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.

I write to clarify what I’m unsure about, or to test ideas I think I’ve solved to see if they hold up. People might use conversation, brainstorming, or long walks. I use my keyboard.

I hope this disclaimer helps you identify the reason I’m writing this piece. It’s not to teach you. Although, if you find it valuable and educational then all power to you. It’s to teach myself. And to solidify ideas I have had circulating in my mind for about six years.

Humans Aren’t Wired for Long-Term Thinking

Alex sat there with the nice man in the lab coat. Alex looked around the room. The room had all white walls. There was a big mirror in front of him. Beside the big mirror, a wooden door. The man in the lab coat sat across from him. He reached into his coat pocket and revealed a marshmallow. He placed the marshmallow in front of Alex. Alex reached out to grab it.

“No no, Alex, you can’t have that right now,” the nice man said. “Now, I’m going to leave this room. And you’re going to sit right here. When I come back, if you still haven’t eaten that marshmallow, I’ll give you two. How does that sound?”

“Okay,” Alex replied.

The man left the room through the door next to the giant mirror. Alex sat there. He kept shifting in his seat. The marshmallow in front of him seemed to beg for his attention. But he wanted two marshmallows. So, he sat on his hands and waited.

The researcher never returned. Minutes ticked by. At least, he thought they had. There was no clock in the room. And he couldn’t read the clock anyway even if there was one in the room. His new position became uncomfortable. He removed his hands from under his butt, which had begun to tingle. He placed his hands on the table. The hands gravitated towards the marshmallow. He put his hands around the marshmallow. He picked it up. He played with it in his hands.

The nice man wasn’t in the room. Alex believed that he would never see what would happen next.

Alex ate the marshmallow.

The researcher returned soon after, empty-handed. He patted Alex on the head while Alex, mouth still full of his only marshmallow, followed him out of the room.

You’ve probably heard a version of this story before. The “Marshmallow Test” was originally done in 1970 by researcher Walter Mishel. He created this study to attempt to prove a hypothesis. That one’s ability to delay gratification improves one's chances of having success in life. That long-term thinking is the better approach to finding success in modern life.

The test was simple and easy to execute. If the child cannot wait for the second marshmallow, they have a poor ability to delay gratification. And if they can wait for the second marshmallow, then they have a good ability to delay gratification. After determining the child’s ability, he tracked their life trajectory to determine if their ability to delay gratification resulted in greater life outcomes. He concluded that, yes, if a child waits to get more marshmallows, then they will be more successful later in life (based on specific criteria). But future studies to replicate the results were mixed.

However, just because this study didn’t achieve a repeatable result doesn’t mean that being able to delay gratification doesn’t result in more success in life. It just may mean that the Marshmallow Test is a bad judge of this characteristic. I think that Mishel’s hypothesis remains a good one. Long-term thinking, as I see it anecdotally around me, results in incredible returns for those who can do it. Because modern society isn’t built like the one we evolved in. And success today doesn’t mean what it did thousands of years ago.

Thousands of years ago, humans were a survival species. We spent our time in the wild just trying to make it to the next day. We lived in small clans. There was no larger society with norms and governments and jobs and HR departments and stock markets. Humans of the survival era didn’t need to know what a compound interest curve or an equity was. They needed to know where the lions made their kill so they could scavenge the scraps. Then, after they had learned to develop weapons, they needed to know where the herd was moving so they could pick off a weak link. All their decisions had immediate returns or consequences. The long-term was irrelevant. Maybe reputation mattered a bit. But not like it does today.

Only for a brief period of human existence have the long-term consequences of our actions really mattered. As a result of this evolutionary pressure, we became wired for short-term thinking. We are wired for instant gratification. We are wired to eat the one marshmallow right now before the nice man in the white coat comes back in the room with another.

But there are the rare few of us who can fight that deeply encoded, short-term thinking nature. And we can learn a lot from the way they see the modern world.

There are Those That See the Future

As a business owner myself, I deeply admire other business owners and entrepreneurs. Guys like Musk, Bezos, and Jobs are on the list of people I take notes from. Another class of people I admire are investors. Stan Druckenmiller, Peter Thiel, Bill Ackman, and Charlie Munger are incredibly interesting to me. And I’m constantly seeking out their guidance (thanks Lex Fridman for sharing).

One of the things I like about investors is their ability to see long-term. Stanley Druckenmiller, one of the greatest living investors we have today, said this about investing:

“It doesn’t matter what a company’s earning, what they have earned – you have to visualize the situation 18 months from now – that’s where the price will be.”

Investors like Druckenmiller, Buffett, and Ackman might be categorized as value investors. Ackman’s firm, Pershing Square Capital, owns only 8 to 12 assets at a time. And when they buy, they buy to own, not to trade. ‘Trading’ in the stock market means flipping an equity over a short period of time, as in a few months or even days. Don’t get me wrong, some stock traders do well. They might do financially better than some top-flight doctors or lawyers if they’re really good. But all the billionaire investors whose names people know don’t trade stocks. They invest in their assets for years and often decades.

For making vast sums of money, the best investors in the world continually prove that the long-term matters a lot. But it’s not just investing where the long-term matters. An executive who has stayed in the same industry for decades usually makes far more in salary than a person hopping from job to job in different sectors. A business owner who operates the same business, making little improvements all the time, usually has a far larger business after twenty years than an entrepreneur constantly starting up and winding down businesses in different sectors when the previous business doesn’t grow as fast as they would like.

But why is that? Why, does it seem to me, that waiting for two marshmallows is better than eating the first marshmallow you are given? Isn’t a bird in the hand worth two in the bush?

Actually, no. The two birds in the bush are worth far more than the one in your hand. Exponentially more. And the reason why is because of compound interest.

Compound interest is the idea that when you reinvest interest earned into an appreciating asset, the value of the interest earned grows exponentially, because it is calculated by the new, larger sum upon each reinvestment period. You might need to read that again, but I’ll provide you with some real-world examples below to help.

Think about Alex, the young boy who couldn’t stop himself from eating that marshmallow. Let’s say Alex was more patient and was able to not eat the marshmallow in front of him. And let’s say that the lab coat man had come back every 5-minutes with a new offer. Instead of just giving Alex another marshmallow, the lab coat man tells Alex that if Alex does not eat any of the marshmallows that he currently has, the lab coat man will double the number of marshmallows that he will give Alex. Meaning, if Alex has two marshmallows on the table and doesn’t eat them, five minutes later he will get two more.

Now, answer this: how long will it take for Alex to have enough marshmallows for the rest of his life and still have some left over for his entire extended family?

Well, within 1 hour and 40 minutes he will have 1 million marshmallows. Yes, you heard that right, 1 million marshmallows. That’s how powerful the compound interest curve can be.

Now, getting a million of anything in less than two hours seems unrealistic. Maybe a game show might provide you with such an opportunity (if it’s produced by MrBeast), but not real life. But the compound interest curve absolutely exists in real life. It just happens slower.

To demonstrate what compounding might look like in real life, let’s consider a fictitious small business and their fictional revenue. There’s a new burger joint in town owned by Sam called “Sam’s Burger Shack” (yes, I’m equally as creative as the authors of your fifth-grade math textbook, thank you very much). If Sam’s Burger Shack makes $100,000 in revenue in year one and the revenue grows 20% each year for five years, how much will their revenue be in year five?

You might think it will be $200,000. Because 20% of $100,000 is $20,000. Multiply $20,000 by five and you get $100,000. Add that to the original revenue of $100,000 and bam, $200,000.

But no, that’s not the way the world works. If a business is growing 20% every year, it’s not growing 20% from its original value. It’s growing 20% from its new value, which is 20% higher than the previous year.

So, let’s run the numbers for Sam’s Burger Shack with this better understanding. If in year two the revenue was $120,000 and it grew another 20%, you would multiply $120,000 by 0.2 to know the revenue increase, which would end up being $24,000 in new revenue. Then, you would add this value to the $120,000 in total revenue. So, year three revenue is actually $144,000, not $140,000.

By year five, Sam is doing alright. His revenue is now $207,360. That’s over double from year one and also $7,360 more dollars than our previous, broken calculation where we just added $20,000 each time.

Now, as I said, compound interest in real life happens far slower than it did for Alex, who was getting millions of marshmallows in only two hours’ time. After 5 years of hard work and with an extra $7,360 in his pocket, Sam doesn’t really feel that his business is on an exponential trajectory to the moon. To be honest, the $7,360 could just have been a rounding error.

But after year 5, the curve will get crazier.

And at year 10, if he just keeps growing at 20%, he will be making $515,978.04 in yearly revenue. If we didn’t take into account compound interest and we only added $20,000 each year, he would have been only making $300,000.

But Sam isn’t a quitter. He is dedicated to the Burger Shacks that bear his name. He’s not done by year 10. He keeps pushing so that his business continues to grow by 20% every year. By year 15, Sam is bringing home $1,283,918.46 in revenue.

That number might seem insane to you. That’s because it kind of is. If Sam opened his first Burger Shack at twenty-five, that means he is making millions at only age 40. How can Sam be a millionaire in such a short period of time while most people are still struggling to bring home $150,000 in their corporate hellhole jobs while begging for a 5% pay raise each year?

Comparison is the Thief of Reason

Me comparing myself at twenty-eight, only three years into my small business, with someone like Sam, who is forty, and is five times further ahead than me, highlights another problem with the way humans are wired. Not only are we wired for short-term thinking, but we also have terrible time perception. We can’t empathize on long time horizons. One of the problems with hearing other people’s stories of success is that they’ll tell you about all of their trials and tribulations in a two-hour podcast. And if two hours seems like a long time to hear the suffering a human went through to experience success, Hollywood will solve that for you by cramming the hardest parts of a character’s life into a two-minute montage before showing the protagonist enjoying a penthouse view of NYC.

Let’s go back to our friend Sam. Of course, Sam is a fictional character created by my imagination. But let’s pretend he is real. Because, let’s be honest, the story of Sam has played out countless times in companies such as McDonald’s, Five Guys, and Wendy’s.

If I tell you, “Sam make $1.2 milly at only age forty,” you’re not getting the whole picture of Sam’s suffering. You’re not watching Sam toil away in his Burger Shack for years before he could take a dollar out of it to pay himself. You’re not watching him deal with employee headaches, landlords, and the imbecile contractor who keeps delaying the buildout on his fourth location. You weren’t there when the health inspector, who is a lifetime friend with Ronny of Ronny’s Burger Palace, gave him a ‘C’ rating and forced him to close the doors of his Central Ave location for a month in June, which is his (and Ronny’s) busiest month of the year. And Sam still closed that year up 20%. What a resilient fucker. Take that, Ronny.

Sam earned all his $1.2 milly in revenue through blood, sweat, and tears. The full gravity of which will never come across in a two-hour podcast or a two-minute montage in a movie about his life.

Unfortunately, as I said, many people don’t appreciate how much suffering they need to go through to experience compound interest. It’ll take years. Decades, even. And if you cut off the compounding before it has a chance to go exponential, you’re going to miss out on all the good stuff.

To Take Advantage of the Compound Curve, You Must Think Long-Term

Let’s say Sam decided to shut down his Burger Shack in year five. At the time, the compound interest curve was hardly kicking in. At $7,360 extra dollars, Sam might not have even realized there was growing inertia building underneath him that would take him miles further if he just kept at it. Instead of riding this wave that would build exponentially over time, Sam shut down the Burger Shack. He moved to a new town, with new people, to start a landscaping business. He did this because his friend in his old town, who had a landscaping business for fifteen years, was making over a million a year (about $1.2 milly, to be exact). Sam, at the time, was hardly making two hundred. Clearly, the money is in lawncare, not burgers.

We now know that, based on everything I said earlier (that I’m obviously right about, by the way), that Sam shutting down his Burger Shack would be a mistake. But we also know that not everyone owns a business. My fictional case study doesn’t apply to everyone. Or, at least, won’t resonate with everyone. Because here’s the thing, everyone should invest their money earned from their corporate hellhole job, if that’s what they have. And compound interest applies here too (duh, John, I’m not a fucking idiot).

And the reason people don’t make money investing (or, at least, not as much money as they could), is because they cut off the compound interest curve before it is able to take effect. Just like Sam could have if he ended his Burger Shack business to do landscaping.

Okay, what I’m going to say next is going to sound really naïve (and probably dumb because I don’t have any money in the stock market), but I asked a lot of my clients who are in finance about this and they agreed with me (and consensus is truth, as I’ve said before and will say again (trust the experts (especially if they’re endorsed by CNN)/believe in science (I’m being sarcastic, in case you couldn’t tell))).

Anyway, here it goes…

I realized recently that most investment decisions are easy to make. Your goal in investing is to make money. You don’t want to lose money. So, you want to give yourself the best possible chance of making money while also not losing money (goddamnit John get to the point already).

Many people, as I said earlier, do stock trading. They buy some equity or asset in the stock market, wait a few hours, days, or months, and then flip it for a profit based on a news story or hype cycle. You can follow their lead and trade on hype cycles and the news. “Oh, Elon is going to be running a shadow organization for Trump, better buy Tesla stock!” Or you can take Stan Druckenmiller’s advice and think about what the price will be 18 months from now. If you have a company that is doing well and has a competitive advantage, it’ll probably be easier to guess if it’ll be worth more than it is today in a year and a half compared to knowing how it’ll fluctuate on a daily basis.

But my guess is that your decision gets easier the longer you look out into the future. And I mean much longer into the future.

Let’s go to the future by first looking at the past. Let’s travel back to 2005. One of the top five companies in Dow Jones at the time was Microsoft. It was valued at the time at around $280 billion. Now, at the time, you could pretty confidently say that the computer and software industry was growing fast with no end in sight. If you looked at the future, you could reasonably predict that computers were going to be a bigger and bigger part of our lives. Within twenty years, you could guess that the computer industry would be larger than it is in 2005. You didn’t have to look at any spreadsheets to make this claim. You didn’t have to be a Wall Street insider. You just had to own a Windows computer and browse the relatively new thing called “the internet” occasionally to see this as an inevitability.

Placing a bet on Microsoft should have seemed like a no-brainer at the time. They were a super-dominant player in a quickly growing market. And if you placed that bet, you would have been right. As Microsoft is now valued at $3.11 trillion as of this writing (January 11, 2025).

Now, let’s say you invested $10,000 in 2005. Today, it would be worth $227,800. That’s without reinvesting dividend payments. Which, as we have seen with the compound interest curve, can dramatically increase earnings.

Now, hindsight is 20/20, of course. You’re probably all like “Yeah, John, and if I bought Bitcoin when it was first created, I would be able to buy Greenland before Trump does.”

That’s a fair criticism. And I agree with it. So, let me make a future prediction that I think very few people would disagree with based on the same principles.

Right now, the battery electric vehicle (BEV) market is growing at a compound annual growth rate of around 20%. Just like Sam’s Burger Shack’s revenue. That means, in a few years, exponentially more electric cars will be on the road. It’s also easy to imagine a world where everyone has a battery electric car. We can predict with a high degree of certainty that BEV’s will be the dominant mode of transportation for people in the future. Just like it was easy in 2005 to imagine every person owning a computer (or several).

You don’t even have to know the compound growth rate of the battery electric car market to understand and see this trend. Everywhere you look you’re probably thinking: These goddamn electric cars are everywhere!

In my opinion, that thought in your mind is probably enough data to make a bet on a company in the BEV market to be worth more 20 years from now than it is today and buy their stock.

And then, from there, it’s not hard to choose a company. We also see full self-driving cars finally being a real thing. Waymo has full self-driving taxis in San Francisco today. Tesla has had full self-drive packages for its cars for multiple years. And we can all easily imagine a future with cars that drive themselves. It’s probably an inevitability, just like computers were.

Combine those two markets, battery electric cars and self-driving, and you have one company: Tesla. Tesla currently owns about 15-20% of the entire global BEV market. And they have the only full self-driving functionality in a consumer car (well, the only one that is any good).

Right now, Tesla is up just a little bit, sitting at a market cap of $1.27 trillion as of this writing, since it went public in 2010 at a market cap of $2.88 billion.

And upon reading that you might be thinking “John, how much more can Tesla possibly be worth! It’s already worth so much and it started at so little!!!!!”

But this is the primary mistake people make in investing. They think that the upside is limited. When really, the upside is unlimited.

My point is that you shouldn’t fear where the price of something is today versus its historical price when trying to make an investing decision. The past is the past. The future is what you’re investing in. Take your emotions and pessimism out of the equation.

Tesla will, most likely, be worth a lot more 20 years from now. Will it be worth more in six months from now? I don’t know. And I don’t care. What happens six months from now doesn’t matter. That’s short-term. If you stop thinking about the short-term, it’s very easy to make an investing decision.

Long-term thinking can solve your money problems. It’ll increase your short-term suffering, sure. You’ll have to suffer at your corporate hellhole job. But those 5% pay raises will compound. You’ll have to stick it out with your small business that feels constantly on the precipice of collapse, but that 20% revenue growth will compound. And long-term, you’ll end up like my clients. You’ll live in a vacation town and then take vacations to even nicer places on planes that only take you and your family to resorts that bring you a fruity cocktail every hour without you having to raise a hand to ask for a refill.

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You Up?

I’m not asking for a booty call at 2am, I promise (unless you’re down?).

I’m simply asking you to talk to me. You see, I’m lonely and in need of friends. Ideally smart ones (like you, which I can tell is the case since you made it this far reading my work which is expressly designed for high IQ smarty pants like you and I).

Leave a comment below so we can chat. And please make it about something you want to talk about in this blog. I’m not trying to get to know you. I just want your intellectually robust comments so that future readers will be inspired to also leave comments and exponentially propel my future fame and success.

Is that too much to ask?

My thesis in the previous part of this series was that we can build a universal moral compass by acting in ways that improve humanity over the long term. And if we disconnect morality from fiction, we will leave the dogma behind and limit bad actors from manipulating us into committing acts that actually disrupt humanity’s progress.

But knowing what will benefit humanity and what won’t is only half the equation. The other half of the struggle is how to inspire those moral acts and disincentivize bad acts. With God, there is fear. Fear guides you to act benevolently. You want to steal a sandwich from that gas station? Expect to burn in Hell for eternity with Hitler. You want to cheat on your wife with Rebecca from accounting? Sorry, but you’ll be denied entry to the eternal paradise of Heaven. You want to murder-rape that innocent college girl and not repent for it? Hell for you as well. Say hello to Satan for me.

But secular people have no God. They don’t have the fear associated with committing acts that displease Him. We must build an incentive system that reaches these people if we want to have any hope at a universal morality that people actually follow.

One of the best books I’ve read recently is Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game. It was the inspiration for this series on religion because it solved this problem of a moral incentive structure for secular people. And it turns out that most of society already has it. It even has a name: consequences.

When people’s outcomes are tied to their actions (i.e. there are consequences), they will revert to actions that build their reputation and help others in the long term. And they will avoid actions that harm humanity. But when their actions have no consequences, they are willing to act in solely self-serving ways.

When people are responsible for the outcomes of their actions, Nassim Taleb calls this skin in the game. The problem with skin in the game is that it is up to society to enforce the morality of the collective. The collective needs to agree that when a person commits an act it sees as good, that person is rewarded with wealth and good will. And when a person commits an act it sees as bad, that person is penalized by the law, a loss of money, a loss of reputation, or all three.

Skin in the Game Must Be Applied to Our Systems of Law

A good example of where skin in the game applies is crime. It is up to society to agree which things it sees as a punishable offense or not. And then it must decide together what degree of punishment each type of offense deserves.

In America, I think, we often get it right. Theft, violence, fraud, and murder are typically met with steep punishments.

But sometimes, we get it wrong. California, as an example, taught us a fun lesson in how the misallocation of appropriate punishments incentivizes bad behavior with Proposition 47. Proposition 47 is a piece of legislation passed in 2014 that reclassified theft of items under $950 from felonies to misdemeanors. The goal was to reallocate resources to violent and other serious crimes. So, on top of making shoplifting penalized to a lesser extent, the police departments (underfunded after the “defund the police” movement) also began policing these crimes less. This more or less allowed criminals to walk out of stores with $949 worth of merchandise unscathed. As a result, theft greatly increased in the state. This caused many businesses to shut their doors or lock up their deodorant.

Yes, Prop 47 never needed to happen. We have enough history and data to show that when you police crime, crime decreases. History should be our guide when trying to decide how we write laws and ensure their outcomes. Time and time again we have proven that when we let criminals have their way, they will commit crimes. The Baltimore Police Department revealed in 2019 that 81.4% of homicide suspects had prior criminal records. 81.4%!!!!!!!!!!! That’s almost all of them. And that number is so specific that it must be true.

Imagine how peaceful society would be if we universally agreed that the incentives for staying out of jail should be high. There should be skin in the game for being a peaceful and respectful member of society. I’m personally on team Harsh Penalties for Criminals. Theft, murder, and the harming of others should be fiercely prosecuted. And the penalties for such obvious harms to society should be high.

The criminals in Baltimore should have been put away with large prison sentences after their second or third offense. Get these people off the streets with the normal, law-abiding citizenry. Because if you just catch and release these repeat offenders, the BPD data shows that soon their crimes will escalate to the point where people start dying.

Bryan Smith, the drunk driver who hit Steven King, had his license suspended and reinstated three times in 1998 alone, the year before he hit King. He received a 6-month prison sentence and a year suspension on his license for almost killing one of the greatest nonfiction writers the world has ever known. Like, are you fucking kidding me? He should have had his license removed for the rest of his life after his second or third serious offense. He should never have been allowed behind a wheel that day. He was clearly a danger to society. But the lax judges in Maine decided he should be given another chance. Then another. Then another. Then ano… you get my point. But Bryan Smith never made it back on the road. He died of a drug overdose before his license was reinstated. His death was probably the only thing that kept him off the road and those around him safe. Because the judges sure didn’t care about the safety of his fellow motorists and pedestrians.

When will society learn that when you decrease the disincentives for criminals to commit crimes, that they will continue to commit crimes? Imagine how peaceful society would be if we universally agreed that the incentives for staying out of jail should be high. There should be skin in the game for being a peaceful and respectful member of society.

The problem is some people have sympathy for criminals. They believe all criminals can be reformed. This is clearly untrue when you examine history and data. According to a 2018 report by the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), about 68% of released prisoners in the U.S. were rearrested within three years, and 77% were rearrested within five years.

The act of being a repeat criminal offender is called recidivism. Rates of recidivism decrease as a function of age. Younger people, below the age of 25, have higher rates of recidivism compared to older criminals. This data suggests that punishments for criminals below the age of 25 should be higher as you age. However, in modern society, we see the opposite happen.

The reason we provide younger offenders with less harsh punishments is because their brains are literally still forming. A young criminal’s frontal lobe, which is responsible for decision-making and impulse control, is still developing. The frontal lobe continues to form through their mid-twenties. So, juvenile and young adult crime is punished less harshly, in the hope that with age and maturity and brain development, they improve their ways.

I have the same hope for these people. But the insane rates of recidivism among people under 24, which was shown to be 84% in that same BJS study mentioned earlier, suggests that the punishments for younger people should be harsher than for older criminals.

And this might actually be the solution to almost all young criminals being repeat offenders. If you police crime harshly early on, you’ll create a better understanding of the consequences for the people who will most likely become our future murderers. If you can show a 16-year-old that theft and violence are absolutely not tolerated by society, then maybe you’ll stop him from being a criminal in the future. And if their friends see that the outcome of getting caught committing crime is a long and hard prison sentence, then maybe you’ll stop the entire friend group from becoming future criminals. Imagine how sobering it would be to a group of misfit teens to lose one of their friends to a five-year prison sentence because they decided to beat up an old person on the subway.

And some of you criminal sympathizers might be saying that’s going to destroy his ability to live a good life in the future. But I would disagree. Especially when the most likely outcome by far for this young thug is a future of more crime. If you can convince him, while his brain is still forming, that committing crimes will be met with steep negative consequences, maybe you can convince him that a future of abiding by the law is the better outcome. And if you give him access to education while he is in prison, he might just come out better than when he went in.

Sympathy, which can often feel good and moral, can actually be incredibly immoral when misplaced. The video below is a hard watch. Viewer discretion is advised. But it shows how crucial harsh penalties are for young criminals and criminals in general.

In the video, an officer pulls over a couple for driving over 100 miles per hour. The officer gives the driver of the car three minor citations and lets him drive away after the driver put him and his passenger in incredible amounts of danger. Moments later, they both wound up dead after continuing to speed and inevitably crash into a truck and then an overpass.

You might think that the officer was being a nice guy by letting them get off so easily. But he could have easily prevented both of their deaths. The officer is supposed to police the law. In the great state of New Jersey where this event occurred, the rules on excessive speeding are a little laxer. But the officer has the discretion to arrest the driver in situations such as this. And in my opinion, that is what this officer should have done. You have a young 24-year-old on a provisional license driving over 100 miles an hour with a passenger in his car. Get him the fuck off the road. Arrest him. Give him jail time. Save at least two lives in the process. Letting the driver of this vehicle drive away after the initial traffic stop was an immoral act by the officer. As hard as that is to admit.

And what about the judges who try to be nice and let young criminals walk free from crimes because they felt bad for the criminal and their unfortunate upbringings and circumstances? Well, most likely these criminals will be criminals again. There’s an 84% chance, actually. These judges, who want to be nice, are actually being immoral. They are committing acts that most likely will harm humanity in the long term.

The moral thing in society is to prosecute crimes harshly. Limit recidivism. Keep society peaceful. Decrease the steepness of the slippery slope to homicide that criminals seem to go down. Get reckless drivers off the road. Prevent unnecessary death. Give everyone skin in the game.

Skin in the Game Applied to Normal Life

Society doesn’t need to just apply morality to things it deems are bad. It should also apply morality to things it deems are good. There needs to be incentives for being a good person. Not just incentivize people from being bad people.

The incentives derived from skin in the game applies to all of life. Especially one’s career. The easiest to see example is entrepreneurship. I’m a small business owner. I own a gym in Naples, Florida. Over the past two and a half years since owning my gym, I’m happy to say I’ve become a better person. Some important traits of my character that have greatly improved since owning my gym are my patience, capacity for kindness, and capacity for forgiveness. And there are two reasons for that: my client attrition rates and my Google review rating.

I promise I am not joking.

Right now, I have a 4.9-star rating on Google based on 92 reviews. One of these reviews is a one-star review. The review comes from a person who has never been to my gym but bought a program from me online. A year after he bought the program, he was asking me for copious amounts of advice about his back pain. I didn’t want to dedicate time to this. So, I dismissed him by telling him I didn’t have time to help him and directed him to my Instagram videos, most of which were about how to relieve back pain.

He was disgruntled by my dismissive attitude, found my gym’s Google page, and left a one-star review telling the Naples area about how I’m a bad person. I have 91 5-star reviews. And I give none of those any mental attention. This sole 1-star review still consumes my thoughts.

I’m driven by preventing people from giving me one-star reviews far more than I’m motivated by getting good reviews. If I’m seen as a bad person, my reputation suffers. And that means my business suffers. And along with it, my income. I live my life, even outside of my gym, being kind to others because I have skin in the game. There is nothing stopping an ex-friend who feels like I wronged them from pretending they were a former client and bashing my business online. I must be nice at all times. My business relies on it.

I’m not the only one like this. Humans are much more focused on the downside risk than the upside reward of their deeds. A study by the famous authors of Thinking Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that found that people needed approximately $2-$2.50 of gain to make up for the emotional deficit of losing $1. This is called loss aversion. To put it another way, people feel better about not losing money than they feel good about gaining the same amount of money. They feel better about not being punished than they feel good about being rewarded.

But we all aren’t entrepreneurs with our reputations tied so clearly to our actions, right? We don’t all have skin in the game.

Not so fast. If you work in sales and are cruel to all your potential customers, you lose out on money in commissions you never earn. If you’re working in a big corporate job and you make sexually suggestive comments to a coworker, the well-funded HR department will get your ass fired. If you’re a doctor and the care you provided a patient directly resulted in their death, breaking the Hippocratic Oath that you signed, you could lose your medical license.

In the real world, you are policed by punishments placed upon you by society for doing things it thinks are going to harm it in the long term. If you do things society doesn’t like but aren’t criminal, you lose your job, your income, and your reputation. You must commit acts that improve humanity in the long-term to gain societies approval and good will.

And it extends beyond your career, where your actions are so closely tied to your outcomes. Society is constantly imposing its morality upon us. If you see a cat in a tree that needs saving and you save it, society will reward you with a good reputation. Maybe you’ll even get your name in the local newspaper. And if you don’t save the cat and walk away? You better hope nobody sees you. Because you’ll be shunned for your cowardice.

But what happens when there is no skin in the game? What happens when can people get off without harm to themselves while harming society in the meantime? We saw that when people commit crimes and don’t get punished, lives are often lost. But how about when crimes aren’t committed?

In Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb discusses this with the financial crisis of 2008. The private banking sector bankrupted much of society. They took on high risk loans, multiplied the risk by one-million times by wrapping high-risk loans with perfectly good loans, over levered the whole thing, and then just let it blow up in all our faces. And what did the executives of these banks get as a result of bankrupting millions of Americans? A giant bailout, pay raises, almost no limitations on the practices they were engaging in before, and a whole bunch of regulations that stopped people from creating banks that could disrupt them. They were able to privatize the gains of their behavior while bestowing the losses on the public.

What would have been the better outcome to prevent this in the future? If we gave the executives at these big banks skin in the game by not bailing them out, we could prevent them from doing this in the future. If you make the banks bear the financial outcomes of their misdeeds, they won’t approve so many bad mortgages and loans. They won’t over-leverage the financial system and put their depositors at risk (which is the defense for the bailouts). And if you don’t create a regulatory framework that makes it impossible to start a new bank while protecting the incumbents, the startup ecosystem could create a bank with a whole new operating model that disrupts the legacy system while providing more benefit to the consumer (consumer = society at large).

The government’s job is not only to police crime to stop bad. Its job is also to police the free market to ensure good. It must ensure that when companies harm their customers, they are met with fines and other consequences to prevent them from doing the same thing in the future. And these consequences should show the rest of the market not do it either or face the same fate. In such an environment, companies are encouraged to be moral by improving the lives of their customers (humanity).

When the banking sector was bailed out by the government, almost two decades later, Americans still bear the burden of this immoral decision. And guess what? These politicians who run the American government will still get reelected next term, because there are no term-limits, and the American people have no other choices in candidates. :)

Our politicians have no skin in the game when it comes to how they run the government. They can be immoral, bailout banks, sign bills that result in regulatory capture, and not face any consequences. How can we ensure that politicians, when they act immorally, face consequences?

Warren Buffet has a fun idea. He was quoted as saying “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

Incentives, such as the potential to lose the chance of reelection if you improperly spend taxpayer dollars, stop people from committing acts that harm humanity in the long term. Incentives stop people from being immoral. All without the fear of God telling you that you will burn in Hell for eternity. Because, if we are being honest, consequences imposed in the real world are far more motivating than those in the afterlife.

Secular people aren’t default immoral just because they have no God. In most of life, they have skin in the game. They are punished by the law for committing crimes. They are punished by society for doing things that hurt it. They are incentivized to be moral by the outcome of their actions. It is simply the role of society to enforce those outcomes. This will ensure the universal morality we all wish to see in the world.

Morality and community aren’t the only benefits that people derive from religion. There is also purpose. Purpose can come from many sources. But secular people, with their decreased fertility rates, are losing one of the biggest sources of purpose one can find: family.

Part 4 Coming Soon…

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Oh, hello there, may I ask you a quickie (slang for ‘quick question’)?

Here’s the deal. I might not know you. But you know me. And that’s saying something. That means, in your world, I’m basically famous. But here’s the deal, I’m not famous enough. I want my name in lights. And I need your help to get on one of those screens in Times Square.

If you could share this with a friend you think could use some more morality, I’m sure they would appreciate the subtle hint.

And a little like goes a long way. Tap that heart button to show support for the piece and get Substack to recommend my stuff to others like you who want to be berated about their religion.

Also, if you want to discuss any parts of this piece, use the comment section! I promise to reply to you (if you’re interesting, that is).

Where does morality come from? As an atheist (or agnostic or whatever you want to label me as), I’ve battled this question forever. It appears to me, as a person who has not murdered nor stole but also doesn’t believe in God, that morality is intrinsic. I see people, religious or not, do good things unto others all the time. Their urge to do good seems to come from within.

For others, however, the answer is extrinsic. Morality is provided to them by their religion. For Christians, Jesus was this miraculous son of Christ who lived a certain way. And if they live life as close to the way he did, then they will be moral. Avoid sin, which is anything that you wouldn’t catch Jesus doing, and they’ll be good. But avoiding sin is almost impossible. So, if they can’t entirely avoid sin, they can just ask for forgiveness when they do sin. And Jesus will forgive them (because forgiveness is one of his virtues) and they’ll still make it to the pearly gates. Easy peasy.

If it’s not intrinsic, is religion the best way to get your morality? My fear with religion as a moral compass is that it can easily be corrupted by bad actors. What happens when your religious leaders, who you trust as interpreters of God’s word, ask you to do things you think are bad?

One thousand years ago, Pope Urban II asked his followers to undergo the First Crusade to take back Jerusalem from Muslim control. Countless Muslims and Jews were slaughtered by the Christians. The slaughtering of these people seems to kind of go directly against the Sixth Commandment, which states pretty clearly: Thou shalt not murder.

So how did Pope Urban II and the following popes over the following 200 years’ worth of crusades justify the murdering of all these people? Well, silly peasant, these crusades were sanctioned by God himself as a part of a holy war. Killings during a holy war are acts of faith, not sin. The Pope, I think, speaks directly to God and gets the inside scoop on what He wants. When he wants you to kill people in a city because Christians are supposed to live there because God wants them to live there, you go kill people in that city.

A power play for more land in a highly sought after part of the Middle East? Clear incentives for the Pope to make up a justification for a war that will bring him both more power and more wealth? YOU BIGOT. HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE THE POPE OF SUCH IMMORALITY. Now, go kill people who believe in a religion that’s vaguely similar to your own because, supposedly, it’s somehow inferior to your own. God asked you nicely, after all.

Now, you don’t have to tell me twice that the crusades were clearly immoral by today’s standards. I would humbly argue that my morality reigns supreme over the popes’ who carried out the crusades. I’ve never killed a Jew for living in a city that I thought they didn’t belong. I actually never even had the thought that any Jew shouldn’t be in any particular city. I really don’t mind. Come to think of it, I’ve never slaughtered anyone. Not even a single person! But somehow, even with all these commandments that tell Christians in plain English (well, kinda plain English) not to do these things, their leaders can still convince them to carry out these horrific acts. Strange.

Not only do these religious leaders sometimes ask you to do things that are clearly against the word in the Bible, but it also seems that the Bible (and the leaders who preach it) uses morality as a fear tactic to get people to believe in God. If you’re a sinner by living in contrast to God’s will, you can acknowledge and repent for your sins before God and be forgiven for them. No matter the severity of the sin. From stealing a pencil from your older sister to murder, you can still gain access to Heaven if you’ve followed the steps to forgiveness. But as an atheist, I’m constantly living in sin for not having faith in Jesus Christ. That means, even if I give my sister her pencil back and never murder a person (as, historically, I have not), I don’t get to go to Heaven.

After going to church with one of my clients, I asked her about this inconsistency (or so it seems to me). Her counterargument was that, according to God, all sin is created equal. God is so perfect, and he is so far above a normal person that he has a hard time distinguishing between the severity of any sin. So, that means, a man who raped and murdered a college student out on a jog and me (for not accepting Jesus as my savior because I don’t think there is evidence for his existence) are one in the same (as far as our sins go, at least, I guess(?)).

However, if the murder-rapist guy repents for his sins and asks for forgiveness, he gets access to the pearly gates. He just really has to mean it when he repents. Meanwhile, if I keep being an atheist, even if I murder-rape exactly zero people, I burn in Hell forever.

?

The morality of religion is so dogmatic that it often seems broken. Or just breaks its own rules entirely. It doesn’t feel right to me that a religious leader can convince their followers to conduct completely disgusting acts because they decided to interpret their religious text in a certain way. And it doesn’t feel right to me that God wouldn’t accept me into Heaven for questioning His existence, when he didn’t come to be once in a clear way to demonstrate it. But, the dude who murder-raped Sarah from biology class gets a place in eternal paradise.

I know I’ve bashed a lot on the Bible. But other religions are just as bad about using their holy texts for bad instead of good.

We used to have these beautiful identical towers in Manhattan that stood taller than any others in the world before Muslim extremists crashed planes into them, killing thousands of people in the process. These Muslim extremists were convinced by their religious leaders that their sacrifice would grant them seventy-two virgins in paradise.

But the Qur’an doesn’t even say this. It says something vaguely similar that believers will be granted access to paradise with companions of purity. Which sounds a lot like the Christian idea that accepting Jesus grants you access to Heaven. But the religious leaders of these Muslim extremists take it thirty steps too far. For their followers, “believing” is now “sacrificing” and “companions of purity” is now “72 virgin women with whom you get your way with”. And although people may think “72” is a random number of virgins, I think it’s actually a clever psychological tactic that these leaders are using to convince their followers that it’s real. Good negotiators use a similar tactic when trying to mitigate haggling over the price of something. Specificity makes something feel more real. It appears to me that these religious leaders can be good manipulators.

How are these religious leaders able to take such liberty with the supposed work of God? The answer: fiction. Morality derived from religion is flawed because it’s based upon fictitious texts. And clever manipulators can take these works of fiction and interpret them however they want to get their followers to bend to their will. And I’ll be even more harsh here. I’ve hardly met a single Christian who has read the entirety of the Bible. I’m surrounded by Christians here in Naples, Florida. They do Bible study weekly and go to Church every Sunday, but when I asked many of them recently about the story of Jesus and the fig tree, they had never heard of it. Some of the people I asked even denied its existence in the Bible until they investigated it and realized I was right. This story, a confusing one where Jesus kills a tree because he is hungry, is really in the Bible. Of course, they came up with their own interpretations on how this story actually shows Jesus being perfect, not flawed like the rest of us. They said he is teaching me an important lesson in not being fruitless. But I didn’t buy it.

If these people aren’t even reading the book that all their truth comes from, how can they determine what is true at all? And how can they argue with their pastor when he tells them to do something that seems wrong, especially when that pastor tells them that the command is actually coming from a passage they have never read before? Or even worse, how can they tell their pastor they are wrong, when all fiction can be interpreted in different ways by different readers?

My overall argument is that religion is not the best way to get your morality. It’s probably the best way humans have now. But, in my opinion, that isn’t saying much. We need a new framework upon which to create our moral compass. One that provides a more consistent and universal approach to dealing with our fellow humans.

If not religion, then where should I get my morality?

I said that certain things like killing Jews and Muslims for living in a particular city or flying planes into buildings in the pursuit of virgins in paradise are immoral. Many would agree. Some will disagree though. And that’s the problem. We have no universal meaning of morality. Just look at Merriam-Webster’s definition of morality. It’s a list of possible definitions. Here’s all of them:

a. a moral discourse, statement, or lesson

b. a literary or other imaginative work teaching a moral lesson

c. a doctrine or system of moral conduct

d. particular moral principles or rules of conduct

e. conformity to ideals of right human conduct

f. moral conduct : virtue

One of the key features of a bad definition is that the word, or a derivative of the word, is used in the definition. All these definitions, except for ‘e’, have the word ‘moral’ in them. Based on these definitions, how is anyone supposed to know what is a moral action and what isn’t? And when one religion tells me that I’m allowed to stone my wife if she commits an act of adultery and another tells me that I’m absolutely not allowed to stone my wife if she fucks Greg, how am I supposed to determine which religion is best for me? Both options seem enticing. If I want to be objective about morality, how am I to choose?

I, for one, think morality should be tied to one specific outcome. And that outcome is determined by asking yourself this one question:

If I commit this act, is it likely to improve humanity in the long term?

Each part of this question is carefully thought out. And revised many times using ChatGPT.

I chose “If I commit this act” because only you have control over what you do. Morality is personal. Religions will try to convince you that it is cultural. But ask any Christian how they feel about gay marriage. In edge cases such as this, they will have completely different answers. Some think it’s fine. Some think it’s a sin and shouldn’t be allowed in the church but are happy to allow gay people in their church. Some will not accept gay people in their church.

What about capital punishment? Many people of any faith are totally okay with capital punishment. You kill a member of society, society kills you. Simple.

But what about the Sixth Commandment? I’m pretty sure it says “Thou shalt not murder,” not “Thou shalt not murder unless the murderee was previously a murderer.”

These examples prove that today’s morality is subjective. Each person has their own view of morality. Even people of the same religion have their own view of morality. Clearly, our current moral frameworks are failing us. I want this new and simple framework to take out as much of the subjectivity as possible.

The second piece, which is calling for the improvement of humanity, is also crucial. If you’re determining the morality of your actions by what benefits you, you’ll be able to justify the morality of a lot of harmful shit.

Are you hungry? Just steal some food from a gas station. It’s easy to not get caught. And if you’re living in modern San Francisco, getting caught won’t even lead to repercussions if you keep your theft under a certain dollar amount. This benefits you greatly. You solve your hunger problem with zero cost to you.

Are you mad at UnitedHealth for malpractice in the health insurance industry? Go kill the CEO so you can become famous as a martyr and gain the sexual arousal of countless women for your deed. You get fame and pussy. Congrats, Luigi.

Also note that in the second part I wrote “likely”. Because let’s be honest, we can never be absolutely sure of the chain of events resulting from our actions. We must act. And cannot be paralyzed by fear. Our goal is to try to do the right thing. Even if sometimes we fail.

But we will fail less if we deeply consider the third part of this self-referential question. This part of the question implies that the long-term outcomes of your actions are important. Not just what happens tomorrow. But what happens for years and decades and centuries to come.

Let’s go back to the psycho-females new love interest, Luigi Mangione. Be him for a moment.

You want to benefit humanity, and you decide to kill the CEO of UnitedHealth. Sure, it might arouse some conversation to the faults in the health insurance and healthcare industries. But you’ve now created an environment where CEOs can be targets of assassination, destabilized the family of the father that you killed, and probably not lead to the implementation of any policies that provide clear restrictions of how health insurance companies should behave to benefit humanity. Also, you didn’t fix the real problem, which is most likely the bureaucracy in the healthcare system (you also admitted that you didn’t understand the problem and decided to kill anyway, fucking idiot). Time will tell, but long-term I’m pretty sure that the death of Brian Thompson is going to be long-term bad for humanity.

We can also ask the same questions about decisions that happened in the distant past. Take yourself back to WWI. Put yourself in the shoes of Georges Clemenceau, the then Prime Minister of France.

You want to end a war that is killing millions of men in horrific trench warfare, so you draft a treaty that imposes guilt and reparations upon Germany. Sure, you might have stopped the death of a few million more people over the next couple of years, but you also laid the foundation for almost a hundred million more people to die just a few decades later. The Treaty of Versailles might have solved a short-term problem for humanity. But it created devastation in the long-term. It might not have been the only thing that caused WWII, but destabilizing Germany was surely a major contribution.

Let’s take these three examples I gave (stealing from a gas station, the killing of Brian Thompson, and the Treaty of Versailles), and change the decision making by applying the framework I provided in the central question I believe the thief, Luigi Mangione, and the authors of the Treaty of Versailles should have asked themselves before carrying out their actions.

If these people were to ask themselves - If I commit this act, is it likely to improve humanity in the long term? - what would they have done instead?

The thief might have decided to just pay for the sandwiches he was thinking about stuffing into his hoodie pocket and running off with. He still gets to eat. And the shop owner gets to keep operating his business at a profit, allowing the people who come to the gas station behind him many more years of having a convenient way to get food, coffee, and gas. And, when he comes back a few days later to get more sandwiches, he can be sure that the store will still be there to provide him with more sandwiches.

The thief should have chosen not to steal. Morality case one closed.

Luigi Mangione might have decided not to kill Brian Thompson. Instead, he would have used his connections inherited from his family and built through years at an Ivy-League university to build a career as a lawyer or in politics. He could have helped defend those wronged by health insurance companies. Or he could have passed legislation that changes the way healthcare companies and health insurance companies conduct business with one another, reforming the system which is inherently broken. A career in law or politics could help create an industry dynamic in healthcare that change the lives of millions for the better for decades to come.

Luigi Mangione should have chosen not to murder. Morality case two closed.

The authors of the Treaty of Versailles might have chosen to forgive Germany for being the aggressors in World War 1. They would not have forced them to pay reparations which bankrupted Germany and created currency hyperinflation. They wouldn’t have drafted the War Guilt Clause, which demoralized Germany and made them hate, well, the entire world. Both features of the Treaty, which if avoided, could have stopped the rise of radical Hitler, who became the voice of the downtrodden German people.

The authors should have chosen forgiveness. Morality case three closed.

I could come up with case studies all day using this framework. And I could defend decisions and reevaluate others to come up with better decisions. And do you know what my decisions would end up looking very similar to? I’ll give you a hint.

“Thou shalt not steal,” is the Eight Commandment.

“Thou shalt not murder,” is the Sixth Commandment.

Matthew 6:12 reads:

“And forgive us our debts,

as we forgive our debtors.”

These ideas: don’t steal, don’t murder, and forgive others, are shared across religions. So are many of the other morality frameworks of Christianity.

Religion is incredible in that these old texts and ancient traditions give people an incredible framework to do good. And their similarities show that humans, intrinsically, have a moral standard that encourages the success of the species in the long-term.

But my problem comes back to the 72 virgins and the crusades and the fiction. When there is fiction at the root of morality, interpretations can be made. And when there’s faith in something without evidence, dogmatism will reign supreme.

If we want a consistent and actionable moral compass that causes people to act for the benefit of humanity in the long-term, we need objectivity. And where will we find this source of objectivity?

History is Our Moral Guide for the Future

In my blog on why you shouldn’t believe in Heaven, I discuss Bayesian reasoning. Briefly put, Bayesian reasoning suggests that when you make a decision but are subsequently provided with new information on your situation, you should most likely adjust your decision to match the suggestions of the new data. Now, Bayesian reasoning is not a good way to create new knowledge, as some may think. But it is a great way to guide your decision making on morality.

The problem with Bayesian reasoning is that when you run into an edge case that has no historical precedent, you cannot use it as a decision-making mechanism. But, for almost all moral dilemmas, we have enough historical precedent to guide us. We know this. Because most religious texts were written thousands of years ago. And despite this, they still are able to provide us with moral guidelines that most people would agree with. Now, with thousands more years of experience and way better ways of confirming the validity of a story, we can use these historical stories, like the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles, to tell us how a treaty after a similar set of circumstances should be drafted in the future to prevent a potential world war.

Should I assassinate this CEO? Well, previous assassinations have led to deeper political and societal divides, increased security measures (which drove up cost and friction of being in positions of leadership), decreased the incentives for smart people to take positions of leadership due to the fear of assassination, and lead to the families of those who were assassinated to be destabilized. Probably not worth the upside of awareness of a particular issue. Especially when awareness can be built in far more peaceful ways.

How can we use Bayesian reasoning and history to resolve the Ukraine War? You might disagree (and it’s maybe slightly more complex), but the Ukraine War began by the US backing Putin into a corner by intimating the expansion of NATO into Ukraine. This is something Putin argued was a red line and would result in an invasion of Ukraine. Biden doubled down on his commitment when he became President. Russia invaded Ukraine. What a fucking surprise.

But look at the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The Soviet Union placed nuclear missile bases in Cuba. Cuba, is, like, really close to the US. This was seen by the US Warhawks as an act of war provocation (because it was). President Kennedy’s cabinet wanted him to invade Cuba and go to war with the Soviet Union. But Kennedy wanted to avoid war (thank God, no pun intended). So, he created a direct line of communication with Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev. They solved the problem diplomatically. Publicly, the Soviet Union removed their nuclear missiles from Cuba. Privately, the US removed their nuclear missiles from Turkey. Potential war avoided.

Okay, so what could we have done (and can still do) for the Ukraine War to prevent it or stop it from continuing. Preventing it would have meant that we do not expand NATO to Ukraine. This seems simple. NATO is adversarial to Russia. Ukraine is a Russian border country. Seems like a fair deal. As a trade-off, a deal could have been struck to restrict Russia’s ability to invade Ukraine. You can imagine a million ways to do this, but whatever way you come up with would have probably stopped the war in Ukraine from happening.

How about now? How could you stop the War from continuing? One way would be to double down on the US war efforts in Ukraine. Beat the Russians with our more advanced technology and skilled military personnel. Sign a treaty that ends the war, blames Russia for the conflict, and makes them pay reparations to Ukraine for the destruction caused in Ukraine. Bankrupt Russia, cause hyperinflation of their currency, and demoralize one of the most powerful countries in the world.

This would work… for a short period of time. The war would end. And over the next five to ten years hundreds of thousands to millions of lives would be saved. But I’m pretty sure I don’t need to tell you what would happen ten to twenty years later.

If this was your choice, you are committing an action that would likely improve humanity in the short term.

The other solution would be to solve it diplomatically. Pull American weapons systems out of Ukraine, rescind the permission of the use of long-range missile systems provided by the Biden Administration in his final hours as president. Restrict Ukraine from becoming a NATO ally. And secretly sign a deal with Russia to remove nuclear weapons from some location that they probably have set up recently near the US border (I’m guessing, by the way). Don’t make Russia pay reparations. But allow the US and NATO countries to provide funding to Ukraine to rebuild its destroyed cities.

Give the Russians a golden bridge to retreat across. Sun Tzu would approve, I think.

If this was your choice, you are committing an action that would likely improve humanity in the long term. You have a good sense of morality, in my humble opinion.

But using this framework isn’t enough. You must incentivize people to want to do it. And to do that, you need Skin in the Game…

Part 3 Coming Soon

Read Next: Why You Shouldn’t Believe in Heaven

Wait, Don’t Go!

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When I was ten years old, I went to Lake George in New York for one of my sister’s basketball tournaments. In the dingy motel where we were staying, my cousin Nate, then fifteen, asked me the most profound question I had ever been asked.

“Do you believe in God?”

At the time, I didn’t even think there was a choice. I was ten, after all. I was fresh off the realization that Santa wasn’t real. And I was starting to grow suspicious about the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. If the adults were willing to lie about a fat dude in a red coat flying around the world in one night delivering presents to children undetected, why wouldn’t they be willing to lie about a bearded man in the sky who created all of mankind and had a son who could walk on water? Both seemed equally implausible, I’m sure I thought to myself.

I grew up Catholic, as all good Italian-muts in New England do. I went to church on major holidays when my mom made me, went to CCD, and even got baptized. However, my pseudo-religious upbringing wasn’t enough to make me pseudo-religious. If anything, it made me areligious, which is where I stand now.

As I became a teenager and then a college student, I couldn’t help but be hypercritical of religious people. And I didn’t discriminate. Muslims were extremists, Christians were homophobes, and Jews wore silly hats. And their dogmatic belief in their made-up God made them do weird, irrational things.

It was only the good atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Richard Feynman, that I could relate to. Their worldview made sense. Question the universe, don’t believe in anything, and be selfishly altruistic. Works for me.

But atheism, or a-religiousness, or secularism, or nihilism, or whatever you want to call it, isn’t working for everyone. America is a growingly secular society, with Pew Research telling us that almost a third of Americans are unaffiliated with a religion (Pew). And while secularism is on the rise, we also see increase rates in depression, decreased rates of marriage, and decreased rates of fertility. I’m not saying correlation is causation, but one must wonder.

The thing is, I don’t fit into the typical mold of your depressed, secular atheist who thinks kids are bad for the environment, marriage is an oppressive construct, and who is also confused about their purpose. I have deep purpose, am delusionally happy, am desperately searching for someone to marry, and I want four kids. Outside looking in, I’m the Christian-Trump supporter that the comment section in one of my blogs would expect you to believe. Which is also why all the Christian clients at my gym are trying to convert me by bringing me to Sunday mass and buying me Bibles. They think I think like them. They don’t want to see me burn in Hell because I haven’t accepted Jesus.

What’s Useful About Religion?

If you’re worried about the growing rates of depression, declining rates of marriage, and declining rates of fertility, and want to find the solution, you don’t have to look far: it’s religion. This might sound weird coming from an atheist. But people with religious practices are less depressed, get married more often (and have less divorces), and have more kids than your typical atheist. In “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland, he makes a valid point on religious practice.

“Religion feels incompatible with modern life because it seems to involve delusional beliefs, but if [the benefits] came from a trial of a new drug, we would want to add it to tap water.”

I don’t see America going back to being a society with religion at its core. Knowledge is too democratized. There’s just too much easily accessible information that shows us how untrue all the stories in the Bible are. There was obviously no great flood that Noah had saved the animals from. Nobody birthed the son of God without having sex first. Adam and Eve were not the first two humans. And Jesus didn’t kill a fig tree by cursing it because he was hangry. And you won’t convince me by telling me these things happened because twelve, most likely fictional people, all told a similar story. Sorry, ain’t happening.

You might tell me that you can be a Christian without being a literalist. You can just believe in the morality that the stories describe without believing that these stories really happened. You can still believe in God, Heaven, and Hell, and the path towards these places without believing that Adam and Eve are the first humans and that the Earth is only 6,000 years old, or whatever.

But I don’t think this is true. I think you’re either in or out. You either take the Bible as truth or you leave it altogether.

Without literalism, you get yourself (and your family) on a slippery slope to atheism. This can happen fast. My grandfather was a Catholic literalist. My mother heard in Catholic school that the stories of the Bible were just fiction that teaches us a lesson. She told her father that her teacher said this to her. My grandfather said, “What kind of school am I even sending you to?” But his vehemence against this idea was not enough. The seed of doubt was already planted in her young mind. She raised me with a belief in God but that the Bible is a fictional story book. My cousin asked me if I even believed in God. Now I don’t. Nor do I even believe in the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny anymore. Two generations later and the Catholic religion is now gone from a family tree. Sorry Pepe (my grandfather).

However, there seems to be a movement among atheists towards “Cultural Christianity”. Elon Musk and Richard Dawkins have both described themselves as “Cultural Christians”. This is essentially saying “I’ll take the values without the belief in God or the silly stories of the Bible, thank you.”

I would fit into this category as well (and as a side can I change out the homophobia for, well, not homophobia?).

How do you get here though? How do you get the benefits and values of religion without literalism or the government putting it in your tap water?

I’ve struggled with this question for years. Now I think I have the answer.

First, we must ask: how do religious people get the benefits of their religious practices? I think it comes down to four factors: community, strength of belief in the family unit, purpose, and ethics.

All these factors are taught dogmatically in the Bible. The bible tells you to live life this way. However, without it, secular society loses their way. We need to somehow get people these aspects of life without the Bible to preach it. Because once the modern American reads that there was a flood which covered all of Earth and that one dude on a boat had saved two of every animal, you’re going to lose them when they have all human knowledge shoved into a tiny metal rectangle in their pocket which tells them otherwise.

For most of the rest of this piece, you’ll see me reference the Bible and Christianity, because that’s what I know best. But I’m pretty sure the foundation of what I’m saying translates across religions and religious practices.

Humans Are Communal Creatures

Community, I think, is the most important thing that religious practices share for human happiness and societal stability. It’s also the easiest one to replicate without religion. This is because community is built on shared interest. A religious person’s religion is one of their interests. And they go to church (or synagogue, or wherever else a religious person goes) on a regular basis to be around a whole bunch of people that think like them. Here, they make friends, keep up relationships, and engage in activities they enjoy (talking about their God) with people they like.

Religion is not the only place that people find community, obviously. People who have an interest that they share with others often meet with them to engage in those interests.

The problem is, without a built-in community that comes from childhood, like religion, people have a hard time seeking community on their own. Religion makes it easy. Show up to the same place at the same time with the same people. We will be here every week and engage in the same activity. It’s predictable, which helps people build up the habit. The predictability also decreases the barrier to entry. If someone moves to a new town, they know they can just find their local church and go there on a Sunday at nine in the morning and there will be this very similar ceremony going on that they’ve seen before many times. The people at this new church will be very similar to the people in their previous town’s church. Instant friendships will be formed.

And communities make people happy. Humans are deeply social creatures. Without social interaction, we don’t enjoy life. As much as it seems nice to go off the grid in the woods, it’s not all that fun. Just ask any contestant on the History Channel show “Alone”. A few days in and the contestants, after having built a shelter and killed enough animals to feed them for months, start bitching about how they miss their friends and family and want to go home. How pathetic. How human.

Without a religion that offers a place to go to practice religion in a consistent way, the barrier to entry for community is high. You must decide what you’re interested in, which hopefully you know. Then you must find people who are interested in that thing, which hopefully there are. And then you must find where these people meet, if there are such places. And then you must meet there with these people at this place, at the same time until it becomes a habit.

If that doesn’t sound hard enough, good luck doing it if the thing you guys are interested in doesn’t have a strong reason to do it. At least religion tells you that if you don’t go to this place, at this time, with these people, you’ll burn in Hell for eternity. If you don’t place disc golf with Dave at two in the afternoon this Thursday, you’ll probably be fine. Dave might be upset. But Dave isn’t the Creator of The Universe.

But here’s the deal, community doesn’t have to come from a shared belief in morality and the creation of the universe. Community simply comes from shared interests. And shared interests can be anything from the books that you like to read, the sports that you like to play, or the gym.

An interest in fitness is actually one of the best ways to find community. A gym that does group training usually has set times that people go and do their workout. The people there have a shared interest in something incredibly important: their health. And when you move to a new town, you can probably find a gym like the one you went to in your previous town. In my biased opinion as a gym owner, this should be the first place where a secular person should find community.

Another important community that you’ll find is at the place where you work. You and your coworkers are all working on a similar mission for your company. You guys show up at the same place on the weekdays (fuck WFH, btw), and work on the mission. You all probably have similar interests, because you’re in this specific industry together. And it’s how you get paid, so there’s a strong incentive to show up consistently. Probably an even stronger incentive than burning in a mythical Hell.

Apart from family, which will get its own dedicated section in this piece, all the other communities you build or join will be more arbitrary. They will be the sports you like to play, the games you like to play, the books you like to read, or maybe the art you enjoy making or appreciating. The internet makes it easy nowadays to find people who share the same interests as you, no matter how niche. But it’s important to find the activities that you deeply enjoy and can find others that deeply enjoy them too. If you only kinda-sorta like bowling, the percentage chance you join a bowling league and show up consistently is low. God will bring you to Heaven if you go to church every Sunday. That’s a strong incentive to be a part of the Christian community. Being moderately enthusiastic about throwing a ball down a narrow piece of hardwood is not enough for you to go to The Lanes every Saturday night.

You don’t just have to join communities. You can build them. For me, I have built the major communities I’m a part of. I own a gym and have cultivated my client base to bring me a lot of joy. I also dance salsa and am building a community of friends that want to take their dancing to the next level. I’m sure I’ll also build a community of friends who write together.

Building a community is like playing on hard mode. It takes years, because the strength of personal relationships is a compound curve. But, for some, being the leader is more fulfilling than being the follower.

To summarize, if you want to replace the community that religious people have, you’ll want to find or build a community that:

· Has strong conviction in that interest.

· Has a predictable time and location to meet.

· Is based on an interest that you really like.

· Has a presence in many places, so if you move, you don’t lose your community.

But the most important community that you’ll ever be a part of is your family unit. And you can only have one by building one.

Read Part 2: Morality Without Myths

Hold on a minute, I could use your help!

Dear reader, I know there is only a few of you. And I see you all. Substack gets me all the juicy data on who is reading these things. And I deeply appreciate you for being here.

Before you go, could I ask you a favor? If you could please drop a ‘Like’ by clicking the heart button, that would be amazing. It would only take you less than a second.

Also, I want to chat with you and hear your opinions! The best way to get me to answer any questions you have is by using the comment section. Drop a comment and I’ll make sure to reply!

And if you have any friends who might like this piece, please give it a share! Show your friends how smart you are by proving to them that you still know how to read.

As the song comes to an end, the next song was immediately blended in by the DJ. It’s the same salsa music I hear every Friday night. I’m learning the pattern of each song. When they start. When they end. When the beat changes in the middle.

I drop her hands, give her a hug, and guide her by the hips towards the edge of the dance floor where five more beautiful woman are standing there, waiting for a guy to ask her to dance. I go up to one, put my hand on her shoulder, and say “Let’s go.”

As the night goes on, the music begins to change from the Latin dance styles like salsa and bachata to reggaeton. Some of the dancers start to leave. One woman, who is an excellent dancer, looked at me with eyes of disappointment.

“Next time, you and me,” she says as she points to me and then back at herself.

I give her a hug as she leaves the club. I’m surprised by her reaction. But I shouldn’t be. I didn’t dance with her once.

“You know, you didn’t dance with me once. Again.”

This time, a different woman.

“You’ll have to grab me next time, I was busy,” I respond, shouting over the sound of the reggaeton music as I try to make my exit.

“You’re a popular guy,” she says.

I guess I am.

Four years ago, I was sitting in my car with this Russian girl I had been seeing. She was a Bachata instructor. I didn’t know what Bachata was. Her body was beautiful. From the little I knew about bachata by looking at her; I was already interested.

“Here, I want to try something with you,” she said as she grabbed my phone. “Have you ever even heard Bachata music before?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I responded.

“Listen.”

She played a Latin song. In the background, I heard bongos. The beat was clear and distinct. The rhythm made me want to twist my shoulders. It made me want to dance.

“Find the one in the beat,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I responded. The music kept playing.

“Find where the beat starts.”

I half understood what she meant. I sat there and listened for a few more seconds. I bobbed my head side to side in sync with the timing of the beat.

“One,” I said.

“Try again,” she said.

I bobbed my head a couple more times. I waited for the beat to come back around.

“One,” I repeated.

“Have you done this before?” she asked.

“No. I don’t even know what I’m doing now.”

“Do it again,” she demanded.

I bobbed my head again.

“One,” I said.

“You need to learn how to dance,” she said to me. She looked at me in the eyes with a look of amusement and surprise. “It takes me weeks to teach people how to do that.”

Seven months ago, I got dumped by a woman I thought I was going to marry. After the breakup, I didn’t want to be alone. And I wanted to get laid. I read copious amounts of dating books. The pickup artist books were predicated solely on seduction and faking status and charisma. They were fun to read. But not my style.

Other books were more foundational and reasonable. One was “Mate” by Tucker Max and Geoffrey Miller. Another was “Models” by Mark Manson. Both books gave one piece of common-sense advice: put yourself where women are likely to be. Try a dance class. The ratio of men to women is usually favorable.

Okay, I can do that.

I began by taking a girl who I had met on a dating app to a salsa class. Afterwards, we went to dinner. I was ecstatic.

“We need to do that again. I want to go out and dance right now,” I said to her as we ate sushi.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I didn’t know enough salsa to go out and dance salsa. I learned two moves that night. Cross body lead. Right turn. And I didn’t learn them well. But I was hooked.

I kept bringing new girls to the weekend dance classes. One was a Latina girl who danced her whole life growing up. Afterwards, we went out to a club that plays salsa, bachata, and merengue music. Many of the people in the local Latin dance scene go there. She and I danced for hours. We did it again the next week. And again the following week. I stopped seeing other girls. We went out again. Then, I stopped seeing her.

By this point, the people around me started realizing I had some talent at dance. One of the things that made me so enthusiastic about it was that I got a lot of praise. And I got more of it from dancing than anywhere else in my life.

The first weekend that I went out without my Latina dance partner, I sat and watched everyone else dance for forty-five minutes. I got up, said goodbye to everyone, and left the club before ten-thirty. I drove home disappointed. I was blaming the dance group’s choice of venue. I blamed the music for not being any good.

But really, I was scared. I was scared to dance. Without the comfort of a dance partner, I didn’t want to seem like a fool. I didn’t want to approach a woman who I hardly knew, or don’t know at all, make myself vulnerable by asking her to dance, and then proceed to show her how terrible I am at moving my body. Not happening.

And I’m not the only one. Most of the guys from the dance classes I go to will go to the club after class, sit at the bar, and talk amongst themselves. Meanwhile all the guys who have been dancing for years have their way with the beautiful women who completely outnumber them.

The following weekend after my quick exit, I didn’t even go out. I simply drove home after class. The weekend after that, as I clutched my steering wheel in frustration, I told myself If you don’t go out, you’ll never get any good at this.

At class on that next Friday night, I asked every woman I danced with…

”Are you going out tonight?”

“Where? What do you mean? Who is going?”

“To Giuseppe in the Lion. There will be Latin dancing. Everyone is going to be there,” I lied.

You see, I figured if I could convince all these women I just met, and the few friends I already had, to go out dancing, I wouldn’t be so scared to ask them to dance. I already knew them.

Then I got to this one girl. She was young. Twenty-two. With brown eyes that sparkled. She had an interesting name that I immediately forgot.

“You better be there tonight,” I said to her.

“Where?” she asked.

“At Giuseppe and the Lion. Everyone is going out after this.”

“Okay, I’ll go.”

And they all went. The night was incredible. I got that girl with an interesting name’s number. And I texted her when I got home to tell her that I had a great time dancing with her. And then she immediately corrected me on her name.

She became my next dance partner. Then the Latina girl came back. Then I started practicing with them almost every night.

The reason women so greatly outnumber men in the dance community is because men have giant egos. And these egos lead to there being two great filters that stop men from getting any good at dancing.

When you begin learning to dance, you find that there are two basic types of men on the dance floor at a club.

First, there are the experts. The ones who have been dancing for years. And by years I usually mean decades. They are the instructors around town. They are former pros. They have moves. They twirl girls around. They lead them through complex sequences with grace. They have style. They make simple shit look good. And the women love them. They love dancing with them.

Then there are the beginners. The guys that go to one or two dance classes a week. They typically don’t go out dancing. But if they do, they sit on the sidelines. They nurse their drinks. Maybe on occasion they ask a girl to dance. Or they get asked to dance by a girl who knows them from a dance class out of pity. And because she is bored. And because she was just sitting around waiting for one of the guys who is an expert to ask her. But he was busy dancing with whoever he wanted.

The beginners who make it out to the club passed the first great filter. The first great filter is when a guy goes to a dance class for the first few times. This is surprisingly difficult for most men. They must move their body in a sensual way in front of a woman for the first time in their life. They must make small talk with many women, some of which are very pretty. They then must awkwardly lead them through dance moves he just learned while she politely tells him “You’re doing great.” Meanwhile, she is bored. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees one of the two experienced guys in the class grab that same girl, lead her through that simple move easily, then goes on to lead her through five far more complex moves, all while she is smiling and laughing and touching his chest. Oof.

This filters a lot of guys out. Especially the guys that bring their dates to class. They don’t want to get emasculated by another man in front of their woman. I’ve seen it happen a dozen times. An advanced guy gets to wrap his arms around his girl, spin her around easily, and make her laugh. Which all happens just after she yelled at him for not doing it right. She then scowls at him out of the corner of her eye while he dances with another woman. See ya never.

The guys who come alone are usually just desperate for dating opportunities (yes, this is me). They don’t have a lot of charisma. They are awkward inside and out. And the reality of this gets amplified in dance class. Good luck. Bye bye.

But if they can make it through the gauntlet of a dance class, they will make it through to great filter two: the club.

Like I said, there are usually two types of men at the club. The beginners and the experts. There are very few guys like me out there. The guys with some talent, who are learning, who are clearly not a beginner, but who aren’t even close to the experts.

But getting to my level isn’t easy. At the club, the male ego hinders men again. But this time, it’s even worse.

Two weeks after I convinced everyone to go to the club and I got to meet the girl with the sparkly brown eyes, three of us went to Giuseppe. Sparkly-eyed girl, my friend Dave, and myself. Dave has been dancing for a while. Far longer than me. He is a great guy. Tons of fun. The girls love to dance with him. He is a great dancer. But he is not one of the experts. He is one of the few in-between sorts of guys.

Sparkly-eyed girl and I danced a lot together. She danced with some other guys. I did a lot of watching the experts. And was feeling too intimidated to ask any of the other women to dance but her. Thirty minutes in, we lost Dave.

The next day at salsa class, I asked Dave what happened. He said that he felt intimidated. The guys there were great. And he was too nervous to ask the other women, who were all amazing that night, to dance.

“I feel you. But we need to go through this. This is what will separate us from everyone else,” I said to him.

He looked at me with a smile. He knew I was right.

You could call me an intermediate dancer. To get to my level, you need to be committed. You need to dance almost every night. You need to find girls who will dance with you late on a Tuesday night after work. You need to do private lessons. And then trade those private lessons for your living room, YouTube, and your favorite dance partner. You need to be listening to salsa music in the car on the way to work so you can feel the beat. You need to be able to find the “one” in the first seconds of hearing a song. This is your cue to start dancing. Your timing will be everything. Without it, you are nothing.

You need to build sequences of moves in the notes app on your phone. Coming up with such names for your new moves like the “Bow and Arrow,” the “Jet Ski Sequence”, and, my favorite, the “Big Stir Right Turn Crossbody with Pseudo Hammerlock to Unwind”. Then you need to memorize your sequences. This will take hours of practice with your partner. Hopefully she doesn’t mind spending all this time with you.

Sometimes you’ll practice alone because everyone was busy. You’ll catch yourself dancing while working out in between sets.

You need to dream about dancing. You need to create group chats with your dance friends to practice outside of dance classes.

You think I’m joking? You think I’m taking this too seriously? Guess what, your competition is professional dancers. Your competition are the people who own dance studios. Your competition is teaching other people to dance. Your competition is taking that girl you brought to the club, holding her close, grinding his hips on her, emasculating you in front of everyone.

Then, you must dance with her while she is still sweaty from dancing with him, and proceed to lead her through moves with a small fraction of the skill and even less style than he did.

And the whole time, your fragile little male ego is going to have to fucking deal with it.

Practice a few times a week and go through this for years. Practice every night, and maybe it’s only a few months.

That’s what it takes to get through the second great filter. Supreme dedication. Obsession. Patience. Learning. Growth. Frustration. Fear. Jealousy.

Because let’s be honest, you’re not tough enough to deal with your ego being bruised for years.

You’ll want to give up when you dance with a beautiful girl who you know is a pro. And the nerves erase your mind of that sequence you just spent all week memorizing.

Cross body lead. Right turn. Cross body lead. Right turn. Basic step. These are the first two moves you learned. You’re flailing. Smile at her as you try to make it seem like you’re just warming up to some big move that will blow her mind. Cross body lead. Right turn.

The song ends. She is bored.

She gives you a hug, says “thanks”, and gets asked to dance by one of the studio owners. He holds her close. He pairs an Enchufla with a Titanic with a Whatchamacallit.

She spins. She laughs. Game over. Go home.

But don’t. Stay. Suffer. Sit with your emotions.

Practice that next week. Work on your sequence.

The next week you come back. You’re too scared to ask her to dance.

Practice again. Work on your sequence. Learn a new move.

The next week you come back. You ask her to dance.

“Oh, you’re good!” she says.

The song ends. Big hug. Was she impressed?

Practice. Work. Come back. She asks you to dance this time.

Show her moves she has never seen.

“Look who is teaching who!” she says.

Practice. Work. Come back.

You don’t have time to dance with her. Too many other women.

“Next time, you and me,” she says as she points to you and then back at herself.

“Sarah has something to show you,” Denise said to me as I looked down at her daughter, who had her tiny arms wrapped around her mother’s leg.

Sarah, only three and a half years old, was holding a frizzy-haired Barbie doll, which was in the condition you would expect a three-and-a-half-year-old would keep a Barbie doll in.

“I don’t know why, but she really wanted to show you her doll. She wouldn’t leave the house this morning without it. Come on honey, show Coach John.”

I knelt down to get on Sarah’s level as she slowly outstretched her beat up Barbie doll towards me.

“Look at that! She is so beautiful,” I say to Sarah, feigning a deep admiration for her toy.

Sarah looked at me in the eyes briefly, then looked away. She petted her doll on the head in front of me.

“I absolutely love your doll. Are you ready to play today?” I said to Sarah. She didn’t respond, just kept petting her doll.

“All right honey, practice is about to start. Why don’t you put your doll away and get out on the field with the other kids,” Denise said to her daughter, who was still latched to her mother’s side.

Sarah reached her doll above her head to give it to her mother. She turned to me, and I gently guided her by the shoulder in the direction of the soccer field, where I had two lines of children practicing shooting. She ran over to one of the lines and joined the other kids.

“Kids are hilarious,” I said to Denise.

“They really are,” she said to me.

I turned away and headed towards the field to watch my team practice. Soccer practice for three- and four-year-olds amounts to lightly kicking the ball in a semi-organized fashion somewhat towards the goal, some crying for what seems to be no reason, and a lot of tripping over their own feet. And I found all of it to be an enlightening experience.

That was seven years ago. I was twenty-one. Now I’m twenty-eight. At the time I didn’t think I wanted to be a father. I was going to be some big, change-the-world business guy. I had countless ideas in my head. Most of them, by my rough calculations, would net me about a billion dollars. And everyone would know my name. And I would do all this before I was thirty-five.

But coaching those tiny little humans kicking a soccer ball changed my life. I realized how incredible kids were. And how much joy being around them brought me. Within a few weeks, I realized I needed to be a father.

My dreams of being a hot-shot business tycoon didn’t fade. I would just be a hot-shot tycoon with kids. Easy.

Elon Musk seems to have a very clear vision for his life. In a 2017 Rolling Stone interview, he said that “The reason [he] founded SpaceX was to make life multiplanetary.” (Rolling Stone).

Although this is a mission statement for his company, it also feels personal. This is his life mission. In a 2012 interview with Wired magazine, he was quoted as saying "I think it's important for humanity to become a multiplanet species and explore the stars. That’s what makes me passionate about the future,” (Wired).

If you look at what he is building, you can connect all the dots back to this mission.

Tesla, to develop sustainable means of transport so we don’t burn through all our resources before we get to the stars.

Neuralink, to help all humans be more capable, improving the net output per human.

StarLink, to help get more humans connected to the internet, improving our knowledge output.

DOGE, to help the greatest and most technologically capable country on Earth not impede its own prosperity.

X, to protect the right of free speech and save humans from tyranny.

Although many of these things may seem orthogonal to the mission, if you think this, you aren’t seeing the full picture. Tyranny, a lack of resources, a lack of knowledge, and a lack of human capability, are all detrimental to getting to the stars. And if we fix the transparency of the internet, allow everyone to participate in it, make it sustainable to be a human, break the regulatory state, and build rocket ships, we will get off this planet. That’s what Elon is doing.

Although Elon is firing on all cylinders with his life mission, he is failing, or, at least, underperforming in other regards. He has twelve children with three different women. He doesn’t seem to have entirely stable relationships with all of them. And he clearly doesn’t have stable relationships with all the mothers of his children either. At the expense of his life mission, his personal life is shaky, at best.

Elon is the most extreme example of how you can be great at something, but not everything. But I think that beyond that, him having such a clear mission for his life allows him to be so great at the things in his life that serve the mission. Life’s a balancing act. And you’ll have to compromise performance in one area to have maximum output in another.

Shortly after my brief tenure as a tiny-person soccer coach, I graduated college and listened to a podcast by Naval Ravikant called “How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky.” In the podcast, Naval discusses how, to get rich, you need to find the intersection of what you love to do, what you’re naturally great at, and what the world needs that it will pay you for. This podcast paralleled a common Japanese concept called “Ikigai,” which is a similar philosophy on how to approach life.

https://www.allaboutlean.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Ikigai.png

I thought deeply over the next few years about how I was going to apply this concept to my life to maximize my financial outcome. I was pretty good at art and knew a lot about exercise science, so I decided to create “Tiny Whiteboard Workouts,” an Instagram page dedicated to workout programs drawn on smaller-than-average whiteboards. I made about $50 over the course of a year and a half with that. Then I realized I’m pretty good at language and exercise creation, so I created the WEN System, a standardized system to revolutionize the way exercises are created and named. I didn’t even release the hundred pages of documentation that my friends and I developed for it. Then I created Fitteo, an online marketplace for workout programs. I did this because I realized that I’m good with technology and had a deep understanding of the content creation environment from Tiny Whiteboard Workouts. This cost my dad about $20k.

And then I bought a gym because I realized that’s probably what I’m going to be pretty good at. It’s simple, I know what it takes, and I have the prerequisite skillset. But guess what? Nobody is changing the world by owning some gyms. And being pretty good at something isn’t enough to be the best. My future as a business tycoon is fading in front of me. Goodbye yachts, supermodel girlfriends, and dinners with international leaders. It was nice knowing you (in my dreams).

But let’s be honest, my goal of being a business tycoon and a dad on the side wasn’t very clear. I wasn’t working towards anything specific. I just wanted to do anything that would make me lots of money with the knowledge and skills I already had and could build upon. Clearly, that’s not enough to optimize the focus in your life. You need a problem to solve. Elon wants to save us from an extinction level event. So, his life mission is to make life multiplanetary.

I was recently on a call with one of my best friends. He is one of the smartest people I know. I built Fitteo with him (it failed because of me, not him, trust me). And at twenty-two, I’m confident he will be a very wealthy guy in the future. On this call with him, he was talking about all these ideas he had for new businesses and products to create. He seemed hell-bent on solving any problem he could with code and a basic understanding of the landscape the problem was in. I didn’t understand his disjointed desire to create such random projects. To gain clarity, I asked him “when you’re eighty, and you’re on your deathbed, what will you be proud that you created?”

He didn’t have an answer. He said he was very happy with his life now. And he doesn’t have any regrets. I told him I thought this was great. But I also told him that he is one of the smartest people I know, and he should focus on why he is here. He has built a lot of companies and products. All of which comes with a mission statement. He has gone through the mission-statement creating process many times. It’s time to create one for his own life.

When Fitteo failed, I realized that being a business tycoon wasn’t my destiny. I simply am not smart, hardworking, and risk-tolerant enough for it. It takes a next-level mind with incredible resolve and little fear to build the next Google. And I’m not him. I’m not even close.

I haven’t given up on my desire to maximize the outcome of my life. To solve a big problem that humanity struggles with. To leave a legacy. Maybe people won’t know my name. But my hope is that they will feel the impact I’ve had for generations to come. I know my own mission statement. I created it shortly after Fitteo failed and I bought Galaxy Fit Lab, my gym.

The fun part of my life is that I get to talk to smart, hard-working people all day. I own a gym and am the only trainer. So, I end up training people for about eight to ten hours daily. My gym is also expensive. Only wealthy, successful people can afford it. And I’ve been training for so long that I can get people to move very well with little effort and few words.

With the rest of the time, I make conversation. I ask people about their lives. What makes them tick. What they’re passionate about. What makes their relationships work. How they raised their children. How their children are doing in the world. How they made their money. What life lessons have they learned. Are they happy.

When you do this every day, all day, with hundreds of people, you see patterns. You see how people made their money (spoiler alert: you must work hard for a long time). You see why people are happy. You see why people are in a good relationship. You see why people are sad. You see why they get divorced. You see why their sons are still living with them. You see why their daughters are still single. You see their successes. You see their failures. You see why they happen. And you see how to recreate their successes. And you see how to avoid their failures.

But what you don’t see is one thing. You never see anyone with a clear vision for what they want out of life. Almost nobody has a mission statement. Even the happiest, richest people with the most successful children retire, play lots of golf, and seem unfulfilled. Or, if they are still working, plan on retiring soon, playing lots of golf, and being confused about what they will do next, if anything at all. They spend a lot of time with their contractors, hairdressers, and doctors. And playing golf.

The 14^th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, outlined a life philosophy in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 1989, stating "I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience, I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being." (Nobel Prize) This may explain his fight for the liberation of Tibet from China.

Steve Jobs once said "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?" (Business Insider). If this is his life mission statement, it would explain his obsession with making the best consumer technology products with Apple the world has ever seen.

Maybe Warren Buffet has a mission statement, and it goes something like “create lasting value.” This would explain his career in investing. And explain why he keeps going at age 307.

The common theme here is that when people simplify their purpose to a few brief words, they have a lasting impact on the world. It’s not a prerequisite, probably, but it seems like it helps.

When you have a life mission statement, it helps you make decisions faster. It helps guide you on what you should work on. It helps you say no to opportunities. It helps you say yes to others. It helps you deal with short-term suffering, because you know the suffering serves the mission. It helps you choose who to spend time with and who not to. It makes you happier by giving your life meaning. It helps you build community by finding like-minded people to surround yourself with and bond over your shared purpose. It keeps you from wanting to retire, because your purpose is so grand your mission will never be complete.

And most importantly, it keeps you from playing golf, which is a waste of time and beautiful landscaping.

As we saw in Part 4, dating apps are broken. But does that mean we should give up on them? I don’t think so. I think they need to improve. As we have said, more and more people are using them to meet their significant other. And this number will only increase over time.

Dating apps offer several advantages over meeting people in person or through friends and family. Let’s go through the positives.

Filtering is better on dating apps.

Your friends and family think they know you, but they usually don’t. And your mom might think that her friend from pickleball’s daughter is cute, but you don’t agree. And your personal training client might be confident that one day you’ll be Christian, so you should meet one of her son’s Christian girlfriends. But you’re pretty confident that you won’t be a Christian anytime soon.

Let’s say you meet a person in a bar or a coffee shop. You’re meeting them based on looks, just like with the dating apps. And there are only so many people in bars on any given night. And they’re not preselected for the things you want. They’re not even preselected for being single or not. That means you’re going to have to talk to a lot of people before you even find one that fits your criteria. But by that point, you might be so drunk that you might blow your chances with her and get a drink thrown in your face while you’re at it. If you’re a girl, you might get so drunk that the guy who you thought was soooooo cute the night before at the bar, you realize after waking up the next morning in his racecar bed is too dependent on his parents to take seriously.

The pool of potential applicants is far higher on dating apps.

Let’s say you’re a lady who wants a guy who doesn’t drink and volunteers. You’re not going to meet him at the common bars and clubs which he avoids. So, what should you do instead? You could go volunteer!!!! But, alas, few men volunteer. The rare guys who do volunteer are prime targets for the other women who are volunteering to snatch up before you even have the chance to introduce yourself. This gender ratio mismatch makes volunteer organizations a highly competitive market for meeting men. And do you really have the time to volunteer at every animal shelter in your town to find Mr. Right? Probably not.

But if you filter for ‘doesn’t drink’ and ‘interests include volunteering’ on a dating app, you might find a guy who fits your criteria. And they’re actively looking for a relationship. And you know this because they’re on a dating app.

Better filtering plus more single people who are looking for the thing you are equals dating apps should be awesome. And they should be superior to your mom saying “oh, she’s cute, why don’t you date her” or Becky stealing Mr. Right from you at the dog shelter.

Most of my dating experiences have come from dating apps. I’ve met some incredible women from them. I met my ex-girlfriend of 8-months on Hinge. And she is a great lady. And now that I’m single, I continue to meet great women.

I personally always felt that dating apps were a positive. However, they are frustrating. As a guy not in the top 10% of beautiful men that all women want to spend the night with, I can speak to the frustration that most men feel. I get very few matches. Maybe a few a week. And I must play a very persistent game to manipulate … I mean uh, convince (?) these women to let me take them out on a first date.

I’m fairly nice, fit, chivalrous, and have more interesting prompts than telling you about my stance on whether or not pineapple belongs on pizza (if you don’t get this, then you’re lucky). I own a gym. I don’t drink, do drugs, or smoke cigarettes. And I’m six feet tall. But I still struggle with dating apps. Thanks mom and dad.

But I found out something while on a date that changed my whole perception on how dating apps should work.

This girl I was seeing, let’s call her Jessica, and I were discussing how we decided to choose each other on Hinge. This girl Jessica is beautiful. She is a former college cheerleader. Out of my league, for sure. And for me to match with a girl as good-looking as her on Hinge was honestly a shock. And we didn’t just match. She messaged me first. That. Does. Not. Happen. This must’ve been pure luck.

But when she told me how she found me, I realized it was not luck at all.

Jessica values a few things. She values a guy who doesn’t do drugs, smoke cigarettes, and drinks very little. She also wants someone tall (six feet and up (many guys lie about this, btw)). These are pretty strict filters. Just to get a guy over six-foot is a big ask. Then to ask him to not drink, do drugs, or smoke is basically asking to cut out 90% of all modern men from her dating pool. Which is what she was looking to do.

On Hinge, you can pay for ‘Hinge+”, which gives you enhanced filtering. Jessica just got out of a relationship that she had been in since she was young. She has never really dated before. She had never used dating apps before. And as a young, professional lady, she had the money to spend on the egregiously priced Hinge+ subscription ($10-$25 per week depending on how long your billing cycle is). She paid for one week at a time for two weeks. And she set the enhanced filters based on the things she valued. And her experience was far unlike the other women who typically use dating apps.

With these advanced filters, very few guys showed up in her feed. And I was one of the few. Also, more importantly, she showed up in very few guys’ feeds. As a result, she wasn’t getting a lot of inbound messages. This made it easier for her to filter for the best possible match. It also solved the paralysis by choice dilemma. Furthermore, she was able to use more of her System 2 mode of thought to select a match.

And it made it worth her time to message a guy she thought was interesting first. That is because she didn’t have to waste time combing through the inbound cesspool that is most girls ‘Liked You’ section. On Hinge, this is the section of the app that shows you all the people who have messaged you, even though you haven’t shown interest in them yet.

After two weeks of the $25 per week subscription, she cancelled the paid plan. The next day, when the advanced filters were turned off, she got 25 new inbound messages. She promptly paused her account.

Her experience on Hinge, with the enhanced filters, seems far more positive than most other women. She didn’t get inundated with messages from low quality dudes. She met a guy who met her criteria, and we had some fun dates that didn’t leave her with any crazy stories (hopefully not, at least).

However, she had to pay for the right to have a good time. I’m all for capitalism, but I have a hunch that making female users pay for premium filtering features is short-sighted.

You see, women aren’t even the ones paying for these apps most of the time anyway. 41% of men say they have paid for a dating service, while only 29% of women have said the same (Pew). But as we have seen, men make up for most of the users on dating apps. That means that the smallest portion of users (the women) are also the least likely to pay. Which means they bring in very little revenue.

From a product perspective, you want to delight your users. Give them a reason to keep coming back for more. TikTok has an algorithm as addictive as crack-cocaine. Facebook is the best place to connect with friends from high school. X is the best place to speak freely about how you love Trump. All these products think about how they can keep their users happy and coming back. This drives revenue.

But dating apps have missed the plot. Their users are pissed. They’re leaving in droves. They’re looking for better ways to meet people. Because meeting people on their platform makes them either depressed, if they are (like) me, or overwhelmed, if they are a woman.

And all of this is rooted in a broken pricing model.

Dating apps could learn something from the real world. Specifically, bars and clubs. Bars and clubs constantly run specials to get women into their venue. Free drinks, no cover charges, and more. And where there are many women, men will come. And those men will spend money. Often, to get the women that the bar or club encouraged to be there with the free stuff they gave them. And when the ratio of women to men is even, or even slightly elevated on the female side, you have the hottest club/bar in town. Dating apps should do the same.

Women get premium filters for free. That is the solution. All these dating apps work the same. When you turn on filters, you only see people who meet your criteria. And only those people see you. This would dramatically cut down on how overwhelmed women feel. And it would make them choose different types of men. They wouldn’t just engage their System 1 part of their brain and mindlessly swipe. They would slow down. Look at the profile of a guy. Because he has already been pre-selected. Looks will matter less.

As a result, good men will thrive. Guys who value women, who are disciplined, and who are charismatic will trump hot douchebags.

Women will have a better time. They will flock to these apps because the experience is better. And more men will come. And more men will probably pay to get priority likes. As a result, the app that does this will outcompete everyone.

Now this is all coming from one experience I had on a date with one girl. But, doesn’t it just make sense?

What will the future of dating apps be like?

To take it one step further, the show “Black Mirror” has an even better solution. In their episode “Hang the DJ”, two lovers meet on a dating app. But the dating app is not what it seems originally. (Spoilers incoming)

The episode is set in the near future. Two star-crossed lovers are in what appears to be an enclosed environment specifically designed for them to meet their perfect match. They have a little handheld device that tells them when they have a new match, what time they will meet their new match, and how long they will be with their new match until they must leave them.

Our two main characters meet each other in the beginning and have an awkward time. That being said, they are kind of a cute couple. But they are told by their handheld devices that they will only be together for twenty-four hours. After which they will separate to find someone new. They follow the rules dutifully.

Then, they each have a series of relationships with subpar matches. Some of which they must be with for up to a year or more.

As the viewer, you think to yourself: How can they spend so much time in this place that is designed solely for them to date? Is this some kind of paid-for experience for the young and wealthy to find their soulmate? A sabbatical from life in which the only goal is to pair yourself with the most compatible person? And leave it all up to a computer to decide? How strange.

At least, that’s what I was thinking. Until the end of the episode, that is.

The star-crossed lovers (I honestly don’t even know what this means, but I feel like I’m using it correctly, so no need to Google) are then paired with each other again by the handheld device after many miserable and hollow dating experiences. They fall in love. And then realize they need to escape the clutches of the handheld device before it strips them away from each other again.

They get to the wall where the enclosed dating environment ends, climb it, and jump over the other side. Here, they are met with many other copies of themselves, who also jumped over the wall to freedom. Strange.

Then, it cuts to a shot of a phone with the female main character’s face on it, circled in green, with the text “99.6% Match” underneath. Another cut to a shot of our male main character as he looks up while seated in a crowded bar. Across the bar, he locks eyes with our female main character, phone in hand (probably seeing a similar screen with his face on it), smiling at him. Ah, love at first site (online dating pun).

You see, the whole episode was set inside a computer simulation. In which the app creators simulated the personalities of our main characters, paired them with other users, and determined which users are most compatible after the computer models ran their course.

And once that app exists, you’ll never need your Christian mother to find you a nice Christian boy ever again.

In summation of The Great Dating Divide

Women need to value men. Men need to become valuable. And they need to find each other in a way that is focused on their compatibility on a foundational level, not a surface level.

I hope that helps.