I'm convinced that 99% of success is just the ability to outlast uncertainty. The one who can tolerate the most uncertainty is the one who will eventually win.

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace…

Bean Soup Theory is perhaps the most relevant sociological analysis of the 2020s and I’m not joking

An underrated red flag in a person is an addiction to being right. The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information. It’s like a software update. The goal isn't to be right. It's to find the truth.

The older I get, the more I realize intelligence is overrated. Intelligent people are more likely to overthink, overplan, and overanalyze. They hide behind motion that doesn't create progress. They fear the judgment of others if they're proven wrong. The truth is that intelligence is abundant. Courage is not. The people you admire are the ones who had the courage to act. They aren’t more talented than you. They aren’t smarter than you. They just took action when you didn’t. I often wonder how many extraordinary people wasted their entire lives waiting for permission that never came. Permission isn't granted. It's taken. You get to tap yourself in whenever you want. You can just do things. Courage beats intelligence.

Chris Fleming and @sethmeyers both grew up in New England but had very different upbringings

Today is about her 💞

Victoria Beckham at her son’s wedding

why don't they ask chatgpt what to do

Huge shoutout to this Carolina Panthers fan dressed as Clark Griswold trapped in the attic in “Christmas Vacation.”

essa valeu cada galão de agua q usaram

this is my version of when people say their dogs favorite words to get them riled up

Jennifer Lawrence reveals to Las Culturistas she’s producing a Miss Piggy movie with Emma Stone. Cole Escola is writing the script.

Difference between online comments and reality

Me tweeting my audience

I hate gay halloween what do you mean you’re @megstalter presenting the Allison Williams Cool Girl Award at the Las Culturistas Culture Awards in a diet coke corset

how i look when i overhear someone bring up astrology

“i asked chatgpt-” NEXT TIME DON’T. ask ME, choose ME, i can misinform you. i do it with love and affection

There's no more smug and annoying personality than that of the well-read beginner.

The dumbest person you know is currently being told “You're absolutely right!” by ChatGPT