My mom works at the Mission Viejo Lake and has befriended two ducks that will come up at eat out of her hand and hang with her at lunch. The male duck hurt his wing and couldn’t fly but they still ended up having babies this spring. She made a video to document this journey.
Major cheat code for life: Be fully where your feet are. When you're at work, work. When you're with family, be with family. When you're resting, rest. Most people are physically present and mentally everywhere else.
People don’t tweet anymore. Feels like as social media matures even further there’s an elite class of content creators and normal people don’t put out anything for fear of visibility or curating a specific vibe. I also have less to say and am less creative than I once was.
i lowkey fuck with how there’s no jobs and rent is infinity money and food is infinity money and fun activities are infinity money and every kind of side hustle is completely flooded and everyone’s angry and mean all the time
Work. Work. Work. Stay hydrated. Go to the dentist. 10,000 steps. “What’s for dinner?” Insurance. Drink water. Pay a bill. Pay a bill. Smile. Credit Score. Check engine light. Go get gas. ALLERGIES! TAXES! STUDENT LOANS! Phone storage full. Email. Email. Apple $12.99. Apple $9.99. Subscriptions. Subscription. Overdraft. Laundry. Fold. Text. Text. Text. Clean the house. “I haven’t seen you in a while.” Doctors appoinment. Hair appoinment. Nail appointment. RENT. WAR! GOVERNMENT! POLITICS! THE PRESIDENT!!
There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.
He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.
When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.
Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.
The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.
Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.
The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.
That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.
If you see Project Hail Mary this weekend, I hope you'll remember how I told you over 3 years ago that stuff like this was going to explode in pop culture.
-From ironic cynicism to post-ironic sincerity.
-Embracing the "cringe" & the celebration of the earnest "try-hard."
-From deconstructing the past, to a nostalgia for some positive "vibe" we lost in the deconstruction.
-The rejection of Fight Club-era nihilism.
-The ability to stare at the apocalypse in front of you and be hopeful instead of a "doomer."
I've been thinking a lot about the themes in Train Dreams lately. The idea of being a bystander in time. The way events outside of our control can shape or unravel our lives. How the year we're born can impact our stories, our opportunities, our choices. A beautiful film.
you see a toddler pass out mid-morning, gripping a tiny half eaten muffin, and when they wake up later, they just start eating the muffin again. this is real freedom. there are wild horses less free than this