The Way We Live Now

Discussions

• Do people who eat together fight harder for each other?

  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...

• Is there really any such thing as 'mirror muscles'?

  One of the dumbest shifts in modern gym culture is the way people started talking about “mirror muscles” like they were fake muscles. Biceps. Side delts. Rear delts. Glutes trained directly. Rotator cuff work. Isolation exercises in general. Somehow all of this got framed as cosmetic fluff while endless compound lifting got rebranded as “functional.” And now there are people walking around with permanently irritated shoulders, aching elbows, unstable hips, and lower backs held together by…

• Does secular society still believe in original sin?

  One of the funniest things about modern secular culture is that it absolutely still believes in original sin. It just refuses to call it that because theological language makes educated people uncomfortable. Listen to how modern institutions describe human beings. We are governed by unconscious bias, shaped by childhood conditioning, manipulated by algorithms, trapped in dopamine loops, distorted by social incentives, blinded by ideology, and mostly incapable of seeing our own motivations…

• Are Silicon Valley tech bros really conservative, or just tagging along for lower taxes?

  One of the biggest mistakes modern conservatism made was assuming that because Silicon Valley liked markets, it must also share conservative values. It didn't. Tech culture was never traditionally conservative. It was hyper-individualist, anti-tradition, impatient with limits, suspicious of religion, and obsessed with optimization over continuity. Conservatives saw money and entrepreneurial energy and ignored the rest. Now the contradiction is impossible to miss.

• Does literalism flatten the Bible into a mere manual?

  One of the strangest assumptions in modern literalist readings of Scripture is the idea that the Bible should be treated as if it were a single kind of document with a single interpretive key. As if it were a legal contract where every clause must be enforced uniformly, or a scientific paper where every sentence is meant as a precise empirical claim, or a recipe book where the point is simply to follow instructions exactly as written.

• Is Zelensky everything the manosphere wishes it could be?

  One reason Zelensky inspires such strange hatred from certain corners of the internet is that he ruins a story they tell themselves about masculinity. The story is supposed to be simple. Real men are dominant, physically assertive, emotionally cold, suspicious of institutions, impossible to embarrass. The bullshit Andrew Tate and his actors are sharing to GenZ. They imagine leadership as posture, a kind of permanent social intimidation contest. That's why so much of that ecosystem obsesses…

• Should you actually work out less?

  Let’s be honest about what most people are actually doing in the gym. It’s not overtraining in any meaningful sense, even though people love to say that when they feel a bit run down. Real overtraining requires real output. Heavy work, high intent, repeated exposure to something close to your limit. Most lifters are nowhere near that. What they are doing instead is just wasteful, training just hard enough to feel it, just sore enough to notice it the next day, just tired enough to believe it…

• History targeted Catholics and the Irish first, so will your turn come too?

  In the 1850s, the dominant nativist movement in the United States was organized around anti-Catholic and anti-Irish hostility. The Know-Nothings argued that Catholic immigrants were culturally unfit for republican self-government , loyal to a foreign power (the Pope), and incapable of genuine American citizenship. By the 1880s, the same suspicion had moved heavily onto Chinese immigrants. By the 1920s, it had moved again toward southern and eastern Europeans, especially Jews and...

• Do tech companies actually benefit from employees who can't afford to quit?

  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...

• Are most AI startups just a UI on top of some Agent.md files?

  Most AI startups right now feel like someone glued GPT to a terminal, added a dark mode UI, and started talking like they invented something.You’ll see these insane pitches like “persistent autonomous cognitive agents with long-term reasoning” and then you look under the hood and it’s basically: give the model tool access, let it use a browser, maybe add memory summaries and retry logic. That’s the “product.” You can get that on your own just giving access to Claude locally.

• Is Mammoth Cave too successful at being a cave to be interesting?

  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.

• Should Petrified Forest be renamed 'boring desert with logs'?

  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...

• Did your biceps stop growing because the weight is too light?

  People got way too obsessed with “perfect form” on curls. If the weight is so light that your torso doesn’t even need to stabilize, it’s probably not heavy enough to force growth. Look, don't spend all your time doing biceps curls trying not to move the shoulders. GET THEM HEAVY. See arnold: Heavy standing curls where you cheat the concentric a bit, then fight the eccentric under control, are brutally effective. 5 hard reps with a weight that actually scares you will build more real-world arm…

• Do rich people really take the same risks the rest of us have to?

  Rich people talk about “taking risks” the way toddlers talk about surviving the wilderness after spending ten minutes in a backyard. Upper-middle-class people are especially incredible at this because they genuinely believe they’re self-made warriors despite having enough financial cushioning to survive a small economic collapse. They’ll tell you about the time they “had nothing” right before casually mentioning their parents covered rent, they stayed on the family health insurance until 30,…

• Did Catholic monotheism make the universe safe to study?

  It is easy to tell the story of science as a clean break from religion. Enlightenment replaces superstition, observation replaces faith, reason replaces authority. It sounds tidy, and it flatters modern assumptions. But it misses something more interesting and, honestly, more uncomfortable for that narrative: the idea that the universe is intelligible in the first place is not self-evident. It is a metaphysical claim. And Catholic monotheism is one of the major historical reasons that claim…

• Is Arches worth visiting once, let alone twice?

  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.

• Is it execution, not innovation, that actually makes companies succeed?

  One thing that starts looking fake after enough years in tech is the obsession with “disruption” as the explanation for every successful company. The winning company simply executed better than everyone else in a market that already existed. Facebook was not some impossible conceptual breakthrough. Social networking already existed. MySpace existed. Friendster existed and the majority of features Facebook had were present in these 2. People already understood the product category immediately.…

• Does anyone actually care about your watch?

  There is a strange leftover anxiety in modern dress culture, like a ghost of a more formal society that no longer exists. We all still behave as if every visible detail is being quietly graded. The watch is one of the clearest examples of this illusion. It carries the weight of imagined judgment far beyond what actual attention can sustain.

• Did Nietzsche make destruction look wiser than it actually is?

  It is easy to sound intelligent by pointing out cracks. It is much harder to give people somewhere better to live. Modern culture keeps confusing demolition with depth, and Nietzsche helped make that confusion look glamorous.

• Is Saguaro just several hours of driving to admire one extremely committed plant?

  Saguaro National Park is basically several hours of driving around looking at one extremely committed plant. Committed to survive where plants don't and humans definitely shouldn't consider living. But that defines all of Arizona. And to be fair, the saguaros are impressive. They’re enormous. Some of them are two hundred years old. But eventually your brain starts categorizing all of them into the same mental folder labeled “big cactus. Look, it's a cactus. Just big and a bit weird