Something has been bothering me for years. Most of the conversations I hear about how to be successful are about how to make as much money as possible. Nobody ever discusses the impact that they would like to have on the world. People retire, only to consider their value in their net worth and not at all whether or not the world is better today than it was when they got their start. In America, as we deal with rising costs of just about everything and decreased quality in, well, just about everything, I’m starting to become suspicious that this obsession with wealth over impact is the biggest problem we are facing. People have been finding ways to extract as much money as they can from things while depreciating the quality of it. I commonly hear people bemoan this phenomenon. And it begs the question: how exactly did we get it all so backwards?

I think the answer is simple: we have begun admiring the wrong people.

All our old heroes were worth admiring. Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius polymath who not only pioneered human anatomy and engineering but was also a world-class painter. Abraham Lincoln was a prolific lawyer and fought to free people from slavery in a time when it could have destroyed the country he presided over. Albert Einstein was a physicist who dared to question the certainty of Newtonian Physics and ended up providing us most of the backbone of our modern understanding of how the physical world works. These people were not only famous in their time, but they are also still in our minds today. And for good reasons.

However, over the past century, our heroes have become less impressive. They are hollow when compared to the heroes of old. Gone seem to be the days of genius polymaths. Gone are the days of celebrity physicists. Gone are the days of the men who fought to build this country with a vision for a free land.

Today, we worship investors who have built nothing except a portfolio with good returns and politicians chanting daily for war against people on the other side of the world that none of us have met or have a coherent reason for why they are bad guys, all supposedly in pursuit of “peace.”

As a result of worshipping these false prophets, the people we should be cheering for have been lost in the noise. And the people who might have become modern-day heroes were corrupted by a system that compelled them to make money over having a positive impact.

All our would-be physicists were swept up by finance executives who promised a salary quadruple that of a physics professor to do money math on a trading floor.

All our would-be inventors became addicted to videogames when they were kids and instead of building flying cars used their computer skills to build an app for immigrants to deliver McDonald’s to your door.

And all our would-be carpenters are unskilled and unemployed, going to bed tonight in their parents’ basements, having been told that manual labor was beneath them.

The heroes are dead. In their place are crooks selling you stock for a company they invested in, a war their campaign donors told them they must support, or a supplement that sponsors their podcast.

This whole transition has to do with money. After the industrial revolution, American’s were able to become as wealthy as royals. Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Ford all amassed incredible wealth building companies that brought us into the modern age. From there, the shift of our heroes began. Instead of being builders, inventors, artists, and scientists, they became executives, investors, political leaders, and athletes. We no longer wanted to hear from people who taught us how to understand the world or seek fulfillment. We all just wanted to get rich (and quickly, please.)

The inspiration these hollow heroes give us drives us in the wrong direction. Instead of striking thoughts about the nature of the universe from Richard Feynman, we have pithy quotes about investing principles from Charlie Munger. Instead of Michaelangelo’s David we have a banana taped to a wall at Art Basel.

Clearly, our standards in the people we choose to influence us and what we expect of them are dropping.

Once upon a time, our country’s leader’s biggest issues were how to build a free nation and unshackle the chains around the feet of slaves. They were not bought and paid for by the interests of other countries. However, today, they seem to only be focused on destroying a group of people in the Middle East because they don’t like the religious book that these people read. Or, at least, that’s what they tell us. Because, if you follow the trail that their campaign donors leave, you’ll see a different story altogether.

Our politicians, like the investor class, only care about money. The invention of the stock market shifted our focus away from building things that made the world wealthy to building personal wealth passively with as little effort as possible. As a result, it was no longer useful to admire those that built things. But, instead, we began looking at those that found a great investment opportunity before anyone else that made them rich without having to, oh I don’t know, invent something that makes the rest of our lives easier.

People like Marc Andreesen, who created the first modern web browser, which is arguably an unimpressive feat, stopped creating new things and now just invests in them. As a result of his ability to shell out his billions to useless tech companies, he has become a regular guest on the Joe Rogan podcast to tell you how great his latest investment in a government spy app is doing.

We have literally fallen from grace. Remember, we once went to the moon. Men, who were truly brave, walked on a surface in our solar system 250,000 miles away from Earth. Everyone knows the names Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong. Nobody knows who the Administrator of NASA was at the time. However, if I were to ask you what the names of any astronaut who is currently residing in the International Space Station are, you couldn’t tell me. Sadly, I couldn’t tell you either. But we all know who the CEO of the world’s “most valuable” space company is.

Yes, I’m talking about Elon. People like Elon Musk are part of the problem. Elon Musk is another failed physicist. He claims he is an engineer. But his real claim to fame is his financial engineering. Elon leans on his degree in economics more than he leans on his degree in physics. He just recently duped the world into believing his space company, which makes $18.7 billion in revenue and loses $4.9 billion a year, is worth $2.5 trillion dollars.

Financial engineers like him are the reason why everything is decreasing in quality and increasing in cost at the same time. We handed the keys to our castles to salesmen, marketers, and number crunchers who are all narcissistic enough to think that they are the prize. Those people then employed inventors, engineers, explorers, and physicists and convinced them that their mind-boggling monthly salary and stock options were worth the price of never being known for the thing they built and being second fiddle to the guy who hired them.

Gone are the days of Edison, Washington, and Einstein. We have ushered in the era of Musk, Trump, and Buffett.

And very soon, we will have wished we hadn’t.

I’m an addict. I have fought coming clean and being transparent for a while about this. I wish I could have told my family before I posted this to the internet. But I feel like posting this online gives the admission concreteness. It makes it feel real. It makes me want to change.

My addiction isn’t drugs or alcohol. I’m not the gambling type. I don’t overdo anything that will harm me physically or drain my bank account.

My addiction, instead, consumes my mind. It makes me dumber. And it makes me feel a sense of hatred towards people I don’t know in ways that make me scared of myself sometimes.

I realized how painful my addiction truly was yesterday. I decided to fight it for one moment and enjoy life without it. I put on my headphones and cleaned my gym’s bathrooms. I clicked on an old friend, the “Discover Weekly” tab on my Spotify app.

The first song that came on was “Evil Ways” by Willie Bobo. If it doesn’t ring a bell for you, I’m confident you have heard the Santana cover of it that has been in countless movies. But Willie Bobo’s original, with its slow Cha Cha like beat and horns that filled the negative space in my ears, knocked me backwards two steps. I began dancing in the bathroom while spraying down the toilet with a foaming bleach cleaner. I wiped the poop stains off the underside of the toilet seat as my hips shifted side to side.

Then, a song I’d never heard before called “Espelho” played. The samba beat, which is reminiscent of mambo beats my salsero feet are all too familiar with, carried me to the next bathroom. I placed new paper towels in the dispenser to the flow of the music while the singer Mari Froes’ voice made it hard to keep my eyes open, as they seemed to prefer squinting while I soaked in the the French twang to her Portuguese words.

When I was done, I drove home with Espelho on replay, completely captivated by the music. And for that brief but fleeting car ride, I thought I was free. I could feel the synapses of my brain firing faster. My thoughts became about bigger things. The types of things that allow me to picture a beautiful future.

But I wasn’t free. This morning, I saw that comedian Tim Dillon posted his weekly podcast. I mindlessly clicked the big green “Play” button and listened to him ramble about the mayoral election in Los Angeles and then go on about the tragic, and highly political, death of Henry Nowak in the UK. He finished the episode by telling me how TikTok star Charli D’Amelio’s father stole millions of dollars from her.

I mindlessly soaked up the slop. I could feel my brain dropping gears to the low grade hum of fear and anger it has been idling at for the past two years. And as I sit here and try to write this article to you, that low grade hum keeps me from typing more words. Every other sentence I type I feel compelled to reach for my phone hanging perilously within reach in the top flap of my backpack. Instead of thinking and putting those thoughts onto paper, my mind craves the furious thoughts of others bellowing into my ears about how the world is falling apart. I used to have a goal of writing 3,000 words on Sunday’s. Now it’s 1,500, and I’m lucky to get that.

But I’m not going to let this decline be reality. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t stand being drawn to hearing about the worst things that happened to people thousands of miles away from me. This piece is my confession. I must finally come clean and admit it.

I’m addicted to political podcasts.

For those of you reading this that know me, this should come as no surprise. I’m obsessed with discussing politics with anyone that will listen to me ramble and engage in a debate.

And it makes me absolutely miserable.

I’m a gym owner in Naples, Florida. I have one of the coolest jobs in one of the nicest places in the world. Why do I care if a guy in the UK got stabbed by a Sikh or that some reality TV show guy is running for mayor in Los Angeles? I’ve never even traveled west of Mississippi. Why do I care that Benjamin Netanyahu had a bad phone call with Trump? I have no future travel plans to the middle east anyway! And I’m sorry, but the racial tension around the fatal stabbing of a track athlete in a state I don’t live in simply doesn’t affect my life if I never knew it happened. I’m getting sick of being burdened by everyone else’s tragedies.

As much as these podcasters would like me to believe that the world is falling apart at the seams, the moment I silence them by keeping my phone out of arm’s reach, I simply don’t see what they are talking about. Despite slightly higher gas and grocery prices, my life is generally the same as it has been for years. Do I agree with Tucker Carlson that we are living in a failing state? Maybe. Does it truly change how I’m going to live my life? Not in any way that I can affect.

Sure, it’s good to be well informed. But it’s even worse to be distracted. And right now, I’m informed to the point where I’m hardly focused on my life at all.

I’ve known that these podcasts have had this effect on me for a long time. But I simply can’t escape the warm embrace of the blue dot next to Joe Rogan’s face that tells me he released a new episode with Eric Weinstein, who will then confirm all my suspicions about Jeffrey Epstein being a funnel for the hyper-elite to get their rocks off.

How does this matter to me? Answer: it doesn’t.

And the most frustrating part of this is that I should be able to buck this addiction. I’ve been incredibly successful at eliminating many of the addictions from my life. My biggest triumph was over the social media accounts that cost me years of my life to mindless scrolling. I didn’t just delete the apps like a coward. I deleted the accounts themselves. I deleted an Instagram account with over 40,000 followers just to get part of my life back.

But I can’t delete the podcasts. They are embedded in Spotify, which is how I also get all my music. As a result, I’m trapped by my love for music. I fear a car ride with failing radio stations that don’t know my taste. I’m worried about the increased friction I’ll experience of finding new music I never knew existed. There is no better feeling for me than discovering a new song that I can’t turn off for the next week. I can’t imagine not being able to do this at the click of a button.

Unfortunately, the Spotify I once knew no longer exists. Instead of promoting new artists I’ve never heard before, it keeps me in a constant loop of the most popular artists in the genre that I like. Song discovery has all but ceased to exist for me on their app. And since they spent over $1 billion on its podcast division, Spotify feels the need to force feed me podcasts on my home screen instead of music.

I’ve realized that the negative impact these political podcasts are having on my life is so extreme that I must take drastic measures to escape them. I’m like an alcoholic who can no longer go to the bar or walk down the beer isle at the grocery store.

Just like these addicts who dodge their vice at every corner, I’ll be doing something equally extreme. I’m abandoning my smartphone altogether. I’m putting my iPhone in a drawer and forgetting it exists. I just bought an old school Nokia flip phone and will only be using that for my personal communication. It can’t even download Spotify. It doesn’t even have an app store.

I hope that it can help me get my mind back. That eliminating the droning hum of fearmongering slop political podcasts allows me to focus on the things that are important in my life and appreciate all the good happening in it. As much as I’m anxious to pull out my bright red Nokia flip phone and take a call in public, I’m excited for the peace I think it will bring me.

Oh, and one more thing, if you need me, don’t text me. Call me. I don’t want to relearn how to type with T9 Word.

I was driving behind a Porsche yesterday. To be specific, it was a 911 Turbo S. It looked brand new. If it was, that means it probably costs somewhere north of $275,000.

Behind this luxury sports car, a dream car for many car nerds, there I sat. My hands on the stitched leather steering wheel of my own car. Mine is not quite a luxury sports car. But it is made by the same company that makes that Porsche. My car even has a lot of features that the Porsche has. I have two-tone leather seats (heated, thank you very much.) I have a Bluetooth stereo. I have LED headlights and cruise control. I even have a turbocharged engine.

But I also have features in my car that Porsche does not have. I have a second row of seating for passengers and a trunk that can actually fit stuff.

My car is a 2014 Volkswagen CC that I bought for $11,500. That Porsche sitting in front of me cost twenty-four times what my car is worth.

But is it truly worth that price tag?

I used to always love cars. I watched Top Gear when I was a kid in the heyday of the show with Clarkson, Hammond, and May. At one point they reviewed a beautiful Mercedes. It was an absolute gem. A two-door, hard-top convertible. The model was an SL55 AMG. At the time, Mercedes claimed it was the fastest production convertible ever made.

Then, a few years later, my dad bought one.

I had just turned 16 when he bought it. It was bright red with a grey interior. He had looked all over the Northeast just to get the one he wanted. My mouth salivated at the thought of driving it.

He, of course, didn’t let me.

It wasn’t until months later that he gave me a shot behind the wheel. We lived in Massachusetts. Every year he would go on a motorcycle ride with some friends through the weaving backroads in Vermont and New Hampshire. His bike broke down in the middle of Vermont, and he needed to retrieve it. He hatched a brilliant plan, for which I am forever grateful.

The plan was for us two to drive his Mercedes into New Hampshire, retrieve the bike, and come back. I would drive his car up there so he could watch me and then drive back, with me following him on his bike so he could manage our speed. The whole trip was 500 miles. That meant 500 miles behind the wheel of one of the fastest sports cars ever made. It was the first speedometer I had ever seen that bothered to show “200 mph” on the dash.

Unfortunately, the whole trip was a disappointment.

Driving a fast car seems like it would be a thrill. However, on a normal road, it’s mundane. We drove the highway up to Vermont to make better time. On the way back, we took the backroads. Although the turns were relatively entertaining, the most excitement came when he would turn onto a road before me and I could gun it before I caught up to him and slowed back down to the speed limit. Within a few miles of the drive, my awe at the car’s power turned into a realization of how normal an experience it was to drive it.

He let me keep driving the car on occasions. I even drove it to prom. And every time I got behind the wheel, I kept wanting to feel something. That car, new, cost around $120,000. Whenever I drove it, I wanted to feel like if I were to spend $100,000 or more on a car, that it would all be worth it.

But it never felt worth it.

Driving those backroads in New England wasn’t even the most fun I’ve had in a car. Not even close. The most fun I ever had in a car was in my sister’s boyfriend’s 1992 Mazda Miata. Miata’s are little Asian two-door convertibles that are only slightly larger than a go-kart. It had cloth seats, rolldown windows, and manual transmission. One day he threw me the keys, and we bombed around the beach roads in my town on Cape Cod for nearly two hours with the top down. I probably could have bought that car off him for $5,000.

I dream of that car. I don’t dream of the red Mercedes.

Mazda wanted to give their customers an incredible experience for a reasonable price when they made the Miata. Mercedes wanted to sell the idea of a luxury sports car only to the people who could afford it with the SL.

A cheap burger joint. A $50 pair of Chuck Taylors. My used Volkswagen. What these things have in common is that they have tremendous value for their price. You will never feel scammed out of your money for having bought one of them.

Every time I eat at an expensive restaurant I feel like my money has been stolen out of my pocket. They aren’t just slightly more expensive. They are exponentially more expensive. A burger from Five Guys is $12. A burger from a high-end steak restaurant is $28. That’s not a 20% marginal increase in cost, it’s 133%.

But the experience isn’t more than twice as good. The food does not feel twice as good in my mouth. My stomach isn’t twice as full. If anything, I’m usually far less full. The high-end restaurant was maybe a bit better. But sometimes, it’s not even better at all.

Expensive restaurants know their audience: people with money who don’t care what the bill costs or people celebrating a special occasion and won’t complain about the bill because it’s a special occasion and that would ruin it.

Knowing this, what do these restaurants do? They upcharge everything. That $15 bottle of wine is now $45 for the same bottle. Want to bring your own bottle? That will be a $20 corkage fee. Their “Signature House Sauce” was just thousand island dressing they bought from Sysco.

And that “ambiance” they provide is all a game to get you to spend more for the same thing.

I watch this YouTuber Matt Armstrong. He rebuilds crash damaged exotic cars. One of the cars he is currently working on is a Bugatti Veyron. If you don’t know, Bugatti is a highly exclusive car brand that builds multimillion dollar cars.

Armstrong is pretty obsessed with rebuilding the cars himself without the manufacturers’ help. His Veyron seemed to have a simple issue that needed to get fixed. Really, he just needed to service the car. Basically, oil and filter change. He investigated what Bugatti would have charged for this service. It was over $20,000. A $20,000 oil change.

To be fair, the full service was more than just an oil change. He had to change spark plugs, a transmission pump, some filters, and some other things. These were all the things that Bugatti would have done if he got it serviced by them. He researched all the parts he needed and compared them to the price that Bugatti would have charged him for the identical part.

Each part Bugatti sold to the customer for two to five times what Armstrong paid. He finished servicing the car for $1,200. That means, Bugatti was planning on stealing $18,800 of Matt’s money if he brought it to them.

One of the most egregious examples of thievery by Bugatti was the hours they billed customers for some of the work they did. Bugatti billed 24.5 hours to service a part in the cylinders that Armstrong and his dad changed within an hour.

But this is not isolated to Bugatti. All luxury car brands have a version of these practices. And they are able to charge so much more than the actual value of the product or the service because they have built a marketing strategy that convinces their customers that it is all worth it.

And it’s not just luxury car companies. It’s all luxury companies.

A $750 bottle of wine is made of grapes that a winery convinces a wine nut are special because they can only grow in these conditions once in a decade. This is despite the fact that they don’t taste better than normal grapes in a cheap bottle of wine.

A $500 pair of jeans is sold to a wealthy buyer because the fabric is somehow rare even though it performs and feels the same as a pair of $50 Levi’s.

A $250 pair of Ray Ban sunglasses is purchased over a cheap pair despite the fact they are both made of plastic, have polarized lenses, and are made in the same factory by the same parent brand Luxotica.

At best, I’ll agree that these luxury items and services provide a marginally better experience. Audi’s seats are slightly more comfortable than my VWs. The $750 bottle of wine tastes a bit better than the $20 one. The $500 pair of jeans lasted a couple more years and had a slightly better fit than Levi’s. The Ray Bans are a bit more stylish than the inexpensive sunglasses.

But that’s it. The experiences you get from these things are never ten times that of their cheaper alternative.

And I’m sorry, if you disagree, you’re a fool. You’ve been indoctrinated by materialistic ad campaigns and the peer pressure of your friends to believe that those luxury goods are worth the exponential increase in cost. The reality is, you’re getting sold overpriced goods and services by people purely taking advantage of your willingness to pay more. The high prices are status signals. Luxury companies price their product to purposely limit how many people can afford it. Their margins are exorbitant.

Burberry famously destroyed millions of dollars of cosmetics and perfumes to prevent the sale of their goods at discounted prices to “protect the brand from devaluation.” That is marketing-speak for ensuring that the wrong type of person wasn’t able to afford their product.

The people who own and manage these companies that sell these goods have no respect for you. To be quite honest, they resent you. They’ll give you white glove service and then make 300% margins selling you something they don’t allow someone else to afford.

Those who own luxury companies are not serious people. You’re a joke to them. When the door closes behind you on your way out, they laugh as you walk away. Every day they can’t believe there are people who are stupid enough to buy their overpriced things made in sweat shops or right alongside their cheaper counterpart.

Stop allowing these “luxury” companies to swindle you. The marginal increase in experience is not worth the exponential increase in cost.

Mike Shinoda, co-founder of the famous alternative rock band Linkin Park, is one of the luckiest people to ever live. He was born in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles called Agoura Hills. He was born into an upper middle-class family that owned floral shops. These simple factors alone make his starting point in life greater than almost anyone in the world.

However, in his song “Remember the Name”, created by his side-project Fort Minor, he makes this claim about his career:

“This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill

Fifteen percent concentrated power of will

Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain

And a hundred percent reason to remember the name”

Here is what his believed reasons for his success are, visualized:

According to Shinoda, a lot of his success came from pain. I’m unsure if this was physical pain or emotional pain. But he has all his limbs attached still and seems to be relatively healthy. I’m happy that despite half of all his success being derived from pain, it didn’t cause him any long-term suffering.

Only 5% of his journey creating music with band members he has worked with for decades in sunny California was actually pleasureful. That seems low, considering the circumstances. But, hey, I wasn’t there. And if 50% was painful, I can’t imagine much of it was all that fun.

And only 10% of his multi-million-dollar music fortune came from luck. For some reason, to me, this feels low. I don’t think Shinoda realizes how lucky he is.

Actually, I don’t think anyone realizes how lucky they are.

I have asked a few wealthy people recently how much they attribute being lucky to their success. Their answers were in the 10-20% range. When I dug down into their responses, I found something interesting: they consider their starting point to be after college, when they were broke and just getting their careers started.

But I don’t think this is the right starting point. Just because your career begins after college (or after high school for most) does not mean that is when your luck begins. In my opinion, your luck begins on day one, when you were born. Luck is measured by the fortunate circumstances you experience in which you had no control over. Where you were born, how healthy you were when you were born, and the income level of the family you were born are your luck.

If I were to guess, most of your luck occurs before the ages of eighteen to twenty-two. This is the point when you enter a stage in your life where you have the most agency over it.

Let’s go back to Mike Shinoda. The internet could not tell me all his fortunate breaks in life. Nor will it tell me all the misfortune. However, if we just take the most certain evidence about his starting point, we get this funnel for his luck compared across all humans in the globe:

This chart shows that to be born in the US and to be born in the upper-middle class, Shinoda’s starting point is better than 99.24% of the population. If we adjust his success breakdown pie chart to include this new luck calculation, we get this:

Fortunately for Shinoda, this means his life was only .42% pain. Which seems more accurate considering the complete lack of physical ailments. However, this luck calculation does not consider the fact that at six-years-old his mother made him play classical piano. This incredible musical head start was something he had no control over. The calculation also does not consider the fact that he went to a high-end art college in Pasadena. And it does not consider the fact that he started an alternative rock band in America at the peak of alternative rock in America.

That last point is especially important. If Mike Shinoda was born in the year 2000 and tried to start an alternative rock band in the 2020s, it would not have had nearly the success it had in the years Linkin Park was getting started. He would be like a great sailor with no wind.

Time and place can alter lifetime returns dramatically. Imagine graduating college with a degree in computer science in 2006 versus 2026. In one case, you could be a millionaire in a few years. In the other, you could be desperately searching for a job because AI took your potential future job away.

Forest Gump is the story of a man born into terrible circumstances, but time and place provided him with great fortunes. The movie would be far sadder if that bullet that hit him in the buttocks hit him in the lumbar spine.

(I’m sorry if that Forest Gump line felt out of place. I simply loved the cover image for this blog and had to make it tie-in somehow.)

What if Mike Shinoda was born in Japan, where his father’s family is from? What if his mom never made him take piano lessons? What if he never got accepted to that art college in Pasadena? These are all reasonable alternative timelines that interchange factors in his life that he did not get to choose that would dramatically change his life’s outcome.

My intentions with this article are not to pick on Mike Shinoda (or billionaire tech founders in Silicon Valley who got rich during the dot com bubble building worthless companies, selling them to suckers, and then shaming young people today for buying lunch). My intention is to show you that you are luckier than you think.

Let’s take me as an example. I have a lot of the same luck as Shinoda. I was born to an upper-middle class family in Massachusetts. My parents were married. They paid for my college. And I was born with a non-dumb brain and all my limbs attached in working order.

If you analyze my luck as we did with Shinoda, I’m incredibly lucky. Using the chain rule of probability, we get this chart. Imagine this chart as a funnel, with each factor allowing more or less people to pass through depending on their likelihood:

That means my starting point in life is better than 99.954% of the world’s population by the time my career began.

I’m 29 now. I own a gym that is growing at over 30% a year. This year, I will make far more money than the average 29-year-old man in America. I can comfortably afford rent. And I live in a nice, expensive town.

I’m doing okay for myself. However, I’ve also had some misfortune. I started my career as a personal trainer at a gym right when COVID hit and shifted a lot of my industry online. Then I started a gym, a lifelong goal of mine, at the same time when Facebook Ads and other online advertising for gyms became entirely unprofitable. If I had started my gym in 2012, my growth would have been far greater.

As a result of the times, I’ve had to work incredibly hard, almost entirely alone, to will my gym to grow at 30% a year. I’ve been working every day since I bought my gym and only started taking Sundays off to write on this blog one month ago. With the same effort in 2013, I would have had five gyms by now (I’m not being hyperbolic, there’s countless stories of the 20-teens gym-owning cohort raking in massive numbers, mostly built on super cheap Facebook Ads. All those gym owners sold at the peak and now try to scam us modern-day gym owners with their consulting services.)

So, I had a great starting point in life but then a hard starting point for my career. But then, if I consider it another way, my career is built on an industry that scientific studies keep reconfirming to people that they must do. Every new study published on strength training shows that you literally need to pay someone like me to show you how to train the way I train my clients. The way I have structured my gym’s program seems to be trend-avoidant and evergreen. Unless they give you a pill that gives you the results I get my clients with lifting barbells and dumbbells, I always have a business.

And I didn’t go into computer engineering, which was my dad’s degree and my close second option. If I had done that, I would have gotten laid off by now. Choosing my career path, although poorly timed, had luck that I could not have predicted.

People have a natural tendency to give themselves more credit than they deserve. It’s their ego speaking when they cry “oh, poor me” and attribute 10% of their success to luck. It’s easy to discount how much of your success is built upon factors that you had absolutely no control over. Doing so feeds the ego. It also sounds a lot better when asked “How did you get so successful?” that you say “Mostly pain and concentrated power of will,” instead of saying “I was born into fairly wealthy parents that breed me to be a musician in the place where a lot of the music is made in a time where the music I was good at making was the most popular at the time.”

If I reflect honestly, most of my success and future success will be from luck. Do I think it’s 99.954% luck? That, I’m not sure. But I’m confident it is the vast majority. I could have been born into the same family but have been severely autistic. I could have been born in the same town but to a mom who was an alcoholic and a father who beat me. I could have gotten a degree in computer engineering.

If you’re reading this article, you probably share many of the same good fortunes as I. I hope that you finish reading this piece realizing how lucky you are. You are so incredibly lucky. There is no denying that.

The only question left is: What are you going to do with it?

Works Cited

Fort Minor. “Remember the Name.” Genius, genius.com/Fort-minor-remember-the-name-lyrics. Accessed 31 May 2026.

“Mike Shinoda.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Shinoda. Accessed 31 May 2026.

I just got married. I’m a super white guy from Massachusetts and my wife is a super Latina mami from Venezuela. I can’t speak a lick of Spanish. She says “jellow” instead of “yellow.” The only thing we seemingly have in common is that we both enjoy salsa dancing (and surprisingly, I like it more than she does.)

With these vast differences, why does this relationship seem to work so well?

I chose my little Latina cutie very carefully. And when I was standing in front of her at our wedding saying “I do,” it felt like the clearest decision I have ever made. Getting such clarity came after a lot of trial and error (also called dating.) It took asking a lot of married people what it took to have a successful marriage. It took me observing successful couples and their behaviors. And more importantly, it came after understanding myself deeply.

Growing up with parents who are together also helps. You get firsthand observational data of a marriage that is working. You can analyze the factors that keep these two people from ripping each other’s heads off. You notice, firstly, that they communicate. They don’t scream at each other. At least not often. As a kid, my parents never handled a dispute in front of us. They usually didn’t have disputes other than over little meaningless pithy things.

What I discovered over time is that they were communicating behind the scenes. I don’t ever see couples in good relationships communicating. That’s because it is almost always done in private. However, you can feel the result of their communication through the way they treat each other in public. Tenuous relationships that don’t settle disputes privately explode on each other in front of others. Quality relationships have their problems resolved before they show up.

The result of this communication is a deep understanding of one another. Not only could I sense my parents’ deep understanding of one another, I also noticed from watching my parents just how different they are. My mom, God love her, is this high-energy, ditsy, extremely fun woman who has a million friends and will make a million more. My dad, on the other hand, is a very serious, high-IQ, analytical mind who might get one text a year from a person he considers a friend. He avoids almost any situation that will make himself look stupid. My mom offbeat line dances. They share nearly zero personality traits.

However, they are not totally different. Underlying their stark personality differences are their shared values. They don’t disagree with each other on big picture things. They both are Fox News Conservatives. They don’t have incredibly different views on how much money they should spend. They raised my sister and I in a very consistent manner. Neither one of us could go to Mom or Dad and get a yes when the other said no. They are both secular with a slight attachment to the Catholic roots they were raised in. They were both raised by middle class families in the suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts. My mom had two sisters. My dad had two brothers.

Despite being completely different people, they couldn’t possibly have more similar values.

From observing them, I came up with the framework in my mid-teenage years that I used to find my wife. The framework is this:

Find someone with an opposite personality but the same values as you.

This pattern of different people with the same values was a pattern I found almost without fail in successful marriages. And, when I saw divorcees who displayed the Selection Issue, I noticed that their ex was someone too much like them, had different fundamental values, or a combination of the two.

This idea is not completely original to me. It is encompassed in the ancient Chinese philosophy of Yin and Yang. We have all heard of Yin and Yang, but we might not understand it’s meaning. The idea behind Yin and Yang is that, in nature, opposite forces are often complementary. And that these opposite forces can create a balance for themselves.

There are predators and there is prey. There is summer and winter. There is day and night.

The Yin and Yang symbol brings deep clarity to this idea.

There are two things worth noting with this famous symbol. First, it’s obvious that each of the two halves take up an equal amount of space. The white is no more than the black and vice versa.

Second, and more subtle, is that inside the white half there is a black dot and inside the black half there is a white dot. Each half contains a mark of the other. In the night sky, there is a bright moon. Some summer days are nearly as cold as winter. In the world we inhabit, there is no black and there is no light. There is always a balance.

And this is what we should seek in a partner: balance. We should find our opposite. Ideally, an opposite such that if they were to leave a little mark of their personality on us, we would greatly improve.

My dad would probably be a hermit if it weren’t for my hypersocial mother to make friends for him. And my mom wouldn’t have much money at all if it weren’t for my dad’s ability to earn and invest.

The same is true in my relationship with my wife. I’m a hard person. I tell the truth, even when it hurts. My wife is soft and has cried in a heated debate with me. But she makes me a little softer in the way I broach topics. I tell the truth, even when it hurts, but I try to limit the hurt by choosing my words carefully and introducing the topic with empathy. I make her harder in the way she can handle conversations. She no longer cries in debates. She will argue with me now and won’t back down when I press her on something we disagree with.

This is just one of the ways we leave a mark on each other. I could give you more examples, but I think you understand the point.

Although I was able to find someone that checks the boxes necessary to make me a better person, I didn’t go out with a checklist on my personality traits and their advantageous counterparts. I knew my traits. When I went on dates, I would try to feel if the puzzle pieces of her and my personality fit together. I don’t think you have to approach finding your person analytically. I think you need intention, but not some clinical screening of each potential candidate. You need to find the types of personalities that make your life harder and the types of personalities that complement your behavior.

If you’re a lonely homebody, an outgoing extrovert will get you out of your shell. If you’re an emotional overthinker, an analytical pragmatist will help you make decisions faster. If you’re a slob, good luck, because I think you deserve to be perpetually alone.

If you want to solve the hardest part of marriage, the Selection Issue, you need to find the person who balances you. And you need to know in what ways you’re unbalanced. You should find that when you’re around the person you’re considering marrying, you are a better person in their presence. You are a version of yourself that you always wished you could be.

If this happens, you have found the right person. If not, and if you’re worse, then you need to keep looking.

Hey! If you liked this piece, please consider subscribing below. It’s free, unless you think I should get paid, then you can pay me. I post a new piece every Sunday at random times. They are about whatever questions are on my mind that I want answered. Enjoy!

The divorce rate is getting less, now hovering around 40% in America. However, the marriage rate is also decreasing, meaning younger generations of people are slower to get married or not getting married at all.

And, I mean, can you blame them? Conventional wisdom seems to always state that the divorce rate is 50%. Why would anyone get married if they knew that they only had a 50% chance of getting divorced?

In some cases, a 50/50 shot is fantastic odds. The dealer at the casino won’t even give you those odds because he knows if he did the casino would go bankrupt. At the casino, if you bet with a small hand, the stakes are low. You might lose some money you were planning on losing anyway or win a bunch more if something statistically improbably happens.

In marriage, if you win, you have a friend and lover with you until you die. You have someone to care for you when you’re sick. You have someone to travel with. You have someone to support you when you take a risk. And you have someone to build a family with.

Unfortunately, these types of happy marriages usually only happen 30% of the time. The other 70% of marriages are stable but mediocre. With couples happier than divorcees but not thriving. Then, about half the time, people get divorced. Which is this soul sucking, money depleting, heinous crime of the heart that tears families apart and destroys the lives of not only the people in the marriage but also of the lives of the people around them.

That means the odds are that 15% of the time you’ll wind up quite happy, 35% of the time you’ll wind up happy enough to say you don’t hate your life, and 50% of the time your life is going to be torn apart, your heart is going to get ripped out, and your money is going to be lit on fire.

What the heck kind of proposition is that?

You might respond with something trite like “love works in mysterious ways.” When things are about love, we lose perspective on rationality. So, let me give you an example not directly tied to love so that we can examine a similarly bad proposition.

Let’s say I’m a used car salesman. One day, you walked into my dealership, and I tried to sell you a used truck. You tell me if you think my sales pitch would work on you:

“Hey there! I’m glad you stopped in today. You’re looking for a truck? Perfect! I think I have just the thing for you. We have this beautiful, lightly used CarFactory Truckmaster 1500 that just got traded in from their old owner. Come over here and check it out. *Slaps hood of truck* The old owner told us that the truck was a good truck, just not the truck for them. You see, it wasn’t the truck’s fault that it got traded in. It’s just that the owner’s friends and mechanic saw things in the truck that the owner couldn’t see and convinced him to trade it in. Anyway, you don’t care about all of that. I know you’re going to like this truck. Actually, that’s not true. I’m about 50% sure you’re going to like this truck. You see, CarFactory trucks are notorious for being unreliable. When they don’t work, they really don’t work. Blown engines. Transmission issues. Leaky oil lines. The works. Just miserable. Some people have even died owning these Truckmasters due to faulty brake calipers. The other half of the time, these trucks are fairly stable. You’ll have minor annoyances with them. But they’ll be good enough so that you won’t want to risk losing something decent for something far worse. I’m sure your friends have told you their own horror stories with their trucks, haha! But, if you’re really lucky, I’ve seen a small percentage of Truckmaster owners say they simply can’t live without them. They’ve even said their truck completes them. I can’t verify their claims for myself, seeing as my own Truckmaster is just an average one, but they say it’s true! So, what do you say, want to take it for a test drive?”

That’s probably one of the worst sales pitches you’ve ever heard. But that is literally the outlook you have for marriage. However, in the real world, trucks aren’t just randomly unreliable 50% of the time. They either came out of the factory with a defect or they weren’t maintained well.

And marriages are the exact same way.

The Reasons for Divorce

I speak to a lot of people about the things you’re not supposed to ask about. It’s one of my quirks. I know who the people around me voted for president. I know the age of every woman I spend any significant time with. I even know how much they weigh.

And if they are divorced, I know why.

There are too many taboos around topics we find sensitive. I was told from a young age not to talk about money, religion, or politics. But barring people from having these conversations creates knowledge silos. Those that learn something, whether it is a clever strategy on how to invest their money, an important moral framework from their religious text, or a flaw in a governmental policy that should be corrected, decide they can’t discuss it with others because it is too “personal” to share.

Divorce is one of those taboo topics. Sure, people vent to their close friends about how much they hated their ex. But they don’t tell their friends the deeper causes of their divorce. And their friends don’t ask the probing questions that might create some insight into what actually happened for fear that the quest for knowledge will be taken as offensive.

I don’t care about these formalities or being seen as offensive. I’ve asked divorced people a ton of questions that would make an etiquette coach squirm. Some examples of those uncomfortable questions are:

Why did you get a divorce?

How long had it been since you last had sex with your partner before getting the divorce?

Why did you get married to that person in the first place?

When you got married originally, did it feel like the right decision?

How did you handle your finances when you were married?

Through asking these deep, probing, and awkward questions, I’ve found the two core reasons for why people get divorced. And the two fundamental reasons for divorce are: a Selection Issue or a Communication Issue.

Now, you might be thinking there are more reasons. But first, let me try to convince you otherwise. Because I believe that these two fundamental reasons are the bedrock upon which all other reasons for divorce are built. Explore these examples below. These are common marriage complaints that I’ve heard from others that led to their divorce.

“I loved Sharon when we got married but she just became crazy after having kids.”

“Steve was so ambitious in college but once we got married, he couldn’t get off the couch.”

“I thought I was enough for Hector, but he just wouldn’t stop cheating on me.”

Let’s be real, each of these complaints have a big picture reality behind them. Like, seriously, we all knew Sharon was crazy when you met her. But she had enormous cans. So, you let it go when she “accidentally” lit your cat on fire. Steve was lazy in college when you fell in love with him. But you didn’t care to notice because you were too busy tanning yourself on the beach at his parents’ home on Martha’s Vineyard and never realized that all he ever did was golf and drink with his buddies. And Hector would literally slap the butt of random girls that he would walk past while holding your hand but you thought he would “grow out of it.”

My argument is that these issues that “caused the divorce” were ever present. These were issues of Selection. And when you dig deeper into why someone got married to their ex in the first place, often you will realize that sometimes there was some external pressure that caused this person to marry the one they are complaining about. And that, from the beginning, these two individuals had traits that were not compatible with one another.

These external pressures can minimize the faults these two people see in one another. Maybe they were getting older and they didn’t want to be the only one of their friend groups to not be married. Maybe their parents convinced them that this was the right person, and they would be stupid to let them go. Maybe the person they married was manipulative and persistent and broke them down to the point of just saying yes.

Other times, there was something special about this person that made them overlook the things that clearly weren’t going to work in perpetuity. A common Special Blinding Quality (SBQ) is amazing sex or some sexual appeal that they think they would be lost without. Another SBQ is that the person makes a lot of money or person’s family has a lot of money. Another might be that the person seemed like they would be a good future parent and was “good enough” to marry (a real reason I’ve heard.)

If you don’t believe me that the types of issues I mentioned above, and the similar ones that you have heard in the past (or lived through yourself personally) are Selection Issues, it’s important to ask if the issues that ended the relationship were there at the beginning. If the answer is yes, there were signs of the issue beforehand, then it is certainly a Selection Issue.

The second reason for divorce, The Communication Issue, is more complex and can often just be a Selection Issue disguised as a Communication Issue. Below, I’m going to give you common Communication Issues and their potential Selection Issue counterpart:

“We went broke because he couldn’t stop spending money and getting us into debt!”

More likely: You never established clear guidelines for a budget that applied to the two of you and then kept reinforcing it. (Selection Issue: He was a massive spender before you got married and you chose to ignore it.)

“She just wouldn’t have sex with me, so I gave up.”

More likely: You never asked her about the type of sex she likes to have, made it all about yourself, and she got bored. (Selection Issue: The sex was always mediocre due to sexual incompatibility, and you thought it would get better with time.)

“We had two completely different styles of parenting, and I couldn’t take being undermined anymore.”

More likely: you never discussed how you would parent your children and come up with a strategy together. Then, when you noticed a divide, you wallowed in it instead of bringing it up to your husband/wife. (Selection Issue: There were clear signs that they were going to parent in a way that was antithetical to your value system and you hoped they would “change” after having kids.)

When you ask people who have successful marriages why they are still together, they usually have short, simple phrases for their success. Or literally just one word. One of them is usually “respect.” Another, which is most cited in my experience, is “communication.” People have respect for their partner because they chose to marry a person they admire. People communicate well in a relationship because they worked hard at creating an environment where communication was allowed and encouraged.

Yet, divorcees will quote a million little complaints about their ex instead of just saying the truth, which is “we didn’t communicate well enough,” or “I chose the wrong person.” Admitting these distillations of their complaints means they must also admit one reality they cannot face, which is that they were wrong. They either chose the wrong person, or they didn’t facilitate a happy relationship through communicating their issues.

Communication is actually simpler than people think. People hire marriage counselors (which I don’t condemn, and think can be great) so that they can sit next to their partner and literally just talk to them about the things that are bothering them. But that’s all it is. When something bothers you or you think you and your partner aren’t aligned, say something. Don’t table it for the right moment. Don’t wait until it becomes an actual issue. Talk right now.

My wife and I just had an argument about which preschool we are going to send our kids to. We don’t have any kids yet and are a couple of years away from even trying. But I sensed that there was a difference of opinion on a particular issue, and I decided to get it figured out right there. Now, that might sound exhausting to you, and if it does, good luck in your relationship. Because I’m pretty confident that effort is a requirement of having a happy marriage.

In summation: communication is easy to understand but hard to execute. However, choosing the right person is incredibly hard to understand and then even harder to execute.

So, how do you do it?

Part 2 of Ying and Yang is about how to find the perfect person to marry. It will come out soon ((or, already has if you’re reading this in the year 2054) or, hasn’t, if I died before next Sunday)).

Please consider subscribing below. It’s free and you’ll get to read more of my writing. Which, if you’re reading this right now, you must not hate because you made it to the end of this one.

From Corinthians 9:7, Paul says “Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.”

This verse is pretty easy to interpret, in my opinion. God loves those who give. And you should give according to how much your heart tells you to give, not because you feel peer pressured or because there is a gun to your head.

I think this verse is exemplary for one of the limitations with the Bible as a guide for morality. The Bible gives loose guidelines for how to behave. Then, it is on the individual to determine what is right based on their own interpretation of the Word.

One of my clients said that the way I live, being without God, is bad because it means my morality is subjective. Her morality, because it comes from the Word of God, is objective. However, upon reading this quote from Paul it feels clear to me that the Bible’s moral code is also subjective. What is in my heart to give will be different from yours. Shoot, what is in my heart to give is going to be different from day to day or moment to moment, even if I did try to follow the truest interpretation of the Bible. It is not objective at all.

Humans don’t do well with subjectivity. I recently had several people argue about what color a rug I put in my gym is (it is obviously a greyish lavender.) Instead, humans do well with clear guidelines for how to behave.

Driving is a good example. Dumb people drive around in metal cannisters at many times walking speed, and when they’re sober, they do a pretty good job of not killing themselves or others. (Yes, accidents do happen. But, for the volume of driving we do, they are rare.) This is because the rules of the road are very clear. When there is a car accident, it is usually caused by one or all parties not following the rules. And we can easily determine who is at fault by who didn’t follow the rules. The rules of the road allow us to determine right and wrong.

People drive in remarkably similar ways despite operating wildly different machinery because they all follow the same rules of the road. But people spend and give money in remarkably different ways, even when they all read the same book on morality.

We simply do not have clear guidelines on how much of our earnings to spend on ourselves and how much to give to others. We are often impressed when wealthy people give enormous amounts of money to charitable causes. However, despite their charitable giving, it hardly ever causes a dent in their net worth (Mackenzie Bezos’ net worth continues to rise). Also, many uber rich individuals hardly pay anything in taxes and use their charitable giving to decrease their tax liability.

This Fortune article applauds mega millionaire Bill Perkins for stating that he gave $16,000 to 30 or 40 people in a year. However, he is also quoted as having a $22.5 million dollar art collection. That means that that year’s charitable giving, at the upper end of his estimate, was only 2.8% of the value of his art collection. Which I would hardly call a sacrifice.

Perkins states that his money philosophy is “that money is a tool to drive your fulfillment, and that’s it.” If his fulfillment was to create a better world, invest in world changing technology, and improve the healthcare system in the United States, I would also applaud him as emphatically as Fortune does in their piece on him. However, his plans to “Die with Zero” (the actual name of his book) seem more to revolve around longevity treatments for himself, playing poker, and buying more expensive art.

Other billionaires have adopted a different model. The Giving Pledge is a pact by many billionaires that states that they will give away their money to charity when they die. The problem with this model is that many of the people on the list, like Larry Ellison, own superyachts, multimillion dollar homes, and private jets. So, this pledge sounds to me that they their goal is to live hedonically upon their fortunes and then serve the remainder to the masses when they die. Which doesn’t sound good either.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum there is Chuck Feeney, founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the duty-free stores in the airports you’ve probably seen. Feeney gave away his multi-billion-dollar fortune to charity while he was still living. All he had left was enough for he and his wife to live in a small two-bedroom apartment.

Chuck Feeney’s contribution led to personal sacrifice. He ended his life, not as some billionaire with a private island, but as a normal person living a normal life. I think if you were to ask him, it did not lead to suffering. He did not die hungry. He actually seemed incredibly happy to donate his fortune.

What Chuck Feeney did was an incredible amount of giving. That said, there is an upper limit to giving. I knew of a man who gave too much. At the end of his life, his young adult children had to drain their bank accounts to pay his medical bills because, despite amassing fortunes along the way, his generosity caused him to gift it to those around him frivolously. And as much as those around him appreciated his sacrifices for them, if we all lived this way, future generations would suffer from such kindness. From his story, I’ve determined that if you are capable and able-bodied person, you should not give so much so that you must rely on others just to survive.

However, if we all lived as Chuck Feeney, I feel that future generations would thrive. They don’t need to be handed vast fortunes upon our death in our wills. What they need is for us to give while we can still have a say in how that giving will be directed. To ensure that the causes being given to are held to account to help those we were expecting the gifts to be for.

So, from these extremes, I have created a guide for myself:

Give so much of what you earn from this world so that you can live modestly, but not so much that you are reliant on others.

Unfortunately, I have not totally solved for the subjectivity problem of the Bible. The word ‘modest’ is subjective. Modest to me as a broke, recently married 29-year-old is different than someone flying around on a private jet. And it will also probably be different than myself in the future as I continue to make more money.

After writing that guide, I polled some people I know about what a modest home and a modest car looked like to them. All the answers were different. But they did have one thing in common: the homes and the cars they chose were smaller and less expensive than they currently have.

It’s easy for me to criticize wealthy people while I’m still relatively poor. But I don’t plan on staying this way forever (please subscribe.) What will happen to my lifestyle as I make more money? Will I too adopt the same levels of greed that I condemn? Or will I live far within my means and sacrifice fortune for the betterment of humanity like Chuck Feeney?

I can only hope that the future, wealthier me, can look at himself in the mirror and be convinced that he is living a life within the limits of his definition of modesty, and not at the limits of his wealth.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on my framework for giving. If you agree or disagree, please let me know in the comments below.

How much is too much? Is there some point at which having a lot, even if you earned it honestly, is immoral? Do those that have made great fortunes owe the world a portion of their winnings?

These have been central questions of my life for many years now. I’ve been living and working in Naples, Florida for give or take seven years. In this town there is a Bentley, Ferrari, and Lamborghini dealership. There are countless designer clothing stores like Gucci and Hermes (and many high-end boutique places I’ve never heard of).

Many of the people who buy cars at these dealerships or clothes at these designer stores are retired. They play pickleball, bridge, and dine at fancy restaurants. The final days of their life are marked by a hedonic sprint to the finish line.

Wealthy retirees are not the only ones living a life of hedonism. Most wealthy people live this way. They hire people to solve all their problems and then go on fancy vacations with private chefs. Mothers go shopping while the nanny looks after the kids.

And my simple question is: Is that okay?

I’m certainly comfortable criticizing the materialism of others. Such things are easy when you’re young and broke (as I am.) As a result of my careless comments, I usually get pushback with such pithy phrases like “Well, that person worked hard for it,” or “It’s their money, they can do what they want with it,” or my favorite “Yeah but they came from such modest beginnings.”

It doesn’t seem to be harming anyone that rich people overpay for stuff. Like I was told, it’s their money, they worked for it, why not? But then that voice in the back of my head fights me and says Think of all the problems that money, wasted on things only purchased for status, could fix?

I’ve battled with these two parts of my mind for as long as I can remember. On one hand, I think people should be able to build the life they want. I’m also a staunch capitalist and deep supporter of personal freedom. At no point in this essay am I going to advocate for a law to prevent hedonistic lifestyles. On the other hand, I want people focused on the greater good. I want the people of today to genuinely care for the people of tomorrow. I also want the wealthiest of us to realize that it wasn’t all hard work that got them to where they are. Sure, that was part of it. And lazy people don’t get much out of life unless they are born into it. But I’ve seen time and time again that right place and right time is a large factor in lifetime earnings.

I’ve realized while examining this internal conflict that the moral question I’m struggling with is: What is the right balance between enjoying what you’ve earned from this world and giving back to the world that helped you earn it?

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The Biblical Response to Hedonism

On my way here to write this piece, I drove past a church parking lot overflowing with luxury cars. Even the church they were parked in front of was sprawling and lavish. Something about the scene didn’t feel right to me.

Although Jesus didn’t anticipate the modern automobile, something about his subsistence lifestyle and distaste for luxuries would make me think that he isn’t looking fondly upon that parking lot.

I’m not a believer that Jesus was the Son of God. My theory on Jesus is that he was probably this incredibly impressive person. He was somebody so good that when he died, his acts of kindness and stubbornness of moral code were so uncommon that they were embellished by his disciples, who could only explain that his manner of being must make him the Son of God. They were so impressed with his goodness that they thought “There’s literally no way he was that moral and good and didn’t come directly from some higher power.”

As I said, Jesus was not a big fan of excess wealth. From Matthew 19:24, Jesus says “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

I’m not sure he is saying that rich men are bad or that being rich inherently makes you a bad person. It’s just that Jesus understood people. He understood their greed. He knew that the typical path of a man who becomes rich is not one of benevolence, but of greed and pleasure.

The Bible offers guidance for man to approach wealth and the pleasures that it can bring. In John 2:15-17, John offers a way to view the pleasures that the world has:

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”

To give my own interpretation of this passage, John is saying that sex, materialism, and pride are aspects of the world to which we are often drawn. God cannot be found within any of these things. When we obsess too much over the pleasures the world provides for us, the further we become removed from God. He reminds us that this world is not eternal, only God is. And if we follow his will, which is not those worldly pleasures that pull us from him, we will join him forever in Heaven.

I hope the Christians aren’t too mad at that interpretation. I’m doing my best.

However, the whole Bible does not condemn all pleasure. It’s just that pleasure needs to come from the right place. From Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, Solomon gives a long sermon on how he indulged in all the pleasures of life. These pleasures align with the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life that John mentions. Solomon then tells us that these worldly pleasures made him feel empty. However, he does not reject enjoying the things that are of this world.

“There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.” (Ecclesiastes 2:24)

This line tells us that Solomon felt that he is allowed to enjoy food, wine, and the work that we do in the world. However, he must only enjoy these things if he is following God and His commandments (he mentions this later), and only when these pleasures come from God himself as a gift.

I don’t believe in the Christian God and therefore don’t regard the Bible as the true Word. However, I use it in moments like these because I think it is full of wisdom. It has simple lines, like John 2:16, or Matthew 22:39 when Jesus says that “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” which is the Second Commandment. They are good guidelines for life. And I think people could do well to behave as the Bible describes.

However, I think the Bible is vague. It is subjective. You and I could each read those three verses that I have quoted and deduce different things from them. Sometimes, the Bible is strikingly clear, as is true with the Second Commandment. Other times, however, it gives the reader too much room to interpret in their own way. That is probably why there are 44,000 Christian denominations.

I think many people would read those two verses from John and King Solomon and be able to make many concessions to excuse their bad behavior. A rich man, to a naysayer condemning his materialistic purchase (me), should not say, “I don’t feel bad about driving this Bentley because I earned it.” Instead, he should say “I don’t feel bad about driving this Bentley because it was handed to me as a gift by God.”

Think back to all those luxury cars in the church parking lot I drove by. I’m sure most of those people have some Biblical workaround like that to justify their excessive purchases.

I asked Claude AI about this contradiction, and it gave me an interesting response. It called out the line from Ecclesiastes where Solomon notes that these pleasures that man is permitted to enjoy were from “the hand of God.” It said that the “moment pleasure becomes the objective rather than a byproduct, you’ve crossed from the Ecclesiastes model into the hedonism John warns against.” (Claude).

But how do you prove the direction of a worldly pleasure, in that it was pursued or received?

Money complicates this. When it comes to determining the morality of utilizing what you have earned from this world, money can skew the line between pursuing and receiving worldly pleasures.

Let’s imagine you are a dentist and use a barter system for payment. One day, you pulled the tooth of a wealthy customer. He is so grateful that you relieved his pain that he gave you something far more than your usual metric of bartered goods, which you typically accept a bag of rice or a pound of flour for such a service. Instead, this gracious man gifts you a Porsche with a bag of rice in it. Because you did not ask for such a thing, only a bag of rice or flour, you might feel as though you are receiving a gift from God.

But, what if instead you charged money to this wealthy client and didn’t use a barter system? And instead, out of his graciousness for the quality of your tooth-pulling services, he gave you a tip big enough to buy a Porsche and then you went out and bought that Porsche? Is that Porsche still a gift from God? Is that hedonism or holy?

That completes today’s piece. Next week, we will explore more Biblical lessons for wealth. And I will give you my ultimate guide for giving.

I believe I might have some insights on how to find meaning. In order to find it, and then live life with true purpose, you must be willing to take the risk in trying new things, accept those things you enjoy into your life, and reject those that you do not enjoy. Then, you need to continue working at those things which give you meaning until you are able to provide value to others with them.

Words: 1655

Time to Read: 6-8 Minutes

I spend hours a week watching salsa videos on YouTube. There are videos that I have watched almost one hundred times.

One video. One hundred times.

On Sunday mornings, like this one, I’ll spend up to five hours at my girlfriend Yaneth’s coffee shop writing blogs that few people read. I was up last night until nine o’clock editing a blog so that I could get it published for today at noon, as if I was on some hard deadline.

On top of these obsessions, I work at my gym from six a.m. to seven at night trying to build the best personal training facility I can.

I do these things because they give me meaning. I dance to express myself and to build a connection with the love of my life. I write to learn and to teach people about the things I learned. I train clients to make others healthier.

I owe my happiness to the immense purpose I feel from all the things that I do.

If you took one of these things away from me, I wouldn’t become lost. One of my other obsessions would grow to fill the void left by the one you took.

Or I would find a new one.

If you took every one of my pursuits away, I could find another—or several—in the matter of a couple of years. It’s possible that the new purpose I find would be even greater than those I’m already working on.

I’ve realized—through my short life—I may have discovered a process for finding meaning, and I’d like to share it with you.

Beginner’s Mind

Finding purpose starts with the willingness to try new things. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve invited to a salsa class after they expressed interest and then never went.

I believe there’s only one reason they bailed: fear.

Trying something new begins by shutting off the part of your brain that tells you about all the things that could go wrong if you tried this new thing. Most likely, nothing bad will happen to you. You’ll just learn something new about yourself and about the world.

Knowing Which Things to Try

You’re probably wondering which things you should try. This is important. You can’t be going around trying all the activities on offer. You’d run out of time.

You must reflect on who you are. You must understand three things about yourself: what do you think you might like, what do you already have some knowledge about, and what do you have a natural ability to do.

I knew I should pursue writing more when I got a perfect score on my Advanced Placement Literature test in high school.

I knew I should pursue dancing when this girl I was dating, who was a bachata instructor, couldn’t believe how easily I could keep a beat.

Even my failed pursuits all began with the notion that I have the skills and knowledge to pursue them.

I created a language for exercise that paired my ability to write with my exercise science knowledge.

I created a fitness app because of the intersection of my understanding of fitness, business, and technology.

Look inward. Somewhere in you there is a part of you screaming to be explored.

Add Value to Others

If you want a fulfilling life, going bungee jumping, skydiving, or go-karting will probably not get you anywhere. Sure, those are new things, but they’re not useful in any meaningful way. Something purposeful adds value to other people’s lives other than your own.

When choosing purposeful activities, find ones that repeatedly deliver value to other people. They shouldn’t be one-shot activities. Sure, you could build one well in Africa on a weeklong charitable trip and you should do that if it compels you. But don’t consider it part of your path to discovering your mission if you’re not planning on taking that trip regularly.

I occasionally watch my friend’s cat Spike, but I don’t consider that my calling.

These occasional activities are problematic for two reasons.

The first is that finding new one-time activities to do will mean that you keep having to break through that barrier of fear to have purpose. Unless you’re more emotionally resilient than most people, I wouldn’t recommend this.

Second, if you build that well in Africa, you’ll do it slowly and inefficiently because, realistically, you have no idea how to build wells. But, if you moved to Africa and built wells for the rest of your life, you could become an expert at it and build a system for well construction, which would be far more valuable to those in need of clean drinking water.

I’m not telling you to move to Africa and build wells. All I’m saying is that you should begin a pursuit you can improve over a long period of time, which means you should choose something you enjoy doing.

You Should Enjoy Your Purpose

Finding something that offers value to others doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be valuable to you. And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t enjoy it.

My girlfriend doesn’t have to drag me onto the dance floor on the weekends. I am not sitting here writing this blog for you through gritted teeth.

I enjoy these acts, which give me meaning. It’s the only way for them to be sustainable.

But how do you know if you like doing something?

It’s easy: you’ll know after trying.

When my first salsa class ended, I resented it being over. The thought of the pattern of the steps and the rhythm of the movement captured my mind. I wanted more.

If you don’t have a similar reaction to the new thing you’re trying, I urge you to give up on it immediately. My biggest mistakes in my search for meaning were never about trying something new. My biggest mistakes came from doing something for too long that I detested.

As an example, I built up an Instagram account of about 50,000 followers while making fitness videos. I made videos that got millions of views. I helped thousands with my back pain tips. It was probably one of the things I did in life that had the widest positive impact.

But I hated making videos. Setting up shots, acting, editing, or posting regularly to social media became the bane of my existence. It was miserable. So, I quit.

Treat finding your purpose like finding your spouse. You wouldn’t give someone who you had a boring first date with a second date.

If you don’t enjoy it immediately, quit.

Your Purpose Should Serve Others

Don’t engage with an activity anymore once you realize you’re doing it for your own self-serving interests over those of the people you’re trying to provide value to.

One of the things I realized about my Instagram mission was that I was doing it purely for the money. I just wanted ad revenue and people to buy workout programs from me. I didn’t really care who the videos helped.

If you go on a first date with someone and you realize that the only reason you would take them on a second date is so that you can have the chance to get them into bed, you shouldn’t go on that second date.

You Will Suffer

You must accept that there will be suffering in anything worth pursuing. As I sit here writing this piece, I am constantly being pulled away from it by my own mind. I want to check my email, scroll social media, or peruse YouTube for a salsa video I’ve already seen.

Writing something worth reading is hard. Just like me sitting here writing to you, the direction you choose will involve struggle, and it should.

Watch Free Solo, Meru, or 14 Peaks. These are all climbing movies. Climbers are the epitome of people who have found an activity they love, that brings them fulfillment, which is also paired with extreme suffering. These climbers inspire us all to reach new heights, no matter the circumstance.

But we can’t all climb El Cap without ropes. The type of suffering you choose must be one you are willing to endure.

I don’t mind fighting my own desire to get away from this computer while I sit in this coffee shop writing to you. I don’t mind the pain of not knowing if I’ll be able to pay my gym’s lease next month. I don’t mind the fear of asking for a dance. But there’s no universe where I climb Meru with frostbitten toes.

You’re not going to love every minute of the pursuit you’ve chosen, but you must fall in love with the process of it. You must appreciate the type of suffering it brings you.

Give Something to the World

Around me, all I hear is a world that is crying out for meaning.

I’ve realized that this piece is less of a way to teach you how to find purpose than a desperate plea for you to find it. I want fewer people to end up with a life they feel they wasted. I want fewer people to be counting down their days to retirement.

Humans are communal creatures. We live to serve the greater good of the species. And that’s what you should be doing. Give something to the world that people are willing to give you extra in return. It doesn’t have to be money. It could be love, connection, or fulfillment.

Your path to a life of substance will not be a rosy journey without strife, no matter what the movies show. It will involve you taking risks in finding something worth pursuing, developing a process you can embed yourself into and keep going even when you want to quit. Forget the promises that were given to you about an easy life, because one with meaning won’t be.

But it will be one worth living.

Hey Reader,

I hope you enjoyed this piece. It’s less doom and gloom than what I’ve been writing lately. Unfortunately, I believe the next piece will be more doom and gloom. But, with a little meaning behind us, I think we will all be alright.

Thanks for reading,

John

Words: 1663

Reading Time: 6.5-8 Minutes

Why Does Everyone Have the New iPhone?

When I was eighteen, I worked in a pizza restaurant. I was a delivery driver. It was a fantastic job. The pay was decent (more than $15/hour eleven years ago), and the work was easy. I liked to drive, and I liked listening to music (still do, though driving not so much). It was the perfect job.

I had this coworker, his name was also John, who always complained about money. His parents were poor (or principled, maybe), and they made him pay for everything, including his car and his phone.

One day, he showed up to work with the newest iPhone. After all his complaining about how broke he was, I had to ask.

“Is that the new iPhone?” I asked him.

“Yeah man, it’s pretty sweet,” John replied.

“Isn’t that thing like $900? I thought you said you were broke.”

“Yeah, but dude I didn’t pay for it up front. Nobody does that. It’s only like thirty-something a month. And they gave me a good deal on my trade in.”

John was right, hardly anyone paid for their phone up front back then. And few people do today.

Telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T have had a strangle-hold on phone markets for a long time. And they have all come to this clever agreement with their customers. They convince their customers that if they just sign a long-term contract, wherein they pay monthly for their phone instead of up front, they can pay zero-interest for the whole term.

The common term duration used to be 24 months. But now that people want new phones less often, as phone technology fails to improve dramatically over time, the loan terms are now 36 months. They’ll even give you massive credit for your old, beat-up phone, for signing on the dotted line. With favorable loan durations and excellent trade-in incentives, you can be paying as low as $8 or $10 a month for the newest iPhone, which retails for $1,200-$2,000.

As a result of these contracts, the barrier to getting the “latest and greatest” tech is low. Most people, no matter how poor, can afford $10 a month. Now, it feels like everyone has the newest iPhone, no matter how much money they have. However, as you can imagine, these contracts aren’t as good as they seem.

Nothing is, unfortunately.

These contracts are actually a scam. If you bought a phone through a carrier with trade-in credits (as most do) and then decide to pay off your phone early and leave your carrier, you must then pay the full price of the phone, minus whatever small payments you have made over the months you have been paying. The credits for that phone you gave them go away. You never get your old phone back. That phone belonged to your carrier the moment you signed it over.

These telecom companies make the process of paying off your phone as painful as possible to keep you from leaving. And with the prices of phones being so high, most people who can afford an $8-a-month payment probably can’t afford the $743 it’ll take to pay the phone off. They’re trapped.

Furthermore, if you look at the prices of iPhones over the past 18 years since the first iPhone was launched, you’ll realize that having everyone pay for their phones on credit has another consequence.

We all know that the iPhone has not gotten much better over the past five years. If I gave you an iPhone from 2020 and asked you to use it instead of whichever phone you have now, you probably would hardly notice the difference.

How has the price of these iPhones continued to climb, despite a lack of the rise in quality? The newest iPhone is now $1,999 for the highest tier. That’s an almost 4x increase over the original iPhone, which was $599 at launch.

Now, you might counter-argue with the fact that inflation has risen a lot since the first iPhone was released. That would be a good counterargument. However, it misses something crucial about technology.

Phone technology has become a commodity. The commoditization of technology should decrease that technology’s price of replication over time. Especially when competing manufacturers make phones as good as the iPhone for one-half to one-third of the price.

We see this in the television industry. Here is a chart of the median price of televisions from 2007, the year of the launch of the iPhone, to today. This chart includes inflation.

Television technology has increased at arguably the same rate as cell phone technology. The prevalence of OLED displays, shrinking bezel sizes, the thinning of television bodies, the incorporation of computer chips, and the improvement of those computer chips proves that. However, the median price of televisions today is now one-quarter of what it was in 2007. That is almost the exact inverse trend of what we have seen in the cell phone industry.

How could that be?

I’ll tell you how: almost nobody buys their TV with monthly installment plans.

However, people do something even worse with TVs: they buy them with credit cards.

BankAmericard

Credit cards have existed in their modern form—with credit carrying and interest payments—since 1958. They began when Bank of America created a new, revolving credit card concept and called it BankAmericard. They sent these cards to 60,000 residents of Fresno, California.

These were not the credit card applications you get in the mail. These were working credit cards with a $300 limit (~$4,000 today) that one day just appeared on people’s front doorstep. The goal, for Bank of America, was to make money. However, at the time, they also considered it as a sort of social experiment. They really were not sure what would happen.

As you can imagine, the experiment didn’t go well. People went on spending sprees. There were massive delinquency rates. Cards were stolen and lost. Fraud was committed. And millions of dollars were lost.

Fortunately, the credit card was never again used in modern society.

Haha—just kidding, obviously. The execs at Bank of America learned something important: people really wanted to use these credit cards. And so, they came up with an application process, set up some safety rails, and away we went into the Era of Credit.

Years later, BankAmericard was turned into Visa. Then MasterCard, American Express, and Discover entered the industry. Now, in the U.S. alone, Americans hold about $1.2 trillion of credit-card debt.

But credit cards aren’t installment plans like loans. We haven’t created a structured monthly-payment plan system for cheeseburgers.

Or have we?

Cheeseburgers on Layaway

The idea of buying a cheeseburger on layaway seems like a ridiculous idea. At least, it did back in 1997, the year when the movie Good Will Hunting came out. They made a whole scene about it.

If you remember the scene, Will, Chuckie, Morgan, and Billie are driving in the car, having just gotten burgers at a drive-through. Chuckie, played by young Ben Affleck, begins handing out the burgers to his buddies in the car. Morgan, played by Ben’s brother Casey, bought a snow cone before and only had sixteen cents to his name. After irritating Chuckie with his impatience, Chuckie gets fed up and comes up with a plan for Morgan to get his sandwich.

“Alright, well give me yoah fuckin’ sixteen cents that you got on you now and we’ll put yoah fuckin’ sandwich on layaway,” Chuckie says in his thick Boston accent as he puts Morgan’s double burger on the dashboard of his old sedan. “We’ll keep it right up here for you and we’ll put you on a program. Every day you come in with yoah six cents and at the end of the week you get yoah sandwich.”

After his tirade, he ends up throwing the burger to Morgan in the backseat anyway.

These young men, who were poor as the day was long, couldn’t actually imagine buying a burger with installments. They were one step up from getting payday loans to pay their rent. Will worked as a janitor at MIT and Chuckie worked laying brick. But even to these guys, a burger on layaway was hilarious. And at the end of it, Chuckie still had the money to buy his buddy a burger.

But, today, a double burger on layaway is a reality.

Just this year it was announced that you can purchase your DoorDash with Klarna. Klarna is one of the largest buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) corporations. If you don’t know what BNPL is, think “glorified, tech-driven payday loans.” BNPL has digitized the ability for people to pay later for things they cannot afford today.

Klarna has two pay-in-the-future options for your cheeseburger. You can pay for it within a 30-day period. Or you can pay for it with four 0%-interest installments. But, of course, there’s a catch: if you miss a payment, you’ll be charged 20%-36% interest for that double burger that you bought a month ago.

Klarna is not just integrated into DoorDash. It’s everywhere. It’s becoming increasingly popular on more merchant websites. It’s available at grocery stores. And if it’s not Klarna, it’s one of its competitors like Affirm or Afterpay. There’s even an app called Flex that lets people pay their rent with credit.

People are making everything financeable.

This might seem like a good idea. It gives people the opportunity to buy something they might need in a pinch. But I sense a massive issue is coming if we don’t start to think critically about whether we accept these new forms of credit lending.

We have seen people buying now and paying later for homes, cars, and phones for a long time. I never even mentioned student loans, which we could add to that list. And over the course of time, we have seen all these things increase in cost.

If we can finance everything, will there be anything left that stays cheap?

Hey You!

I hope you enjoyed this little two-part series. Now, go be a good little sheep and order DoorDash, buy it on credit, and stay inside before anyone catches you causing a ruckus, talking about ‘Hey, you know, I wish our government wasn’t in so much debt,’ and ‘Why does it seem like the stock market goes up irrationally high when the fed lowers the rates?’

Stop asking questions, little one. You’re not in control of this ship anymore.

Love,

John

Words: 1224

Reading Time: 5-6 Minutes

Imagine I stripped away all ability for you to get a loan for anything. No more loans for your kid’s college, your home, your car, or that new addition for your house that you were going to use a home equity line of credit for. Then, I cut up all your credit cards. Afterwards, I told you that you were only allowed to buy the things that you could afford with the money in your bank account.

How much would the car be that you would buy next?

How much will your next house cost? Would you decide to buy a new one at all?

What kind of university would you send your kid to?

Would you still do that addition?

Humans fear losing money today more than in the future. We are more willing to pay a small number per month, but pay more in aggregate, than we are willing to pay a large sum up front. This all stems from a neurological battle that goes on in our minds. Our prefrontal cortex, which handles long-term abstract reasoning, must fight our limbic system, which seeks immediate reward.

People are bad at this. We evolved to survive the day. We ate our kill the moment the hunt was over because we didn’t know when the next kill would come. And, frankly, we had no way of preserving it.

Immediate gratification is baked into our genetic code. And it’s why people pay every month for things they bought in the past. Things like their home, their car, their cell phone, or even their most recent meal delivery.

This is called being in debt. Debt is bad because it usually means that you couldn’t afford something that you wanted so now you have to pay more for it over time. But, according to some, debt can occasionally be good.

Good Debt

Good debt is considered good because it is usually wealth building and has low interest rates. Business debt is seen as good because it’s leveraged to build revenue that provides you with an income. A mortgage is seen as good because it helps you obtain (hopefully) appreciating real-estate assets. A student loan provides you with an education and better job opportunities when you graduate (well, they used to.)

The thing about business loans, mortgages, student loans, and car loans is they are—or at least should be—challenging to get. They typically require high credit scores, a substantial lending history, and years of sustainable income that is far more than the loan repayment costs.

But I don’t think the good debt is always all that good. When it is overused, it can become a systemic financial hazard.

Take home prices. The current state of home ownership in the U.S. is problematic, considering that the median home price is far more than most people can possibly pay with what’s in their bank account.

As of 2025, the median home price in America is $415,200. Because home prices are so high, people must use mortgages to buy them. And because people are willing to pay more in the future than they are willing to pay today, they are willing to pay more than they can afford for a home. This becomes a self-reinforcing loop, pushing home prices ever higher.

Then, when home prices get too high, the government often jumps in to “help” the situation, by loosening lending practices. This boost in lending usually leads to the problem of inflated home prices getting worse. And we have many such cases of this.

Help to Buy

In 2013 in Britain, the UK government created a series of programs called “Help to Buy” (HtB). These programs offered a mortgage to first-time buyers that decreased the barrier to entry for home purchase. Another goal of the program was to increase the construction of more affordable homes. So, the subsidy only applied to new construction homes under a certain price.

The program worked by offering first-time buyers a low down payment, 5% of the value of the home, and then an interest-free equity loan for the next 20% or so of the value of the home. Then, after an interest-free period, these buyers would pay their normal mortgage.

It was a messed-up system. I’m honestly probably describing it wrong. It was convoluted and stupid, as most government subsidy programs tend to be. It also had a stipulation that when these people sold their homes, they owed the government money on the original equity loan. So, they didn’t get nearly as much of the upside if the value of the home went up, and then they owed on the downside if the value of the home went down.

If that’s not bad enough, the HtB program also distorted the UK housing market.

First, prices of homes that fit the description of the program ballooned to the cap price of the program. This inflated the prices of these homes beyond the value of the subsidy.

Furthermore, builders shrank the sizes of homes to increase the profits they would make on the sale.

On top of that, construction volumes didn’t even exceed what would have been expected if the program were not to exist.

What the UK got for this program was more expensive homes of lesser quality that people now had to pay back the government for.

The HtB program ended in 2023.

HtB shows how cheap money lending in a market distorts prices. But it doesn’t just happen for homes; it happens in every sector where purchases can be made in installments, like cars.

Sleazy Car Salesmen

The people who know this human tendency best are car dealers.

Recently, I was chatting with a couple of female clients of mine. One woman mentioned that her daughter was about to buy a new car, and that she was going to go with her daughter so that she didn’t get screwed by the dealership.

I asked her a simple question, “What’s her budget?”

I thought I’d get a number like $20,000 or so. But that wasn’t the answer.

Instead, she said, “Well, she can afford $400 a month.”

When my client’s daughter walks into that car dealership, she will be fought over by the salesmen. They will work the numbers to make the most expensive, attractive car on their lot that catches the girl’s eye to cost only $400 a month (as long as she is willing to pay $400 a month forever.)

And because people like my client’s daughter have primarily used car loans to buy their cars for decades, the price of cars has risen as well.

This problem is exacerbated when the Federal Reserve (which should be abolished) lowers rates. In the Pandemic zero-interest-rate-policy (ZIRP) era, car prices skyrocketed. New car prices ballooned 27 percent from an average of $38,800 in the first quarter of 2020 to $49,500 only two years later. Used-car prices went up 45 percent in the same period.

Again, cheap money lending means prices go up.

But there’s another item that is purchased with debt that has no interest tied to it. The prices of it are not affected when interest rates or lending policies change. However, it’s clear to see that prices have risen because most people buy it with debt.

And it’s something that you spend most of your day holding in your hand.

Hey, Reader!

I hope you’re enjoying this piece. Stick around for part two, when I answer the question you’ve been asking yourself for years: Why do all these poor people have a newer iPhone than me?

Stay tuned,

John

Words: 1672

Reading Time: 7-9 Minutes

Economic Reform

We have more issues, however, than just military and immigration. We also have a severe debt problem. To begin solving the conundrum of massive debt that our country has created, Americans need to place blame and enact consequences of the over-spending where it should be placed: Congress.

Congress holds the power of the purse, according to the American Constitution. To ensure they spend our money wisely in the future, American lawmakers should pass a Law, or better, ratify an Amendment, that bars anyone in Congress from reelection if the U.S. Treasury holds any debt whatsoever. Our Country must be a creditor, not a debtor, if we want to retain our greatness.

Furthermore, once we have paid our debts and have a financial surplus, we must begin purchasing large amounts of gold. Once we have a justifiably large quantity of gold, we must peg the U.S. dollar back to it.

This is no easy task. To ensure that we don’t devalue our currency, we would need to purchase a large amount of gold. I don’t know what the actual amount, in tons, America would need to purchase in gold to get back to a gold standard. But it’s safe to say this could take decades of gold purchasing and gold mining to achieve; however, the long-term goal of a gold-stable U.S. Dollar would be worth the time and effort.

Speaking of the U.S. Dollar, the Federal Reserve must be abolished. They have mishandled the U.S. Dollar since it began operations in 1914.

Truly free markets must be able to dictate the interest rates on loaned money, which means the federal government must not have such a large role in the economy, as it currently does with its ability to adjust interest rates against free market currents.

The Federal Reserve was not envisioned by the Founding Fathers, who had incredible foresight. Many things that were invented by the federal government as additions to its Constitutionally granted powers were mistakes. The Federal Reserve was one of those mistakes.

But there were also things that the Founding Fathers missed. Which is why we have 27 Amendments. And I propose we have one more.

I believe that we should have a 28^th Amendment that declares that corporations are not people, nor should they be granted the same rights as people.

Ever since the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Supreme Court ruling, we have continued to grant more human rights to corporations. We have allowed people to shield themselves from legal burden and tax liabilities with entities like limited-liability companies. And we have permitted corporations, interpreted by the Supreme Court as ‘persons’ under the law, to buy property.

Corporations should not be allowed to own property as a person can. If we want home ownership to be affordable, we cannot let large corporations be property owners and landlords. And if we want fair landlords, they must be people, not massive corporate entities.

Large corporations have also captured the American market through regulations. In 1971, economist George Stigler argued that “As a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.”

Much to the disagreement of the socialist, regulation does not control big business, regulation supports it. Regulation creates barriers for small businesses to compete. It encourages monopolies by restricting competitive practices employed by smaller companies, who are targeting the market of larger companies with novel approaches.

Most regulations in America are spearheaded by large companies, in collusion with the government for exactly this purpose. If the regulation is implemented before any collusion takes place, collusion happens after the fact, to ensure that the large corporation does not have to withstand the consequences of the regulation that is in its way.

American businesses are dying from corporate regulatory capture. Almost no new banks, telecom, or healthcare businesses can be created because of the web of regulations that currently exist. To stop large corporations from continuing to suck the life out of small companies through regulatory capture, we need to implement a three-step plan:

1. Place a five-year regulation freeze on all future federal business regulations.

2. Set a one-year expiration on all current business regulations at the federal level.

3. Force all expired or about-to-be expired regulations to pass the House and Senate with a two-thirds majority and be signed by the President to be reinstated.

Having all regulations expire after one year completely refocuses our House and Senate on reinstalling only those regulations that are useful, instead of adding more harmful regulations. And since there would be a two-thirds majority requirement, the regulations will most likely be bipartisan.

Furthermore, stopping new regulations from being implemented over five years would limit the government’s ability to slow down businesses in the short term. This also would allow the economy and environment to experience this low-regulation period to see which regulations are needed back into the system.

Social Renewal (Work, Retirement, Entitlement)

Regulatory capture is not the only thing holding back the U.S. economy. There are also three more government-supported systems staining the American workforce: entitlement programs, unions, and retirement programs.

America is facing a workforce that has been defined by government dependence and entitlement. We have over ten million working-age Americans currently receiving some or multiple forms of disability payments through Social Security, the VA, or other programs. And we all know people who are on these programs. I would go as far to say most of these people receiving these payments could work — and would work — if the programs didn’t exist.

These entitlement programs are encouraging people to remove themselves from the American workforce. Their reception of this money is also a massive burden on the American taxpayer who must pay for them. It is time we abolished these programs. Or, at the very least, raise the bar for those who receive their support.

We should also abolish all federal laws that offer union protection. Unions should be allowed to exist, as there is no constitutional argument restricting them. But there must be a balance between the employer and employee. Free markets depend on voluntary agreements. And employers get very little, if any, say in how they can handle their employees in union-led industries.

Union bloat has pushed a lot of manufacturing offshore due to this pressure on employers to provide working conditions and pay levels that are not economically possible. This bloat has also greatly slowed down the speed of construction in the United States. We have all seen a roadside construction site with one guy digging a hole and four guys watching him. These types of overly empathetic working conditions, driven by union demands, should end.

Unions also provide pensions to union members. This is fine if a union can support such a system. It is even fine for an employer to develop and enact a pension system. The issue is, most pension systems, if upheld only by the currents of the free market, would fail. Unless a union or company is eternally growing faster than the number of people retiring from it, pension systems are always mathematically doomed to collapse.

This is also true for federal pension systems and social security. Both of which need to be immediately abolished. The reason for my hard stance on these systems is because pension systems and social security convince workers that they can receive a paycheck forever for doing no work after a certain age. These government-backed systems, just like any union pension system, are also economically not feasible. And we are currently seeing this with the US Social Security system, which is supposedly going to be totally depleted by 2035.

Old-age retirement systems create bad incentives. They ensure that people, at a certain age, can stop working for the rest of their lives. This, in a functioning society, is not possible. There must only be a small number of people whom the rest of the population supports. Otherwise, if this non-contributor class grows too large, the whole population begins to collapse. This is happening right now with Japan, whose dependency ratio is now at about 70 dependents (children and elderly) for every 100 working-age adults. A country that was once the epicenter of incredible growth and innovation is now seeing economic stagnation and rural collapse. America cannot face the fall that Japan is experiencing, and the numbers show we are quickly headed there.

America was never meant to be a country of retirees. Nor could it theoretically withstand such fate. But slowly, that is what America is becoming.

Not only do we have pensions and social security draining the pockets of taxpayers, but homes, private businesses, property, and public market assets have become vehicles to support retirees. This retiree class is sucking the life out of the American economic system, which to operate at the productivity level that will give us any shot at a future that looks like The Jetsons, requires an all-hands-on-deck approach to making progress.

Now, that doesn’t mean that older people need to work in factories with their bare hands. Their roles should transition to more physically manageable tasks or more mentally engaging tasks that involve their ability to use their wisdom in decision-making. But they must be productive Americans. They must help us build the future and restore the American Dream.

My solutions are simple and easy to implement with the right amount of willpower. Nothing I’ve proposed requires more than Americans agreeing on what America should be and then signing on a dotted line. The biggest physical hurdle will be building the border walls. Everything else is a matter of focus and desire.

As Americans, it is time we call on our leaders to do what is right. It’s time they fight for America, not for foreign nations. Our leaders should govern for Americans, not corporations and illegal immigrants. And then, we must come together, as a community of Americans and as groups of American families, to build each successive generation better than our own.

That is the American Dream.

Read Next: Part 1 or Part 2 of the America is Dying Series

Hey You,

If you’ve read Parts 1-3 of this series, I really appreciate that. I hope that you see the problems I’ve identified as well and think that my solutions aren’t dumb.

But, if you don’t like my solutions, leave me a comment and tell me why! I’m always up for discussion.

Anyway, thanks again for reading. It’s kind of weird that you took time out of your day to read words I wrote and that’s a nice thing for me.

See you in the next one,

John

As I was editing these next two parts of this series, I had a worry. I worried that the next two pieces will bore you.

You see, we humans love to talk about problems. Problems are fun to discuss with friends. We can all sound really smart because we can identify the issues around us and intellectualize about it.

But, what’s really hard, is coming up with solutions. And solutions are way less fun to discuss. Problems engage us. We hear Breaking News on the TV and we turn the volume up to hear what bad thing just happened. But, weeks later, when the lawmakers and authorities are working on solutions to the problem and passing bills and laws, we have already moved onto the next problem.

The next two parts of the America is Dying series are about solutions. They aren’t as much fun as reading me ramble on about debt and fertility rates. But I think they are significantly more important to read than part one. Even though you’ll be bored by them.

So, Dear Reader, do your best to enjoy how I think we can fix America.

Love,

John

Words: 1220

Reading Time: 4-6 Minutes

The death of America will not be quick. When empires fall, they fall slowly. Depending on how you view their respective empires across time, it took centuries for the eventual collapse of the Roman and Ottoman Empires. America is exhibiting many of the same attributes of a failing empire: rising debt, a devaluation of its currency, spending money on entitlement programs and funding unjustifiable wars.

We are all living during the decline of a once-great nation. I’m sure that most of us can see the decline. I’m not without hope for our country’s revival, however. There are a series of solutions that we could implement to spark such a revival. We can reinvigorate the American Dream and then obtain it. There is no physical law that says we cannot. And if we begin rebuilding today, the benefits of the plan that I suggest we put forth will be felt tomorrow.

Foreign Policy and Defense

The plan starts with America ceasing the funding of all foreign wars. We must refocus our military on American defense. Part of the reason America funds these foreign wars is because we pledge to defend allied nations in nearly all circumstances. Israel and Ukraine are good examples. These are two countries that we gave assurances of defense to. And despite Israel conducting a probable genocide on the Palestinian people it claims to be at war with, and Ukraine fighting a losing battle with little hope against Russia, we continue to support them with money we simply do not have.

For America to think rationally about where it spends its military dollars, it must institute a “No Favored or Enemy Nations” policy. George Washington, in his farewell address, said that “The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave... it is a slave to its animosity or to its affection.”

As a founding father, he deeply understood why America was built and how to protect it. America needs to return to our historical ideals and leave all foreign alliances, both military and economic, such as NATO, the U.N., and the W.T.O.

This set of actions would help refocus American leaders on America. In the future, with this renewed understanding of how to conduct foreign affairs, we can better defend America and American interests. We will greatly decrease the chances of another 9/11 because we have more military eyes honed onto American soil and looking out for danger. It would also massively help our debt problem, because so much of our federal spending goes to the military, which has never once passed a financial audit.

Immigration and National Identity

Once we focus our leaders back on America, we must ensure that Americans are truly Americans, and that citizenship in this Great Nation holds great meaning. We ought to have shared values. And we need to agree on the big picture. These are essential components of having a peaceful society.

That means America should have hard lines on immigration and stick to them. The current political landscape seems to concern itself only with border security. There hasn’t been meaningful immigration reform since President Reagan legalized 2.7 million illegal immigrants. Recently, President Trump added a $100,000 fee to the H-1B visa. If this is what modern immigration reform looks like, I would argue that American leadership has been focused on the wrong things lately.

Border protection is a crucial aspect of immigration policy. We need to ensure that we have strong borders in the long term. We need to build big, beautiful border walls between Mexico and Canada.

The Great Wall of China was built between the 14^th and 17^th century and spans over 5,500 miles. The borders between the US and Mexico and the US and Canada are roughly 7,500 miles combined. In the year 2025, it should be possible to build an immense set of border walls in far less time than it took the ancient Chinese. The current metal lattice structure that America has dividing us and Mexico is not sufficient for the world’s greatest nation.

Then, to secure our ocean-facing borders, we must station Navy vessels continually off the Costs of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Gulf. We can do this for far less money than we spend on foreign war fighting. The American borders must be seen to outside nations as an impenetrable lining around a great fortress.

Then, we must tackle a deeper problem of immigration, which is that the fundamental makeup of our country is problematic. Our overly lenient immigration policy has flooded our country with immigrants who do not share American values or American ideals. They do not have the same vision for this country that our Founding Fathers shared.

US immigrants generated $80-85 billion in 2022 of remittance payments, which makes the US the single largest remittance-sending country. They do not see America as a place to invest their money. Immigrants view this country as a honeypot to distribute money back to the land they call home. It is time for America to put an end to the modern American immigrant’s lack of integration with American society.

The solution to this is to simplify the US immigration process and raise the bar for who is granted access to our Great Nation. To do this, we should revoke all immigration statuses and start from scratch. America should have a three-tiered immigration system: illegal, Green Card, and full Citizen.

Green Cards, under my suggested minimalist plan, would be granted to anyone who meets a few clear but demanding criteria. To get a Green Card, one must speak English, have no communicable diseases upon application, no history of criminal activity in their previous country or America, have a skill or skills that applies to a job with few applicants, and clearly be able to demonstrate American values.

The first three criteria are easy to test and are mostly objective. Being able to demonstrate American values would be the toughest to evaluate. But I believe a civics-style test would suffice, especially because this Green Card would not automatically grant you full citizenship. Furthermore, anyone in this country today who does not meet these Green Card criteria and intends to stay for a long period should be deported and required to reapply.

Full citizenship would only come to those who are either born here, of course, or who meet another set of even harder to achieve criteria. To achieve full citizenship, a person should have to renounce their citizenship in all foreign nations, have had a green card for five years, have had a U.S.-based income for four full years, and have conducted no criminal activity since being a Green Card holder.

In my opinion, if an immigrant is working hard in this country to make a living, contributing to our society, isn’t a criminal, and they are willing to revoke their citizenship to a foreign nation to become fully Americanized, I’m happy to let them into this country. I can be confident that such an immigrant most likely shares a value system like mine, and we can live peacefully together. There will be outliers and bad actors with the ability to patiently wait, of course. But this system would be a substantial upgrade compared to our current bureaucratic process that is typically avoided through fake marriages.

Read Next: Part 3 (Coming Soon)

Words: 1588

Reading Time: 6-8 Minutes

The Lost Dream

Since I was young, I have been unusually tuned into politics. Before Obama got elected, I can remember debating with my sixth-grade homeroom teacher about who should become the next president. My teacher argued in favor of Obama. I argued in favor of McCain. We had it out in front of the entire class. I can distinctly recall the look on her face as we jousted back and forth. The look said, “Am I really arguing with a 12-year-old about this?”

I knew that I cared more than my classmates about America. While most kids at twelve were watching cartoons and Nickelodeon, I would stay up late watching Steven Colbert and Jon Stewart. Upon reflection, it wasn’t the best political education ­­­­­­— but they were hilarious. And I think Colbert’s old parody of a Republican talking head shaped my political viewpoints today.

Through their crass jokes about American political infotainment, I developed a sense that America was not doing okay. It was not the beacon of exceptionalism that my teachers in history classes taught me to imagine us as. The post-World War II United States that I learned about in textbooks and History Channel documentaries did not appear like the America of today.

The America of old seemed more coherent and together. The men and women of the 40s, 50s, and 60s seemed like they were working towards a common goal. We fought against true evil in alongside our European allies to topple Germany, Japan, and a fascist Italy. These were three nations that seemed deeply immoral but also powerful. Then, after the War, we became a manufacturing giant. We built incredible cars, appliances, and goods that were built to last. Made in America was a default, not a rarity.

However, as a young boy, I knew America was not as it was when my grandparents were young. As the Republican talking heads cheered on Bush’s war against terrorism in the Middle East, I watched Steven Colbert make a mockery out of their certainty that we were doing the right thing. But, to me, those war efforts clearly felt different. At the time, I played a lot of the video game series Call of Duty. And the fourth installment, Modern Warfare, had far less appeal to me than World at War. America was not fighting great powers, as we did in World War II. We were bombing desert people who lived in mud huts that were in countries that I couldn’t point to on a map.

Meanwhile, all the clothes I wore were no longer Made in America. They were made in Taiwan. And my toys were no longer made from metal. They were made from plastic and they came from China.

I knew things were not going in the right direction for the country I was born in and loved. When I was fourteen years old, I had a deep fear about US National debt. The year was 2011, and I was in eighth grade. At the time, total US national debt was $14.79 trillion. A number so big it didn’t make sense to me at the time (and it still doesn’t). There was all this talk about China. China was becoming a world power. We had given them the keys to our manufacturing castle. And they owned almost ten percent of our debt. At fourteen, being easily compelled by violent war video games, I figured soon enough China would invade us.

That didn’t happen, obviously. But at twenty-three, my fears for the fall of America came sharply back. I watched the movie The Big Short alone in my bedroom. COVID was still consuming the airtime of most news stations. At the end of the movie, when Steve Carrell’s character, Mark Baum, and his team are discussing the bank bailouts, they explained that the banks, government, and rating agencies all knew of the systemic problem they were creating. And the executives at the top were not going to have to face the consequences for their actions.

I cried at the end of that movie, one which I had seen before, upon the realization that this is the America I live in. One where the government, overstepping its powers by great lengths beyond the ideal limitations of the Constitution, protects the rich and powerful at the expense of those they profited from for years. In this moment, the structural decay of America seemed greater than what we can handle. And I feared that the country I love might not be long for this world.

And six years later, I still do.

The Decline

Our Founding Fathers had a vision for America. One with free markets, free people, and minimal government intervention. It’s a grand vision. And it’s one I think America today is failing to strive for.

I’m a capitalist. I think capitalism is the best economic system that man has enacted. I cheered while reading Atlas Shrugged. And I know that the America we live in today does not have a capitalist system. Far from it.

Free Market Capitalism is supposed to exist as its name suggests, a system in which individuals may freely pursue their own economic interests, unimpeded by others, and engage in voluntary exchange. But regulatory capture and government collusion have destroyed capitalism in America, and it’s hard not to see the consequences.

Go to any American city. More of the restaurants and shops than ever are no longer owned by those who work inside their walls. Many of the restaurants that we visit as Americans are franchises, because mom and pop restaurants can no longer afford the rents. The plazas that these restaurants occupy are owned by national development companies like Benderson, who hardly see their tenants as real people. Apartments are not owned by anyone who lives in that town. They are owned by massive companies like Greystar, who engage in predatory rent practices to raise rents beyond what the average American can afford.

Why are we even talking about rent, anyway? So much of the American Dream that I was sold on as a younger person was to own a home and fill it with a family. But now it feels like people under thirty-five aren’t buying homes anymore. And with the homeownership rate for people under thirty-five at 36.3%, that feeling holds true.

While people under thirty-five can’t buy homes, their parents and the generation above them are living like kings. Boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — hold 52-55% of all US household wealth. Many are happily retired. They play pickleball and go on European vacations. They experienced the American dream.

However, the younger generations are feeling the American Dream they were sold on slip through their grasp. So much so that the young people of New York City, saddled with debt and overcome with rent payments, are poised to elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-proclaimed socialist, as mayor.

Socialism is anti-American. And socialist or socialist-adjacent politicians are gaining more traction than ever. This trend tells us that American people are giving up on the capitalist system that made this country exceptional.

The American Dream all began to fall apart in the 1970s. As inflation began steadily creeping up, partly due to spending too much on losing battles in the Korean and Vietnam wars, Nixon suspended the US dollar’s convertibility into gold in 1971 (state.gov). The American dollar began to fall in value faster than ever before. The prices of groceries crept up. The prices of cars slowly increased. The price of appliances rose ever so slightly.

After some rough economic times in the 1980s, America doubled down on its economic losses. In 1994, after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, much of American automobile manufacturing moved away from Detroit and down to Mexico. And then in 2001, China was added to the World Trade Organization. As a result, America handed over a large share of its electronic and consumer goods manufacturing workload.

Not only did we throw away a lot of our manufacturing might, but we also stopped focusing on American priorities. On September 11, 2001, two planes struck the Twin Towers, and gave American war hawks a greenlight to begin wars across an ocean against people who live in the desert with a culture we simply don’t understand.

Our increasingly globalist agenda doesn’t stop with our politicians, either. Instead of focusing on problems in America, our news stations spend most of their airtime discussing foreign affairs. And the American people seem so focused on their division about what to do about Ukraine or Palestine, that few really worry about the problems in their own backyard.

After all this decline, both in American capability and American nationalism, we are now a country with $37.7 trillion in debt, a fertility rate of 1.6, and the once-vibrant New York City on the cusp of electing a socialist as mayor.

Back in the 60s, there was this show called The Jetsons. It envisioned a life in the mid-twenty-first century that had flying cars, homes in the sky, and robot maids. This show was a testament to the optimism of Americans at the time. The future seemed so bright for them.

But now, when people speak of flying cars, robot maids, and automation, a sense of fear grows in their eyes. This fear is mixed with a slight flicker of anger, directed at the nameless and faceless oligarchs who are building the future that they believe is not for them.

America is dying. And it needs to be revived.

Read Next: Part 2 on How to Save America

Hiya Buddy,

Thanks for reading this. I hope you’re as American as I am and don’t want to see the death of this great country.

Stay tuned, because the next piece I write is going to be about how we fix America before we lose it. And I think my plan is pretty good!

Stay Tuned,

- John

A runaway train is speeding down the tracks towards your future children who you have not yet had. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull the lever, it diverts the train. And instead, it will run over the career you’ve currently planned for yourself.

Do you pull the lever and destroy your chances of having your career, or let the train keep going and end the chance of you having children?

Words: 2205

Estimated Reading Time: 9-11 minutes

I ask a lot of questions to those around me about parenting. I am one of the rare Americans who actually wants to have kids one day, and ideally a lot of them (I’ve gotten my girlfriend to agree to four but shooting for five (she’ll come around)). Since I’m a personal trainer in Naples, Florida, most of the people I speak to about parenting are Boomers and Gen Xers. But I have one pregnant client and a sister who just had a baby.

And from these conversations I’m growing increasingly excited about what I hear. Parents are growing cleverer over time to raise their children to not only be more capable on their own, but also to have their children be less of a burden on them. Just read below about some of these clever parenting hacks that I have had the privilege of learning about.

I recently heard about how parents are having their kids spend more time barefoot to make them more tactile. There’s actually some good research to back this up, as being barefoot in early childhood can lead to the development of balance and jumping ability.

Then there’s a new craze traveling around the parenting watercooler about white noise machines, which supposedly can improve a baby’s ability to fall asleep by up to 55%, according to a study.

And, how could I forget the Owlet “smart sock” or the Snuza “diaper clip” that tracks your baby’s tiny little vitals to alert you when they’re sleeping if something goes wrong to their tiny little cardiovascular system. Now, there isn’t any evidence that these devices prevent Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, but it is reported to help parents sleep better at night knowing their baby isn’t having a tiny little heart attack.

I’ve also heard about “sleep sacks”. They were described to me as little baby straitjackets that are all the rage for the babies in my client’s granddaughters daycare. According to a guy somewhere, these are better for babies to sleep in because they feel like they are being held by their parent, who is actually working from home on a proposal for the private equity firm they work for, but can’t have their newborn son around because he would be too much of a distraction.

I’m even lucky enough, before I’m a parent myself, to know about the SNOO Bassinet. This is another straitjacket-like bassinet that you strap your ever-so-small infant child into before she knows what the arms of her mother feel like versus Velcro strapping. It rocks your baby and even makes shushing sounds to keep her quiet at night. According to SNOO’s internal data, it gives the parents hours more sleep at night. Data is not currently available on the baby’s sleep quantity (but does that even matter, really?). Now, the SNOO Bassinet might cost $1,695. But, on two incomes, you can afford it.

And my personal favorite is sleep training. This is the medieval … sorry, um, modern parenting practice of having your tiny baby, who doesn’t even know how to say “Dada, why are you doing this to me?”, sleep in another room, and when they cry, letting them just continue until they’ve learn to shut up already.

All these clever hacks are also being implemented at a time when 50-60% of children are being placed in daycare either part-time or full-time as both parents work to make ends meet (or, to keep up with their spending habits).

I was under the impression that having children was a sacrifice. A sacrifice that one makes for the future of humanity. To raise the next generation, with love and care, so that they can prosper at a level that we only dreamed of ourselves. That the next generation, that we actively raise, can lead a life far grander, and with more progress than we can imagine happens today.

But all these parenting tips and tricks are making me realize that no, actually, this is the first time in the world where you can have your cake and eat it too. You can essentially not raise your children, replace the love and care typically provided by you, the parent, and outsource it to gadgets, gizmos, and minimum wage employees, and live the life you want. Meanwhile, your child grows up to have no developmental consequences whatsoever.

Or can you?

On top of listening to Boomers discuss how their Millennial children are raising their grandchildren while also juggling two full-time careers, I also listened to a TRIGGERnometry episode with psychoanalyst and parenting coach Erica Komisar. In this podcast, she said that parents are actually important to a child’s development and that we were all lied to about it being otherwise. According to Erica, it is important for a mother to be present for her baby. Especially in the first three years, she said that it is important for babies to be in low stress environments. When they are crying, they should be held. Ideally, by one or two primary caregivers (the mother and the father, ideally, probably.)

Komisar mentions cortisol, the hormone released in times of stress. She claims that babies in daycare environments have higher levels of cortisol and that these prolonged years of elevated cortisol could have negative consequences for a child’s mental development. And with adolescent prescriptions of antidepressants rising a staggering 66% between 2016 and 2022, I’m getting the impression that maybe she is right.

This was also talked about in a Psychology Today article by Corinne Masur, another psychoanalyst, who advocated that parents should think long and hard about, if they even decide to at all, what kind of daycare to send their child to. She had this novel idea in the article that parents should deeply consider the needs of their children before chucking them into some daycare that their friend Stacy told them about, whose four-year-old now has a biting problem.

Masur mentioned a Canadian study that tracked the cognitive outcomes of the children who attended Quebec’s universal childcare system that was rolled out in the 1990s. According to the research, the children who attended the government-funded daycare system had higher rates of aggression, anxiety, and hyperactivity. And yes, many became biters. But that was just a phase.

As they grew older, these young people had lower life satisfaction, worse health outcomes, and higher rates of criminal activity. All while having no cognitive gains. Which, unfortunately for the pro-daycare camp, is typically argued as a benefit of daycare because it socializes children (while they are all trapped in their sleep sacks in cheap bassinets).

Now, it seems brutal to condemn daycare as the cause of all these things. And Masur doesn’t fully condemn daycare. She really condemns low quality daycare. This is the daycare where you have one caregiver for multiple children (four or more). These caregivers don’t have degrees, aren’t paid well, and the facilities they work in are not particularly nice (definitely no SNOO Bassinets lying around).

There’s an often-cited study done by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development that tracked 1,364 infants from birth to the age of 15 from ten different daycare sites. The study essentially found that the low-quality daycares have bad childhood development outcomes, while high-quality daycares have less of the bad outcomes.

Shocker.

But many daycare advocates point to this study as proof that daycare can replace parents. And this advocacy has allowed daycare usage to increase dramatically, from 6% in 1965 to around 60% today.

The issue is, I’m unconvinced that daycares, particularly the low-quality ones, are as good as they claim to be. I fear they lie to parents, who they know aren’t doing enough research anyway.

I had a client who was a caregiver in a daycare center in Florida. Now, Florida has a law that requires daycares to have a ratio of one caregiver to every four children. But these laws aren’t well policed, or my client is a massive liar, because she said that she was the only caregiver looking after thirty babies at once. All while she was getting paid only $8.50 an hour.

If you’re scared by that reality as a parent, you’re not really in luck. Because getting high-quality care is expensive. Inexpensive daycare can get to be up to $1,000 a month in some cities. High quality care, with credentialed caregivers and good caregiver-to-tiny baby ratios, can cost upwards of $3,500 a month. And that’s only for one child.

Now, you may have heard that the reason daycare is important is because in modern America, where things are admittedly too expensive, a family must have two incomes to survive. But, if they can afford $3,500 a month on daycare for their three-month-old, how the heck am I supposed to believe that they can’t afford to have mom stay at home and watch the kids instead?

I think there’s probably a more unfortunate reality here: Americans just don’t want to be parents anymore. They don’t want to sacrifice their life for the life of their children. They are deeply and horrifyingly selfish.

At the risk of losing you, my dear reader, I wanted to mention an anecdote to prove my point. I know a couple who are lawyers. The father makes $4 million a year. The mother makes $1.5 million a year. They have two kids. And instead of giving up the extra $1.5 million in income, they send their two young boys to daycare all day.

I get it, very few of us will ever have a net income of $5.5 million. But what I’m trying to say is that many Americans are not just choosing daycare because they couldn’t afford to have kids otherwise. They are doing it as means to outsource their parenting. And even though they probably chose an expensive daycare, is it really better than the love and care their mother would give them?

I know, what I said was so anti-feminist, but I don’t care anymore. I’m saying this because I think we are destroying the development of children by not having their mothers take care of them. And it’s time more people stand up (or sit down at a keyboard and type) and say something.

My guess is that Komisar is right. That parents are important. That a mother holding her child in the crucial first few years of the innocent child’s life is important. That when a child cries, it needs to be cared for. Not trapped in the “nursery” with a smart sock on while it cries until it gives up and falls back to sleep.

While some Americans are choosing daycare as a convenience, there are many who truly feel like they must for financial reasons. I get that. I personally don’t know how I’m going to afford children, if I’m being honest. I recently just told my girlfriend that I can’t cook her dinner on Sunday because the price of meat is getting too high. How am I supposed to afford a SNOO in this world?

But there are things people can do to avoid putting their children in daycare full-time.

Komisar has recommendations for those who truly need to outsource their parenting because they must work. She recommends doing everything you can to give your child access to only one or two caregivers before your child turns three. If you can’t stay at home with your baby, have your parents take care of him. If your parents live in Florida now and resent you and your baby’s existence, have a close family relative watch them. If not, co-parent with your local community. Do anything that gives your child the highest quality of care with the fewest number of people involved possible.

Komisar places the responsibility of properly raising a child in the hands of the parents. Another novel idea. She said that as a parent, “you are responsible for your child’s mental illness.” A damning claim. And one that parents today really don’t want to hear.

I think what is happening with all these gadgets and gizmos and parenting hacks is that they are compensating for the fact that parents know they are neglecting their child. A mother misses their baby every minute of the day while she types out a budget report for the pharmaceutical company she works for that sucks her life away. A company she feels obligated to work for because she was told by society that she would be an anti-feminist if she followed her natural urge and stayed home and cradled her baby in her arms and shushed it until it stopped crying.

Parents put their baby in a sleep sack and hand it off to the caregiver at the daycare center with ten other babies. And then they feel half-decent about it because ten other parents chose to do the same thing.

We can’t all be bad parents, right?

If everyone else is neglecting their children, how am I the bad parent?

I want to live my life. I want to have my career. I don’t want to sacrifice my night of sleep for my baby.

You want. You want. You want.

And your baby wants too. But you can’t hear her because you sound-proofed her nursery.

Read Next: Retirement Investing Is Causing the Next Big Market Crash

Hey Reader!

Thanks for taking the time to read my writing. I respect you and your time. And it means a lot to me that you would spend your valuable time reading my work.

Please leave a comment or send me a message with any thoughts you have. I don’t think I’m right on everything, or anything, for that matter. And I’d love to be proven wrong. So, if you disagree with me, feel highly encouraged to reach out!

Enjoy Life,

- John

References

Komisar, Erica. Interview on TRIGGERnometry. Hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, TRIGGERnometry Podcast. YouTube, 2023.

Masur, Corinne. “Daycare: Yes or No? An Opinion Piece.” Psychology Today, 8 Oct. 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/202410/daycare-yes-or-no-an-opinion-piece.

Masur, Corinne. “What Is High Quality Day Care Anyway?” Psychology Today, 8 Oct. 2024, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/202410/what-is-high-quality-day-care-anyway.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). The NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development: Findings for Children up to Age 15 Years. National Institutes of Health, 2006.

Baker, Michael, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan. “Universal Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Family Well-Being.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 116, no. 4, 2008, pp. 709-745.

For you to read this piece and not reject nearly all of it, I need you to start by rejecting everything society has ever told you was right. Just for the next 3,500 words.

Accept that many of the trite, pithy statements that were told to you as truth are actually societal constructs that have existed for your whole life, but only a brief little blip of human existence. There are people alive today who were born before many of the ideas, which we as Americans hold as true, were even invented.

I’m asking you to think from first principles, from here until you’re done reading. Don’t allow your initial societal biases to influence you into immediate rejection of what I’m saying. And I’m going to start with one of your deepest held assumptions:

Money, in no way, shape, or form, creates more money. Money will never, ever, “work for you.” You cannot “put your money to work for you,” in the way your financial advisor would like you to believe. Money is not an engine of productivity. Put a dollar on the table, let it sit there, and it will never become a hand-made piece of furniture or a rocket ship.

People are the engine of productivity. And when you invest money into something and ask for a return on your investment, understand that you are asking people to generate that return.

Now, with that out of the way, I want to tell you that all of your plans to invest in your retirement, so that your money can “go to work for you” for the rest of your life while you play pickleball and go on cruises, is destroying society. Modern retirement investing is a blight upon humanity.

I’m probably going to be the first one to tell you this. I haven’t heard this from anyone. I’ve only heard people dancing around the topic. Millennials and Gen Zers are harping about boomers because they seem to own everything and then charge you too much to rent out the things they own from them. The younger generations complain that the price of everything is too high. And you’re even hearing these same complaints from Gen Xers who are just outside of the real compound interest curves of their “investments”.

Now, I do have an emotional bias against retirement. I’ve always despised it since I was a little boy. I watched retirement destroy my grandfather, who became a pensioner at fifty-five. He sat on one part of the couch watching game shows for so long that the part of the couch he sat on sloped downward from the weight of his frail body. He died at seventy-four from a myriad of diseases that come when you do nothing for twenty years of your life while drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and watching Bob Barker on repeat. And that hatred for it has only increased as I’ve surrounded myself with retirees in the world’s largest old-folks home that some people call Naples, Florida.

Retirement Investments Own Everything

It started to hit me that the asset price inflation that we see in literally every sector, from housing to public markets to crypto to commercial real estate, was tied to some form of retirement investment. And then, I started to realize that all of the economic problems that my friends and I are struggling with like low wages, high prices, and unaffordable assets, are indirectly tied to those older than us “investing” in their retirement and then “living off of” their retirement investments once they reach the magical age of sixty-five.

Take this example. I’m a future renter, having just signed an apartment lease for the first time in over four years after having to live with my parents because it is simply too expensive to be a small business owner anymore (don’t do it, work for Blackstone instead). While doing my research for housing and looking to get the best rates possible, I stumbled across a YouTube video by the channel How Money Works about the overabundance of “luxury apartment housing”.

In this video, he describes the reason the prices of these apartments remain so high despite low occupancy rates, is because the asset value of these properties matters more to the underlying investors than the year-on-year revenue. So, the property managers of these rental complexes are incentivized to keep rental rates as high as possible, often far beyond what the market will pay. Since the underlying owners of these apartment complexes are pension funds, 401(k)s, hedge funds, and mutual funds (typically investment havens for those seeking retirement), they don’t care about what the valuation is that year. They care about the valuation of the asset when the fund matures.

If you give your money to a hedge fund, or any other investment vehicle like a 401(k), they hold your money to place long-term bets in a “diversified” set of asset classes. They only distribute returns after a certain period, say 7-10 years, upon which they are hoping that the valuation of their portfolio assets will increase substantially. So, that apartment complex, when purchased by the (probably morally bankrupt but financially successful) fund, doesn’t need to be occupied in year one. It needs to be at 90% occupancy by year seven at the max possible rental rates. This ensures that when the fund goes to sell it and distribute the gains to their portfolio investors, the property appraiser appraises the property based on future revenue potential. Present and past revenue be damned.

When I found this out, my brain started to shift. I started to realize that, oh my god, only a few large financial institutions own basically everything. We have all had this feeling that this was the case. Because when you go into any restaurant, they all feel the same. None of them are owned by anyone working there. And when you go to stay at an Airbnb (which you should stop doing immediately and get a hotel instead), they all have the same amenities and aesthetic to them. And when you go to any shopping plaza, they all have the same seven stores, that again, are never owned by the people who work there. (My gym is one of the rare cases, and I’m being forced out by my landlord on the price of rent so that they can acquire another franchise owned by State Street, probably, to take my place.)

And then, and then, literally this morning on my drive to write this piece, I realized something even worse. That the reason the prices of everything keep going up, while the wages of everyone are going down, is all part of the same problem.

Any Form of Retirement System is Unsustainable

So, what is the problem?

The problem is that the modern form of retirement, that is a concept that feels like it has existed forever, is built upon systems created only a short period of time ago, with numbers made up on the spot. And these numbers have caused greed to squeeze every last drop from the American economy.

And there are two crucial numbers that I want you to think from first principles to dissect and criticize: the age of retirement being sixty-five years old and investment portfolios averaging 10% returns. These two numbers are going to cause a financial crisis, the likes of which we have never seen before.

Let’s start with the sixty-five-year-old retirement age. This number came from Germany in 1889 when German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck created the first state-sponsored government old-age pension system. It was exactly what you imagine, workers paid into a pension system until age sixty-five and then were able to collect pension payments for the rest of their life thereafter.

But there’s a catch. The age of retirement when Germany first created this new system was actually seventy, not sixty-five. And the mortality age back in 1889 was in the mid-forties. People hardly ever made it to seventy to collect those benefits. And Germany came up with the age of seventy because that was a number they figured people physically couldn’t work after. They didn’t have gyms like Galaxy Fit Lab to improve longevity 😉. And the system could (probably) sustain such a small population of people with little input from the workers.

Germany later changed this number to sixty-five because so few people were making it to seventy (which, I thought was the point????). And then America, in 1935, created the Social Security Act under FDR’s New Deal initiative. And they took that number of sixty-five from the Germans. Again, a completely randomly assigned number. The mortality age in America in 1935 was sixty-one.

Before the pandemic, the mortality age was seventy-nine years of age in America. Seventy-nine. That means, almost everyone makes it far beyond the point of the randomly created and seemingly magical number of sixty-five. Almost everyone is collecting large amounts of social security payments for well over a decade before they die. It’s no surprise that it is calculated that the modern American social security system will go broke around 2033.

When an entire country must support all the old people financially for fifteen or more years, you have a systemic problem on your hands.

But, I fear, that problem is far worse than a failing social security system. The problem is all forms of retirement plans, that don’t include people “saving” for retirement, are failing. State pension plans are slowly crawling towards insolvency. And union pension plans are struggling to such an extent that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which is the insurance company that insures these private pension plans, will be insolvent in 2026 with 99% certainty.

But it gets a lot worse than that.

Remember, I said that there were two made-up numbers we needed to focus on. And these two numbers you had to stop and question your previously held assumptions that society gave you about these numbers.

The second one, that the market must return 10% annually, terrifies me. It’s an insult to human intellect. And it should make you want to camp out in front of the headquarters of Wall Street bankers and occupy their territory. (Which, admittedly, would and did do absolutely nothing useful.)

This, also seemingly magical, number of 10% originally appeared in the 1980s and 1990s when 401(k)s and IRAs were popularized and the newly minted financial advisors needed a benchmark to tell their clients that they were going to beat. At the time, if you didn’t adjust for inflation, that was the historical average annual growth rate of the S&P since its inception in 1926. So, basically, this was just a 60-year average that financial morons needed to beat. That’s it. We have carried this number all the way to today. And if your parents’ financial advisor doesn’t meet or exceed this target, guess whose head is on the chopping block?

Since the number of financial advisors has increased 35% since the 1990s, the number of people incentivized to ensure the markets grow at 10% a year is now greater than ever. And do you know what is absolutely hilarious? In the first six months of 2025, the S&P 500 returned a measly 6.2%. Clearly, people were furious (and probably wrote some nasty emails to their FAs), because as of this writing (August 24, 2025), the S&P is now up 10.88%.

I don’t swear anymore. So, I’ll just say it for everyone reading: What. The. Eff. Is. That. 4.68% growth in less than three months!?

Now, if you asked the normal American, not the boomer on yet another Alaskan cruise (I mean the young family trying to get started (or afford anything, really), the young man who can’t move out of his parents’ basement (or, as his parents like to call him, their built-in home watch service), or the young single woman at a soulless WFH marketing job she hates whose womb is covered in cobwebs), if their life is 10.88% better this year than last year, my guess is they would tell you, categorically, to eff-off (these are the rare moments I miss swearing).

Partly, this is because the economy, measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is only up 1.2% this year (well, as of the first half of 2025). Meanwhile, the consumer price index (CPI), which measures price inflation, was 2.7%. So, the average person, who simply has no ownership of any assets whatsoever (me and my friends 😊), has seen their life get 1.5% worse so far this year.

Oh, shoot, I forgot to mention that home prices also are experiencing a 4.8% year-over-year increase!? Can I get a “woot-woot” for all my boomers out there who just purchased their third Airbnb?!

And, I’d love to say that this was an anomaly. That this is the first year we have seen the public markets and retirement assets be so grossly disconnected from the lagging progress everyday people are seeing. But this level of disconnect is actually common. Every year. For far longer than I’ve been alive.

Each year, as the concept of retirement rots the minds of the populace, asset owners demand asset valuation increases on the order of 10%. But it’s not as greedy as I’m making it seem. I’ll make this number a little easier to swallow. If you adjust for inflation (your money being worth less than it was before), the average annualized growth of the S&P is only 6-7%, which is still 3-5% above the actual growth in productivity of the real economy.

But how do you get this growth to be so far above what the economy is actually worth?

It’s easy. You squeeze the system for everything it’s worth.

You raise the rent. You slash the wages. You raise the prices of the food. You buy up all the homes and list them on Airbnb for a 250% markup over yearly rental rates. You buy all the mom-and-pop businesses, “lay off” most of their employees, cancel the rest of the employees’ health insurance plans (the cost of which is also part of the same problem), and you raise the prices of the goods and services sold on the loyal customers who don’t have a good nearby competitor to go to. In short: you destroy the lives of the people around you, mainly the younger generations, for the good of the old and rich.

The Foundation of the Problem

Why are we here? Why can’t young people own homes, start families, or start a business (I’m trying super hard, I swear)? Why can’t we do the things our parents were able to do at the same age with the same level of effort (or even earlier and with less effort, if we were progressing as a society, that is)?

That’s because we are supporting the old in the pursuit of their retirement.

I told you at the beginning. Money doesn’t make money. Money isn’t productive. People are productive. And if a large portion of the population removes itself from the productive population for twenty to thirty years as they go to expensive dinners, sail on cruises, or take month-long vacations to Europe, the rest of the population must support them.

If the world already couldn’t sustain social security and pension plans, it surely can’t sustain the 10% of people, admittedly smart, who “invested their life savings” to retire to a grander standard of living than they had when they worked (or, better stated, were productive and useful).

The deep foundation of the problems I’m commenting on here is greed. Human greed fuels every market boom-bust cycle we see. And yes, we will see another bust soon (I promise I’m an eternal optimist, but I also can see the world for what it is sometimes). And this one will be bigger. Because unlike ’08, the Dot Com Bubble, or the Great Depression, this one impacts all asset classes, even the made-up ones (like crypto, which was probably made by the government, but that’s a story for another day).

The practical application of greed, in this context, is retirement. It’s a promise of a life that society should have never given anyone.

It took the parents away from the kids, because the parents’ kids simply can’t afford to live in one place for six months and another place for six months when the weather alternates being nice in those places like they can.

It took the parents away from their grandkids for the same reason.

It made the parents feel burdened by their children, because any financial help they gave their children was going to be a drain on their retirement lifestyle that they had been promised since they began working, not all that long ago.

And the young began to resent their parents because they couldn’t make for themselves the kind of life their parents had at the same age. And while they are struggling with rent and can’t fathom having children of their own, their parents are on (yet another) European vacation.

And I’m really getting sick of this “I worked my whole life for this!” attitude. When did forty years, the typical career length before retirement, hardly even half of your expected lifetime, become “your entire life”? You really get to sit on your butt for twenty to thirty years because you worked for half of it? What kind of promise is that? Will that even make these people happy? The answer is no. Most retirees are insufferable and without purpose.

Before modern retirement, old people continued to be useful to society. They left hard labor and worked in the community governments as decision makers. They became educators of the young with their wisdom. They lived with their adult children and became caretakers of their grandchildren. They were useful. They were productive. They didn’t sit on the couch watching game show reruns. And they didn’t demand 10% returns every year.

They were happy to provide in any way they could. And on their final days, they were surrounded by the family and the community they supported their whole life (actually their whole life), who now could thrive because of how much that person sacrificed on their behalf. And my guess is that they died a lot happier than the old, rich person, alone in the nursing home that their children hardly ever visit, who “saved their whole life” for retirement.

Yes, There Will Be A Crash

Yes, we will experience a major economic crash soon. I don’t know when. In my lifetime, obviously.

Why? Simply put, there is too much greed for the system to be sustainable anymore. You can’t have all the young people incapable of affording rent, never mind being able to afford children of their own, for much longer before massive change happens.

When it happens, we can’t make the mistakes of our past.

In 1935, as America was clawing its way out of the Great Depression, we created the Social Security system.

In 2008, we made a drastic mistake by bailing out the banks. The people at the bottom suffered acutely and chronically, while those at the top were saved and financially prospered.

After reading this piece, you might have made the mistake in thinking that I’m a socialist. That I’m some young, liberal wacko. If you thought that, you have truly no idea what free markets are or what socialism looks like. Because bank bailouts, social security, and the government investing 10% in Intel, is socialism.

Free markets create balance. A balance between greed, prosperity, and productivity. When there is not enough productivity in the system to match the level of greed, there is a market correction. And these corrections need to occur without government intervention for the free market to remain a free market. And for it to be efficient in the future corrections it will need to make.

When this market crisis happens, and those who own everything see their paper wealth get slashed by 70% or more, we must remain strong and not bail them out. We must let them fail. We must flush the greed out of the system.

They’ll be okay. They’ll come together with their families. They’ll ask for help. And we, the younger generation, will help them. And in return they will go back to being productive and useful to help those around them. Yes, they’ll have to cancel their trip to Africa. Yes, they’ll have to sell their Airbnbs to a young family who couldn’t previously afford them. Yes, they may even have to get a job at a local community college to share with the younger generations their wisdom of the way the world works. And no, the family around the bed of their dying love-one will not have a massive financial windfall that will tear the siblings apart. But that’s a small price to pay for the future prosperity of humanity.

Works Cited

Bureau of Economic Analysis. Gross Domestic Product, 2nd Quarter 2025 (Advance Estimate). U.S. Department of Commerce, 30 July 2025, www.bea.gov/news/2025/gross-domestic-product-2nd-quarter-2025-advance-estimate.

“Forget GDP. The U.S. Economy Isn’t Doing Great. But the Worst Might Be Over.” MarketWatch, 10 July 2025, www.marketwatch.com/story/forget-gdp-the-u-s-economy-isnt-doing-great-but-the-worst-might-be-over-6d202c35.

“Gross Domestic Product: 2nd Quarter 2025 Advance Estimate.” U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, 2025, www.bea.gov/news/2025/gross-domestic-product-2nd-quarter-2025-advance-estimate.

“Home Prices Post Smallest Increase in Nearly Two Years, Case-Shiller Index Says, Offering Buyers a Reprieve.” MarketWatch, 30 July 2025, www.marketwatch.com/story/home-prices-post-smallest-increase-in-nearly-two-years-offering-buyers-a-reprieve-3c3a4e83.

“Home Prices Cooled in May. Where They Are Falling the Most.” Barron’s, 31 July 2025, www.barrons.com/articles/home-prices-us-case-shiller-685bf810.

“Rallying Stock Market May Help Public Pensions Reduce Shortfall This Year, Study Finds.” Investopedia, 2025, www.investopedia.com/rallying-market-may-help-pensions-reduce-shortfall-8678654.

“Retirees: The News from Jackson Hole Is Ominous for You.” MarketWatch, 22 Aug. 2025, www.marketwatch.com/story/retirees-the-news-from-jackson-hole-is-ominous-for-you-9ca906f0.

RBC Wealth Management. H1 2025 Equity Recap: Business as Unusual. 1 July 2025, www.rbcwealthmanagement.com/en-us/insights/h1-2025-equity-recap-business-as-unusual.

“Social Security: Insolvency Date Gets Closer.” The Week, 15 Aug. 2025, www.theweek.com/personal-finance/social-security-insolvency-date-gets-closer.

“Stocks Set New Record to Wrap Up First Half; Here’s What Drove Markets.” Washington Post, 30 June 2025, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/06/30/stock-market-record-2q.

“Trump Calls on Fed to Cut Rates after US Growth Surges to 3%.” The Times, 25 July 2025, www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trump-calls-on-fed-to-cut-rates-after-us-growth-surges-to-3-percent-rt6vsjxlm.

“U.S. Economy Shrank in Early 2025 as Tariffs Sapped Growth, Imports Surged.” Washington Post, 30 Apr. 2025, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/04/30/gdp-q1-economy-tariffs.

USAFacts. “What Is the Current Inflation Rate?” USAFacts, July 2025, usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-current-inflation-rate/country/united-states.

YCharts. “US Real GDP Growth.” YCharts, July 2025, ycharts.com/indicators/us_real_gdp_growth.

This is the next part in the “Deadly Dilemmas” series. If you’re not caught up, go read the first two parts in the series. It won’t take long, which is the point. All my pieces from now on are designed to be shorter and more condensed.

Also, I’m going to begin adding word counts to each piece and estimated reading times. Hopefully, it’ll help keep you engaged, because I know the writing won’t…

Just kidding, I know I’m a great writer.

Enjoy!

Words: 1473

Estimated Reading Time: 5-6 Minutes

Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) stated that “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” I tend to agree with this statement. However, as I sit here at this coffee shop considering the statement, I find myself deeply conflicted. If you steal from me, can I really just sit back and take it? If people who tend towards thievery find out that I let people steal from me without consequence, what happens next? Obviously, I will probably get robbed far more often. But, according to Gandhi, if we keep repeatedly stealing from each other just because we stole from each other in the past, we will all end up with nothing.

Society deeply fears falling into constant thievery and murder so much that it rejects Gandhi’s second half of his statement and just keeps the first. That’s why, in many states in America, there is the death penalty. But is this really the most effective strategy for creating a peaceful society? Or is it just mutually assured destruction?

I don’t think Gandhi is entirely right. But I don’t think society is entirely right either.

My solution for a peaceful society is embedded within the solution for a concept called Prisoner’s Dilemma. Prisoner’s Dilemma offers us insight into mutual decision making and consequences, the exact type of decision making and consequence structure that gives us the phrase “an eye for an eye”.

Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theory concept in which there are two suspects arrested and brought into the police station for questioning over a crime. The investigator asks each of the suspects who committed the crime. Based on the outcome of both parties’ decisions, each prisoner receives a prison sentence. But the length of the sentence varies based on whether they confess or defect and rat out their counterpart. Here’s how it works…

Our suspects, Prisoner A and Prisoner B, are trying to get the shortest sentence possible for a crime they both committed. They can either confess to their crime or defect and blame it on the other. If they both choose to confess, each suspect receives one year in prison. If Prisoner A chooses to defect and blame it on their counterpart while Prisoner B chooses to confess, Prisoner A gets zero years while Prisoner B gets three years in prison. If both Prisoner A and Prisoner B decide to defect and blame it on each other, they each get two years in prison.

However, there’s a twist. Neither suspect knows what the other is going to do. They must hope that their counterpart makes a choice that maximally benefits themselves. The obvious choice is to defect. Because you either get zero years in prison or a maximum of two. If you confess, you’re going to jail for a while no matter what.

This example is called a One-Shot Game of Prisoner’s Dilemma. It actually emulates many of life’s decisions. We can cooperate with other people for a smaller but mutual benefit. Or we can screw over our counterpart for maximal benefit to ourselves. You’ve probably been in positions in life, either in business or your personal life, where you had one of these choices. Think of drafting a contract for a business partnership, deciding whether to offer a friend help, etc.

But the problem is, life is never just a one-shot game. Life is a series of games of Prisoner’s Dilemma, called Iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma. This is where the person we are interacting with knows of our past actions, and our past actions will influence how people will treat us in the future. If you cooperate with others, they’ll be more likely to cooperate with you next time. But if you screw people over, they are less likely to work with you in the future. Or they’ll screw you over if given the chance.

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In the 1980s, a man named Robert Axelrod held a series of computer tournaments in which computer engineers were tasked to come up with a strategy to win a game of Iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma. They would put two strategies up against each other head-to-head to see which strategy would win. Instead of prison sentences, the outcome of each round provided each strategy with “points”.

Some people would come up with mean strategies. These mean strategies would default to defection very easily. That means they would either start with defection or always defect. Or, like Grim Trigger, would defect every time after their opponent defected once. Other strategies, like Tester, would start cooperating, but then defect occasionally to see how nice the other strategy was. Nicer strategies got taken advantage of, continuing to cooperate despite Tester defecting, and as a result giving Tester far more points in the process (remind you of any of your friends (or enemies)?).

Other strategies, like Tit for Tat, were designed to be nicer strategies. These strategies defaulted to cooperation. One strategy, called “Always Cooperate,” literally just always cooperated, no matter the cruelness of its opponents past actions (we all probably know someone like this). These nice strategies, on average, scored higher than meaner strategies.

Although we learned that defecting works better when two people only play one game of Prisoner’s Dilemma, when you play many games back-to-back and understand the other sides tendencies, cooperating actually scores better.

The winningest strategy, Tit for Tat, defaulted to cooperating. And then reacted based on what their opponent did in the past round. If in the previous round their opponent cooperated, in the next round, Tit for Tat would cooperate. If the opponent defected, Tit for Tat would defect in the next round. However, if the defector returned to cooperating, Tit for Tat would return to cooperating as well.

Basically, Tit for Tat started by being nice to maximize the number of points for each. However, it proved in its behavior that it will not be taken advantage of. If their opponent defected, it would respond by defecting. Put two Tit for Tat strategies up against each other, and they will go on forever cooperating and getting two points each time they do so, assuring consistent mutual gain (you hopefully have at least one relationship in your life that is like this).

Another important thing to realize about Tit for Tat’s success is that not only would it not be taken advantage of. But it was capable of forgiveness. If its opponent defected but then returned to cooperating, it would also return to cooperation.

The success of Tit for Tat and the nicer strategies in Axelrod’s tournaments prove a key component of life: nice guys finish first in the long run. There are a million stories of people screwing people over, winning for a little while, but then losing their reputation and freedom (or even life) for it. Take Bernie Madoff, Harvey Weinstein, Elizabeth Holmes, and others. In the end, society cast them out by putting them in jail or ostracizing them or killing them.

And on the flip side, we are constantly reminded that being a good person, who doesn’t allow themselves to be taken advantage of, will be rewarded handsomely by society. Billionaire company founders who got investors to invest in their second company because they made them so much money the first time. Jimmy Donaldson, who got $100 million to create Beast Games on Amazon because he has built such a massive following and positive reputation for himself on YouTube. Even things as small as a local restaurant donating to a food pantry might be rewarded with more new customers by a local news station running a story about their good deed.

I think the study of game theory and the success of Tit for Tat so perfectly maps to the real-world that we must consider it as a guide for operating in life. Because I find it so essential, here again are our lessons from Tit for Tat:

· Begin each relationship by cooperating.

· Do not let others take advantage of you when they do not cooperate.

· Forgive others for defecting.

Tit for Tat does not promote “an eye for an eye”. Tit for Tat operates in a world in which there is always room to forgive. There is no forgiveness with the death penalty. Once you kill someone who has previously killed others, you can’t give them a chance for redemption. Which, I think you should.

But Gandhi’s claim that if we blind others for blinding us then the whole world would be burdened by blindness, leaves kind individuals vulnerable to exploitation. And leaves the worst of society to get off without consequence, incentivizing bad behavior.

So, where’s the middle ground? How, in the context of the death penalty, can we apply Tit for Tat’s fair but firm style to upgrade what we do with society’s worst offenders? Or should we even care at all and just kill killers?

Part 4 answering those finals questions coming soon…

Read Next: Create a Life Mission Statement

I Hope you enjoyed that piece! I know I know, I’ve been a little dark lately. Honestly, expect it to continue. I’m literally trying to figure out when it’s okay for society to decide on the death of others. I’m doing the Lord’s work here, cut me some slack.

But I want you to know, I’m a very happy guy. I’m actually very optimistic, really! You’d be amazed. My life is awesome. And I hope yours is awesome too.

Go introduce yourself in the comment section and I’ll tell you my favorite Reese’s product.

As you can probably tell, I’m trying something new. I’m going to deliver each of my new pieces in shorter, easier to digest chunks. I’m going to aim for around 500-1000 words each. And I’m even going to try to deliver these bit-sized nuggets of wisdom twice a week. Unfortunately, it’s high season here in Naples, Florida. And my gym needs more of my attention than I have available. So, I might be a little spotty with my post frequency. But rest assured, I’m trying my best!

Here’s the next chunk of “Deadly Dilemmas”. Enjoy!

I think a reasonable place to start discussing the morality of murder is the death penalty. I’ve sometimes been for the death penalty. At the moment, I’m against it. But I’ll be honest, my distaste for the death penalty is built upon a shaky foundation. And I don’t like that.

My reasons for being against the death penalty are basically simple retorts to reasons in favor of the death penalty. Below, for conciseness, I’m going to write the typical reasons that people are for the death penalty, and then my simple counterargument.

An eye for an eye.

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

Keeping people in prison is a great financial cost for society

People on death row will stay on death row for years, and sometimes decades, because of the appeals process. So, death row will always be a great financial cost to society, which nullifies the merit of the financial burden argument. And the appeals process is essential, because of the uncertainty that persists in our legal system.

Capital punishment is a great deterrent for murder.

Very few people get the death penalty. And those that do get the death penalty, are not dissuaded from their evil actions because of its existence. Furthermore, life in prison, if the conditions are harsh enough, can be a better deterrent than death.

The death penalty takes these people out of society, preventing them from causing further harm.

If the jail system is secure enough, which it generally is in America, a life in jail is just as effective at incapacitation as the death penalty.

The families of the victims need closure.

The morality of closure is fragile. This argument breaks down to “The death of this person makes other people feel better.” Feelings and emotions are subjective. And determining the death of another person should be sought through objective measures, not subjective ones.

My goal is to use evidence, data, and reason to determine if the death penalty is morally good or bad. But we will also have to define morality, which I’ve done in the past. Morality, to me, is any action committed that improves humanity in the long-term. If you disagree with my assertion about morality, you can either read my blog on morality and see my argument. Or you can just stop reading this blog. Because everything I say from here on out will be tied to this assertion.

We will go through each of these five arguments one-by-one to determine where the truth lies. And if three or more of the arguments are found to be more compelling, then we will choose the either for or against argument based on the winner.

Part 3 on “An eye for an eye” coming soon…

Read Next: Morality Without Myths

So, what do you think?

Do you like this new format? Or do you not get enough at one time? Let me know in the comments below!

Also, if you like my work, show it to your mom! I’m sure she’ll appreciate thinking deeply about death, rejecting the existence of a soul, and why young people aren’t fucking.

When is it okay to kill someone?

That might seem like a ridiculous question. But humans kill other humans all the time. In some states, where the death penalty is legal, an entire jury of people will decide to kill someone. Sometimes, our society thinks that’s okay. You might not agree with the death penalty. But I think we can all agree (at least, most of us reasonable people) it’s okay to kill someone who is about to kill you or others. And society generally agrees that killing people who haven’t done anything wrong enough to justify their own death is bad. We call this murder.

The problem is, we don’t always agree. And we have our reasons for disagreement. Some states have the death penalty, while others don’t. New York prosecuted Daniel Penny for killing a homeless man on a train who was threatening to kill other passengers. He was found not guilty of all the charges brought against him. But some states, like my home state of Florida, wouldn’t have even thought of prosecuting Penny.

So, I ask again: when is it okay to kill someone? And why do we find it so hard to agree when killing someone is bad and when it is acceptable? Should it ever be acceptable?

My ideas on this topic have been tested lately. And I’ve learned that the things I took for granted as truth might not be. I want to go through all the ways people kill other people and determine which are okay and which aren’t. From the death penalty to self defense to war to flat out slaughtering your husband in the middle of the night, we will go through all the ways people kill each other to find out which ones are okay, and which aren’t.

Be prepared for a fun ride. 😊

Read Part 2 HERE

Read Next: The Great Dating Divide

Read this, I promise it’s not about death…

Hello, dear reader. Can I ask you a quick question while the thought of murdering your enemies is on your mind?

If you know anyone that you don’t like, send them this blog. Because it will inspire them to be a more moral person. And if you don’t like them, if they were more moral, you might like them in the future.

But I’ll be honest, you should also send it to someone you do like. Because you don’t want your friends accidentally killing people in immoral ways, right?

Be kind today. Share this blog about killing others. Make the world a brighter place.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m writing this note to you because I want you to know that you did nothing wrong. You were both amazing parents. And you don’t deserve to go through what you’re probably going through while reading this.

I’m not sure what was wrong with me. I’m not sure why I couldn’t be happy. All I know is that I wasn’t. And for that, I’m sorry. Again, you don’t deserve this. It’s my fault I couldn’t solve this problem. And it’s my fault that the only solution was to end my life.

Love,

Jack

Our main character folded the note, put it in an envelope, peeled off the paper covering the sticky strip, and folded it over. On the envelope, he wrote “I’m sorry” and placed it on the bedside table in his parents’ bedroom in their vacation condo where he was currently living.

He walked into the living room and passed the TV. On it, a paused episode of Mad Men. One of the characters in the show had failed to kill himself by looping a garden hose from the tailpipe of his Jaguar into the cabin. It’s not that the method wouldn’t work. He failed because the Jaguar wouldn’t start. The character decided to hang himself in his office instead.

He always thought that hanging himself would be the worst way to go. My Jeep will start, he thought to himself.

A few years before, in a town close to his own, a girl convinced her boyfriend to kill himself. He got a gas-powered air pump, put it in the back seat of his pickup truck, and ran it until the cab filled with carbon monoxide, replacing the perfectly breathable oxygen that was there before.

“I don’t think I can do this. I got out. I could feel myself falling asleep in there,” the victim texted his girlfriend from a strip mall parking lot only minutes from his home.

“I know you can do it, baby. Just get back in your truck. You need to do this. You’ve been struggling for too long,” she replied.

Her boyfriend did get back in the truck. And her boyfriend did die. And she did go to jail for manslaughter. And the funny thing is she only got 11 months. They even made a movie about her story. I wonder what she got paid for it. Profiting off convincing someone else to commit suicide. That’s the American Dream.

That was a clever way to go, if we’re being honest, our main character thought to himself when he read that story for the first time.

You see, when you’re plotting your own death, the fear of pain grips you. Well, it does if you have a fear of pain like he did. Algophobia. That’s what the psychologists call it.

He was twenty-one. And the idea of killing himself began when he was twelve. When he realized half of his sixth-grade class hated him. And the other half didn’t know who he was. At twenty-one, he no longer cared about what twelve-year-olds thought of him nine years ago. However, he was still sad. And he was really getting tired of it.

Jumping off stuff never appealed to him. He had seen this documentary of the people who had survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Apparently, it was suspected that most people survived the fall. They usually died from drowning, because their injuries prevented them from swimming. Or they got eaten by sharks. Which he was sure, if they had known those were the two options going in, they probably would have just bought a gun and shot themselves in their car like most people.

But it’s hard to buy guns in California. Especially if your only purpose is to kill yourself with it. There’s a lot of paperwork. And by the time you’re halfway through all of it, you would probably think to yourself Man, killing yourself feels like a full-time job.

So, to prevent themselves from not killing themselves, the jumpers chose the expedient thing and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge instead. And then got eaten by a shark. Which they really weren’t anticipating.

But you know what’s funny? Most of the people who survived, all three of them, said that right as they jumped, they regretted jumping. They realized that all their problems were solvable. But what they had just done was so permanent.

It’s possible that the people who didn’t survive probably felt the same way. Especially when they were being eaten alive by a shark.

Years later, our main character would meet a girl at the gym he owned who had what looked like burn marks down her legs and arms. After one of the group classes he ran, she confided in him that the scars were from a suicide attempt. She had stepped in front of a train. She even had a picture of herself posing in front of the train before it happened. It was a big train. And she was a small girl.

She didn’t have time to regret her decision because the train hit her far faster than the water hit those who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. But as she lay on a hospital bed days later and was relearning how to walk again weeks later, she realized that she didn’t want to kill herself anymore.

And do you want to know what’s so funny about her story? She didn’t want to kill herself in the first place because she was sad like him. Well, maybe she was kind of sad. But the real reason she wanted to kill herself before the train slammed into her was because she had gotten these horrible migraines all her life that made her life hell. As you can imagine, getting hit by a train would really affect your brain. And it did affect her brain. After the run-in she had with the train, it made the migraines worse.

After the accident, she joined many suicide-awareness organizations. She would go around telling her story to those struggling with their own depressive episodes. She would tell them that despite the even more intense migraines, her attempt only convinced herself more that she should live. And that suicide is almost always regrettable (it’s good to never speak in absolutes).

Through these organizations, she developed a friendship with a young man who was struggling with depression. They had fallen in love. And she was working to help her new lover get through the sadness he was surrounded by. She thought she was doing a good job of helping this guy. And she felt that way up until the day her new love shot himself in the head.

Our main character had thought about shooting himself in the head too. Hemingway went out that way. And Hemingway was one of his heroes. Years before, when he was probably eighteen or nineteen, he had even tried to get the gun out of his dad’s gun case underneath his parents’ bed. When he pulled the case out from under the bed, he had been pretty sure he knew the code for the digital keypad.

Dogs can always sense when something is wrong. Generally, they’re pretty stupid creatures. But they do get human emotions somehow. And as he sat there on the floor of his parents’ bedroom, locked gun case lying before him, Tootsie sat across from him. She barked at him as he cried into his hands.

The fear of pain gripped him again. Algophobia. As he knelt there on his parents’ carpeted bedroom floor, remembered the story of a girl, then eighteen, who had shot herself in the head after a breakup and a lifetime of dealing with gastrointestinal issues. She was beautiful. Well, she was beautiful before she shot her own face off.

And that was the problem with the story. She survived.

You see, the issue was that she shot herself up from her chin. The angle of the gunshot missed all her brain and just took out her face. Her brother was home at the time to hear the shot and got her to the hospital before she died.

Three years later, she was the youngest person ever to receive a face transplant.

But our main character only saw the story shortly after the incident on a YouTube video. The video was filmed before the miraculous face transplant she later received. It had a sit-down interview with the girl and her mother. The survivor mumbled some words, which were hard to understand without subtitles because she was speaking through the mangled hole below her missing nose that was once her mouth.

Sure, he might have been able to guess the code. But he didn’t want to end up like that girl with no face. So, he slid his father’s gun case back underneath his parents’ bed.

No jumping off bridges. No shooting himself in the head. And, of course, hanging himself had always been off the table. If he sat in his Jeep with the tailpipe plugged, what was the worst that could happen? That one guy was able to get out of his truck when he knew the carbon monoxide was going to take his life and text his girlfriend before she told him to get back in and finish the job.

So, he figured that was the best way to go. But the problem was that his parents’ condo was on the second floor. And the garage, where his Jeep was parked, was on the first floor. And the garage shared a wall with the first-floor condo.

He became worried that if he ran his Jeep in the garage with the tailpipe plugged up, that after some period of time with the Jeep running in the garage, his neighbors would get suspicious and come to evaluate the situation. And by the time they checked on the mysterious car running in the garage, he wouldn’t be dead.

Algophobia wasn’t the issue. The fear of someone finding out you’re trying to kill yourself before you were dead was. And there was no word for this fear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

He turned on the Jeep and went upstairs to test out how loud it was. And it was loud. He could feel the rumbling of the engine from the kitchen, which was up a flight of stairs and towards the back of the condo. He figured his neighbors, if they were home, would hear it too. He went to the garage and turned off the car. He sat at the wheel and cried.

I’m so pathetic, I can’t even kill myself, he thought to himself.

He went upstairs, passed the paused TV again, went to his parents’ bedroom in their vacation home, knelt beside the bed, and cried some more.

“God, if you exist, please help,” he said aloud.

There was no answer.

After some time, the tears on his face dried and he noticed that he was starting to fall asleep on the edge of the bed. He got up, grabbed the envelope from the side of his parents’ bedside table, and threw it in the trash. He wasn’t sure what number suicide note that was that he had written over the past decade, but he was hoping it would be one of the last.

Read Next: The Two-Marshmallow Mindset

Oof, that was a dark one…

That was different from what I usually post. But my question is, did you enjoy it??? I’ve never really written a story before. And yes, it was all true.

If you liked it, could you ‘like’ it? Please? It’s literally a tiny little button and it costs you nothing!

And if you have thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them! If you have your own stories to share, you can share those too. You can DM me or drop a comment. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.