Author: the Author
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Rich People Behaving Badly: A Tale as Old as Time
Oh, wealthy folks. Some of them are lovely, humble humans who quietly donate to charity and live in understated mansions. And then there are the others—the ones who treat money like a personality trait and their bank accounts like a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. Let’s talk about those rich people. The Flaunters vs. The Sane You…
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The Luck of Being Liked: On the Quiet Privilege of Social Favor
Some people are lucky. Not lottery-winning, plane-crash-surviving lucky. Just slightly lucky—lucky in the one area that matters most in a society built on human relationships: other people. For them, the world seems to lean ever so gently in their favor. Strangers smile a little longer, bosses assume competence before proof, and police encounters end with…
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The Echoes of Progress: How Five Social Problems of the 1950s Became Worse in Modern America
The 1950s in the United States are often remembered as an era of optimism — postwar prosperity, suburban expansion, and the rise of a confident middle class. Yet beneath that glossy surface were deep social fractures. Racial segregation, gender inequality, poverty, and environmental neglect were foundational to the structure of that society. While the decades…
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The Tragedy of the Out-of-Touch Ruler
Somewhere between the marble halls of power and the glowing screens of the modern world, a disconnection has taken root. The world’s most powerful leaders are speaking to ghosts — fighting wars that ended, solving problems that evolved, and governing people who no longer exist in the forms they remember. It is a quiet tragedy,…
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The Temperament of Disease: A Pondering, Not a Prescription
I wonder if our bodies have personalities—if introverts and extroverts carry different biological rhythms, not just in mind but in immunity. It’s a tempting thought. The quiet, measured life of the introvert might seem to shape a cautious, inward immune system. The outgoing life of the extrovert, with its constant contact, might build a kind…
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the rails I try to stay between
What principles define how you live? I live by a few simple principles that have been sharpened over time — through work, through mistakes, and through watching the world repeat itself in new disguises. First, self-reliance. I believe the instinct to immediately call someone else to fix a problem is the surest way to stay…
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The Moral Arithmetic of Wealth
There is a quiet debt that comes with wealth—one rarely written into law but woven into the moral fabric of civilization. Every dollar of profit, every increment of fortune, exists within a framework built by the many: the workers, the inventors, the educators, the infrastructure, the peacekeepers, and even the consumers. To deny that connection…
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Title: The DEI Settlement
Imagine a company that spent decades dumping waste into your town’s water supply. It made billions in profit while your community paid the price — in sickness, in lost property value, in diminished opportunity. Then one day the truth comes out. The company apologizes. They promise to do better. They hold a press conference and…
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Living in the Past: The Ultimate Money-Saving Hack (Because Being Current is Overrated)
Let’s face it—keeping up with the latest everything is a scam. Tech companies, fashion brands, and car manufacturers want you to believe that you’ll wither into irrelevance if you don’t buy the newest shiny thing the second it drops. But guess what? You can save a fortune by living in the past like a frugal…
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The Real Levers of Productivity
The Pay-Performance Illusion There is a deeply ingrained myth in modern economics and management — the idea that the more you pay a person, the better they will perform. It sounds logical, clean, and reassuring to those who believe people are simple equations of effort multiplied by reward. Yet it’s a false hypothesis that persists…
