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Now that everything is wasted
We crush it with our mighty sneakers
We wipe off the corner of our mouth
Before we finally look up and out
-Melissa Kassab, Summer's Over
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. 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. 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. 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.
December 30. Stray links, starting with a Reddit thread from yesterday, basically about minor super powers: What is something you can do but can't explain how you can do it? Related, a deleted thread from a year ago, What's the one random genetic trait you lucked out on? One more: What's the creepiest display of intelligence you've seen by another human?
From Suggest Me A Book, What book(s) should I read to stop feeling disappointed about my lack of achievement?
Related blog post: Slowness is a Virtue. The author explains how timed IQ tests put a heavy cultural bias on our concept of intelligence: "People who excel at quickly solving well-defined problems tend to gravitate toward... well-defined problems."
From PsyPost, New psychology research flips the script on happiness and self-control. We think that self-control leads to happiness but it's exactly the other way around.
And from the Guardian (thanks Roger), Hunger's whip explains how authoritarians think hunger motivates people to work, when it's exactly the other way around. Hungry people are less motivated because they have less energy. "If you want to make a rat work, give it some sugar."
December 28. One more quick book review. Agatha Christie wrote six non-detective novels under the name Mary Westmacott. One of them, Absent In The Spring, she cranked out in three days, and called it "the one book that has satisfied me completely." It's about a woman stranded in the desert with nothing to do but look over her life, and gradually discover that her role in the lives of other people was a lot worse than what she thought. This is my Goodreads review.
December 25. Three happy links for the holiday. Where the Hell is Matt? is a 2008 video where a guy goes all over the world getting people to dance. (Thanks Kevin)
Suicide survivors of Reddit, what's "a little thing" that's worth sticking around for?
We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years
December 23. I've been reading more books lately, and these were the two best novels that I read in 2025.
Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett. It didn't win any awards, that's the title of the book, and it's my favorite literary novel of this century. Willett is a writing teacher who published a great book of short stories in the early 80s, which was forgotten and then championed by David Sedaris, which got it republished, which led her to finish and publish her masterpiece. The narrator is a no-nonsense librarian whose cynical takes on human foibles make this book a joy. Her sister is the complete opposite, loopy and trashy. They get in a love triangle with a wicked and charming intellectual, and all three characters are fascinating and sharply drawn. Jincy Willett writes the opposite of AI. The tiny decisions, which AI makes in the most obvious way, she makes in interesting ways, so often that I kept thinking, I can't believe how good this is.
To The White Sea by James Dickey. Famous for Deliverance, Dickey would only write two other novels. This was his last, and on one level it's a badass WWII adventure. An American tail gunner bails out over Tokyo and must make his way north through terrible danger. But this guy is not your normal hero. He's ruthlessly efficient, a creepy loner who grew up in frozen Alaska and daydreams about predation and camouflage among arctic wildlife. James Dickey was a serious poet, and this is some of the most poetic nature writing you'll ever read, in the voice of a terrifying killer. As he goes farther north, it's less like a war novel and more like a spirit journey, and by the end it's basically magic realism.
December 18. A few more thoughts on charisma. Reality distortion field is an interesting Wikipedia page, mainly about Steve Jobs:
Bill Gates talked in an interview about Steve Jobs using his reality distortion field to "cast spells" on people. Gates considered himself immune to Jobs's reality distortion field, saying, "I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I'm a minor wizard, the spells don't work on me."
I don't think it's quite like that. Being immune to wizardry doesn't make you a wizard. More generally, charisma is not like a light that shines on everyone. It's more like a key that fits a lock, or doesn't. A reader tells a story of a manager at his workplace who had a breakdown because he was accustomed to always succeeding through charisma, and suddenly he was among a group of people who didn't fall for it.
I think charisma has a metaphysical component. My evidence is that people who don't think charisma has a metaphysical component, are continually surprised and befuddled when they see it in action. If you look at the whole phenomenon around a leader like Trump, or an entertainer like Elvis, it doesn't look like sound and light waves tickling the neurons of a bunch of disconnected people. It looks like the activation of an archetypal cohort, like they were already connected on a deeper level and they were just waiting for someone to take the role as their point of focus.
December 16. No ideas this week, so I'm going to post a few political links. You might already know about Heather Cox Richardson, a historian who posts frequent YouTube talks about contemporary politics. The point she keeps coming back to is that the Trump administration is not consolidating power, it's falling apart, and while the short term outlook is really bad, eventually things will turn around.
A recent comment on the Atheism subreddit, about how to try to break down authoritarian Christianity by asking questions, rather than making statements.
And a psychology article from this summer, Narcissistic leadership in Hitler, Putin, and Trump shares common roots. "According to the research, all three leaders experienced forms of psychological trauma and frustration during their formative years, grew up with authoritarian fathers and emotionally supportive mothers, and showed signs of pathological narcissism in adulthood."
My unusual belief about narcissism is that it's a side effect of charisma. Mainstream psychology misses this because it doesn't know how to think about charisma, but I suspect that it's impossible for a low-charisma person to develop narcissism, because other people just won't treat them in a way that feeds narcissism.
December 12. A few happy links, starting with two about fungus. The mysterious black fungus from Chernobyl that may eat radiation
CRISPR Fungus: Protein-Packed, Sustainable, and Tastes Like Meat
My favorite coming technology, Noninvasive brain stimulation increases idea generation and originality. If we ever get a cheap home unit for this, it's going to be bigger than drugs in the sixties.
And an archive of a Washington Post piece about a guy who has been walking around the world for 27 years. "Bushby said he has learned a lot over the past nearly three decades, but one thing stands out: '99.99 percent of the people I've met have been the very best in humanity,' he said. 'The world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.'"
December 10. A few more thoughts on autism. Greg sends this article, "Autism is a Spectrum" Doesn't Mean What You Think. It's not like being farther or less far up the spectrum. It's like what colors you pick out. "...autism isn't one condition. It is a collection of related neurological conditions that are so intertwined and so impossible to pick apart that professionals have stopped trying."
This article, Autism's Confusing Cousins, explains how a bunch of different conditions are getting lumped under "autism" by popular psychology. But you can find the deeper message in this disclaimer: "The diagnostic boundaries between conditions are scientifically unclear and often reflect clinical convention." And the Hacker News thread is full of examples of how diagnosis of autism and related conditions is a total clusterfuck.
Now I'm even more convinced that all of this stuff will be conceptualized very differently when we understand it better. More radically, I suspect that "autism" is a feature of the present age. A diagnosis always reflects a problem, a mismatch between how people are and what society needs. Late stage industrial capitalism is so far from human nature that it's generating a lot of problems that require increasingly fiddly diagnosis. In a few hundred years there will still be neurodiversity, but it will interface with a more flexible and human-scale society in such a way that many ways of being will not be problematic enough to require experts to figure out what's wrong.
But I've changed my opinion on the practical dimension of diagnosis. I think it's good that a bunch of stuff that's not technically autism is getting lumped under autism. This paragraph from the second article explains why:
Social communication disorder is rarely diagnosed in favor of autism primarily because autism provides access to critical services, insurance coverage, educational support, and legal protections that social communication disorder does not reliably offer, creating strong practical incentives for families and clinicians to prefer the autism diagnosis. Additionally, autism has an established evidence base, validated assessment tools, clear intervention protocols, and a large supportive community with a neurodiversity-affirming culture, while social communication disorder has none of these. It has no community, minimal research, no specific treatments, and little professional awareness since it was only introduced in the DSM in 2013. Service delivery, insurance, and educational systems are built entirely around autism rather than social communication disorder, and since both conditions require similar interventions for social-communication difficulties, there's little practical incentive to make the diagnostic distinction, especially when the boundary between them (whether restricted/repetitive behaviors are truly absent or just subtle) is often unclear and clinicians are often unsure the distinction really matters.
December 8. Negative links, starting with four articles about industrial chemicals:
Parkinson's is a man-made disease
Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics
Common artificial sweeteners linked to cognitive decline
Prenatal exposure to common insecticide linked to brain structure abnormalities in youth
And a big Ask Reddit thread from last week, What change is coming that people aren't prepared for at all?
December 5. Five Ask Reddit threads loosely related to this week's subject. Redditors with extremely niche interests: What's the one thing you are completely obsessed with that almost no one else you know cares about? Answers include training crows, Medieval coin making, and hunting without killing anything.
What does an uneducated genius actually look like? Have you ever met someone who was incredibly smart but had little or no formal education? A lot of examples are people who are really good at fixing machines, which tells me that after modernity collapses, we're not going back to the stone age, but potentially to a decentralized utopia of garage tinkerers.
Which hobbies attract the kindest people? Pottery, knitting, birdwatching, gardening, and heavy metal music.
Removed by mods, Who is someone everyone branded as crazy but they turned out to be right?
Who died believing themselves a failure, but was judged otherwise by history?
And for Bandcamp Friday, Appalachia Borealis is a cool solo piano album inspired by birdsong.
December 3. Continuing from Monday, it's unfair to say that I live life through a straw. A better way to say it is that perception can be narrow or wide, like a laser or like a floodlight. This has something to do with left brain and right brain, but until I can stick something in my actual brain, it's more helpful to just say that my attention defaults to narrow. An elite perceiver can switch easily between narrow and wide, and stay effortlessly in either one. I can get to wide focus but it takes an act of will, and a continuing effort of will to stay there. It's not like sliding into a groove, it's like holding up a weight. Lately I've been walking around practicing wide focus, being mentally aware of both sides of my peripheral vision at the same time. Some people who do this report an altered state of consciousness, but I haven't noticed anything except that it's easier to not bump into people.
I don't think there's anything wrong with me. An adequate society would have plenty of social roles for people who perform best with narrow focus and wide time. I say "role" and not "job", because in a job someone is making sure you're in a hurry so that they can make more money from your labor than they're paying you. That's what they mean by "time is money," and it's a recent invention. Medieval crafts and primitive flint knapping were done with narrow focus and no time pressure. These kinds of tasks have been replaced by mechanization. The soullessness of AI writing is not new. The same thing happened over a hundred years ago when physical items went from hand made to machine made. We live in a weird dystopia with miraculous devices and rampant "mental illness" which is what they call it when the way you are has no place in a society that's obsessed with perpetual increase.
December 1. Today, psychology. From the Autistic Adults subreddit, Driving isn't a neutral task for everyone. For many autistic people, it's a high-stakes multitasking nightmare. I think autism will eventually be understood as multiple different conditions, because descriptions of what it's like to be autistic are all over the map, and often contradictory. For example, this thread, your favorite part of being autistic, includes both hyper-logic and hyper-empathy, both intellect and intuition, both sense of style and indifference to style. Even in the driving thread, there's a sub-thread about autistic people who love driving.
I haven't been diagnosed with anything, but it seems to me that neurotypicals have a mode I call "self-driving human". They can "zone out" or "stop thinking" and their body automatically does the right thing while their conscious mind can just sit back and watch. I've never done this. When I'm driving, I have to constantly pump out my attention: look at the white line, look at the speedometer, look at the mirror. If I zone out, I crash. Even in my own apartment, I need fully conscious attention to not bump into things. Even when I'm walking, I have to monitor and instruct my mechanics and posture or I get stiff and slouchy. I live life through a straw. Peak performance is not expansive but contractive, not tuning into some larger being, but tuning out everything but this one little move, which in total isolation, with unlimited time, can be done perfectly. This is the opposite of driving, and the opposite of how this society is tooled.
November 25. A few happy links. From Ask Reddit, What's a company that didn't succumb to enshittification? The thread includes this amazing long comment about what it's like in Morton salt mines.
An archive of a NY Times piece, Iowa City Made Its Buses Free. Traffic Cleared, and So Did the Air.
And a book recommendation. The Book of I by David Greig just came out this year. It's a short historical novel about three people living on a tiny
Scottish island after a Viking raid in the 800s.
November 21. I've been meaning to make a political playlist, and I finally put it together. As usual I tried to favor obscurities: for Neil Young I didn't pick Ohio or After The Gold Rush, but Welfare Mothers and the de-censored This Land Is Your Land. But I did pick some very popular songs, including Iron Maiden's Run To The Hills, Bob Dylan's Hurricane, and Kaiser Chiefs' I Predict A Riot. Most obscure are Metropes by Orphans and Vandals, Eleanor McEvoy's superior version of Eve of Destruction, and a beautiful song about social breakdown, Johanna Rose's Eat the Rich. I found five different original songs with that title, and decided to use four of them (sorry Aerosmith) so that's what I called the playlist: Eat the Rich
July 31, 2025. My novel, The Days of Tansy Capstone, is now in beta. I'm good at worldbuilding and bad at exposition, so I want to do more polishing to make it readable, and you should probably wait. But I'm satisfied that I've done what I set out to do: write the novel I wanted to read, that nobody else was writing.