Why We Do That

Discussions

• 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…

• Does your personality matter far less than you think?

  I realize, interacting with students, teenagers and younger co-workers peers that many believe that their personality traits are a leading factor in deciding what do to or how to tackle their own career. Although younger people ask these questions more explicitly, older adults also seem to think along the same lines. I personally find it to be far more irrelevant than most people think. Besides my job, where I observe successful people doing the same role with drastically...

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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…

• 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.