Polymathic Being

Water Off a Duck’s Back

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 08:02:30 GMT

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic is a reminder that we have a lot more control over our lives than many actually manage to apply. We’ll look at how much of our chaos is based on the demand that we react to everything, and how avoiding that unlocks calmness, clarity, insight, and peace as you handle chaos like water off a duck’s back.

h/t @wolfgang for the improved title image.

Not a day goes by without me shaking my head at the outrage I see over the most banal, manufactured, or misconstrued situations. I have friends and acquaintances reach out to ask whether I’m bothered by one thing or another or, worse, upset that I’m not bothered by whatever outrage is trending.

Frankly, it’s exhausting… but it’s also much less chaotic in my life because I’ve learned to step away and avoid the mess. It’s as simple as realizing that regardless of the outrage, very little changes, and the world goes on to the next outrage. The trick is very aligned with what wrote about in How Special Operations Face Uncontrollables, where he describes the Norwegian Special Forces learning a “sense of water” in facing chaos where:

The irony is the Marinejegers’ “sense of water” has nothing to do with knowledge of the water, and everything to do with knowledge of one’s self.

What then?

How Special Operations Face Uncontrollables

a month ago · 66 likes · 33 comments · Sam Alaimo

Let’s build on this concept and apply it to our less special and often very average lives. Here are a few examples of chaos that demands our attention:

Yes, Trump is an ass. Yes, he says absurd things. Yes, he’s been doing that for… ever… Yet each utterance is met with exactly what he wants: noise, confusion, anxiety, and distraction.
Yes, AI has risks. Yes, data centers have concerns. Yes, big tech doesn’t seem to give a crap about anything but profit… Yet every hyperbolic claim is met with pearl-clutching outrage. Falsehoods like data-center water consumption prevail, and the fingers of Chinese disinformation are ignored. The result: noise, confusion, anxiety, and distraction.
Yes, the climate is changing. Yes, we need to conserve our environment and not pollute. On one side it’s apocalyptic; on the other side they ignore it. In the middle? When you follow the incentives and money, both sides are getting exactly what they want: noise, confusion, anxiety, and distraction.

The result is collapsing mental health, perpetual outrage, and manipulations of algowhores, scammers, and legitimate nation-state manipulations, which is one key reason why I treat everything that demands my attention as a PSYOP, until proven otherwise. Each of these challenges is why it’s so important to be aware of where our attention is focused and to discern whether you are ceding agency over your actions.

So, what do we do?

Going back to Sam’s example of the Norwegian Special Forces, I’ve been in that kind of situation during my own Ranger Training where instructors are screaming in my face, demanding the absurd, and watching for one thing in particular:

Are you reacting?

Or are you acting?

The Norwegians needed to show a “sense of the water” that wasn’t the actual water to pass this test… what the heck does that mean?

Well, we also have the common idiom "water off a duck's back," which implies criticism, insults, or outrage have no lasting effect or emotional impact on a person.

Fundamentally, they’re the same idea because it's not about the water; it's about understanding the situation, recognizing our inherent capabilities, and letting the noise and chaos flow around us without letting it interfere. It's action through intentional non-action... Put another way, it’s non-action toward what doesn't matter and then action only toward what does. In a nutshell, the Daoist principle of Wu Wei.

It’s action through intentional non-action.

In Ranger School, I learned that intentional action or non-action was always preferable to reaction. Once the Ranger Instructors (RIs) got me to react, it was over; I was theirs, and they would continue to pull my strings.

A great example was the classic tactic of RIs challenging your decision. Their goal wasn’t to show you were wrong but to inject doubt by asking leading questions. The trick was to consider their input and, most often, the right answer was to stand by your decision or plan. Yet, too often, a candidate would react and try to change the plan, which created chaos. The RIs then fed that chaos and watched the unit struggle and fail to execute the mission. We were our own worst enemies and continually made the training harder than it needed to be.

I saw this happen over and over, and when it was my turn in leadership and the RI challenged my plan, I tried a different response: “Sergeant, based on the information I have and the recommendations of my squad leaders, this is a workable plan. It might not be the best, but I’m confident that we can execute. Unless I’ve missed something safety-critical, do you have any new information that would be worth changing it?”

I remember seeing the RI’s eyebrows rise as he cocked his head with a slight smile and said, “Well, if you think it’s going to work, Ranger, then continue.” Having no new information, I let the noise flow around me, didn’t grab onto the potential chaos, and felt the angst and panic of constant changes ebb in the team. As we humped through the woods, the same RI came up and offered a few quiet tips, and the mission executed smoothly, efficiently, and successfully, albeit not perfectly, but… that’s war. At least the chaos that did exist wasn’t self-inflicted by our own reactions.

In Basic Training, a similar tactic is called a “Shark Attack.” How is the Soldier doing? Because you are the Soldier and they are Social Media. (U.S. National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Scott Tynes)

In our daily lives, the chaos agents aren’t like the RI who stepped back. Just look on social media: the chaos agents won’t stop; they’ll just adapt, but the more you step away from the swirl, into the center, and let the ‘water’ flow off your back, the less likely you are to be targeted because you aren’t worth the effort. And that’s a good thing! It means you have agency, you have resiliency, and you have a grounding that keeps you focused on what does matter.

It’s not easy.

Now, I’m going to hit this one a little closer to home: The response of reacting to everything is what children do. It’s what my children do when someone upsets them. It’s a very natural response and a very easy response. It’s a response I work very, very hard to teach my children they don’t have to fall into.

It is hard to bear insult, accusation, injustice, inequality, and outrage without reacting. However, once you do, once you let the water flow, once you face the physical manifestation as the Special Forces do, you realize that over time, the intentional non-action is actually easier.

Better yet, you find that the actual actions you do need to take become clearer, cleaner, simpler, and more effective. It helps you pick your battles, and it helps you understand what’s actually happening.

Trump is chaos, but what is he doing while everyone reacts? Where do we really need to ensure we don’t screw up? Who are the ones not reacting who can help? If you want to make a difference, it’s pretty clear the outraged reactions of the last 10 years have solved — counts on fingers — zero problems.
AI is a very useful tool that’s overinflated by tech-bros and overreacted to by pessimists. History shows us that this is a common feature of technological revolution, from books to the printing press to photography. Further, data centers are common (you probably live right near one) and are how you are able to read this essay and post outrage on social media. Yes, we need to pay attention to energy and water, but the real outrage is actually largely manufactured by China as recently found in this article.
- For more insights, check out ’s essay: Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me This About Data Centers?
Yes, the climate is changing, but why is the response that we have to react and stop it? What if we adapted? What would that change, and how could we make it better? Why do we have to react to every weather event as if it were the worst instead of looking one layer deeper and seeing the larger patterns? Even when we consider the rate of change, we find a precedent just 12,000 years ago.

This is where we get back to something ancient, a simple question that reframes the problem and Sam’s favorite question: “What Then?”

Attributed to both Epictetus and Diogenes the Cynic, the latter’s style is captured in an account of Alexander the Great finding the beggar-philosopher relaxing in the sunlight. Diogenes begins questioning the young king about his grand ambitions:

Diogenes: "What are your plans?"
Alexander: "I plan to conquer Greece, then Asia Minor, and eventually the whole world."
Diogenes: "What then?"
Alexander: "I suppose I would relax and enjoy myself."
Diogenes: "Why not save yourself a lot of trouble and enjoy yourself right now?"

“What Then” allows us to consider the worst case and then consider what comes after. What’s fascinating is that you find we are more adaptable and resilient than you’d think. And bringing this all full circle: What is stopping you from enjoying yourself right now?

Why do we allow the architects of chaos to control our experience when we can literally let the ‘water’ flow off our backs like a duck?

It’s a cycle we haven’t broken yet because, about once a year, I end up writing on the topic, as you’ll remember from 2024 with Heaven is High, and the Emperor is Far Away, and just last year with Go Touch Grass. These are reminders of different ways to work on achieving the same outcome, namely, regaining agency, separating the noise and chaos from life, and taking intentional non-action when it’s clear that the goal is your reaction.

And the steps to take are about that simple:

Recognize that the goal is your reaction
Sense the water. Start to apply the Mixed Mental Arts we’ve explored here before so that you can grapple with complex problems in the octagon of life.
Find the flow, discern the turbulence, find the calmer eddy.
Take intentional action or, even better, non-action as appropriate
Repeat

That’s it, yet this will be one of the hardest things you’ll do. So hard, it’s used as a test for Military Special Forces around the world and has been talked about by philosophers for millennia. With that difficulty, you can unlock calmness, clarity, insight, and peace as you handle chaos like water off a duck’s back and reclaim your agency and self through the tried and true insights that Wu Wei provides.

This is why I’m able to stand in the chaos and not lose my mind.

Want to join me?

Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

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Bullshit Jobs

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:02:05 GMT

Today’s topic dives into the idea of bullshit jobs, the misunderstandings of why they exist, and how misaligned incentives reward them. Once we untangle the foundational economics, we’ll explore how to eliminate the bullshit to achieve meaning and satisfaction in your job.

Intro

I recently read the book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber. It’s provocative and hits at something important, but also misses actual experience within these organizations. Graeber’s fatal flaw is that he did his investigation from the outside, interviewed those people who didn’t like the jobs, and missed that many people view the bullshit of these jobs as a feature, not a bug. Let’s dive in and find out what’s really going on.

The Bug

Stepping back quickly and giving credit where credit is due, Graeber rightly identifies a “bullshit job” as a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless or unnecessary that the worker secretly believes it should not exist, even while pretending it does. He breaks these roles down into five distinct categories:

Flunkies: Roles that exist only to make someone else look or feel important (e.g., receptionists, doormen, store greeters).
Goons: Jobs that act to harm, deceive, or defend against others on an employer’s behalf, often in an “arms race” where they only exist because competitors have them (e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, PR specialists).
Duct Tapers: People who temporarily fix problems that should be fixed permanently because of poor organization or shoddy initial work (e.g., programmers fixing bad code, desk staff calming angry passengers over lost bags).
Box Tickers: Employees who create the illusion that something useful is being done when it is not (e.g., survey administrators, compliance officers, internal magazine writers).
Taskmasters: Jobs that create extra work for others or manage people who do not need management (such as middle managers)

I’m sure each of us has seen people working in roles like this day after day. Yes, these are bullshit jobs, and they can be quite miserable. In the world of Six Sigma, we call them Non-Value-Added roles and work diligently to eliminate the root causes.

Personally, I’ve removed thousands of these jobs and reallocated their time to productive work. What Graeber misses in his book is that Six Sigma optimization is actually hard because, way too often, the people doing this bullshit like it!

The Feature

I’m going to break this down to show some counterintuitive insights for each of the job categories. Let’s start with the Flunkies. Yes, they exist. Pretentious celebrities like Coco Austin, Wife of Rapper Ice-T, had an assistant vacuum the streets of New York as she walked.

Yes, this is a bullshit job.

For Coco Austin and Ice-T, it’s a flex that they have enough money to afford this indulgence. It’s ‘bling’ and bluster through wanton excess that most humans interpret as being evidence of success. This also exists on the low end of the income distribution, where any analysis of Compton shows as much bling and bluster, albeit on a lower budget. This is great for Coco Austin, but what about that flunkie?

This is where it gets interesting because he just might be selling his soul for the access and visibility it provides. Bullshit or not, this has precedent in the example of William Compton, who was King Henry VIII’s Groom of the Stool… And if you imagined that this is attending to the king’s most private bodily needs and heading his private chamber, you would be correct. However, that access placed him at the center of royal patronage, and he accumulated wealth and privilege, evidenced in his grand country house, Compton Wynyates.

Compton Wynyates - Yes, this is what you can earn dealing with a King’s bullshit

There are also legitimate reasons for what can be considered flunkies, which can be as simple as a secretary at a single-member consultancy or legal firm. However, in a twist, this role actually helps the single lawyer who may be too busy to answer the phone and their clients who have someone who quickly answers. Is 90% of that secretary’s job bullshit? Probably, but the cost of that role is likely well compensated by the status and payroll of the clients she inspires confidence in.

Goons is just Graeber’s pejorative for folks who are actually serving a legitimate role. He takes a particularly harsh stance against corporate lawyers, yet that world is constantly dealing with parasites looking to extract wealth. How many accident attorney billboards did you see on your drives this week? While he’s right to address the negative behaviors of these fields, those fields themselves aren’t bullshit. The bullshit is when the field is weaponized or used to erect regulatory barriers to stifle competition/

Duct Tapers definitely exist. I once fixed a document system that, through poor design, created tons of defects, delays, and more. The duct taper there was a sweet woman who had literally sacrificed weekends, holidays, and weddings to keep the process running and was devastated when she realized how simple the fix really was.

On the other hand, there are people who love this role and are seen as heroes for fixing things. We also value this role a lot and, as we explored in Lazy Leadership, “when you reward firefighting, you invite arson.” Again, it’s the application of a behavior to a role that’s the problem, not the need for the action or the role itself because heaven knows, no system is perfect and fixes will always be necessary.

Box Tickers drive everyone nuts. It’s the meeting for a meeting for a meeting that makes up legions of memes on LinkedIn. It’s also just the overcompensating compliance, like how, just the other day, I had to submit a travel authorization request, itself an extra, unnecessary step, but one our government accounting demands. The Box Ticker, four levels of approval into the process, rejected it for being over the set hotel rate for 2026. The problem is, I’m traveling in Fiscal Year 2027, where the rate is higher. Regardless, he rejected it, then forced me to find out why, then told my manager he didn’t want to be contacted directly and that I should go through two levels of authority and…

Guess what? Napkin math says he ‘saved’ $27 at the cost of the plane ticket going up $100, the $1,000 in labor charges trying to straighten it out, and, oh by the way, he didn’t save the $27 because he was wrong and the slightly higher rate was correct. But oooooh, was he morally justified in thinking it was his job to police the process, and he’s notorious for it.

That said, we need to manage compliance with expectations and, at a different company, where travel wasn’t as judiciously policed, we saw more and more egregious spending that eventually saw first-class tickets, lounge access, and luxury car rentals before being reigned back in. So, Box Tickers start from a place of value, but they can certainly devolve into bullshit.

By this point I think you can see that the problem isn’t that these jobs are fundamentally bullshit and that’s a bug; it’s that the bullshit nature of the job is the feature for a great many people. In fact, if a person struggles to actually perform value-added work, contribute to the corpus of knowledge, or provide innovative ideas, or, heck, just do the task properly, it’s easier to fall into these negative behaviors we’re exploring. And nothing quite brings this to light as well as the Task Masters.

Of course, this isn’t a condemnation of middle management at all. In the military, we recognize that leadership is constrained by the network effect. Therefore, we have Team leaders, Squad Leaders, Platoon Leaders, Company Commanders, Battalion Commanders…. all the way up to the Commander in Chief. However, you can’t just have the top dog and a million individual contributors. That’s not how humans work, and delegated accountability and authority are necessary for efficient execution.

However, Graeber is correct in identifying when a leadership position is bullshit because it’s creating chaos in the system. Task Masters aren’t a feature in an organization; they’re rightfully hated by anyone who has dealt with them. However, when you try getting rid of that role by demanding the Task Master step back into performing work, you’ll quickly find out that bullshit is a feature for him.

The Flunkie, Goon, Duct Taper, Box Ticker, and Task Master exist primarily because there’s a perversion of incentives. All of them exist because humans aren’t perfect, and leadership, true leadership, is actually hard. As these systems devolve, the bullshit increases. In simple terms, bullshit jobs are also known as bureaucracy.

The challenge, and my beef with Graeber, is that he misses that there is a significant cohort of people who relish these jobs. It’s part of what I explored in The Successfully Unsuccessful, where we characterized these as “…people who continue to do the same thing over and over, never really succeeding, yet are able to go home, proud of the work they do, and are still rewarded for it.”

These people are successful in spite of, and sometimes because of, the bullshit, and these folks provided a lot of the challenges I faced while working to optimize processes across multiple domains and disciplines in my career. It’s also not just individual behaviors, as there are larger, systemic compounding challenges.

Compounding Challenges

Underlying these challenges is my key complaint with Graeber, as he likes to blame capitalism for somehow failing to quickly and efficiently eliminate these roles. Here, he mistakes the goal of capitalism for the reality of what we have; namely that it’s more corporatism, a perversion of true free markets, government burden in regulatory reporting, and more. Capitalism is great when people apply it, but it’s rarely applied without significant shackles, and those shackles aren’t a feature of Capitalism but cronyism and statism.

One case in point of a true bullshit job of a corporatist type was highlighted in the book Box, which explores the curious and convoluted history of the ubiquitous shipping container. (yes, it’s a good book; yes, I’m a nerd) The container itself is a genius of capitalism and efficient material transfer but was bogged down by the burdens of regulation, labor disputes, and more, as many groups vigorously opposed the innovation even though the jobs they had were back-breaking and bullshit.

The worst example was “stripping and stuffing,” where the International Longshoremen’s Association required that containers had to be opened and handled by union longshoremen at the pier. Laborers would "strip" (completely unload) a perfectly packed container onto the dock, only to immediately "stuff" (reload) the exact same cargo right back into the same container before it could move forward. This wasn’t capitalism by any stretch of the imagination, and it certainly didn’t make anyone but the workers and the unions any money. In economics, this is called ‘featherbedding’ and affects everything from oilers on cranes that do not need them, to unnecessary railroad brakemen and more.

This is where we get to another twist that recently added to the topic, where he describes these jobs as “Middle Class Welfare,” where incentives are for jobs, not output, and as long as companies, especially start-ups receive funding, their product is largely irrelevant. As the classic adage goes: “Follow the Money”

This lines up with my own experience as, years ago, in jest, I put together a business plan for how to run start-ups where the goal was resource extraction from investors, not creating a viable product. The problem was, in researching Silicon Valley, it seems like my idea was not novel, and I estimated that roughly 50% of the companies were doing just that. From the top down, they were run like a well-paid hobby business, not value creation.

The reason I poke here is that I’ve seen too many interpretations of Graeber’s book, as Maya does below, where she suggests that these jobs are designed to do nothing more than make the rich richer. It was this argument that motivated me to read the book. (which I actually don’t recommend to anyone else)

But that interpretation isn’t actually an argument Graeber makes to that degree. For example, he does argue that some roles directly serve financial interests: lobbying for favorable rules, extracting fees, or protecting corporate advantages. This falls under the corporatism we discussed before. It also doesn’t take long in the study of capitalist economics to realize that this is the opposite of free market principles and is opposed by the likes of Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises of the Austrian School of Economics.

But there’s another twist to the ‘rich getting richer’ in that Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, is notorious for shredding bullshit jobs. When he bought Twitter, he eliminated roughly 80% of its staff, reducing the company from nearly 8,000 employees down to about 1,500. Even today, the entire platform is running with fewer than 2,000 employees, and no one has noticed a difference in performance or product. Clearly, there were a lot of bullshit jobs at Twitter, but he became richer by eliminating them, not keeping them.

To understand the underlying economics of these contradictions, I would actually like to recommend a book called Basic Economics by the brilliant Thomas Sowell. It’s an outstanding primer that helps anyone avoid these classic misinterpretations of the real waste we see in the workforce. He highlights so many fundamental elements that you’ll see both the source of the bullshit and how that bullshit is a feature for too many people.

All of this is great from the perspective of a book review and social media debates, but some of us are probably in a bullshit job that we would like to fix. Thankfully, there are steps you can take to improve that.

Fixing Bullshit Jobs:

If you’re ready to step out of the chaos and regain satisfaction in your work, there are a few key things to grab onto. The first is understanding Lean Six Sigma and its goal of eliminating a lot of the issues that drive the bullshit. Much has to do with activities collectively called Waste, which are categorized as:

D – Defects: Errors, scrap, or products requiring rework and the processes that cause them.
O – Overproduction: Making items earlier or in greater quantities than required. Also includes excess data entry/re-entry
T – Transportation: Unnecessary moving of materials, parts, or information.
W – Waiting: Idle time of workers, equipment, or parts waiting for the next step.
I – Inventory: Excess stock or materials waiting to be processed.
M – Motion: Unnecessary physical movement by employees during their work. This also extends into digital movements such as the number of clicks per task.
P – Processing inappropriately (or Overprocessing): Performing more work or using more complex tools than the customer actually requires.

The key here is that you have to understand the larger value chain to see how you integrate with the systems around you to properly assess waste. Lean execution is then all about eliminating these activities.

Critical to add here is the definition of Value Added when it comes to tasks. For this, the simple idea of the Three Cs helps: The task is Correct the first time, it Changes the product incrementally toward completion, and the customer Cares, meaning if the customer knew about the activity, would they want to be billed for it? If you can eliminate waste and ensure the tasks are centered on value added, then, by definition, it’s not bullshit.

The cool thing is that you don’t have to do this yourself, as almost every business has a Six Sigma or Operational Excellence department. Even better, you can find innumerable Six Sigma certification programs at your company or online that will teach you the process and empower you to run your own improvement projects.

I’ve also never met a company that didn’t appreciate employees identifying improvements and, if they don’t appreciate it, that might be an indication your skills are more valuable elsewhere. Also, as with most things we explore here, It’s always best to start with the work you do before trying to fix others’ work. Over time, you’ll naturally include them as the process improvements expand, but you’ll also find a lot of opportunities that are right at your fingertips that can help you do better.

The second element is also recognizing that you are more than your work. It’s a concept we explored in one of our first essays, “Yes, Do Quiet Quit,” where, sometimes, the lack of productive work can be a feature for you when you can find the eddy in the noise, stop reacting to the manufactured chaos, and find ways to avoid the bullshit. In quiet quitting, we found that:

By stepping back and quitting the problematic expectations of the corporate rat race, my teams, and I, have been able to achieve results on projects that other teams hadn’t been able to solve for years

The tactic was to not contribute to the bullshit and, since you can’t unilaterally stop it, you can only refuse to participate and repurpose that time to more productive ends. This is a key tactic I use to great success in my own professional roles.

Summary

Bullshit jobs do exist; however, they’re often a feature, not a bug, of corporate life. There’s rarely anything malicious or nefarious about the work, and the intent isn’t to suck people’s souls away. It’s just imperfect humans, imperfect systems, and imperfect incentives.

But this gives us hope, because imperfection is a perfect opportunity for continuous improvement, and we have entire disciplines dedicated to optimizing systems in the form of Lean Six Sigma and more. It just takes the wherewithal to stop accepting the bullshit and start taking the steps to eliminate it. When you do this, you’ll achieve meaning and satisfaction through that, let alone the overall improvement of your actual, formerly bullshit, job.

Do you, or have you worked a bullshit job in the past? What advice would you add?

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Mansplaining vs. Shelaborating

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:10:45 GMT

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and explore them from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.

Today’s topic risks the accusation of mansplaining to explain the nuance behind how humanity has evolved both mansplaining and shelaborating to communicate important information for our survival. By understanding the value and the difference, we can learn how to interact and communicate better.

A term that needed to die a long time ago and has never managed to go away is Mansplaining. It’s a portmanteau of Man Explaining. It’s quite self-definitional and used to dismiss information or insights that a man presents. Now, the original idea, as captured by Wikipedia, is “describing the act of a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner, without regard to her own expertise.”

And yes, there really is a recognizable behavior in which someone assumes a woman lacks knowledge despite evidence of her expertise. Research has found that condescending explanations do communicate competence questioning and that it affects women differently than men. At the same time, research found that the label can also be used strategically to discredit disagreement rather than identifying actual condescension.

I’ve seen this happen both ways, and yes, it’s sexist, spiteful, and unacceptable when it’s the former. The problem I have is that the true incarnation of mansplaining is also not the vast majority of the accusations. A great example came up recently as my wife recalled a woman who was describing a particularly grueling climb in a mountain biking race and said:

“I was super tired, but riders kept mansplaining to me that I should shift my gears.”

It just so happens she went on to confirm that yes, in fact, shifting gears solved her struggle. But the tone she used when she uttered the word? It was as if it were the most insulting thing that ever happened, and how dare they…

But the men were helping, and when they saw someone struggling, likely knowing that when you start sucking wind on a ride, you sometimes forget the basics, and they reminded her. Since this really is Biking 101, it’s a ‘No duh’ moment and probably a little embarrassing. So instead of coping with the face-palm moment, she attempted to redirect her shame onto someone else.

Mansplaining is also a deflection from a perennial female tendency, as was so perfectly captured in the incredibly funny short video It’s Not About The Nail, where women want you to understand her feelings without explaining. They want validation, not solutions, and they likely know the answer, but are not willing to do that yet. Because it’s not about the nail…

Where it gets messy is men do care to explain. We do it to each other all the time. Just listen to a conversation and, instead of getting offended, you see that we typically build on it just a little to show we know it, and the conversation can continue forward.

Also, if it’s an important topic, even if you’ve heard it before, sometimes hearing it again adds nuance. There are also people out there I call ‘multiple exposure’ because I do have to state the same thing multiple times before they understand it. What’s frustrating is that the ones who get offended at hearing it twice (or more) often can’t even summarize the nuance of the topic to begin with.

I’ll pause here a second because we’re teasing back a few layers. Yes, men like to explain. Yes, men can misread the audience. And yes, there can be true condescension and gender bias.

Want to know the funny thing? It happens to me all the time, a point Wikipedia goes on to describe. Want to know a funnier thing? Women tend to do this form of explaining as much, or more. Especially when it’s condescending. It doesn’t take long on any social media platform before I’m chided by women for even having an opinion on a topic, regardless of how well-informed, especially when it comes to discussing things about the feminine.

Heck, even the accusation of mansplaining is rarely levied in an uncondecending manner. Think about whenever you’ve heard the word, because it’s normally used to shift the focus from a conversational flaw like over-explaining or misreading a room to a reductive gender stereotype. But even more, by levying the accusation, they presume the speaker’s intent as malicious instead of enthusiasm or a simple misunderstanding. And I can tell you, working with highly technical engineers, it’s normally the latter.

Worse, it’s patronizing in two ways. First, it treats the listener as too fragile to handle an explanation and, second, it strips the speaker of nuance. In the end, the accusation just replaces one form of potential intellectual arrogance with actual intellectual arrogance, with the added dash of moral superiority.

Here’s where it gets even weirder, because there is such a thing as Girlsplaining, which is defined as “offering a female perspective on relationships, society, or everyday topics.” Note that it’s a positive term. In common use, it’s glowingly described as offering support, assistance, and clarity. Also note the diminutive term “girl” vs. man, as that quickly evokes innocence while trying to avoid naivety.

But the more apropos term to compare to mansplaining is “shelaborating,” which is the stereotypical tendency for women to provide a well-meaning but overwhelming dump of information, context, and side stories. Ask a “shelaborator” how their day was, and you’ll receive a 20-minute timeline starting from their morning coffee down to the backstory of a coworker’s cousin’s dog.

At their root, mansplaining, girlsplaining, and shelaborating are all methods of sharing information and transferring knowledge. Want to know the fun part? It’s all rooted in evolutionary biology.

That’s because, across history, men focused on creating resources and, as such, benefited from using a more descriptive and direct explanation because they needed to ensure a clear and common understanding of things. This often meant mansplaining the basics to make sure.

Women, on the other hand, focused on creating and nurturing offspring, which means their shelaboration builds the relational component, communicates a ton of supplemental mental state information, and weaves together the community. It’s so important that women typically sit quietly and listen.

Men mansplain to men, and they don’t think anything of it.
Women shelaborate to women, and they don’t think anything of it.
Women shelaborate to men, and they roll their eyes and laugh about the drama.
Men mansplain to women, and that’s misogyny.

That last line is the part of the equation we need to fix because it has serious consequences where accusations of mansplaining result in men largely forgoing the mentorship of women. Nothing quite ruins getting into something that’s normally a back-and-forth, push-and-pull of descriptions, and then being accused of mansplaining. It just shuts down genuine, peer-to-peer, egalitarian dialogue.

It also doesn’t even have to be directed at me. That woman and mountain biking? I’m now much less inclined to help her with biking or anything else. Her casual accusation about helpful advice that she actually needed created a reputational landmine I don’t want to risk. The consequences for her are obvious as her reputation becomes known.

That doesn’t stop me from mentoring women, but it is definitely something I’ve seen in those sessions where I have to communicate differently than my natural inclination, and the way I normally engage with men, to get an equal response. A key point to weave back is that women typically sit quietly and listen to shelaboration and are also inclined to sit and listen to mansplaining, whereas men will often interrupt both if they already understand.

So, let’s break out some practical advice for both sides of the equation.

First, you have power: If someone is legit mansplaining in a condescending, lecturing, or pontificating manner, just interject a “Hey, I’m aware of that.” and then build that into something else. “And have you considered XXX YYY implications?”

Second, explain what you’re doing: This was advice given to me when my actions were interpreted as lecturing when my intent was exploring and explaining. I learned to caveat a few different ways:

Do you mind if I draw on the whiteboard really quick?
I’m thinking out loud right now.
Let me know if you already know this.
Jump in at any time; it’s not interrupting.

These set the stage about your intent, and invite engagement while also disarming the perception of rudeness if they do step in.

Third, pause and offer the opportunity for others to enter the conversation: This goes for both mansplaining and shelaborating. Remember that women, in particular, will suffer through mansplaining much longer than a man will, but it’s also just general social graces to pause and offer the opportunity for others. This gives them the chance to redirect without interrupting.

Fourth and last, understand your own motivations: If the situation is that you’re just embarrassed that you forgot to do something like shifting your gears, accept that, learn from it, and own that lesson. If it’s just not about the nail, then say something like “I get that, and I’m not ready to do anything; let me work through my feelings.” That’s OK too, but it means you need to introspect. It’s important to remember that good intent doesn’t guarantee good communication, but your negative reaction doesn’t prove sexist intent.

Really, what we are doing here is appreciating that mansplaining and shelaborating are just part of normal human dialogue, conducted, typically, with no malintent, and specialized between the sexes because that’s what’s worked best for a very long time. The consequences of not understanding the nuance create a very real reduction in the amount of information or help you’ll have access to.

So, next time you’re annoyed with the communication style of another person, you now have some tips to deal with it. Even better, you also have a few techniques to bridge the communication gap yourself and avoid condescension. In the end, I hope you better understand the value and the differences between mansplaining and shelaborating so we can learn how to interact and communicate better.

What examples do you have of true mansplaining or shelaborating and what did you do about it? Leave a comment below.

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From Front Porch Neighbors to Backyard Strangers

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:02:04 GMT

Today’s topic explores the consequences of how our social lives transitioned from the front porch to the backyard and what that’s done to our sense of community. We’ll also look at some simple steps you can take to reconnect with those around you!

Think back to the classic image of a house with a front porch, some flowers, a couple of chairs, and maybe even a porch swing rocking in the breeze. It wasn’t uncommon to walk or drive through these neighborhoods and hear the chatter of conversation or just the creak of a rocking chair on the weathered wood porch.

Neighbors said hi, asked about the kids, just general chit-chat that created a connection, letting you know you were not alone and that people, real humans with different lives, saw you.

Today, as I drive through the suburban neighborhoods, I notice that there are no front porches, and if one exists, it’s not designed for more than a vestibule to protect the front door from the weather. There are certainly no neighbors sitting out front, raising a hand in greeting, and commenting on the weather.

What happened?

There was no single event that changed this dynamic but a cascade of different technologies. One of the first was television, which drew people inside more than even the radio, which could be listened to outside in the cooler evenings. Another major shift was the installation of air conditioning, which removed one of the main reasons for spending summer evenings outside.

Another element is the ability to drive into your garage, automatically close your door, and walk straight into the house without ever having to step outside or even enter or exit your front door.

Adding to the trend, we migrated to the backyard, ensconced in tall privacy fences, rarely peeking over for more than a glance to see whether to report their neighbor for a Homeowners Association violation.

Which reminds me: What do you call a group of Karens?

… An HOA. 😁

But there’s more to that joke than just a wry chuckle. The video below highlights the absurdity where a man is told that sitting in his garage, waving at neighbors, is not allowed by his HOA.

It’s clear that we’ve lost something in the process that causes us to live cheek to cheek with a press of humanity and know hardly a soul around us. This was not lost on Lisa and I when we lived in a subdivision and realized that, outside of our next door neighbors, we never got to know anyone else.

Ironically, we got to know one of them because our cat kept knocking over their birdbath, and the other because, every Friday, they’d sit in their garage, listening to music and drinking beer, and I joined them quite often.

What We’ve Lost

Well, we’ve gone from Front Porch Neighbors to Backyard Strangers.

It’s also the loss of the weak-tied social interactions that can be as simple as a wave acknowledging your existence. To highlight the impact, A study of older residents in Miami found that blocks with porches and other usable front entrances were associated with greater perceived social support, which was in turn associated with less psychological distress.

On a personal level, how well do you know those who live around you?

How far do you have to drive to find community?

How much effort does it take to finally connect?

More and more, young adults aren’t even socializing in these groups, but are staying at home, deep in the bowels of the internet, where their digital reality is not reflective of what’s actually happening. The end result is a loss of community, a loss of a sense of identity, and the perceptions that pervert what’s seen online as reflective of what's happening outside your front door. (Just to be clear, it’s a hellscape online, but rarely the same out front) So, what do we do?

This is a bit of an extreme example but it highlights how bad things can go.

Taking Action

We covered a few ideas previously in Heaven is High, and the Emperor is Far Away, where we recommend not collapsing heaven into the helscape of social media and not inviting the Emperor to live rent-free in your brain. We also showed the power of Touching Grass, where simply getting out and paying attention to what’s happening in life reveals that the world moves in a much less apocalyptic fashion when you step out the front door.

But the overall goal isn’t major transformation but repeated, low-pressure contact where casual familiarity builds into deeper friendship. A few simple actions you can take today are:

Put a couple of chairs in the front yard and use them.
Walk the same route at roughly the same time each day.
Leave the earbuds at home and wave first.
Introduce yourself and learn one neighbor’s name at a time.
Do ordinary tasks out front: watering plants, working on a bike, or reading.
Ask for a small favor or lend a tool. Reciprocity builds connection.
Offer specific help: “I can bring in your trash cans while you’re away.”
Exchange phone numbers with the nearest few households.
Start a simple ritual, such as Friday evening front-yard drinks, without turning it into a major event.
Use neighborhood apps to arrange face-to-face contact, rather than letting the app become the neighborhood.

I want to underscore that the key is consistency rather than intensity. A block party once a year helps, but ten two-minute conversations usually do more. You don’t need to become close friends with everyone because you’re rebuilding the small layer of recognition that turns the strangers nearby into neighbors.

And that’s kind of the main point here: Do step out the front door. Pay attention to what’s happening on your street. Go for a walk and smile and wave. Chat with folks. Put down the phone and just walk and observe. And, yes, spend some time on your front porch and reconnect with those around you!

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How to Die Like a Boss

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 08:01:49 GMT

Today's topic stares death in the eye in order to help identify what really matters regarding your legacy, your impact on life, and your ability to let it go for what comes after. Today, we’re going to learn how to die like a boss.

You are going to die.

I know, I know, that’s not exactly the sort of motivational opening that looks good stitched onto a throw pillow, but it’s quite likely the most important fact about your life, and one we are really going to stare at today so we can do it right. Intellectually, we understand that we’ll die; however, how many of you are living as if that were true?

Earnest Becker, in his capstone book, The Denial of Death, explains part of the challenge in that humans live inside a contradiction: We are animals, born into bodies that eat, reproduce, excrete, decay, and die, and yet we also possess consciousness. We can imagine eternity, create meaning, and recognize our own splendid uniqueness like an angel but struggle with being trapped in the body of an animal, a topic we explored in Sex, Poop, and Rock ‘n Roll.

Worse, we are animals who know exactly what happens to animals in the end yet cannot reconcile that with our aspirations. So, because that’s terrifying, we build psychological defenses against it, and we do everything we can to avoid it.

Avoidance

The extreme example of avoidance are influencers and ‘lifehack’ gurus like and his “Don’t Die” project, which aims for radical life extension which he views as an engineering problem in which massive financial investments are being made. As describes Bryan:

…spends $2 million per year on body rejuvenation. He’s now getting fountain-of-youth injections (not approved by the FDA) that cost $25,000 per shot.

Want to know the kicker?

All of these bio-hacks, all of this goal of immortality, and he just announced he was diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis, a chronic condition where the immune system attacks the acid-producing cells in his stomach lining. This limits his uptake of iron and vitamin B-12 and has no cure. The double kicker is that it is very likely caused by all the tinkering he did that our body is not adapted for.

’s book Being Mortal goes beyond individual avoidance and explores what happens when our denial of death combines with a medical system designed to solve problems. Medicine can defeat infections, repair shattered bones, replace failing joints, and restart a stopped heart and these are incredible accomplishments, but they also train us to see death as a solvable medical problem.

What this looks like is that instead of awareness, mobility, comfort, time at home, and time with family, loved ones are locked in a hospital room for another procedure, offering a little possibility of additional days of life later. Except, Atul points out a 2010 study from Massachusetts General Hospital where lung cancer patients who received early palliative and hospice discussions lived 25% longer while experiencing significantly less pain and higher quality of life than those who ‘fought’ till the end.

The cost is also social. The aging population is now the largest driver of America’s growing dependence on government spending, particularly Social Security and Medicare. Did you know that the US government spends roughly four times as much on each senior as it does on each child? This is a complex subject described as the Nursing Home Economy, where:

Modern America has a really schizophrenic approach to aging - first, it is entirely youth obsessed and the elderly are ignored and hidden far away from the media spotlight. Second, even though the elderly are out of the media spotlight, they are generally desperate to live for as long as they can, to take every breath they can, because they are secular, materialist, and terrified of death and the possibility of the Void; the boomers are ready, willing and able to stack on unlimited debt so they can live a little longer

We saw this in COVID, where we locked kids out of schools to protect people who were in nursing homes. To be clear, this isn’t an argument for abandoning the elderly, but it does highlight a quandary our culture would rather avoid: How much of the future should be consumed trying to preserve the present?

Die Like a Boss

This is where we get to the “boss” part. Here, I’m using the term in lieu of “badass,” but even the association with management still works because that’s really what we’re doing. Managing our lives, managing ourselves, and managing our affairs. We explored a similar topic in Lead as if You Won't Survive the Engagement, where we have to look outside of ourselves to find the best way to manage.

And the badass part is that we are doing this because we’ve ditched the “I” ego and look at it all with an “Us” ego.

This is exactly what recent research is showing with the use of psychedelics in terminal cancer patients, where just one or two doses of psilocybin produce rapid, significant relief from end-of-life distress for roughly 80% of terminal patients. Even more interesting, ~60% achieve complete clinical remission from depression and anxiety, lasting six months or longer. Even cooler, almost 85% of participants reported a permanent reduction in their fear of death coupled with a renewed sense of meaning and peace.1 This is because one of the key tenets of psychedelics is the destruction of your ego.

In the idea of a soul journey we’ve explored previously, I think all the ‘hacking’ and avoidance is the sign of a young soul. Bryan’s got a cheat code, taking himself to another level but without maturing from the “I” ego to the “Us” Ego. It’s all about him, and death is something to avoid, however inevitable. This is another reason why I love the idea of a soul journey because in that model, death is not something to avoid, but to embrace as the culmination of this incarnation, the ability to learn and the opportunity to continue growing. Even if I it’s not true, I live as if it might be and that means, I’m doing something right.2

This is where we get to the core element of this exploration because we can’t defeat death by preserving the self. We defeat it in the only sense available to mortals, which is by transferring the self. This transfer happens through a series of mechanisms.

We transfer ourselves biologically through our children
We transfer ourselves culturally through our stories, art, inventions, and traditions
We transfer ourselves socially through the people we teach and mentor.
We transfer ourselves materially through the resources and institutions we leave behind.
We transfer ourselves spiritually through the character, courage, and moral example we cultivate in others.

This connects directly to the Two Rules of Life. The first rule of evolutionary biology is reproduction and resource creation while ensuring you raise future generations to succeed. The second, soul maturation, demands the ego to grow from “I” toward “Us.”

And death is the final test of both.

Did you create and nurture life? Did you produce resources that helped life continue? Did you mature beyond your own appetites and anxieties? Did you prepare others to carry forward what mattered?

Back to Ted and his article, How to Achieve Immortality, where he connects back to the ancient pursuit of immortality via great deeds and enduring art. Shakespeare remains alive through his words without requiring frozen organs, teenage blood, or a pharmaceutical routine that resembles a part-time job like Bryan.

But you don’t have to be Shakespeare because most genuine legacy is anonymous. We carry genes, habits, recipes, skills, sayings, rituals, and moral intuitions inherited from countless, nameless people. They might not be remembered, but their legacy remains, virtually immortal, and the future is different because they lived.

Counterintuitively, you must embrace your mortality to achieve this immortality. So, how do we do this?

Taking Action

The first thing to do is to accept what described in article Ancient Wisdom: How to Die Well:

We must learn to hold two truths at once: to wish things were different, while accepting what is. Modern medicine is incredible, and it continues to advance our lifespans and health spans. Yet we should acknowledge that death is still inevitable, and these very same medical advances may also deepen our collective denial of death.

Therefore, I propose a few steps that help us do just that:

Face your death: Think about it before you’re forced to and, even better, write what would remain unresolved if you died tonight. Also, imagine the decline that precedes death, and you’ll find it becomes less scary when it becomes familiar.
Define what makes life worth living: Identify the abilities and relationships that matter most. You get to decide what suffering and dependence you would accept for a realistic chance of preserving those things. Sometimes it’s as silly simple as eating chocolate ice cream and watching football, as was one of Gawande’s examples in his book.
Make decisions now: Don’t ignore the documents and choose a healthcare proxy, complete an advance directive, prepare a will, identify beneficiaries, and document passwords, financial records, and funeral preferences. Simply put, Lead as if You Won’t Survive the Engagement, because you won’t survive.
Talk about it: Tell your family what you value, what you fear, and what tradeoffs you would accept. Don’t just hand them those legal documents. Give them enough understanding to make decisions when things go sideways.
Build a medical off-ramp: Palliative care can begin alongside treatment, and that helps align medicine with your priorities. Hospice helps when comfort becomes more important than attempting a cure. Resources like chaplains, counselors, or Death Doulas (yes, a real and useful thing) can help ensure a human presence that institutional medicine often struggles to provide.
Transfer while you’re alive: Give resources when you can see what they create. Teach skills instead of leaving instructions. Mentor your successor, share authority, pass on the family stories. Focus on the “Us” ego.
Settle your non-financial accounts: Offer the apology, express the gratitude, forgive where you can, and say what needs to be said while someone is still alive to hear it. Your family shouldn’t have to inherit your emotional debts.
Let your legacy evolve: This is probably the biggest thing to let go of with your “I” Ego because your children, students, readers, and successors aren’t there to preserve you like a memory mummy. You need to give them the freedom to improve, reinterpret, and even reject what you handed them. An “Us” legacy makes other people more capable.
Take care of yourself: It’s not all about death. Something as simple as Functional Fitness can improve your living moments, extend your life, and allow graceful degradation, not medicalized life support.

You will die. Your body will stop, your position will be filled, and the world will keep turning. The question is whether you’ll spend your remaining life trying to prevent that world from continuing without you, or preparing it to continue because of you. This is why I found what recommends in Don’t Fancy Dying? Cicero Has Ideas, where he reminds us of ancient wisdom:

“‘Rehearse for death’: he who says this is telling us to rehearse our freedom. One who has learned death has unlearned slavery…” — Seneca, Letters, 26.10

Stare death in the eyes and decide what matters. Grow from the “I” ego to the “Us” ego and identify your true legacy. Prepare the people you love and transfer what you’ve learned. Embrace mortality to achieve immortality and then, when the time comes, let go and die like a Boss.

What’s something you’ve realized you’re hanging on to that you need to let go of?

What’s something you’ve decided you want to transfer into your legacy?

Leave a comment

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The Problem with Polymaths

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 08:01:39 GMT

Today’s topic directly addresses a critique of those who claim polymathy as their focus. We’ll explore how to balance the ego of titles, the hubris of credentials, and uncover the truth of polymathy and its value in solving wicked problems.

First off, I want to acknowledge a common complaint regarding the title of Polymath, and that is the perception of ego that goes with it, especially pertaining to the audacity of claiming competence in multiple different domains or disciplines.

To be fair, the more I’ve embraced the aspiration of becoming polymathic, the more I’ve run into people who claim it and yet unsettle me with their use of the term to excuse focus, inflate ego, or claim status. Even a key contributor to these pages, recently told me, “At this point, when I see people calling themselves one, I instantly assume “bloviating jackwad” (Although, to be fair, your Substack was the first I ever heard of the term, sooooo that’s why you get a pass. You’re the OG. lol).”

Clearly, I’ve got some bad publicity to overcome… even from fans.

I think part of this branding stems from how many other cringeworthy titles are out there, especially on LinkedIn, that obscure a core nugget of good, such as Visionary Thought Leader, Disruptive Thought Architect, Chief Innovation Evangelist, Cloud Ecosystem Ninja, Agile Transformation Guru, Synergy Strategist, Career Whisperer, and more. Core to most of these is a sense of ego, hubris, and self-promotion, while beneath the surface lies a banal reality of mediocrity.

The thing is, there’s not a better term for what I want to do. It’s not like hiding Garbage Collector under Sanitation Engineer, and there’s a reason why I aspire to be a Polymath: I think the world needs more systems thinkers who can tie together insights across domains and disciplines.

Sure, there are other descriptors for Polymathy, like Systems Engineering, Systems Architecture, and other technically focused terms, but my goal isn’t just to be technical; it’s to weave the human and social dimensions into technology. That’s why we study both the Keys to Innovation and Mixed Mental Arts in these essays, along with multiple other domains and disciplines. In the end, Polymathy is the simplest and most inclusive word that fits.

However, as we explored in this Substack’s inaugural essay, The Bane of Specialization, modern society favors hyperspecialization rather than the generalist, which means polymathy and the Systems Thinking that underpins it are not common disciplines. This is evident in my own employment, where I’m asked how I ground my capabilities in a focused discipline while, at the same time, they recognize that the value lies in not being focused on a single discipline.

Part of this is because, when it comes to personality proclivities, only 25% of the population is ‘wired’ for broader systems thinking, whereas 75% are more comfortable diving into the details. In practical terms, this means it’s very hard for 75% of the population to grok that others are more comfortable navigating broader systems.1

Adding to this quandary is a Catch-22: Intuitive people like me naturally understand and appreciate specialists. In fact, I can’t do what I do without the specialists. However, the specialists naturally expect the value to be deeper, not wider, and have a very hard time even understanding that, yes, I can have very broad exposure and see across domains and disciplines.

That doesn’t make me better, but it does make me useful, as so many systems are evolving from complicated through complex, and into wicked problem sets. To help articulate that progression, let’s step back to understand these systems:

The fundamental difference lies in their predictability and human alignment: complicated systems have many parts but are linear and predictable. This means experts can solve them with standard checklists (like building a rocket). Complex systems are dynamic and interconnected, meaning outcomes emerge unpredictably and require continuous experimentation to manage (like a stock market). Where it gets interesting is when we get into wicked systems, which combine complex dynamics with severe social or political disagreement, meaning they involve conflicting human values, have no single correct answer, and can never be fully solved, only mitigated (like climate change).

Complex and Wicked Problems stop benefiting from deeper and deeper expertise and start requiring a mindset that can begin to integrate deep experts. It’s not a binary one or the other, but an additive function, just like mechanical systems begin to integrate together into complex machinery with control systems.

Back to Polymathy, the original word is Polymathēs, which is interpreted as “very learned” or “having learned much.” But it’s more than that because “poly” means many, so a more literal definition is “learning across many topics.” Put another way, these were jacks of all trades that embraced three dimensions:

Breadth: serious engagement across multiple domains.
Depth: enough competence to understand and use what those domains contain.
Integration: connecting their concepts, methods, or perspectives productively.

The first and third dimensions are important because our modern experts are all around depth. Conversely, the polymath compliment that with Breadth and Integration, and there are many examples of the value of this kind of thinking:

In an experiment involving roofers, carpenters, and inline skaters, people from analogous fields generated solutions that were substantially more novel, although sometimes less immediately usable, than those produced by insiders. This is nuanced because outsiders often expand the solution space while specialists help make the solution work.2
An analysis of 17.9 million scientific papers found that the highest-impact work generally combined a conventional foundation with some unusual combinations of knowledge. Pure novelty performed less reliably than grounded recombination.3
A study of nearly 900 scientists and 32,000 papers found that interdisciplinary work received more citations while also taking longer and producing fewer publications. It was genuinely high-risk and high-reward.4
Nobel laureates are unusually likely to maintain serious artistic and craft practices outside their principal scientific disciplines. The relationship is correlational, although many reported using those pursuits to stimulate their scientific thinking.5

Clearly, there’s something important in what we are doing here that needs to be maintained while, at the same time, ensuring we remain grounded.

Ego

The main core of the opposition surrounds ego. One of the challenges is in the meaning of the word itself: “Having learned much.” Who am I to claim this? What proof do I have? It’s very hard to credentialize a broad exposure and workable knowledge across disciplines. The most common critique I get is that who am I to dare form an opinion on a variety of topics, a problem we explored in Who Are You to ____?, an essay that looks at the appeal to authority fallacy and addresses the difficulting in doing polymathy right.

It’s also important to understand that Polymathy doesn’t harbor more ego than any other discipline. It doesn’t take long in the ivory tower of siloed disciplines to find many bloviating jackwads who know nothing more than their tiny area and are still insufferable twats about it. It’s the same with any topic, whether it’s artists or authors, software engineers and scientists, or CEOs and content creators. In an irony not lost on me, it’s also ego to think someone like me, or any other aspiring polymath, can’t actually think in systems and has to be merely bloviating

But that’s not good enough for me, and so, to avoid ego, hubris, and self-promotion, I intentionally demand two things of polymathy:

It’s a journey, not an endstate. I’m an Aspiring polymath. That makes it a goal, not a title.
The central principle I espouse is Humility, which I place right between Insatiable Curiosity and Intentional Reframing.

These provide a constant reminder that people are watching me and judging me based on my claimed aspiration, and that I need to challenge my ego every step of the way.

And yes, I do struggle with this. On the one hand, I need to be able to speak clearly, and that means articulating with authority. On the other hand, I need to embrace the nuances of arguments, be adaptable in my thinking, and not make my knowledge my identity. Instead, I try to focus my identity on the aspiration for knowledge, and Polymathy is the best word to describe that aspiration. Hopefully, this inspires you to the same mindset as well!

Summary

Yes, there are bloviating jackwads claiming polymathy as an ego flex, just like many people try to flex their egos with other inflated claims. But, when the title is used to challenge ourselves to think differently, it’s at odds with the ego. I don’t aspire to polymathy because I have all the answers. Quite the opposite: I aspire because, to paraphrase Plato, “the only thing I know is that I know nothing.”

To wrap up a few threads here:

Breadth without depth becomes dilettantism.
Depth without integration becomes a collection of silos.
Integration without humility becomes bloviation.

It’s that last part that’s the most important to understand, and it's the opposite of what I challenge everyone here to embrace:

Insatiable Curiosity
The Humility to accept you don’t have all the answers
Intentional Reframing to see if you understand the problem correctly.

This doesn’t stop me from writing about anything; it just means that as I write, I’m constantly challenging myself to avoid being a “bloviating jackwad.” It also doesn’t mean I won’t turn sacred cows into delicious thought burgers, nor does that mean I’ll pull any punches around political correctness or sensitive feelings on all sides. It just means I can do that with, hopefully, more skill and tact when appropriate. In the end, the problem with polymathy is solved by balancing the ego of titles, the hubris of credentials, and leveraging polymathy to help solve wicked problems.

“Jack of all trades and master of none; but more often better than a master of one.”

To date, there are over 200 essays in the archive, open to everyone, on a wide variety of topics. They’re also open to critique, and that critique has made my work better.

Becoming a paid member keeps these essays open for everyone. Hurry and grab 20% off an annual subscription. That’s $24 a year or $2 a month. It’s just 50¢ an essay and makes a big difference.

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Chit-Chat

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 08:01:43 GMT

Today’s topic works through a great deal of angst surrounding small talk that too many of us dismiss as shallow or irrelevant. However, the research tells a different story of how it unlocks our superpower of social learning and rewards us with feelings of belonging, involvement, and camaraderie.

You don’t have to be around the interwebs too long before you find a lament of ‘small talk.’ It’s often an edgy introduction to the humble brag that they want to dive deeply into topics that matter, with the implication that those who engage in small talk are somehow vapid, shallow, and wasting precious time. Here are two common takes:

And then this particularly cringe video on LinkedIn describing ADHD socialization thus: “What exhausts them is this: Pretending to be interested, forcing reactions, performing a personality, so they choose silence… because they value authenticity.”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some pretty banal and incredibly boring experiences with small talk where it felt more like I was hearing about a four-year-old’s day than what I expected from a grown adult, but…

captures the angst really well: “Somehow we’ve absorbed the idea that connection counts only when it’s deep. Small talk became the junk food of social life: empty, fake, and a waste of time.”

So deeply have we internalized this that 22 different studies indicate we are talking less overall,1 and this isn’t resulting in deeper conversations or more positive outcomes. In fact, the more we close ourselves off to the social connections that surround us, the more we replace them with the artificial connections online where everything seems to bifurcate into Algowhoring, Fear Porn, and PSYOPs.

But the research indicates that the underlying impression is totally wrong:

People underestimate how enjoyable even “boring” conversations will be. Across multiple experiments, participants expected conversations about mundane topics to be less interesting and enjoyable than they actually were.2
Interactions with those you don’t know well, like acquaintances, classmates, and people we casually know, contribute measurably to well-being, and people reported greater happiness and belonging on days when they interacted with more weak ties than usual. 3
Even extremely brief interactions can improve mood and a sense of belonging. In a field experiment, coffee-shop customers who were simply instructed to smile, make eye contact, and briefly converse with their barista experienced more positive affect than customers who were instructed to complete the transaction as efficiently as possible. The former felt better and had a better experience.4
People consistently underestimate the benefits of talking to strangers and incorrectly predicted that interacting with a stranger would be worse than remaining alone, but experimentally assigned conversations produced more positive experiences than solitude. 5
We often underestimate how much we learn from talking to another person. We believe we’ll learn nothing, but are often surprised. This was my own experience on a plane recently, where both my seatmate and I were shocked at how much we learned in a relatively short time.6
Weak ties (The $5 term for these sorts of relationships) are disproportionately useful for exposing us to information outside our immediate social network because close relationships tend to occupy overlapping networks, while weaker ties more often bridge otherwise separated groups, allowing novel information and opportunities to move between them. This is a great method for breaking out of your echo chamber.7

Those findings weren’t a surprise to me because I learned long ago that humans aren’t that wise and our true superpower is actually social learning. As such, we should embrace calling ourselves Homo Socialis over Homo Sapiens, and much of that socialness starts with small talk.

Put in a more memorable way: Dogs sniff butts; humans small talk.

To be honest, I’d rather lean into the chit-chat over butt-sniffing myself. It’s also physiologically important because we have to give our bodies and brains a quick minute to adjust to another human, their styles, tones, culture, language, sex, religion, and dozens of other characteristics that help us suss out the proper profiles to start with and, without significant consequence of a social faux pas, tailor those profiles to match the actual person, learning to stereotype properly.

, a fellow I’ve known for almost 20 years, recently wrote on the power of small talk, where he shares the insight from Gillian Sandstrom, a professor at the University of Sussex who has a mnemonic for how to have good small talk she calls QUICK: Question, something In Common, and Kindness. It’s that simple: just start with a question, look for something in common, and lead with kindness.

Justin writes how he was doing this without the framework, and that’s honestly how I got to know him. We worked at the same company, but in different areas. We didn’t have a lot of time to just hang out, so often our conversations were just quick chit-chats that jumped topics somewhat randomly; however, over time, we built a friendship where we learned a lot about each other.

It's still something I love doing in general. Simple questions like, “What’s your favorite color?” seem capricious on the surface until you follow the conversation and see how much it puts someone at ease, opens new avenues, and builds rapport that you just don’t get elsewhere. Chit-chat also, quite literally, saved my life as I shared in The Enemy’s Gate Is Down about my time in the Army, deployed in Iraq:

Similarly, when I’d sit with police leadership and was offered a cigarette, I’d accept, sit back, and ask questions that had nothing to do with my mission. In this manner, I learned a lot about the Iraqis I relied on for my success.

It was those simple, ‘weak-tied’ relationships that connected us on a human level, and that connection allowed us to get intel on an IED that we were able to avoid. Chit-chat works, even with those who might be your enemies - Homo Socialis for the win!

Likewise, I like to start meetings, even with people I’ve worked with for a while, just talking about life. Just five minutes of caring about them, not the job, unlocks so much more value and goodwill for the deeper conversations later. A favorite question is “Tell me something about you I don’t know yet.” It’s never disappointing.

Small talk is powerful, and it’s also core to being human and a sign of social intelligence. I honestly don’t care to go any deeper until I can respect the whole person I’m engaged with. Simple chit-chat will tell me a great deal about your intellectual and emotional mettle. It shows your adaptability and quickness of thought. It lets me see if you can manage to hold onto a couple of threads of conversation at the same time. It gives me time to regulate my initial profiles of you and allows you to relax as well.

And the harder truth is this: Those who cannot pass through chit-chat also rarely have anything valuable to add in the deeper conversations. They’re so enamored with their own intellectual ego that they can’t appreciate the delicate dance and humor of the surface-level. Subsequently, they often carry that same rigidity and closed-mindedness into more complex topics as well, which never bodes well.

That’s because true intellectual curiosity requires broad relational curiosity. That relational curiosity leverages humanity’s superpower of social learning, which allows us to hack into the incredible corpus of human knowledge, insights, and creativity.

So, chit-chat. Approach the world with Insatiable Curiosity about everything. Have QUICK conversations where you ask fun questions to find something in common and be kind. Engage with that stranger on the bus. Share things about yourself. Unlock social learning and feel the rewards of belonging, involvement, and camaraderie. That’s about as authentic as you can get!

Even better, before you leave, tell me something about yourself that I don’t know yet.

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The Bunnies and the Bears

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:01:31 GMT

Today’s topic investigates two views of the world that exist across societies. It’s a simplified view with significant consequences for understanding different perspectives. It’s critical to personal relationships as well as how we can view larger social systems.

Years ago, I had a great mentor, let’s call him Craig, who was my company commander in Korea. We were out at a gunnery event shooting the Bradleys and, in a break in the training, he asked me about my girlfriend, now wife, as our relationship was getting serious entering late summer 2006. The resulting discussion wasn’t about how in love we were; it was about how frustrated we both were over a disagreement.

As a bit of backstory, we started dating after I commissioned in the Army and right before I entered Ranger School. From there, I went to Airborne School, and if you’ve read The Things You Do For Love, you’ll remember how I forged a doctor’s signature on my return-to-duty form so I could go on a cruise with her, my cousin, and his girlfriend (now wife). After that adventure, I went to Korea, where our relationship was limited to video and phone calls.

On the positive side, it forced us to learn how to communicate.

On the downside, it gave us many opportunities to step on each other’s toes.

I don’t even remember the topic of our disagreement, but it boiled down to her feeling uncomfortable with it and my being frustrated because I wanted to dig in and dissect it. Craig listened to my lament and said something along the lines of “There are bears and there are bunnies. No matter how well-intended the bears are and no matter how gently they play, the bunnies still think they’re going to die.”

I wasn’t trying to be malicious; I was well-intentioned and wanted to play with a complex idea. It’s likely a precursor to my love of Mixed Mental Arts, where we grapple with complex ideas in the octagon of life… However, when a bunny squares off against a bear, it really doesn’t matter how well-intentioned I was; the matchup seemed imbalanced.

Now, it’s funny because my wife is actually not a bunny. She’s just a smaller bear, and people she worked with as an engineer fully assumed she wore the pants in the family because she was a bear to their bunny. However, the analogy holds when considering different perspectives and different personalities at play in the world.

On the surface, this seems totally obvious. We have many names for this understanding, from emotional intelligence to Personality Proclivities to situational leadership. At work, we talk of bringing our whole selves to work, and in life, we appreciate not getting trampled.

At least, that’s how we tend to deal with the bears.

But how do we deal with the bunnies?

Bunnies, specifically the prolific European varieties, live underground during the day in large warrens of family groups. They emerge in the evenings and mornings, when the light makes it harder for predators to find them. Their eyes, on the sides of their heads, provide near 360-degree peripheral vision, and they’re built to jump and run.

That’s a real rabbit, and for our bunny analogy, that translates into Personality Proclivities that look more introverted, conscientious, very agreeable, and higher in neuroticism. The warren for these folks was family, church communities, social clubs, internet forums, and more.

Just to clarify, this isn’t a bad thing at all. The world needs bunnies to create balance. The challenge emerges, as we explored in Born or Trained, that current Western culture, and I’d argue culture through time, overtly values the bears, not the bunnies.

So who are the bears? Largely extroverted, also conscientious, but not anal retentive, willing to be disagreeable, naturally open, and very low neuroticism. They’re rumbling and rolling, and wrestling with ideas, and challenging the status quo.

As we looked at business leaders before, we value traits such as openness, structured conscientiousness, being able to get along without being a pushover, low anxiety and self-doubt, and being outgoing and engaging. Almost every leadership book and every celebration of leaders, both men and women, value the bears. What else is the phenomenon of the ‘boss bitch?’

Worse, we value the bears so much we view any difference between the bears and the bunnies as some form of systemic oppression or structural limitation, which, to be clear, are systems more often designed to control the bears and protect the bunnies. However, instead of appreciating the bunnies, and teaching the bunnies to appreciate and understand the bears, we’ve been spending decades destroying the systems and have focused on turning bunnies into bears.

A challenge emerges that, when bunnies try to be bears, they’re going against their natural inclinations no matter how much they’d like to be a bear and no matter how much society values bears. So, they play a different game to level the playing field.

For example, I know a person who is a pure bunny. She’s trying really, really hard to be present in the world, but she exudes nervous tension. Everything is a threat. Everything can be, must be, safer. In the face of an upper-middle-class life, living in an extremely low crime/risk area, with an advanced education, and a well-respected career, she’s still a bunny acting like she’s surrounded by predators.

And if the bears are playing, no matter how gently, you’ll hear about her worries, typically through a third party and never directly. This isn’t manipulative, covert narcissism that we explored, either. It’s just that the world, outside the warren, will never be as safe, and she’s a bunny.

This leads to a counterintuitive twist that the bunnies are an unappreciated threat to the bears. We have many systems in place to prevent the trampling of bunnies and, especially when they’re women, we have no shortage of other bears willing to white-knight. However, this is sometimes weaponized because rabbits, to quote Monty Python, can also be “ the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on." It’s bad when it’s intentional, but the real danger, to the bears, is when the bunny doesn’t even know what they’re doing, or why, or what that does to the bears.

The infamous Rabbit of Caerbannog

Now, think back to the COVID lockdowns six years ago and the number of people celebrating the ability to stay home, in their warrens, playing it safe, eagerly masking, and reacting to anyone who questioned the safety of the warren as a threat. The problem is that they undermined the bears, attacking anything that they viewed as a threat no matter how mundane.

Adding to this, I feel like over the past 20 years we have seen the revenge of the bunnies, as society has demanded they play while allowing them to rewrite the rules of play. The result is a massive mismatch: over-indexing on threats, underappreciating the violence needed to keep danger away, and pushing bunnies to be bears while dragging bears down to be bunnies. At the same time, as the spaces for bunnies are being abandoned, the space for bears is also shrinking.

So back to my wife and me: It’s pretty clear that I needed to adjust my tact and meet my wife where she was. She wasn’t even a bunny. She’s a bear, but I was a bigger bear, and I’ve spent years tempering and adjusting myself so I can integrate, lead, and love better. It’s easier because so much focus is placed on helping the bears and containing the bears when necessary.

But what do we do about the bunnies? Can bunnies learn to be bears?

I wish I had an easy answer for this question. The only place to start is by understanding the difference and appreciating it, actively looking for mismatched expectations, and then adapting.

Both the bunnies and the bears are essential to a healthy society, and when that’s not appreciated, the entire system is at risk of being ripped apart by the always-afraid bunnies and the ill-intentioned bears. The former attacks the systems that protect them, and the latter, unbound by those systems, roam freely.

It might be a simple analogy, but it helps articulate, without having to name distinct systems, what happens when we don’t understand the differences between perceptions, the systems that exist to manage them, and the consequences of ripping things down. Instead, we need to embrace the bears, protect the bunnies, and learn to value the diversity that these two perspectives provide to our societies.

Are you a bunny or a bear? Did you learn something about yourself and others based on that insight? Leave a comment and let us know!

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A related conversation about the implications of this was explored in Damn the Patriarchy, where we see how systems designed to restrain our negative inclinations get attacked when they’re not understood.

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How to be Right

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:01:37 GMT

Today’s topic explores an old axiom of mine and how that ties into the core philosophy of Polymathic Being. The goal is to improve our ways of thinking, open ourselves to new information, and to truly learn how to be right in our search for truth.

One of my core axioms is “Don’t be disprovable.”

The twist is that this doesn’t mean I have to be right.

There’s a nuance there because it typically leads me to being right more often than otherwise because, counterintuitively, I’m not worried about being wrong.

Okay, okay, that hurts my own brain. Let me break this down:

What not being disprovable means is that I’m the first person to critique my own ideas, and that pushes me to stress test my ideas before blithely accepting them as right. It also means I’ve learned how to decouple my identity from my ideas so that being wrong doesn’t challenge who I am, avoiding what calls “Identity Protective Systems which she described recently as:

“It’s when a belief becomes part of who you are, or part of the group you belong to. Your reasoning will shift from finding the truth to defending your belief. Instead of weighing the evidence, you’re guarding a piece of yourself.”

These identity-protective systems shield bad ideas from critique and fuel an insatiable drive to feed a rage-bait-driven algorithm regardless of the facts. As such, decoupling information from how I define my identity helps me navigate life more effectively.

Let’s use a quick example: Climate Change

It doesn’t take a lot of evaluation to see that climate change is much less about the actual science of the climate and much more about political and ideological identity and signaling.1 Key to note is the dearth of discussion about which conditions have represented the greatest planetary thriving in biodiversity throughout history. (fun fact: it’s higher temps and higher CO2)

And if that statement was triggering, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. A large part of that is that we only talk about avoiding change, and that change is assumed to be de facto bad mostly because humans have a natural inclination to avoid change.2

Well, I know we have this inclination, and so I’m curious about the biology, entomology, geology, and more about the topic. As I investigated, without fearing climate change, I observed that the planet has generally had greater and more prolific biodiversity under conditions that current climate alarmists claim are deadly. Note that I don’t claim to add a moral dimension of ‘could’ or ‘should,’ but I’m curious to understand ‘why.’ Why do warmer temps and greater CO2 lead to more biomass and biodiversity?3

This query uncovered that CO2 is a fertilizer. So much so that commercial greenhouses pump in tons of CO2 to help their plants grow faster with increased yield.4 In fact, 10% of the yield increase in staple crops like corn and wheat is due to increased CO2, and almost 70% of the planet's vegetated land surface experienced active greening.5 You may or may not know that this is because all plants, all of their mass, is built from CO2, extracted from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, with trace minerals and water coming from the soil. So, if increasing atmospheric CO2 increases plant biomass, then what is the consequence of reducing CO2?

Well, the last ice age showed a few indications when CO2 levels were so low that plants nearly suffocated,6 and as temps and CO2 increased, we’ve seen dramatic greening. This opens another thread on temperature: the climate is both emerging from an ice age and dynamic. The compounding causal chain of increased temperature is fundamentally so complicated that it’s only recently that computers have been powerful enough to compute a fraction of it. Most models lock all but a few variables, so their outputs look severe but rarely match reality.7

Now, this is where it gets interesting because the right answer isn’t confidence in an ideology, but insatiable curiosity to delve deeper and wider. These facts aren’t attempting to dismiss climate concern, deny climate change, or dissuade action, but to demand that we have the proper context, facts, data, and understanding. This ensures that our actions actually have the impact we want, rather than the common outcome of greenwashing, and addresses the challenges we face, where even recycling has a dirty secret because of feelings over facts.

This is why the polymathic mindset I embrace balances these three things:

Let me reiterate here that my goal isn’t to be “right”; it’s to not be disprovable because the deeper you get into the science of climate change, the more you realize two things: First, the science is certainly not settled and, second, our knowledge of the climate is still nascent, and we’re still applying simple analytic tools to a highly complex and adaptive system.

So, am I right? Well, in the world of science, it helps to remember British statistician George Box’s famous line:

“Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.”

It’s a great reminder that no scientific model can capture the full truth of the real world. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful, as a simple model can still help us solve problems, make good guesses, and understand how things work. However, we, too often, suffer the fallacy of composition when we assume what is true of a part must automatically be true of the whole, which is what’s happening in spades in the climate conversations, which are then weaponized by politics and moral language.

In the end, we’re all wrong.

If you’ve been reading Polymathic Being for a while, you’ll see we take this approach with almost every topic that we explore. From Feminism to the Patriarchy, from Polio to Skin Cancer, from Leadership to Innovation, and from Religion to Myths, the goal here isn’t to be right. It’s first and foremost an effort to prove ourselves wrong and, in doing so, avoid being disprovable.

Weaving in a final concept we’ve looked at before, being right isn’t just about learning something new but about a critical focus on unlearning what no longer works and relearning new positions. Let’s break this down and weave it together.

Learn - Driven by that insatiable curiosity, the goal is to constantly explore. As I coach others, I intentionally look across domains and disciplines to see what new information is out there and how others are approaching similar problems. I found out CO2 was a fertilizer from the Department of Agriculture, not the Environmental Protection Agency.
Unlearn - Undescored by humility, we have to recognize when old models are too wrong to keep using and remove them from the equation. This is something that Thomas Kuhn would describe as shifting your paradigm and forces you to analyze and, hopefully, decouple yourself from rote adherence to old systems. This also helps us critique moral statements from base facts. A critical conflation that permeates climate science is the unwillingness to unlearn.
- I need to caveat here that this isn’t throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Sometimes, it’s just clipping something you thought was important and seeing if anything even changes. So much of what we hold tightly doesn’t need to be.
Relearn - If you’ve already thought about how intentional reframing fits here, you’re right. Sometimes, it’s just rotating our perspective and recognizing that other views and interpretations exist. This is why Steelmanning is such a powerful critique because, instead of trying to prove someone else wrong, you try to make their argument better than they can. Similarly, you apply critique to your own arguments to challenge and keep yourself open to challenge.

With these two frameworks woven together, we’re now armed to reconsider almost anything. Back to climate change, this doesn’t mean we just switch from one extreme to another but actually consider avoiding the binary completely. For example, I like to play a thought game where I call myself a ‘climate change advocate,’ and I embrace both the increase in temperature and CO2.

What then?

Well, now you’ve unlocked a powerful tool that the Stoic philosopher Epictetus frequently used throughout The Discourses to challenge his students' assumptions and bring them back to the core dichotomy of control. But truly, what then?

What do increasing temps and CO2 do to our perceptions of geopolitics? Why do most debates end up talking economics, and not bioscience? On a dynamic planet, why is the debate over whether something should, or shouldn’t, change? Why did we pick the baselines we’re even arguing over? What if we did nothing?

What then?

When you apply curiosity, humility, and reframing with learning, unlearning, and relearning, you’ll be amazed at how interesting those questions really are. You also realize how many elements of the topic you hold dear that don’t need to be. Done well, you’ll also learn you don’t have to be “RIGHT!” When you get to that point, you’ll find yourself less disprovable, less wrong, and more open to new information.

That’s the best place to be and is certainly never wrong.

What’s fun is how this essay was pulled from my drafts after a random Tuesday tag in Substack Notes with a continuation poem. The goal was to take the last line and build a new stanza. The one tagged me to build from was: "Until the hour that my grip on life eases.” The first thing that popped into my brain was learning, and the poem flowed from there:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Until the hour that my grip on life eases

I will strive to learn—

To chisel ossified truths from my bones

And test them against a world still shifting,

To unlearn the walls I called foundations,

Then relearn how to stand among the rubble,

Keeping only what can still bear my weight

And letting wisdom grow from what I lose... and learn.

This is how to be right. Counterintuitively, it’s more about not being wrong while also challenging everything you think to be right. It’s insatiable curiosity, humility, and intentional reframing wrapped into the mantra of Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn.

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Rediscovering Awe

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:02:07 GMT

Today’s topic is a quick reminder to slow down and appreciate the complexity of the world around you. It’s a great antidote to misery and doesn’t require anything special. We’ll introduce a simple technique that can help you find awe in almost anything.

When was the last time you felt Awe? Like truly marveled at something that showed the beauty, complexity, and even rawness of life?

Too often, we pass right by millions of things that are awe-inspiring while tending to focus on the things that matter least. Like what a politician said thousands of miles away, or what a social media influencer thinks, thought, or did. Or worse, the invention of things to fear that have no bearing on reality, as Seneca the Younger said 2000 years ago:

“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”

Thankfully, I’ve been introduced to a cohort of thinkers and writers here on Substack who leave me in awe. One of them, whom I mention often, is who recently wrote: “How to Find Awe In Everything.” I left a comment that I want to build on today:

I find that awe happens slowly, not quickly. I find myself appreciating the tiniest things when I slow down long enough to see them. I've never felt awe at a sprint.

What then?

How to Find Awe In Everything

5 months ago · 61 likes · 43 comments · Sam Alaimo

First, let’s touch back on the intro because it’s not even the speed at which we move that pushes us to overlook awesome things. Perversely, social media has taken to scorning awe as somehow infantile or, worse, ‘tone deaf’ to what they see as endemic suffering. Ironically, that behavior is the second of the 10 Commandments for Misery and I explored before:

2) Thou Shalt Scorn Awe
You must never experience awe on the road to misery. You get extra points for constantly denigrating the awe of someone else. The trick is to always be irreverent while demanding reverence for your own irreverence.

Obviously, the title contains the answer to how successful eschewing awe really is. It’s also just a miserable look, as evident in many people mocking Europeans who came over for the World Cup and were in awe at what we consider normal. Common things like gargantuan stadiums that hold tens of thousands of fans, massive freeways that transport millions, ridiculous gas stations like Buc-ee's, with over 100 gas pumps and a massive convenience store with one of the best brisket sandwiches around.

But we drive by that every day and don’t even consider just how amazing it all is. It’s also worse than that because while we aren’t even awed by the awe-inspiring extremes of consumerism or nature, we’re overlooking so much below that which can still inspire awe. Thankfully, we can rediscover awe in some of the simplest things that surround us.

Rediscovering Awe

Start by slowing down.

Getting back to that comment, I find that awe happens slowly, not quickly. I find myself appreciating the tiniest things when I slow down long enough to see them. I’ve never felt awe at a sprint. This is important because the world is demanding our attention in a thousand different ways, and the best thing to do is just push them away and focus on something super simple, like this Gorilla, and his son intently watching a simple caterpillar.

I find that watching an anthill does the same for me. Find a quiet space with an anthill, and just stop and watch them. Consider their industriousness, relentless effort, and sophisticated command and control for the entire nest.

Same for flowers. Just deeply observing their colors, textures, and the way they move in the breeze, and the types of insects that come by.

Spider webs are similar. Even if they’re not active, just looking at how intricate the web is, how it moves, tracing the gossamer strands to see where they attach it and considering how they did that in a single night.

When you can find awe in the micro, then it also helps to find it in the macro. Not just in massive vistas or beautiful mountains, but in the complexity of humanity as we explored in The Awe of Sondering, where we learned a new word for many of us:

Sondering: The profound realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, filled with their own stories, struggles, and history, even though they seem like background characters in your life.

Just stepping back and considering that the people you zip by each day have lives as complex as your own, and then considering what you’re dealing with, is a wonderful way to depressurize the anxiety that constantly threatens to overwhelm us. Even better, you realize that there’s almost nothing going on out there that matches what we’re told is happening online.

The same thing can happen when you do sit on the lakeshore, or the mountain, or deep in the woods, surrounded by a mass of other things that, as you start to zoom from the macro to the micro, and back, is frankly awe-inspiring.

It can happen within nature or deep in a city because there’s always something big or something small that you can focus on that helps you slow down and get out of your own brain, where it’s hard not to find awe.

Take a moment, go find something to focus on. Spend 10 minutes just considering the complexity of the micro and/or the magnitude of the macro.

Slow down, and let the world keep moving.

Let yourself be amazed at what you find, the tiniest details or massive majesty.

Intentionally find awe and feel what it does to your brain.

Now, see if you can find awe in almost anything.

So, what did you find? What did you find awe in? Leave a comment; I’d love to hear!

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Masking as Neurodivergent

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:01:50 GMT

Today’s topic attempts to unmask true anti-social behaviors from the protective cover of neurodivergence. We’ll explore the current state of the neurodivergent world, identify key patterns to pay attention to, and in doing so, I truly believe that once we pull off that mask, we can create healthy, inclusive cultures.

Intro

Human behaviors have broad diversity in cognitive, emotional, cultural, and social expression. There are, however, toxic behaviors; the shadow behaviors that manipulate, control, and exploit. When I started investigating neurodivergency, I was annoyed at how healthy behaviors were getting classified as divergent and personality profiles, which are useful for identifying the healthy diversity of neurotypicality, were being ignored, which allowed anti-social pathology to hide in plain sight.

As I explored, I found that we collapsed neurotypicality into a facsimile, some largely undefined ‘other’ which, apparently, controls and designs everything to exclude the neurodivergent. This allows the ‘divergent’ to be victims, set apart, and special, openly claiming status as gifted and exceptional while also, paradoxically, claiming disability.

This cocktail of victim + special is intoxicating and has exploded the diagnostic window of neurodivergence, where a majority of Gen Z claims neurodivergence as core to their identity. This is bad enough, but as I kept digging, I found something more sinister lurking beneath that I felt in my original post, and confirmed as I kept digging. There is clear manipulation within neurodiversity by classic Cluster B.

Yes, the *non-exhaustive list which goes on and on and on…

All these variables make this both difficult to critique without being accused of ‘punching down’ and impossible to pin a definition where quirky personality sits next to Down Syndrome, Stuttering, Giftedness, and Anxiety. It’s so broad as to include anyone and claims enough legit disabilities to create a minefield for analysis. So what we’re going to do is start picking it apart, starting with the pathology of Cluster B.

Cluster B

To better understand, in psychology, Cluster B is a category of personality disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). It encompasses four distinct conditions regarding emotional regulation, impulse control, and maintaining stable relationships:

Antisocial: Disregarding laws, norms, and others’ rights.
Borderline: Intense instability in emotions and relationships.
Histrionic: Constant attention-seeking and excessive drama.
Narcissistic: Grandiosity and lack of empathy.

What makes Cluster B challenging to recognize is that it’s largely a feminine cluster, in contrast to the Dark Triad's (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) masculine tendencies. Add to this, Cluster B manifests as what can sound and look like caring, but it’s the feminine shadow, the devouring mother, and reveals itself as toxic empathy, which isn’t empathetic at all!

I don’t make this claim lightly, because as I dug deeper into understanding True Neurodivergence, I kept coming across social media and Substack accounts that were purportedly neurodivergent, but all started to sound the same. It was the victim + special cocktail where anything and everything that held these influencers back was blamed on the nefarious neurotypical.

Three accounts highlight this best:

writes about how everything that holds her back is the fault of everything else. Her recent article, Fragile Men and the Women Who Outlast Them, is a perfect example where, if you replace Neurodivergence with Cluster B, the reasons for her ‘harassment’ become clear.
is a case study on what can be best described as ‘intellectual masturbation,’ where any sense of agency or acceptance of challenge is pushed away for the easy button. No surprise that she claims a PhD in ‘Creativity’ and that comes through in her fantastical justifications. She’s also (self-described) ‘gifted,’ so that purportedly gives her unquestionable wisdom.
’s most popular articles all lament exclusion and, with no irony intended, include one on how toxic personalities target neurodivergents. I don’t place Eva in Cluster B yet, but she’s a great example of utility for Cluster B, which we’ll get into shortly.

I could add in the and and and and and and and and , ad infinitum1 because, as I explored that area, I kept coming across more and more accounts that all had something critical in common:

They are women.
Of higher socioeconomic status
Claiming disability as core to their identity
Displaying clear Cluster B behaviors in their writing and/or reactions.2

Now, I don’t want this to be viewed as an attack purely on women, but two things emerged: first, it was nearly exclusively women3 and, second, Cluster B manifests under the neurodivergent banner much more seamlessly than the masculine Dark Triad. Put another way, it’s much easier for the shadow feminine to hide there than for the shadow masculine, because it masks itself in caring, nurturing, and comforting. It’s the perfect recipe for toxic empathy and the devouring mother archetype, which creates the very exclusion the nuerodivergents fear.

Cluster B Exclusion

The challenge is that it actually weaponizes those with true disability. This is where I think Eva plays a role in that she may very well be autistic, but her language and her supporters push her away from agency and accountability and into victimization, which, in turn, helps hide the Cluster B manipulators. Eva is a useful lackey and perversely views her manipulators, selling her the cocktail of victim + special, as allies.

To add insult to injury, Cluster B designs intentional exclusion, fosters division, and stokes animosity while weaponizing the vulnerable who actually need help but convinces them it’s a superpower that no one should take away. So, those who are divergent are pushed further away, not by people like me who want to see Eva integrate and grow, but by those who relish the power the division provides while being able to excuse socially pathological behaviors.

The perverse result of the Cluster B infiltration is the exclusion of truly autistic and ADHD people who need the attention and resources to lead more productive lives. As more people try to gain influence, accommodation, and disability compensation, we see the explosion of pathologizing personality and the subsequent siphoning of funds and resources from those who need them the most, as describes:

Note here, they have to append “desperately” to help you understand that these are what we merely called “disabled” twenty years ago. Similar to how (note the modifier ‘profound’) writes about her autistic children who are lumped in with a social media influencer with a quirky personality.

It’s so bad, , writes about the gentrification of level 1 autism (formerly Asperger's), and recently described the exclusion thusly:

Redefining autism to exclude its negative symptom because they embarrass the least disabled autistic people is harming those of us who do not have the luxury of denial.

The resource drain is becoming more and more obvious as Karina, who works as a practicing therapist, has this to say about the situation:

also pulls no punches in “The Spectrum”: How Autism Was Hijacked By Narcissists, where she puts it plainly that neurodivergence now feeds those Cluster B behaviors where autism now,

“means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.

Likewise, a year ago, wrote Dark neurodivergence or Cluster B traits? where she delineates the ever-eroding line between disability and anti-social pathology and how the latter demands no fix for the former. This is why you now see people protesting the push to prevent or cure autism, because if we fixed the problem, we’d take away their social currency and mask.

Masking as Neurodivergent4

Here’s where it really gets truly messy because Cluster B traits can resemble autistic behavior at the surface,5 and the intelligent narcissist learns to mask. This is profoundly counterintuitive because nuerodivergents have been using the term “mask” to explain how they’re expected to fit into normal life, which, I have to point out, everyone does, and sociology calls it code-switching among other terms. However, in a true twist, Cluster B successfully uses neurodivergence as a mask to hide, or cloak6 their behavior where:

Emotional volatility may look like a meltdown
Criticism sensitivity, like rejection sensitivity
Unstable relationships, as social-communication difficulty
Entitlement like accommodation-seeking
Cruelty, like autistic bluntness
Identity instability like late “unmasking.” (You can tell a brilliant cover where they tell you what they’re ‘masking’ but make it sound like they’re masking for neurotypical while they’re actually masking Cluster B as something else)

The strongest warning sign is their selective incapacity, where the person invokes neurodivergence when challenged, yet demonstrates restraint, social awareness, and strategic presentation when reputation, authority, or personal advantage is at stake.

Which brings us back to , of recent fame for her 5,000-word AI-generated posts, published near daily, which end up being insightful in a perverse way. In her essay on being Targeted by Toxic Personalities, she nearly gets to the problem when she identifies that: “One in three autistic women has received at least one psychiatric misdiagnosis before an autism diagnosis, most commonly a personality disorder.”

The challenge here is that we’re finding it’s not a misdiagnosis at all! In fact, it lines up with my own analysis that 1:3 women claiming autism are using it as a mask for their personality disorder, and it isn’t autism at all! It wasn’t a misdiagnosis because personality disorders are typically much more strenuously diagnosed, with multiple observations, whereas I can go online, schedule a meeting, and walk away with an autism diagnosis in minutes.

This allows neurodivergence to be an unusually effective identity shield for people who display manipulative, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, antisocial, and other abusive behavior. It’s brilliant at reframing misconduct as disability. It protects by accusing criticism of ableism. It deflects demands for accountability by claiming they’re a denial of accommodation.

It hides this exploitation as a misunderstanding, all while allowing access to disability and accommodation. Even worse, it feeds narcissism by claiming to be ‘gifted’ and ‘exceptional.’7 In her most amazingly close assessment of the situation, while I was drafting this essay, Eva actually wrote Why Neurodivergent People “Attract” Narcissists, which indicates that she perceives the same thing but hasn’t figured out that Cluster B are creating these problems and she’s their lackey. She worries that it paints the neurodivergent as defective, while I think most of us see how their innocent vulnerability provides a perfect mask for pathology.

That’s where we find (real name Sher) wearing this mask so well as she laments feeling excluded from everything. Unlike Eva, the Cluster B is much more obvious as she blames everyone else. The catch is, her behaviors are a poison that our long-evolved social systems were designed to exclude because they’re a pathology, not some cute cognitive quirk. noted that her rant reads as deeply aggrieved, entitled, and antisocial, while trying to say it’s a superpower being held back by the neurotypical. She’s right that it’s being held back; she’s wrong that it’s a superpower, at least in the protagonist sense.

Mike also astutely points out that most of these writers studiously police their comments, deleting anything they disagree with, ironically, excluding anything that diverges from their narrative. This is something even Eva did on a post about the problems with exclusion… Yes, the irony goes deep.

This reinforces the idea that the easiest discernment is in their response to accountability. A person acting in good faith can usually say, “This explains why it happened, but I recognize the harm and will work to prevent it.” Conversely, the mask produces a recurring cycle of harm, denial, justification, identity-based counterattack, victim reversal, ally recruitment, censoring, and blocking with no sustained, nor even attempted, behavioral change.

Unmasking Cluster B

I want to be clear that I’m not offering a diagnosis, but I’m seeing and naming patterns. This discernment allows me to accommodate legitimate disability, state my engagement boundaries explicitly, expect reciprocity and repair, and judge whether the diagnosis is being used to improve functioning or to create immunity from consequences. It helps me be maximally inclusive while protecting me from toxicity.

As far as a recommendation for you, dear reader, the easiest way to discern the difference is that neurodivergency produces lifelong, broadly consistent difficulties with social communication, sensory processing, rigidity, and repetitive patterns, whereas Cluster B behavior is more often organized around abandonment, validation, status, control, entitlement, or exploitation.

Once you see the behavior for what it is, it becomes much easier to distinguish it whether online or in person, and all you have to do is start watching for the pattern. This recommendation is for both neurotypical and truly neurodivergent people, as we aren’t as far apart as the Cluster B manipulators would have you believe. I truly believe that once we pull off that mask, we can create healthy, inclusive cultures.

I’d like to point out that many others are starting to see the same thing, including , who opened my eyes to Cluster B behavior through his personal stories about his mother growing up. He has this to add to the conversation:

So does :

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The Catastrophe of Smokey Bear

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:00:28 GMT

Today's topic ignites the conversation about human hubris and its ecological impact when we view ourselves as masters of nature, or set apart from the consequences. It looks at the recent focus on wildfires and how they’re largely of our own creation, though, not through the reasons that are often provided.

This summer, and most summers of the recent past, we are inundated with news of wildfires across Canada, California, and Europe. Last year started with the devastating wildfires in California and, for over two weeks, we watched the news as the entire town of Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. Everywhere we turn, it seems like the world is on fire.

The blame is often placed on climate change, but that’s only a minor part of the story. The main cause is actually the ecological disaster of Smokey Bear, the mascot for a well-intended prevention of human-caused wildfires, that rode on the back of suppression of ALL wildfires starting around 100 years ago.

Let’s start with a little context about fire first: It’s natural.

It’s so natural that everything on Earth has learned how to adapt to survive it. Even more so, fire is often an essential culling and reproduction method that keeps ecosystems healthy. For example, the Midwestern Jackpine requires fire in older forests to open the pine cones to allow new growth. When fires were suppressed, the stands of trees aged and choked out other species and ecosystems. Notably, the Kirtland Warbler was a bird on the verge of extinction until biologists recognized that it only nests in young-growth jackpine. Fire suppression was causing their extinction, and when prescribed burns were reintroduced, the population rebounded.

This is just one example of thousands, and so, for the sake of brevity, let’s look at what happens when we second-guess nature as we did following the Great Fire of 1910. This fire was undeniably catastrophic and shocked the world in its speed and devastation. It also led to the mass suppression of wildfires in the United States as the U.S. Forest Service shifted to a rigid policy of total fire suppression, aiming to extinguish every wildfire quickly and completely. This led to the 10 A.M. Policy in 1935, which mandated all fires to be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day after discovery.

The result was, counterintuitively, much worse fires. Extinguishing the fires early merely postponed the inevitable while allowing more fuel to accumulate. That’s because frequent low-intensity fires consumed grasses, fallen branches, and young trees, creating open forests in which larger, fire-adapted trees could survive.

Suppression overburdened the forests with unnaturally dense stands of trees connected by “ladder fuels” that can carry flames from the forest floor into the canopy. The resulting fires burn hotter, spread faster, and become far more difficult to control. Instead of fires that burned low and slow, the entire forest now burns.

A thousand years ago, especially in the US, those fires, even if catastrophic, had little human impact. However, dense housing developments nestled close to fuel-dense wildlands, and the resistance to allowing more suburban forests to burn and ‘scar’ the landscape views, created the perfect conflagration for an ecological disaster.

Simply put, what we are seeing is the result of fire suppression, which, even if climate change is putting a thumb on the scale, that scale is already overloaded with a hundred years of unnatural fuel that will burn, regardless.

Let’s focus on the Palisades Fire for a moment because the root causes of the ferocity and devastation were well known! In fact, Design For Disaster, a 1962 Documentary produced by the Los Angeles Fire Department, highlights how, long before we blamed everything on climate change, we understood the risks and yet spent the last 60 years doing nothing about it:

Central to this is the fundamental human foible of hubris. We just think we know more than we do; we tend to view ourselves as supernatural, and we tend to view completely natural things as problems to be contained. Put another way, instead of understanding nature, we pretend we are set apart and above that noise.

Three great examples start with what wrote in Culture of Failure, Geography of Reality, where he shares:

as you keep reading about Los Angeles being burned because of prolonged drought and a desperately dry landscape from climate change, notice what’s happening thirty miles to the south, as the beachfront City of Rancho Palos Verdes pumps up to a million gallons of groundwater a day into the ocean.

The second example is from Stan Luhr, a forensic building expert, who posted a great discussion on LinkedIn where he showed how the houses that burned down were designed in such a way that they are at high risk when you combine the high winds that are endemic to that area of California with fire, which is also a natural occurrence in that coastal desert.

High wind moves burning brands into attics.
Houses with vented (code required) attics burned down.
Houses with single pane windows burn down.
Houses with wood siding burn down.
The very few houses with no attic, no eaves, no gable vents and no combustible siding had the best chance for survival.

He goes on to say that, while water mains dried up due to the reservoir mismanagement, houses burned down with 50,000 gallons of water sitting in pools nearby. That’s the typical amount of water needed to fight a single-family home fire.

The third example is how Eucalyptus trees were planted en masse because they grow fast, they’re quite lovely, and they do well in the California coastal deserts which surround LA. Problem is, they are also nature's pyromaniacs with volatile oils that vaporize under heat and release flammable gases…

So, how many layers of hubris do we have?

Total fire suppression
Combined with restrictions to controlled burning due to concerns of CO2 emission and air quality
densely packed eucalyptus trees like gas-soaked rags
All wrapped into a coastal desert that gets less rain than the Sonoran Desert in Southern Arizona.
Add in the issue with the houses
Then water management
And this doesn’t even get into the problems with the fire response.

Oh, I need to add one more because in 2019, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) began to replace century-old wooden power line poles with steel, widen fire-access lanes, and clear surrounding brush. However, environmental advocates halted the work within days out of concern for the endangered Braunton's milkvetch plants. However, those plants all burned to a crisp in 2025…

So, what do we do with this information?

For every heart-rending picture of burnt wildlife is the underlying reality that Nature isn’t nice; things do die. Fire kills.

Yet it’s also perfectly natural, and it really helps to appreciate nature in all its destructive glory.

It also helps to contextualize that, while Smokey Bear was a well-intended activity, our perpetual human hubris has turned it into an ecological disaster worse than anything Nature would have thrown at us without our interventions.

Thankfully, since it’s almost totally human-caused, we can actually fix it, and this starts with disabusing our pretention that we can control nature or that we can stand outside of it without consequence. Once we do that, we can start to better understand our integration with Nature:

Better forest management through intentional burns
1. This has been starting, but with so much fuel accumulated, this is an incredibly difficult challenge without tremendous labor or the acceptance of more catastrophic fires.
Intelligent building codes:
1. Back to Stan from above, that great discussion on LinkedIn comes with a lot of good building ideas like installing pipes into pools that fire trucks can connect to, spraying fire retardant in attics, water sprinklers in eaves, and more.
Improved urban/wild integration:
1. Ensuring proper set aside for wild areas, and when combined with #1, the acceptance that fire scars are a healthy sign for regrowth.
2. Understanding the larger impact of housing in fire-prone regions.
3. Recognizing the multi-level role of water management and use
And there are even some fun ideas like the introduction of goat herds, on public and private lands, to help reduce foliage. A partnership where ranching can become integrated in urban areas, as Smithsonian Magazine discusses here.
Finally, just to foot-stomp this: Humans are natural, and we are hubristic. We really have to understand that we cannot control nature because, despite our best efforts, nature finds a way to humble us.

What I find, when I apply this to my own life, is more understanding of how I fit in the world, a greater sense of calm about catastrophe, a greater connection with nature, and more humility and appreciation for the world around me. Smokey Bear may have been an ecological disaster, but it provides an opportunity for us to understand who we are and how we fit into a more natural existence.

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The Noble Savage

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:00:55 GMT

Today’s topic explores the mythos of tribal cultures worldwide. When we dig just below the surface, we find the same humans, the same issues, and the same struggles, whether in the Amazon jungles, among American tribes, or in the cities of the world. We’ll also discover how to reconnect with the land to ensure thriving.

There’s an underlying assumption that emerges in conversations about indigenous peoples: that our historical and current tribal cultures are more in tune with nature than the rest of us. This is especially prevalent with what people love to call ‘first nations’ or what we’d call Native Americans here in the United States. However, it also includes Australian Aborigines, the African Bushmen, and uncontacted tribes around the world.

The image that’s created is the Noble Savage with better ways of knowing, connection with nature, a utopia of harmony, peace, and prosperity where the animals sing, nothing dies, and war is a distant thought, brought by invaders who despoil paradise.

Wait, that was Pocahontas…

This is important to extract because much of that angst is exacerbated by what I’ll call the Disneyfication of indigenous people and, in my generation, Pocahontas, specifically the song Colors of the Wind whose lyrics decry European colonization and exploitation of the Americas, is a perfect example.

It resonates because it has an element of truth in it. Graham Hancock writes about this in America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization on the crazy layers of civilization that existed before colonization, and Jason Stannard wrote similarly in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Simply put, the European conquest reset Native American civilization to the point that what most colonists experienced were the Mad Max apocalyptic survivors, not the nations from before.

However, it fails to fully land because the natives who lived here at the height of their civilizations weren’t any more in touch with nature or any more magnanimous than those who conquered them. This is something explores in great detail in Conquest Everywhere: The New World Was No Eden. In just one example, he shares how, when the Mayan written scripts were decoded, their culture, once thought to be peaceful, instead carved its true legacy in stone where:

chronology tables read like a ledger: Ah-Cacaw of Tikal captures Jaguar-Paw of Calakmul. Caracol conducts star-war action against Tikal.

More interesting is that the Aztecs, who followed the Mayans, were mercenary soldiers from the North American prairies who moved south. In a twist of fate, they were hired by warring Mayan tribes and, after decades of fighting on behalf of others, decided to just conquer them all and brutally subjugate them.

Unfashionable Truths

Conquest Everywhere: The New World Was No Eden

Templo Mayor (reconstruction), Tenochtitlán, Wikimedia Commons…

4 months ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · Edward Campbell

The stories of mass killings, human sacrifice, and brutal enslavement aren’t hidden, but they also tend to be ignored as inconvenient. It was so bad that when the small contingent of Spanish arrived under Hernán Cortés and conquered Tenochtitlán, they were supported by large numbers of regional tribes, itching to unseat the Aztecs.

Similarly, to the north, the Comanche were some of the most prolific raiders and slavers in North America. In fact, they have more in common with the Vikings than many consider. Like the Vikings, their terror evoked legend and enemies, where the Texas Rangers had no shortage of Native American help, from tribes who were NOT Comanche, to eliminate the threat. Just like the Aztecs.

Another example, pre-dating Columbus, was the Mushkodain tribe from Michigan, also known as the Bone Indians. Their brutality and constant fighting culminated in the creation of the Council of Three Fires consisting of Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes. The Council responded to the Mushkodain provocations with an intentional war of execution and extermination. Simply put, it was targeted genocide to purge a hyper-violent tribe from their midst. They systematically hunted the Mushkodains down the western coast of Michigan, annihilating men, women, and children, and forcing the few survivors to flee the region permanently, where they were absorbed by other tribes, often as slaves and ‘wives.’

This isn’t isolated, as recent studies in the Mesa Verde region of the Southwest United States show incredible violence, where 90% of human remains from around 1160AD contain trauma to the hands and heads, while other evidence suggests attacks on the pueblo towns in the region as the civilization collapsed. Archaeology continues to uncover long-term trends of persistent war, conquest, and extermination.

What’s really interesting is how this weaves together where the precursors of the Navajo and Apache moved down from Canada and took over the lands recently decimated in the Mesa Verde region. Those who remained hunter-gatherers became the Apache, while those who settled and absorbed the survivors of the Pueblo extermination became the Navajo. However, the Apache were regular raiders and pillagers of the Navajo, and they also raided the Zuni, Hopi, and Taos tribes in the region. The tribes changed, but fighting remained the status quo.

Back to the Comanche, they also weren’t natives to Texas, and, after an internal rift within the Shoshone nation, they pushed down from the north, attacking the Apache in the Great Plains over the course of many decades and pushing them into the mountainous southwest US, where we are most familiar with them. They conducted a war of colonization, pushing from their ‘mother’ tribe in the Wyoming region and capturing the occupied lands south of them, pushing out the ‘natives.’ To close the loop, remember, the Aztecs migrated from this same Texas region further south in their eventual conquest of ancestral Mesoamerica.

As another example of the brutal nature of the Native Americans is the Mandan of the northeast plains. wrote, in detail, about the Okipa, a grueling four-day Mandan initiation ritual that tested young men's endurance to prepare them as warriors. The extreme test started with a four-day fast without sleep, then suspension from the ceiling by wooden skewers pierced through their flesh, and voluntary finger amputation. It ends in a final race where those skewers are hooked to buffalo skulls and the boys are dragged until the skewers rip out, and they fall unconscious, ‘dying’ in practice, to prepare for the realities of war.

While it demonstrated the classic hero's journey and the rites necessary to enter manhood, it also captured the brutal reality of the perpetual war these tribes prepared for. In a perverse way, it was in tune with nature, but that nature is the brutal reality of harsh survival, not the Disneyfication of utopia.

The Okipa, where the initiates are dragged until the skewers pull out, and they’re rendered unconscious.

You don’t have to search deeply to find similar behavior among the Apache, Cheyanne, Cree, and other notable warrior tribes. When you read the history, you also find how many tribes allied with the colonists against their violent neighbors, as the Iroquois and Algonquin did with the French and English. This doesn’t exonerate the brutal nature of the Europeans but contextualizes that the Indigenous residents weren’t fundamentally different.

Even when it comes to spirituality, the indigenous Americans weren’t any more attuned to human needs and their connections to nature than other groups in Europe at the time. levies a similar complaint against the reaction to psychedelics, which ignores that the use likely carried over from the Middle East into Asia and the Americas, as studies in ergot, the mystery religions, and more continue to underlie our ancient history as we expanded outward from Africa. The shamans of the Americas were no more idyllic than the shamans of the Vikings. The truth is, as Andrew concludes, these practices “reflected the full spectrum of human motives, just as modern use does.”

And this really comes close to home when you observe the Indian Reservations across the US. With the exception of a few outliers, what you see aren’t societies living in tune with nature. More often than not, you’re seeing dilapidated housing, broken cars, and zero landscaping sandwiched between reservation casinos and non-reservation urban centers. One of the most jarring being the Salt River Reservation abutting bougie Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s the same land, similar opportunity, burgeoning tribal commerce, and a wasteland on the reservation where the natives survive; they don’t thrive either.

However, all this said, there is a strong case that, in modernity, the West has stepped away from the dirt, the trees, and the blood of its history, and that’s left a gaping hole in our psychology and physiology that causes us to yearn and imagine what life could be if we went native.

Artificial Separation

This separation is undeniable as we sequester ourselves in concrete jungles and subdivisions where everything, including the grass, is artificial. We drive in air-conditioned cars on paved roads and work in steel-and-glass buildings.

Our food is packaged in plastic, thousands of miles from where it grew, perfectly selected, not raw, not too ripe, and surely stuffed full of chemicals we don’t know how to pronounce that don’t exist in its natural state. Food genetically engineered either through selective breeding or laboratory alteration bears no resemblance to what existed just 100 years ago.

Our water pours from taps, perfectly filtered, treated, and clean. In fact, everything is too clean, too sanitized, too divorced from nature. We know this in our minds, and our bodies are also rebelling as our gut biomes are being thrown out of whack.

It’s so bad that our basic physiology is collapsing, where we breathe wrong, we walk wrong, and we even poop wrong because modern convenience separates us so dramatically from our bodies.

Our fabricated societies, crafted online and not in person, are lacking. Even our information is no longer personal, but pumped into our eyeballs through blue light screens, filtered by algorithms, inflamed by algowhores, fear-porn, and PSYOPs designed to trigger your primal brain but divorced from primal responses and tribal safety. We are over-connected and yet more isolated in artificiality. It’s a problem Chris Ryan explored in Civilized to Death.

We are divorced from nature, by and large, and we yearn to get back. Since we are, generally, Western in the United States, it’s easier to blame the origins of that on the East and the solutions on what we took over. It’s a classic game of assuming that Other = Different, and that Different must = Better.

The result is the Disneyfication of Native Americans and the subsequent denigration of everything else. We whitewash the history of the native americans with the colors of the wind, ignore that, not long ago, we were there too, and fail to understand that modernity isn’t something we can manage.

Taking Action

I hope this has added some perspective to the myth of the Noble Savage: that humans are humans are humans, and the solutions aren’t wrapped in some Disney Fairy Tale of natural kumbaya. Nature isn’t nice. Everything is trying to kill you. History is replete with travasty.

However, there are some pretty simple things you can do:

When was the last time you actually stepped barefoot on dirt?
When was the last time you grew food? (or even a houseplant?)
When was the last time you harvested it? Butchered an animal? Hunted or gathered food from the wild? Went fishing for goodness sake?

Because there is something sacred about all of that. It just involves putting down the screens, leaving the chaos of the cities, and touching grass! If you want to find people who are in touch with nature, go to a farm, a hunting lodge, a fishing camp, a backcountry hiking group, a birdwatching, butterfly, or nature photography group. Really, anyone out there who is engaged in real life.

There’s nothing mythological about Native Americans or any other tribal cultures around the world. Europeans were there, not that long ago, and the tribes here were not so noble. They represented the grand texture of human life, ingenuity, and, yes, brutality. However, that doesn’t mean that what we have today is necessarily better.

But it’s also not worse. We are safer, healthier, more peaceful, with more leisure time, more disposable income, and greater freedoms to travel, explore, and more. Put another way, there’s nothing stopping you from reconnecting with nature. You just have to be savage enough to say no and step away to regain that noble connection with the land to ensure thriving.

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Hack Your Brain! A dynamic exploration into Counterintelligence and Mixed Mental Arts

Michael Woudenberg — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:41:24 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

Damn the Patriarchy

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:01:20 GMT

Today’s topic investigates the nuance between the Patriarchy and the Matriarchy and how our common misunderstandings of what they really are deny us an understanding of what it truly means to be human. Let’s strip back the false binaries and fictions to find out how nature optimized us for both.

The term Patriarchy is almost exclusively used as a pejorative in the modern lexicon to capture everything wrong with humanity. Conversely, the term Matriarchy is used as a shortcut for victim or a juxtaposition against the patriarchy for everything that’s good and healthy in humanity. A recent LinkedIn post by highlights a quandary while proffering the following definitions:

“Patriarchy organizes society around: → Hierarchy — who is above, who is below → Control — who has it, who doesn't → Ownership — of land, of labor, of women, of children → Competition — for resources, status, dominance → Domination — the idea that power over others is the highest good

Matriarchy organizes society around: → Stewardship — care for what sustains us → Relationship — the web we live inside, not a ladder we climb → Cooperation — the understanding that survival is collective → Care — as a serious value, not a soft one → Continuity — the long view, not the quarterly report”1

At first blush, those definitions seem to fit, and for very obvious reasons. Given what we explored recently in The Two Rules of Life, evolutionary biology has optimized males and females differently:

The female is optimized for creating, growing, and raising new life.
The male is optimized for creating, growing, and providing resources and protecting the tribe.

Underlying that definition is an issue I need to address out of the gate, and that’s the perception that the patriarchy protects men while oppressing and abusing women. This is where it starts to get complicated because we have to face the shadow behaviors on all sides, tease apart the healthy vs. the unhealthy patriarchy, and strip down the structures to their fundamental elements to really understand them.

Yes, there are negative masculine behaviors, but it is my argument today that those are not a feature of the patriarchy, but rather why the patriarchy exists. Further, due to human nature, that negative shadow never goes away because those behaviors can be useful, and it’s a constant battle to keep it at bay (or turn it into a weapon against your enemies). Further yet, the matriarchy and the patriarchy have never existed in an either/or binary. It’s always been an AND function. This is something we explored in Chaos and Order, where the Yin and Yang are two halves, one of chaos and the other of order, one feminine and the other masculine, coming together to create an antifragile whole that restrains the shadow in themselves and in each other.

While the original definition in that post teased at the nuance of the answer, the conclusion, and further posts from Carolyn highlighted a simplified definition that seems to drive the major perceptions of patriarchy and matriarchy:

Patriarchy = everything wrong with everything in the world
Matriarchy = everything right with everything in the world

This isn’t hyperbolic on my side because she went on to post:

We did not invent patriarchy because it was the best system. We inherited it because it was the system that won wars, r.a.p.i.n.g. and destroying ancient Matriarchal societies. A society built for conquest will conquer societies built for living. That’s not a moral victory. That’s just how conquest works.

What Carolyn describes is the shadow behavior, and the shadow has a seductive attraction. (Don’t give in to the Dark Side!) She is right that we need to keep the shadow in check, but the shadow is not the patriarchy. Further, the statement positions the matriarchy and patriarchy as adversaries, which, as we just described in yin and yang, is wrong and shows her own adverse shadow. The shadow is why the patriarchy exists.

The Shadow

It helps to understand that both the masculine and the feminine have positive and negative manifestations. Again, back to Chaos and Order, these are represented as:

The Good Mother, Gaia, Mother Earth | The Devouring Mother
The Good King | The Absent or Tyrannical Father

What’s typically being described as “patriarchy” in this debate is narrowed to the negative manifestation of the masculine. A definitional error is that this masculine shadow is only compared to the positive manifestation of the feminine, the Tyrant vs. Gaia. But that’s not how it works, and that’s not how it is, and those negative behaviors aren’t the status quo. The shadow exists, absolutely, and the patriarchy and the matriarchy fight to keep the shadows in check. (Stay tuned for a forthcoming investigation into the feminine shadow)

The other catch with Carolyn’s original definition is that what she describes as the matriarchy is actually part of a healthy patriarchy. I wager she’s blinded by the adversarial relationship she’s created, but it’s pretty clear she’s abandoned the actual femininity of the matriarchy. As an improvement, I’d proffer that her original definition encompasses most of the patriarchy, while the matriarchy differs thusly:

Matriarchy organizes society around: → Nurture — dependency is protected and developed into competence → Enculturation — transmitting values, identity, behavior, and tradition → Socialization — teaching language, manners, values, identity, and the norms required to live with others → Integration — weaving individuals into families and communities through relationship, mediation, inclusion, and care.2

This distinction is important because feminism seems to ignore the uniqueness of the matriarchy and, like Carolyn, is fighting over who does the patriarchy better.3 It also misses that her prescriptions are the shadow feminine under the guise of care, and what we see is Toxic Empathy and a ‘Mother knows best” attitude. It’s very successful in painting the entire patriarchy with the shadow while absolving the matriarchy of any role, agency, or, heaven forbid, negative impact itself.

Yes, there’s a shadow. It exists on both sides and expresses itself slightly differently. However, the patriarchy isn’t defined only by its shadow, and claiming the positive patriarchy as part of the matriarchy actually exhibits the feminine shadow and doesn’t help us understand the patriarchy at all!

The Patriarchy in Context

Here’s the reality: The healthy sides of both the patriarchy and matriarchy constrain the negative inclinations of both men and women while directing their energies toward the two things that are optimized for.

Matriarchy = creating, growing, and raising new life.
Patriarchy = creating, growing, and providing resources and protection to the matriarchy.

To put this in context, the worst inclinations of men are terrible until you really need them. Sociopaths create chaos in society, but they’re useful as weapons of war to protect the very society they can’t quite fit into. This is why elite military units have an above-average number of sociopaths. Note, though, that it’s the patriarchy encapsulating these shadow behaviors and directing them toward something useful. Left alone, these behaviors would dominate; held in check, they eliminate threats.

To be balanced, each half has to encapsulate the light with the shadow.

The patriarchy is also a dragnet that doesn’t discriminate whether these negative behaviors come from men or women. When you hear complaints about ‘boss bitches’ being ‘held back’ by the patriarchy, just recognize that the patriarchy doesn’t appreciate that behavior from men or women. Too often, when women enter patriarchal systems, they emulate the shadow behaviors the patriarchy is designed to suppress. They feel the suppression without realizing that men, behaving the same way, do too.4

There’s another twist here in that both the patriarchy and matriarchy correct the excesses of the other. Carolyn demonstrates the valuable role the matriarchy can play in correcting the excess of the patriarchy, but the complication is that she’s railing against any attempt the patriarchy might make (this essay likely included) in correcting her own excess, manifesting the shadow of the feminine.

I’d also like to point out that her definition of patriarchy includes domination, which is wrong.5 A healthy patriarchal hierarchy shouldn’t be confused with unchecked rule by the strongest individual. Research on humans and chimpanzees shows that while alphas can gain influence through dominance, intimidation, and coercion, this influence is fragile because adversaries, working together, can bring the tyrant down. Domination is the shadow, and we can see its shade cast in many places because it can work, but only in the short term, and often provokes resistance over time.

Instead, the best leaders cultivate allies, care for potential supporters, mediate conflicts, and maintain coalitions. Simply put, domination doesn’t work because hierarchy depends on social intelligence, alliances, reciprocal support, and some degree of acceptance by the group. Put another way, it’s stewardship, relationship, cooperation, care, and continuity. This is what the healthy patriarchy and society writ large celebrate, nurture, and promote.6

That’s why humans have repeatedly developed what researchers call leveling mechanisms: criticism, ridicule, ostracism, sanctions, and coordinated resistance against individuals who try to convert rank into unrestricted personal power. This is why, as adeptly points out, you have chivalry because these are the mechanisms that create healthy, balanced men.

Similarly, this is also why the healthy patriarchy holds men accountable to the Hero’s Journey, where men have to literally die to their shadow to be reborn and add value to society. The matriarchy also values this sacrifice, as evidenced by its persistent use in books, plays, and movies throughout history. This is true patriarchy.

Burn it Down?

At this point, I hope you appreciate how the simplified definitions of the evil patriarchy and magnanimous matriarchy fall apart under simple scrutiny. The problem is we rarely allow the conversation to get into this gritty reality, and today, it feels like feminism is improperly comparing only the positive feminine with the negative masculine. But clearly, this is stupid.

But what happens when you damn the patriarchy and seek to burn it all down? This is a topic we poked at in Tradition, where the author Donald Kingsbury wrote:

“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back.”

Simply put, when you work to destroy the system that holds back the worst inclinations of men, you aren’t freeing yourself from domination, as that’s a shadow behavior. What you’ve done is tear down the fence that keeps that behavior in check and let it roam unfettered.

I also don’t know any men who appreciate the masculine shadow. But, in attacking all things bad as patriarchy, we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater, and, as Chesterton’s Fence warns, when you remove a social structure, you unlock everything that it was designed to hold back. Let’s look at two examples that shatter the simplistic understanding of patriarchy that we’ve been analyzing.

The first is my Alma Mater, Michigan Technological University, an engineering school where there were three men to every one woman. To hear tell, that should have been the most dangerous place for women. In fact, it was the opposite. Michigan Tech is, and has been, one of the safest places for women at any University. All that raping, domination, and ownership of women? It was rare because the worst inclinations of men were checked by men.7

The statistics are damning because universities that have equal to or greater numbers of women actually have greater percentages of sexual assaults.8 The women are competing more, and the patriarchy is not as strong. These also tend to be more liberal universities, which makes the numbers more contradictory than we’d assume.

For the second example, let’s look at the collision of the shadows of both the patriarchy and the matriarchy happening right now in the United Kingdom regarding the Pakistani Rape Gangs. recently wrote Britain’s Rape Gangs and the Failure of Feminism, where she identifies: “One of the report’s most unsettling implications for feminists is that the loudest voices forcing this scandal into the open were not the major women’s organizations or state-backed feminist commissions but insurgent figures: male, and outside the consensus classes.”

What you’re seeing is the patriarchy trying to stand up against accusations of racism to protect the women of their culture against sexual threats.

Think on that one again: the loudest voices demanding accountability, even protesting this violence on women, are largely Men.

When you tear down the healthy patriarchy, you unleash the very things you want to avoid. This is exactly the situation that’s manifesting in universities and with the Pakinstani Rape gangs as the shadow ‘patriarchy’9 meets Western feminism, which has hobbled chivalry with accusations of racism via misapplied, toxic empathy.

Summary

To formulate a better definition, I propose that the Healthy Patriarchy = creating, growing, and providing resources and protection to the matriarchy through structures that constrain the shadow and direct the energies toward order, competence, hierarchy, and sacrifice.

Human civilization depends on two social orders, where the matriarchal order creates, nurtures, and integrates human life, while the patriarchal order organizes resources, protection, external cooperation, and long-term provision around that life. Each order channels characteristic human drives toward socially productive ends, and each restrains the ways those same drives can become destructive within its own order, while also correcting the excesses of the other.10

The counterintuitive insight is that the alternative to patriarchy is not matriarchy. Likewise, the alternative to male domination is not female domination. The right answer is a complementary system in which both the matriarchy and patriarchy constrain, correct, and strengthen one another while preventing the negative tendencies, the shadow behaviors that threaten stability.

Divided, masculine order becomes sterile, and feminine care becomes suffocating. Integrated, they produce a social order capable of protecting, generating, developing, and renewing human life; in short, an antifragile relationship. So, let’s damn this unhealthy understanding of the patriarchy and ensure we elevate the healthy version, allow it to restrain the shadow, and pair it with a healthy matriarchy that’s doing the same. Long live the Patriarchy!

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Earning Life

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:01:10 GMT

Today’s topic addresses a common misunderstanding that our survival in a hostile natural world has become systematized through complex transactional mediums which are misinterpreted as requiring humans to pay to live. We’ll step back from the moral language and dive into evolutionary biology to see the truth.

Every once in a while, I come across an opinion that’s so divorced from reality that I have to really stop and wonder how they got to this point. Recently, it was this gem, right here on Substack, suggesting that we are the only species on Earth that has to pay to live.

Superficially, it almost sounds legitimate; however, it quickly falls apart. Note the switch in language. The post starts with “Pay to live” and then transitions to “Earn the right.” It’s nuanced and sounds similar but hits you with two triggers, attempting the same task but missing what’s actually happening underneath. Let’s break this apart, starting with Paying and then analyzing Earning to better understand the problem.

Paying to Live

This is the hook. He’s not wrong. We have to pay for Land, Water, Shelter, and Food. No other creature on this earth has to pay anything…

Kind of… Notice where your brain went with “Pay.”

Payments are typically made with money, or at least, in our common vernacular, we immediately consider the exchange of currency for goods as payment. The reason is that humans are the only species that uses currency as a transaction medium.

Humans are also the only species that have developed broad-spectrum and highly specialized skills and services across all elements of Land development, Water acquisition, sanitation and delivery, complex Shelter engineering, building and maintenance, and the global farming, harvesting, processing, and distribution of Food. Put another way, humans are the only critters on planet earth for whom the vast majority of us put zero direct labor into developing our land, water, shelter, and food. We just consume what others produce.

And the consumption we have available is that of the ultra-rich just one hundred years ago. Given you’re reading this on Substack, you have access to the internet, a computing device, and the luxury of time. However, most of us have even more. Even the poor have conveniences that were unfathomable just centuries ago, which we, yes, have to pay for.

Likewise, others consume what we produce. I write here on Substack and have published two novels. They’re not necessary for survival, but they help us understand who we are as humans and how to survive better, hopefully even thrive! Which, by the way, if you appreciate these essays, you can help keep them open for everyone by becoming a paid subscriber!

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What we just showed is the exchange of currency for goods. Because 20% off, which makes it $24 a year, or $2 a month, or just 50¢ an essay, is a way to demonstrate value using a transaction medium. I’m not bartering for chickens, housecleaning, land, or freshwater because that just doesn’t make sense.

But… if I were your tribal shaman, sharing these counterintuitive insights, helping you understand human psychology and sociology, and even physical health, you would probably hook me up with Land, Water, Shelter, and Food. But these insights would have to be worth that compensation, or I’d have to go do the work myself. Simply put, I don’t have a right to your hard-earned money; I have to earn your support.

Earning the Right to Exist

Now, let’s get to the twist: the post began with payment for Land, Water, Shelter, and Food, then pivoted to earning the right to exist. The simplest read screams injustice when we think of the other creatures on the planet just existing.

But are they? Because if you think those other creatures aren’t working their assess off for those things, you don’t know nature. There is zero unconditional access, and nature is not nice. Every other species has to fight to get land, water, shelter, and food. Hell, most animals eat other animals to get that food.

Every living thing on this planet earns the right to exist on the planet that made us. That’s the fundamental cornerstone of evolutionary biology. Survival of the fittest. If you don’t earn that right, nature will eliminate you, and the fossil record is replete with billions of examples of animals that did not earn the right.

There is no natural right to existence. It is the core foundation of what we explored in the first of the two rules for life. Incidentally, that post reflects the necessity of the second rule of life because it’s cloaked in the moral language of could, should, and ought, and is missing what IS. We have the ability to survive; we don’t have the right.

Any living thing on this planet has to fight, strive, and yes, earn the ‘right’ to be here because not doing so leads to entropy, which ends in decay and death. What makes that meme intoxicating is that entropy is easy, and you see the shift of blame from personal laziness toward the implication that the system is somehow costly and denying the right to existence.

If you take that system away, the effort, counterintuitively, increases. As many of you have observed in survivor-type TV shows like Alone, Outlast, Survivorman, 7 vs. Wild, and the eponymous and long-running Survivor series, the challenges and effort involved in mere existence, unprotected by that system, are epic, and failure is constant. That’s because the right to exist requires fighting to earn it, and the systems that we created help us maintain that right and to allow thriving in a hostile world.

From Surviving to Thriving

The systems humans created foster hyper-specialization, allowing masses of people to put in fractional effort across millions of systems to produce the things we use. A simple example of the depth of economics is the classic story of the pencil, where systems of systems of systems and global supply chains work together to produce a ‘simple’ pencil.

This system, in turn, pays us for our labor, and that payment is in a currency that serves as a medium of exchange, which we use to obtain those things. The whole system created a life of luxury, separated from nature and, ironically, allows people like Frank Bard to post that meme and angrily type away on high-tech keyboards, connected to billions of humans around the world, while enjoying air conditioning and plentiful and safe food and water.

Thriving in this environment means understanding where we actually sit in the natural schema and finding better ways to connect because the root feeling here isn’t wrong. We do feel out of touch with nature as we live in concrete jungles surrounded by artificial… everything. We also have a moral language that’s often divorced from fundamental reality.

For the latter, I recommend you Go Touch Grass. Get out there into nature, get away from the chaos and hustle and bustle.

For the former, for the moral language, once you’re out in nature, I challenge you to watch an ant-hill for more than five minutes. Or a bee’s nest. Or watch the birds. Observe the rabbits constantly looking for threats. What you don’t see there is leisure time; you don’t see rights; you just see them earning their existence day after day after day. You don’t see the moral language in their existence. You see survival.

When you step back to your current situation, with proper grounding in what IS, you can then consider ways to make it better. The catch is to always align your moral language to reality. This balances the first rule of evolutionary biology against the second rule of soul maturation and is the key to thriving.

We do have to earn our right to exist, and we, as humans, have mastered it to the point where we are really thriving in almost every conceivable dimension. Ignoring that risks entropy, whereas appreciating that reality allows us to continue the trend.

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Laugh at Yourself

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:02:18 GMT

Today’s topic adds to our toolkit of Mixed Mental Arts and provides another way to embrace humility, which we first explored in Embracing our White Belts. This powerful art can be applied to politics, our life circumstances, and to our own behaviors to uncover the absurd things we do, and then laugh them away.

Let’s be honest, we take ourselves too seriously. Just look at any social media platform, and 90% of it is the projection of the most inane banalities as the most important thing in the world. When questioned, we often double down and affix to tenacious identities, and when pushed, we catastrophize our circumstances as worse than they’ve ever been.

Simply put, we don’t laugh at ourselves enough. There’s no room for the ironic chuckle when you realize you’ve created a logical contradiction. There’s only anger when it’s pointed out. Instead of seeing the absurdity in how the seriousness is feeding the problem, the reaction is to accuse the person laughing of irresponsibility.

But this isn’t easy. It requires introspection, and it requires constant effort. There is no ‘one-stop’ win for laughing at yourself. Once you pull the self-righteous stick out of your ass, it might start with a frustrated yet rueful grunt, but over time, the more we learn to laugh at our own absurdities, the more we can find the amazing things that surround us, boosting mood, perspective, and positivity.

To get started, let’s break this down into three layers and explore how to laugh at politics, circumstances, and ourselves, both our behavior and our ego.

Laugh at Politics

The politics challenge came to a head recently with a fellow who was clogging my feed with post after post about the horrors of American politics. This is bad enough, but even crazier because he’s Australian and, when questioned, he viewed me as the irresponsible one for not caring as much as he does and his actions as his duty…

However, I honestly think it’s hilarious. Sure, Trump is an anathema to how I would like to see the President of the United States conduct business. I wouldn’t want to work for him, that’s for sure. But what I find more absurd than Trump is the response. I still chuckle when I think of how many news cycles were spent on “Covfefe.”

Yes, he says absurd things. No, you don’t have to repost every absurd thing he says. Humorously, he’s called an egomaniac, yet those same folks fail to understand that every over-inflated panic-attack post they feverishly type feeds his ego. It’s the opposite reaction to what I recommend in Heaven is High, and the Emperor is Far Away, and we’ve collapsed heaven into a hellscape of social media while inviting the emperor to live rent-free in our brains.

And yes, I laugh. I laugh a lot because it’s so absurd, and yet people take it so seriously that it becomes more absurd. It’s something recently wrote in Never Trust the Unironic, where he dives into the idea that, if you can’t laugh at yourself or your life or your beliefs, you’re never going to be able to do much in this world but experience misery. He asks:

Can dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and Democrats laugh at their presidents’ follies? Do communists, libertarians, and socialists smirk at their ideologies’ absurdities? Why do the devout never seem to chuckle at the inanities sprinkled amid their admirable beliefs?

So, yes, laugh at politics, laugh at how seriously they’re taking themselves, and laugh at how seriously you take them. When you can step back and just chuckle, you’ll feel the shackles in your brain unlock, and you’ll be able to step away more and more and focus on laughing at your circumstances.

Laugh at your Circumstances

Coupled with our sense of identity with politics is also how seriously we take our circumstances. As we explored in How to Be Miserable, much of our misery is self-inflicted because we take ourselves, our goals, our perceptions, and, especially, our grievances way too seriously. That’s why the 10 commandments of misery are bracketed as.

1) Thou Shalt Label Thyself and Chafe at Labels
10) Thou Shalt Wallow in Apocalypse

The first is that we take the labels so seriously that we can’t see them for their facile absurdity, and the tenth is that we catastrophize everything under the idea that NOTHING HAS BEEN WORSE! which is absurd, and I laugh about all the time when I consider just how damn good we have it right now.

One of the tricks I’ve learned to help provide perspective, especially when I’m tempted to take my circumstances too seriously, is to Stare Into Evil and really consider how bad things could get and have gotten in the past. It’s shockingly therapeutic to consider the depth of darkness, and then, when you pull back out and consider your current minor inconvenience, done right, you can’t help but chuckle.

Even better, you’ll start to realize just how much cool stuff is happening as recently wrote in World Cup Fans Discover Ordinary America; Maybe We Should Too. Imagine awe in ‘ordinary’ America. Awe in things we take for granted that cause thousands of others to stop and marvel while we drive by, rage-posting the latest banal political outrage on social media. When you do that, you’ll start laughing at your own behavior.

Laugh at Your Behavior

Lastly, and wrapping it all together, is to laugh at yourself; your own behaviors at the intimately personal level. This is important because it’s about introspection, not projection. It’s fundamentally related to the crucial social tool of teasing. Now, this might seem counterintuitive, but teasing is incredibly important to gently guide behavior in larger social settings.

Being able to laugh at yourself and roll with the teasing allows informal feedback, long before it needs to escalate. Those who can’t handle teasing risk something even worse, as people tend to avoid overt confrontation and will just slowly push the person out of their lives. The overserious person typically finds themselves both miserable and alone as they eschew the ability to laugh at themselves.

Worse, they miss the critical opportunity to improve at what they do. This leans into another of Andrew’s essays, How To Be Great, According To Xenophon, where he shares a quote from Seneca:

“No one prompts laughter if he has already gotten a laugh at his own expense. Tradition relates how Vatinius, a man born for both laughter and hatred, was a charming and witty joker. He said a great many things at the expense of his own feet and his scarred neck. This is how he avoided being made fun of by his enemies, who were as numerous as his deformities…”
— Seneca, On the Constancy of the Wise Person, 17.2

This is a tactic I used to great success growing up, when I was truly bullied by a small group of people. I was tall, gangly, and, yes, nerdy. I was a perfect magnet and got the nickname “Gump” from the blockbuster movie of my childhood. Instead of hiding from it, I leaned in. I laughed at myself, and that forced a situation where anyone else was laughing with me, not at me.

Sure, I was gumpy; I grew six inches in a year, my brain had no idea where my body ended! I could have taken offense, but I stopped taking it seriously and laughed. However, because I was laughing at myself and I saw the need for improvement, I doubled down and worked my ass off to improve my coordination. I’m also focused on helping my own percosiouly tall children do the same (My 13-year-old daughter will likely break 6 feet in height this year.)

Being able to laugh at my behavior has been one of the most important tools for professional development I’ve ever used. It breaks down the defenses and keeps me humble as I consider the absurdities of my own reactions and the size of my ego.

Laugh at Your Ego

The final element is to just laugh at your ego and all the things you clutch to yourself as identities, values, and all the other banalities you’ve conflated to be of utmost importance. Once you’ve stripped off the first three layers, you’ll find your ego at the core, and with the practice you’ve acquired, you’ll find, as Epictetus said: "He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at."

Because truly, the person who needs to laugh first is yourself, and once you do that, you’ll find how many things you’ve allowed others to control or manipulate and, giving perspective, just how absurd that really is. Laughing at your ego is hard, but incredibly rewarding.

Tying it Together

Being able to laugh at politics, your circumstances, and yourself provides four different layers of existence that demand reconsideration. It’s what and I wrote about in The Power of Inversion, where, when we find ourselves hyper-focused on something, desperately trying to hold on, it helps to invert and really consider if we’re being logical or absurd.

Most of the time, our ego blinds us to absurdity, and one way to really highlight this is the art of Mastering Irreverence. This is a powerful mental tool for looking at the things we take most seriously, and it intentionally applies irreverence, breaking the ‘sacred’ into gritty reality. Coupled with that sense of humor, I’ve found myself laughing at just how crazy and silly it really looks.

I’ve done this personally, professionally, and politically. It’s been refreshing to just laugh because it frees me from the bonds that others demand I conform to, while helping reframe and redirect my attention to what really matters. I laugh, step away from my computer, and realize there’s actually more in life that's awesome than the absurd banality of what I thought was serious.

It’s a critical Mixed Mental Art that helps us embrace the polymathic mindset of Insatiable Curiosity, the Humility to accept I don’t have all the answers, and Intentional Reframing to see if I understand the situation. Laughter helps soften the impact of each of these as they challenge who we are, how we view ourselves, and how we position ourselves in the world.

Laughter is also one of the best therapies, and this powerful art can be applied to politics, our life circumstances, and our own behaviors to uncover the absurd things we do and then laugh them away.

What have you discovered that now makes you laugh? What beliefs, cares, identities, or politics were held dear, but now you just chuckle?

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A Defense of Populism

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:01:58 GMT

Today’s topic strives to untangle and understand what is actually meant when we use populism as a pejorative. As with much of politics, we find that its use reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of a critically important concept, and that the solution is far easier to achieve individually than we’re told. It’s a perfect topic as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence here in the United States.

It doesn’t take long on social media or even just watching the news to hear the word “populism” thrown out as a pejorative specifically toward the right wing of political America. “Right-wing populism” is lumped in with Fascists and Nazis as some deep, menacing force that threatens our country.

But what is populism?

noun

a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

Huh… Doesn’t that make almost any Democrat a populist under a Republican regime and vice versa? Oh, and do you know what else is profoundly populist? Communism and Socialism. In fact, their entire foundation requires populism, and it doesn’t take a hard look at the revolutions over the past 100 years to see that, whether right-wing or left-wing, they’re populist.

But also, wasn’t that the entire reason for the American Revolution? I mean, if you’ve read the Declaration of Independence, you saw the unmistakable flavor of unadulterated populism constantly pushing back on government excess and disdain of the elites. That’s what we celebrate every 4th of July for the past 250 years.

In fact, our entire Constitution is based on empowering populist agency, with power in the federal government restrained and governance structures pushed down to the states and the people. Even more fundamentally, democracy itself is populism, in which the masses get to vote for their preferred candidates.

This is what I’ll call healthy populism, which recognizes that institutions are failing to represent ordinary people, that elites have become insulated, and that power needs to be made accountable again.

There’s an interesting flipside to democracy, though, which Alexis de Tocqueville coined: the "tyranny of the majority" in his seminal 1835 work, Democracy in America. What he describes is the potential for democratic majorities to impose their will, suppressing the rights and voices of minority groups or individuals.

What this is really describing is a form of populism which suggests that “We alone are the real people. Our enemies are illegitimate. Institutions that block us are corrupt. Losing only proves the system was rigged.”

This is unhealthy populism that tilts toward factional authoritarianism. It’s also apolitical, as you can see with how fast communism turned from anti-elite to the elite communist party as the ‘real people,’ and anyone who disagreed was considered illegitimate. I merely have to point out that the Gulags existed to put proof to point.

Balance

The thing to recognize is that few of our political systems would exist without populism. This is the nature that describes as both anti-elite and revolutionary. Which makes sense because your elites are my tyrants and vice versa, and the only way to fix that is revolution. What he adds, though, is key, and that’s polarization. As he describes:

Affective polarization refers to the belief that the “other side” is not merely wrong, but illegitimate, dangerous, or evil.
While populism describes a theory of politics, affective polarization occurs when that theory of politics becomes manifest.

Polarization is the natural manifestation of any political ideology, and populism is how you motivate polarization in order to make a change. Put another way, no revolution, including the one that founded the United States, could happen without populism and polarization.

I’d also suggest that polarization isn’t bad either, as we need to challenge the status quo to grow, or at least avoid being stagnant. For example, a perfectly conservative nation will die for lack of growth, and a perfectly progressive nation will die from a lack of controlled identity. So you need a functioning polarization to keep the two balanced, which is driven by their own populisms.

This is why the Founders didn’t create a democracy; they created a Constitutional Republic with multiple checks and balances. Did you know that the Senate was originally designed to temper the populist House of Representatives? Representatives are elected by the people for two-year stints and reflect the will of the people. Conversely, Senators were originally representatives of the States, and voted for six-year terms to temper the passions of the populace with the pragmatism of the States. On top of this they added the Executive Branch and the Judiciary, providing three legs of government with their checks and balances (read empowered yet managed polarization and populism), all further constrained by the Bill of Rights.

This allows true populism to happen down deeper at the state and local levels. Even the original intent of the States were to be areas where people could experiment with what worked well based on their desires. This allows California to manage differently than Texas and the people can vote with their ballots and their feet as they’re currently doing. The system has constrained populism overall, with fractional polarization, keeping the voice of the people clear, ensuring the elites weren’t tyrannical.

The Fear

So what’s the fear of modern populism? Fundamentally, because power has slowly concentrated higher and higher, and polarization has also concentrated into two major parties, which weaponize populism, stoke polarization, and tilt toward factional authoritarianism and the ‘otherization’ of their opponents. The irony of accusations of right-wing populism is that it’s a mirror back. The right wing are the ‘others’ against whom? The left wing’s noble population and glorious leaders?

This is a topic we explored in Looking Into a Mirror, where you realize the ones levying the insults and accusations are reacting to what they see in themselves. They’re reacting to what they’d do in your situation, not what you’re doing. And that should be patently obvious as well. (We can invert this, but the main accusations of populism come from the Left, so I’m holding the mirror up that way first)

Simply put, they’re expecting from the other side what they expect from themselves. And since many of our elite universities, elite companies, elite governments, and elite social circles have tilted towards the Left, they naturally see the anti-elite and revolutionary elements of populism as an existential threat. Thankfully, there is still a chance at balance.

Synthesis

To balance populism, there should be tension, and I think we need to return to MORE populism, not less. This is where I found what wrote in the recent essay, These Two Books Contain the Sum of All Human Knowledge, so insightful. The First book is The Revolt of the Elites, which posulates that the elites have locked themselves away from reality and disconnected themselves from society, where the author, Lasch, recommends:

Return to a more populist, community-oriented form of democracy, where power is decentralized, and citizens are actively engaged in public life, restoring trust in institutions and bridging the gap between the elites and the masses.

The second book is Revolt of the Public, which suggests that the public’s access to social media and the ability for almost anyone to garner an audience regardless of who they are undermines the legitimate authority necessary to function as a country, and the author, Gurri, recommends:

We need new models of governance—more responsive and adaptable to the demands of the digital age, to maintain the visibility the public demands of its elites.

I agree with Adam that we see both manifesting today, and that’s what I’d suggest is inflaming polarization, which is fueling the elites on both sides who want nothing more than to weaponize populism. However, it’s not like a cabal of Crystaliens or Lizard People,1 it’s something much simpler. It’s the abdication of our healthy populism, and that populism relies on one thing, and only one thing: Agency!

Healthy populism requires each of us to recognize that we own ourselves, that we are responsible for ourselves, and that we can elect people who we also hold accountable. What we see on both sides is the abdication of agency. MAGA isn’t about individual accountability but siccing the attack dog of Trump and Company© on the Elites™ on the other side.

Which, I actually support because those elites had become so entrentched and ossified that a counter dark populism bubbled up with Trump Derangement Syndrome® where you’ve seen a political party go from viewing open borders as a Republican Conspiracy as Bernie Sanders accused in 2015 to the full embrace of open borders and claims that anything less is pure racism that the left flipped to in 2021, largely in opposition to Trump’s Build the Wall campaign.

Other notable flips include the general leftist distrust of big-pharma and the medical-industrial complex as recently as 2015, to their incredible inversion and full-throated defense of the COVID vaccine in 2021 (but not when the vaccine was Trump’s idea). Ironically, this created an inversion collision between both sides with “My Body My Choice” where Republicans used bodily autonomy arguments against vaccine mandates while supporting abortion restrictions, and Democrats used bodily autonomy arguments for abortion rights while supporting vaccine mandates.

On the right, it’s just as bad as they pivoted from fiscal responsibility under Obama to Trump-era debt expansion and from free trade to tariff nationalism. They “back the blue” but complain about the weaponization of the FBI. They decry the over-reach and militarization of the police while supporting paramilitary ICE raids.

What you see in each of these is a complete abdication of Agency in support of demagogues and elite elements. You also don’t see the demand for accountability, of actual agency from others (unless it’s the opposing side). The abdication is complete, and politics is driven by Narcisssists and NPCs where freedom dies in the middle.

The key thing to remember, though, is that changing this starts with you! You have to break the shackles, free your mind, think for yourself, and step beyond the slogans. Populism isn’t the problem. Our lack of Agency is.

That’s not to say that we’re all free to live to our own desires. The structure of the Republic was designed to balance populism against the ambitions both of the few and of the many. This requires that agency, and its subsequent liberty, cannot be separated from civic duty; otherwise, it turns into private indulgence, turning back into the negative populism that is being corrupted and weaponized.

And that’s what is most likely to upset the balance of populism and create polarization, because there’s no shortage of people looking to gain power, and there’s no shortage of people with half-baked opinions that will say anything to gain clicks and engagement. The only way to balance it is with our agency connected to civic duty.

So, let’s get back to populism. Let’s wrangle with what Lasch and Gurri are warring with in those two books regarding our elites and ourselves. Let’s embrace our agency and recognize that the institutions are failing to represent ordinary people, and that elites have become insulated, and that power needs to be made accountable again. Let’s defend populism and also temper it by recognizing that healthy populism requires individual agency. Let’s keep this great experiment going long into the future.

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The Original Porn

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:02:45 GMT

Today’s topic wrangles with a contradiction between male and female consumption of erotic content. Men tend to prefer visual, and women tend to prefer verbal. This, in itself, isn’t the contradiction; that occurs when we have such different perspectives on the acceptability of those media as well as the twists and turns of female sexuality we aren’t supposed to discuss in polite company. Let’s go deeper!

I’ve been wrestling with a contradiction for a while: the number of women gorging on dark romance and also pearl-clutching about #MeToo. Fifty Shades of Grey, a smut book about a rich and powerful man taking sexual advantage of a young woman, was a blockbuster book and movie, gushed about in thousands of book clubs by women. At the same time, women, often those very readers, were accusing rich and powerful men of taking sexual advantage of women.

What’s even crazier is the number of women who have rape fantasies and use that imagery to orgasm during sex. Yeah, when I heard that I had to uncover the data but I hesitated to just plunge in before handling the nuanced prep work.

According to one study, 62% of women admitted to fantasizing about being forced to have sex.1 Other surveys find that about four in ten women admit to having rape fantasies with a median frequency of about once a month.2 This includes during actual intercourse, where one study noted that many married women used those fantasies to help attain orgasm,3 with a related summary reporting that 48% had fantasies of being “overpowered or forced to surrender” at least some of the time during intercourse.4

These studies are so shocking to our modern yet surprisingly puritanical perspectives that many of us just ‘glitch’ and flip the script. I can hear the justification bubbling up already, but let’s stare at what rises up a little bit first because were not done yet! We’re barely past the foreplay of the argument.

Because I’m going to explain why, when I started looking, I found that I wasn’t as surprised as I thought I’d be. Let me take you on a segue…

When I was a kid, my church held a summer garage sale where people would bring items to sell, with the proceeds benefiting the church. I remember perusing the tables and looking at piles of Louis L’Amour, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and other books. But those piles were dwarfed by those the ladies brought in.

Stacks of erotica; Bodice Rippers, the covers adorned with the shirtless Fabio embracing a darling damsel. The church ladies had brought the hardcovers, the softcovers, and apparently every style in between. As a young man, the covers sent a little jolt of excitement because they were naughty. However, I remember not wanting to get scolded by the church ladies for enjoying the women on the covers. I thought the covers were scandalous, not realizing the real thrust of the matter was inside.

Which really cracks me up now, because those ladies were reading those books by the dozens, trading them with other women, and sharing what they liked most about them. These books, which immerse them in a sexual state where the descriptions never lack, and the man always satisfies everything, often, were openly sold at church.

This wasn’t too shocking as, back then, you’d see these books arrayed at the grocery store checkouts. It was just something that was ‘normal.’ It wasn’t until much later that I ever considered how pornographic they really were!

Pornography

Origin: mid 19th century: from Greek pornographos ‘writing about prostitutes’, from pornē ‘prostitute’ + graphein ‘write’.

The original pornography wasn’t pictures or video; it was written erotica. Now, the astute reader will point out that this term was coined by researchers and observers in the 1840s to describe and categorize “licentious” art and literature, and was later expanded to include imagery as we know it.

And this is key because erotic literature has existed for at least four thousand years, with the Babylonian and Sumerian erotic poetry circa 1800–2100 BCE. These were intimate, often explicit love songs celebrating physical desire and sexual passion. As with modern erotica, they were frequently written from a female perspective and centered on the goddess Inana and her lover Dumuzi. The texts used intense, metaphorical language about the body, with many poems likely performed during sacred marriage rituals.

Fun fact: many modern scholars, literary critics, and theologians consider the Bible’s Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, to be one of the finest examples of erotic poetry in the ancient world. It has everything: intense sensual imagery, breathless longing, intimate dialogue, lush metaphors, and enough “your body is a garden” energy to make a modern romance novelist reach for a fan. So how did it get in there?

I like to imagine some poor scribe, late at night, candle burning low, copying sacred texts like a good and faithful servant. Then, because he’s human, he sneaks a quick read from his favorite little scroll of spicy poetry. Right then, the chief rabbi walks in.

The scribe does what every guilty man does when caught with forbidden material: he shoves it into the nearest pile of respectable documents and tries to look scholarly. Flustered, he forgets where he stashed it, years pass, and another scribe comes along and finds a stack of holy writings and, tucked between law, wisdom, and prophecy, this suspiciously passionate little poem where everyone is admiring each other’s bodies with the subtlety of a vampire duke in a dark romance. But, instead of saying, “Wait, why is there a bridal boudoir scene in the sacred archive?” he shrugs and incorporates it. Apparently, the line between sacred poetry and smut is mostly binding, age, and how confidently someone says “allegory.”

The fun part is how Christians have been wrestling with this for a very long time. Historians, meanwhile, look at the whole situation and basically see a copy of Playboy slipped into a catechism, preserved by accident, sanctified by tradition, and then defended for centuries by people insisting, “No, no, you don’t understand. The breasts are a metaphor.” Which is probably the oldest recorded case of someone being caught between the covers and insisting it was research.

And this is where we hit an interesting catch. We have a major difference of perspective in how we view men’s sexual consumption versus women's. Let’s go back to that church yard sale. As a man, I’d be chastised for fantasizing about the girls on the cover while these women were finding out how many holes that man could fill between the covers. Just imagine the uproar if those ladies’ husbands brought their Playboy or Hustler magazines to sell and trade! There would have been a whole church intervention and full-throated condemnation while the original porno-graphy weighed down two entire tables.

One was visual, the other was written. And part of that is because men and women are wired differently for sex. Men are much more focused on the visual, and women are much more focused on the whole context, the story, the coffee done right in the morning, the subterfuge, and nuance, and… Same appetite, different entry point.

Simplified, guys like to see naked bodies; women like to read all the intimate details. I’ve also heard that men love with their eyes and women love with their ears.5

And we view the former as worse than the latter. This is why I appreciated what recently wrote about how Erotic literature is worse than visual porn, where he poignantly observes:

And what are books, exactly? At base, books use text to provide you with a controlled hallucination produced by your own mind, and if you’re reading a particularly good book series, the effects of this hallucination can stay with you for weeks, months, years, or perhaps even a lifetime.

Brackish Waters, Barren Soil

Erotic literature is worse than porn

A little while ago I wrote a couple of posts…

5 months ago · 88 likes · Rohan Ghostwind

He goes on to point out that while the average porn video session lasts about five to ten minutes, a romance novel lasts for hours to days. Is it addictive? Yes! It targets the exact same dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphines providing pleasure, bonding, and natural pain relief. Porno-graphy addiction, among women, is common. The only real difference is that men get pixels, women get prose.

That’s kind of crazy when you think about it! What’s even crazier is that there’s also no shortage of genres for women to select from:

General Erotic Romance is your Hallmark Films edition with more sex. It can happen across any time in history or even the future. It’s attractive adults, jobs that somehow allow endless time for sexual tension, and a plot powered by misunderstandings that could be solved by one honest conversation. Expect coworkers, neighbors, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, second chances, and emotionally repressed people discovering that communication is hot when paired with abs. Every plot needs conflict, tension, climax, and release. Sometimes several.
Power-position erotica is the fantasy genre for readers who looked at normal dating and thought, “Fine, but what if he owned the company, ruled the castle, controlled the wolf pack, or had been brooding shirtless since the Crusades?” Sometimes he’s a billionaire CEO with control issues or a vampire with cheekbones, trauma, and boundary problems, or a werewolf alpha who can smell desire but still can’t communicate like an adult. It doesn’t matter. The formula is overwhelming power, dangerous attraction, possessive obsession, and a heroine taking it all in, narratively speaking, of course. It actually fuses the desire for resources we explored in Two Rules for Life with the seduction of power and influence that can represent reproductive success.
Dark Romance throws restraint away, and people love it. It plunges into morally gray or outright villainous love interests, coercive situations, captivity, revenge, obsession, stalking, crime, trauma, and non-consent or dubious-consent fantasies. It’s closer to BDSM / Kink Erotica than not, so if you like being spanked or having a train ridden on you,6 this one might be spicy enough, and oh, is it popular!

Now, mix those with any of these other flavors, and you get the picture: Paranormal Romance / Supernatural Erotica, Monster Romance (Orcs, minotaurs, krakens, aliens, gargoyles, dragons, mothmen, and… more) Historical Erotica, Reverse Harem, Taboo / Forbidden Erotica, Religious / Spiritual Transgression Erotica, and… If it can go inside her, it will. If it’s not physically possible, don’t worry, it’s fiction, and it’ll just raw-dog biology and end up being the most fulfilling fit ever.

How fulfilling? Well, erotica sells over 50 million units a year in the United States, with dark romance accounting for about 25% of that. A 2026 report indicates 62% of women surveyed are interested in "spicy" or romantic books for fun. We aren’t talking small numbers here, and that 62% also lines up well with our rape fantasy statistics from earlier, and research indicates that those romance novels fuel those fantasies.

The weird thing is that all this is OK in the general consciousness. Until you actually turn one of them into a pornographic video. (apparently Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t count as it was only rated R, not X) When it becomes a true video porn, it suddenly crosses into a taboo that we need to hide and legislate and people write long, moralizing articles mocking men’s taboo tastes.7

Biology

Well, the fun thing about this whole conversation is that it’s actually not too far from evolutionary biology either. We explored this earlier in Sex, Poop, and Rock ‘n Roll, but it bears repeating here. Did you know that the human penis is unlike any other primate in both shape, size, and persistence? The head, specifically, is uniquely shaped in a manner that can expunge ‘competitor’ semen… and it only gets weirder.

Human women not only have persistent mammary glands signaling sexual capability,8 but also a hidden ovulation, so that even they aren’t typically aware of their full cycle. Add in that this cycle is monthly versus the more typical seasonality, and you have a sexual capacity and drive that is vastly greater than that of other animals.

This culminates in a situation that many want to absolutely ignore about our animal evolution: A woman is biologically wired to act more like a cat in heat9than a monogamous maiden, and men who proposition and compete have a higher chance of reproductive success over the white knight.10 So, it really does make sense that Fifty Shades of Grey was a bestseller. It’s a billionaire unlocking something deep in our primal brains that tantalizes. Porno-graphy is keyed to something deep in a woman’s reproductive desires, and it’s not so surprising that it’s so popular.

What still needs to be teased apart is how we have a prudish response to male sexuality, i.e., the visual and carnal sex in porn, while ignoring that complicated side of female sexuality, including the shockingly rape adjacent material in porno-graphy.

The Implications

Now that we’ve named erotica for what it is: Pornography, and we understand some of the biology and psychology behind it, we can begin having a more nuanced discussion. Like whether pornstars are empowered or exploited, whether the reduced friction of porn drives poor behavior in men when it comes to pleasing their women, whether the egregiously inflated and unrealistic storytelling in erotica is causing women to make sex more complicated than it needs to be, and more. But I hope, more than anything, we can realize that women binging errotica for hours at a time, over the course of weeks, months, and years, is having an impact on real life.

In fact, in therapy, visual porn has a huge clinical vocabulary around it: porn conflict, porn concealment, porn addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, betrayal trauma, sexual dissatisfaction, escalation, shame, and partner comparison. All of which revolve around the rejection of visual porn as acceptable and the pushing of the material into the realm of taboo and shame, which also increases its addictiveness.

It appears the clinical world has probed every angle of male porn use while barely slipping a finger between the pages of women’s written porn. Annecdotally, I reached out to two therapists I know who both said written porn has similar addiction, dysfunction, and relationship impact. However, what I was able to find in the literature tiptoes around the topic,11 but leans towards the angle that erotica is often used in therapy to improve a woman’s libido, and that’s viewed as a good thing. In fact, feminists celebrate this. Ironically, visual porn does the same for a guy as well, hence that laundry list of terms, but that’s not viewed as a good thing nor celebrated.

And again, this makes sense because women generally have a lower libido, and men aren’t complaining when they find their partner all aroused and randy after a few hours of hallucinating over the bestseller, Morning Glory Milking Farm (Book 1 of 5). However, when men increase their libido, at odds with their partner, many of those negative connotations manifest. One way I’ve heard this described is that women use porno-graphy to get in the mood, whereas men use pornography to finish, which is part of the challenge, but we’re still talking about the same thing, aren’t we?

Frankly, I’m not sure what to do with all of this. It’s a weird cultural glitch when we can have Fifty Shades of Grey and #MeToo at the same time. Where we can have more than 50% of women fantasizing about forced sex, while an awkward pickup line can ruin a man’s career. Where a relationship can be violated by video porn, as the argument escalates in front of a bookshelf full of erotic porno-graphy.

It really is a great example of the Angel and the Animal that Ernest Becker writes about in The Denial of Death. I think it’s a conversation that needs to be open and analyzed so we can better understand who we are. It’s certainly something we need to reconcile on why it’s denigrated for men and ignored or even celebrated with women. That’s the fun adventure of learning what it means to be human!

So, what do you think? Why do we have such a double standard? Why is written porn viewed as innocent, whereas video porn returns such condemnation?

Are they fundamentally different, and I missed something obvious?

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Don't Lose Your Voice

Michael Woudenberg — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:02:49 GMT

Today’s topic addresses the challenges of an uncritical use of AI in writing. On the one hand, AI represents a transformative tool that can help unlock creativity, improve research, sharpen arguments, and challenge bias. On the other hand, it can lull the author into a sense of agreement, feeding their ego, and drowning their voice in the banality of the average. Let’s dig into the consequences and the solution.

Intro

I feel like I’m losing my mind. Over the last few years, I have kept coming across more and more articles that are all starting to sound the same. The same cadence, tempo, style, flow. More and more often, I get about 25% into an essay, and I see a convergence, it’s almost a resonance in my brain, a high-pitched whine where my eyes start to glaze as the markers of AI begin popping out of the text.1 As I scroll, the essay just keeps going without a clear focus, peppered with complex words that add nothing to the context. At that point, I close it down and move on.

My intuition tells me it’s all AI because I use AI for many things. One of my new favorite things is using Gemini on Android Auto to ask questions about history, geology, small town economics, random facts, and more on family road trips. It’s super insightful, like a personal tour guide, but after a while, you notice the pattern. If not managed, it just blathers on, reuses the same ‘dress-up’ words, and constantly telling me how my questions and its answers are amazing, unique, fascinating…

I know what generic AI sounds like because I train my AI to avoid it. And, to be clear, the issue isn’t with the use of AI, as I really enjoy using it as a valuable tool, and it can provide a Brain Boost if used properly. But those essays I’m reading? I’m not reading anything unique, which is fine for historical facts about Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and a basic overview of different bike computers, but not for true insights.

Because what’s really valuable is what you add to the writing. What’s your voice? Do you sound like you write? Are there fingerprints and personality that make it unique? Is there some quirk or counter-intuitive insight that you’ve discovered and want to share? I can confidently say that if there was, the uncritical use of AI buried it under the banal voice of an LLM. Worse, when it’s no longer your voice, it’s really no longer your ideas. You’re just agreeing with the output.

Losing Your Voice

A great example of this is when, in a recent article on Neurodivergency, responded to an accusation of it being purely AI-generated with:

“AI is part of my writing process the same way dictation, spellcheck, or text-to-speech are part of someone else’s. I’m autistic, and the cognitive load involved in translating complex thought into linear written language is very real. Tools that reduce that load are accessibility tools, not shortcuts. The ideas, framework, structure, and lived experience in this essay are mine.”2

Which is fair and a point I made in the past about Artists vs. AI, where I shared how AI can help unlock creativity:

Two examples from writing are an author I know whose husband has a fantastically creative mind but crippling dyslexia. He can’t write and struggles to work with writers to capture his ideas. Enter ChatGPT which has inordinate patience and can take the ideas and bring them to life so he can edit. The second example is an author I met who has a progressive neurological disorder threatening her ability to write. She uses AI to help capture her ideas while her body fails. It’s her imagination and creativity expressed through technology before it’s too late.

It’s not the accessibility that’s the problem. Those two examples are people who used tools to capture their ideas. They had conversations with the AI, they used voice-to-text, and had the AI pull threads together. They added their voice, and they worked with human editors to polish it up. What they didn’t do was rely on it completely.

This is a nuance that Eve Fairbanks nails in a recent Atlantic article titled The Biggest Tell That Something Was Written by AI:

“Now some authors tell me they’ve embraced AI as a “writing tool,” no different from spell-check or a laptop. The phrase is protean and euphemistic, covering everything from using ChatGPT to find a quote to having it compose a long essay based on a two-sentence prompt.”

The tell, she says, is when you “Look closely and you’ll see that every part of the text is not quite right.”

My visceral reaction described earlier, that high-pitched whine in my brain, is that every part of the text reads nearly perfectly, but is not quite right. There’s perfect punctuation, a lot of big words, but nothing there. That’s the common mode of an LLM and the way it formulates a general prompt. I have many hundreds of hours fighting with LLMs to eliminate this bias, and so I’m sensitive to it.

That’s what triggered my internal AI detector with Eva’s essay in question and many others including ’s essay here, and who attempted to rebut3 my post on True Neurodivergence with her’s titled When Someone Renames Your Experience For You 4 all of whom admitted using AI to write them. What you’ll see is that there’s content, but it just doesn’t feel authentic. They’re all 5,000 words, blathering on and on, claiming to present a new view while offering generic blurbs of nothing but a marginal average.5

Part of what bugs me is how often the uncritical use of AI comes from the neurodivergent sphere. I’m harder on them because they claim to offer a different perspective, unlike the Algowhores or PSYOPs we’ve looked at before, where we aren’t told to expect more. They talk about their ‘lived experiences,’ or ‘gestalt language processing,’6 yet all start sounding convergent and typical. Worse, it’s not actually their lived experience; It’s an inanimate AI describing something for them, which was averaged from everyone else, and they thought it was close enough.

This happens because AI is incredibly synchophantic and actively strokes your biases like Wormtongue, replacing you with itself if you aren’t careful. AI also doesn’t Default to Truth; it will tell you things that you want to be true. Lastly, AI is trained on enough victim narratives to make it sound compelling to the ‘author’ and to their readers. The outcome is that all three of those ladies I mentioned proclaim a neurodivergent perspective, all claiming to be gifted or exceptional,7 (Chris claims twice-exceptional), while they all sound like the same AI.

What’s even more fascinating is that Eva turned around, just days after my critique, and wrote: “How AI Systems Exclude Neurodivergent People by Design.” Which is suberbly ironic because that’s the argument I’m making against her use of AI. There’s no need for me to rebut those examples more from that perspective, so let’s look, instead, at the other consequence of losing your voice.

To truly understand her contradictions, consider that both essays are clearly AI-generated.8 She took the easy path, tossed in a couple of prompts, and pasted the result. She didn’t struggle to form, unform, and reform the logic underpinning Critical Thinking, and she ended up in logical contortions while also missing the valuable insights sitting in plain sight.

You may recognize that Eva gets close to understanding that AI is merely mathematical bias, on top of data bias, on top of organizational bias, but just misses that unique insight. The irony of her angst was already covered here, in Eliminating Bias in AI/ML, where, simply put, you cannot eliminate bias; you can merely bias the bias. Moreover, she misses that when you pathologize healthy personality, you tend to be excluded from normal engagement, which is another of her frustrations.

All of this occurred because, when you lose your voice to AI, you also risk ceding your thinking.9 Eva not only ended up with the banal average in her claimed experiences, but was also unaware that she was uncritically creating cognitive distortions. She’s pasting AI content instead of learning about the nuances that drive the challenges she seeks to rectify. She lost her voice, ceded her thinking, and lost the ability to find solutions.

AI is also very slippery. As Bates recently describes in a recent essay, it’s not that AI is useless, but, to quote him, “No, the infuriating part is that it is useful enough to keep using.” This is the slippery slope with AI, especially when you aren’t looking at it with critical thinking. With its syncophancy, sophistication, and semi-accurate output, it can lull you into complacency and tempt you with the ‘easy button.’

The perverse outcome is articulated well by who captured the risk in “We Know You’re Using AI,” where he shares:

“You burn bridges, in fact, when you indulge in not thinking. If you commit to this strategy, you’ll end up frenetically chasing your own tail, trying to spike your slowly declining popularity with people who, by definition, go away as they pay more attention to you.”

I’ll be blunt: when you lose your voice, you lose your thinking, and you lose the very thing you want people to follow you for: your humanity.

Finding Your Voice

That said, AI is a great augmentation tool, and even using it to compose a long essay isn’t necessarily bad. hits the target with his struggle of balancing the tool with authenticity in the note embedded above. The tough reality is that there’s no right answer except for that struggle. The struggle is authentic.

Similarly, shared the note below showing that AI is the safe route, it’s not going to challenge what the guardrails deem politically correct, and it tilts toward justifying your inability to act instead of motivating agency to act. Both of these are anathema to creative writing or uncovering counterintuitive insights. Your voice should add something new to the conversation, not just mimic others.

For myself, I used AI to help me get past the blank page and start writing the first chapter of The Singularity Chronicles. The AI produced rubbish writing, but it got me writing and creating. As I went back to edit, I realized, about halfway through the book, I’d found my own voice, a cadence, a style. I then went back and re-edited the rest to pull that unique voice through. In the end, what the AI produced was completely eliminated by 120K words of my own, authentic voice. AI just provided the original grit to motivate the struggle that helped me find my voice.10

I’ve also found my own voice here on Substack. My AI-augmented spellcheck doesn’t like my style very much and recommends lots of edits. (but for some reason never flags that I can’t spell nuerodivergent) I ignore most of them, and what you read here is largely how I talk, and you are, quite literally, reading my brain flow… Even better, you’re seeing me wrangle to form, unform, and reform my thoughts. This last part is important because that’s not something AI does and, in my experience, can’t do. AI’s output is deceptively perfect but not quite right. My output is gritty and uncovers counterintuitive insights.

It’s also made me appreciate human writing more. Recently, I got a blurb from another author for a collaborative essay and loved it, but when they submitted a more polished version as we edited, it felt flat. They admitted using AI to touch it up, and I asked to keep the original because, even imperfect, I felt it had their voice, and I valued that more than perfection.

I’ve also reached out to fellow Substackers when I feel that what they published sounded like AI. If that was intentional, then OK, but it sounds like it. If it wasn’t AI… it still sounded like it.11 Some don’t care, and eventually I find myself tiring of their writing and falling away as James warned earlier. The others typically improve their writing as they find their voice and strive to highlight their unique contributions.

An added challenge, as , who wrote The Pitch-Perfect Author: Voice Mastery for Writers, notes is that what used to be considered straightforward formal business writing style12 is now what AI emulates by default. That’s part of the attraction we discussed earlier, but when content creators pollute the commons with AI content, the resulting enshitification also drowns out professional writers who are writing to a formerly established standard, which forces us to find a new voice.

However, this is where the most counterintuitive insight emerges because you can use AI in a way few do: It can actually help find your voice, highlight your biases, and challenge you to think differently. For example, I use AI against my own writing to:

Produce a counterargument
Steelman another’s argument to make sure I’m understanding
Have AI challenge my biases or identify biases in my writing
Critique my voice, my tone, and my style
Highlight gaps in my logic

Simply put, you can use AI as your toughest critic and best coach at the same time. The key is that you have to critique the output and force yourself to introspect when it feels like something you want to hear because it loves stroking your ego and bias.

Other tips are, as J. Daniel Sawyer recommends: “First thing to do is to listen to how you speak and write already: read your writing out loud, record yourself speaking extemporaneously, record and listen back to your stories or essays. You develop an ear for what “sounds like you.” You learn your own verbal/writing ticks, your sense of idiom and turn of phrase, etc.”

This is what I do with these essays, and each one has a recorded voice-over read by myself to ensure just this. I’ve found my voice. I think it’s important that others find their own, and balancing between the extremes of pro or anti-AI13 is key to that.

Summary

So, I feel like I’m standing between two worlds. I embrace AI as a tool, and it has dramatically improved many things in my own writing, and yet, the more AI becomes ubiquitous, the more I use AI, the more value I’m seeing in the raw, but human writing that remains. What I’m avoiding is slop, whether human or AI-generated.14 What I’m trying to produce are human insights into who we are.

So, for those authors I mentioned and everyone else reading, the key is to embrace the struggle of writing. You have to accept the grit of imperfection; you have to find the line between Augmenting your Intelligence with AI and replacing your voice and thoughts with AI. I want to hear your voice. This is how we maintain our humanity in an AI-saturated world.

If you see someone who you think needs this message, please share this article. The more people we reach, the more we can rebalance our humanity. At a minimum please hit the ❤️ button above or below. This will help more people discover Substacks like this one where we explore what it means to be human.

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Polymathic Being

Water Off a Duck’s Back

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Bullshit Jobs

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Mansplaining vs. Shelaborating

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

From Front Porch Neighbors to Backyard Strangers

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

How to Die Like a Boss

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

The Problem with Polymaths

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Chit-Chat

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

The Bunnies and the Bears

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

How to be Right

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Rediscovering Awe

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Masking as Neurodivergent

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

The Catastrophe of Smokey Bear

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

The Noble Savage

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Hack Your Brain! A dynamic exploration into Counterintelligence and Mixed Mental Arts

Damn the Patriarchy

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Earning Life

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Laugh at Yourself

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

A Defense of Populism

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

The Original Porn

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate

Don't Lose Your Voice

Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate