The Cost of Integrity When the Incentive Is Wrong When I played peewee football, being late to practice was punished, but skipping practice was not. If you showed up late, you had to run. If you stayed home entirely, there was no immediate consequence. This was when I discovered incentives. The rule was meant to promote discipline, but once you were already late, the incentive was obvious: avoid practice and avoid the punishment. That example has stayed with me ever since, though until now I...
8 days ago • 2 min read
Be Careful What You Wish For I have always found prayer interesting, especially as someone who is agnostic and does not believe in the literal existence of what most people call God. That may sound strange, but I still think prayer can be useful, and maybe even necessary. At its best, prayer is not merely a way to calm yourself down when life becomes difficult, although research does suggest that prayer is often connected to emotional regulation, stress, and well-being. To stop there, though,...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Use You Unfair Advantages The road less traveled is often the right road. A lot of the best things in life come from choosing the hard thing on purpose. Discipline, courage, endurance, self-respect, and confidence are usually built through discomfort, not convenience. I believe that deeply. I once ran 100 miles in 25 hours for no other reason than to prove to myself that I could do it. Training for it was a fucking grind. It kept me away from my wife, interfered with my sleep, made school...
29 days ago • 3 min read
We Can't Afford to Hang Out We Are Being Priced Out of Third Spaces One of the less discussed reasons people are socializing less is that ordinary social life has become increasingly expensive. We talk a lot about phones, social media, anxiety, dating apps, and people becoming more isolated. While all of that certainly contributes, there is another part of the story we're ignoring. People are being priced out of physical third spaces. A third space is the place you go that is not home and not...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
How to Think Bad Questions Create Bad Thinking A lot of people think more than enough. The issue is that their thinking is organized around questions that are too vague to be useful. When you ask a bad question, you usually get a bad answer because the question does not give your mind anything clear to work with. It sends you searching for certainty inside a concept you have not even defined yet. A good question gives your thinking a direction. A bad question turns thinking into rumination....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Intent Versus Impact In therapy, we often talk about intent versus impact. It is one of those ideas that sounds simple until it applies to you. Most people understand it when they are the one who got hurt. They can easily explain how someone’s comment, tone, decision, or silence affected them. But when they are the one who caused the hurt, suddenly intent becomes the whole story. “I didn’t mean it that way.” “I was just trying to help.” “You know what I meant.” And maybe that is true. Intent...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
The Era of Suspicion In today’s newsletter, we’ll look at emerging research that is almost certainly relevant to your life in one way or another. 1. Loneliness makes rejection easier to see One recent study found that lonely people felt more rejected in ambiguous social situations, especially when the social cues were unclear. Modern life leaves a lot of room for interpretation. A delayed text or short reply might mean nothing, but if you already feel disconnected, it becomes easier to take...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Self-Improvement or Self-worship? If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably a pretty intelligent person, which means there’s a decent chance your favorite defense mechanism is intellectualization. Mine is too. We like frameworks, theories, podcasts, books, attachment styles, family systems, trauma responses, and all the language that helps us feel like we are getting closer to the truth. And a lot of that is useful. I’ve built most of my adult life around trying to understand why...
2 months ago • 2 min read
You Brain Thinks it's Surviving a Famine You wake up, check your phone, and immediately feel behind. Texts, emails, notifications, a meeting you forgot about, and a calendar full of commitments that sounded reasonable when you made them, back when “future you” was apparently going to become a completely different person. Before your feet even hit the floor, your brain is already triaging. Scarcity Scarcity is different from stress or overwhelm. Stress is pressure. Overwhelm is too much at...
2 months ago • 2 min read