Thought of the day

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• Why We Fear People Who Live Differently

  You built boxes in your head. This is normal, this isn't. And then someone shows up who doesn't fit any of them. Your brain doesn't fear them because they're dangerous — it fears them because their existence proves other paths work too.

• 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...

• Does being entertained all the time make ordinary life feel dead?

  I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.

• Does 'no days off' actually mean you're training hard enough?

  “No days off” is one of those phrases that sounds tough right up until you think about it for more than five seconds. Because what is the sentence actually saying? If you genuinely train hard, really hard, with enough intensity to force adaptation, your body will demand recovery. Not emotionally. Biologically. Tissue damage, nervous system fatigue, glycogen depletion, inflammatory response. The entire point of hard training is that the body cannot fully maintain itself without rebuilding…

• Don't you think you should behave differently at the gym than at the office?

  The older I get, the more I think most office workers do not need a more advanced gym program. They need to stop behaving like office workers for one hour. I am an office worker, but I feel I'm smarter about it. Let's go for big brain time Look, you sit all day at work. Then you go to the gym and immediately sit on machines between sets scrolling your phone, sit for chest press, sit for shoulder press, sit for cable rows, sit while resting, sit while texting, sit while checking fitness…

• 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...

• 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…

• 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.