me after a long day of distracting myself only to realize my heart is still heavy

Sometimes the road less traveled is the better choice

I don't remember where I found this, but its spot on.

🇵🇱 | Aficionados del club de fútbol polaco Lech Poznan desafían a la UEFA: mostraron ayer una pancarta en la que aparecían representados los santos Pedro y Pablo, patrones la ciudad.

We’re living in a black mirror episode.

Every 6 months i realize how dumb i was 6 months ago

you have zero control over how people perceive you, so you might as well just be the person you want to be anyway.

when you’ve been so caught up with life that you didn’t even realize you’re living some of your answered prayers

going on a walk will save you again and again and again and again and

These two photographs are separated by only 66 years.

"Every creature in the universe, every bird in the trees, every fish in the seas, has to live with scarcity, maximizing use of scarce resources." "The only creature who doesn't do that, is the politician, because he's always using someone else's money."

A pattern I've caught in myself more than once: the advice I give most passionately is almost always the advice I most need to take. Pay attention to what you tell others. It's usually a direct message from the part of you that's been trying to get your own attention.

Went down the rabbit hole on this one. Your brain burns 20% of your body's total energy. It weighs 2% of your mass. Per gram, it costs 10 times as much to run as muscle. And it barely changes its energy consumption whether you're solving calculus or staring at a wall. A focused mental task increases brain energy use by less than 5%. The difference between "thinking hard" and "doing nothing" is not how much fuel you burn. It's where the fuel goes. When you don't give your brain a specific task, it defaults to something neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network, a set of brain regions that fire up when you're not focused on anything external. It runs your inner monologue. Rehashes old conversations. Simulates future arguments you'll probably never have. Replays embarrassing moments from 2014. A 2010 Harvard study tracked 2,250 people via a smartphone app, pinging them at random moments to ask what they were doing and thinking. Result: our minds wander 47% of our waking hours. Nearly half your conscious life, your brain is somewhere else. And the people whose minds wandered most were consistently the least happy, regardless of what they were doing. How often your mind drifts predicted your happiness 2x better than whatever activity you were doing at the time. When you give the brain a goal, the entire system reorganizes. The prefrontal cortex takes over, activating your brain's reward and motivation pathways. A 2022 Nature Communications study found that goal-relevant information enters through the prefrontal cortex, triggers dopamine neurons, and creates a self-reinforcing motivation loop. Your brain literally rewards itself for pursuing something meaningful. A 2026 review in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience found that flow states, those moments of complete task absorption, partially quiet the Default Mode Network. Less DMN activity meant less self-evaluation, less rumination, and lower anxiety. A twin study of over 9,000 people found that people who experienced flow more often had lower rates of depression, anxiety, and roughly 4% lower risk of heart disease, even after controlling for genetics. The longevity data makes it real. A 2022 Harvard study tracked 13,000 adults aged 50 for 8 years. People with the strongest sense of purpose had a 15.2% mortality rate over that period. Lowest sense of purpose: 36.5%. More than double. The effect held across race, ethnicity, and gender. A separate meta-analysis of 136,000 people found that a strong purpose was linked to a 17% lower risk of death from any cause. Purposeful people were 24% less likely to become physically inactive and 33% less likely to develop sleep problems. Dan Koe compressed a lot of neuroscience into one sentence. The brain doesn't idle when you don't give it a goal. It defaults to a mode that burns the same 20 watts but points them inward, toward rumination and anxiety. Give it a direction, and those same watts start building motivation loops, quieting your inner critic, and apparently adding years to your life.

Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920 with one devastating insight: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." The socialists spent the next century pretending this problem didn't exist while their economies collapsed around them. And yet here we are, watching politicians promise they can "fix" healthcare, housing, and energy markets through central planning. They can't even calculate the cost of their own programs correctly — how exactly are they going to allocate resources across an entire economy? Every Venezuelan breadline, every Soviet grain shortage, every Chinese famine was just Mises being proven right in the most brutal way possible. But sure, let's try democratic socialism this time. What could go wrong?

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.” —Roger Scruton

*opens instagram * yep, everyone's life is still better than mine *closes instagram* *opens twitter* ah yes. my fellow specimens.

social anxiety so bad i wonder if i'm welcome at places i was invited to

Andrew Fraser Tytler writing in the 1780s: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”