Ran Prieur

January 8.

2026-01-08T20:40:42Z

January 8. Psychology links, starting with an archive of a clickbaity piece, The One Thing That Child Therapists Say Harms Kids' Happiness The Most: parents wanting their kids to be happy all the time, instead of letting them feel the full range of emotions.

Related: Happiness maximization appears to be a culturally specific preference. "The data suggests that for a large portion of the world's population, other values compete with or supersede the desire for personal happiness. These alternative values might include social harmony, family duty, or the ability to withstand hardship." If you think the meaning of life is to be happy, and things go wrong, then you're double-unhappy because your life is also meaningless. But if you think the meaning of life is to withstand hardship, and things go wrong, then you're not "happy" happy, but your life is still meaningful.

Related: Brain scans reveal an emotional advantage for modest people:

Modest individuals tend to view themselves as a single part of a larger world. They recognize the value and contributions of others and do not remain hyper-focused on their own status. The researchers hypothesized that this trait might allow for a "double win" in emotion regulation. They predicted that modest people would experience fewer negative emotions during rejection but would still experience strong positive emotions during acceptance.

One more from PsyPost: Data from 6 million couples reveals a surprising trend in how we pick our partners. Of course it's completely unsurprising. People are picking partners who share the same psychiatric diagnosis, because that's a big part of identity now.

Finally, a fascinating piece about mind-body practice, Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle. The idea is, your body has two kinds of muscles. Skeletal muscles are under conscious control, and are either tensed or relaxed. But smooth muscles are not under conscious control, and have a third state, called "latched", a kind of tensing that requires little or no energy:

Latches can persist for minutes, hours, days, months, or years, and the sum total of all latches likely accounts for the majority of bodily suffering. If you are "holding tension in your body" you are subject to the mechanics of the latch-bridge mechanism. Migraines and cluster headaches are almost certainly inappropriate VSMC latches; all hollow organs are surrounded by smooth muscle and can latch.

Long-term latching is still unproven, but the Hacker News thread has a lot of stuff about meditation techniques for deep relaxation. Personally, I get a lot of help from cannabis -- not that it automatically relaxes me, but if I lie down in silent darkness when I'm high, I discover that silent darkness is a zoo. There are all kinds of subtle things going on that become obvious. People say that drugs interfere with meditation, and it's true that it's harder for me to still my mind, but I'm a lot more motivated to try to still my mind, and a lot more aware of what's going on under the surface.

January 5.

2026-01-05T17:10:31Z

January 5. Three more Reddit links. Great thread for schadenfreude, Do you know anyone who actually left their country to get away from what they saw as 'wokeness', and if so, how did that turn out?

A well-informed comment about the many reasons alcohol consumption is declining in the USA.

And from the Seattle subreddit, a smart comment about the two kinds of homeless people. I would say it like this. You've got your high-functioning homeless, who would thrive in a society that was built for the needs of humans rather than the desires of billionaires. They're living in cars or on couches and mostly invisible. Attempts to help these people are hindered by the "homeless problem": mentally ill drug addicts who need to be in the institutions that were shut down in the 1980s.

January 4.

2026-01-04T16:00:34Z

January 4. Everything I have to say about Venezuela is either completely obvious or completely speculative. But here's a good Reddit comment by an Iraq war veteran, about the absurdity of America "running" Venezuela:

When a government collapses by force, power doesn't disappear; it breaks apart, security services fracture, criminal networks step forward, and armed insurgent groups fill gaps and wrap themselves in the language of liberation.... Removing Maduro doesn't automatically rebuild institutions, restore trust, or feed people. It creates a power vacuum in a country already hollowed out by corruption, sanctions, and scarcity.

January 2, 2026.

2026-01-02T14:40:56Z

January 2, 2026. The year that just ended was the worst year ever for the American federal government, and this video is a good summary, What This Year Looks Like to a Historian. I would say it like this: In 1980, the economic right wing took over America and has been ruling it ever since. Even Clinton squeezed the poor and enriched big business. Inevitably, some of the rich got so insane with power that they fell under the spell of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, who believed that raw power works better than the rule of law. They got their guy elected president, and with control of congress, he could have passed laws for many of his policies, but that's not his style. He just did it through illegal executive actions that nobody stopped on the top level. But on the level of states and cities and lower courts, there were a lot of actions to slow him down, and now the biggest power trippers are on the brink of losing power, which makes them more dangerous than ever. 2026 is going to be scary, but I think whatever happens, we will be in full recovery mode by 2030.

For me personally, 2025 was great. I wrote the novel I wanted to read, I made my best playlist, and I put a lot more attention on my body, leading to cleaner walking and less clumsiness. In 2026 I plan to practice the pointing and calling method to stop forgetting where I put stuff down, and also work on cleaning up my emotions. The best psychological insight I got in 2025 was oddly from a near-death experience book (Beyond the Light by PMH Atwater), that emotions seem to be caused by the outside world, when really your emotions are you talking to you.

I'll also have a lot of thoughts on AI. I'm not at all worried that AI will replace humans, because for any task that humans like doing, automation can only be a fad. Once you get over the novelty that a machine can do something you'd rather do yourself, you'll go back to doing it yourself. My most unpopular opinion is that AI is good at making images, just not photorealistic images, where it's burning massive resources just to stay out of the uncanny valley. If an image is obviously not real, for example surrealism or impressionism, AI can compete with pretty good human artists, and I'm trying to get as many images as I can before the bubble pops.