Category: Life & Human Nature
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The Case for Apathy: Why Caring Less May Be the Healthiest Choice
By The Author We live in a culture that treats caring as a moral duty. We are told to care about our jobs, our reputations, our relationships, our politics, our social media feeds. Self-help gurus urge us to “lean in.” Motivational speakers tell us to “find our passion.” Corporations urge us to “bring our whole…
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The Hard Truth About Human Nature: Self-Interest and the Choice of Evil
Every society likes to flatter itself with the idea that humans are naturally good. We teach children that kindness is instinctive, that cooperation comes easily, that cruelty is an aberration. But history, psychology, and even biology tell a darker story. Humans are not naturally good. We are naturally self-interested—and when goodness stands in the way…
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Title: When a Problem Has No Solution: Learning to Manage the Unsolvable
By definition, a problem is something with a solution—a puzzle to be cracked, an error to be fixed, a task to be completed. This mindset dominates modern thinking: everything is a problem, and therefore everything must have a solution. If only we think hard enough, spend enough money, build enough technology, or legislate enough rules,…
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Writing is the missing civic discipline of our age.
There is a quiet assumption in modern life that having an opinion is enough. You feel strongly. You speak passionately. You post frequently. You debate energetically. You vote accordingly. And that is supposed to count as thought. It does not. If you have an opinion—and you do—then you have a responsibility that goes beyond conversation,…
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The Memory You’ll Need When It’s Gone
Antivaxxers love to talk about freedom. They wrap themselves in a flag they don’t understand, quoting science they’ve never studied, while treating modern medicine as though it were a conspiracy hatched in a basement by Bill Gates and the lizard people. And yet, beneath all their bluster, the only thing their freedom guarantees is loss.…
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I’m not dead yet
The most important invention in your lifetime is… “The most important invention in your lifetime is…” —I can’t tell you. I’m not dead yet. Anything I name now is just a midpoint dressed up as a conclusion. The printing press looked finished until electricity showed up. Electricity looked finished until computation arrived. Computation looked finished…
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In Defense of Influence
Modern society treats “corruption” as a moral absolute—an unquestionable evil. But this reflex deserves scrutiny. What we call corruption is often nothing more than discomfort with hierarchy made visible. At its core, influence is not stolen; it is acquired. People who shape policy do so because they possess scarce and valuable resources: capital, networks, expertise,…
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The Myth of More: Why Chasing Extremes Rarely Improves Our Lives
We live in an age obsessed with maximums. A phone that charges in ten minutes. An electric car with 500 miles of range. A house with twice the rooms you’ll ever enter. These promises dazzle us, yet in practice they rarely change how we live. After all, if you charge your phone overnight and drive…
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The People We’re Deporting Are the People We’ll Be Begging For
There is a peculiar confidence in deportation policy.It assumes time is on our side. In the mid-2020s, the United States is removing hundreds of thousands of people from its economy, its labor force, and its future with the serene belief that this is a problem permanently solved. Planes depart. Court dockets clear. Press releases speak…
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“If I Live and You Die, It’s God’s Will”—The Arrogance of Interpreting Survival as Superiority
When a hurricane barrels through a coastal city, and the dust settles, there’s always a moment—a statement, a tweet, a Sunday sermon—that captures the warped way we like to explain survival: “God was watching over us.”“We were blessed.”“It was His will.” But for every person who survived, someone else didn’t.So what then? God turned his…
