Researchers have found that spending about two hours a day in quiet environments may lead to physical changes in the brain, including the formation of new nerve cells.
Daily life is filled with constant sound, but evidence suggests that silence itself plays an important biological role. Experiments show that prolonged quiet, especially around two hours, stimulates neurogenesis in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory, learning, and spatial awareness. Rather than simply offering relaxation, silence appears to actively support brain renewal.
Noise keeps the nervous system in a heightened state of readiness. In contrast, silence allows the brain to settle, creating conditions that support repair and internal processing. With fewer external signals to manage, neural networks may strengthen, and new cells are more likely to survive and integrate. This challenges the idea that the brain only benefits from stimulation, highlighting that meaningful neurological growth can also occur during deep stillness.
Source: Kirste, L., Zaba, Z., Wang, S., Herrmann, T., & Kempermann, G. Is silence golden? Effects of auditory stimuli and their absence on adult hippocampal neurogenesis. Brain Structure and Function.
Elon Musk just said saving for retirement becomes pointless in 10 to 20 years. Not speculation. Math.
Musk: “Don’t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like ten or 20 years. It won’t matter.”
We passed the event horizon. Retirement savings assumes scarcity persists. It won’t.
AI and robotics collapse labor costs to zero. Living costs follow. You’re not saving for security. You’re saving for a world that stops existing.
Musk: “If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”
Age of Abundance isn’t vision. It’s physics. Economic laws executing whether you believe them or not.
5,000 days. Fourteen years. Global GDP uncaps. Production approaches infinite. Net worth as concept dies.
Only scarcity left is meaning. Money stops being the constraint.
Timeline is shorter than your brain accepts. Fourteen years. We transition from survival work to Universal High Income in that window.
Event horizon isn’t coming. You’re in it. Operating under old rules while ground disappears beneath you means you already lost.
Production costs hit zero through automation. Everything priced on human labor reprices instantly. Housing. Food. Goods. Services. All reset when scarcity evaporates.
Traditional planning assumes structure persists. Save for decades. Retire on capital returns in scarcity markets. That model shatters when abundance becomes baseline.
You’re optimizing for a world vanishing while the replacement materializes. Your strategy becomes obsolete before you finish executing it.
The retirement you’re building toward assumes costs stay high. They collapse. And your savings designed for expensive scarcity become irrelevant in cheap abundance.
Every dollar you put away for future scarcity is a bet against the transformation already happening. And that bet loses the moment production costs hit zero and the economy you planned for stops functioning.
You’re not preparing for the future. You’re clinging to a past that’s ending whether you accept it or not. And fourteen years from now, the question won’t be whether you saved enough. It’ll be why you wasted time saving for conditions that don’t exist anymore.
@mcuban We should have access to health ins without having to go through an employer. That’s an outdated idea. I'd rather my employer not be involved in my health ins. Cobra is ridiculously expensive, when changing jobs. We need a large pool of Americans so actuaries can assess risk.
@mcuban Most plans are already considered high deductible plans ($5,000+) with copays for primary care, specialists, and Rx. Would those copays go away?
@SpeakerJohnson Some folks want to pay a higher monthly premium through their employer, that's fine. I prefer my directly subsidized plan in my control—not through an employer.
A single payer program is really the best plan. And, Americans deserve (we are entitled to) health insurance coverage.
@SpeakerJohnson It’s not broken.
It gives self employed groups of 1 an affordable option to buy health insurance.
Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions that were traditionally not covered.
Obamacare has worked just fine for me and my family.