For thousands of years, babies slept with their mothers. When they cried, they were attended to. Then two men came along: Dr. Holt and John B. Watson. They said babies should be trained. That babies had to fit the assembly line schedules of their parents. "Newborns must cry to expand their lungs," they claimed. "Simply let them cry it out." And that's how the "cry it out" sleep training method was born. Watson treated babies like experiments. "Never hug or kiss your child," he wrote. "Shake hands with them in the morning." After all, mothers needed rest, to attend to their husbands and households. Watson had four children. Three attempted suicide. One succeeded. And we still follow it today. Because once you convince a mother to ignore her baby's cries, you've broken something primal.
Will is the rarest skill on earth right now. you can mass produce intelligence you can buy beauty you can fake status but you cannot download will from anywhere it has to be grown in suffering and nobody wants to suffer so nobody has any. one man with will is worth ten thousand without it. the future belongs to whoever can still force themselves to do things they do not want to do
@pete_rizzo_ They’re now saying that the next stimulus checks will come from tariff profits to avoid printing money. I wonder what you think about this and how it could adjust the base assumption of Hayes (based on his articles)
A few lessons learned from 2025:
1) Life has a way to give you what you want after you give up on chasing it directly.
2) The best conversations happen serendipitously between people with no agenda.
3) If you are not becoming more humble as you get older, you are running in the wrong direction.
4) If you married someone thoughtful who genuinely cares and who is committed to building a better life together, you’ve already won the lottery.
5) Kids completely change your routine, but it doesn’t mean you will be less productive, you just need to be more efficient with your time and focus on the right things.
6) If your environment doesn’t reflect your vibes, the faster you have the courage to move on, the earlier you will start getting lucky.
7) You can always take a good guess at how much time left you have with your parents, it’s up to you to make the most of it, for them but also for you.
8) People who don’t grow much are just people with too much pride and not enough humility to question their methods.
9) Everyone should have one hobby that forces them to be the healthiest and physically strongest version of themselves, and another hobby that forces them to maintain mental sharpness and bold creativity.
10) Lack of courage to speak your mind ruins all relationships regardless of your intentions.
11) The most talented people don’t take themselves seriously, otherwise, they wouldn’t have made all the necessary mistakes to get where they are.
12) Being well-dressed and aesthetically pleasing is underrated, for yourself but also for others; most people who claim it’s narcissistic just don’t have the discipline to make the efforts.
13) People with clear and ambitious goals, and a loving family, don’t have the time or the energy for any unnecessary drama.
14) Introducing people who might get along great with each other is an underrated habit.
15) You are more resilient than you think, especially when you do things for people you genuinely love.
Happy new year to everyone! All the best for 2026!
Your great-great-grandchildren won't know your name but they'll carry the warmth or coldness you touched people with, encoded in their nervous systems like genetic memory. Every hour spent becoming important is an hour not spent being real, and at the end only the real moments survive the fire. Touch or be touched - everything else is just expensive distraction from the fact that you're going to die having never actually been here
Possess the eyes and you possess the soul. The new monasteries won't have crosses, just men who remembered how to be bored, how to sit in silence without reaching for the pocket-demon, how to think one thought all the way through instead of half-thinking thirty thoughts fed to them by the feed
God buries the gold in the filth and this is not cruelty it is selection. He asks - how badly do you want it. badly enough to kneel in what others step over. badly enough to touch what the clean men will not name. and the poor stay poor because they want clean gold, gold that arrives without shame, and there is no such gold, there never was. the pearl comes from the wound in the oyster. the wine comes from the crushed and broken grape. the bread comes from the buried wheat that agreed to die. everything precious passes through disgust, through decay, through the place where pride cannot breathe - and you stand at the edge wanting the treasure but not the grave, wanting resurrection but not the cross, wanting the kingdom while refusing the dirt it grows in. the saint kneels where the coward will not look. this is law. go lower. go where your pride screams no.
the way up is down
the way out is through
and your hands are still clean
which is why they are still empty
Mediterranean people, generally speaking, just want to have fun.
It’s a Northern European phenomenon… directly attributed to Protestantism.. that prioritized work, structure, and committee governance over leisure. That mentality then transferred itself to the North American colonies and became deeply embedded in the American psyche.
This cultural package ultimately led to differences in institutions, education systems, trust in impersonal cooperation, and the timing and depth of industrialization. This is one of the important reasons the US became the global economic hegemon and why Northern European countries, in aggregate, are more productive than the southern ones. It has little to do with intelligence or sophistication and much more to do with cultural orientation toward work versus living.
You see this clearly in parenting.
In places like Greece, Spain, and southern Italy, you’ll often see adults out at 10 or 11pm on the plaza or at a restaurant, genuinely enjoying themselves while their kids run around playing in the background… and toddlers literally passed out on a bench, a chair, or in a stroller nearby.
Meanwhile, Americans and many Northern and Western Europeans put their children to bed promptly within a defined bedtime window, because the next day is structured, scheduled, and built around order, routine, and getting up on time.
One culture allows the present moment to stretch. The other organizes the present around the needs of tomorrow.
It’s all about “what’s next?” versus “experience now.”
That distinction explains a significant part… more than many people care to acknowledge… of the differences in productivity, power, and modern life in the West.
As a wise man once said: a strong man is one who can say no to the things he likes.
Our current economic imbalance forcefeeds us this lesson. But there’s little else we can do to create strong men in weak times, when everyone chooses to remain distracted.
Great column by @jburnmurdoch. Reading this at an airport where most employees are moody or lost in their phones hits harder.
I’d argue that another few years and all these jobs will be replaced by AI while ppl continue distracting themselves from the struggle of existence.
Financial nihilism is a great first step to a more spiritual way of life. As AI replaces more jobs, personal financial austerity will be seen as a positive quality to develop spiritual austerity. But only after the chaotic splurges of desperation regarding future cease.
@bryan_johnson@Baze_Trader Doesn't a machine like that re-mineralize water with inorganic minerals after the filtration process takes place? Are these minerals not disrupting your hormonal balance as well?