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Look, Yellowstone is objectively incredible. The landscape is insane: steaming rainbow-colored pools, geysers erupting out of nowhere, herds of bison wandering through fog like the opening scene of a fantasy movie. But the actual experience of visiting Yellowstone is mostly just being aggressively instructed not to do things.

This one is entirely my own fault for the high expectations. Maybe, if you lower yours you will like it. I heard “petrified forest” and imagined an ancient stone forest frozen in place like something from a dark fantasy movie. I did see pictures before I went but they looked like this one...

Joshua Tree feels less like a national park and more like a place where someone’s ex moved to “find themselves.” The landscape looks exactly like what happens when a desert develops opinions that used to be mocked before cancel culture. Weird twisted trees. Piles of giant round rocks balanced at angles that look cool on Instagram. Every single corner of the park looks like it’s either a U2 album cover or the background of an overpriced skincare ad.

It’s huge. Historically important. Geologically fascinating. Also somehow kind of boring. The same features that make it the longest cave system in the world also make large sections of it look like somebody hollowed out a government parking garage underground. There are cave systems in Appalachia that look like fantasy novels. Mammoth often looks like an unfinished subway tunnel.

Rocky Mountain National Park is gorgeous in the same way a 4K television demo is gorgeous. Everything looks fake. The lakes are too reflective, the mountains are too dramatic, the elk wander around with such perfect timing they feel computer-generated.

Yosemite Valley is stunning. Unfortunately, it is also a traffic simulator. You spend half your visit inching forward behind rental SUVs while trying not to sideswipe a cyclist dressed like they’re competing in the Tour de France. Then you finally get out of the car and, yes, okay, El Capitan and Half Dome are unbelievable. You see them, you will NOT climb them*

I don’t dislike Indiana Dunes. I resent that it calls itself National Park. I guess someone had to give a National Park to Indiana so every state feels included. You hear “national park” and your brain starts preparing for something mythic: towering mountains, ancient forests, landscapes that fundamentally alter your relationship with geology, God and yourself. Then you arrive and realize you are at a reasonably nice beach near Gary, Indiana.

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...

Zion is heartbreakingly beautiful. In pictures and in reality. You come in from the desert and suddenly everything changes: towering cliffs, hanging gardens, rivers, cottonwoods, sunlight bouncing off red stone like the entire canyon has its own internal glow. It genuinely feels biblical. Like you accidentally wandered into the location where prophets hear voices.

Arches is honestly fine. It delivers exactly what it promises: there are arches. You definitely get what you seek, you and the thousands others. Oh you thought it was going to be a magical moment in between alien-arches? Think again.

It looks exactly like the pictures. Great, now you’ve seen it. I’m not denying it’s impressive. It’s obviously impressive. There’s even a plaque there basically admitting: “Okay, fine, it’s not the biggest canyon in the world in any measurable category, but spiritually? Emotionally? Vibes-wise? It’s the grandest.” Sure. Why not.

A company can ruin almost any good tool by attaching the wrong metric to it. Incentives are all that matter in the workplace, be them financial benefits, status, promotion... Workers work with incentives. You and me too. Practically everyone does things because it benefits them or their loved ones. Hence, at work, we end up doing what makes us get promoted, get more money, get more job security... We're not the owners of the company, we're an employee. We look out for ourselves. That's ok.

Strong groups do not become strong only because they agree on a mission. They become strong because people stop feeling abstract to one another, they see each other as people and friends. That is one reason shared meals matter more than most official culture programs. You don't need expensive workshops and getaways to build a team culture. You just need to be present. Have lunch with your team, have them eat together. Have coffee together...

I genuinely think Rolex may have achieved the impossible: becoming a luxury brand that makes everyone look worse, while getting them to pay thousands of dollars. Which sucks, because a lot of their watches are beautiful. The Submariner is basically a perfect design, iconic for a reason. But the second that crown logo enters the equation, your entire aura changes like you equipped a cursed item.

People like the idea of cheap politics because it feels morally clean. If politicians are underpaid, the thinking goes, they must be serving for noble reasons. If the salary is modest, corruption must have less room to grow. It is an attractive fantasy and a bad way to design a state. In fact, is an elitist way and it leads to government by the rich, who can afford it.

Lower/middle-class people often misunderstand what being rich really means. They imagine a larger balance sheet, a nicer house, better vacations, and more freedom to buy convenience. That is part of it. But not even the most important part.

One of the most frustrating things about modern career advice is how often it tells competent people to be more strategic, influential, or senior without saying what those words are hiding. A lot of the time, what they are hiding is sales.

Something I see in the gym every day are private coaches (usually from the gym itself) being paid to walk around and give some basic exercises to the trainee. Most people walk into coaching with a simple assumption: I have a goal, and the coach is paid to get me there. But that is not true. The coach is also running a business, and businesses respond to incentives whether the owner is transparent about them or not.

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.

The current panic says AI is making people worse at thinking. Maybe. But if you want to know why so many younger workers are fluent with apps and so shaky with computers, AI is not the first place to look. The deeper break happened earlier, when schools and institutions decided that students should interact with managed appliances instead of actual machines, like Millennials did.

If you are not a powerlifter, stop training legs like one. Actually, stop training everything like one. That is the argument. It took me years to realize that I didn't need to keep on lifting more and more on squats, since my legs didn't change after anyway. lbs would go up, muscles would stay pretty much the same. And the rest of my body paid the bill, less volume on arms, core, chest... Due to the focus on maintaining strong squat numbers. The problem is that seriousness, exhaustion, and...

Some of the most expensive fantasy ever put on screen felt emptier than the more limited work that came before it. That is not because viewers secretly prefer cheapness. It is because abundance is a terrible substitute for judgment and good storytelling.

One of the common atheist temptations is to confuse unbelief with clarity, to assume that religion is the irrational part, so removing religion must leave behind a cleaner and more rational human being. But human beings do not work that way, human beings operate through beliefs, emotions... We do not stop wanting ritual, purity, moral tribe, sense of sacredness or transcendent meaning just because we stop using religious language for those desires.

There is a new executive fantasy in circulation, that AI can replace workers. Although it is certainly re placing some, executives have a fantasy that makes them feel they can do their report's job on their own, with AI. That they can code! Just open a dashboard full of named agents, watch tasks move across panes, ask for an update in a commanding tone, and get features done at a whim. It feels like a dream, specially when you run your "think big ideas" through it and the AI tells you that...

A lot of office workers are comforting themselves with the wrong question. They keep asking whether AI can do their whole job. That is not the threshold their employer will use. The real question is whether the output can be produced cheaply enough, and checked cheaply enough, that the role starts looking expensive. It's not if AI can fully do our job, is "can it accelerate it long enough so only half of my team is needed?". Because the answer to that, sadly, is yes.

There is a common trend of young men being interested in the Roman empire out of movies and populat history, and imagining it as a militaristic, right wing hyper-masculine empire that was great for men. Spartacus, Rome, Gladiator... to different degree all give a perception of Rome being a sort of warrior-culture, sometimes bogged down by decadence. Gladiator II takes this to a ridiculous extreme. For that particular movie, I recommend reading Brett's, from acoup.blog , critique:

The premise of every gritty Batman reboot is basically the same: what if we took this seriously and made it realistic? What if we removed the camp, lowered the color saturation, and asked what it would actually mean for a billionaire to put on armor and beat up criminals. Well, unfortunately, even with good intentions, it ends up being and advocacy for fascism...

I've been moving through tech orgs long enough to recognize a pattern that many of you will recognize as well. Some teams are passive, they ship on time, hit targets, run clean processes, and yet nobody ever kills a bad idea in the meeting. Nobody says this is the wrong thing to build. The roadmap has a thing, or six, on it that three people privately talk about how it won't work, but it moves through planning without a word, with smiles even. You watch the lead engineers nod at something...

The HP printer example is still the nuts to me. To many users, it stops working, not because anything inside it broke, but because the ink subscription lapsed and the manufacturer's software disabled cartridges you already owned . The printer is physically there and it just stops working

No parents encourage their kids to study Humanities. By default, recommended options are STEM related. Engineering (Computer Science), Finance, Medicine...The argument against the humanities in the AI age makes it even less compelling to dedicate 4 years to study a Humanities degree. Language models can write passably, summarize quickly, and produce research-shaped text on demand. So the old humanities skills are supposed to matter less. Learn to code, learn to prompt, and stop pretending close.