The science behind the happiness

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• Should you really be drinking raw milk?

  I think a person who sleeps well, lifts regularly, eats decent food, goes outside, and keeps real social ties is doing some of the most evidence-supported things available for long-term health. I have noticed that a surprising number of people learned that from communities that also push raw milk, seed-oil paranoia, and other nonsense. The problem is not that medicine is wrong. The problem is that medicine left a prevention gap, and the cranks moved in.

• If you're not a billionaire, why do you vote like one?

  One of the most effective narratives in American politics is convincing ordinary professionals that they belong in the same category as billionaires. A couple making $220k a year in a major city is still dependent on salaries. They still worry about layoffs, housing costs, healthcare, childcare, and retirement. They cannot buy political influence. They cannot move markets. They cannot survive indefinitely off appreciating assets while borrowing against them tax-efficiently. They are not living…

• Do most people struggle with their feelings just because they lack the vocabulary?

  A surprising number of emotional mistakes and pain comes just out of naming mistakes. Someone says he is angry when he is really ashamed. Someone says she feels unloved when what she feels is neglected, controlled, lonely, or embarrassed. Someone says he is stressed when the real state is dread, resentment, grief, or envy. Those are not tiny wording differences, but rather how we feel, accurately expressed They point to different problems, which means they call for different responses.

• Is therapy just confession with the theology stripped out?

  One of the funniest things about secular modern culture is watching people reinvent Christianity piece by piece while acting intellectually superior the entire time. People abandoned confession and now pay someone $240 plus taxes an hour to listen to them describe their guilt in a softly lit room. They abandoned sin and replaced it with "unprocessed trauma." They abandoned repentance and replaced it with "doing the work." They abandoned examination of conscience and replaced it with journaling…

• Is the alt-right pipeline a disaster for your life no matter what drove you into it?

  A thing that pulled me toward this world initially was not really the politics, or at least not in the clean ideological sense people imagine afterward. It was the feeling of recognition. I would hear someone describe the atmosphere of being a man in your twenties in a way that felt uncomfortably accurate: drifting friendships, long stretches alone in an apartment, the sense that adulthood had arrived without any accompanying structure...

• Can AI make you lose your mind, and are you more at risk if you doubt it?

  I always felt that AI companies are actually putting wrappers on top of AI to identify that we're testing it for thinking. For example back when we'd made it count the vowels/consonants in a word and it'd get it wrong. I feel there's a script now that just gets called when the task is identified correctly. I also feel that it gets trained on these memes. Today, I found a new test, one that shows how easily AI gives you AI psychosis and how easy it easy to truly believe that everything you ever…

• Did EDC culture turn normal life into a gear fantasy?

  I used to think EDC culture was mostly harmless nerd behavior. Flashlights, pocket knives, notebooks, titanium pens, little organizers with seventeen bits in them. Fine. People like tools. People like objects. Some people enjoy refining a system. I get it. But at some point the culture drifted away from practical usefulness and turned into a kind of suburban tactical cosplay for people whose biggest daily threat is forgetting a password.

• Shouldn't cultural criticism go both ways?

  I had one of those big-tech team dinners. The conversation turned to how people met their partners. A few of my Indian coworkers talked about arranged marriage, family involvement, and how much more normal it is in India for marriage to be treated as a family matter and not just a private romantic choice. That part is ok, different cultures and all. It was interesting to see their perspective, even though I wouldn't share it. The problem started when one of them stopped describing the custom...