Today I learned that my 7 yr old didn't realise that people without autism or ADHD exist.
He was blown away. "What's that even LIKE?"
"They wake up after A FULL NIGHT'S SLEEP, nearly every night."
"WHAT?!"
"And if plans change unexpectedly, they might be disappointed or annoyed, but they're ok."
"W- HOW?!"
"And if they're doing something new, they don’t need to know exactly what it will be like."
"WHAT?!?!"
"Sometimes, they look out the window and think about nothing."
"NO!!!"
He couldn't stop laughing with incredulity. He was so gobsmacked and delighted.
He kept going, "How?! What would that even be like?!?"
And I had to say, "I don’t know! I can't imagine!"
He was like, "Tell me more about the people... the ones without autism," like they were exotic magical creatures. He's clearly found a lil neurodiverse niche of friends at school haha.
I have a friend whose stress tolerance absolutely marvels me, 100% a psychopath because no normal person could tolerate that much stress and not completely crumble, handles it all with charisma and swagger too, truly exceptional and definitely someone to look up to in that regard, I once asked him if there's any mental models he employs to just keep pushing through and he looked me dead in the eyes and said "When I see a storm, I just know I will ride that storm to the end, I am the storm rider"
A psychologist once sent a single actor into a series of group business meetings with one quiet instruction: act upbeat, or act irritable. Within minutes, the rest of each group had drifted to match whoever was in the room with them. The upbeat groups cooperated more and argued less. The irritable ones did the opposite, and afterward none of the real participants could say why their own mood had moved.
That was Sigal Barsade's "ripple effect" study at Yale, and it works because of something your face does without asking you. When you see an expression, the muscles in your own face begin copying it in about a third of a second, faster than conscious thought, picked up in labs as tiny electrical pulses in the muscle. Mirroring someone's face is tied to feeling a faint version of what they feel, so the mood slips in before you have decided anything.
It does not even need a face to travel. In 2012, researchers changed how much positive or negative wording almost 700,000 people saw in their Facebook feeds for a single week. Through plain text alone, with no faces or voices attached, people shown less positivity started posting more negatively, and the reverse held too. The shift per person was small, but it surfaced across hundreds of thousands of people who never felt it happening.
The bad mood almost always wins, and there is a reason it is the bad one. Negative feeling is built heavier than positive. A 2001 review titled "Bad Is Stronger Than Good" found that one negative event outweighs several good ones across nearly every situation researchers have measured. John Gottman's couples lab put a number on it: stable relationships ran about five good moments for every bad one during a disagreement. A single sour mood can quietly swallow five warm ones.
In families it sinks below mood entirely. Cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, tends to rise and fall in sync between partners and between parents and kids, and that sync tightens the more time you share the same space. One person's bad day really can set the level for the whole house, because a single bad mood is built to outweigh a roomful of good ones.
"Educate the girl child"
The girl child has been educated and has more opportunities than the boy child
But she does not want to pay rent in the house she lives with her 'partner'
She will disrespect him if she pays but expects him to respect her when he pays
MMS
Just left the funeral of a friend that took his own life this week. He was one of the nicest, kindest, most selfless people ever always helping others. He would do anything to make someone smile that needed it so it made me think of one of my favorite quotes from the late Robin Williams.
"I think the saddest people always try their hardest to make people happy because they know what it's like to feel absolutely worthless and they don't want anyone else to feel like that."
#MensMentalHealth
The plumber arrived to fix my leaking sink.
He looked underneath, tightened a few things, and nodded.
"Should be good now."
"Great, thanks."
Then he opened my refrigerator.
I stared.
"What are you doing?"
"Just getting some water."
Before I could answer, he pulled out orange juice.
"Actually, this looks better."
Five minutes later, he was sitting at my kitchen table eating leftover lasagna.
Then his phone rang.
"Yeah," he said. "I'm at my place."
My place?
That's when the doorbell rang.
Another plumber walked in.
The first guy pointed at me.
"Oh good. Tell him what the issue was.".....
A single gram of antimatter costs about $62.5 trillion to make. That is roughly half of everything the world economy makes in a year, for one gram. Reaching the nearest star would take hundreds of thousands of tons of it.
Antimatter packs more energy per ounce than anything else. A normal rocket barely turns any of its fuel's weight into energy, less than a billionth of it. Nuclear fission, the reaction inside a power plant, releases about 0.1 percent of its fuel as energy. Fusion, the reaction in the sun, reaches 0.7 percent. Matter meeting antimatter converts almost all of it. Per pound, that is about ten billion times the energy in rocket fuel. Nothing else we know of could push a ship to a fraction of the speed of light.
Speed is the whole point. The nearest star sits 4.2 light years away. Voyager 1, the fastest object we have ever launched, would need about 70,000 years to get there. An antimatter ship could make the trip in a few decades. Closer to home, it could reach Pluto in weeks instead of the 9.5 years the New Horizons probe actually took.
The price comes from how antimatter gets made. You cannot mine it. It is built one particle at a time in machines like the collider at CERN in Geneva. Every scrap humanity has ever made adds up to under 20 nanograms, enough to light a 100 watt bulb for a few seconds. At the current rate, a single gram would take about 100 billion years. The universe is 13.8 billion years old.
So the dollar figure is just multiplication. A 2003 NASA design figured that a crewed ship fast enough to reach the nearest star in 40 years would need roughly 815,000 tons of antimatter. At today's price, that bill lands past 50 trillion-times-a-trillion dollars. The number in the tweet is, if anything, on the low side.
The price tag is really a yardstick. It measures the distance between making antimatter one particle at a time, the way we do now, and making it by the ton. The obstacle is closing that distance. The dollar figure is just what that gap costs.
One of the attributes of unintelligent people is disagreeing with people they don’t like, even if they are right or no basis for disagreement. They just want to disagree for the sake of it. It’s impossible for them to agree with someone or people they don’t like. It’s difficult for them to publicly acknowledge that the person they don’t like is correct or right about something.
LRT: “Genius” is one of the most abused words out there. I’ve met a lot of highly intelligent people in my life, but in 30+ years of existence, I can count the actual geniuses I’ve met on one hand. Probably less than 5
When you meet an actual genius, you’d know. There’s no debating it. You’d just sit there in awe of how their brain works.
When you come from a poor family, it simply means you know more poor people than rich people.
That means you may not have many successful people around you to follow their footsteps, mentor you, or show you the way.
So what do you do?
Learn from the people around you.
But learn the right way.
Instead of doing exactly what they’re doing, understand why they are where they are.
If anybody tells you that you can’t learn from poor people, that’s not true.
If you want to become rich, you can learn from poor people by understanding the habits, decisions, and mindset that keep them where they are.
Most times, it’s not just about money. About 90% of the time, it’s the mindset.
One young man said something to me recently that completely changed the way I think about parenting. 🥀
He said:
"Everything good people see in me today came from my mother... not from my father's beatings."
That statement hit me harder than he probably realized
His father was the kind of man who always had advice
Always talking
Always shouting
Always correcting
Always telling his children how they should live
But there was one problem
His life looked nothing like his words
He drank heavily
Partied often
Stayed out late
Made reckless decisions
Yet he expected his children to become responsible simply because he told them to
Whenever they made mistakes, he responded with anger.
Sometimes with beatings.
Sometimes with long lectures.
Sometimes with both.
His mother was the complete opposite. ❤️
She rarely raised her voice.
Rarely gave long speeches.
Rarely tried to force lessons down their throats.
Instead...
She lived the lessons.
She became the example.
The way she treated people.
The way she handled disappointment.
The way she corrected without humiliating.
The way she listened before judging.
The way she protected her children while still holding them accountable.
Everything about her spoke louder than words ever could 🥀
Then he told me something I may never forget.
He said:
"My mother never taught me character with her mouth. She taught me character with her life."
And that was when something clicked.