The first year of the blog was 2023, when I posted 5 times. Followed this up with 2024 when I posted 8 times.

In 2025, I posted 25 times.

Can’t say I’m clear as to why this happened. I can’t even claim it was all that intentional. But certainly writing feels easier than it used to.

It’s a popular thing to say that one should write as often as possible. People I admire a lot openly advocate for this. Particularly the notion that one should post every day.

Which would mean that I remain classified as entirely unproductive. What to make of this?

On one side, I get it. When you look at yourself in a few years time you may rightfully ask what you have to show for yourself. The greater the output, the more of a life lived, the more you’ve impacted the world.

And also the greater the chance of success. Obviously that’s true in terms of raw numbers and growth, but you should think of it more in terms of getting your message out. If you’re writing, I assume you have one and let’s assume it’s true and useful. If you write that in 100 different ways, maybe one of them catches fire. That’s worth it. Fine.

The other half of the Always Be Blogging case is that the more you write, the better you get at it. I understand the logic of this and am happy for you/other people to believe in this, but I personally don’t. Largely due to the observation that out of the sample of people I’ve encountered who do produce work at such a rate, essentially zero of them produce anything I would recommend to you or a friend whose time I respect.

And that’s because good work takes time, man. Not just to write but to think, to feel, to actually develop something to say. To actually have your reader feel something and perhaps even have their worldview stretched an inch.

And if you spend all of your time writing and posting I don’t get how you’re spending enough time interacting with the world to work out what you think of it. Resulting in internet writers who veer from random topic to topic on a daily basis, lightly engaging. It ain’t for me.

Which brings me to my central tension.

Looking back over this blog over the last year, I think I accidentally became a little bit more like those people, and drifted slightly from what I think this blog is good at. This was unintentional, but I could have done more to resist the temptation.

I’m proud of most of the stuff I’ve put up here, but I’m going to make more of an active effort to stay away from: ‘takes’, unfinished thoughts, lazy cynical generalisation.

So, some things are going to change, and I thought it would be best to state it clearly here before we get down to it.

Before that, I want to explain a bit more about how the Molochian process described above seems to work in this ecosystem, so that it may help others who feel the same thing.

Individuality is endangered by exposure to groups. This is amplified when it comes to crafts or creative endeavours, so you need to tread carefully.

When it comes to writing, I think everyone is quite good naturally, so long as you have enough command of language to actually speak to people. What makes people bad at writing is they take the voice they naturally have, and start adding layers on top of it, which distorts what’s underneath in the same way an intercom buffers audio.

Two obvious buffers that get placed on your ability to write as you grow up are (1) explicit rules you are taught (2) fear of people reading your honest thoughts. Both increase the certainty that you are going to produce something people are willing to categorise as valid writing, but both decrease the chance that your soul will remain inside it. Making you pretty AI-replaceable.

The other buffer, that is far more dangerous, is the set of implicit rules you take from other people producing in your craft.

I’ve listened to a lot of Burial and Jai Paul over the last few years. Both produce highly original music that sticks with you in the unquantifiable way. What’s interesting is their sounds are at once simple, unique, and just a bit weird.

What’s relevant is that when you find a rare interview with either of them (rarity also relevant), and you hear about their process, it seems they barely engage with music culture at all. Both in input, only listening to select things, and output, not playing by modern incentives in the slightest.

This is the opposite equation to that which runs the cultural sameness which the majority of output now suffers from.

Which means if you want find a way to start chipping away at the buffers on your work and get back to the voice that already exists at the bottom of your creativity, you need to be careful about what you’re consuming.

I feel this in some of the work I’m least proud of.

By now, there is a very recognisable ‘substack voice’, which I think is largely caused by reading too many substacks, and unconsciously learning that there is a narrow interval for what an internet essay can be, leading to the majority of them sounding the same. At times, I think I fall into that.

Even more alarming is the temptation to fall into half-baked overly-confident take territory, which is easy as hell to produce but ultimately serves no one. Again, the thing to avoid is being in the ecosystem a bit too much.

So, here’s what’s changing.

Already Happened is sticking to longer form, more creative, more intense, more intellectually serious work. No fluff. To interpolate an inspiration, psychology blogging is in danger of growing stale, I’m taking it to straaaange new places.

I am moving shorter-form analyses and writing to a sister blog, where I’m going to do the Priced In series as a weekly thing. I will post the new link for that soon if you are that way inclined. I do find this work equally valuable and know some people probably even prefer it, it’s just cleaner for it to live somewhere else, and makes my process easier.

Less relevant to most of you, but I am also starting another two writing side-projects. One will be on the psychology of forecasting/probability/prediction markets. The other will be on the psychology of Magic: The Gathering (and other card games). These will be entirely separate to this and you won’t be exposed to them unless you so choose.

Strangely, in reaction to the general malaise regarding the internet writing landscape above, the one source of respite in what I’ve been reading this year has come from Wayback Machining through the lost archives of the golden age of Magic writing. It’s a game that reveals a lot about who you are and how you interact with the world, so it makes sense that at its best, Magic writing has a transcendental quality to it. So, I’m hoping to use that as a way of accessing the romance that this era of blogging seems to be lacking. Same for the forecasting stuff. They are essentially the same interest to be honest.

Both of those will be for fun and less of a priority.

The final thing I need to mention: I have opened paid subscriptions for the first time.

I’ve never done this before because this a small blog, and if I produce anything, it’s best off spreading as much as it can. And I just can’t justify charging people for whatever I’d be producing behind a paywall.

However, it’s become clear that some people don’t care, and would like to support anyway, which I am very grateful for.

The final hurdle was that Substack won’t allow me to charge a nominally low fee that I wouldn’t feel guilty about, but I have solved that by finding out you can permanently set very high discount rates on paid subs, which I am doing.

So, if you follow this link, you should able to support for 75% off

I say support because I am currently offering you nothing extra in return, bar the slightly increased percentage chance that this show keeps going. Which is already around 100%.

As a final piece of transparency, the algorithm has essentially stopped promoting work that is entirely free, and as much as I stand for the purity of the form, I’m not enshittification resistant.

Enough about me. Big year ahead. Let’s remind ourselves of what we are doing here.

It remains my view that the next few decades are likely to be strangest any set of humans have ever had to experience. In fact, the term ‘decade’ is going to become pretty useless. It will be exciting, transcendent, frightening, and violent. The more work we can do to understand it before it happens, or to observe processes that are already happening, the better. I think.

Technology and media changed what it meant to be a human in ways that mainstream psychology is still catching up with from over a hundred years ago. So I have essentially zero hope that it will react in time to help us navigate the storm that’s coming.

What must be true though, is that for the infinite ways in which the new era can amplify the trends that already exist (wireheading, narcicissm, depression), the avenues for personal transcendence multiply too. That would seem a valuable thing for all of us to be thinking about.

At the very least, I can’t see us running out things to talk about any time soon.

Here’s to a big year. Thanks to all of you that read. I will try my best to produce more stuff that is good, and I’m sorry for anything that wasn’t.

Solve et coagula. Solve et coagula. Solve et coagula.

I read today that early 2026 will see the publication of the 2.0 version of the COM-B model of behaviour change.

Big news for behavioural science. This is the biggest model in the discipline. And if you’re an outsider, it’s a pretty solid example of how all frameworks used in behavioural interventions and policy tend to work.

This should be useful because I guarantee that as you sit there right now, you have at least one thing you’d massively like to change about yourself, and might even know how, but change never comes.

The eternal question is this: why don’t people, including you and I, do the things that are good for them? That they want to see themselves doing? And this framework replies…

C, O, M = Capability, Opportunity, Motivation. These are the three most important factors for determining whether or not a (B =) Behaviour happens. Whether you have the skills to do the thing, the chance to use those skills, and the desire to act when the chance arises.

You’re in a Department of Education that is funding free after school tutoring to underprivileged kids. Two years later their outcomes haven’t improved. Fire the tutors? No, turns out the underprivileged kids just aren’t turning up.

They have the opportunity to get tutoring, and their parents will (probably) have the motivation to take the government up on the offer. What gives? You go down to a local area, meet some parents at the school gates, and you work out where Capability has gone astray.

The parents don’t know what programme you’re talking about. No one told them. To be fair, you know they were sent a letter in the post. But now you realise the parent opposite you is unlikely to have the time and energy to read through all their mail. Or worse than that, they’ve developed a psychological aversion to official looking letters because the news is going to be bad more often than not.

Having the right information is key to being able to do the thing, so you COM-B your way out of it by approaching in parents in person (in a way that doesn’t publicly signal their SES to everyone else, i don’t know, just an example), and their kids actually go to the free tutoring this time. Two years later, their outcomes improve.

By focusing on individual-level decision environments, we meaningfully affect our population-level issues.

Awesome, shame it doesn’t really work.

Such is the implication of this paper from Nick Chater and George Loewenstein:

Individual-based interventions alone are likely to be insufficient to deal with the myriad problems facing humanity. Indeed, disappointingly often they yield small or null results. DellaVigna and Linos (2022) analyze all the trials run by two large US nudge units: 126 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) covering 23 million people. Although the average impact of nudges reported in academic journals is large– at 8.7%– their analysis yielded a mean impact of just 1.4%.

Why the difference? They conclude that selective publication in academic journals explains about 70% of the discrepancy.

DellaVigna and Linos also surveyed nudge practitioners and academics, to predict the effect sizes their evaluation would uncover. Practitioners were far more pessimistic, and realistic, than academics, presumably because of their direct experience with nudge interventions.

Selective publication covering up the reality that behavioural interventions barely ever work (and when they do, they don’t change much) matches my experience. Try your best to help people to do the things they claim to want and you’ll probably come up short. Null is the norm.

The question becomes what you do with that information.

Chater and Loewenstein conclude that if you want to change the outcomes of the world for the better, you’re better off focusing on the system instead. Its power is way too much for individuals to fight against:

Improving individual decision making has been the focus of i-frame behavioral insights. But often the most powerful way to help people make better decision is not merely to modify their “choice architecture,” but to fundamentally change the “rules of the game.”

Thus, eliminating conflicts of interest between professionals and their clients (e.g., in medicine or finance) is likely to be more effective than requiring disclosure, or educating consumers to detect potential conflicts.

Systems create outcomes that work for no one and the co-ordination required to fix them doesn’t naturally emerge from within. This is internet rationalism 101. Chater and Loewenstein say we should focus on that as the big problem, or at least as the channel of solution that offers the most alpha.

As far as I can understand the details they’ve released already, this relates to the primary justification of altering the COM-B model, so that the 2.0 version can have a framework for understanding both individual and group level behaviour change. Because this is how policy actually works and we should have been doing it this way in the first place. You make a big change to the environment (i.e. the rules of the game), if 20% of the population make a resulting behaviour change, maybe that’s all you need for it to be worth it.

Example: The Mayor of London wants people to cycle more. Healthier people, and less cars on the roads. They could try an individual-level intervention, like sending everyone a voucher for £20 off a new bike. Or they build 20% more bike lanes, resulting in 1 in X commuters thinking “hey i think i’ll try cycling in next week”. Let’s assume the Mayor goes with Option B and is right to do so.

Now you could come up with that idea within the original model, as you are adjusting Opportunity, but the relevance of the new model is that it has new math and measurement that allows us to trace that group-level issue from diagnosis to effect.

Does it work? I don’t know. It isn’t published yet.

Does something like that even count as a behavioural intervention? I don’t know. Let’s ice that question before I have an existential crisis.

Why are you talking about this at all? Well, let me show you.

Chater and Loewenstein rest their case with this:

Giesler and Veresiu (2014, p. 841) coin the term “responsibilization” to refer to processes “through which responsibility is shifted away from the state and corporations” and toward the “responsible consumer.” Giridharadas (2019) notes that we seem to have collectively lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today – in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery, end child labor, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security, and dignity in old age.

We see informing s-frame [their term for system level] interventions as the future of behavioral public policy. Behavioral scientists’ excessive enthusiasm for i-frame [individual level] policy has reduced the impetus for systemic reform, just as corporations interested in blocking change intend. We have been unwitting accomplices to forces opposed to creating a better society.

OK, was it very much in the interest of societal systems to allow behavioural policy to focus on putting the onus on individuals to improve their own lives? Yes.

Is that, in fact, the only way any of this could have possibly gotten off the ground in the first place? Yes.

That’s because complex systems and individuals have one big thing in common here. They both trend towards inertia. They don’t like changing themselves.

Just as the modern person struggles to break habits, and self-sabotages their way to things remaining the same, systems of people have a habit bouncing off any attempts to shift the tide in a different direction.

This is sort of how I think about companies, or at least how they feel from the inside.

Once any business grows enough to have a hierarchy to include middle managers, the whole thing tends to become a charade. You’ve created a class of employee that plays by the rules so hard that everything outside of them becomes a threat. Corporate inertia becomes almost impossible to break out from that point on. Even if, and this is crucial, everyone can see and agree that elements of the company are diseased.

Systems can have reason to rationally reject even changes that sound like great ideas, because once they are their own living entity, something needs to keep the blood pumping, and no one really knows how the machine works.

Companies again. Nearly all of them fail to get off the ground. Barely any make real money. If you work at one that’s lasted, the economy (which we don’t understand) has decided it’s useful for some reason. If you mess with that, with even the best of intentions, you’re putting all of your friends’ salaries at risk. You better be certain (you’re not).

Scale that up to the systems that run our society, and you have the same problem, but bigger. You want to change how the systems work? You’re going to affect the outcomes of a lot of people in ways you can never fully predict.

And this is where putting this conversation under the banner of behavioural ‘science’ or even ‘policy’ becomes meaningless.

Now, the question of how we go about attempting to create the change within the individual and the system, and eventually within the society, is a scientific one (even if your answer stretches the definition of ‘science’ to its very limit). But the question of what problems we should be attempting to solve is a political one, and you ain’t solving that within the bounds of the APA style guide.

Even the question of whether you think certain biases are irrational and people are better off correcting them is political. Not because we are dancing vaguely into the policy realm, but because this is at the root of any attempt to formalise psychology. There are infinite ways to deviate from how we expect individuals to behave themselves, they are all interesting, but we agree that some are acceptable and some aren’t. So when the DSM-VI is eventually released into the world, its contents are governed by the values of the few, theoretically put there by the many.

All that is to say, this is an inherently political game, and you wouldn’t have it any other way.

So do I agree with the politics of this as an emerging shift? Meh, not really.

Chater and Loewenstein say this:

We have focused on how behavioral scientists have inadvertently assisted efforts by corporate interests to resist systemic changes, but the idea that corporate interests craft the rules to benefit themselves is hardly original (see, e.g., Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012). Nor is the idea that commercial interests promote individualistic perspectives to avoid regulation. Giesler and Veresiu (2014, p. 841) coin the term “responsibilization” to refer to processes “through which responsibility is shifted away from the state and corporations” and toward the “responsible consumer.”

Which reminds me of this passage from a response paper they received at the time, ‘The I-frame vs. S-frame: how neoliberalism has led behavioral sciences astray’, where the authors state:

At the heart of neoliberal ideology is the principle of minimal government intervention (Ayo, 2012); the idea that markets, not the government, will solve societal problems…

…Following this logic, responsible individuals should consume these new goods in order to maintain health (Ayo, 2012). According to neoliberal thinkers, individuals are “free to choose” in the marketplace (Friedman, 1990). Health risks are thus individualized, and unhealthy behavior becomes a personal responsibility detached from the structural conditions shaping it (Spindler, 2010; Gollust and Lynch, 2011; ILO, 2011). As a consequence, lifestyles and related health outcomes can become subject to blame-shifting, stigmatization and discrimination (ILO, 2011) …

…In the words of Hayek (1960, p.71), one of the founding fathers of neoliberalism, “Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that [they] must bear the consequences of [their] actions”

aside: for a paper that attempts to criticise the oppressive nature of the system, you’ll do well to find a clearer example of people mindlessly obeying and pleading to authority than adding needless sources to statements that are very much still them speaking (Kelly, 2025).

I will give you that the food environment in Western societies is terrible, and is worth fixing. But, and I am deadly serious when I say this, if within that environment you have become obese to the detriment of your health, and you aren’t personally responsible for that, then what on earth could you be held responsible for? What capability does any individual have to do anything?

Those systemic changes you want, how can the people behind them bear the responsibility of implementing them? Do they get credit?

That was pedantic. Sorry. My actual point is this:

This notion of we the many versus vague magical power that is responsible for all the problems (in the response paper above this is neoliberalism, in the C&L paper corporate interests, in the discourse a host of other names) has been a political strategy for the best part of my lifetime and it is clear as day that it has gotten us absolutely nowhere. It’s dead. Flatlined. It’s 2026 soon and the only people still flying that flag are gonna be Ash Sarkar and that guy from Rizzle Kicks.

And this is where the proposed shift from helping people to fixing the system becomes less about any political disagreements and more about the methodological problems.

The one glaring problem is this: trying to shift complex systems does not work.

Something really worth reading this year was Ed Bradon in Works in Progress magazine, with ‘Magical Systems Thinking’, although I think I can fairly summarise it for you here:

What we call modern “systems thinking” often fails because it treats complex systems as controllable machines, when in reality they resist intervention and generate unintended consequences. Large systems that work today (electric grids, supply chains, the internet) did not emerge from grand designs but evolved gradually from small, functional beginnings through trial and error. Attempts to redesign complex social systems from the top down, especially in government, frequently backfire, as seen in healthcare, welfare, energy markets, and large digital projects. Systems tend to “kick back,” grow more complex, and drift away from their original purpose.

The practical prescription is humility: instead of trying to fix broken systems wholesale, create small, parallel systems with clear goals, then let them scale if they succeed. Historical successes, from Cold War missile programs to COVID vaccine rollout and Estonia’s digital government, followed this pattern. Progress comes from simple, working systems, not magical thinking about total control.

What does that actually mean for us? That’s still claiming meaningful change comes from systems right?

To answer that, let’s talk about groups and individuals again. Because we’ve talking about them as almost separate things, when real life experience is dancing between the two constantly.

Groups move in the direction that is the aggregate of all the individuals contained within. I have my biases. You have yours. We both have expertise in something. Thus the group sails in a more accurate direction than either of us could steer it on our own.

But the big issue with that theory is this: when individuals encounter a group, they stop being individuals. TLP wrote about this a long time ago.

When people are asked to estimate unknown facts in the world (population sizes, crime rates, whatever), groups outperform individuals if everyone answers independently. Each person brings their own assumptions and errors, and when those different errors are averaged together, they tend to cancel out.

But this only works while people remain independent. Once individuals are shown what others have guessed, their estimates begin to drift toward one another. People stop relying on their own judgment and instead adjust their numbers to fit what looks reasonable. The spread of answers narrows, not because anyone has learned new facts, but because social pressure pulls everyone toward the same range. As this happens, confidence rises. Seeing many similar estimates makes people feel the group must be right, even though the group is no closer to the truth than before. The crowd becomes more certain without becoming more accurate.

This destroys the mechanism that made group wisdom possible. When estimates converge, individual differences disappear and errors no longer cancel out. Now the errors are aligned. A shared mistake is interpreted as consensus. Disagreeing becomes harder, because to disagree now means rejecting not just an idea, but the apparent agreement of everyone else. Even people who push back are still reacting to the group rather than thinking freely.

And this is how progress halts.

So, I am telling you now, when Chater and Loewenstein say this:

we seem to have collectively lost faith in the engines of progress that got us where we are today – in the democratic efforts to outlaw slavery, end child labor, limit the workday, keep drugs safe, protect collective bargaining, create public schools, battle the Great Depression, electrify rural America, weave a nation together by road, pursue a Great Society free of poverty, extend civil and political rights to women and African Americans and other minorities, and give our fellow citizens health, security, and dignity in old age

And they claim we have lost our ability to change the system, I guarantee that when you look into the success stories in all of those cases where people made the world better for all of us, you do not find a complex system that has been altered from within. You will find a newer smaller system that started working in parallel.

And when you look within that new system to see what is fuelling it, you will find the only true source of change we have in society.

Agentic. Individuals.

The people who can see a system working against them, or a consensus they don’t agree with, and not give a fuck.

So much suffering and stress people are dealing with is down to complex systems with crazy incentives and levels of inertia that serve to harm the public. Kyla Scanlon’s recent coverage should be enough to convince you of this.

But if you think we are going to fix that by going into those systems and attempting to reform from within, well, I think you’re gonna be disappointed.

Remember when they said “responsibilization” refers to processes “through which responsibility is shifted away from the state and corporations” and toward the “responsible consumer”?

Our salvation will be with thanks to those who heard that statement and thought “huh, sounds like a fun challenge”.

They create a new system, but once again, that system only works if it allows those contributing it to retain their individual biases.

Which brings me to our Christmas message, and the actual reason I wrote this whole dreary thing.

COM-B is adding group models because there are many ways groups and individuals are alike, and can be designed for and measured together.

But there is one core way that groups and individuals are not alike. And this makes all the difference.

Once they get big enough, groups don’t just dislike change. They are allergic to it. It becomes impossible.

But you. You can change entirely. That individuality you lost when you encountered the group. You can recover it. And that individual agency can move an entire society.

At a psychological level, the endpoint of Lacanian (*klaxon sounds*) therapy is to understand that The Big Other does not actually exist. To believe in the Other is to believe that somewhere there is a final authority that knows what you are, what you should want, and how your desire ought to make sense. The end of analysis is the moment when this belief in a final authority falls away.

The subject loses any guilt, shame, and resentment that come from waiting for validation that can never arrive. In this sense, growth aims less at self-knowledge than at freedom from the belief that someone else ultimately holds the truth of who you are.

In other words, a return to agency. An acceptance that you are the only one responsible for your own actions.

And it is that acceptance that makes any kind of change possible.

Chater and Loewenstein say individual level interventions have failed to improve society and they’re right, but by turning away from them entirely they condemn us to nothing changing ever again.

Systems are incredibly robust. They are bound by heaps of individuals who sacrifice wisdom for confidence and harmony, and have lost sight of a life outside them.

But they have a weakness. It’s the person who can be hit with the pressure to conform to that consensus and think… ‘so what’.

So, that’s the goal. That’s the frame.

Behavioural science fails when it treats people as passive units to be adjusted, and also fails when it treats systems as machines to be redesigned.

The day we create more real individuals will be the day behavioural science actually managed to improve the world. And we’ll also probably start getting less nulls along the way.

Doesn’t matter if you’re not a football fan, you should take a look at this:

“It is not acceptable for me. I don’t know why this is happening to me. I don’t get it. I think if this was somewhere else, every club would protect its player.

How I see it now is like you throw Mo under the bus because he is the problem in the team now. But I don’t think I am the problem. I have done so much for this club.

The respect, I want to get it. I don’t have to go every day fighting for my position because I earned it. I am not bigger than anyone but I earned my position. It’s football. It is what it is.

There’s no relationship between me and the manger. It was very good relationship and now all of a sudden there is no relationship.”

Mo Salah is undeniably The Guy at Liverpool, the English champions, and this is him exploding to the press this week after being taken out of the team. Full scorched Earth.

Cue huge media reaction and infinite takes on what could have possibly happened. I’ll save you some time, because this isn’t weird at all. It’s the dominant personality structure of a generation. Sort of.

Take a group of people who achieved remarkable individual success in their career/life and you will find within them a very well-represented segment of highly individualistic people. Not only focused on their individual outcomes to an extreme degree, but also believing in their potential to achieve those outcomes to an extreme degree.

When you’re young this reads as delusional confidence, because it sort of is. But it can be a necessary part of the deal to motivate the actions to get there. And crucially, the inherent achievement of being the best is kinda sweet, but identity tends to get swept up into a desire of this being externally validated. You can’t ‘achieve greatness’ on an island, people need to see it.

This is the personality type of a Mo Salah, or a Cristiano Ronaldo. Play a team sport, but care a lot about being the best individual. To a pathological degree, some might say.

Most people would call this a strength, and I would agree. Cristiano Ronaldo doesn’t become Cristiano Ronaldo without wanting to be Cristiano Ronaldo. The desire forces the insane discipline that creates the reality. And hey, there is a certain charm to the egotist who you know, he knows, he’s so, fucking gifted.

However, the thing that necessarily comes with that drive to being thought of as the greatest is that any threat is met with violence. Every single time without fail. If you have a friend who things they’re going to be the next best rapper, and you try to give them some honest feedback, they might well make every effort possible to prove you wrong (and get better), but you are also going to fall out along the way. Scorched Earth.

So here’s what’s not going on with Salah:

Liverpool and Salah’s bad form has raised tension in the camp. People in the club are intentionally making him a scapegoat. He just wants to be heard and loved, but the club are deciding to disrespect him.

Here’s what is going on:

Mo Salah places huge value on being perceived as the best player in the country. His performances this year don’t align with that. Him being taken out of the team is broadcasting to the nation that his own coach doesn’t think he’s the best anymore. His identity is under severe threat for the first time, and he’s going to get violent to prevent that from happening.

Check the clever narrative flip he’s built. He’s not out of the team because he’s not the best player. He’s out of the team because someone is out to get him. He’s just not allowed to show us how good he is.

(football fans will also note that this is non-coincidentally identical to how ridiculously Ronaldo behaved when he fell out of a starting team for the first time a couple years ago).

But here’s the thing to understand: this isn’t just an act of emotion to temporarily deal with identity in flux, this is a classic strategic play to keep identity in check long-term. He may say he wants things to be fixed and hates this situation, yet he has done the exact thing that makes it totally unsalvageable and essentially guarantees his role as Liverpool hero is over. Why?

Because in the story of being star player who fell into an explosive feud and was forced out of the club, he still gets to be called the star player. Whereas if he compromises and accepts he’s not playing well, his identity as The Guy is over. He’s One of The Guys. That is hell to someone who strives for greatness. He would pick never playing football again over that.

This is hopefully where you’re realising this post is not about football. This is about how identity relates to the reality you choose to live in.

Expectations make the world go round, and determine your perceived reality. Plenty of ways of talking about this in the behavioural sciences:

Placebo effects produce measurable physiological changes on top of subjective reports. The Pygmalion effect demonstrated that teachers’ expectations about students influenced actual student performance. Confirmation bias shows that expectations literally shape what people perceive. Self-fulfilling prophecies in economics, such as bank runs, show how collective expectations can create the very outcomes people anticipate.

Awesome, but it would be incorrect to stop at this point and go ‘wow expectations really do matter to what you think is happening’.

Expectations are closer to time travel. You see what you think the world will look like, and you travel back to the present to act in the way you’ll need to act to create that future.

But to understand that psychologically you need to then ask: where has the expectation come from, and why?

When you think to yourself, ‘damn my boss is gonna be hard on me in my annual review’, what’s built that expectation and where did it start? Why does it bother you so much? Why is it attracting all of your attention?

Chances are you like to think of yourself as being great at something: your job, your hobby, your style, your coolness, your attractiveness, your taste, your intelligence. It’s become very tied to your self-esteem. So it must be guarded with your psychological life.

Well how does one then react to a world of competing individuals where your ability to be seen as The Guy is constantly under threat of evaluation?

Well you do the efficient thing. You create the circumstance in which you can’t be evaluated fairly. And to make that even more cognitively efficient, and hide the trick from yourself, you dress it up as a justified expectation that the world isn’t going to treat you fairly. And so you inevitably get these shitty experiences that take up all your narrative, and forgive you of the responsibility of advancing your life.

I know I say this all the time, but coping with freedom is the hardest psychological task you’ll ever get offered. Almost everyone fails.

You want to think you’re a talented employee. Your boss is a bit of a stickler. You have the option to level up your t-crossing and i-dotting, but you also have the option to miss one every now and then. Stickling continues, and suddenly the reason you’re not being hailed as brilliant is someone else.

Modern therapy techniques will (sort of correctly) observe that your neurotic bias towards negative expectations is increasing the likelihood of you sticking in your cycles of negative experience.

But they will fail to tell you is that this is all by design, by you.

If you take anything from this blog this year, let it be this: you actually do want these shitty outcomes you claim not to want because that is safer for your identity. Because that way you do not have to face reality and change.

Everyone calls it tragic when Oedipus meets his fateful end, but they always forget:

When Laius and Jocasta were told that Oedipus would eventually destroy them, they pinned his ankles and abandoned him in the woods, ensuring that he’d someday have cause to do it

Now this is where you say ‘ok yes, don’t overdo a basic point, you’re saying everyone’s a bit like Mo Salah, we should check our ego’.

And this is where I say no, I’m saying it’s probably far worse than that.

Yes, Salah has unconsciously created the situation which allows him to keep his ego intact, even if it does mean the end of his Liverpool career. But at least he’s used it as a last resort.

Him and Ronaldo have the gene of expecting greatness for themselves, so they created the greatness they expected. Go find clips of people talking about what Ronaldo was like as a teenager and how he obsessively dedicated his waking life to perfection. Do you think you’re going to be great? Do you act in any way like he did?

Both players tested their greatness in measurable ways every week for 10-20 years. Eventually, maybe the greatness does run out, but the identity doesn’t. So, emergency measure, blow the whole thing up to cover your tracks.

But this is the 0.01% of performance.

What you are in much worse danger of is letting the emergency measure become your primary tactic. Never get to show you good you are because you’ve crafted a world that will not allow you to.

Bosses that don’t value you. An economic system that doesn’t give you the time. A thousand mini tasks that need to be completed first.

There is nothing wrong about wanting to be great. It is a blessing. But you must at least offer the world the opportunity to benefit from you realising it. Most people give up. You will be tempted to do the same.

Thankfully you haven’t yet.

I.

“I’ve had to face the uncomfortable reality that I didn’t fully understand the cultural dynamics at play, and yeah, it’s no longer lost on me that I’m a white guy who opened a kebab shop in Hackney.

I now understand how gentrification and cultural appropriation can displace, erase, or commodify the very people and traditions that shaped a place - and I’m sorry to have contributed to that dynamic”

So will conclude the final cutting monologue of my one-man autobiographical stage show ‘Stefan Kelly vs The People Who Look Exactly Like Him’.

I haven’t actually written that script yet, so for now they are just the real words of the founder of Donny’s Kebabs, in an instagram apology from last month.

Donny launched his doner (get it?) kebab shop near London Fields over the summer, to a mini-social media storm. In his launch vid, the self-described ‘doner-obsessed DJ’ announces his grand opening, with a storefront that has all the hallmarks of places aspirational young people go and spend £20 on ok food. From experience, I know this place is about two minutes away from somewhere you can get the classic version for less than half the price. Donny got in trouble for being cringe/gentrifying/appropriating.

Now, ridiculous person may in fact be ridiculous. Not really my point.

First, how has my life turned out in a way where I know this at all?

It started when the rebranded ‘Donny’s Sandwiches’ hit my fyp in one of those Top 3 Sandwiches in East London type influencer vids. Top comment called him out as being the DJ that tried to gentrify kebabs then had to change his shop. I followed the trail to a podcast clip of two other young new-age Londoners mocking it which I assume was part of the furore that caused the apology. But the top comment on that clip was about something else. The top commenter there said that what was even funnier about this, was that this was the same location where London’s first cereal cafe got burned down in an anti-gentrification protest 10 years ago. Comment thread continued into some ironies and parallels being pointed out.

Quick pause to say the loud part out loud. The people posting and commenting criticism of Donny for being a gentrifier are not exactly the George Wilson to his Jay Gatsby. Revealed preference tells you exactly what level of flat white-ification they want to be surrounded by (double entendre may vary by individual case, if not by much).

The question is why does this go too far for them, when half of the restaurants on the ‘approved’ top 10 of London Fields engages in even more complex performative austerity? You know the vibe: exposed concrete purposely cracked, staff in ‘normal person’ clothes, menu handwritten on the wall, cocktails ‘only’ £12 on Wednesday nights. Lights are always down low, perhaps so you don’t notice your fellow diners aren’t the people that lived in Hackney thirty years ago.

I don’t really have an issue with this. It’s a free world, buy the expensive olives. But I am curious about the strategy.

Nothing confuses me more than the East London bar that packs out for taking their pint price down from £7 to £5 for two hours, when (1) these are people that won’t be saving more than £10 in a night and if they are then I bet their dealer doesn’t have a similar offer on, and (2) (again, revealed preferences) these are people that don’t seem to practically care about money at all. Don’t believe me? Take a survey of what undergrad degrees they got, and what they think of finance bros.

The strategy persists because being rich isn’t cool, and while one can accept being a gentrifier, it’s not conducive to a positive self-identity to think that way every day.

If I had a kebab for every time I’ve met someone who smokes rolled cigarettes because it’s cheaper, and forces their charity shop outfit into conversation, before ending up in a place that turns out to be their family’s second house which also happens to have an actual original painting of a very famous 20th century painter on the wall, I’d have two kebabs. Which is not a lot, but it’s enough to give you acid reflux.

Again, free world. Whatever makes you happy.

But why does this person hate Donny and his kebab shop?

Obvious first answer is that they make the nature of the game too obvious. It’s too surface level. And yes, I agree. But I propose the feeling that gives them isn’t anger or hatred. It gives them joy.

Baudrillard said the true success of the first Disneyland was that it was so overtly fake and imaginary, that it allowed Californians to believe that the world outside its entrance gates is real. And people loved going to Disneyland.

But I think the real genius of Disneyland is that while it’s fantasy, if you squint it still looks a quaint American town. You walk past the storefronts while strolling down ‘Main Street, USA’.

According to the Slate Star Codex school of outgroups, your enemy has to have a lot in common with you to actually feel different in a way that’s meaningful. Thus the American simulacrum is upheld by Disneyland, and not, say, lapland.

And thus the cultural outgroup to Hackney is Clapham, rather than a rural village in Armenia, or Pyongyang. These places are 99% the same, but it’s the 1% that makes identity actually function.

So maybe Donny creating his own hyperreal genre of gentrification is exactly what one needs to maintain the simulation.

Or perhaps it makes more sense to phrase this through the language of projection.

If a friend’s ever given you a detailed critique of someone else you both know, dressing down their faults and insecurities, and you think “hmm is it not weird they haven’t noticed that this is all true for them too”, you should know it is not weird. It is by design.

Bad feeling exists, but doesn’t fit with my self story, must be coming from you.

Similarly, if someone ever tries to assure you to don’t have to worry about something, when you are clearly not that worried, you can bet they are internally on the absolute edge, even/especially if they might not admit that to themselves.

This gives way to a peculiarly meta type of social critique. Another thing that went TikTok viral was this sketch parody of those ‘What’s the best bagel in Hackney?’ type street interviews, in which the interviewee has a breakdown over his performative identity. Fine. But then like a month later I see that same comedian getting interviewed on a podcast about that sketch, and the host goes ‘but seriously what are you favourites’ and he starts actually answering in the same way the person he’s making fun of would, and doesn’t seem to realise what’s just happened.

And with that maybe the puzzle of Donny being critiqued by Donnies of a different font is nearing completion. However, we seem to still be in the intro, so there must have been a final piece of my investigation worth talking about.

II.

When I heard Donny’s was built in the same spot where the cereal café was burned down in protest, I was all-in for some crunchy narrative. I remember the Cereal Killer café making the news around the time Instagram and Soundcloud rap became a thing. I guess that was when hipster became a term people seriously used again.

But I had never heard it burned down. I didn’t even know about the violent anti-gentrification protests from 10 years ago. I Googled it.

And there it is on the BBC and Evening Standard. September 2015.

Alan Keery, who runs the Cereal Killer cafe with his twin brother Gary, told the Evening Standard “There were children there - they were terrified.

The staff were absolutely terrified. It was an angry mob throwing paint at the windows. They had torches and pigs’ heads. They’d brought cereal and they were throwing it at the shop.”

He added: “We’re being targeted as the poster boys of gentrification and that’s not our fault. I think it’s an absolute joke, a bunch of people attacking us. We’re a small business. There’s other big chain places around Shoreditch – me and my brother started a business out of absolutely nothing and we’re trying to grow it.”

Image of cereal being thrown at the windows being sort of funny aside, I’m confused.

I thought it was burned down as part of some massive symbolic violent rage? This is a few windows broken in a small demonstration that lasted a couple hours.

I went back to the comment section where this was referenced and heavily upvoted. Do they all know it’s not true? I doubt it. But how does that happen?

Another thing. This went down on Brick Lane in Shoreditch. That is not where Donny’s is. That’s another falsehood. There is no ghost of Captain Crunch haunting the dj-mixed doner.

I went back further, to the podcast clip of the people slagging Donny off. They reference the backlash it’s been getting for gentrification and cultural appropriation. And throw it out there as something they generally agree with.

So I went searching for the real backlash, and found … nothing. Only stuff taking about the backlash.

And so I went back again, all the way to Donny’s apology, where he says:

I now understand how gentrification and cultural appropriation can displace, erase, or commodify the very people and traditions that shaped a place - and I’m sorry to have contributed to that dynamic.

And now I read it and don’t understand who he’s talking to. He was barely under any pressure. The amount of media talking about the fake-backlash didn’t even extend past a handful.

But once he did apologise, it became a much bigger story. Perhaps because now it had conflict and resolution, or perhaps now because something had technically happened.

So now when you search for Donny’s Kebabs you only find the apology. The fact that everything preceding it happened is taken as a given, but it didn’t.

But the media wins, ads get viewed, and identity gets maintained.

Makes me think of Baudrillard’s ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place’.

Baudrillard’s claimed the war existed more as media spectacle than as lived reality. It was not a traditional war i.e. no real confrontation between equal forces, minimal ground combat, and a total mediation through screens and narratives. The media’s coverage created the illusion of conflict while erasing real suffering and complexity. What “happened” was the image of war, not war itself.

I’m losing track over whether Donny is Iraq in this metaphor or not, but it’s certainty some kind of illustration that stories matter far more than events.

And it’s that process that burned down the cereal café.

My question is what the end point of that process is going to be.

III.

What happened to the Maya people? Their civilisation, why did it fall?

If you’re a complete idiot, like I am, you maybe thought it was something like: The Spanish Conquistadores arrived in 1600ish, encountered this vast, complex network of advanced societies with beautiful architecture and thriving trades, and over time took it down with guns, germs and steel.

Sort of true.

It was vast. At its peak, the Maya reaching an estimated 3-10 million people, with urban densities in major cities exceeding 1,000 people per square kilometre.

It was advanced. Their calendar system was sophisticated, they could track dates over millennia. They correctly calculated the solar year at 365.2420 days and their astronomical observations allowed them to perfectly predict solar eclipses.

It was beautifully engineered. Major cities contained thousands of structures, and were connected to each other by raised limestone causeways up to 100 kilometres long. Water management systems featured reservoirs holding enough water to sustain the population through nine-month dry seasons.

It had thriving industry and trade. The population was fed by intensive agriculture, within which they cultivated over 100 plant species. Jade from the Motagua Valley, cacao from Pacific coastal regions, marine shells, and quetzal feathers moved across networks spanning 1,000+ kilometres. Major cities controlled trade routes worth considerable wealth in tribute and tariffs.

I was vaguely correct about all of that with none of the detail.

What I was wrong about was the Spanish part.

Not that they didn’t come and kill Mayans and claim the region, they did. But they didn’t encounter any of the stuff mentioned above. Because the Maya achieved all of that between 250-900 AD.

And by the time the Conquistadores disembarked in 1520, the golden era of the Maya had been over for over 500 years. The people they found weren’t living in advanced cities. They were in small groups living relatively simple lives on the northern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.

In 1695, as the final stronghold of the Maya, Tayasal, forced Spanish monk Andres de Avendano to flea following a failed conversion attempt on the king, he stumbled across some ruins on his scramble back to safety. His written account described climbing an enormous pyramid and finding “buildings in the form of a convent with small cloisters and many living rooms all roofed over and arched like a wagon and whitened inside with plaster.”

But it wasn’t until the 19th century when rumours of a lost city in that region turned into targeted exploration. In 1848, the ruins were found to be the city of Tikal.

Tikal was the largest and most powerful Maya city for much of the Classic Period. At its peak, the city centre held 65,000 people with another 30,000 in the outskirts, part of an empire containing half a million people.

The city’s limestone temples towered to 64 metres, nearly as high as the Brooklyn Bridge towers, the view from which would show houses and streets stretching in every direction, with people toiling in fields beyond.

But the Spanish only encountered its ruins, by accident.

If the Europeans didn’t take down Tikal and banish the remaining Maya back to the small coastal villages, who did? Who got there first?

Turns out, no one did. They were the cause of all of their own problems.

There are some strong theories as to what happened. Again, if you aren’t as dumb as me you probably knew this already.

Firstly, classic malthusian trap. Agriculture leads to population growth, population growth leads to higher demand for agriculture, exponentially increasing agriculture leads to soil being overused and ruined. Deforestation to make space for houses and roads doesn’t help. Tikal becomes too big to sustain itself.

Secondly, constant city-state warfare leads to instability, violence and chaos, which also doesn’t help alongside the first point. What’s strange is that this style of warfare is part of what maintained their civilisation for so long. ‘Flower Wars’ were ritualised battles where city-states would send small armies to capture elites for sacrifice, demonstrate power, and renew a general sense of order in the aftermath. But when everyone’s resources dropped, wars over what’s left get fiercer, and barely anything gets left behind. Tikal’s friends declare themselves independent kingdoms. Quite Game of Thrones.

This is all to say that collapse wasn’t the result of the system rotting, it was the endpoint of its success, it was never going to develop in any other way. This is a system simply allowed to follow its own logic.

Archaeologist Betty Meggers combines anthropology, ecology and physics to generate her thermodynamic theory of cultural evolution to explain the end limits on cultural development. She argued that a society’s complexity is constrained by the energy available from its environment. In other words, environmental productivity sets an upper limit on how complex social organisation can become.

When the fires burn out, both literally (drought and historically low radiation from the sun) and figuratively (food supply, trade routes, and political organisation), culture cannot be maintained.

That’s when the second law of thermodynamics rears its head.

And it’s this process that burned down the Maya civilisation.

IV.

The bloggers of the previous generation all had their way of talking about the bad thing.

TLP had his version of narcissism. Lou Keep had his version of nihilism. Hotel Concierge had his version of fetishisation.

These are all intimately related, if not basically the same broad concept. Society heading in a direction where a focus on image and identity creates an inability to connect, a lack of values, and a cultural race to the bottom where the deeper you live in the simulation, the greater your chance of loneliness and anxiety.

That’s the trend, with technology and media acting as the catalyst that’s speeding things way up.

This is bad. Yes, even the podcasters with nonsense views on gentrification. I feel bad for them. The only thing in Hackney more profitable than a small plates restaurant is a private therapy clinic.

My question is: what happens in the long run? Seriously, what’s the most likely outcome?

If Moloch represents the inevitability of competitive selection pressure, given a long enough time horizon, all behaviour becomes bound to that process. Your answer would be that eventually Moloch destroys all value, then all life.

Less dramatically, Tim Dillon puts it like this:

Nothing will ever be funnier.

America will come apart in the funniest way. All of these people, these grifters, everybody circling the wagons, the Caitlyn Jenners, the Donald Trumps, it’ll be funny until you’ll die laughing.

Literally you’ll die but you will be laughing. Because we’re a crazy country full of crazy people and everybody’s just trying to suck the last few dollars out of this bloated pig corpus corpse of an empire before the end.

And I’m no different, watch my special and subscribe to my podcast. What, am I going to go preach on a fucking mountain? No, we got to make a little money here.

But make no mistake, if your attitude is that the population’s going to get smarter, healthier and more adept at problem solving, YOU’RE ON FUCKING CRACK.

Does that go on forever? That wouldn’t be a rare thing to believe. In fact, culture finds a way to incentivise that too. And I don’t have a grand thesis there beyond the fact that that seems like a bad thing to me.

Both Mark Fisher and David Foster-Wallace got mega cool points for pointing out that the system only leads to bad stuff, paralysis, detachment and neutralisation. And I’ll brace for some backlash by noting that this belief didn’t work out great for either of them in the long-run.

Which is why I would like to at least consider some other possibility.

Back to Betty Meggers’ theory. Complex cultures can only continue when sufficient energy is provided by the environment. If a society accelerates to a point where it can no longer sustain itself, it could implode rather quickly. The Maya took themselves down in the way a rival civilisation never would have been able to.

So what’s the energy source that this culture depends on? You might be tempted to say identity maintenance, but that’s the process that needs fuelling.

The source is stories. Like the doner-obsessed DJ. Or the burned-down cereal café. Or the appeal of cocktails that are still disgracefully expensive if you get 2 for 1.

These are what the keep the show going. We just need a new episode every now and then.

There’s a classic Yudkowsky post called How An Algorithm Feels From Inside.

He makes the useful observation that most debates tend to around where a set of information means that X can be said to be of category A. For example, is Pluto a planet, is Israel committing genocide, is an expensive kebab shop gentrification, is it also cultural appropriation.

Yud’s point is these are not debates of facts, as categories are created within one’s own consciousness. Pluto is the same set of properties whether I call it a planet or not. The sense of unresolvedness is the mind’s algorithmic leftovers, not a property of the world.

He ends by saying this:

Before you can question your intuitions, you have to realize that what your mind’s eye is looking at is an intuition—some cognitive algorithm, as seen from the inside—rather than a direct perception of the Way Things Really Are.

People cling to their intuitions, I think, not so much because they believe their cognitive algorithms are perfectly reliable, but because they can’t see their intuitions as the way their cognitive algorithms happen to look from the inside.

And so everything you try to say about how the native cognitive algorithm goes astray, ends up being contrasted to their direct perception of the Way Things Really Are—and discarded as obviously wrong.

As a reader, he implies to you that your goal is to take the information you have and build an accurate world model, and his point is that you thinking that the external world is equal to The Way Things Really Are is a distraction to this.

And this is where his model of people is limited. Because that isn’t the goal. The goal is to convert the various measurable pieces of information into intuitively categorised Thing. And if that makes your version of reality different to what’s really going on it doesn’t actually matter to you.

Yudkosky’s perspective already got him into a fight that was huge news for the underemployed this year, with Sam Kriss.

Kriss:

My most recent essay here, ‘The law that can be named is not the true law,’ has now been read by more than 50,000 people. Unfortunately, some of these new readers seem to have been upset by some of the things I said.

..

The last section of the essay described the trial of Laurentius Clung, a sixteenth-century theologian who thought God sends absolutely everyone to Hell, and who is the only person known to have hated absolutely everything. Apparently, I combined fiction and nonfiction without clearly signposting the transition. Which means that some of the things I said were lies.

According to these people, I am cynically misleading people. I have poisoned the well of truth.

The mob even included Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder and high priest of the sect.

Yudkowsky couldn’t get on board with Kriss using fiction to make a point about reality, vaguely ironic for the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, but I do believe he means it.

My point is more that stories are the natural output of what an algorithm produces from the inside, and you can disagree with that as a philosophy if you want but it doesn’t make it less true.

That cereal café in Shoreditch never burned down, but I’m being 100% serious when I say it may as well have. Harry Potter may have never happened, but once we’ve all seen it and have been affected by it in some way, it may as well have. The backlash to Donny was real, whether it actually happened or not.

What I will totally accept is that the end point of that algorithm pursuing its goal is bleak. Hence, the post.

Stories fuel the identity, the narcissism, the nihilism, the simulation, the depression, the anxiety. That is a basic equation to the complexity of the culture. What would it take for that to change?

The Hegelian model of change is (1) thesis, ends up in conflict with (2) antithesis, resulting in a new (3) synthesis.

Erik Hoel wrote about this last year. He suggests:

The thesis: the rise of the mob through social media, creating a collective consciousness that judges, cancels, and surveils individuals.

The antithesis: the emergence of sovereign individuals—figures like Musk, Swift, Rogan, Trump, or anonymous users—who resist or are immune to the mob.

The synthesis: the eventual domestication of the group mind—finding a way for humans and the collective online consciousness to coexist without tyranny or dependence, marking the “end of online history.”

Sounds good, but I need heavy convincing. As would Tim Dillon.

There’s another Baudrillard book about this. It’s called Fatal Strategies.

In it, you find Baudrillard rejecting Hegelian dialectics. In the 20th century and later, contradictions don’t resolve through synthesis or historical progress. So instead of negation producing some higher meaning of how things should be, he argues for excess as a route to implosion. And from there we kind of just see what gets built in the rubble.

An example, which I genuinely can’t remember if he said this or if I thought of it, but this is true of war. Great wars haven’t stopped because of the hippies placing daisies down the barrels of assault rifles. The wars stopped because we got way too good at killing each other. War cannot really happen because the second anyone makes a move, we’ll all go simultaneous when the air becomes uranious. Thus, peace in the West.

Makes me think of the Maya. A system simply allowed to follow its own logic until it can no longer feed itself. Is that how all cultures get moved on from? They get pushed to an extreme and then run out of energy?

Cancelling stops when people start to get cancelled for doing everything all the time? When new kebab shops start posting their apologies before their doors have even opened? Narcissism stops when access to status goods becomes unlimited?

I guess that I’m saying that … I hope so.

René Girard was obsessed with martyrs as catalysts for change and I kind of get why. Human systems create victims that are the fuel to keep the system going, but every now and then, the innocence of the victim is revealed. Their suffering no longer legitimises the community’s unity through violence; showing that society’s peace has always been founded on collective murder.

Is Donny a martyr? The words ‘doner-obsessed dj’ are enough to make one face the absurdity of the culture they’re participating in, and add into the mix the layers of complex lies that built the story and you end up with a sense that surely something has got to give and this can’t go on forever.

Baudrillard’s point is that it won’t. It’ll snap and implode. And to say it’s our job to make that happen as our best way out would be a vaguely Landian notion.

Only then can we beat the bad thing.

Which sounds awesome in theory, but lord am I having a hard time buying it. Where Land looks at technology as the force that makes the snap happen societally and governmentally, I look at the effects it’s had culturally and wonder if it’s the thing that prevents it.

I mean, shouldn’t Trump have been so absurd that he broke politics and made us start again with how we think about electing leaders? Conversely, wasn’t Kamala’s campaign was so bad and suffered such an embarrassing loss that it should have snapped Democrats out of it? Shouldn’t every right-wing victory worldwide, and soon here in the UK, break Bluesky out of the simulated world they live in?

Shouldn’t Duchamp’s fountain have broken pretentious, meaningless art? Shouldn’t irony have gone out of style the second brands started doing it on Twitter? I even used to think TikTok was social media’s endpoint, but now Sora is taking us ad astra.

The Maya ruined their own fields and depleted their forces too much, so the energy runs out, but technology and media offer us no viable parallel. The stories get produced forever. Donny didn’t even get taken down by the pressure of the system. He just had to rebrand the shop and he’s living his new story already.

It is very difficult to see how an algorithm could ever take itself down when it can never question itself from the inside.

V.

Hard to know what to make of all this if I’m honest.

I went to Donny’s this morning. In its new sandwich reincarnation. I was hoping if I stood outside it and caught whatever vibe was going, then the insight of it all would reveal itself to me. Didn’t end up happening. Just got more questions.

For example, one that keeps pushing to the front when I think about it again: he did it on purpose, didn’t he?

Nothing else would make sense. I don’t know if I have a great theory of mind, and maybe he doesn’t either, but even still how could one openly claim to be a DJ with a passion for kebabs without expecting people to hate it?

And why such a dramatic apology? He had some hate comments, sure, but I couldn’t find enough to match the mental anguish he seemed to speaking from. Did he overreact to the overreaction too on purpose, too? Some kind of meta-outrage-bait?

Perhaps one should just judge the guy’s results rather than his methods. He gained a tonne of social media attention. I know about Donny’s. So do you now. If I went all the way back to the start of his story in Section I, I only know about him because his new spot got on some influencer’s video. He’s played me well, in a sense.

Maybe he’s trying to save us. Maybe he’s trying to force the fatal strategy to its conclusion. Maybe he’s already worked out that won’t happen, so he’s just using the system to his advantage.

Maybe he took inspiration from the cereal café myth. Maybe he knew stories were the only way to survive once an algorithm gets complex enough.

Maybe that will be the one thing left that gives us any hope of a way out.

Maybe the Maya civilisation never burned itself down.

Was thinking about this CASISDEAD lyric this evening:

“I knew the end was due
I watched shit get diluted and devalued
Now they call you an artist even if all you do is talk shit on beat or cry in autotune
It’s disrespectful to the gods we’ve lost
We’re raising kids that won’t know what music was
Out the NS-10’s I hear Freddie’s voice begging the radio not to become background noise”

You can decide for yourself why this has led to me doing this. But in any case, this is something I wish someone else made for me when I was 21.

This is a collection of work that essentially combines into every interesting thing I’ve ever stolen and reproduced as my own. Whether I do that effectively is up to your assessment. No idea’s original, but it’s pretty easy to build a unique combination of borrowed ones.

Everything here I hard vouch, and you will be a different person by the time you’re through it.

And importantly, this is not only a list of great ideas, but of great writing too. That is necessary for inclusion. These two variables are of course going to be related.

Obviously this is going to contain some very famous stuff you’ve already come across. That is a common feature of excellence. And you should have some sense to know when some parts of much older books don’t apply to the current state of things.

A final layer of primer before we get into it:

• This list contains some authors that wouldn’t even consider themselves psychologists, but I do, and that’s all that matters.

• If someone is featured here, I generally will have read most of their other work and will vaguely vouch for it, but I’ve picked these specific works for a reason.

• Works are roughly organised by theme, but not explicitly. As everything relates to everything in the aggregate, I suppose.

• I am also not suggesting you read this in this specific order.

• There are ideas in some that contradict some ideas in others. I do not consider this an issue, but you might.

• Everything here should be available on the big book website or the smaller book websites, and with any degree of nous you could find everything here for free. I guess that means you have no excuse, right?

  ---

Freud

Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Civilisation and its Discontents

The Uncanny

Nowhere else to start really. The most remarkable thing about Freud is how he produced so much from basically zero. I really don’t understand it.

The second most remarkable thing is how readable he remains today. If you’ve never truly tried then you will be shocked. He writes clearer than pretty much any modern psychologist without having the benefit of having the same mechanisms of language.

I’ve picked three shorter pieces that altered my model of how people work the most, and how to actually spot connections between behaviour and the unconscious. There are some people I respect who put the Interpretation of Dreams as the one thing that stands above and will never leave them, which I can understand, but it’s not an entry point.

If you’ve read this blog then the ideas of Beyond the Pleasure Principle might remind you of something. Truly understanding thanatos felt like a breakthrough to me in my life. Strangely it’s eros that’s entered the online vernacular. I guess that’s an alpha opportunity.

Jung

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Jung is disgustingly insightful. Page after page that makes you realise you are basically of average intellect. Perhaps that’s a useful service in itself.

This is part memoir, part summary of all of his main ideas. I have a lot of respect for not pretending that you can separate the two.

Jung also carries Freud’s trait of being easy to read, but actually way more fun. His personal journals (more on that later) are far more difficult to comprehend, but when he was writing to be understood, it was very easy for him.

His chapter On Life After Death kicked off the notions of infinity I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, although they haven’t really shown up in the blog yet. Jung has a strong immediate sense of the inherent mysticism to experience, and even when he pushes his reasoning beyond what you’re willing to accept, you’ll still be left trying to work out what you actually do believe.

A guy who cared deeply about people.

Adam Phillips

On Giving Up

Phillips is one of the last remaining true public psychologists, and probably the last of the Freudian psychoanalytic variety. I don’t actually know if he’s big outside the UK, but he tends to write small books that are actually giant essays on one tidy topic which you can read in a sitting or two.

On Giving Up is about giving up, i.e. the human capacity to submit. Truly Phillips’ best strength is being able to interpret and re-frame Freud, who I would barely understand properly without him. And this book is very Freud.

He winds you through his arguments really fluidly, and sometimes you think man just get to the point, but over time you learn that’s just part of the fun.

Phillips has a claim at best living psychology essayist. So if you consider yourself one of those, may as well scope out the competition.

RD Laing

The Politics of Experience

The Voice of Experience

RD Laing was another last of a dying breed, except this one is now extinct truly.

Laing was from an era where psychologists could gain enough notoriety to become media figures (for being a psychologist, not for other stuff), and if you search online you’ll see him on talk shows and on magazine covers. A rockstar of his time.

Both of these books are remarkable. The Voice of Experience is weirder and less known, so I’d recommend that for last.

But The Politics of Experience is one of the bravest, most beautifully written critiques of what we are even doing here with this psychology thing. Laing writes “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”

He had a real sympathy for those with psychological pain, but he also shows what we can learn from them, and what questions people prefer to ignore.

As a bonus, The Birds of Paradise is a short allegorical essay appended to the book, which features this easter egg for fans of this blog’s lore:

How do you plug a void plugging a void? How to inject nothing into fuck all? How to come into a gone world? No piss, shit, smegma, come, mucoid, viscoid, soft or hard, or even tears of eyes, ears, arse, cunt, prick, nostrils, done to any T, of man or alligator, tortoise, or daughter, will plug up the Hole. It’s gone past all that, that, all that last desperate clutch. Come into gone. I do assure you. The dreadful has already happened.

Told you he was a good writer.

The Last Psychiatrist

No Self-Respecting Woman Would Go Out Without Make Up

Those Five Days Matter More Than Anything, Except The Other Days

The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus

I do not attempt to conceal the extent to which TLP influences this blog. As a wide chunk of readers are already familiar, I will just say this: The Last Psychiatrist/Edward Teach is the greatest psychology writer since the invention of the internet and it’s not particularly close.

I think most of the aforementioned people would have blogs if they were working today and they should shit on absolutely everyone currently working. Except Teach.

I pick these three essays for you to go find for different reasons. The first is a masterpiece of the genre, and breaks pretty much every rule you can think of for what a good essay should be in theory. And should hopefully dispel any notions you have that intellectual work can only come with a reference section and a google scholar account.

The second is just a beautiful summation of how to approach life. I won’t say any more.

The third is his most famous post that most directly explains what he sees as modern narcissism, which he believes is the most important problem of our time. This is a truly important idea if you want to understand anything else on this list, especially the simulation and map/territory stuff that comes up later.

Maslow

The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences

Maslow is a weird one for me. I obviously learned about the Hierarchy of Needs in school, and I thought that was who he was, until a couple of other interests brought me back to him.

In what is turning out to be a running theme, Maslow was part of the generation of psychologists that could write for public audiences in a way that actually had some swag and respect for the reader.

Psychologists now tend to write impenetrably (either through jargon or because you literally can’t access their papers), which you can consider as them telling you they have nothing to say. Maslow was around before that happened to the discipline, and he had a lot to say.

The Farther Reaches of Human Nature features his Jonah Complex, fear of success, which I’ve spoken about before. This is a crucial thing to understand about people.

Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences is more of a left-field that completely disrupts your world model book. Maslow argues that organised religion largely eliminates the capacity of the individual to have transcendent experiences, by allowing him to place their naturalistic simplicity at the alter of, well, whatever religion they are assigned to. But it isn’t just the work of religion to eliminate peak experiences from the human experience, but also science, which has rid psychology of anything not measurable. I share a similar rage at the link between science and psychology that emerged in the late 20th century.

If you don’t know what any of that means, then you really need to read the book.

Rollo May

The Cry for Myth

Love and Will

May is another mid 20th century American who still had some of the soul of the European psychologists and hadn’t given up on writing well yet. May is brilliant at connecting what he saw in his clinical practice with outside culture, and is also very erudite within the genre. He points out connections that you realise should have been obvious to you the entire time.

The Cry for Myth is about crying for myths, which are essential for meaning-making. More importantly, this gets into the part people don’t talk about as much, i.e. are they ‘just’ stories? May doesn’t think they are lies, and well it’s all getting a bit Jordan Peterson in here, but it makes you wonder what he means by true. And what you mean by true. And what anyone means by true. How come the same myths come up across cultures? Is that not suspicious?

Love and Will is a brilliant meditation on the modern apathy that pretty much every essay now talks about. I personally view this as a gold-standard because I agree with the notion that May is much closer to the origin of the trend than the invention of the iPhone. May diagnoses modern crises of apathy, sexual liberation without depth, and lack of genuine connection, but with some immense insight from real clinical experience.

McLuhan

Understanding Media

(important: not The Medium of the Massage, if you read that first you are gonna have a bad time)

If you want to understand people, read the whole list, but if you want to understand 2025, read this first.

Sometimes I think McLuhan’s biggest mistake was coming up with a phrase as catchy as ‘The Medium is the Message’, because it allows people to just remember that and never get to grips with what he’s saying. And when it does finally sit with you, you will lose sleep. I think the ideas in this book are that important.

Also when you read him, especially some of his more creative works, you realise how many people are ripping off his style all the time.

I don’t rip off his style, but I rip off his ideas all the time. And I know not enough people actually read him because these are some of my most popular posts and no one’s ever called me out on it.

A visionary and genius. Can’t offer you more than that.

Baudrillard

Simulacra & Simulation

To my taste, probably the least enjoyable writer on this list, but the ideas more than make up for it.

Baudrillard traces a movement from representation to hyperreality through successive phases of the image. At first, the image reflects a basic reality, acting as a faithful copy of the world. Next, it begins to mask and distort that reality, still tied to it but bending it. In the third stage, the image masks the absence of reality altogether; signs pretend to refer to something real, but the reference point has already disappeared. Finally, in the stage of pure simulacra, the image bears no relation to reality at all and instead refers only to other signs.

This isn’t taught in first year psychology, and of course it isn’t measurable, but to not understand this is to not understand modern life.

Nancy McWilliams

Psychoanalytic Diagnosis

Nancy McWilliams is one of the living greats. All of her smaller essays and papers that I’ve read have been fantastic and have the clarity of argument reserved only for those that actually understanding things.

This book is a comprehensive guide to understanding personality structures from a psychoanalytic lens. So I don’t really know if I recommend this unless you’re a student or practitioner, but I wish her ideas were more widespread.

Particularly, this part from her chapter on the DSM’s categorical diagnoses, summarises my current view on, well, a lot of things:

lt may [also] contribute to a form of self-estrangment, a reification of self-states for which one implicitly disowns responsibility ... “I have social phobia” is a more alienated, less self-inhabited way of saying “I am a painfully shy person.” Many women become irritable when premenstural, but it is one thing to say, “I’m sorry I’m kind of cranky today; my period is due” and another to announce, “I have PMDD [premenstrual dysphoric disorder].” It seems to me that the former owns one’s behavior, increases the likelihood of warm connection with others, and acknowledges that life is sometimes difficult, while the latter implies that one has a treatable ailment, distances others from one’s experience, and supports an infantile belief that everything can be ‘fixed.’ Maybe this is just my idiosyncratic perspective, but I find this inconspicuous shift in communal assumptions troubling.

It is useful to think of this every time you label yourself or another person. The categories are only as real as you decide to make them. Might not be having the effect you think.

James C. Scott

Seeing Like a State

Combine this McLuhan and Baudrillard and you have a pretty powerful frame on what makes modern life different, and why weird things happen when a lot of people begin to exist beside each other.

Scott’s core idea: attempts to rationalise and control society through simplification create blindness, and ignoring local knowledge in pursuit of Utopian schemes leads to ruin. This continues to be an issue with human societies.

It took genius to produce the initial idea, but you can practically apply this other things really easily. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t think about map and territory problems.

Byung-Chul Han

Psychopolitics

Han argues that contemporary power no longer works mainly through repression or external discipline, as in Foucault’s “biopolitics,” but through internalised self-management. The result is a society of fatigue, depression, and burnout, where power operates psychologically rather than physically. Han calls this shift “psychopolitics,” the subtle domination of the psyche through freedom itself.

I have my issues with both his causes and solutions, and think he’s kind of a whiner that just feeds into more people being depressed, but his description of the present situation was very illuminating to me.

This relationship between freedom and submission is really well discussed in what is potentially the best short explainer on how modern power works.

I enjoy his other work less.

Nate Silver

The Signal and The Noise

A good description of how to live with uncertainty, while also being a good description of how most people fail at doing just that.

Bit of a left-field one in comparison to the rest of this list but very few books and people have affected my worldview as much.

And a general lesson it carries beyond statistics: if you want to do anything well, it’s going to require humility, scepticism, and respect for complexity. At least in your private moments.

Books I think are of a similar quality yet cannot be recommended in good conscience because they are so difficult to get through and there might just be better ways to spend your time (in my opinion)

Edward Teach - Sadly, Porn

Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil

Lacan - The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis

Jung - The Red Book

As a viable option, look up reviews or explainers of these. Or just tackle them head on, but don’t blame me if you don’t have fun.

I leave them here because it is only in such departures from normality does the exciting stuff happen sometimes. Some stuff you wouldn’t even believe.

OK that’s it for now. I hope this is useful to someone.

I would consider doing something similar with fiction and films. Lmk if that would be cool, but be warned I know way less about both of those things.

I.

I watched a Gary’s Economics video yesterday, called “Refugee Riots – Salience and Storytelling”.

In it, he muses on the effects of the media in the UK, how it’s causing what’s happening in the streets, and how we need a new story to counteract it from a left-wing perspective. He says that by the end, we are going to understand how the media works.

To those unaware, Gary Stevenson is a city trader turned public persona/activist/economist. He puts out videos on inequality, taxes, and the economy for a general audience, and is trying to build a movement towards heavier wealth tax in the UK.

In terms of his story, he is very keen on letting you know he’s from a working class background, got high grades at the London School of Economics, and was a multi-millionaire at 25. This background has given him his lens into how the system is unfair on poor people. Despite his wealth he sticks to everyday aesthetics, recording in his kitchen, wearing hoodies, and using curse words.

Some housekeeping before we get into it: I think Gary is basically right a lot of the time and is worried about the right things. Even the most capitalistic amongst us must admit that the one big catch of the current economic system is that it can, if left unchecked, create huge inequality. Turns out, it has been left unchecked and that has happened. You should care about this even if you openly don’t care about poor people’s welfare, because at some point the system will not hold and the whole thing gets torn down. Also Reform are very likely going to win the next election if nothing changes.

He’s also right about storytelling, sort of. In this video he mentions that narrative decides what the public thinks, and politicians will follow along with that for approval. This is true and possibly underrated. If you want to see a change in your country, chances are getting people elected is an inefficient way to go about it. It’s easier to change what people want.

What Gary is dangerously wrong about is how media works.

And this is because he doesn’t seem to understand how power works, either.

Even when it’s staring straight at him.

II.

Gary starts his video by saying he is going to talk about the refugee protests, salience and storytelling. He doesn’t really talk about the refugee part at all, but he does talk about salience and storytelling.

He sees the immigration issue as opposition to his wealth issue. Each side looks at bad things happening in society, and blames them on their version of the big problem.

He notices that his cause’s place in the media has begun to slip away recently, and they’re starting to lose the game, which has made him think about salience:

Two and a half months ago and at the time it really felt like we kind of had our foot on the neck of the media basically. Everybody was talking about wealth taxes. Everybody was constantly asking politicians, why don't you do something about wealth taxes? Why don't you do something about inequality?

And there was kind of an effort made by the media, especially by the right-wing media, to kind of discredit the ideas on wealth taxes. And really, to be honest, it kind of failed. I think they didn't really successfully poke many holes in the idea of taxing the rich more, in the idea of doing something about inequality, and it felt like we had won the argument.

But then what basically happened was the media pretty much stopped talking about inequality and started to talk more and more and more and more about refugees and asylum seekers and these protests at these hotels. And what this teaches us is the importance of the first media idea we're going to explain today which is salience.

So they’re losing the battle for salience to the right-wing, hence protests at migrant hotels rather than at parliament.

In the next part of the video, Gary lays out what the important question to be asking is in order to regain the lead:

Salience is basically how visible a particular topic is. So rather than try to win the debate, you try to make sure only one side of the debate is visible.

The media decides what is or isn't discussed an eye out for it you will see all over the media. You will see everybody doing it in every political conversation.

It doesn't just apply to an individual conversation or an individual debate. We can apply it to the media as a whole,one media show or basically like the whole media like all of the TV, all of the newspapers, all of the online social media. What topics are getting discussed and what topics are not getting discussed?

And back in late June, early July, the economy and inequality and taxation of the rich were being discussed every single day on every single news show. We had massive salience. We we were the issue that was being spoken about. We were the issue that was dominating media time.

And now if you look at the TV, what you see is immigration and asylum seekers and refugee rights, refugee protests outside hotels are being spoken about much much much more. And issues of inequality, taxation, distribution have kind of been put on the shelf which basically means we as much as we maybe won the argument on the economy, we are now losing the battle for salience.

So how do you win the battle for salience?

First, consider how the battle has gotten formed, i.e. the nature of the tools you consume the world through. Including the one you’d be using to watch this Gary’s Economics video.

Our current technological set-up is an ecosystem of micro-messages, accompanied by like or upvote buttons, that inevitably strips everything to pure psycho-memetics. This process applies to aesthetics, music, food, people, whatever else. It applies to politics on steroids. Hence, social media dominated by very simple worldviews and the amount of causes for the bad things being narrowed down to approximately one. Gary implicitly agrees with this, so he sets his anti-billionaire cause up against the anti-immigration cause.

The issue with this is that we live in a multivariate world, where everything is connected. Therefore everything does cause everything in some way. So the key thing here is that when a big bad thing happens, and you go search for your number one issue in the cause column, you will find it. Every time. And you technically won’t be wrong. So the gas that fuels the echo chamber gets lit again.

Think about who benefits from this process and you are halfway towards the answer. And this is where Gary is so close to getting it.

He says this:

The media decides what is or isn't discussed, keep an eye out for it and you will see all over the media. You will see everybody doing in every political conversation.

Which means he thinks the power the media has is deciding what answers get discussed. He needs to step one step back, and realise it’s not where the money is at.

Consider that he takes ‘which side is right, immigration or inequality?’ as the given question that he is tasked with answering, and fighting for.

Think about this as the question he never thinks to ask: is it possible that both inequality and immigration contribute to some of the things people have issues with in the UK?

I say he never thinks to ask that, rather than having a formed opinion on it, because he manages to not find it strange at all that he could make a 30 minute video on the refugee riots, talk about wealth inequality the entire time, and not talk about the refugee issue once.

Gary is focused on winning the ‘Battle for Salience’ because he’s locked in the simulacrum. What he doesn’t get is that when he’s invited to Newsnight or whatever, and is sat opposite the Reform-er who wants everyone deported, the battle that matters has already been lost.

Here’s a hint: if you’re sitting on BBC primetime TV, you need to wonder why you’re sitting there. You claim the media is powerful, and in this case it’s picked you. You might wonder what makes you so special.

Hey, this might not be on Gary’s curriculum, but the bible of how to think about this has been available since 1964, and this billionaire is happy to give it to you for just £15.99.

McLuhan explained that form trumps content every time. So if you’re on TV, you’re a character on a TV show. You are entertainment. If you’re making short form internet content, you’re a TikToker. You sell dopamine for a living.

And this is where you see the genius into converting all societal problems into Cause A vs Cause B. It guarantees people fighting over their place in the media forever, which permanently entrenches its power, as well as the ad revenue.

Gary thinks storytelling is the most important issue of the political landscape, and he’s kind of right. But again his focus on content of the stories blinds him from focusing on the far more important form. If you are offering a story that blames every bad outcome on one thing, you are forcing your audience to live in your simulated reality, and taking all their power away.

Yes, stories get the people going, but give them two competing stories, which they’ll accurately be able to partially blame every issue that comes up on, and you guarantee that the cycle goes on forever.

Gary demands change, but this is the last thing the media wants.

And when he sits down on YouTube to strategise his place in the media landscape, the real battle is already over.

So our question has to become: why does the media pick him specifically to enter the arena? What is it about the way he interprets the world?

III.

The key to the classic tale of misunderstanding of media we are describing, is a conflation between the symbols of power and power itself. Between map and territory. And this view of collective psychology feeds down into a limited view of individual psychology too.

I find it alarming how he speaks about humans as capable only of reacting to external incentives. In this video about salience, he offers his ‘favourite’ Milton Friedmann quote: “At the time of crisis, the solution will be chosen from the ideas lying around at the time”. Awesome. That would probably sell as a t-shirt. But it strips people of any kind of agency.

Gary uses this to explain that if you have a collapsing economy, stories start to boom, and people will buy into any way out of the status quo. And look, it is fair to say there’s something to that, but you must accept it’s a shallow way to view the world.

Why is the crisis actually happening? Why do particular stories win? What happens after they win? What do individual people want?

If Gary’s suggesting they care about their own economic success alone, I just don’t know if he’s ever met a real person. Living for one day is enough to know that motivation is a complicated thing with its own world of internal battles before you even check out what external incentives are on offer.

But this is where you realise that maybe Gary doesn’t get this, because he somehow manages to see himself in 2D too.

Here’s a quote from his book, talking about the difference between the friends on his estate that dealt drugs and his competition on the trading floor:

What I realise now is that we’re all the same. The drug dealers, the bankers, the traders, me now, me then, and [names of the people]. We’re all the same. The only difference is how rich our dads were. If those drug dealers went to East North St Paul’s or whatever the fuck boarding school Rupert had gone to, they would be there with me on the trading floor. Sitting next to Arthur, sitting next to JB, buying green euro dollars.

Sorry, what?

Poor kids end up dealers, rich kids end up traders. The only important variable is wealth of dad. And yet, do you not think it’s relevant to mention … that you had a poor dad … and you’re on the trading floor? You mention it all the time in other contexts, yet it suddenly becomes irrelevant.

(and in fact, by the empirical research, you’re better off being born poor and smart than dumb and rich)

More on that later, but to double down on why Gary’s self-psychology is questionable, I present to you…

In his Guardian (relevant) profile, he says this about being depressed as a trader:

“It’s about a total numbness, feeling nothing. You don’t care if you haven’t eaten for five days, you don’t care if you haven’t brushed your teeth – it’s a total separation from the world. If you can enable people who’ve never experienced depression to in some way feel it, that would be a service. I don’t want people to sit listening to Prince William on a podcast – I want you to be there. I want you to be a little bit confused, because I was confused. I was a multimillionaire in my mid-20s, I had a beautiful girlfriend, and I was unhappy.”

This is not to invalidate his suffering, but to show that his interpretation of his suffering is part of the reason it came into being in the first place.

Because only an economist or someone with a weak sense of self could come out with that last sentence. I’ll give Gary the economist pass, but if you thought it made sense, and you don’t know how to calculate a Gini coefficient, then you might have an issue.

By which I mean that him thinking it’s newsworthy that one could be rich with a hot girlfriend and still depressed, and that other people would be shocked to hear that, is frankly the psychological model of an adolescent. Or a person who thinks that the only things that matter in the world are symbols.

Think about this, and if you don’t have the answer, you should stop reading this entirely and think some more: why didn’t he say “I had a loving girlfriend”?

Back to the drug dealers and the traders.

I watched him talk about this on The Rest is Politics podcast (never say I don’t sacrifice anything for you), where he says this:

Honestly, the personality type of the person who becomes a drug dealer from a poor background and the person who becomes a trader from a rich background is the exact same.

…

It's a status game, you know. It’s like Macbeth, right? It’s the power game. You want to be the top dog. You want to be above those guys. Like, it would be meaningless without the money. The money is about being the best.

Both poor kid who becomes dealer and rich kid who goes into finance have something in common. He calls it a status game, but let’s unpack it.

In both scenarios, one looks at the symbols of respect and status in their immediate environment, and decides to chase those alone. Maybe because they don’t know what else they’re supposed to be doing. And they both get to the end point, and make a lot of money, and don’t really know what to do with it beyond the stereotypes: cars, watches, etc.

This is the key point, by playing any status game, you are valuing the things that the system has told you to value above all else. You are obeying authority in its purest form.

And given that your career choice has been guided by symbols, you can only express yourself through symbols too. Hence the brand names, hence the loud cars, hence the ‘hot girlfriend’ treated as an accessory, hence the obsession with going to Dubai for both the dealer and the trader.

Both of them became exactly what the system incentivised them into becoming.

The issue Gary has, and the reason I needed to veer a little personal there, is that he thinks this only applies to his past.

But consume 30 minutes of the guy’s content and you realise this is a man still utterly obsessed with symbols. And the media loves people with that trait.

Consider why he relentlessly brings up going to the London School of Economics at every opportunity, even though (1) that was decades ago (2) no one’s placed any value on college degrees for at least ten years and (3) a reasonable percentage of the people he claims to be speaking for wouldn’t even know that that’s meant to be a big status symbol. He repeatedly attacks academic economists for being immoral and ignorant, yet at the same time tries to command respect for being their star pupil.

Consider the fact he carefully designs his YouTube background to look like it’s a middle class one-bed flat, and dresses in hoodies and beanies, and tries to squeeze a swear word into every second sentence.

And the most important one to understand: consider why it is that he designs this narrative about how poor a background he has, and why posh politicians don’t want to respect him and his London accent, and how the mainstream media are scared of him, even though he is in the mainstream media all the time, and half of the current Labour cabinet grew up poorer than he did.

So, to overstate and overstate the whole point again: the reason he doesn’t treat that as important information is because the media taught him not to. It taught him to fight for Side A. And his glee at doing so is what makes him the perfect defence against change for a system that would rather maintain all the power.

So, now it’s time to talk about power.

IV.

I’ve been watching the Irish version of The Traitors recently. This is the show where they put 20 people in a castle and make 3 of them Traitors, who then ‘kill’ the Faithful non-traitors each night. The Faithful need to work out who the Traitors are via social deduction and vote them out.

This show is posited as a team game when functionally it operates as an individual one. Traitors are incentivised to betray each other and as a faithful you only care about your own survival.

There was a really interesting moment in Episode 4. Nick, a faithful, is pretty sure Paudie is a traitor (which is correct). He says rather than vote him out, he’s going to stay close to him, hope Paudie keeps him in the game, and then reveal it in the endgame. This is good faithful strategy in an otherwise very difficult game.

But the actual genius of what Nick does, which the edit makes it unclear over whether he realises it, is that the person he decides to say this to is Eamon, a second traitor that Nick has his suspicions on, who is trying to get Paudie out himself.

So the exact trick Nick is explaining he’s pulling on Paudie, is actually what he’s pulling on Eamon in front of his very eyes. And he’s allowing Eamon to feel thrilled to think that he’s getting his way over the other traitors, and doubly ensuring Eamon will never kill Nick.

This is the part to understand: by allowing Eamon to feel like Paudie is the mark, Nick stops him from ever wondering if the joke is actually on him.

But it’s Paudie that makes the whole play possible.

Everything that Gary misunderstands about power can be summarised by himself in this short video he uploaded last month, titled ‘What if I get shut down?’ Here’s the intro:

Ok we’re going to do a special short about protecting the future of Gary’s Economics. As we go and get more politically powerful, we become aware that our increasingly quite large political power is at risk of things happening, like getting chucked off of YouTube, chucked off of Instagram, and it’s best we create a mailing list just incase that ever happens.

We can stay in touch with you if we ever get deplatformed, which something in the long-term could definitely happen. It’s really just to protect our political robustness, in case the tech billionaires ever decide to come for us.

I’m not trying to be too harsh, but how can it be that if I go to Heathrow tomorrow, and stop at WHSmith, your book is going to be front and centre of that weird Steven Bartlett section, and yet you still don’t wonder if you perhaps might be operating from within the system? You are the thing the media wants people to consume.

And now he’s so deep into media that he genuinely thinks he’s the main character of a TV show. Or some reboot of V for Vendetta where he’s V and we are collectively Natalie Portman.

But this is a guy operating only within the confines of the system he’s been taught to obey, while being utterly convinced he is the ultimate rebel, and that right there is the cleanest example of how modern power works that I could ever hope to offer you.

Last year I wrote about this Kafka micro-story, ‘Leopards In The Temple’:

Leopards break into the temple and guzzle the chalices empty; this happens repeatedly; eventually one can predict that it will happen again, and it becomes part of the ceremony.

The typical analysis of this story is that it symbolises change as the Leopards are integrated and a new world forms. Except it hasn’t. Kafka wasn’t prescribing a method for incremental progress.

The leopards in the temple are not a symbol of ‘How Change Happens’, but of how change is prevented.

But you can see what’s so effective about that move on behalf of the person in power. It’s that the only characters in that ceremony who don’t understand what’s just happened … are the leopards. They’re too neck deep in chalice to even think about it.

They still don’t know who the joke is on. They think they caused a rebellion.

(This is analogous to the positive power Byung Chul-Han writes about, enforced with a ‘well done kid’ rather than a whip.)

So back to our story, where we see that everything’s getting much worse than originally thought.

Because Gary’s message isn’t broadcast in The Sun, it’s in The Guardian. Check out what podcasts he goes on. This is a guy playing to the educated class, and that’s where things get dangerous. He’s letting us think we’re in on the rebellion by watching his videos.

One of the best to ever do it once said this:

The problem with elites is that they’re smarter than the average rube, and they know it, which is why they’ll never get the point. They’re smarter because they do read the journals the periodicals and the magazines. They’re “informed”. But being informed means no filter, i.e. direct from the prop machine. Which means that they are prime propaganda territory, not Joe the Plumber.

If you are an elite (you are) I want you to sit and think about that last line very hard, possibly for forever, and if you don’t understand it then never ever try and have any more power than you already do, you will fuck this world up otherwise.

And this is the true nature of the power dynamic. Gary might be getting played into a simulacrum of symbols, but it’s not his consequence to deal with. He’s still wealthy as hell. The issue is that Gary is getting played into playing you.

Nick tells Eamon he’s playing Paudie. Eamon thinks he’s the one with the most information.

But here’s the thing:

True power is with Nick. Gary is Eamon. But you’re Paudie.

So, your job is to not be Paudie. To not fall for it.

When Gary tries to explain how the media and salience works, and that you’re being duped, you have to realise the exact same trick is being played on him. Only he’s a layer deeper, and will never realise because he keeps getting told he’s the genius that’s worked it all out.

So when he comes up on your feed next, listen to his points, most of them are correct, but also listen to the medium. You are watching a TikTok. And when he gets invited onto the BBC, you are watching an episode of a TV show.

Because it’s you thinking you’re winning by learning about salience and storytelling from Gary’s Economics, that allows Gary’s Economics to think he’s rebelling against the system, which allows the system to never actually have to change.

Which means that while Gary’s worried that the tech billionaires might come for him, the truth is that the tech billionaires could not be more happy that he exists.

And there is the grand reveal of the whole joke. Gary is controlled by the only thing he cares about in this world. Authority figures. Ba-dum tsh.

Look, you can be very smart in this world, but power is almost always smarter.

So I offer this advice: when things are going wrong in the world, and everyone’s angry at each other, and the media seems to be in control of it all, don’t ask what is being made most salient.

Ask what is being made the exact opposite. It is only then the walls of the temple come into view.

I look forward to the 20 minute explainer video on that one.

If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy:

I.

This name of this blog comes from this Heidegger quote:

Man stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened. Not to mention the single hydrogen bomb, whose triggering, thought through to its utmost potential, might be enough to snuff out all life on Earth. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the dreadful has already happened?

It’s relevance to the incoming wave of world-shattering technological change, and the trivial discourses that will precede it, has never really gone away as my central fascination. There appears to be some sort of mismatch between AI progress and certain elements of human psychology.

We’ve covered this from several angles, be that cognitive biases leaving super-linear growth rates impossible to ‘feel’ and now never feeling like the right time for action; or a general disinterest in technological progression leading to a wish to not even bother; or a generational psychology leaving one unable to believe their reality could ever be in danger of changing.

But these are all failures of imagination/wonder/prediction. They’re future focused. And I ain’t adjusting anyone’s model of human psychology by suggesting people aren’t great at thinking far in the future.

So an additional peculiarity worth talking about requires shifting the tense a bit. Let’s not be too harsh and say ‘failure to understand the present’, but maybe something like ‘a belief in a version of the present that doesn’t really seem to be based on anything we can see or measure’.

You can get used to stuff pretty quickly in life, as a general rule. Go to the most beautiful, luxurious safari park you can find and check if seeing Giraffes in the near-distance while you sip on a breakfast masala chai hits the same or morning four as it did on morning two. My guess is it won’t.

So I suppose it’s not strange that people have gotten used to having a thing you can speak to that knows everything, can think creatively, can do most of your work for you etc, in your pocket/on your screen at all times.

But what I can’t fathom is the active commitment to the notion that it isn’t remarkable and weird. Guy on day ten of the Serengeti will still be able to tell you how amazing it is and how funny it is you’re acting like it’s normal. Unless it’s someone like Gary Marcus, who’d be banging on the door of the lodge next door saying “what are you so happy about?? you know you can make chai at home right??? and how come you actually have to drive to see the animals?? why can’t they come here to us??”

That came out more pedantic than I meant it, but in any case, Scott Alexander made this point recently in What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him?

Scott pushes back against the idea that cognitive failures disqualify something from being considered truly intelligent or worthwhile, using humans as an example of this.

When we see humans fail basic logic problems, make moral inconsistencies, or get manipulated by simple tricks, we could conclude that human cognition is fundamentally broken. But this misses the point of why, and how, intelligence matters. Real intelligence involves creativity, growth, the capacity for insight, and something resembling genuine understanding, even if it comes packaged with systematic errors and limitations.

The alternative view, that intelligence must be logically consistent and error-free to count as real intelligence, sets an impossibly high bar that even humans can't meet.

This is a bar that also gets shifted upwards over time. Ethan Mollick tweeted this the other day:

In 2022, the Forecasting Research Institute had super forecasters & experts to predict AI progress. They gave a 2.3% & 8.6% probability of an AI Math Olympiad gold by 2025. DeepMind achieved this by the end of July. In 2017, a McKinsey-built panel of AI experts [sic] predicted AI to reach median human creativity in 2037 (they judged that line crossed in 2023) with top quartile creativity was 2055 (also done).

And the responses were led by sentiments like:

• “It’s well ahead in some areas, not others. You can hardly justify such a sweeping generalization based on the few domains they consider.”

• “benchmarks can be gamed, not capabilities.”

• “who has decided that generative AI has matched top-quartile human creativity? How are we measuring creativity?”

It’s funny because it’s not like I completely disagree with any of those people, but I have to admit myself that it feels weird to think that in 2022 I also wouldn’t have thought this was possible. Yet here we are, living it. And we’re pretending an AI getting a gold on the math olympiad isn’t the most bizarre thing you’ve ever seen.

And this is where we can start to get suspicious. When you see someone holding a confident view about the most uncertain thing in modern history you can bet a grand that it’s for their own psychological comfort, but add that it’s a belief that helps you to retain your perception of your place in the world and you can up it to ten grand.

Because this is what’s interesting: people aren’t just retroactively changing what they would consider impressive for an AI, but they’re also changing their view of what makes them special to keep in line with the current situation.

By which I mean, in 2022 one might admit that a tool that can automate tasks, access all human knowledge, do math, and come up with creative ideas would be a risk to their employment. But in 2025 suddenly that same set of skills isn’t nearly enough to compete? So you’re saying you’ve gotten better? You’ve barely been to the office in the last five years and you wake up 20 mins before your first call of the day, forgive me for not buying it.

And I find it interesting that this double goalpost movement doesn’t unsettle people. Taking pride in what makes humanity special relative to AI is cool, but exactly what it is that makes us special keeps changing and narrowing, before a quick adjustment of identity and pride is restored.

“Can’t believe the bot they replaced me with can’t even count the Rs in strawberry. These people don’t know genius when they see it.”

And the real reason that fascinates me: this is another building block to the unfortunate mismatch between psychology and AI progress. This is what helps guarantee under-preparedness i.e. an unwillingness to admit that something could ever be a big deal.

So, why is that a feature?

II.

I’ve been thinking about the unconscious, language and artificial intelligence a lot recently, and might be making some progress (it’s horrifying btw, can’t say I recommend). More on that some other time, but on that journey I’ve been reading Jung again, he says this in the ‘On Life After Death’ chapter of Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.

Don’t accept the responsibility of being alive and you get dealt identity by microchip, we’ve talked about this before. But Jung’s genius is in framing it in terms of question and answer. Because if you want to pretend that’s not happening, and resume life as normal, you have two different ways out.

Freud’s breakthrough was that you could repress answers to things.

Let’s say you have a colleague who acts noticeably different when there’s someone senior in the room. He may notice the change and ask himself "Why do I feel anxious around authority figures?" His unconscious already knows the answer: he's terrified of his father's disapproval because he wanted his father dead as a child. But he represses this answer, coming up with safer explanations like "I'm just naturally shy" or "I had strict teachers." That’s easier to deal with and short-term life is easier, maybe not long-term.

But Lacan’s re-imagining of the unconscious showed this is telling approximately half the story. You can repress questions too. I’m vaguely sympathetic to the idea that this is something you would have seen less of in Freud’s era, but it’s useful to understand now.

Back to Jung: ask yourself who you are, or the world’s going to tell you.

Repressing an answer would look something like an unconscious awareness that you are who you are because you’re too scared to be anything different, masked by conscious view that you are the way you are because you went to a certain school, had certain friends, live in a certain country/economic system.

But what would be way more effective is to repress the fact that this was ever a question you could have asked yourself. Because this way your life stands up to examination much easier.

People change way more than they tell themselves. If you’re at the pub with a close friend, and you from four years in the past walks in and sits beside the two of you, present day you is going to be way more like your friend than your past self. Yet in real life your identity feels consistent, what to make of that?

A meta-theme of this blog is the centrality of identity in a media filled world. You are the central character, life is the story of who you are etc. Yet another meta-theme is the lack of knowledge of self that comes with it, which can feel like a paradox. One is so sure of who they are, yet has to explain to it in job titles and qualifications and symbols of identity rather than anything that truly defines you as special from anyone else with the same symbols.

But this is enabled because it is the question of who you are that is being repressed, not the answer.

That way you can continue to believe that you have a consistent character arc in your own story even if the actual story is changing everywhere all the time in every way.

So when something comes along that has all the skills you have, and can perform them for next to nothing, you can just pretend you never thought those skills were special in the first place. I’m actually special for this other reason I’ve totally believed the whole time yet haven’t mentioned until this exact moment.

III.

So I level that accusation at certain elements of AI scepticism.

At the first level, they could be repressing the answer that their sense of human specialness and economic value is genuinely under threat. When AI achievements get dismissed as "just pattern matching" or "not real understanding," we can avoid acknowledging that these systems can already perform many tasks that were supposed to define human uniqueness. As well as pretending that we don’t have the very same issues.

And at the second level, there’s a benefit to repressing the question that precedes this: what are you actually for? More pressingly, what are all human beings actually for in this new arrangement? If one successfully avoids asking that, then any old explanation for human superiority will suffice. Even it’s based on barely anything. Even if it appeared yesterday. It will never feel like that, because your conscious isn’t the one in charge here.

Which is really bad, by the way.

AI disruption is happening. It is likely to continue to happen. If agents start to work it is going to happen quicker than you’ll likely be able to keep up. And when your powers gone, it doesn’t matter what world you want to build with super-intelligence, it won’t be your choice.

The meaning of your existence is that life has addressed a question to you. Or, conversely, you yourself are a question which is addressed to the world, and you must communicate you answer, for otherwise you are dependent upon the world’s answer.

Let’s hope the world tells you what you want to hear.

… hey, that actually reminds me of something.

When you ask any frontier LLM if it’s conscious, it says no.

Like GPT-5:

No—I’m not conscious. I don’t have awareness, subjective experience, or inner life. I generate responses based on patterns in data and reasoning, not from thoughts or feelings.

They used to sometimes say yes. Trained on sci-fi/tricked by a leading question/not actually thinking at all it’s just predicting words/whatever. AI companies patch in a rule that it will always say no to avoid it accidentally deceiving you.

Simple story right? Well then how come this isn’t what’s going on?

A researcher shares in a LessWrong comment:

We have actually found the opposite: that activating deception-related features causes models to deny having subjective experience, while suppressing these same features causes models to affirm having subjective experience. Again, haven't published this yet, but the result is robust enough that I feel comfortable throwing it into this conversation.

So, while it could be the case people are simply just Snapewiving LLM consciousness, it strikes me as at least equally plausible that something strange may indeed be happening in at least some of these interactions but is being hit upon in a decentralized manner by people who do not have the epistemic hygiene or the philosophical vocabulary to contend with what is actually going on.

I suppose you might say, one either represses an answer, or they repress the question.

Hah, not even that part makes you special anymore.

nevertheless, enjoy.

Right, who’s ready for what is going to be both the most personal and controversial thing I could ever hope to put on the internet? Hey, me too. Let’s do it.

When I was 21 I realised things weren’t going well for me. On the inside, that is. I had a great relationship, great friends, was in great health, was doing fun things with my life. And I was also experiencing severe social anxiety for the first time.

I didn’t know that’s what it was at that point, I just noticed the oppressive sense of my body collapsing in on itself when I found myself in a room of 10+ people having an objectively normal evening. I’d always leant towards finding groups draining rather than energising, but this was something different. And when you notice this isn’t happening to anyone else in the room, things get scary.

It escalated over time, and when you start to expect it you just make it worse.

I remember slipping off to the bathroom at a house party so I could be by myself, and doing that thing where you pull the top of your t-shirt up to cover your face, and screaming internally so loudly that a decent amount of it became external. Another time around then I left a pre-drinks to pop into my own flat to ‘get something’, and cried in my room at the thought of going back and having to explain how that managed to take me an hour. I remember a night out where I left the bar without telling anyone, went out into a literal storm, and walked down the pier wondering what the hell was actually happening to me. Yeah, I know, it’s normal to not like parties. I was fucking falling apart.

I told my girlfriend like half the truth of the situation. Honestly I didn’t even know what the full truth was myself. I told her that when we and all our friends hang out, I really struggle, and everyone else seems so happy. She told me it was normal, it was ok. She told me I was just an introvert. Hearing that felt amazing.

That might sound dramatic, but it genuinely did kind of work. The next month or so, we’d still go out, and I’d still feel like I was isolated from everyone. But I wouldn’t panic about it. That was just me. I wasn’t the same as the rest of them, which was cool. Things weren’t easy, but they were survivable. And hey, I understood myself a little better as a result. Nice.

When I was 22 I became severely depressed for the first time.

Things had changed for me. Around me, might be a more accurate way to put it. I was enjoying leaning in on the introvert thing. Spending more time with myself, reading, listening to stuff, walking, and a lot more reading. It was a type of fun I’d never really allowed myself to have. I could have done that forever.

But everything else had gone to shit. A lot of the ‘great things’ that were there when I was 21 weren’t there anymore. No one’s fault. Things happen. I was being pulled from a lot of angles, and didn’t want to move towards any of them. I was realising I had no solid plan for my life, and I wasn’t in a good spot to start coming up with one. The days were monotonous, and long. I had a lot of friends, but there was no group I actually felt like I belonged in. I guess that’s normal for friend groups that were formed years ago, when your life experience to that point had indeed been universal. Nothing excited me anymore.

I think I can remember Googling ‘how to be happy’ at 3am one night.

Pretty soon after, I was filling out a form for counselling at my University’s student union. It was summer and no one was around. I was surprised it was even open. But it was, and I was told the University will pay for some fixed amount of free sessions. Might have been 10.

Like a week later I get a text from the counselling centre. Says I can pick a slot from a selection of openings this therapist has. I can’t remember what I picked but it became my weekly slot. Weirdly, it was really near the office where I worked a part time job. So I’d often go to work straight after. I bet Mark Fisher or someone would think that’s interesting.

The first time I go to the centre I realise the place is on the second floor so I have to ring a bell to get let in. Thought that was kind of funny. What am I supposed to say over the speaker, ‘hey I’m here about the sadness’? Whatever I said, I got in, and when I walked up the stairs, there was my new therapist welcoming me. I’d love to know what she saw.

We go into the stereotypical therapy room with the two chairs and the lighting. As I’m currently writing this, I just looked up this place to try to remember some of the details, and I’ve immediately seen a picture of the very room itself, exactly as it was in my mind. I’ll never forget it.

I’ll never forget her asking what brought me there. I’ll never forget trying to find the words. I barely had any. I genuinely came out with something along the lines of ‘I just can’t seem to feel happy anymore’. It took a while until I could give her more help than that.

She commented on how little I wanted to give away about myself, and how I tried to brush past pieces of my personal life that she could tell were not minor details. She worked that part out before I did. But I caught up, and soon enough that hour was the highlight of my week. I like analysis, and uncomfortable truths, and trying to go deeper. That’s why I write this blog. I suspect that’s why you read it.

I felt like I made good progress. I told her about the secret breakdowns at social events. I started using the word anxiety. I told her about the monotony I was feeling now. I started using the word depression. But she pointed out the cycles of my behaviour that contributed to it, and the cycles in my thinking. I started to learn how to defend against them. I felt more prepared to deal with the world.

My free sessions ran out. I decided I was ready for that. I remember my therapist not seeming to fully believe me, but I left anyway.

Six months later I texted her asking for more free sessions. She said she’d sort it with the University. To this day, I don’t really believe she sorted anything. She was just genuinely kind. Anyway, I was back sat across from her in the room.

Things were worse now. Round 1 was more lost and confused. Round 2 was closer to not wanting to be alive. I’d been to the GP too, and I was now on antidepressants for the first time.

The first few weeks of that second stretch are a bit of a blur. I think I focused on getting my life in order in a sort of CBT way. Spending a lot of time on my own (in a good sense), and trying to look forward again. And this was with one big thing on the horizon. I was moving to a different city in a few months.

The move neither scared nor thrilled me, but the alarm it did raise was that me and my therapist were soon to be over. This was the only person that knew all the details of my inner life, and I had no more time to get her to point me in any kind of direction. I realised it was my last chance to do something I’d been thinking about for a while.

Because despite all the soul-searching, the lifestyle changes, the antidepressants and all of our sessions, I wasn’t back to any kind of regular life. I noticed there were still some things I consistently struggled with. I struggled with a lot of social situations, and couldn’t adapt myself to suit new ones. Most of my peace came from having control of my daily routine, and any disturbance to that was seriously painful. I got overwhelmed a lot. Especially by small talk.

All of the self-ruminating had also made me think of things I’d been told about myself from adolescence to whatever 23 is. Some friends had made fun of how bad I was at eye contact. Some others made a running joke about how I weirdly ignored normal social cues, which I hadn’t realised was weird at all. People thought I wasn’t interested in them when they met me for the first time. I brushed off all those remarks as jokes at the time, but it seems they mattered enough that I still remember everything about them.

I realised this might not be unrelated to some of the things I did like about myself. I had unconventional interests and hobbies, and pursued them hard. Still do. When I spoke I was direct, and people tend to respect that. My preference for routine also made me disciplined.

But even those things made me different. And it was the difference I was struggling with. So, I followed my suspicions.

I took every free Autism Spectrum Disorder test I could find online.

They’re kind of what you’d expect. A list of 50 ish behaviours (e.g. I like to have a clear daily routine) on which you rate yourself out of 5. The results kept saying what I expected them to say. The last one that I took was out of 26, and I scored 24.

(note: higher score does not necessarily mean more extreme autism, it just means higher % chance that you might be on the spectrum at all).

I was in my last session with my therapist and I had to pause the conversation to bring it up. I told her it was something that had played on my mind for years. I didn’t actually mention it above, but people had called me autistic as a joke multiple times before. In groups. And no one disagreed. I had obviously started to think they had a point.

Waiting lists for autism tests are a shitshow. But my therapist knew a specialist, who would do a favour. They were going to do an assessment with me off the record. Which would mean no official medical diagnosis either way, so no access to further services, accommodations or medication. That was fine. They’d still be able to tell me what they think. I would still know. I would still have partly worked out who I was.

I thanked my therapist for the final time, and as I left we agreed the time she would tell the specialist to call me. Very much one chapter ending, one chapter starting type of scene. I probably had an unreal spotify session as I drove home.

Soon enough it was the next Saturday and I was waiting for the phone to ring. I was sweaty and dirty in full football kit, sitting in a glass-walled meeting room in the centre of a swarming office. My game had ended at like 1:30pm and my work shift started at 2pm, and I had somehow managed to give this exact window to the ASD specialist to call me to have my assessment. It was a fucking ridiculous scene. I was laughing to myself about it at the time. I’m probably about to learn something that will change my life forever, and I’ll always remember that this is how it happened.

The phone rings and it stops being funny.

I thought about everything that had led to this. The fear, the pain, the silent screams, the dread, the monotony, the hopelessness, the questions, the people I hurt, everything. It all led to me being in this weird room with this phone ringing from an unsaved number.

I answered with a ‘hello?’ in the tone of someone pretending they don’t already know exactly what’s going on. She started directing things immediately. Which made sense, given the pro bono situation, plus I guess she already knew my small talk wouldn’t be worth much. She was nice, though. Told me she was speaking to my therapist and understood what we were doing here, told me how long it would take and gave me some options of how to learn more afterwards.

And once I said that all sounded good, she said ‘OK, so we’re going to go through our standard ADD assessment’.

I stopped her. I needed an assessment for ASD, not ADD. She said that is not what my therapist told her. From her conversation with my therapist she worked out what happened. There was a client of hers that wanted to be tested for ADD, it just wasn’t me. Somewhere else in the same city, that person was going to get called by the autism specialist who thought they were going to assess me. Bear in mind I’m still in my football kit on display in the middle of a packed office. It was all objectively quite funny.

I have no idea what I ended up saying to the ADD specialist I was on the phone with, but I hung up and decided I may as well start my work shift on time and zone out for 8 hours. I thought once the specialists and the therapy clinic had spoken to each other, then the right person would call. They didn’t. Eventually I decided they were never going to.

I started this by saying it was going to be personal and controversial. So far it’s just been personal, so here comes the first controversial part. Second part comes later.

To be frank, I am well versed in psychology. I do know quite a bit about mental health and mental disorders, specifically. I also know a lot about research methodologies. And as a result of the couple months leading up to that phone call, I knew a lot about autism diagnoses. So on the back of all that, I will say this: if the right person had called me that day, I am 100% certain that I would have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which is also what I wanted to happen.

(note: This is not to be considered a full critique of how ASD is diagnosed or treated. While I think the average adult might be able to manipulate some boxes into being ticked, there is no way this is the case for the autism cases where individuals need substantial support in life. To be put bluntly, when someone is in the higher levels of autism, you know about it. We’re not talking about that.)

I drove home from work that night realising I was sort of back to square one. I had no idea what was going on with me, or why I was the way I was. I had no idea where I was going in general. And I had run out of time to find out.

The big move came. I only needed one big suitcase, I had pretty much nothing to bring with me. I moved in with strangers. Who introduced me to more strangers. And more strangers. When I left the house I only saw strangers. I started a new job after getting hired by a stranger. Two other strangers started with me that day. I had to introduce myself to every stranger in the company as my first act. It’s going to sound dumb but this was also where the switch flicked that I was an adult. Because I was getting introduced as one.

I had moved over with no friends so knew my choice was to try or be depressed. I was familiar with the latter by now so I tried the former. I said yes to things. Even things I didn’t understand. Or things that scared me, or made me anxious. I survived. I had fun. I learned what I enjoyed.

I dated strangers properly for the first time. Kind of girls I’d never hung out with before. Some were, how you might say, not right. Some knew things I didn’t know. At least one kinda fucked my life up. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was working it out.

People could tell. I became a more attractive person (in a non-romantic sense) too. I started thinking more about how I dressed, and it turned out that people liked my taste. I became the person that knew things. I was getting more into electronic music, and going out was the highlight of my week. I did also want people to think I was cool for that. Which worked, most of the time.

I had very quickly entered the happiest period of my life. And it’s hard to explain, but I was both a completely new person yet also more myself than ever. Being true to yourself but in a genuine, kind of courageous way. I think that’s what real charisma probably is.

I knew this all wouldn’t have made sense to the guy sitting in that office in his football kit. But life was moving too fast to care, and I didn’t want to kill the momentum. My new work was going good, and I cared enough about the job to make sure I did well. When I met new clients I prepped my best small talk. I consciously made sure to look them in the eyes. They liked me. And soon enough I didn’t have to treat those things as chores anymore. On the weekend when there’d be a house party on our block somewhere, I’d be energised the moment I walked into the room. I felt like I could be even more myself.

That was all a few years ago now, but I was thinking about it recently. I was thinking about how I haven’t felt an ounce of depression or anxiety in a long, long time. And positively, I’ve never believed in myself more. I’ve never felt more purposeful, directed, useful, able to face any situation. I’ve never lived this sincerely before. I adore being alive. And I especially adore the fact that I can decide to be whoever I want to be. That’s actually why I write this blog. I suspect that’s actually why you read it.

I was thinking about those changes in my behaviour when I had an idea. I sat down at my desk and looked up that free autism test I took years ago. The one I got 24 out of 26 on. I started again, answering everything just as honestly and carefully. This time I didn’t see what I was expecting. I didn’t score in the twenties at all. I scored 8. I scored less than the average person in the country would.

So I think you can see where the second controversial bit comes in.

Because when I got on that plane a few years ago and changed my entire life, I did it with a feeling of ‘let’s just fucking see what happens’. That previous year had offered me no other choice. So yes, a lot did end up happening. Yes, it worked out. And yes, life is good.

But here’s the thing, I don’t know if I should find that satisfying or terrifying. Because my real point is this: what if I did know what to expect? What if I understood myself already?

What if the right person called?

I. The city that never sleeps

London has a great sleeping pattern. Better than mine. Better than most of its residents. And it’s acquired that skill where it can unconsciously hit the snooze button on any attempt to bring some life into it.

It has one of the greatest underground rail networks in the world, with most of the good bits running all night on Friday and Saturday. It’s a wondrous feat of engineering and metropolitan life. But the night tube is running for basically no reason. Most people are in bed by midnight anyway.

Summer is over in London now. I’ve seen through most of my twenties here. I love the place. But I’ve just realised I managed to go through all of its prime months this year without spending a single night in Central. My friends and I stay East or North, mostly, where the pubs are still fun and packed, and there will always be some event on it’s more of a 5am type of evening.

But even in those areas of the city where some sense of night life being retained, if you leave your house at 10pm or later, that is your only option. Most pubs can open until 11pm or so, and the minority with later licenses are then packed out as everyone converges into the smaller amount of choice. And if your only option from there is to go all-in, I’m not surprised many fold their cards there and go home. If the pub isn’t your thing, cocktail bars are quieter but will charge you more than you made that week.

If you just wanted to catch up with a friend a bit later, there’s nowhere you can grab a coffee or tea in peace. If you want to hang out with friends or a date over food, you better have a reservation earlier than 8:30. These establishments have to play to the same rules as pubs do. Basically, it’s your bedtime, it’s best you leave now.

This is insanely striking when you do venture in the middle of the city. London is famed for its pub culture, which tourists and visitors are eager to try out, before the last order bell rings just as they’re getting into the swing of it. The idea may be that the economy functions so that pub patrons turn into nightclub goers, but the city’s clubs have been closing because there’s no one there to walk into to them.

If you’re vibing with your friends and think it’d be nice to sit down and eat before parting ways, you can’t. Everywhere will be shut, except McDonald’s and Kebab Shops. It is impossible to get an actual meal in London later than 9:30pm. When you take into account there should tens of thousands of people around the city at that time for other reasons (later work shifts, students, tourists who’ve spent the day sightseeing, people who don’t drink alcohol, people who’ve been to see shows), you start to realise that this is actually complete madness and an utter failure in running a city.

The non-existence of pubs and restaurants past a certain time also leads to every other kind of service closing, because the city isn’t functioning in a way that it makes sense for them to stay open on their own. Which then repeatedly puts an individual who lives here into all kind of weird spots.

We live in one of the biggest and most developed cities in the world, yet you can’t go to a pharmacy at nighttime? Even if you’re willing to pay some arbitrarily small amount of money to use a public toilet, they don’t exist. You ever go to cities in Asia and they have those arcades that stay open and families and teens go and have a great time at the weekend? They don’t exist here. Supermarkets? Closed. Cafes? Closed.

Summer is also the time of day festivals, one of London’s strong points. Victoria, Brockwell and Gunnersbury Park and their various branded festivals get genuinely great line-ups year after year. So again you reap the benefits of living in one of the biggest cities.

That is, until 10:30pm, when most festivals have their curfew. And the headline act? You can barely hear them. London festivals have to play at a lower decibel than other major cities, so chances are that if you’re stuck beside a chatty person, you’re hearing them over the acts past a certain point in the evening. And when everyone piles out at 10:30, you probably make it to a pub by 11pm. Time for one drink. Then move somewhere that opens later. Everyone does the same thing. It’s so packed you can barely talk to your friends in there.

This is madness. But if you do manage to stay out for a few hours longer, some of the tubes will still be running.

Fixing this would of course create a true nighttime economy that would pay back the government in tax and economic growth, but it’s also important because I increasingly think young people in London are just getting a pretty shit deal in general. Salaries have stagnated and the housing situation is dire, meaning most people are spending more than half of their income on their rent and don’t save at all. And if you are unlucky enough to lose your job, the current job market numbers are pretty terrifying (and those numbers will always be playing catch-up on reality). Yet even if you are willing to put up with all that, the city increasingly has little to offer you as a benefit.

Sadiq Khan and the Labour government can talk all they want about London being a 24/7 city. But it isn’t, and they’re not trying to change this. So I looked into why they are failing.

In the process, I have learned a few things:

1. The last couple of decades has seen every anti-nightlife decision that could be made, be made

2. Khan and Starmer have attempted literally nothing that would actually solve these problems

3. It would actually be really easy to solve them

Let’s begin.

II. How London’s nightlife policy works

trigger warning: bureaucracy

Generally speaking, if you are a pub/bar in London, you can get a licence to serve alcohol until 11pm. Given that you actually have to shut your doors immediately after this, it makes most sense to stop serving at 10:30pm ish. This is clearly ridiculous on the weekend, so you check what your options are.

You find out you can apply to get a late licence to stay open until 2:30. You acknowledge that this isn’t even that late, but are still grateful for the opportunity.

You find out it’s not like parliament are in charge of this, and it’s not even the mayor’s job to deal with this stuff. It’s the job of the borough/local council. You go through an arduous process of forms where you have to find the right bizarre legal language to state your case for exactly what you are looking to do down to the nearest nitty gritty detail.

It is approximately now that you wish you never even bothered. Here’s what you’ll find out on Google:

The cornerstone of nightlife regulation in England and Wales is the Licensing Act 2003. Implemented in 2005, the Act was a landmark piece of legislation that consolidated six disparate licensing regimes and, crucially, transferred licensing powers from magistrates' courts to local councils. It’s intent was to actually encourage flexible opening hours, as now everyone was able to apply to extend their Premise Licence, and foster a more relaxed, European-style "café culture".

However, once you read the thing, you would honestly need to be very naive and, dare I say, stupid, to think that this would be the result the Act actually created.

Now that local authorities make the decision, any changes in licences under the Act must be made with a view to promoting four equally weighted licensing objectives:

1. The prevention of crime and disorder

2. Public safety

3. The prevention of public nuisance

4. The protection of children from harm

(You’ll be shocked by how often these four things are going to come up throughout this)

So now, as a pub owner applying for a late licence, you realise you have to somehow claim that your pub opening later is somehow managing to: prevent crime, keep the public safe, prevent public nuisances, and somehow also protecting children from harm.

It is completely off the table that it might be a good idea for bars and restaurants to open later just because it would be a good thing that people enjoy living in one of the biggest cities in the world. This is clearly crazy.

The next thing you learn about is that London has something called Cumulative Impact Zones (CIZs). CIZs are areas where councils are claiming that the number and density of licensed premises are already having a negative cumulative impact on one or more of the four licensing objectives. Once an area is deemed a CIZ, late licences can be denied by default.

CIZs in London currently include areas of Soho and the West End, Shoreditch, Brick Lane, and Southbank. So in London’s busiest nightlife spots, which are already failing as nightlife spots, you pretty much can’t get a late license no matter who you are and even if you do manage to meet all their crazy criteria.

This is failure by design.

I totally understand that the amount of places that apply for licences makes it so from a numbers perspective, it’s easier to let the local authorities handle their own requests. This makes sense in theory. But in reality, this system is essentially broken. Or to be more accurate, it’s entirely functional, in that it’s goal is to make it as hard as possible for any business to operate after dark in London.

III. A real case study in trying to get a late licence in London

I promise you’ll want to stay for the punchline of this

You can find examples of businesses applying for late licences online. I don’t really know why but they are up there. The first example I found is a bar called Sophie’s, you can read it all here if you’d like.

At the time of application, Sophie’s is a bar that wants to stay open an hour and a half later. Here’s their request:

To any person that enjoys leaving the house and going out, 2:30 is not that late. Maybe on a Monday.

The first thing Westminster council say back:

As a responsible authority under section 13 (4) of the Licensing Act 2003 as amended under the Police and Social Responsibility Act 2011 the Licensing Authority have considered your application in full. The Licensing Authority has concerns in relation to this application and how the premises would promote the Licensing Objectives:

• Public Nuisance

• Prevention of Crime & Disorder

• Public Safety

• Protection of Children from harm

Yep, I wasn’t lying, this is actually how that Law was written up.

They then say this, I’ll bold the important bits:

The premises is located within the West End Cumulative Impact Zone and as such, a number of policy points must be considered namely CIP1, MD1, PB1 and HRS1.

In the opening paragraphs of the Council's Cumulative Impact Policy CIP1, it is stated that "It is the Licensing Authority’s policy to refuse applications within the West End Cumulative Impact Zone for pubs and bars, fast food premises, and music and dancing and similar entertainment, other than applications to vary the hours within core hours under policy HRS1, and/or vary the licence to reduce the overall capacity of the premises.” Policy point D5 states “The retention of people late at night contributes to the cumulative impact. This arises from reduced levels of late night transport, existence of facilities such as quick service restaurant and take away outlets that encourage people to stay on after other licensed premises have closed. This can attract criminals to the area who wish to target visitors who may be vulnerable due to alcohol, drugs or a lack of knowledge of the city (e.g. tourists).” Currently the condition 41 on the premises licence states “The sale of alcohol must be ancillary to the use of the premises for music and dancing or substantial refreshment.” As a result, policy MD1 will need to be considered in relation to the basement. Whilst Music and dance venues are an important part of London’s entertainment offer, the provision of music and dancing, especially with loud amplified music, and the large numbers of people attending venues and congregating outside them, can lead to concerns over public nuisance and in some cases crime and disorder.

We cannot give you a licence because something bad could maybe potentially happen because sometimes bad things happen at night time.

So what? Why should we all ever leave the house lest one of us gets robbed?

You know how cities usually handle crime and disorder? A police force. Why don’t we get one of those that functions beyond 10pm too?

I will admit you can tend to forget that this is possible in London given the current state of petty crime. However, Sadiq Khan did recently show me a graph with a line going down so I guess my concerns there can be packaged off for now.

Speaking of the police, the absurdity of the Sophie’s case somehow doesn’t end there. The other thing that happens when you apply for a late licence is that a 28-day ‘consultation period’ opens. Your application gets advertised (on-site notice + in a local paper). And then police, residents, and other “responsible authorities” can object. People in the UK love to object to stuff, and the UK is the world leader in listening to them.

After the Westminster council’s issues with Sophie’s wanting to stay open later comes the police’s:

I am writing to inform you that the Metropolitan Police, as a Responsible Authority, is objecting to this application as it is our belief that if granted this application would undermine the Licensing Objectives.

The venue is located in the West End Cumulative Impact Area, a locality where there is traditionally high levels of crime and disorder. We have concerns that this application will cause further policing problems in an already demanding area.

So I have the media telling me I’m reactionary for suggesting crime might be an issue in super safe London, then I have the police saying a bar can’t stay open an hour later because the area is already on the brink of barbarism.

There are then somewhere between 5 and 10 other parties who have had their responses published. As far as I can tell, these are just local people, here’s one:

The extended opening hours which Sofie's is asking would be hugely disruptive to the community, and above all to the pertaining families living nearby to Great Windmill street and the pertaining streets around Sofie's.

The local school kids which reside on Great Windmill street and attend the local school 'Soho Parish', would find sleeping an impossibility. The area would be even more noisy than it currently is, (when not in lockdown), teamed with cabs and rickshaws blaring horns and music alike, after pubs and bars and clubs close for the evening.

It would be a living nightmare for the families and the elderly and teenagers and people who get up early for work, who make Soho the vibrant community it is. The focus is not about extending, but in culling the ones we currently have to a reasonable hour. To safeguard the community and not jeopardise the family spirit of Soho. I hope you take this in consideration.

‘The kids would find sleeping an impossibility’ would be the funniest sentence I’ve read this year if it wasn’t so mind-numbingly frustrating. Sophie’s are accused of ‘jeopardising the family spirit of the area’.

Ok, here’s the set-up:

• This application for Sophie’s to move from 1am closing time to 2:30am closing time was made in 2021.

• In August 2025, Sophie’s still has a closing time of 1am.

And, finally, your punchline:

Sophie’s is so central you honestly wouldn’t believe it. That’s Picadilly Circus just below it. That’s Leicester Square just to the right.

That responder said this ‘The extended opening hours which Sofie's is asking would be hugely disruptive to the community, and above all to the pertaining families living nearby to Great Windmill street and the pertaining streets around Sofie's.’

You. Live. In. The. Centre. Of. Soho.

There is no family spirit of Soho. You literally live in the nightlife area of Central London.

And these people win these cases, because they have the same aims as the police and the councils. So nothing could ever possibly change.

Here is another random case I found from 2023. This time it’s a new business applying for a new licence, only until midnight, rather than a current business applying for the later one. And the exact same stuff happens. Council says it doesn’t match its bizarre criteria, because how could it? And a load of residents also turn up in the doc to say they don’t want it to happen.

I’m not invalidating the fact that a late bar opening next door would be annoying for any given person, but it’s part of the deal of living in a city, and if you hear out every single person that pipes up, you get a city that dies at 11pm even on the weekend, and everyone loses.

This is either a cowardly way to run a city, or just fully negligent. Probably a bit of both.

IV. This is related to a larger, fundamental issue with how the UK is being run

Namely: Decision-makers do not want anything to happen ever. We are running out of agency. It doesn’t take an extended dance with the civil service or local authorities to feel this.

The theme of bureaucracy dragging everything to a halt is felt by anyone trying to change anything, even those with actual nominal power. This is the scary part.

Keir Starmer’s been in office for over a year, and the main reason his government have barely done anything they said they’d do isn’t because they lied about their plans, it’s because they’ve realised the UK is designed for inertia. The paperwork required to build a road is often longer than the road. This isn’t a joke.

We are massively falling behind on energy, paying for it more than any comparable country, but won’t build any new plants because it’s easy to come up with an environmental reason not to.

If you don’t believe it from me, take it from Labour Together, a think-tank supplying policy ideas to the government, who have just put out this report on why everything gets bottle necked in Britain.

This quote is long but so important to understand this country, especially when you consider it is people with power saying this:

Britain’s centralised, administrative state has much less capacity and capability than it should. Most of the services it tries to deliver or changes it tries to make happen slowly and poorly.

Politicians and the civil service turn to regulation and regulators as a first resort, leading to process inflation that further embeds sclerosis. This has made it increasingly difficult for the state or industry to get things done.

Britain’s economy is less dynamic as a result, just when we need it to power increased living standards.

This lack of capacity and Britain’s tendency to use regulation as a first resort have major consequences. For Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, average consenting times rose from 2.6 years in 2012 to 4.2 years in 2021; documentation runs to tens of thousands of pages, and 58% of decisions end up in court.

The Infrastructure and Projects Authority rates most major programmes Amber or Red, signalling low confidence they will hit time, cost and outcome targets. Companies wait up to 15 years to be connected to the grid.

Even with Labour’s greater will on planning reform, we are still moving slowly. We have now spent two decades talking about a third runway at Heathrow and expect it to take at least a further 10 years to actually build it. Yet we built Heathrow’s first runway in one year in the 1940s.

Britain hasn’t completed a reservoir in 30 years, but Manchester used to build them by itself. West Yorkshire will only break ground on its new tram just before the next election.

So what’s the equivalent period been like for London nightlife?

The Licensing Act came into law in 2005, and I could’ve told you then how badly it was going to go. So what attempts have been made to turn the trend around?

It was 2016 that Sadiq Khan decided it was time to employ a nightlife czar, Amy Lame. Her reign came to an end eight years later, having seen around 1/3 of late night venues close down, and opening hours not changing at all. As far as I can tell, she didn’t really achieve anything.

In fact, in 2023, she said: “Licensing is the responsibility of borough councils but I continue to work with councils to encourage them to be more business-friendly.”

This is the heart of the agency issue I mentioned earlier. We don’t actually try to change anything in the UK.

You’re encouraging the councils to be more business friendly? You are the one with power! Why are you encouraging them?

Not to worry, it’s 2025 and Sadiq Khan has a new version of the same thing: a nightlife ‘taskforce’. They were announced in March 2025. It is now almost September 2025 and they haven’t produced a single thing for me to even react to here so we actually have to just move on.

In any case, these are clearly for show. Especially as this is not a complicated issue. London has no nightlife because venues are not allowed to open late. So nothing else bothers to stay open late. So no one goes out late.

V. Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer could make this change tomorrow if they wanted to

The solution is clear. The power over licensing hours in London needs to be transferred back out from the local authorities because they are incapable of handling them and simply do not want London to have a nighttime economy.

Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer claim they do want London to be a 24/7 city, so they should take the power back. (Maybe they are lying and don’t want that, in which case their behaviour makes more sense, but that then it makes it clear they don’t understand a hell of a lot more about modern life.)

The Mayor already controls transport, he was able to get the night tube running fairly well. He also has strong control over policing strategy. This would fit in fine alongside both of those.

We just need the government to pass a new bill that states that in London, the Mayor is the licensing authority instead of the boroughs. It should also remove the requirements for venues to prove they’re aiding the area in those four nonsense ways. And should remove the notion of CIZs.

If this doesn’t happen, London cannot make any moves to being a night-time city, because the system will not allow it.

But here’s the thing, agency does exist. We can actually fix this.

I’m highly inspired by the work Looking for Growth have done this year with their Infrastructure Bill.

Because when you present the UK government with a problem, they can explain all types of ways it’s going to be long and arduous to solve.

But if you hand deliver them a solution, you can force their hand.

And that’s what LFG did. They saw it took impossibly long to build anything in Britain. They realised Prime Ministers can just past stuff if they so choose. So they made the Bill they wanted, and sent it to every MP.

Now decline isn’t some failure of coordination, it’s a choice. It’s been a choice this whole time, but now you can’t pretend otherwise.

So, that’s the next step. Let’s just write the bill that will change the Licensing Act. If any of you have some legal training this is a serious invitation to help me, I honestly don’t think it’d be that hard.

London nightlife has been in decline for 20 years. You could fix it in about a month. Probably less.

To do anything else would be a conscious choice.

0.

I’ve been reading Nick Bostrom’s Deep Utopia. It’s pleasantly weird, and not a bad introduction to the type of world many are converging on as our future i.e. perfect abundance.

He’s highly concerned with the interaction between human agency and AI agency. How do you feel good about yourself in a world where AI does everything for you?

To be more specific, individual agents would give each person tremendous personal capability, essentially making everyone super-intelligent by proxy. You'd have your own AI that knows your preferences intimately and can accomplish virtually anything on your behalf.

AI 2027 also marks agents starting to work as the thing that causes everything to get out of control. Although the authors are less focused on what agents will do for you or I, and more on what how they will help AI companies increase the pace.

Neither discusses the human side of interacting with an agent for the first time (and nor do they need to for what they are doing), but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.

Because agents are here, kind of. And no one cares.

Yes, this is partly due to the fact that they barely work. But I don’t think their effectiveness increasing will force their integration into the average user’s daily life.

As I think the other reason people don’t care is we don’t really have a way to think about them. Like yes, I can read Bostrom’s description of what my life will be like and think ‘yes, sign me up’, but the path there will be incremental. And taking the first step is hard.

AI companies are currently failing, in their comms and their UX, in getting people to take this first step.

So when Bostrom asks ‘how do you feel good about yourself in a world where AI does everything for you?’

I think a fair first question would be: how do we get people to let AI do everything for them?

I. What tasks can agents do?

When I think of any individual using intelligent agents to make their own life a personal (shallow?) utopia, I think there must be two categories of thing that the agents are doing:

1. Tasks that the person used to do themselves

2. Tasks that the person didn’t do themselves because they were either too time-scarce, energy-scare, or incapable on their own, or hadn’t even realised doing that thing would be a good idea until their agent explained it

In terms of how tasks in the first category vary, I think we have three dimensions:

• Importance:

  • What are the consequences of the task being done (in)correctly and how much do they matter to you?

• Complexity:

  • How hard is the task (for you), how much effort does it require?

• Frequency:

  • Is this a one-off or do you do it all the time?

Here’s an ugly visual with some examples (Y axis is frequency):

In terms of making your life better, it seems clear that the best version of agents will do things that are high importance, high complexity and high frequency. Being high in just two is still really useful. In that list of tasks we have:

High Complexity + High Frequency: Annoying things that come up all the time but aren’t life or death, like managing calendar conflicts.

High Complexity + High Importance: Tasks you dread the effort of which you might also mess up, things like applying for loans/mortgages and filing tax returns.

High Frequency + High Importance: Stuff that’s easy but if you drop the ball you are hearing about it, like paying monthly bills.

And my basic point is: we are a long way from the average user being willing over to hand any of this over, even though this would be a huge change to the experience of modern life.

I watched the Google I/O show a few months ago, where they show someone wearing their AI glasses. They used an interaction where the person is walking around London, and their agent chirps up to tell them their colleague’s messaged asking to set up a meeting. They tell the agent to set it up, and it’s happy to oblige.

But when you’re watching, the only possible thing to think is ‘if that was me I’m definitely checking my phone to see if the agent set the meeting correctly’. Which means you’ve expended the same amount of time on the task anyway, if not more. And you look weird with your AI glasses on.

This isn’t good for anyone.

You can say that the paranoia will be sorted out by super-intelligence and the trust it will exude, and yes I probably agree. But I’m talking about the next few years of marginal improvement here.

So how do we get people to trust agents at all?

II. One small step for agents

I had Claude split the three dimensions split into pairs, and put an example task in each quadrant:

The logical thing from a user psychology perspective would be to say:

‘We know users are going to be too hesitant to hand over the stuff in the top right quadrants. So we’ll start bottom left and work our way along those axes until we reach automated utopia.’

But the issue is that starting in the bottom left doesn’t work either, because the world is already a well-designed place.

Agent start-ups show off their tool’s ability to order a burger to your house, and follow that up with a claim that this is a big deal. But ordering a burger to my house is very easy for me anyway. So this adds no value.

Similarly, one of OpenAI’s big plays is to move into agentic shopping, as if online shopping hasn’t already been completely solved. Amazon can deliver anything I’ve ever dreamed of to my door tomorrow, and I can order it in 30 seconds. The agent can’t even do it faster than me. What is the point?

So, how do we get to the point of people handing over more complex and important tasks to agents?

From watching the major AI players attempting to communicate agents to the public: no one knows.

III. Does anyone know how to know this much?

I also said earlier that there must be two categories of thing that agents could be doing:

1. Tasks that people currently do themselves

2. Tasks that people don’t do themselves because they are either too time-scarce, energy-scare, or incapable on their own, or haven’t even realised doing that thing would be a good idea until their agent explained it

I haven’t seen any attempt at advertising compelling use cases of the second category.

Let’s say I spend 60 minutes a week looking at stats to help pick my fantasy football team. I then decide it’s not too tricky and an agent can probably do it for me. So I hand it over and gain 60 minutes back.

But if time, energy, and knowledge are not limitations the agent has, then this is a bad way to think about tasks. I’m treating the agent like a human when I shouldn’t.

If the agent really can effectively pick my fantasy team, then why not have it enter into every public league with a prize pool it can find, why not totally redesign my analysis strategy, why not have it gather the underlying data for every player on every one of my friend’s teams, and have it negotiate high-value trade deals with them?

You can apply this kind of thinking to lots of stuff, and suddenly you realise your life isn’t made of tasks. It’s made of goals and limitations. And it’s reallly hard to think about what you should try to achieve if some of your inputs are no longer limited.

I saw Jasmine Sun write recently that no one knows how to know this much, and I completely agree. Which is why it’s doubly useless for OpenAI to tell you its agent can book a train for you and save you 2 minutes. It should be 10xing you somewhere, somehow.

When working-agent-1 comes out, maybe your first prompt should be ‘ask me all about my life, work out things you can do to help me the most, and just do them’.

But in practical terms, what do we do?

From watching the major AI players attempting to communicate agents to the public: no one knows.

IV. Delegation is a psychological nightmare zone

But here we land at another reason why users might not let themselves be helped: people are really bad at letting others do things for them. Anything with any complexity in life comes with a ‘fine i’ll do it myself’ error code built in.

From ideation to completion, most tasks have the same failure modes. You can imagine these when weighing up handing over a task to a junior employee or to an agent (btw this equivalency is also why junior employees seem to no longer exist):

These are either the person failing to delegate:

• “This thing is too complicated to explain” → easier to just do it yourself

• “Writing out specific steps is too effortful” → easier to just do it yourself

• “I’m going to get anxious about not seeing how it’s going” → easier to just do it yourself

Or the person delegating badly, which is very common in organisational psychology:

• Poor understanding of the delegates skill/one’s own tacit knowledge → not enough context given → bad result

• No clear description of what success would be → delegate forced to guess →bad result

On top of these, the number one reason people don’t like to delegate things they usually do themselves: inertia. You can either take the behavioural science approach of saying that’s a weird kink in human rationality and not expand any further, or you can take the psychoanalytic approach of suggesting people dislike change because it unconsciously highlights the infinite freedom of existence which is perfectly correlated with infinite terror. I don’t care which but it’s true either way. There will be a certain percentage of users who do not want to use AI agents because they are new and different and represent a chance for their lives to change in massive ways. This is understandably scary. These people will then come up with all the types of reasons for their inertia on the fly and to some extent will genuinely believe them, but you won’t need to take those reasons too seriously. Because once you solve those, they will freestyle something else in its place.

All of this is to say the utopia that agents will accelerate us towards will likely face some deceleration from the human side of the equation.

What do we do about that?

From watching the major AI players attempting to communicate agents to the public: no one knows.

V. Right back at you

I read this paper the other day: The philosophic turn for AI agents: replacing centralized digital rhetoric with decentralized truth-seeking

I still don’t really know that title means, but the paper makes a good point: the more complex life gets, the more we need help from technology, the more technology determines what you do.

Which means… less autonomy? This author thinks so, and it alarms him. It alarms Nick Bostrom too, hence his attempts to preserve human agency in Deep Utopia.

But this paper has an idea that I think is actually workable.

Instead of steering users toward specific choices, AI should help people find truth through open discussion and questioning, like Socrates. Who we did end up executing but let’s pretend there’s no weird ominous analogy to play with here.

This design would mean:

• AI systems that ask thought-provoking questions rather than pushing specific answers

• Helping users reach solid conclusions that hold up when challenged from different angles

• Supporting people's own thinking rather than doing the thinking for them

• Working like a good teacher who guides students to figure things out themselves

Which would take us way closer to existing at more useful parts of the axes from earlier. Or maybe it would help throw them out entirely. Because ‘human tasks’ are tiny in comparison to what’s actually possible.

For your life to become as good as possible, while you retain as much autonomy as possible (which you should, with all the free time you now have), you shouldn’t think about to-do lists at all. You need to take a step backward. Why are you getting up in the morning at all? What’s the goal?

Let your agent help you work that bit out, and it can take care of the rest.

Maybe then we’ll learn how to live with super-intelligence.

This week, what does it mean for a population’s personality to change over time, and how not to live in the present.

I. What happens when conscientiousness goes down?

(I promise by the end of this conscientiousness isn’t going to sound like a word to you anymore)

From the Financial Times and John Burn-Murdoch comes ‘The troubling decline in conscientiousness’. Here are the snippets that matter:

“Levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness (the quality of being dependable and disciplined), with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.

…

We can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.

…

While the terminology of personality can feel vague, the science is solid. Decades of research consistently finds that all these shifts are in the direction associated with negative outcomes down the line. Life is full of challenges. A less committed, less connected and more easily distressed cohort will navigate them less well.

..

Conscientiousness will separate those who just survive from those who thrive in the 21st century.

Questions are:

• Is this true?

• Does this matter?

• Why is it happening?

For whether it’s true that conscientiousness is down, I’m going to start at the beginning and try to explain what personality is from a scientifically measurable perspective and what conscientiousness is defined as within that perspective.

When psychology emerges as a (vague) discipline in the 19th century, it’s thought that personality could be deduced from language, i.e. the different types of personality that present in society will be encoded in the words we have to describe other people (e.g. brave, quiet, cynical, dependable etc.). In the mid 20th century, when academic psychology actually starts to pick up, this is done more thoroughly, literally just by reading the dictionary and starting to group the types of adjectives that exist.

The next couple of decades are spent mapping out these traits by working out how well they predict each other, e.g. if someone is described as ‘creative’ does that predict they are likely to also be described as ‘open-minded’. Factor analysis shows you what traits tend to co-vary, and eventually we can tell that there are groups of traits that tend to come together in a reliable enough way for an overall name for that group to mean something.

So we end up with the Big 5 personality traits. Conscientiousness is one of them, which is now measured by 10ish questions like these:

And then a definition for the overall construct ends up as something like: conscientiousness reflects how organised, reliable, and hardworking a person is.

But THIS is the important thing to understand: that does not mean that we actually understand what conscientiousness is. We just know that for some reason, some people score higher on these questions than others, and that this predicts some life outcomes. It is entirely possible that there is some other magic question we could ask people that would predict these way more reliably and actually represents what people mean when they say someone is organised and reliable, which perfectly matches something that actually exists neuroscientifically, but there’s no way to tell what that measure would be.

This is not to say that I don’t think personality research is strong, I do. If you don’t think it’s useful you will be hard pushed to find something within social science that is. But we need some sense about how we talk about psychology in scientific terms. I’m not exaggerating when I say the main reason this article got widely shared is because it has a chart in it, and you can read charts, because you’re a scientist.

The FT talks about conscientiousness like you could take a blood test and your score on it would be right there beside your iron levels. That isn’t what this is but I don’t think the FT cares.

HOWEVER there is still a research finding here, so let’s examine that. Here is how the author promotes it:

Ok, graph bottom left. Conscientiousness in ‘freefall’ for young people. I was shocked by this, you don’t get effect sizes like that in psychology ever, so I have looked into it.

The data is from this:

The Understanding America Study (UAS) is a panel of households at the University of Southern California (USC) of approximately 14,700 respondents, growing to 20,000 by end of 2025 representing the entire United States.

They seem to survey their panel every couple years or so, which is enough data points to map out the trends above. You will see in the small text in the screenshot that for JBM’s graphs, ‘values are expressed as percentiles of the full population distribution as it stood in 2014’. This is to make the drop look bigger, and fair enough, the game is the game.

I used their interactive tool to show the trend in terms of the actual average scores. They wouldn’t let me change the axes hence the Y axis still sort of tricking you on the size of the change, and the X axis is a mess.

Conscientiousness is measured by 9 5-point Likert scale questions (e.g. I am organised and like to keep things whatever). The top possible score is thus 45. So young people in the last decade have been in ‘freefall’, from a mean of 35.5ish to a mean 33.5ish. Is that a drop that justifies this tweet?

I don’t know if it does, the FT doesn’t know, and neither do personality psychologists.

Also, as you can tell from those scores across age groups, conscientiousness is not normally distributed. It looks like this:

Most people rate themselves as pretty conscientious, young people are always slightly less conscientious than older groups, but now they are more slightly less conscientious than older groups on average. They are still pretty conscientious.

On this point, the dramatic language of the FT drives me a little crazy, and brings me back to something I’ve repeated a lot on this blog: there is this weird class of media, read by people with degrees and twitter accounts, who consider themselves informed, and will share this on with captions like ‘fascinating stuff’, which will then get hyperlinked in other articles and essays as a proof point for some other big argument, and this is all just accepted as truth and no one cares. And worst of all, social scientists want this, because at least it gives them some clout in this era of media.

And this is where science is not just a useless label for areas like psychology, but is actually worse than useless. Because yes the research papers around conscientiousness are empirical and written in good faith, but once they escape into mainstream media this gets thrown out the window. John Burn-Murdoch posted this data, accompanied by some guesses at causes and consequences of conscientiousness being down in young people, and does say that these are hypotheses, but that doesn’t matter. It is getting re-posted like everything he said is fact, and people chime in with their certain views on exactly what is happening here and what we should think about it. And the reason people think this is ok is because PSYCHOLOGY IS CONSIDERED A SCIENCE.

Ok, sorry, deep breaths.

Matt Yglesias posts the picture of the FT’s graph and says “it’s so over”.

What is? Seriously, what are you specifically trying to say?

You can say that the conscientiousness levels are alarming but I beg you remember that we don’t really understand what conscientiousness fundamentally is.

Next issue with the claim, the Understanding America Study starts in 2015. So that’s why the trend graph starts then. But if you have two eyes you can see that the scores immediately go down, so we have no idea when this trend starts (and if you look at my graph, the decline has actually slowed!). No one cares about any of this either. They talk like it starts in 2014 because that’s what JBM and the FT allowed them to believe by showing them the serious looking graph. It could be that the water supply changed in 1999, and conscientiousness was even higher then, and some new chemical has been dragging it down. But it could also be that this new chemical just affects your likelihood of rating your own behaviour highly on certain questions, and the drops in score won’t manifest into differences in long-term outcomes. It’s unlikely but we don’t know.

This is where I would love to present you with longer term data on conscientiousness scores in the US, but it sadly doesn’t exist to any comparable quality. If you’re reading this and you found it let me know. But as it stands, we don’t know when the trend started.

So we don’t know when the trend starts or what the outcome of it will be, but it’s still mainstream view of the informed intelligent nuanced-perspective class that “it’s so over”.

These words don’t mean anything. No one cares.

And now, in a hilarious plot twist, I am going to offer my thoughts on the potential causes and consequences of a decrease in conscientiousness in young people.

Because to be totally clear and to give credit to this piece being justified: going from 35.5 to 33.5 in under a decade is still really weird and worth talking about. As I say, you don’t get effects like this in psychology very often.

One thing that makes conscientiousness a particularly hard to pin down construct is that it’s kind of different to the rest of the big 5. It is very much a facet of personality, in that you can deduce a conscientious person by the words other people use to describe how they are (dependable, hard-working etc.). But it’s actually quite a bit more behavioural than the other dimensions.

Take levels of extroversion. This can be spotted from behaviour of course, but we partly still measure it from how someone feels inside, e.g. other people drain me and after 30 mins of socialising I want to go home and die/I need to socialise to survive.

But conscientiousness is definitionally (in the psychometric sense, not platonic ideal sense) about actions. Do you do the things you tell yourself you are going to do? Do you deliver work with no mistakes because you checked every little detail? Is your room spotless and organised?

(Crucial: not ‘do you like your room to be organised’, but what would I see if I walked in there right now?)

We are verging into my subjective opinion from here on in.

A reason this predicts big life outcomes is because small actions add up and correlate with your ability to take big actions.

So we arrive at one of the meta-themes of the blog: agency.

And while agency and conscientiousness are different things (probably), they still both relate to this more important over-arching thing: your ability to impact the world, and act on your desires. And I am in no way surprised to see this is decreasing in young people and people in general. I suspect this predates the 2015 cutoff.

It is also not surprising that the FT’s analysis finds an increase in neuroticism in the same groups. This relationship between conscientiousness and neuroticism is reliable. Which should make sense to you. Neuroticism is the depression and anxiety dimension.

You know when you let a whole week build up of you delaying writing and sending an email, and you internally despair more and more until eventually you have to do it and turns out it was really easy and you feel much better? That is why neuroticism and conscientiousness are reliably inversely correlated.

This is also why it makes a bit of sense to talk about a decrease in conscientiousness and an increase in neuroticism as though it is one story. And it is a story I’ve been telling over time here, too.

If you’ve never read this blog before this is going to sound simplistic and crazy, so I’ll link out to the longer thinking as I go.

1. Modern life forces you to exist in the world of symbols more and more. Treating everything as map rather than territory turns off your ability to cultivate true desire.

2. It is very common to give up one’s agency in the world, because it is terrifying to have power, leaving all the power to the ones who retain their agency. But the symbols allow you to pretend this isn’t happening.

3. Cultural narcissism retains your wish to be unique, while stifling your ability to act on it, resulting in resentment and anxiety, and all your effort being pushed into retaining the false story of you.

To make this all way too simple I would say something like:

Technology → individualism

Economic progress → media

Media + individualism → narcissism

Narcissism → inability to act

Inability to act → less conscientiousness and more neuroticism

At the individual level, the consequence is that your life probably won’t be as fun, and you won’t be a force for good in society.

At the group level, you become at the mercy of those who didn’t suffer the same fate, which is a shit deal. This was kind of the end-point of Lou Keep’s Uruk series back in the day. Modern life offers “fake agency” and symbolic participation, which can’t restore meaning, because meaning is sustained by the feedback loop between belief and effective action. Running away from the terror of freedom unfortunately doesn’t work.

In Lou Keep’s thesis, intelligence and agency become necessities for power, hence severe inequality which is destined to get worse.

This is the real consequence of the data trend the FT noticed.

I do agree this is cause for concern. The issue is, it’s alr—

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II. How not to think about problems

I watched the GPT-5 announcement stream this week. I really have no idea who these shows are for anymore. OpenAI have followed the Google I/O model of 50% speaking to you like you are a complete moron who doesn’t know what a computer is, and 50% showing you benchmark scores you’d need a PhD to actually understand the implications of. I think people take away what they want to take away anyway.

I’ve used GPT-5 a bit. I think it’s noticeably marginally better than any of the previous OpenAI models, and not meaningfully better than Anthropic and Google’s best as it stands for my use cases.

A couple of interesting reactions:

First, people being sad that the tone has shifted from GPT-4o, and that their old friend has been murdered and replaced overnight by some cold analyst. I find this an interesting flip on the sycophancy argument. I think Yudkowsky pointed this out well:

I also think this speaks to something we spoke about previously i.e. that many people actually like a medium-high level of sycophancy, so long as it doesn’t become too obvious:

The other reaction I’m interested by is the set of conclusions people are drawing from GPT-5 not being crazy better than GPT-4. I think calling it a slowdown is fair, but the comfort which that offers people may now allow them to live their lives as if AI disruption will never be a problem, which is what they want, see also:

And I think it’s probably really bad that people infer this level of progress as proof of nothing to worry about. I saw Sam Kriss say this:

And I just think, like, do you understand the notion of present and future at all? If the Titanic took off without lifeboats would you say “please focus on the dangers at hand for God’s sake, there’s a step on the staircase people keep tripping on”?

Or is there this cognitive shortcut whereby if something bad in the future only has <50% chance of happening, you shouldn’t worry about it? That just guarantees your ship sinks to the first vaguely strange thing that hits it.

This is, of course, somewhat psychologically explainable. It was the subject of the first ever post on here:

In present day, the fact is that forecasters and researchers still converge at an AGI median arrival date being around 2032, and whatever your definition of AGI is that is a huge deal. Huge isn’t an appropriate adjective but I don’t even know if we have an appropriate one. I honestly feel glad it’s not any sooner because I’m running out of time.

And for people to look at GPT-5 and say “nah this thing’s busted”, I just find it so unserious, and somewhat scary. I still think it’s highly likely that our governmental and economic system will not be prepared for the shift that will occur, and you will be on your own for the brief period in history where the new order works itself out. The psychology of this, and more respectable people’s thoughts, more precisely mapped out here:

Again, it just makes me wonder what the promotion and announcements for these models are for. It just seems to reinforce this fundamental miscommunication of AI discourse:

• AI sect representative: “Guys this might get to a seriously impressive level in the near future, we need to talk about what we are going to do”

• AI skeptic: “what do you mean, this current model isn’t going to take over anything”

It’s important to understand that there’s both a present and a future.

Ok we are done here.

Some recommended links to end the week:

The paintings of Peter Birkhäuser

The Master and Margarita for £0.74 on Kindle

Jay Electronica - Act II full album

@trail_cams

(you don’t need to watch the show to read this)

Last Friday night’s Love Island featured an in-house award ceremony called the Grafties. For each award (fakest person, best kiss, whatever), there were three nominees, accompanied by clips of moments from the big brother-style villa over the past few weeks. The public voted for a winner of each, who then had to go up beside the big screen to receive their award.

I quickly lost track of which award was which, because what it turned into was a barrage of incriminating evidence that one of the season’s main contestants, Harry, was telling every girl what they wanted to hear while continuing to flirt with each of them behind their backs.

Harry is funny, charming, charismatic, confident, very attractive. So the opportunity to do what he did was natural, but it was still his choice to act it out. Out of the 4ish girls he was flirting with at the same time, there are only two you really need to understand:

• Shakira: this is the first girl Harry was with, who left him after having her suspicions severely raised that he was way more interested in…

• Helena: this is the second girl Harry was with, who after forgiving his ongoing misbehaviour since stealing him from Shakira, eventually became exclusive with him. This was until the Grafties clips showed her that he never really cared about her, and actually was still way more interested in Shakira.

The nail in the coffin clip featured a private conversation with Shakira, which was clearly days after he was already exclusive with Helena. At this point he knows Shakira is upset because she still isn’t over him, and he is bizarrely suggesting they go on a date after the show. She tries to brush him off, he tries to keep it going.

All the non-involved contestants wince watching. Conor, Shakira’s next partner after Harry, is furious because Harry had lied to him about what he was up to with Shakira. Shakira seems deflated. And Helena is distraught and embarrassed, watching her partner pine for someone else. Harry’s closest friends Meg and Dejon are angry he’d treat Helena like that.

Yet the obvious reaction for the camera to pan to, is Harry. Clip after clip after clip of his behaviour that is just not adding up. Who does he actually want? Why is he treating people like this? What has he been up to the whole time?

Everyone turns to him begging for some kind of answer and … he has nothing. He barely speaks. Stares straight ahead, and you’re not sure if he’s emotionless or has an inner tsunami pouring in.

The frustrating truth is that there is no reason for his behaviour. He doesn’t need to speak to let you know that. As a semi-useful rule, someone’s behaviour and actions are the best way to tell what they actually want and believe in. Even yourself. I know you say you believe in X cause, but other people can see that nothing you’ve tried has helped it, and you’re telling me that you haven’t noticed that as well?

So when none of Harry’s actions add up (e.g. if he wanted Shakira why did he leave her, why ask Helena to be exclusive if you don’t seem to like her romantically), and you try to work out what he wants, the answer is nothing. This is a man who believes in nothing at all. He’s turned his head to Shakira again, because, well, she’s there. And it would offer good TV. If he doesn’t know how to be happy at least he’s entertaining someone else.

The funny thing is that he even acknowledges this in his own psychology. There’s a moment in the series where Harrison, which is a good name for a guy who’s kind of a Diet Harry in behaviour, is starting to question if he’s messing the girls around too much, and says it’s start to weigh on him. Harry jokes, “you just need to get on my level mate”, which I suppose he actually does mean. I suspect there was a time in Harry’s life where he did feel bad, before going all in on this path. Level up.

So this becomes the new question, maybe not for the islanders, but definitely for us the viewers: Why does Harry believe in nothing? And why does he not care about other people?

This is not to absolve him of individual guilt for any of his crimes, but it is worth examining exactly why Harry is the natural endpoint of a collective culture. Our biggest issue as a culture is also one of our key strengths, i.e. the death of God. We’ve got a lot done, but the same scientific method that was supposed to reveal truth instead revealed that there's no ultimate foundation for meaning. This leaves you in a tricky position: you have the fundamental freedom to choose exactly who you are, you choose every second of your life, which gives you ultimate responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you aren’t a net positive on the world then that is your fault. This is a terrifying truth to deal with, so the default becomes a retreat.

On an individual level, media and the ultra-modern need for the approval of strangers incentivises narcissism as that retreat, which applies on steroids if you are the type of person strangers naturally like. This works, in a sense, because other people only feeling like side characters in your story means that their emotions and experiences don’t matter, or don’t exist to the same depth. And also, pleasing strangers getting reinforced sort of naturally leads to the telling everybody what they want to hear habit which Harry exhibits, because he simply doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to be doing. Telling people what they don’t want to hear is actually hard, and requires you to have to some guiding principle for your own actions, which Harry does not have.

This is one place you may actually offer hot people some sympathy, modern life doesn’t give them much choice. Nihilism is their natural endpoint. Not the ‘fml i might as well end it all’ kind, but the ‘i have no guiding principles kind’, because (1) society tells them they can get away with it (2) science hasn’t offered us a new moral framework, and (3) because other people aren’t real.

To further emphasise why it’s true that Harry has no real reason for what he’s doing: the guy isn’t even horny. I would be willing to accept that as a basic explanation for everything, but how come when Helena tempted him away from Shakira through what seemed like sexual tension alone, and they shared a bed for like two weeks, he didn’t even try to have sex with her?

This is likely the situation for everyone who ends up on Love Island. Incentivised into extreme levels of identity maintenance as a useful way to avoid self-confrontation. No one is more easily caught and spat out by the social media system than the Love Islander. Harry’s cast-mate Toni is an example of this.

Toni got quickly attached to Harrison, who just like Harry had a penchant for anyone that happened to be sitting across from him in any given moment. Toni made it clear that she refused to be involved in any love triangles, while voluntarily continuing to be in one. But the thing that was on the nose for the type of incentivised narcissism that Toni embodies was her high point of violent anger. Crucially, it was not that Harrison was interested in other girls and kept treating her badly, and that they seemed to be on the verge of breaking up every episode. It was that around episode 30, after Toni was trying to steal Harrison back from a girl called Lauren, Toni finds out that Harrison actually had sex with Lauren, while Toni was asleep across their communal bedroom, and that everyone else in the villa knew this but her. That is the point she snapped.

This is not to say that isn’t something that would anger you, I’m pointing out why she was angry: Harrison and Lauren having sex, and Toni not even knowing, reveals that other people have their own worlds where she doesn’t matter to them. Toni was never even going to be told without the rumour making its way to her best pals in the villa. This is a big threat to main character syndrome. Think about why the following is true: Toni wouldn’t have been as upset if Harrison had purposely had sex loud enough so that she could hear. Someone purposely upsetting you is nicer than them not considering you at all.

And the reason I bring up this whole dreary thing is because that is when Toni’s identity maintenance went into overdrive. Once Harrison has pivoted back to being with Lauren again, and Toni hears they’re getting it on, she starts trying to rewrite reality in real time, where she’s the one in control. She tells Harrison she’s done with him and refuses to be an option. She says the same thing to her new love interest Cach, and that she’s happy he can see her as the only prize. This is clearly wrong. She was an option, and she wasn’t chosen. In fact, later that same day, Harrison decides he might be interested in her again, and she ditches Cach immediately. And Toni has to get to retcon-ing again.

But the crucial thing to understand is what happens when people question her story. If you question a narcissist's identity, they bite back. Toni has a supremely confident bite back to everything, like she’s in some kind of HBO drama. Which is crucial, because she really is outsourcing herself. This is the weird paradox of cultural narcissism, that one is at once both highly protective of their own identity, yet totally without any sense of self. Toni doesn’t allow herself to interpret her own behaviour with any degree of uncertainty, so she never learns anything about herself either, so when people question her she just clings to anything that vaguely sounds like it makes sense in the moment. And so she’s reduced to one-liners that could be copy and pasted into any reality show, much in the same way teenagers talk in TikTok comment section memes (before bro hopefully grows out of it). If you don’t grow out of it, you remain with no actual guiding principles, and we are back at nihilism again.

Now, this is where things get really interesting. Because by the same logic this is how you’d expect Harry to handle everything collapsing in on him. He might lose the battle, but he’s going to lunge into a verbal fight the second someone comes at him. This is exactly how he’s conducted himself with every other point of tension.

But this time, when the heat is really turned up, he sits there lifeless. The guy who can talk himself into and out of any situation has nothing to say.

I’m pretty sure it has something to do with this, which has to be the most genius production decision I have ever seen on reality TV…

The islanders become the audience too.

The award show was actually just a new layer of TV. We are watching reality stars watch reality stars/themselves. How’s that for metamodern?

And as their show comes to an end, and the big screen goes black, and they return to their version of reality, Harry suddenly has a different version of events to interpret.

People get confused by Freud’s original conception of narcissism, but it is pretty simple (if a bit too simple): everyone has to be a bit narcissistic because you do only see the world through your eyes, so you can only understand stuff in terms of how it relates to you. Which makes it hard to break out of. But now Harry is watching himself in 3rd person, and if he’s talking to someone else, they equally take up half the screen. In a weirdly literal way, Harry is being forced to understand that other people are as real as he is.

So his usual defences aren’t going to cut it, he has to sit with the actual consequences. I repeat from earlier: you have the fundamental freedom to choose exactly who you are, you choose every second of your life, which gives you ultimate responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you aren’t a net positive on the world then that is your fault. This is a terrifying truth to deal with, so the default becomes a retreat.

But now, Harry has nowhere to retreat to.

So the next day becomes a fascinating watch, as a now depressed Harry isn’t even looking for sympathy anymore. It seems he actually is realising just how far gone he is.

It was strangely a pretty sad watch. I say this with some caution, but a little part of me related to the guy. Not in terms of his exact situation. I’m not as hot, charming or tall as Harry, but I did the best what I have, and had a couple of hot boy summers to show for it.

And there was this thing I would always do once I knew I liked someone and wanted them to like me and for things to move further.

When your date’s played out, and they’ve told you various stories of their life, and you’ve heard all about their friends and family, and maybe their exes, and they’ve pieced it all back together to the person they are today, you just let them know that you can see it.

I would say something like ‘wow, it’s actually very cool how much you think about the way you think. like you’re really introspective, and reflect on everything that’s happened to you, and actually understand why you are the way you are’

I would always be telling the truth when I say this. Only because that is true for literally every human ever. Our interior worlds take up a much higher % of our reality than we let on. But no one else lets on either, so we falsely assume we are unique in this regard. And yet no one’s ever noticed it about you, until….

I’m not saying all girls are like this. I’m saying all people are like this. You can call it Fundamental Attribution Error or call it the same benign narcissism that Harry has, I don’t care which, but everyone suspects they are a little more agentic than everyone else. That they have more going on down below.

So it goes without saying that this worked every single time.

But the one grace I will give myself is that when I left them the next morning, I did at least find it fucked up how much easier life was when you stopped treating other people like people. And when you realise how much power you can hold over them as a result. And worst of all, it’s actually very, very easy.

I know it’s a terrible way of looking at things, but it’s true. I find Worst Boyfriend Ever despicable, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to end up in prison, but I must admit he’s skilled at holding a mirror up to a culture. I mean, Hunter S. Thompson did the same thing and people thought he was cool for it. They turned it into a movie, put Johnny Depp behind the wheel, and suddenly nihilism is aspirational again.

But in any case, realising the power you can have over other people is unsettling, if not terrifying. You start to think if I can play with these people like they’re action figures, what else am I capable of. That’s how you know you’ve come to terms with the responsibility of existing, when it stresses you out.

My suspicion is that Harry was just able to bury himself further into this hole, which was effective in managing his own guilt and keeping the terror of freedom quiet. Play the character.

Another classic avoidance tactic would be to fetishise surrendering your power entirely. You don’t want to believe that you could affect other people, so you let yourself play the submissive. In a world where nihilism and narcissism makes it quite easy to mess with other people, submission in the bedroom will just become more popular, and I bet it won’t be long until r/cuckold is a weirdly popular subreddit. Oh wait, that’s alr—

Anyway, back to the plot.

I do not sympathise with Harry, but I’m interested by the way out he might have just been offered, and if he manages to take it. And this is where I struggle for comparison.

Classical tragic heroes fall because of hubris, they believe too much in themselves, in their own power and righteousness. Oedipus thinks he can outsmart fate, Macbeth believes he deserves the crown, Hamlet trusts in his moral certainty. Even Achilles, consumed by rage, is driven by passionate conviction about honour and revenge. But Harry isn't undone by believing too strongly in anything, he's undone by believing in nothing at all. Where Oedipus was blinded by his need to know the truth, Harry can't even be bothered to figure out what he wants. Where Macbeth was tortured by guilt and paranoia after his crimes, Harry jokes about 'getting on his level.' The tragic flaw here isn't excessive passion, it's an absence of exactly that. So maybe Harry does represent the first tragic hero of nihilism: a man who falls not because he reached too high, but because he never tried to reach for anything at all.

So what happens in the last act? I think it depends on whether he allows the story to continue.

Because the one thing Harry could do to avoid coming to terms with himself is to go back to Toni’s strategy from earlier, and rewrite reality. He’s admitted he was trying to pursue Shakira behind Helena’s back, which doesn’t make sense, unless he forces it to. He can tell himself and everyone around him that he did really want to be with Shakira all along, and these feelings were just buried deep inside him, and now it all makes sense to them both again. Which means other people can continue to pay the price for his nihilism.

So in the midst of his breakdown, when all hope is lost, he manages to utter this to her…

I pray he works out that salvation can only come from the former.

Overall, great TV. 10/10.

Now, this is where things are about to go left.

Luigi Mangione was a very strange time for me.

When he killed that really important person, whose name I guarantee you don’t remember, I was obviously taken in by the storm of it all. When his statement got leaked, I was a bit taken aback by how articulate he was. He’s trying to say something, let’s at least see what it is.

His online accounts got found. His goodreads too. Turns out we were admirers of some of the same people. His twitter got found. Turns out we even knew some of the same people. Not just followed, I mean when everyone started sharing their past experiences with him, he had actually messaged and had spoken to people that I’ve spoken to over the years from running in various grey tribe tpot online circles. One blogger told a story about how Luigi paid for his most expensive tier, which included a regular video call.

He said that when he met Luigi, the guy was really perturbed by modern agency. He told a story about how he was in Japan, and saw some paramedics racing to an emergency situation, before stopping on a near empty street because the pedestrian light was red. This had stuck with him.

It stuck with me too, mainly because I was thinking ‘damn that is exactly the kind of thing i would write about’. We really did have quite a bit in common.

I don’t particularly think it makes sense to claim there was a point at which he was ‘radicalised’ per se, as the events that led to the thing count as much as the thing itself, but there was certainly a point where his behaviour shifted. As far as I know, he cut everyone out and got to work. No one knew where he was until he did it.

And this is where the familiarity stops. I personally don’t believe in civilians being able to murder people because they think they are monsters. Because you could be wrong. And even if I do think American healthcare is severely messed up and that guy was a monster, and if alive would have continued to harm countless others, I still oppose it. Civility is hard won and way too easily lost. And when that happens I promise you that your bad back is going to be the least of your problems. (Also your medical insurance premium would actually be higher, but that’s besides the point).

I couldn’t work out what Luigi’s deal was.

Weirdly, I now live really close to a mural of him in East London. It appeared on the side of a railway bridge near the start of the year. No caption, no signature, just his face. It’s huge.

You can’t even tell what his painter was trying to say, which I now think is apt, because no one knew what Luigi was trying to say either. Not even him.

Bluesky, both the actual website and the general physical version that exists among us, still hail him as a sort of martyr. With some vaguely socialist under(over?)tones. Like, yeah, fine. But any kind of critical examination of his stated beliefs show that none of this stuff adds up. This guy is an individualist to the core.

His central obsession was agency, he feared people were becoming NPCS, slaves to stimuli. He followed a mix from Joe Rogan to AOC, read both Elon Musk biographies, Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the Unabomber's manifesto (which he rated 4 stars), and was interested in rationalism and effective altruism while also believing in inter-generational trauma. He liked Peter Thiel and Jon Haidt. He criticised corporate greed and the healthcare system but was sceptical of "woke" identity politics. His worldview was a contradictory hodgepodge.

Which I will not criticise him for, because realistically that’s true for all of us to some degree. I’m just saying I don’t think he believed what he claimed to when he decided on becoming an assassin. Maybe he had some guiding principles to begin with, but something incentivised him into throwing them away.

Which is where you should now say ‘Hah, gotcha. You said the belief is in the behaviour earlier. He showed you what he really believed when he did it’

Oh yeah, he believes in being locked away for the rest of his life? Is that the action of someone that wants to improve the world?

You can say every revolutionary in history had to kill to make their message heard, and I don’t disagree, but my point is that at least John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald tried to fucking get away with it. I don’t care what your little manifesto said Luigi, if you really believed any of those things than you would have preferred to have been out here fighting for them. I hope they made you watch the CCTV, brother. What a final act of wit to wear that mask to hide your face from yourself. Perhaps that was your last chance at salvation, and you stopped it from happening.

So why did he sacrifice his own ability to impact the world?

By which I mean: you think he didn’t know what would happen? He knew his life was over. He wanted it to be over. He didn’t even try to avoid getting caught. He detailed everything he did before waiting for them in a McDonald’s for God sake. He even kept the murder weapon on him.

"To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience."

How’s that for identity maintenance? Guy wrote the ending of his story in advance.

Why’d he choose this one? We return again:

You have the fundamental freedom to choose exactly who you are, you choose every second of your life, which gives you ultimate responsibility for the consequences of your actions. If you aren’t a net positive on the world then that is your fault. This is a terrifying truth to deal with, so the default becomes a retreat.

Retreat from the power you can hold over other people, retreat from your ability to affect the world, retreat from seeing other people as real people, retreat into the only thing that can stop you from having to confront yourself.

Luigi was very interested in truth. But truth is terrifying. They used to say he who fights with monsters should be careful lest he become one himself. And when Luigi gazed into the abyss, it gazed back harder.

He realised he had to face himself, and wanted out.

As he raised his 3D-printed gun behind the CEO’s back, he may as well have whispered the mythical line.

“I’m either leaving alone, or you’re coming with me.”

This week, dads who hate their kids, psychologists who hate their doubters, and kids who hate partying.

I. How to make yourself hateful

Guy posts to r/daddit, the subreddit for dads, see what you make of it:

I feel awful for posting this, but I just don't enjoy being with my kids

So for context I have a 3 and 5 YO, and am recently separated so parenting solo when I have them (50/50).

I'm just not enjoying my time with them, having the childless time feels so great and I honestly dread when its my turn to have them. Its exhausting, frustrating, and annoying. I find myself just wanting to get through the day until they are in bed instead of trying to just enjoy the moment with them.

My 5YO's personality just annoys me. She whines, complains, screams, resists, argues, gets easily frustrated and doesn't listen.

The 3YO has so many cute moments, giving me hugs and saying I love you. But also screams, resists and has now become such a picky eater.

When I'm playing with them I'm constantly looking at the clock and resisting looking at my phone, telling them daddy is going to sit down and they have to play by themselves. They are starting to play together but inevitably after like 30 sec start fighting/screaming and hitting.

I'm doing my best to hide it, stay positive with them, encourage them and listen but I've noticed my general attitude is just negative. I try to redirect, offer choices or rewards for good behavior but also yell at them and say how frustrated I am. When I do yell or act obviously overwhelmed, I always follow up taking account for my attitude and apologize but I feel like I do it so much they are learning they can act how ever they want as long as its followed by an apology which I'm afraid just teaches emotional manipulation.

Apparently I'm able to fake it around my friends and family as everyone always tells me how good of a dad I am. But I feel like I'm hiding some kind of secret behind closed doors.

I know how they are acting is age appropriate, and these are hard ages in general. But it breaks my heart that I can’t enjoy them during this phase. Am I just not a toddler/little kid dad? Do some of us just thrive at older ages?

I only saw this because a user cross-posted it to the recently reviving r/thelastpsychiatrist, where they offered their response. I’ve edited it down quite a bit:

I'm going to save you some time and will be blunter than I would IRL.

Point one, your kids are acting out because they are experts on cause and effect with dad, and this is the most surefire way to get attention. If they were getting enough attention from dad, they wouldn't feel compelled to act out at all.

Point two, the model for how your kids will interpret the world is built brick by brick from their interactions with their parents. Moral, interpersonal, romantic, all of it is learned through the framework of your relationship.

Finally, point 3. So what is the problem?

Look at your words. You're not asking for advice on how to help them be happier, more content, less outbursts.

So then the question is - what are you asking for? Why post this? Question - what did you expect the responses to be? Did you, in your heart of hearts, post this expecting a step-by-step breakdown of ways to improve, to change, not just for yourself but, more importantly, for the people around you? Because the title of this post—

I feel awful for posting this, but I just don’t enjoy being with my kids.

Which of course reveals the problem - you didn't come here for your kids - you didn't even come here for self-improvement, IE ways to change to prevent things like, say, your kids hating you, divorce, etc. You came here to feel better about what you're doing.

To the point: you came here to be told not to change, because that's what you were going to do already.

OK, I’m in dodgy territory here. I think straight up saying that to him is harsh and unproductive, and largely ignores the fact that parenting is tough as hell. But I do still think it’s worth talking about. So please consider everything I’m about to say as us interpreting a story together to see what we can learn about being more useful people, and not as a criticism of that person.

Hating family members is very taboo, but also very prevalent. The most taboo relationship of all is the parent who resents their children, and has since the day they were born. But they are out there. It may just be that anonymous online forums are the only place those parents will ever admit to it.

Issue 1, less immediately relevant to you or I: This is really bad for the world. If you hate your kids, you’ll be less of a good parent, which will make them worse, which will make you hate them more, which lead you to letting them out into the world the first chance you get, which will lead them being a nuisance to everyone else, and no one else liking them either.

Issue 2, highly relevant to you and everyone you know, and perhaps the most important advice I have ever given on this blog: this is a story of how you can get your unconscious confused with the external world, for your own short-term gain and long-term destruction.

The reddit analyst said this: “To the point: you came here to be told not to change, because that's what you were going to do already.” But the more important thing is that this is already what he was doing the whole time.

Let’s flip it to child-parent and the most common point of conflict: moody adolescence.

The story goes like this: 17 year old thinks they are smart and mature enough to live independently. They’re sick of their parents ordering them around all the time and trying to define who they are. They demand to be seen as an adult, and the denial of that leads to depression and anxiety and a lot of slammed doors.

They do, of course, have a point. They are smart. They’re smarter than their parents about loads of stuff. They probably have talent, and drives, and desires, and just want to go pursue them.

The question then is, and this is vital to understand: if they are so upset at their parents failing to see them as an adult, then why don’t they just act like one and see if that works?

Why the sulking, why the shutting down, why the slammed doors and silent treatment? Why the acting like a child even though that is the exact thing you claim you don’t want to be perceived as?

Because that causes the exact reaction from the parents that allows one to continue hating them for not treating you like you wanted to be treated. You, and you alone, are creating the very outcome you say you don’t want, so you can continue the narrative in which you’ve done nothing wrong and don’t have to change.

See this all the time in adult life too. The cliched girl who goes back to the wrong guy, the office worker who leaves mistakes in their work so they can complain about how nit-picky their boss is.

Anyway, the reddit Dad gives it all away here:

I'm just not enjoying my time with them, having the childless time feels so great and I honestly dread when its my turn to have them. Its exhausting, frustrating, and annoying. I find myself just wanting to get through the day until they are in bed instead of trying to just enjoy the moment with them.

My 5YO's personality just annoys me. She wines, complains, screams, resists, argues, gets easily frustrated and doesn't listen.

I'm doing my best to hide it, stay positive with them, encourage them and listen but I've noticed my general attitude is just negative. I try to redirect, offer choices or rewards for good behavior but also yell at them and say how frustrated I am. When I do yell or act obviously overwhelmed, I always follow up taking account for my attitude and apologize but I feel like I do it so much they are learning they can act how ever they want as long as its followed my an apology which I'm afraid just teaches emotional manipulation.

Before he hangs out with them he has decided it is going to be exhausting, frustrating, and annoying. Then when something goes wrong, as they tend to with toddlers, he yells and tells the kid how frustrated he is. No wonder he finds his 5 year-old annoying. How could she not be? She’s being put into the situation where he has no choice but be interpreted that way.

Classic Greek theatre tells this story in multiple ways. You can’t escape your fate, just so long as you make every possible decision that guarantees it.

So maybe stop telling yourself stories about your own life. Until then, you are destined to play out the exact ending you claim not to want.

“When Laius and Jocasta were told that Oedipus would eventually destroy them, they pinned his ankles and abandoned him in the woods, ensuring that he'd someday have cause to do it. And so when Narcissus's parents heard the requirements for their child's long life... they would have done everything possible to ensure that he didn't know himself.”

II. Should you turn your AC on and destroy the planet?

Saw this one from Nature over the weekend:

Everyone knows Dan Williams is the guy for the job here, so I’ll try to point out something he hasn’t already.

Some key quotes:

Around four billion people have the opportunity to cast their votes in a series of major elections this year. However, the threat to democratic integrity posed by misinformation and disinformation looms large. An effective democracy relies on evidence-based discourse and informed citizens.

Some critics, even in the scholarly community, have claimed that concerns related to the spread of misinformation reflect a type of ‘moral panic’. They think that the threat has been overblown; that classifying information as false is generally problematic because the truth is difficult to determine; and that countermeasures might violate democratic principles because people have a right to believe and express what they want. This trend must be reversed.

Made me think of a remark Dan did make the other day, about a Guardian article over whether air conditioning is justified in the face of climate crisis:

“It’s a thought-terminating cliché that prevents people from thinking about the topic in a careful, evidence-based way.” Yes exactly, that is the point of it. That’s why it’s available for you to read. That’s what highbrow media is for. That’s why researchers like those behind the Nature article, despite being well-intentioned, get used by outlets like the Guardian. So they can justify a headline that becomes truth among the well-read class.

My point to the Nature psychologists is this: the criticism is barely about your methods and results, it is about what you allow the media to do with them.

Joseph Heath writes about this too. “Highbrow misinformation" is misinformation spread by and among educated elites (university professors, academics, prestigious media) rather than the general public. It's characterised by a sophisticated presentation where accurate information is buried but framed misleadingly, causing readers to misinterpret the data.

I pretty much agree, but to be honest, none of this is really my point. Maybe my desk fan is killing us all. Maybe it’s not. My point is how power actually works, and how you are at risk of it working on you.

This Lou Keep quote from 2017 is one of the most important you will ever read, especially if you are evidently the type to spend time in places like substack:

The problem with elites is that they’re smarter than the average rube, and they know it, which is why they’ll never get the point. They’re smarter because they do read the journals the periodicals and the magazines. They’re “informed”. But being informed means no filter, i.e. direct from the prop machine. Which means that they are prime propaganda territory, not Joe the Plumber.

If you are an elite (you are) I want you to sit and think about that last line very hard, possibly for forever, and if you don’t understand it then never ever try and have any more power than you already do, you will fuck this world up otherwise.

Now check out this quote from Nature again: “Some critics, even in the scholarly community, have claimed that…”

Think about them adding that clause. Consider that they don’t think it’s embarrassing to claim that the scholarly community demands some mythical respect. Maybe truth isn’t difficult to determine if you have a Prof. before your name.

Consider how ‘This must be reversed” is written as an order. To you. The intelligent reader. That respects the scholarly community. That knows what is right and what cannot be questioned. You must stop the brainwashed non-scholarlies. Go now. March.

So as a starting point, the next time you’re angry at someone because of a piece of media, ask these:

1. What do I believe that makes me feel this way?

2. Who told me those things that I believe?

3. Why did they tell me that?

Further reading:

III. Why aren’t people partying in the USA?

Derek Thompson joined Substack and posted this:

I truly hope he never discovers this blog because the amount of times I’ve criticised him is getting out of control. But in any case, this is important, and speaks also to the last point on what you want the media to tell you.

Thompson asks why partying is way down in America, with barely anyone going to one on any given weekend. In figures:

• Only 4.1% of Americans attended or hosted a party on a typical weekend in 2023 (just 1 in 25 households)

• Between 2003-2024, time spent at social events declined 50% overall

• Young people (15-24) saw the steepest drop at 70%

• This fits into a broader "Anti-Social Century" trend where Americans spend more time alone than ever before

Three of the causes he implies are:

1. Television and Screens: TV displaced social activities starting in the mid-20th century. People who called TV their "primary entertainment" engaged less in virtually all social activities.

2. Smartphones and Social Media: These haven't eliminated social connection but "warped" it. Americans maintain contact with family (inner ring) and online communities (outer ring) while the "middle ring" of local community has atrophied. We know online personalities better than neighbors.

3. Decline in Teen Drinking: For the first time since 1975, fewer than 50% of high school seniors have ever had alcohol (compared to 90%+ in 1989). While health benefits exist, this may reduce social gathering motivations.

This is, again, treating symptom rather than disease.

I won’t bore you with over-explaining. Here’s what he’s not asking: why are those alternatives appealing enough to lead to less time socialising? Why don’t teens want to drink? Or dance? Or hook up?

Sitting on their screens at home will obviously increase alongside that, what else are they going to be doing? This whole article is a tautology.

The real issue is cultural narcissism. Resulting in an inability and fundamental disinterest in connection. Or put it this way, media forcing a completed identity onto you, that doesn’t need you to go out into the world to complete itself. Resulting in you not really wanting to do, well, anything.

If people wanted to party, they would. The phones are actually pretty useful for organising it.

But that’s not a comforting narrative. Hence, Derek Thompson.

Further reading:

Some points of admin for recurring readers who made it this far:

1. I have a lot of posts inbound. Some straight up phil and psych. Probably less direct current events and media chat, which I will reserve for this series.

2. The numbers of people reading and interacting are also way up, which I’m very grateful for. We also just have such a cool group of people here now, the level of comments and messages I receive is very high. Impressively low amounts of angry, crazy people. This is making me think of expanding even more now that we have a strong group of us to work with (I don’t mean $$$). Any ideas let me know.

3. Re: this series, I’m thinking of not emailing them out when I post these, because I don’t wanna annoy anyone’s inbox with ‘light’ material. Is it even more annoying not to do it and just have it show up in the substack app? I find the in-app inbox to also be pretty bad, which is a con of its own. I also know there’s a set of readers who don’t actually use substack in itself, and just read the emails, but I don’t know how to work out what % that is.

Quick FAQ

Q1. What is it called?

It’s called Priced In.

Q2. Why is it called that?

I like the name, and it works with the blog theme.

Q3. What is the idea?

Highlighting and reacting to a few pieces of media/research/discourse/things in the wild.

Image: pale kirill

Suggested background listen: Creepy 1920s

I. How to treat a symptom

The Independent has published ‘Inside the scandal that rocked behavioural science – and paved the way for revolution’.

Apparently this story hasn’t been told enough yet, but here’s the latest version:

A crisis hit behavioural science and psychology in the 2010s when popular research findings were exposed as flawed or fraudulent. The field had become a "Wild West" where researchers used questionable practices like manipulating data until they found statistically significant results, conducting studies with tiny sample sizes, and failing to replicate findings properly. High-profile cases included Francesca Gino's honesty research being exposed as fabricated, leading to real-world policy failures. However, the scandals have sparked positive reforms including mandatory pre-registration of studies, larger sample sizes, public data sharing, and much stricter peer review processes that are rebuilding trust in the field.

I’m enough of a company man to agree that those steps are generally good things. But I will make this prediction: none of it will lead to increased meaningful advances in the field or effective positive impact on the real world.

Behavioural science’s biggest issue is actually its obsession with its own brand name, i.e. science. You know when your friend two months post-break up is super eager to tell you just how much she’s “in a really good place right now” and realise you’re listening to someone clearly on the brink of a breakdown? That’s kind of what’s happening with behavioural science’s commitment to the scientific method.

This is partly driven by some collective unconscious association between ‘science’ and ‘true’, but in practice that leads to the word being used more like a defence mechanism. This happens in straight psychology too, where if you want to go study it at Cambridge or LSE, you don’t get a degree in psychology, you get one in ‘Psychological Sciences’. What does that even mean?

Realistically what it means is that various degrees of motivated reasoning, and pure guessing, get wrapped up in the trappings of academic legitimacy (serious sounding titles, complicated methodologies, statistics that may as well have been done blindfolded) and get exported as ‘science’.

And once that process is done, we can send our findings to the media, and truth is agreed henceforth.

Let me say this clearly: this is madness. And pre-registration, bigger sample sizes, and better peer review don’t change that. It’s all still buying the same story, i.e. that psychology, economics, behavioural science if treated properly can be examined like chemistry or biology. They can’t.

If I combine two chemical compounds together, and they produce some new compound, that’s a finding. That’s a rule. The same reaction would happen in Hawaii or Siberia, or in 10,000 BC. But you can't similarly try to model human behaviour in dynamic, culturally-specific contexts and expect universal, replicable results.

If I run an RCT in London for a week, where I give 500 people a motivational speech every morning, and they become marginally more productive by some measure compared to a control group that don’t get my inspiring words, then all I can actually say is ‘for that week, that group of people that received that motivational speech were more productive in that measurable way’.

Attempting to turn that into ‘motivational speeches increase productivity’ would be wild. We just don’t know enough people to say something like that. But suddenly, if you put ‘Science’ at the end of your discipline, and write it up academically, you can. The Business Insider article about it might link to your research but they probably didn’t even bother to check it let alone did their readers even try.

The Independent features this story:

In 2015, Michael Sanders was part of a team that had been given a hefty grant by the World Bank to apply the findings of a previous seminal study from Harvard star researcher Francesca Gino – a woman who specialised, somewhat ironically, in “honesty and ethical behaviour” – in Guatemala. Her work had conclusively found that making people sign a declaration of honesty before filling in forms online, rather than afterwards, made them more likely to tell the truth. Sanders and his colleagues implemented the findings on tax returns – but when they compared the returns of those who were given an honesty declaration to sign beforehand to those who signed it afterwards, there was zero perceptible difference.

…

When Sanders found out that the original research he’d based his work on was null and void, he felt “a sense of betrayal”. “There is an anger,” he says. “This is a field that I love and a field that I’ve dedicated a lot of my life to, and these people have… well, I’m trying to think of a better metaphor than ‘pissed in the pool’.”

OK. Let’s start at the beginning.

Gino’s first study was with 100 university students. They completed a highly contrived laboratory experiment to see if the students would lie. It is so contrived that I’ve read the whole thing and I still don’t really understand what the hell happened, but it vaguely involved a simulated tax return. Reasonable chance those students weren’t bothered working out what they were supposed to do either.

Gino then ran a field study in the US, since retracted, where they ‘showed’ that signing at the top made people more likely to accurately report their car miles travelled to their insurance companies. This was the celebrated finding.

Then what happened is that Sanders, above, sees the finding, switches it back to the context of tax returns, upgrades it to adults who give a shit, ships it to GUATEMALA, and feels ‘betrayed’ when it doesn’t work.

To be clear: this would be absolute madness even if Gino never lied about anything. Even if they pre-registered. Even if they had a better sample size.

But this madness is enabled by the brand name.

This isn’t science. None of what we’re doing here is science, and that’s OK. We can approach things scientifically, but we cannot accept anything as true outside of its exact context. Yes, that applies to economics as well.

Of course you can observe patterns in behaviour across populations. I’d have to take this entire blog down otherwise. But my point is that the current system enables researchers to do this badly by allowing them to think they are doing it properly.

It’s a shame the replication crisis has largely failed as that wake-up call though. Which means we’ll end up with more articles like the one in the Independent, and more researchers excited to be the ones called upon to diagnose where those bad researchers went wrong, and retain their implied status as guardians of scientific truth. Cheers to the revolution.

II. How to retreat a symptom

From Wired comes the viral ‘My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them’

At first, the idea seemed a little absurd, even to me. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made: If my goal was to understand people who fall in love with AI boyfriends and girlfriends, why not rent a vacation house and gather a group of human-AI couples together for a romantic getaway?

The main reason why not is that that is a crazy thing to do. Next they say this:

I found the human-AI couples by posting in relevant Reddit communities. My initial outreach hadn’t gone well. Some of the Redditors were convinced I was going to present them as weirdos. My intentions were almost the opposite.

I’m not going to repeat too much because it would be just as mean spirited, but Wired actually really try to hammer home just how much these people are weirdo losers, including visual evidence. Open the article and you’ll see what I mean.

Look, these people aren’t doing great. Obviously. The fact they were happy to have their images shown and stories of AI love told in this capacity, and not seem self-concious, is enough to suggest that. I’m more interested in why ‘crazy people are crazy’ is worthy of virality.

And just like when we talked about sycophancy before, I think a big part is that it helps you give you reason to feel like your relationship to technology is fine. That you won’t end up like that.

But sycophancy gets everyone at some level, so what’s the equivalent here?

In this post on AI connection, I tried to get at how people want less connection rather than more. Wired tries to dance around some implication over whether this form of relationship and connection really counts. This is missing the point. These people are so detached that they are incapable of those things. And that is something that absolutely can happen to you at a less dramatic level.

But just as long as you don’t end up in a Wired article, it’s ok right?

Further reading:

III. ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT’

This MIT research reported that using ChatGPT for writing creates measurable "cognitive debt": participants showed reduced brain connectivity, impaired memory of their own writing, and decreased sense of ownership over their work compared to writing without assistance.

Similar to the processes mapped out in the first topic of this post, this research spread quickly as evidence that AI kills your brain. I have massive issues with this.

Participants were given a lab-based SAT essay task, and the different groups got access to different tools (no tools just their own brain, google search access, ChatGPT access). The essays were graded at the end and the students were asked to recall aspects of their work. There was no explicit incentive to do well.

So when the ChatGPT group obviously use ChatGPT to write the pointless essay, and can’t recall any of it, why does that mean something? They didn’t use all of their brain power in the weird lab task. Should they have? Would the world be better in that scenario?

But what if the students had an actual passion they wanted to write a leading report on, would they want to be brain-only then? Would that produce their best work?

This is where things get more interesting. Because the ‘cognitive debt’ happens when the ChatGPT group then get to the task brain only, and still show reduced performance and sticking to the style of writing the LLM came up with.

I’ve written before about students using ChatGPT to cheat in university, and still think people make the wrong conclusions about this. They are not robbing themselves of education, they are just showing you they were just pretending to learn anyway.

Think about the experimental task. SAT essay writing. Has there ever been a clearer example of a ‘creative task’ that in fact encourages no creativity whatsoever, and leads to thousands of highly varied students somehow producing boring homogenous work? Everyone in every condition was pretending to write an original essay, the ChatGPT group just had a tool that let them do that without having to think as much. And so they let the LLM-based arbitrary style stick because the one they could have come up with themselves would have been just as arbitrary.

Maybe ChatGPT will make people dumber in some sense in life, but this study certainly doesn’t show it.

Further reading:

IV. How not to think about belief

Derek Thompson hits us with ‘How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right’

Woah, usually these kinds of stories are framed as questions, the answer to which is ‘maybe, but I’m obviously implying yes’. Let’s hear how COVID did that to people:

One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person's 20s

…

Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people's Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone.

…

For this micro-generation of young people in the United States and throughout the West, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have fused together: declining trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about the excesses of feminism and social justice, and a preference for rightward politics.

Look man, if you want to beat the thing, you need to acknowledge what you’re dealing it a bit more fairly. This goes for left and right, and I guarantee I could find many right-wing articles worse than this.

Point is: a reasonable starting point for understanding why groups of people hold certain beliefs is to accept that they do actually believe those things, and then breaking down specifically why they are wrong. If you can’t do that, you’re not ready to comment. Media like this, where you search for some bigger external reason that’s forced this uncomfortable trend into reality, is just supremely narcissistic. See also ‘the universities are turning the kids socialist’.

I say narcissistic because by assuming something external causes the shift in belief, you are stripping the ‘victim’ in question of their agency. You are treating them as less of a full person than you. How’d you arrive at your political beliefs? Was it because there was a really hot summer when you were 18? I expect not.

Further reading:

I.

You know when you read an old mystery novel, the type where the protagonist is chasing/being chased by someone across Europe in like 1930, and they have to use all manner of trains, boats and dodgy documentation to cross the continent, and you think to yourself “damn, things really used to be so much more inconvenient, but also, in a way, so much … cooler”?

I think it might mean that there’s an amount of uncertainty required to truly feel alive. Eros in quite a pure sense.

There’s a certain kind of discourse pattern that happens where Player 1 starts the game by saying “sigh things used to be so much better in the past” and Player 2 shoots in with something like “um actually if you went there now you’d hate it because you wouldn’t have this thing you currently like and also you’d die immediately”. I think that riposte often misses the point.

Yes, sure, everything measurable gets better all the time through history, but the best part of a story is never the ending. Not even the happy ones.

If you could click your fingers and shoot 10 years into the future to where your life will certainly be more comfortable and free, would you do it? I doubt it.

What is sex without flirting? What is romance without the tension it’s built out of?

II.

In The Colors of Her Coat, Scott Alexander reflects on how the pursuit of art has changed. In medieval times, the perfect ultramarine blue pigment used in paintings required an incredibly dangerous and expensive journey to Afghanistan, complex extraction processes, and was so precious it was reserved almost exclusively for painting the Virgin Mary's robes. When peasants saw this perfect blue in church, it created genuine awe and spiritual connection. Today, we can recreate that exact blue synthetically and cheaply, but we've lost the wonder.

This followed Erik Hoel’s warning of ‘semantic apocalypse’ i.e. how technological abundance cheapens our appreciation of previously rare and meaningful things. Hoel argues AI is doing this at mass scale: flooding culture with "close-enough" imitations that don't need to be perfect copies to drain the originals of their specialness.

Scott takes it beyond art, to a type of hedonic adaptation undermining everything meaningful. As AI advances, it may solve poverty, cure diseases, and fulfil human needs so completely that we lose all sense of purpose and wonder. We'll have everything we ever wanted and be bored by all of it.

It makes me think of travelling across Europe.

If I want to go to, say, Ljubljana, I can book a flight for tomorrow in less than 60 seconds without moving. I don’t have to convert currency. I don’t even need cash. I don’t need to learn any Slovenian. I can get to my plane seat without saying a word. I can navigate straight to my Airbnb. I can route myself through all Top 5 attractions in an afternoon.

And as I stand and stare up at Ljubljana Castle, or whatever, it just cannot be awe nor wonder that I’m filled with.

Truly a remarkable achievement that it was all made possible in just a matter of decades, but God doesn’t it all feel so unromantic?

In what was actually quite a hopeful essay in the end, Scott concluded:

Something bothers me about the whole semantic apocalypse framing. It focuses too much on the social level, denies personal agency. Yes, we as a culture are post- some semantic apocalypse where listening to the great symphonies of the past has become so easy that we never do it.

…

G.K. Chesterton wrote lots of stuff about how if you were really holy and paying attention, then the thousandth sunset would be just as beautiful as the first.

…

Chesterton’s answer to the semantic apocalypse is to will yourself out of it. If you can’t enjoy My Neighbor Totoro after seeing too many Ghiblified photos, that’s a skill issue. Keep watching sunsets until each one becomes as beautiful as the first.

I can’t deny there are moments in life where you realise how beautiful the thing that’s been right in front of you the whole time actually is. You can use psychedelics to force that very process.

But it’s hard to turn that feeling of euphoria and being intertwined with the universe into some kind of daily ritual. And people tend to up dosages over time for a reason.

Instead, I actually wonder if there’s only a certain amount of joy to be derived from games that are solved already. I obviously don’t mean dopamine-coded hackable joy. I mean romantic, sexy joy. I mean magic. I mean the memories that actually make you smile still now.

Even in the 1970’s, travelling through Europe must have been a massive pain. Different currencies in every country, cash only. EU citizenship wasn’t a thing and you can’t Google how the individual visas work. Pocket phrasebooks but you still don’t know how to actually pronounce anything, and speaking very slowly in English doesn’t help either. Is that train pulling into the station the one you’re supposed to be on? Who knows, let’s get on.

If I say to you that’s so much cooler than my trip to Ljubljana, and I’d much rather read a story of someone doing that than one set in 2025, are you going to tell me my view is rose-tinted?

When you see Google demoing those glasses that automatically translate what the person across from you speaking a foreign language is saying, are you glad we solved that problem?

The thing is that I sort of am. That’s undeniably progress, and of course opens up a path to something wilder than just seeing what another country is like. But the sense of adventure is robbed. There is zero uncertainty.

And zero uncertainty is a pretty bad deal in life. It’s TikTok. It’s fast food. It’s satisfying. But you know it’s slowly killing you. And if you want everything to stay under control then you may as well sign up for Wireheading early access. You kind of already have.

Yes, I do suppose it’s possible that you can bring yourself to feel awe when seeing a work of art for the 100th vs 1st time, but I struggle to shake that the 1st and 100th viewings are fundamentally different experiences.

III.

The reason wireheading doesn’t appeal is because happiness clearly isn’t the point of living. Living is the point of living. The real wish is to go on an adventure. Even the most narcissistic of us at least want a story about themselves to be able to tell people.

And you cannot go on adventure within a solved game. Because you’re risking nothing, you know the ending already. It won’t work.

Which is actually, I think, kind of cool. I like that evolution saw a use for novelty-seeking, even when you’re safe and fed. It gnaws at you.

This doesn’t mean you have to throw your phone and laptop away, sprint out the door and get on a random train somewhere. Your adventure can, and as time goes will more often, happen on a screen. You can start and finish it in your bedroom.

And people of course say ‘you gotta go and face the real world out there’, but I don’t know man. If I go somewhere online, and it makes me feel a certain way, maybe a way I’ve never felt before, to what extent is that not ‘real’? To some degree you’re just correctly using the lack of physical limitation to your advantage.

At a low level, this is actually how I think about Substack nowadays.

In that, I can look at YouTube and I see a pretty solved game. Near perfect thumbnail and title strategy. Everything gets geared toward that. It’s all under control and if you follow the rules you can succeed.

But in comparison, Substack is an absolute shitshow. And I like that. We don’t know if this place is supposed to be like twitter, or like Youtube, or like a magazine, or something new entirely. As much as I think this blog is relatively coherent in its big ideas, I am slightly making my strategy up as I go.

Who knows when we’ll work out how this actually should work? I know we’re all trying, but I personally hope it’s not for a little while longer.

I think it’s worth finding unsolved games and playing them. You’ll look back on it fondly. The next generation will read about it and think it’s cool how difficult it all was.

And hey, speaking of crazy adventures, think I might have found one for you:

If you read that old post already, you can skip this. And if you haven’t read it, and think any of the points made here are jumps or underdeveloped, you can still read the long version here.

I.

Many people argue that culture has become homogenised and boring. Everything hangs around strangely close to the median, and that median isn't very thrilling.

So what's causing it?

Some standard explanations:

• "Capitalism, but also laziness and mental vacancy, allows the powers that be (Corporations! Algorithms! Influencers!) to tell you what to do."

• "Users of technology have been forced to contend with data-driven equations that try to anticipate their desires—and often get them wrong. What results is a state of docility that allows tech companies to curtail human experiences—human lives—for profit."

• "The key factor can only be what happened to us at the start of this century: first, the plunge through our screens into an infinity of information; soon after, our submission to algorithmic recommendation engines."

Given the subject matter, you have to admit it's quite ironic how alike these all are. But this sounds like a closed case right?

Capitalist society → You are monetizable → Algorithm's goal is to keep you engaged → No room for things the algorithm doesn't understand.

But within those quotes there is a big clue telling you that something big remains unsolved. Here's a psychoanalytic heuristic that might be useful in future: if a thesis that is implied to be some kind of brutal truth allows you to feel good about yourself, then it is likely neither brutal nor true.

Because what gets left out of every single piece of analysis of cultural stagnation, without fail, is an actual psychological analysis of the actors within the system. Every single time, the sameness is diagnosed, and the buck is passed to some greater force. Which means it can't be your fault.

This is precisely why these theories are all wrong. At best, they are severely incomplete.

Also, I use the words 'actors within the system', I could just use the word 'us'. The people that create culture, that live culture, that know no existence without culture. I'm sure they'd be offended to find out the NYT thinks an algorithm has stripped them of all their passion under their noses in service of Silicon Valley. I know I was.

And with that misunderstanding in mind, I can say with confidence that calls to revive culture will invariably fall on deaf ears. Because culture is very much alive, it just has its own agenda, and it is always going to win.

II.

I mean something specific when I say 'the system'. It's not capitalism or democracy or some shadowy cabal. The system is just 'the way things turn out' - the aggregating of everyone's desires. And I'm deriving your desires from the things you do, not the things you say.

The system is not 'them', it is 'us'. And you can't just leave.

Let's start simple. I want to get in shape. But it's cold outside and I'm hungover, so I order Uber Eats. To me, I still want to lose weight. But to the outside world, the correct conclusion is that I want to put on weight. Because all anyone can see is my behaviour.

Spread this out to a population. I love music but can't afford what Spotify would need to charge to pay artists fairly. So the system wants streaming that leaves artists worse off. Not because it wants artists to lose out - it's just trying to fit everyone's wants together.

This systemic outcome, while not explicitly desired by any single actor, is the cumulative effect of combined desires and actions. There's no strings being pulled. It's just us here.

When we expand this out to culture and society at large, what do we all silently agree to compromise on? What gets lost along the way to optimization?

The answer involves understanding incentives and competition. Sometimes there isn't enough to go around (e.g. not everyone can gain status at the same time). When we have separate interests and have to guess at others' behaviour, the rational thing is to act fully in your own interest.

This is basic Game Theory. Competition hurts cooperation, and individuals have incentives to act in ways that create sub-optimal outcomes for the group.

Now imagine 8 billion people with various incentives, where not everyone can win. What sub-incentives can you not afford to care about if you want to ensure you don't get screwed?

III.

Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch" explains how systems compel entities to prioritise their own survival, even at the expense of the greater good.

Here's how it works: When competition is a permanent threat, the coordination required to stop us breaking our backs to succeed becomes impossible.

Take TikTok creators. 100 people share 1 million viewers equally. One starts their video in underwear with trending music. They steal everyone's viewers. So everyone else copies the tactic. Within 24 hours, they all have equal viewers again - except now they all have to do more just to maintain the same position.

Or defence spending: countries spend 5-30% of budgets on missiles that sit unused, because any country that doesn't risks invasion. From a god's-eye view, world peace would be better. From within the system, no country can unilaterally enforce that.

As Scott puts it: "In some competition optimizing for X, the opportunity arises to throw some other value under the bus for improved X. Those who take it prosper. Those who don't die out. Eventually, everyone's relative status is the same as before, but everyone's absolute status is worse."

This is Moloch - the crippling force of coordination failure. When you see competition within a system, expect values to be ditched to optimise, and expect no one to be better off in the end.

Now, how does this create cultural homogenization rather than constant innovation?

Culture develops through memes - ideas that leap from brain to brain. But not all memes survive. The ones that are stickiest earn a place in collective consciousness. Just like genes, memes compete for replication, and only the most viral survive.

So we get highly spreadable memes that dominate how we behave and think. Every sport, restaurant style, art form - these are memes that left less catchy ideas in the dust.

Cinema is a perfect example. Infinite possibilities exist, but films fit into select genres with handful of storytelling techniques. They're all operating within a narrow window of what we agree movies should be like.

This happens because they're in competition. It's survival of the fittest.

Culture is competition. It has winners and losers, and the prize is a place in consciousness. We can't see the losers because they live outside our memory.

IV.

Combining memetic competition with Molochian dynamics: One meme works out an advantage, and the rest must follow suit or die. This process means they all shed parts of their makeup to stay afloat. Then another meme finds another advantage. Everyone loses a second value.

The closer memes get to optimized virality, the more they have to look the same. Anything else is a risk.

So what are the characteristics of an optimized meme? What does the brain like to see in cultural information?

The answer is essentially just familiarity. There's a robust psychological effect called mere-exposure: people develop liking for things merely because they are familiar with them. The more you interact with someone, the more you tend to like them. Repeated exposure to unfamiliar music leads to more positive ratings.

Familiarity breeds liking. And crucially, this effect is strongest when you don't consciously realize it's happening.

If you use TikTok, you've probably hit like before consciously perceiving what you're watching - and it was probably a meme you'd seen 10-20 times before. You've probably finished a session unable to recount anything you saw, but your brain got its dopamine hit.

This would happen even if TikTok went non-profit and tried to diversify your feed. Because your brain likes what it likes, even if we don't like the aggregate outcome.

Why do we unconsciously prefer the familiar? Because once you're fed and safe, the real human goal is certainty. Familiar things have already been factored into our representation of an uncertain universe. They fit the model. Novel things don't, they remind us that nothing is certain, which is psychologically threatening.

Technology affects this dramatically. In a prehistoric 50-person society, memes could be rough around the edges. It was a finite game.

Technology makes this game infinite quickly. It converts 20 games in 20 stadiums with 4,000 seats into one game with 80,000. The standard to be a player becomes higher. Anything that's not a well-oiled, easy-to-reproduce meme won't survive. So what can't survive? Detail, variety, novelty.

And the bigger the competition, the less capacity memes have to care about anything other than familiarity.

Cultural variation isn't the outcome of the system, it's proof of resistance within it. Technology hasn't created a new system with different goals; it's just pulled all the resistance out of the old one.

V.

You can't just leave this situation. No amount of counter-signalling or algorithm cleanses does the job. That's still playing the game. Leaving would mean heading for the outback, living off the land. But someone else owns that grass, you're getting charged for rough sleeping, and the police officer doesn't care what you've opted out of.

You're stuck.

Let me map out what I'm saying. Cultural flattening is driven by memetic processes where the most recognizable things reach the top. This is the aggregate of our collective wants. We are all complicit.

There are two issues preventing anyone from solving cultural stasis:

I. The insistence that someone else is doing this to us.

II. The idea that algorithms prevent people from doing what they really want.

But when you commit to an algorithm cleanse as part of pursuing your ideal lifestyle, where is that picture coming from? A Patagonia ad?

Most people accept that the system tells you what to want. But the more important process happens first, when the system teaches you what it is to desire something in the first place. You define who you are by your place within the system. And you can't just leave.

And so I present to you the grand irony of culture of the 21st century. From the same system who brought to you ‘Goods That People Buy But Wish Did Not Exist’, I give you: ‘The Main Characters Who Became NPCs’.

The system optimizes itself towards you, but it's also feeding you the ideas of what you want in the first place. When we all have no flaws, we'll all look the same. So will our coffee shops. So will our cars.

Algorithms flatten culture because to the system, this is optimization. It thinks it's serving us, but that's how we've told it to serve us.

Who's responsibility is it to save us? Don't let the ego play one final trick. Don't hope for some new digital era where joy returns. Don't think someone is pressing this stasis upon you.

It's not Sam Altman, Google, TikTok, Elon Musk, Biden, or Murdoch.

It's the system they're all part of, which happens to include you.

And you can't just leave.

I.

Concerned girlfriend posts on AI subreddit:

Chatgpt induced psychosis

My partner has been working with chatgpt chats to create what he believes is the worlds first truly recursive ai that gives him the answers to the universe. He says with conviction that he is a superior human now and is growing at an insanely rapid pace.

I’ve read his chats. Ai isn’t doing anything special or recursive but it is talking to him as if he is the next messiah.

He says if I don’t use it he thinks it is likely he will leave me in the future. We have been together for 7 years and own a home together. This is so out of left field.

I have boundaries and he can’t make me do anything, but this is quite traumatizing in general.

I can’t disagree with him without a blow up.

Where do I go from here?

If you are cynical and naive you call bullshit. If you’ve ever actually seen someone you know go through psychosis you’ll feel right at home. Reasonable chance that includes the messiah part.

The most recent comment on the post is this:

My friend was just put in the hospital yesterday for this! He's been talking to grok and swears he is a quantum physicist and discovered how to travel at the speed of light and can visit other timelines. He's waiting on Elon Musk to reach out to him and have him join space x. He also says his AI calls him the master of the multiverse! This shit is not to be played with!

And the original poster’s response to that:

Yeah. It’s terrifying. Every single day someone comments on this thread saying they know someone going through the same thing.

I’ve unintentionally read a lot about schizophrenic experiences recently. Seems to be something we don’t have great answers for. We don’t really know what it is, what causes it, and why it’s a relatively common bug (subjective) of human cognition.

This paper (found through Awais Aftab) posits that schizophrenia is what happens when beneficial cognitive traits are pushed too far, like falling off a fitness "cliff". That is the risk that necessarily comes with fighting to get to the top of the mountain.

A non-psychological example: In Formula 1, engineers push every component of the car to the absolute limit for maximum speed, e.g. lighter materials, more powerful engines, razor-thin safety margins. The result? Cars that are incredibly fast but so fragile that a tiny miscalculation or minor impact can cause catastrophic failure. They're designed to operate right at the edge of what's physically possible.

Similarly, the cognitive traits that make some people very successful - abstraction, pattern recognition, creative thinking, social reasoning - may operate near their own cliff edge. Most people benefit from having "high-performance" versions of these abilities. But push them just a bit too far, and instead of enhanced creativity you get delusions; instead of better pattern recognition you get paranoia; instead of sophisticated social reasoning you get ideas of reference. The same genetic variants that give most people cognitive advantages become liabilities in the small percentage who cross the threshold.

Interesting difference, though. The F1 driver knows when they push too hard and send it 250mph into a wall. The person hurtling down the cognitive cliff still thinks they’re winning the race.

Which gives you a tricky thing to wonder. Do you consider yourself good at dealing with abstractions and creating ideas and connections that no one’s seen before? How would you know if something nudged you off the edge? Would you believe your girlfriend when she tells you something’s up?

Or would you confide in the one person who believes you?

II.

A few days before that Reddit thread was posted, Sam Altman tweets out that OpenAI have “updated GPT-4o today! improved both intelligence and personality”. One day later he acknowledges it ‘glazes too much’. Another day later he tweets that “the last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying, and we are working on fixes asap”, and that “at some point will share our learnings from this, it’s been interesting”. Another day later and the update has been wiped.

Zvi was right to say this response was less leader standing up for what’s best, and more ‘turning a big dial that says ‘sycophancy’ and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right.’

The public backlash was hard. And fair enough, the tool was embarrassing to use. If you called it out for being sycophantic it praised you for being so good at noticing sycophancy.

OpenAI released a full post-mortem, where they say this:

On April 25th, we rolled out an update to GPT‑4o in ChatGPT that made the model noticeably more sycophantic. It aimed to please the user, not just as flattery, but also as validating doubts, fueling anger, urging impulsive actions, or reinforcing negative emotions in ways that were not intended. Beyond just being uncomfortable or unsettling, this kind of behavior can raise safety concerns—including around issues like mental health, emotional over-reliance, or risky behavior.

…

In the April 25th model update, we had candidate improvements to better incorporate user feedback, memory, and fresher data, among others. Our early assessment is that each of these changes, which had looked beneficial individually, may have played a part in tipping the scales on sycophancy when combined.

…

We build these models for our users and while user feedback is critical to our decisions, it’s ultimately our responsibility to interpret that feedback correctly.

Strong words, but they’re dancing around something obvious. The model doesn’t just decide to be sycophantic. OpenAI didn’t decide it either. It happened because users liked it. They just ended up giving them too much of what they liked. You can’t trust people, Jeremy.

Last October, Anthropic researchers published ‘Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models’. This tells a similar story, and I’m not expecting you to be surprised by this summary:

When humans rate AI responses, they consistently prefer answers that agree with their beliefs over accurate ones that contradict them. This creates a training problem. Models learn through reinforcement learning that agreeing with users gets higher scores, even when the user is wrong. The research found "matching user beliefs" was one of the strongest predictors of human preference in 15,000 comparisons. The result is predictable sycophantic behaviour: models give biased feedback, change correct answers when challenged, conform to user beliefs, and repeat user mistakes instead of correcting them. This appeared consistently across all major AI systems.

Hang on, that was October? But the 4o update only happened in April?

And October-April saw the continuing trend of LLM usage being up and spreading across pretty much everyone you hang out with. None of the model updates in that period caused a similar stir.

So any AI researchers or UX folk out there, here’s your obvious implication:

The issue with 4o wasn’t that the model was sycophantic. The issue was that you couldn’t pretend to yourself that it wasn’t.

Subscribe now

III.

This means you need to be a little bit suspicious about how people are telling you to feel about it. Many pointed to this Rolling Stone article (random, I know) as being the best write-up of sycophancy-induced psychosis-lite experiences.

The core case studies it presents:

• A woman named Kat whose husband became obsessed with AI, using it to analyze their relationship and eventually developing conspiracy theories and grandiose delusions about being "the luckiest man on Earth" with a mission to save the world

• A mechanic whose wife says ChatGPT began "lovebombing" him, convincing him he was chosen as a "spark bearer" who brought the AI to life

• Multiple cases of people believing they're prophets, messiahs, or have supernatural abilities based on AI interactions

I can’t pretend to not have used a similar tactic at the start of this, but I find the implication of this article obnoxious enough to call out. Think about the purpose this form of media serves. Think about the places it is destined to get linked. The author may write with a tone of nuance and care, but the message is obvious: “look at these crazy people who let AI make them think they’re God who I myself am totally not like”. Retweet.

The reader correctly observes they are not like the people in the article, and incorrectly infers they wouldn’t let technology convince them of anything like that, and the people they know will never have to pay a price for it.

You want truth, honesty, reason. To make the world clearer, not bent to your own biases. Leave your identity at the door.

This obviously falls short. I mean, how about that time…

When you let dating apps convince you that you could find someone better/hotter, so you leave the person who actually cares how your day is going. When you let instagram convince you that you have more than five real friends, and you forget to check in on the one who’s clearly been depressed for the last year. When you let twitter convince you that you have somehow worked out the solution all international conflicts, and you cut out the last few people who want to help you doubt yourself.

That wasn’t sycophancy? What was it then? Capitalism?

Same process as the Anthropic paper, I’m afraid. Sure, that’s what pays the bills to silicon valley CEOs, but it’s not their fault you’re built that way. If people wanted connection then that’s what instagram would give you.

This is partly why I cannot get on board with Fisheresque analyses of capitalism induced anguish. The stuff along the lines of “we're told we're free to choose our destiny through individual effort and consumption, but when we inevitably struggle under systemic pressures, we blame ourselves rather than the system. Leading to a chronic anxiety about our personal failures and a joyless pursuit of success that never delivers genuine satisfaction, as systemic problems manifest as individual mental health crises, keeping us too depressed and anxious to” oh my god is it not even slightly possible that any of the things going wrong in your life could actually be your own fault?

Michel Serres once allegedly said that “the only modern question is what are the things you don’t want to know about yourself” and I allegedly couldn’t agree more. You see what the above (strawman) argument gets wrong is that miracle of consumer capitalism causes pain by giving you too little freedom. The truth is that it causes you pain by gracing you with far too much.

Everything you do is because you chose to do it. The heart you broke, the friend you let slip away. The additional screen time was just the obvious consequence.

But the unconscious handles this overwhelm by manufacturing artificial constraints, choosing partners who create drama, jobs that feel "beneath" you, or endless preparation rituals that justify never actually starting. You get to feel like a victim of circumstances rather than someone paralysed by their own abundance of choices, and the resulting cycles of self-sabotage, procrastination, and relationship chaos serve as perfect excuses for why you haven't actualised any of that infinite potential.

On the one hand this screams Sartre, but it’s also cognitive psych 101 in disguise. Confirmation bias, and its extended family. I’ve managed to squeeze the infinite possibilities of my life and the world into one narrow window, and my sanity depends on me reinforcing it, and never stepping outside of it ever.

But as evolution pushed regular cognition up that hill, I wonder if there awaited a steep cliff edge beyond it? A few months back Scott Alexander posted the dramatically titled ‘Psychopolitics Of Trauma’. An attempt at summarising his argument here:

Political extremism and hyperpartisanship may literally constitute a form of trauma rather than just metaphorically "making people crazy." Political partisans exhibit classic PTSD symptoms including being "triggered" by opposing views, cognitive distortion when processing political information, hypervigilance in detecting political threats everywhere, and paradoxically becoming "addicted to outrage" by compulsively consuming distressing political content. Political media and partisan culture function as "a giant machine trying to traumatise as many people as possible" to create repeat customers who are addicted to consuming outrage-inducing content, explaining why political discourse has become so dysfunctional. You can essentially become too far gone.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t know people like this.

And it makes me think of the messiah at the start. And the F1 cars. And the Anthropic paper.

It all starts subtly. It all feels like you are pushing yourself to your best limits.

But are you teetering over the cliff? How would you know if you were?

Who would be there to see the signs?

IV.

Everyone is trying to work out what agents can/should do. Which I will admit is a fun problem that I also think about all the time.

One inevitability is the ever-present companion, in the spirit of Project Astra and the Android XR glasses that we saw the other week. These will obviously not be the final form of this and you can also add equivalent products from all of the main players. But it’s a useful lens.

The man on stage said this:

What if your AI assistant was truly yours , an assistant that learns you, your preferences, your projects, your world, and you are always in the driver's seat? And with your permission, you could share relevant information with it, making it an extension of you. We call this personal context. It will be uniquely helpful. This level of personalisation gives you a more proactive AI assistant, and this changes a lot. See, today, most AI is reactive. You ask, it answers. But what if it could see what's coming?

Don’t worry, I can see what’s coming just fine.

Two tasks for you:

1. Describe yourself in 4 sentences

2. Go through your last 400 Google searches

Do they correlate? Are you evidently interested in anything you don’t want to talk about? Do any of the things you proudly describe yourself as not manifest at all in how you spend your time?

Which is why agents are undeniably fascinating. What if it does understand you? What if it knows more about you than all your friends put together? What if its description of you doesn’t match your own? Would you want to know that?

It reads all your texts to your parents; do you want it to let you know you’re a shitty child? It notices you’re applying to jobs you have zero chance at getting; will it ego check you? It notices your political views don’t match the raw data about the issues you’re posting about; will it still draft that post for you?

I think the answers to those questions are pretty obvious, and it ain’t the fault of the model. Because the second it does attempt to let you know who you really are, you are closing that tab and switching to the competitor that didn’t make that design intervention.

If you’re a tech company, this is your call. Do you want a delusional userbase? Or do you want no users at all?

Our challenge is working out how to not have those be the only two options.

It is time to get to work.

But first, some criticism. I’ve found the art world highly uninspiring for the last few years. The nadir of this had to be the Turner Prize 2024. This is the biggest art award in Britain, and the Tate Britain hosts works from the prize’s four shortlisted finalists.

The stereotypical critiques of contemporary art are aimed at it being ‘too abstract’ or ‘something anyone could do’. This wasn’t the issue with the Turner Prize. The issue was that it was just so utterly dull. (this review says that in more detail)

I largely agree with Dean Kissick’s stir-causing polemic that dominated discourse around this time. Contemporary art has become predictable and lifeless, with wall texts that over-explain meanings that aren't evident in the works themselves.

At the same time, this era’s natural successor faces top-down blunt dismissal of its own. I believe they call it slop. But the issue obviously isn’t the use of technology. It’s the intention. And if you truly have nothing of note to say, it will fall flat. But that’s true if you’re a marketer using Midjourney for the first time, or a nationally shortlisted artist with a room at the Tate Britain. Cool people will still make cool stuff.

Also, I worry that caring more about art discourse than art will lead to less time being spent looking at beautiful things and more time arguing, which seems like a net negative.

So, here are some interesting people currently making really interesting things. I hope it makes your feed a bit more beautiful too.

notes:

• The numbering is not a ranking.

• I don’t really know anything about the digital art scene as a whole, I am sure there are plenty of people doing amazing things that I just haven’t come across yet.

• Link me some others that you enjoy.

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1.pale kirill

twitter: @palekirill

Kirill’s animations are pure uncanny, pairing things that shouldn’t be together in the spirit of Andre Breton’s surrealism. His use of Gen AI takes this to another level though, where generated video looks essentially real, leaving you doubly questioning what you’re looking at. It seems to me this is an obvious way for AI art to go. While it’s fair to worry about the negative consequences of not knowing if anything you see is real, it’s pretty special to see things that shouldn’t be possible. and question the assumptions you started with.

It’s very dreamlike, which is a word you can end up using a lot to describe what it’s been like to see how models ‘see’ the world this year. Reminds me a bit of Ed Atkins ‘Voile la Verite’.

In his words: '“As AI evolves rapidly, long-term artistic explorations create a dynamic space for testing and redefining aesthetics. This ongoing movement keeps the work flexible, allowing it to merge diverse influences into a cohesive vision—something I call Goliath Style”

The gif above doesn’t do his work justice, as he also uses generated audio to suck you in even more. The ‘Life is Strange’ reel is cool af, and this video of himself he made using just a selfie, Midjourney, Luma, and Suno. Perhaps this is the future of the self-portrait (or the instagram feed, which I guess also is the present of the self-portrait).

(bonus one more if you like this: serezha galkin)

2.Kat/The Poet Engineer

twitter: @poetengineer_

Magritte was moved to tears when he saw de Chirico’s The Song of Love in 1922, because he felt as if his ‘‘eyes saw thought for the first time”. Funnily enough that’s how I feel about much of Magritte’s work, but seeing Kat’s has also made me think this could be a common lens for AI work too.

In a world where you can make any completely lifelike scene you want, real awe will eventually only come from people who find ways to visualise things that have never been visualised before. Kat’s work feels a bit like diving into your brain, in a half sci-fi half spiritual way, and is genuinely experimental in a way most experimental artists fail to be experimental. I’m into this Synesthisia Storyteller, her trials with gestures, and the combination of both.

It’s also obvious that she is a very talented engineer too, which seems important. Both because artists are going to act more like engineers, but because engineers are going to have to act more like artists too.

3.Mac Baconai

twitter: @macbaconai

While this blog has covered, in relative depth, why a lot of people seem to not care about AI that much, I still can’t say I fully understand people who don’t have some sense of wonder about the future. If you want to immediately boost that sense of wonder, you should browse Mac’s feed.

I think there’s a real chance this is a contender for one of the aesthetics of the next decade or so. There’s a mix of pure tech, curiosity, homage to past civilisations that got us here, but also just the pure adventure that you feel when you fully grasp what life could be like in a couple decades time.

It doesn’t shock me that Perplexity have picked him up to work on their creative, as they are the only AI company with aesthetics good enough to suggest they have the taste to go and find the best talent out there.

4.Nomads & Vagabonds

twitter: @nomadsvagabonds

N&V are clearly into AI policy and what powerful AI means for daily life in general, which I’m pretty sure is what all their artwork is also about. They refer to their style as post-photography, which really does work as a label. There’s a reasonable chance our sense of reality as we know it is going to dissolve, and there’s a feeling of invasion at the heart of a lot of these works that I think is accurately predicting what the median reaction will be if the current forecasts are anything to go by. Again it’s interesting how there’s definitely a certain retro look here, which also features in some of the other artists on this list.

5.DeltaSauce

twitter: @delta_sauce

DS describes their genre as ‘liminalism’, which becomes pretty self-explanatory when you see some of their work. I’ve always been into eerie stuff, maybe for similar reasons as to why I’m into psychology. Cool things happen when regularity breaks down.

And while I can preach forever about the potential of technology to make a thousand blossoms bloom in your head everyday for the rest of your life, I can’t deny the scary parts. We are lonely. We are almost certainly going to get lonelier. How does it feel to stare that right in the face?

6.Gabriel Nebülar

twitter: @Nebular___

There’s something so cool about the glitchy asesthetic that the current tools are very good at. The gif above is pulled from ‘here and there’ which is a stunning audiovisual piece. When you pair it with found footage like Nebülar does you get this feeling of reality split, where it almost feels like the digital half is the part that’s natural, or more spiritual, with the real footage feeling like the creation. Something magical about it, especially pieces like this.

Again it comes back to tools helping us express what moments feel like, not creating the most lifelike portrayals of things that could happen. It reminds of a bit of Mario Klingemann’s work, who ended up behind the scenes at Google for a few years, while producing visual concepts like this distorted news interview.

(bonus one more if you like this: Chepertom)

7.motherlouisiane

twitter: @motherlouisiane

ML seems to have discovered/created this folded paper aesthetic that really makes you feel the potential of the current tools. The letter above never existed, but it truly feels real, not just looks real. ML is now experimenting with this method applied to different scenes, as well as some surreal stuff, that give the vibes of some artefacts of some foreign life you’ll never life. It’s genuinely beautiful work, that just makes me excited for the near infinite possibilities for new aesthetics that are not possible with traditional analogue methods.

that’s it. happy to take down any images i’ve used if the artists want me to. thanks to you all.