You'll regret it if you get married, you'll regret it if you don't get married. You'll regret it if you have kids and you'll regret it if you don't. Kierkegaard said this 200 years ago as follows - whatever you choose, you'll regret it, because the problem isn't in your choices, it's in romanticizing your life. A person always finds an untravelled path alluring and mysterious. That's why the issue isn't making the right choice. It's choosing and deciding which regret you'll live with. In life, we must choose our regret.
the best thing you can do for yourself is actively increase your surface area for luck to hit you. go outside, try new cafes, museums, events, take a new route home, speak to people, ask questions, side quest. the more you do, the more serendipity and synchronicity will find you.
human beings are born with this same ability btw. your thoughts are so powerful, they can not only reshape your entire reality but also send information to reprogram your cells, rewrite your DNA, control your immune responses, and reorganize your whole body on a cellular level
“Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it”❤️🩹
the air quality sucks, the food gives you explosive diarrhea, we have no public transport, medical care is unaffordable, they’re tearing down forests to build AI data centers and I still have to clock in for work
Breathing in hefty lungfuls of smoke as I get explosive diarrhea from salad, the sky turns apocalyptic orange while oil companies drill in protected lands, screwworms are eating cattle alive and the president just paid $6 million for rape. And I’m also able to bet on all of it!
Your tattoo ink doesn't stay in your skin. It breaks apart and travels through your body to your lymph nodes, where it settles for life. And in the US, nobody has ever tested what's actually in it.
Lund University in Sweden studied 5,695 people for this one. They controlled for sun exposure, tanning beds, skin type, smoking, income. After stripping out all those variables, people with tattoos still had a 29% higher risk of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Mixed black and colored ink pushed that number to 38%. People who'd had their tattoos for 10 to 15 years had 67% higher risk.
Only 30% of the melanomas showed up where the tattoo actually was. The other 70% appeared on completely different parts of the body. The ink is traveling through the body, doing damage far from where it was injected.
Your immune system is the reason. It treats tattoo ink like an invader. White blood cells swallow the particles and try to drag them to your lymph nodes (small filters spread throughout your body that help fight infections). But the particles never leave. They just sit there. A research team in France used X-ray imaging on donated human bodies and confirmed tattoo pigments stay lodged in the lymph nodes permanently. A separate 2025 study then found this causes inflammation in the lymph nodes for months, and it actually weakened the body's response to COVID vaccines.
Black tattoo ink is loaded with the same compounds found in coal tar and cigarette smoke. The World Health Organization classifies these as cancer-causing. Colored inks use pigments that break down into different cancer-causing compounds when they get hit by sunlight or during laser tattoo removal. Arsenic, cadmium, lead, and chromium show up across almost every ink color.
The EU saw the data and in January 2022 restricted over 4,000 chemicals in tattoo ink across all 27 member states. The FDA has the authority to do the same thing. They have never used it. No tattoo ink sold in America has ever been FDA-approved for injection into human skin. The only guidance the agency has issued was in 2024, and it covered bacteria in ink bottles, not the cancer-causing chemicals in the ink itself.
82 million Americans have at least one tattoo, roughly 1 in 3 adults. Every one of them has permanent, untested chemical deposits sitting in their lymph nodes right now. The EU already decided those chemicals were too dangerous to leave on the market.