrophic as the raw numbers might suggest. It is a buffer, not a fix.

A warmer ocean expands, raises the sea level, and feeds bigger storms with more energy. Thus we have the wildfires, floods, and billion-dollar disasters arriving every 10 days rather than 82 days.

The Math Of “It’s Not My Fault”

The line I hear most often from people, including myself, is some version of: I can’t fix this on my own, so why should I bother changing anything? Taken individually, that sentence is almost entirely true. One person’s efforts is statistical noise. You are not wrong about your own ability to solve the climate crisis on your own.

The problem is that we are one of roughly eight billion people who are also, individually, correct. That is the trap: a true statement at the individual level becomes a catastrophic excuse at the collective level. Nobody is lying when they say their personal contribution is negligible. But “negligible times eight billion” is not negligible. It is the whole story.

Everyone is doing the math correctly on their own behalf, and the sum is wrong for everyone.

This is not a new pattern in human behaviour. Economists have a name for the underlying behaviour: the free-rider problem, a diffusion of responsibility. Social psychologists studying bystander situations found the same thing: the more people who are capable of helping, the less likely any single one of them feels personally obligated to.

Consequences That Have Not Arrived Yet

Here is the second point, and I think we need to think about it in more detail. We talk about climate change as a crisis, but for most people it does not yet feel like one. The summer is hotter, winters are more mild than we remember. The insurance bill went up. The news cycle had another wildfire, another flood, another “once-in-a-century” event that has happened four times this decade.

Changes in our climate and temperatures register as inconvenient and very uncomfortable, not existential. The consequences are real and rising. However, they are just not yet unbearable long enough for people to really and truly act.

That gap between known risk and felt consequence is where almost all human procrastination lives. We are extraordinarily good at responding to a threat once it has its hands around our throat, and remarkably bad at responding to one that is still ten years away.

Behavioral economists call this present bias; we discount future costs and benefits far more steeply than we should, simply because they are in the future. Climate change just runs that same flaw at a civilizational scale, with the stakes turned up to a level our instincts were never built to register.

There is a quieter trick our minds play on top of all this, sometimes called shifting baseline syndrome. Each generation treats the climate it grew up with as "normal," and adjusts its sense of extreme accordingly. A summer that would have shocked our parents is now normal to me. We are constantly recalibrating our sense of normal to match a slowly worsening baseline, which means the alarm keeps quietly turning itself down even as the actual temperature keeps going up.

What Procrastination Actually Costs

I do not think most people are climate deniers anymore. I think most of us are climate procrastinators; convinced, yet mostly unmoved. We outsource the discomfort to the future. I have outsourced many things in my own life to “later,” because later felt less expensive than now. The bill for that kind of delay always arrives. It is just rarely sent to the person who deferred it.

This essay does not end with a five-step plan, because I do not think the fix is mainly about recycling more. The fix is about policy, infrastructure, energy systems, the kind of change that happens when enough individually “powerless” people stop treating their own irrelevance as a reason to disengage. Instead, people start treating it as the reason to organize, vote, and demand something different from the people who actually hold the levers.

I do not have a good answer for how we collectively our own inclinations: the present bias, the diffusion of responsibility, the shifting baseline. But I would rather name the pattern than keep pretending the problem is a lack of information. We are not short on data.

We are short on the urgency that turns data into action. Until the consequences become large enough, and until we really snap to attention, that gap is where the next ten years will quietly get decided.

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We should call a spade a spade in the gun ownership debate: nobody needs an AR-15 to protect their home. So when someone tells you they own a military-style rifle for self-defense, the practical argument starts to fall apart pretty quickly. What you are left with is something far more interesting and revealing.

This is not an article about gun control; it is about psychology. The article is about what we reach for when we feel small, powerless, or afraid in a world that seems increasingly indifferent to us. I will explore what I believe this reaching tells us about the anxieties beneath everyday life.

The Fantasy Is The Product

When you see pictures at a gun show, you will notice something immediately: the military-style rifles are displayed like jewelry. They don’t just sit on the table; they are proudly presented.

Men crowd around them with an energy that has nothing to do with home security. There is a reverence in how they pick them up. Weight. Grip. Something is being felt in those moments.

The feeling is power, or more precisely the simulation of power.

The military-style rifle does not just protect a fantasy. In many cases it is the fantasy. The rifle stands in for a version of yourself you have never quite gotten to be.

Gun manufacturers know this. The marketing for AR-15s and AK-47 rifles rarely leads with "ideal for home defense." It leads with imagery of operators, warriors, tactical men in the field. The rifle is sold as an identity before it is sold as a tool. You are not buying a firearm. You are buying a persona: masculine, capable, not to be messed with. The gun industry borrowed the playbook from other industries that sells aspiration: luxury cars, cologne, gym supplements. The message is always the same. Buy this. Become someone.

When The World Makes You Feel Irrelevant

The people most drawn to military-style weapons tend to be working-class men with an average age of 55, often living in communities that have seen better economic days.

When sociologist Jennifer Carlson spent years embedded in Michigan’s gun-carrying community for her book Citizen-Protectors, what she found was not a bunch of eager survivalists. Carlson found men quietly terrified of becoming obsolete. Men who felt the world had moved on without them and were looking for a way to still matter. The gun, particularly big military guns, became a way of saying: I am still someone to be reckoned with. I still have weight in this world.

Owning a weapon designed for a battlefield is less about what you will do with it and more about who you believe yourself to be when you hold it.

That is not weakness. I think this is a natural response to a very real feeling of powerlessness. The problem is that the gun does not solve the feeling; it just temporarily soothes it. The anxiety that drove the purchase is still there on Monday morning when the gun is back in the safe and the same job, the same bills, the same invisible life is waiting.

The Prepper, The Patriot, and The Action Hero

I see three archetypes worth naming here, because they reveal different personas of the same underlying need.

The prepper builds stockpiles of guns. His belief is systemic collapse, government overreach, societal breakdown. The military rifle fits into a narrative where he is the competent survivor, the last man standing, the one who saw it coming when everyone else laughed.

The patriot frames his arsenal in constitutional terms. It is a sacred right. The Second Amendment becomes almost theological. The gun is proof of citizenship, of belonging to something larger and older and more meaningful than the mundane frustrations of his everyday life.

Then there is the action hero archetype: the man who grew up on action movies and military video games and finds something deeply satisfying about handling a weapon that looks exactly like what the hero carries. This is pure fantasy fulfillment and there is little shame in acknowledging that.

What We Are Actually Afraid Of

Take a higher level point of view and a pattern emerges. Military-style gun ownership spikes in periods of social anxiety; after elections perceived as threatening, high-profile shootings (counterintuitively), and economic downturns.

The gun becomes a tangible response to intangible fear. You cannot shoot a recession. You cannot hold off the feeling that the world has left you behind. However, you can put something heavy and powerful in your hands and, for a moment, feel like the lead of your own story instead of an extra in someone else’s.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister’s research on threatened egotism is the idea that violence and aggression are more often rooted in fragile self-esteem than in low self-esteem. I feel this is worth exploring. It is not the genuinely humble person who reaches for symbols of dominance. Rather, it is the person whose sense of self requires external reinforcement. The person who needs the world to see them as powerful because they are not quite sure they are.

A gun on the hip does not change what is happening at work, at home, or inside. It just gives the anxiety somewhere to go.

None of this is unique to gun owners, by the way. We all have our symbols of status and control; luxury cars we can barely afford or job titles we drop in conversation. The military rifle is just a particularly loud version of the human impulse to feel less afraid by looking less afraid.

The Conversation Nobody Wants To Have

The gun debate in America tends to collapse almost immediately. Both sides dig in, and almost nothing useful gets said. What I never see discussed is the underlying emotional reality that drives demand in the first place.

If a meaningful number of people are drawn to military-grade weapons as a response to anxiety, powerlessness, and a hunger for identity, I think the conversation needed is about what is producing those feelings in the first place. About why so many people feel irrelevant. A discussion of why communities have been hollowing out for decades.

In my opinion, military-style gun purchases are a symptom. Treating the symptom while ignoring what is driving it is the conversation America keeps refusing to have.

And until these conversations occur, men will keep reaching for the most powerful thing they can hold and calling it safety. For a lot of them, in a world that does not make them feel like they count, it might be the closest thing to safety they can find.

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There is a man somewhere in a Costco parking lot right now, loading a flatbed cart into the back of an SUV, about to drive home with a pack of paper towels, a two pound bag of almonds, and a receipt for $300. And before he left the building, he stopped at the food court and ate a hot dog with a soda for $1.50. He did not think much of it. That is the point.

The Costco hot dog combo has been $1.50 since 1985. Not $1.75. Not $2.99 after a “minor adjustment due to supply chain pressures.” A price unchanged for more than four decades, through recessions, pandemics, and the kind of inflation that turned a fast food combo meal into a $15 decision you have to think about.

That price is not just a price. It is a philosophy. In 2026, it hits different.

The Numbers Do Not Add Up. That Is The Whole Point

Costco is not making money on the hot dog directly. This is textbook loss-leader pricing; sell something below cost, get people through the door, and watch them spend $300 on bulk olive oil and a 72-inch TV on the way out. The hot dog is bait, and we all know it is bait. Yet we keep taking it because the bait is delicious and costs $1.50.

But here is what separates this from a cynical marketing gimmick: they have held the price for 40 years. Other food court items have crept up. Membership fees went up in 2024. But the hot dog? The hot dog does not move.

When former CFO Richard Galanti was once asked about it, he called it “sacrosanct.” When his successor Gary Millerchip took over in 2024, one of his first public statements was reassurance that the $1.50 price is “safe.” Just recently, current CEO Ron Vachris posted a video of himself eating a Costco hot dog on Instagram with the caption: “The hot dog price will not change as long as I’m around.” That is not just a social media post. That is a vow.

"If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out." — Costco co-founder Jim Sinegal, to the CEO who suggested raising the price to $1.75

That quote is real. When CEO Craig Jelinek approached Sinegal in 2013 about raising the price because they were, in his words, "losing their rear ends", Sinegal did not want a business case. He wanted a solution that kept the price.

Costco ended up switching from Coca-Cola to Pepsi to make the math work. The hot dog stayed at $1.50. They later built their own hot dog manufacturing plants to cut supply chain costs further. This is a company that has, more than once, rearranged significant operations just to protect the hot dog price.

Why It Builds The Kind Of Loyalty Money Cannot Buy

Retail loyalty is usually manufactured. Points programs, birthday discounts, exclusive member pricing: all engineered to make you feel like a brand cares while quietly optimizing for your wallet. People see through it. They play the game, but they are not fooled.

The Costco hot dog is different because it does not ask for anything. You do not have to scan an app. You do not earn a stamp toward a free hot dog after ten purchases. You just pay $1.50 and get a quarter-pound hot dog and a soft drink with free refills.

In fiscal year 2025, Costco sold 245 million hot dog combos. This is more than every Major League Baseball stadium combined. There are t-shirts celebrating the combo. There is a book called The Joy of Costco published under the imprint “Hot Dog Press.” People have genuine feelings about this hot dog. Not because it is the best hot dog they have ever eaten, but because it keeps showing up the same way, at the same price, year after year, when nothing else does.

And membership revenue, accounting for about 64% of earnings in fiscal 2025, keep climbing. As of early 2026, Costco has 82.1 million members. The hot dog is not just a loss leader. It is part of why people renew.

The Message It Sends To Budget-Conscious Shoppers

We are living in what economists are calling a K-shaped economy. The top 20% of earners have seen real spending growth since the pandemic. Everyone below that line has essentially just kept pace with inflation. In practical terms, they are treading water.

Food away from home rose about 4.1% from December 2024 to December 2025 alone. McDonald’s extended its value deals past their original run. Wendy’s, KFC, Taco Bell — everyone is scrambling to remind lower-income customers that they are welcome. Most of those come with an expiration date.

Costco’s hot dog price does not expire.

For a budget-conscious shopper there is something quietly profound about a company that has, for 40 years, refused to shift the cost of doing business onto the people who can least afford it. Every other price going up makes the $1.50 hot dog louder. It is not advertising. It is not a statement. It is just a price that holds while the world inflates around it, and somehow that acts as the clearest statement of all.

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, put it plainly: “Saying that hot dog prices won’t rise is akin to Costco renewing its vow of providing value to the American people.” A vow. That is the word he chose. Not a strategy. A vow.

Every other price going up makes the $1.50 hot dog louder. It is not advertising. It is not a statement. It is just a price that holds. Somehow, that says everything.

What We Are Really Hungry For

I do not think the Costco hot dog is about a hot dog. I think it is also about the increasingly rare feeling that a company made a decision with mutual interests in mind, and then did not bail when it became inconvenient. We are so accustomed to being managed, optimized around, and nudged toward spending more that actual consistency reads as an act of integrity.

Jim Sinegal, the co-founder who apparently threatened bodily harm to anyone who touched the price, understood something that a lot of business thinking gets backward: trust compounds. A customer who believes you will not squeeze them becomes a member who renews automatically, brings their parents, and tells their co-workers. The $1.50 hot dog costs Costco money in the short term. It has made them billions in the long term because people remember how you made them feel when they were counting dollars.

That is not nothing. In this economy, that is almost everything.

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I use AI.

Not to write my entire essays, nor generate perspectives and introspections. I use it for something more specific and for a more practical reason. When I finish writing a piece, I often want to give readers something beyond prose. A data visualization, a pull quote formatted as a graphic. A chart to make an abstract trend more visible. These elements help support my writing and make my points land more directly.

I am a writer. Graphic composition, data visualization, and layout design are not my strengths. Never have been, never will be. AI is incredibly helpful for me in this regard. I bring the idea and the concept. I provide as much specific detail as I can, and the AI platform helps me produce a visual to bring this to life.

This is how I use AI. Apparently in some corners of the literary world this makes me a fraud.

The New Scarlet Letter

There is a growing voice among writers, academics, and self-appointed gatekeepers of creative legitimacy that AI involvement in writing is a sin. Use it and you have tainted the work. Use AI regularly and you have abandoned the craft altogether. The implication is clear: only real writers suffer for their sentences. They stare at blank pages. They delete and rewrite and delete again. They bleed onto the keyboard.

Anything less is cheating. You are a fake, an illegitimate writer. How dare you!

I understand where this comes from. The fear is not irrational. When AI can generate a good essay quickly, the anxiety about what makes human writing valuable is real. If AI can do it faster and sometimes better, what exactly are you bringing to the table?

But here is where I think the logic breaks down: it confuses the product with the process, and it assumes that suffering across every element of the work is the only valid proof of your literary talents.

It is not.

The Idea Is Still Yours

Here is what I think happens when many writers sit down to work.

There is a thought, maybe half-formed, rattling around in your mind for a few days. The writer knows what they want to say. They can feel the shape of it.

But the path from that feeling to a clean, readable piece of writing can be long and full of detours. Career, family and life get in the way. The writing needs structure. The data needs context.

Increasingly, modern readers expect more than just words; they want something to look at. A chart. An infographic. A visual anchor that makes an abstract point concrete.

I think AI can help writers translate ideas into something more real. The creative intelligence behind the writing and the graphics are the writer’s assets. The execution is assisted.

Is this fraud? Is this not legitimate? Or is that just a writer using the tools available to do the job well?

The Disability Nobody Talks About

The legitimacy debate also tends to ignore something important: not everyone who writes does so from a position of physical and cognitive ease.

Some writers have dyslexia. Some have ADHD that makes sustained composition more difficult. Others have physical conditions that make typing slow, painful, and difficult.

For these writers, I believe AI is not a shortcut. It can be a lifeline.

AI in these cases can be the accommodation that lets the idea reach the page. You would never look at a wheelchair ramp and say it delegitimizes the person who needed it to enter a store. You would never tell someone who uses voice-to-text that their words do not count because their hands were not involved.

But you are willing to tell a writer with cognitive or physical challenges that their work is suspect, because they used AI to help bridge the gap between thought and expression?

C’mon. Get real.

That is not protecting craft. Instead, this is gatekeeping and grandstanding dressed up as principle.

What Writing Is Actually For

We need to go back to basics for a second.

Why do we write? What are we actually trying to do?

We write to connect. To make someone feel less alone. We try to offer a new perspective for something already seen a hundred times.

Our goals as writers include wanting to entertain, provoke, educate, and preserve something that would otherwise disappear. Writing at its core is communication; one mind reaching across space and time to touch another.

If these are the goals, in my view the question is not how every element of a piece came together. The question is: did it land? Did it do what writing is supposed to do? Did it make someone feel something, think something, or see something differently?

If a reader finishes an essay and feels genuinely moved or challenged, do they care whether the writer used AI to generate a supporting graphic or visualize a data point? Should they care if AI helped structure a thought or idea better than the writer could achieve on their own?

They care that the words meant something. They care that their time has been spent consuming something of value.

That is the bottom line. I believe the general public is unconcerned with how you got there, only that you got there.

A writer’s obligation is to make all reasonable efforts to prepare an articulate, organized, and entertaining communication on the topic of interest. For many people, this means using tools like grammar and spell check, Google searches, and AI. Others will choose to not rely on these tools. There is no one right answer.

I think it is important for us to acknowledge and congratulate writers who put out great work. Maybe how they got there is not how you would do it. However, this does not give self-selected literary experts the license to deride someone’s work because of this difference. Let the readers be the judge.

The Honest Reckoning

With all this being said, there is room for nuance here. There is a meaningful difference between a writer who uses AI as a productivity tool, and one who inputs a title and simply publishes whatever comes out of the AI platform used. The first is a writer using assistance for their own work. The second is something closer to intellectual abdication.

If you are not bringing your ideas, perspective, and intention to the work, then the legitimacy question is worth asking. I believe we can all agree on this point.

I feel most writers who use AI are not doing that. They are using it the way a filmmaker uses editing software. Not to invent the story, but to bring it to life in a form that serves the audience. The ideas and perspectives are theirs. The argument is also their own.

The process, which may include the use of AI, supports the outcome. If the outcome is something true and worth a reader’s time, the process helped get you where you needed to go.

The Verdict

Legitimacy in writing has never really been about the tools. It has about whether the writer is genuinely trying to communicate something worth the reader’s attention.

Architects use CAD software to design beautiful and creative buildings. Musicians and their producers rely heavily on the use of mixing boards and software to enhance the voices, instruments, and sounds on songs we listen to. At every level of creative work, human beings have always used the best available tools to translate vision into something real.

AI is the newest tool on the block. A very powerful tool, but in the end it is just a tool. Its effectiveness depends on the creativity and ingenuity of people who provide the inputs, the data, the context.

Remember: Garbage in, garbage out. AI cannot produce great writing from thoughts and ideas that are poorly formed, illogical, and sloppy. AI can produce output quickly, but the quality of the output is still very dependent on a person supplying strong thoughts and direction. In the end, you are still in control of the final work.

What you do with it in terms of the ideas you bring or the judgment you apply remains entirely human.

A ghost in the machine is not writing your story.

You are.

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The box looks nearly identical on the shelf. The price is the same, maybe slightly higher. But something is off. Something has shrunk. You reach the bottom of the chips bag too soon. The burger fits in your palm a little more neatly than you remember. The once-overflowing fountain drink now leaves you eyeing the refill station before the meal is half over.

This is shrinkflation: the art of charging the same or more for less. And it has become the defining quiet tax of our time.

The Big Mac As A Mirror

For decades, the Big Mac has served an almost mythological function in economics. The Economist magazine invented the “Big Mac Index” in 1986 as a lighthearted way to measure purchasing power parity across nations. The idea was simple: a Big Mac is a Big Mac, more or less, everywhere. It was a fixed point in a fluctuating world.

Reports from food bloggers and longtime customers suggest that the modern Big Mac and Big Mac value meal is not what it once was. The burger itself has reportedly thinner patties and a slightly less amount of special sauce. The medium fry has noticeably fewer fries. And the price of a Big Mac meal can range between $11-$14, a figure that would have seemed absurd 10 years ago.

McDonald's is not the villain here so much as it is the symbol. The fast food industry, under relentless pressure from rising labor costs, food commodity prices, and supply chain disruptions that began accelerating around 2020, has found shrinkflation to be a far more palatable solution than increasing prices.

Psychologically, this makes sense. Consumers are acutely sensitive to price changes; we notice immediately when a meal costs a dollar more. We are far less attuned to the incremental loss of a few fries, a slightly thinner patty, or a slightly smaller cup.

"We notice immediately when a meal costs a dollar more. We are far less attuned to the incremental loss of a few fries. The portions shrink in the shadows while the price rises in the light."

It Is Not Just Fast Food

Walk the aisles of any major grocery store and the same logic is playing out across thousands of products. The “family size” cereal box contains fewer servings than it did three years ago. The toilet paper roll has a wider cardboard tube at its center — a quiet way to reduce sheet count without redesigning the package. Chocolate bars grow thinner.

The numbers are damning, and the mechanism is elegant in its deception. Manufacturers know that consumers anchor to price. As long as the price doesn't spike dramatically, the brain tends to assume that what it is holding is more or less the same. The package design stays familiar. The branding stays consistent. The illusion of continuity is maintained. Only the content has dwindled.

The Rage Is Legitimate, The Grief Is Real

There is something philosophically unsettling about shrinkflation beyond the economics. It is a form of dishonesty that hides inside normalcy. When a company raises its prices, there is at least an informed decision consumers can make. You can push back, switch brands, adjust habits. Shrinkflation denies you that moment. The choice is made for you, in the dark, by someone banking on the fact that you won’t notice until it’s too late.

We feel vaguely cheated, vaguely unsatisfied. Frustration and anger builds.

For families stretching a food budget, it is not philosophical at all. It is plain math. When every product quietly contains less, the weekly grocery run buys less food. The family meal stretches a little thinner.

Here Is The Uncomfortable Twist

I want to complicate the outrage in the interest of seeing the full picture.

When we examine what is being shrunk, something interesting emerges. The products most subject to shrinkflation are, in large part, foods that are not good for us. Processed foods, fast food meals, sugary cereals, salty snacks, and sweetened beverages. They are, to put it bluntly, the products nutritionists have been begging us to consume less of for decades.

"The irony is sharp and a little uncomfortable: the food system is accidentally doing what no public health campaign has managed to pull off — nudging us, through greed, toward eating less of the things that were never good for us."

A smaller Big Mac meal means slightly fewer calories, slightly less sodium and saturated fat. A bag of chips that contains fewer chips does slightly less damage. The cereal box with fewer servings might just mean fewer bowls of sugar consumed before the box runs out.

The irony is that the food system is accidentally doing what no public health campaign has fully managed: nudging us, through corporate greed, toward eating less of the things that were never good for us.

Nobody intended this as a public health intervention. The motive is pure profit. And yet the downstream effect, for those eating processed food as a significant portion of their diet, is not entirely without a silver lining.

The Limits Of That Silver Lining

We should be careful not to celebrate too loudly. A family that relies on fast food because it is the most affordable and accessible option in their neighborhood is not well-served by paying more for less. The nutrition argument only holds if one has the luxury of simply eating something else. However, that luxury is not equally distributed.

Second, the same shrinkflation logic is being applied to goods that have nothing to do with junk food: cleaning products, personal care items, paper goods, staple foods. There is no silver lining to a smaller bottle of dish soap. There is no hidden health benefit to fewer servings of canned beans. The phenomenon has spread well beyond the snack aisle.

Third, as consumers we deserve transparency. We deserve to know what we are buying and at what price. Shrinkflation survives on opacity, on the quiet hope that we won’t look too closely. That is a form of contempt dressed up as commerce.

What We Owe Ourselves

As consumers we should demand that we see clearly, even when what we see is inconvenient. Shrinkflation is real, it is widespread, and it deserves our attention and our frustration. However, we need to examine the topic with some nuance, the willingness to look at the issue with complexity rather than simple outrage.

The Big Mac meal is smaller. We are paying more for it. And we might benefit from eating it less. All three things are true at once. The corporations did not shrink those portions out of concern for our health. Our health may nonetheless have something to gain from pausing before we demand the old portion sizes back.

What we should demand, and loudly, is transparency. Unit pricing on every shelf. Clear disclosure when package sizes change. An end to subtle package redesigns meant to disguise less as the same. Not because we need to eat more chips, but because we deserve to know what we are getting for what we are paying.

The shrinking Big Mac meal is a symptom of an economy that has learned to take from us in ways too small to trigger alarm. The antidote is not outrage for outrage's sake. It is attention. It is the refusal to be quietly diminished. It is, in the most literal sense, knowing what you are actually holding in your hand. Then deciding for yourself whether it's enough.

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I have binged Narcos on a Sunday afternoon, following Pablo Escobar’s rise with something that I can only describe as fascination. I am not someone who grew up in that world, who lost people to it, or who would last five minutes in it. So the question that stays with me is: why does it pull?

The easy answer is the aesthetics. The music, the fashion, the swagger. But I think the real answer runs deeper, and it has less to do with them and more to do with us.

On The Surface: It Is Genuinely Compelling

Gang culture portrayed through music, television, and social media has produced some of the more gripping storytelling and aesthetics of the last fifty years.

Think about what we have consumed. Narcos and Narcos: Mexico turned the Medellín Cartel and Guadalajara Cartel into must-watch TV, where millions of viewers follow Escobar and Felix Gallardo with fascination and adulation. Snowfall traced the crack epidemic through Los Angeles in the 1980s, the same era that birthed the Bloods and Crips gangs. More recently, BMF dramatized the Black Mafia Family’s rise from Detroit streets to national drug empire, and audiences showed up in force.

The music has been just as pervasive. West Coast gangsta rap from Snoop, Dre, and Tupac was inseparable from Crip and Blood culture when it emerged. The red and blue, the hand signs, the rivalries: all of it seeped into mainstream culture through lyrics and music videos long before most listeners had any idea what they were actually watching.

It is not just street gangs that carry this allure. Biker culture led by groups like the Hells Angels and Bandidos has generated its own mythology. The patches, the roar of Harleys on the highway; bikers offer a cultural imagination that is not different from the street gangs.

There is craft in it. There is originality and an authenticity that a lot of mainstream culture cannot match. When someone like Tupac, Jay-Z or Kendrick Lamar describes their world in lyrics, it does not feel like entertainment. It feels like a deep insight into their life.

So part of what draws us in is simply that it is good entertainment. That is not complicated.

There is a version of the gang fantasy that is not really about gangs at all. It is about filling in what is missing in our own lives.

Then There Is The Other Thing

I think a lot of us who enjoy a suburban, comfortable, safe life are not just fans of the art. We are drawn to something gang life seems to represent. This something is made up of a few specific things.

Belonging. Not the polite or networking kind. It is the kind of belonging where people would take a bullet for you. The kind where your crew is your crew, no conditions attached. Most of us have friends we would call if things got bad. Very few of us have people who would show up at two in the morning with no questions. That bond looks like something we have never been offered and would not know how to build.

Power and influence. In a gang, your status is visible and immediate. Your reputation precedes you. When you walk into a room, people know who you are. Compare that to most of our working lives , where influence is slow, political, and often minimal. The street hierarchy is brutal, but at least you know where you stand. A lot of us spend entire careers not knowing that.

Wealth. The cash, the cars, the bling. Yes, there is conspicuous consumption in it. But underneath that is something we do not say out loud: the fantasy of money that came from you, not from a salary someone else set. Self-made wealth, outside the rules of a system that many people feel has excluded or undervalued them.

The Mirror We Do Not Want To Look At

When I put the belonging, power, and wealth together I notice they are not exotic desires. They are basic desires and what most people want from their lives. I feel the uncomfortable implication is that a lot of us are drawn to gang culture not because it is foreign to us. We are attracted to gang life because it seems to offer, in concentrated and visible form, things we quietly feel we are missing.

This is a harder story to tell than “it is the music.” Because it means the fascination is not really about gang culture on its own. Instead, it is about a gap we identified in ourselves and have not figured out how to close.

We live in a time when community has thinned. The social structures that used to give people a sense of place like church, neighborhood, and extended family have weakened or fragmented. We are more connected than any generation in history and, by many measures, more lonely. Into that gap rushes the image of people who seem completely, unambiguously embedded in a world that knows them.

When you are not sure who would show up for you, that image hits differently.

Glamour Is Always A Displacement

Glamour works by promising you an escape from your own limitations. The movie star does not just look beautiful; they look free from the anxieties that follow you around. The athlete does not just perform; they look fully in control of an outcome, which is something most of us rarely feel.

Gang culture glamour operates the same way. It does not just offer a look. It offers a fantasy of being completely known, completely loyal to and protected by your people, and completely outside a system you never trusted in the first place.

That last part is worth noting. A lot of the people most drawn to this image are not just craving belonging in the abstract. They are craving a version of respect and power that does not require the approval of institutions that have historically ignored or failed them. The gang, in the cultural image at least, plays by its own rules. That is not just appealing; for some people, it is the answer to a direct wound.

What Do We Do With This?

I will not end this article with a tidy takeaway about building better communities or practicing more vulnerability with your friends. That would be true, but it would also be the kind of advice that sounds dismissive and trite.

However, the fascination is worth taking seriously. Not as something to be embarrassed about, but as a signal. If you find yourself drawn to the image, it is worth examining what that points to in your own life. Not to judge it. Just to see it clearly.

Often the things we glamorize most are the things we feel most deprived of. That deprivation, if we can name it, is a place to start.

The streets did not create that longing. They just found a way to make it look cool.

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In my Substack article The Silence We Choose, I examined the topic of ghosting: the clean, if brutal, disappearance of people. Someone is there, and then they are not. The silence is devastating, but at least it has the decency to be a complete sentence. You grieve. You process. Eventually, you move on.

Breadcrumbing is a different animal entirely. Breadcrumbing does not leave, it lingers. Someone who breadcrumbs sends a message at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday just to remind you she/he exists, then goes quiet for days or weeks. It is not silence. It is noise carefully calibrated to keep you locked in.

If ghosting is a door slamming shut, breadcrumbing is a door left perpetually ajar. A door never open enough to enter, never closed enough to walk away from. In that gap, people lose months. Sometimes years.

This is what makes breadcrumbing, in some ways, more harmful than ghosting. With ghosting, there is a one-time wound. With breadcrumbing, the wound is periodically reopened just often enough that it never fully heals, and just infrequently enough that you start to wonder if you are being too sensitive for even noticing.

What The Breadcrumber Is Really Doing

I want to resist the easy answer, which is that breadcrumbers are simply selfish. Some are. But the behavior is more psychologically nuanced than that, and understanding it is the first step toward either addressing it or leaving it behind.

At its core, breadcrumbing is a strategy of option preservation. The breadcrumber is unwilling to commit, not necessarily because they do not care about you, but because committing to you means closing a door on something else. That something else might be another person, a version of themselves they have not figured out yet, or the comfort of keeping all options open.

They are not stringing you along out of malice. They are stringing you along out of cowardice. Sometimes, they do not even know the difference.

There is also a validation dimension. Every time you like their message or return their intermittent warmth, they receive confirmation that they are desirable or wanted. You are not a priority. You are a mirror. Mirrors are useful precisely because they reflect without demanding anything in return.

Fear of confrontation plays a role too. Many breadcrumbers know, on some level, that they are not offering what the other person deserves. But ending things cleanly requires a difficult conversation. Difficult conversations carry the risk of conflict, guilt, and the loss of validation they have been quietly feeding on. A well-timed “hey, been thinking about you” is much easier than “I need to be honest about where I stand.”

Breadcrumbing often lives at the intersection of avoidant attachment, low emotional accountability, and the fear of missing out. The crumbs are not generosity. They are a hedge.

What The Breadcrumbed Person Is Really Accepting

Here is the harder conversation, the one that requires us to look inward rather than outward.

Breadcrumbing only works if someone keeps picking up the crumbs. The question I want to examine is: why do people let this happen? The answer is rarely simple, and it is never something to be ashamed of. However, I think the answer is something to think hard about.

Often, it begins with hope. The first disappearance is explained away. The intermittent contact is rationalized; they are busy, they have a complicated life. People are good at building full narratives out of partial evidence. Someone who sends occasional warmth gives us just enough material to work with. The mind, desperate for consistency, fills in the rest.

People do not accept breadcrumbs because they are weak. They accept them because somewhere, they decided that a little is better than nothing. That belief is the thing worth examining.

Beneath that hope, there is often an older wound. People who have been taught by early relationships or experience that they are not worth full attention. They have been told that love is earned through patience, or that needing more is asking too much.

Breadcrumbing fits a familiar template. It feels like love because it replicates the anxious hope of waiting for something that never quite arrives.

There is also the sunk cost effect. You have invested time, emotion, and optimism into this person. Accepting that the return on investment is breadcrumbs and not a relationship means acknowledging that the investment may have been misplaced. That is a loss no one is eager to sit with. So people keep going.

None of this is weakness. All of it is human. But the moment you can name the hope, wounds, and sunk cost is the moment breadcrumbing loses a little of its grip.

How Both Sides Break The Cycle

The elephant in the room is that breadcrumbing is a two-person dynamic. It continues because one person keeps leaving crumbs and another keeps following the trail. Both sides have work to do.

For the breadcrumber: The starting point is true honesty. Honesty not with the other person first, but with yourself. Ask the question you have been avoiding: Am I willing to show up for this person the way they deserve, or am I keeping them around because it benefits me? If the answer is the latter, the kindest thing you can do is say so. Not with a “let’s keep it casual” that you know they will interpret as hope.

Say it with a direct, clear, and respectful conversation. You will lose the validation. You will feel the discomfort of that conversation. However, you will stop being the kind of person who takes from others but is not willing to give back. That is worth something.

Confronting your own avoidance is not comfortable. But integrity is built in these moments when you choose honesty over convenience, even when no one is forcing you to.

For the person being breadcrumbed: The work is in retraining what you accept as enough. This begins with observation rather than confrontation. Track the pattern, not just the moments. Does this person show up consistently, or only when the silence becomes long enough to be noticed? Is this situation progressing, or cycling? Once you see the pattern clearly, you can name it first to yourself and to the other person.

Setting a standard does not mean issuing an ultimatum. I believe it means clearly stating what you need and allowing the other person’s response to tell you everything. “I have noticed we tend to connect in bursts and then go quiet for long stretches. I am looking for something more consistent. Where do you see this going?”

Their response, whether in words or in the silence that follows, is your answer.

Sometimes the work is simply in walking away. Not dramatically, but with clarity. The trail of crumbs does not lead anywhere. It is designed not to. You can put them down and choose a different direction.

The Slow Drip And What It Costs

Ghosting leaves a scar. Breadcrumbing leaves something subtler and, in some ways, more insidious: it leaves doubt. Doubt about your own perception, your own worth, your own judgment. You were never abandoned: you were kept. Just not enough. And it is much harder to grieve something that technically never ended.

What breadcrumbing ultimately costs both parties is the same thing: honesty. The breadcrumber avoids it. The breadcrumbed person keeps hoping it will arrive on its own. Neither gets what they actually want, because genuine connection cannot survive on a diet of sporadic texts and half-intentions.

Most of us have, at one point, been on both sides of this dynamic: leaving crumbs when we should have been upfront, or following a trail we knew, deep down, was leading nowhere.

The crumbs will always be there. The question is whether you keep following them.

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There is a particular kind of hope that only exists before the result comes in. It lives in the six hours you spend standing in a parking lot at 4 a.m. holding a number card, and waiting to sing in front of a stranger who might change your life. American Idol understands that hope better than any show in television history.

When American Idol premiered on Fox in June 2002, it was not expected to become a cultural institution. The show was a version of the British show Pop Idol and slotted into a summer schedule with modest ambitions. Within weeks, it had rewritten what prime-time television could be.

By Season 2, the show was drawing over 20 million viewers a week. By Season 5, the finale was watched by 36 million viewers. For context, that is roughly the population of California watching a twenty-year-old from a small town hit a high note and cry.

Why It Works

I think the genius of American Idol is that it does not just give you a winner. It gives you a journey: auditions, Hollywood Week, the live rounds, and the eliminations. Each stage is cleverly designed to build attachment. You watch people fail in spectacular fashion during auditions. Then you watch someone genuinely talented emerge from the auditions, and you feel something closer to awe.

The original judges completed the show in a way nobody has quite replicated since. Simon Cowell’s calculated cruelty gave the show its teeth. Paula Abdul’s warmth gave it its heart. Randy Jackson gave it the vernacular — “dawg,” “pitchy,” “in it to win it” — that hung around for a decade.

"The show does not sell you a star. It sells you the idea that the star could be you"

Then there is the voting. Tens of millions of text and phone votes per episode turn passive viewers into invested stakeholders. You have skin in the game. When your pick goes home, it feels personal. That participatory hook was novel in 2002. Now it is the template for almost everything.

The Empire It Built

It is nearly impossible to overstate how thoroughly American Idol reshaped the television landscape. The success it demonstrated was studied and replicated by every major network within a few years.

The Voice, America’s Got Talent, The X Factor, So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing with the Stars all became hit shows because of American Idol. The influence extended beyond music and performance.

Top Chef, Project Runway, and The Apprentice replicated the contestant elimination format and the audience as judge dynamic. The DNA is everywhere. The next time you watch a cooking competition where a chef weeps over a poorly executed soufflé, you are watching American Idol‘s grandchild.

The alumni tell the story. Kelly Clarkson, Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and Adam Lambert. They built sustained careers post-Idol. Clarkson became a daytime television host after a very successful singing career. Underwood is among the best-selling country artists alive. Hudson won an Oscar. Lambert became the lead singer for Queen. The show’s argument that real, lasting talent could be found this way had merit.

The Dream And The Math

Here is where it gets interesting, and where Idol becomes intriguing as a cultural object rather than just a successful one.

The audition lines that snake around convention centers in cities like Louisville and New Orleans are filled with people who genuinely believe. Not all of them are delusional. Many have real talent. Some have been told their whole lives that they were special, their voice was unique, and all they needed was a stage. American Idol hands them this stage and says: come prove it.

What it does not say loudly enough is what the numbers mean. This season a few hundred make it to the filmed rounds. A total of 127 contestants made it to Hollywood Week. Only 30 to the Ohana round. One winner.

The funnel is brutal in a way the broadcast never lingers on; lingering on it would break the spell. The audition failure montages are often played for laughs, not as a sober accounting of odds. The message underneath is always: but what if you are the one?

The question “but what if you are the one?” is one of the most powerful and most dangerous things a culture can ask of ordinary people.

What We Are Really Watching

However, I do not think the show is cynical in any way. I am not sure the people in those lines are foolish in any simple way either. There is value in the act of showing up and trying. I think it is courageous to stand in a parking lot at 4 a.m. not because the odds favor you, but because you could not live with yourself if you didn’t.

What American Idol offers those people is not a realistic path to fame. It offers them a story about themselves. A moment in which they are someone who has gone for it, and sang in front of the judges. They tried. That story has worth regardless of the outcome.

Pop culture does not exist separately from the values a society holds about itself. American Idol arrived at a particular American moment: post-9/11, pre-social media, and told a story the US was hungry to hear. The show weaved the narrative that talent rises. That ordinary people can become stars. That the system, if you’re good enough and brave enough, will recognize you.

We still watch American Idol because we want to believe that is true. Some part of us always will.

Now airing on ABC, American Idol is in its 24th season. The ratings are modest compared to the peak years, because nothing competes with a 2006 Idol in a world before streaming fragmented every audience into a hundred smaller ones. But the audition lines are still there. People still show up. They still hold their number cards. They still sing.

The dream, it turns out, is remarkably durable. It outlasts the math every time.

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There are songs you listen to, and then there are songs that take you back to a moment in time. For me, “You Give Good Love” by Whitney Houston is that song. The moment the song begins, I am twenty years old again.

Jill is sitting with me in the campus cafeteria at UBC, laughing at something I said. We dated in university, she was my first real girlfriend. Jill was warm and caring, and so good at making me feel like I was the most interesting person in the room.

“You Give Good Love” was the debut single from 23-year-old Whitney Houston, announcing herself to the world with a composure that many singers spend a career trying to find. But that is the thing about Whitney Houston: she was not working up to greatness. She arrived with it fully formed.

“You Give Good Love” was the debut single from 23-year-old Whitney Houston, announcing herself to the world with a composure that many singers spend a career trying to find

What Made Her Different

No doubt Whitney was The Voice for technical reasons attributed to vocal training from her mother Cissy and cousin Dionne Warwick. But it doesn’t fully explain what Whitney did to you when she sang.

The difference for me was her emotional precision. She did not just hit the notes; she knew exactly which emotional gear each note required, and she shifted accordingly.

Listen to the bridge on “I Will Always Love You”. Other singers who have attempted that song can hit the technical marks. What they cannot replicate is the specific quality of grief and grace that Whitney poured into it. The restraint before the explosion. The held breath before the release. You can learn the notes. You cannot learn that.

In my opinion Whitney Houston was also an extraordinarily intelligent interpreter of a lyric. Whitney did not just sing songs. She understood what a song was about on a level beneath the words. That is a rare gift and is what separates singers from artists.

The Gold Standard

When we evaluate the great female singers of the modern era, we measure them against Whitney Houston. Not consciously, maybe. But the question is always there, underneath the praise. Yes, but is she Whitney?

Mariah Carey has a range that is one of the most impressive in music history. Yet Mariah herself has acknowledged the debt owed to Whitney Houston.

Celine Dion has the kind of voice that fills arenas and sells out Vegas residencies and reduces grown adults to tears on command.

Adele resurrected love ballads for a generation that had largely given up on them, and did so with a rawness and emotional honesty that felt genuinely new.

Beyoncé has turned performance into something closer to a total sensory experience, redefining what a pop artist can be in the twenty-first century.

All of them are extraordinary.

None of them are Whitney.

That is not a slight; it is simply an acknowledgment of what she established. She set a ceiling so high that even the most gifted vocalists of the past thirty years have spent their careers in its shadow, and I have a feeling most of them would tell you so themselves.

The Privilege Of Watching Her At Her Peak

Watching Whitney Houston perform at her peak was a privilege that only reveals its full weight in retrospect.

The 1994 American Music Awards. The 1991 Super Bowl US national anthem is still, by wide consensus, the greatest rendition ever performed. She delivered the anthem with a joy and effortlessness that made the impossible look casual.

The Bodyguard soundtrack sold over 45 million copies. Those of us who were present for that — who heard “I Will Always Love You” for the first time on the radio and just stopped what we were doing — we carry that in us. It was that kind of voice.

There were moments watching her perform where you could feel the audience collectively processing the fact that they were witnessing something that would not come again. She left audiences suspended, speechless.

Bobby, And The Grief Of Watching Her Unravel

Sadly, there is the other story. The one that ran parallel to all of that brilliance, quietly at first, then catastrophically.

Whitney Houston married Bobby Brown in 1992. What followed was one of the most publicly documented and privately devastating declines in pop music history. There is a part of me that wants to assign all the blame to Bobby. He was certainly not a positive influence. However the truth is more complicated and heartbreaking.

Whitney had her own vulnerabilities and demons, and a complicated relationship with the pressure of superstardom. Bobby did not create this. He just arrived at exactly the wrong moment to make them much worse.

What I remember is watching her on television in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and feeling a kind of dread. The interviews where something seemed off. The performances where the voice that had once been indestructible was showing cracks. The decline was not because it had aged naturally, but because it had been damaged.

There is a particular grief attached to watching someone squander a gift that was never really theirs alone. That voice belonged, in some larger sense, to all of us who had ever been moved by it. And we were watching it disappear in real time.

“There is a particular grief attached to watching someone squander a gift that was never really theirs alone. That voice belonged, in some larger sense, to all of us who had ever been moved by it.”

Whitney Houston died in February 2012, in a hotel bathtub in Beverly Hills, the night before the Grammy Awards. She was 48. The world stopped for a day, the way it only does for the genuinely irreplaceable.

I watched her funeral service at home. When Kevin Costner stepped up to deliver his eulogy, I cried in a way I had not cried in a long time. He spoke about her with such tenderness and such specific love, as her friend and her co-star. You could feel that he was one of the few people in that room who had known her in a way the outside world did not.

He talked about her insecurities and her humanity, the girl beneath the voice. That made it all so much worse, and so much more real. It reminded you that Whitney Houston was not a monument. She was a person. A person who had been loved, and lost, and was now gone far too soon.

I was not expecting to fall apart. But I did. I think a lot of us did.

What “You Give Good Love” Does To Me

I have not spoken to Jill in a very long time. After we broke up, we went our separate ways and lost touch. But I will always be reminded of her when I listen to “You Give Good Love” .

Every time I hear the song, I go back to the time I was 20. The cafeteria. The laugh. The walk after English class to the parking lot. The feeling that something special was happening. The feeling that someone actually cared for me.

The Voice. Whitney Houston.

A category of one.

If Whitney's voice ever stopped you in your tracks, you already know everything I am trying to say. That is the thing about great art; it does not need explaining. It just needs to be felt.

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The serious relationships in my life have been with white women. I am Chinese- Canadian, born into one world and raised straddling two. I say this not as a confession, nor a boast, but simply as a fact that I have spent time thinking about. When you occupy this intersection, the personal becomes sociological as well.

People have opinions. Sometimes those opinions live in a sideways glance, or even a full on stare at a restaurant. They can arrive as a well-meaning question from a family member that lands like a small stone thrown into still water. And sometimes they live inside you, as a low hum of self-interrogation you cannot quite turn off.

Interracial relationships have never been more visible, yet they remain one of the more loaded topics a person can navigate. We have made enough social progress to celebrate them in principle, but not quite enough to stop commenting on them in practice. I want to provide my perspective on interracial relationships in a real and direct manner.

The Fetish Question Nobody Wants To Ask

There is a version of interracial attraction that is, to put it bluntly, about fetishes and projection. A set of fantasies borrowed from stereotypes and pop culture. It happens and is worth naming. Yellow fever. Jungle fever. “Once you go black, you never go back”. The vocabulary is ugly because the dynamic it describes is ugly.

Chinese people dating a white person can become acquainted with a quieter version of this discomfort: the occasional thought that you might be someone’s “type” for the wrong reasons. That your features, your background, your perceived cultural identity are doing more romantic work than you are. It is a strange thing to sit with; the notion you are being loved as a category and not as a unique and interesting person.

The reduction of a person to their ethnicity is real, it happens, and it is worth naming. But so is the much more common truth: that people fall in love with people.

However I believe fetishization, for all the attention it deserves, is not the whole story or even most of it. The more common truth is simply that people fall in love with people. We fall in love for so many reasons that have nothing to do with anybody's ethnicity. To treat every interracial relationship as a puzzle that must be decoded for hidden motives is its own kind of reductionism.

What Society Sees (Whether You Asked or Not)

In my experience, there is no such thing as a private interracial relationship. The moment you step outside, you are a statement. You are on stage. Your children are looked at differently. People categorize you and form opinions about what your relationship means.

In Canada, we pride ourselves on multiculturalism, and rightly so. The tolerance is largely genuine. Yet tolerance is a lower bar than acceptance, and acceptance a lower bar than indifference — the kind of blessed, unremarkable indifference that is the true mark of a society that has stopped keeping score. We are not fully there yet from my perspective.

Asian males in particular occupy a curious position in Western romantic culture. Pop culture has not historically been kind to us. For decades, the stereotype was either the math nerd or the martial arts expert. Rarely the romantic lead, rarely the one who gets the girl. These images seep into our culture. They shape expectations.

The Gifts, Because There Are Genuine Gifts

There is something extraordinary about building intimacy across genuine difference. It is the actual daily work of navigating two different relationships with food, language, celebration and grief.

Being with a white partner has taught me things about how they navigate issues that I could not have learned any other way. And I like to think I have offered something in return; a window into a perspective shaped by a very different set of circumstances.

There is a particular quality of attention that interracial love demands. You cannot take for granted that your frame of reference is shared. You have to ask, explain, and remain curious when it would be easier to assume.

That curiosity becomes a kind of intimacy. You see each other more clearly because you cannot lean on the comfort that comes from shared cultural backgrounds. In this way, the very thing that makes interracial relationships harder can also make them richer.

The Table You Both Have To Sit At

Then there is family! Family, in my experience, is where the abstract becomes very concrete very quickly.

Chinese families carry their own complicated relationship with the idea of marrying “within.” There is a generational weight to it. The sense is that to love outside the community is to drift from it, to risk the dilution of something precious and hard-won.

This is not always stated directly. It lives in questions about where she is from, in a particular pause before congratulations, in the slow warmth that takes years to fully arrive.

White families can carry a different but equally complicated set of assumptions. The progressive ones may have made their peace with it intellectually long before they had to make their peace with it at Christmas. The less progressive ones may say very little out loud, while communicating everything with body language.

What I have found is that families are usually better than their first instincts. Given time, most families arrive somewhere good. Not all. But most. Love, it turns out, is fairly persuasive.

The Person, Not The Parable

The moments that have mattered most in my relationships had nothing to do with race. They have been about whether someone made me feel seen, whether we laughed at the same things, or whether we shared tender feelings for each other. Love, in my experience, is not cultural. Love is human.

But to pretend race does not exist in the background is unrealistic. The backdrop is real. The context is real. We carry it into our relationships whether or not we name it.

The work, I think, is to understand and accept both of these truths at once. You can see it. You can acknowledge the weight of it. And you can choose, with eyes open, to walk toward each other anyway.

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There is an unwritten code in rap and hip-hop music. Not a rulebook anyone hands you. Instead, it is more like a shared understanding that kept the competitive fire of hip-hop from burning everything down. You could battle rap. You could diss. You could go hard.

The code said: leave children out of it, do not weaponize allegations you cannot prove, or turn a rap beef into a public prosecution. Talk your talk about someone’s music, or their personality. However in the end it is competition, not destruction.

The code was not perfect, but it was there.

The Kendrick Lamar and Drake feud broke the code, and then stood in the wreckage asking the crowd to cheer. The crowd delivered.

How We Got Here

The tension went back to 2013. Kendrick dropped a verse on Big Sean’s “Control” declaring he was gunning to “murder” every rapper on his list, Drake included. Drake waved it off publicly. Low heat. Mostly forgotten.

What lit the fuse in 2024 was Lamar rejecting the idea that he, Drake, and J. Cole were hip-hop’s “Big Three.” His message: it wasn’t a tie. It was just him. Drake responded with “Push Ups” which mocked Kendrick’s height and pop collaborations. Drake followed up with “Taylor Made Freestyle,” using an AI-generated voice of Tupac Shakur to taunt Kendrick for not firing back fast enough. Tupac’s estate issued a cease and desist.

That should have been a signal things were going downhill fast.

What followed was six weeks of rapid escalation. Kendrick released “Euphoria” (a six-minute character assault), “6:16 in LA” (alleging Drake’s inner circle was against him), “Meet the Grahams” (a letter addressed to Drake’s family), and “Not Like Us” (the song that ended the war).

Drake countered with “Family Matters” and “The Heart Part 6.” Seventeen tracks in total. People chose sides and watched two of the biggest names in rap try to destroy each other.

What The Code Was Actually Protecting

People romanticize rap beefs. They point to Biggie and Tupac, Jay-Z and Nas, Pusha T and Drake himself. These were jousts between men testing each other’s skill. And there is something genuinely compelling about a well-constructed diss track. The wordplay, the timing, the ability to land a line the whole culture feels at once; that is real craft.

The code wasn't about protecting feelings. It was about keeping the game a game and not becoming a demolition derby .

When you drag children into a public beef, they do not get a vote. When you make serious accusations in a song that racks up hundreds of millions of plays, you have made a courthouse of the internet. In that courthouse, there is no due process, no standard of proof. Just the court of public opinion, which has never been known for its fairness.

Drake’s Part In This

I am a Drake fan. But in the interest of trying to be as objective as possible, being a fan does not mean being blind.

Drake is one of the most gifted artists of his generation. I have enjoyed his music for years. But in “Family Matters,” he alleged that one of Kendrick’s children was fathered by his manager Dave Free, accused Kendrick of abusing his partner Whitney Alford, and mocked his height and activist credibility. He also used an AI-generated voice of Tupac Shakur in “Taylor Made Freestyle” to taunt Kendrick, a move so disrespectful that Tupac’s estate issued a formal cease and desist.

These were not competitive jabs. They were allegations about a man’s fidelity, his parenting, and his partner. You cannot un-hear these once they are in a song with hundreds of millions of streams.

Watching an artist lose publicly is one thing. Watching them fight in a way that embarrasses what you respect about them is something else. That is where I lost some respect for Drake. Not because he lost, but because of what he was willing to do.

Kendrick’s Part In This

Then there is Kendrick Lamar, the man the internet crowned the winner of the feud.

Lyrically, he landed harder. But the weapon that ended it was not just a diss track. It was a cultural event disguised as one.

Before “Not Like Us,” Kendrick released “Meet the Grahams”, addressed directly to Drake’s family members: his mother, his son Adonis, and an alleged secret daughter. He described Drake as a deadbeat and a predator.

“Not Like Us” dropped May 4, 2024, and it moved differently from everything that came before it. The song had a bounce to it. A chant. It was designed to be performed, not just heard.

The accusation at its core was that Drake was a pedophile, a “certified” one. This was delivered with the energy of a festival crowd.

That is what made it dangerous. It made a serious allegation feel like a celebration. People were not just listening, they were dancing to it.

The cover art placed a map pin over Drake’s Toronto mansion as if it were listed on a sex offender registry. After its release, fans tagged that exact address on Google Maps the same way.

None of the allegations were proven. Drake’s own defamation lawsuit against his label was eventually dismissed, with the judge noting that a rap battle’s “incendiary language” would not lead a reasonable listener to treat the song as verifiable fact. But by then, the damage was done. The song had already become a cultural verdict.

Then came the Super Bowl.

February 2025. Kendrick Lamar performing the halftime show at Super Bowl LIX. He performed “Not Like Us.” in front of an estimated 130 million people. He had Serena Williams, Drake’s former love interest, on the stage dancing during the song. He performed the song that called his rival a pedophile on the largest stage in entertainment, just to make sure everyone understood who won. The crowd sang every word.

The Super Bowl wasn't a victory lap. It was an execution broadcast to 130 million people, choreographed for maximum humiliation.

The thing about "Not Like Us" and the Super Bowl performance together was that this was not just rap combat. It was a deliberate campaign to permanently attach an allegation to a person's name.

It worked. Ask anyone what they know or think about Drake, and that allegation is now part of the answer. That is not artistry. That is a reputation destroyed in public, with an audience of hundreds of millions cheering it on.

The Fans: The Part Nobody Wants To Examine

Here is the part that implicates all of us, the fans.

We love examining what the artists did wrong. It is easy to point at Drake or Kendrick Lamar and talk about where they crossed the line. But the fans were involved taking sides, cheering on their favorite and hoping and cheering the next insult, the next allegation. We were involved in the escalation; every click, stream and social media post was a signal to the music industry that this was what we wanted.

Hip-hop has always had a complicated relationship with its audience. The genre has celebrated authenticity, pain, struggle, and violence. There is a conversation to be had about what hip-hop has asked fans to consume, and what fans have been willing to consume. This feud did not start that conversation, but I think it made it impossible to ignore.

There is something worth asking yourself if you were swept up in it: what exactly were you cheering for? The artistry of the songs? Some of it, sure. However, we need to be honest with ourselves. Many of us were also cheering for the destruction. The humiliation. The moment when the other guy’s reputation got destroyed.

We wanted someone to lose, badly. We got it. And we called it culture.

What We Actually Lost

The code was never perfect. The code was built for a different era. The internet dismantled it before anyone realized what was happening.

What we lost is not just a set of unwritten rules. We lost the shared agreement that certain things matter more than winning. That accusations are not verdicts. That a song or a halftime show can be brilliant and wrong at the same time.

This is what I am sitting with. Not who won. Not who had the better lyrics. But what it means when the people at the top of their craft will burn everything down just to be the last one standing. Also, what it means that the music industry and fans handed them the matches and cheered the show.

I do not think we should expect an artist to be a saint. But we should expect them to know where the line is. Watching this, I'm not sure either of them did.

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