The same day, The Atlantic‘s editorial staff decided to feature, on the magazine’s front cover, his article My Family’s Slave. He never got to see it, but the world did. The article went viral, provoking intense responses across Filipino, American, and global audiences. Some praised him for his honesty and craft while debating moral responsibility and cultural complicity. Others were appalled that anyone in modern-day US could own a slave, regardless of how it turned out.

When the article came out, I realized I knew of Lola. To me and the rest of the world, she was his sweet, caring grandmother. He was caring for her in her old age until she passed away in 2011. What none of us knew was that the truth was much more complicated, and that my thoughtful, educated, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, mentor, and dear friend Alex lived with, benefited from, and participated in maintaining a dark family secret - they owned a slave.

I was someone he had trusted with other deeply personal family things. But even I didn’t know this until I read about it. Was this article his way of breaking the spell of a secret that defined three generations? How did it affect him and his life trajectory as someone who studied people deeply? He embedded himself in a Filipino gang so he could write about the complexities of survival and human interactions. He exposed hierarchical abuse in Native American tribes. He followed 911 survivors for years, tracking their lives and stories. He was a compassionate human being if I ever saw one.

Lots of families have secrets. Jack Nicholson was raised by his grandparents, believing his grandmother was his mother, until Time Magazine reported that his older sister was his mother. By then, both had passed away. Hidden adoptions or misattributed paternity were common in mid-20th century Western contexts because society didn’t take kindly to women who had children out of wedlock. Facing stigma and denied opportunities, many felt that they had no other choice.

Family members’ concealed involvement in events like the Holocaust. I remember taking a tour of Munich some years back with a tour guide my age who proudly told stories of the city’s history until she hit WWII and German society during Hitler. Her pride, replaced with facts about buildings, made me ask, “Do you know what your family was doing during that time?”

“My grandfather was a professor at the university, and my grandmother stayed at home taking care of my mom and the other kids.”

No mention of the other side of the family. She tried to change the subject, pointing at a landmark.

I noticed.

“Have your grandparents ever told you how they felt about Hitler and the rise of fascism, about what was happening in the war, and to Jewish people?”

“German families don’t like to talk about that time,” she said. “Many people had to go along to get by, to keep their jobs and feed their families, to avoid ending up in a concentration camp themselves. Everyone usually says that they were not involved in any way with the rest of it.”

If no one was involved with “the rest of it,” then who stood guard at the concentration camps? Who rounded up Jewish kids? Who processed the paperwork? Who delivered food and supplies to the concentration camps? Who built the buildings? Who approved Hitler’s budget? Who voted for his regime?

I didn’t ask. Secrets don’t come out just because people ask.

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You’ve seen the videos of “Karens” asking to see the manager. Fun fact: Guys who do the same are called “Kevin.” If you run into one, you should know what to call them. These people explode in public, making everyone around them uncomfortable. Some get arrested. Others get instant karma. But they never just apologize and walk away, restoring peace, order, and their dignity.

But what about your co-workers, friends, and family members who emotionally overreact, triggered by only-they-know-what? What do you do when they spring into anger, name-calling, blame, manipulation, and even violence? How do you handle difficult conversations where some sort of confrontation is inevitable? What do you do if you are the manager Karen just called, or have to deal with an emotionally activated and out-of-control spouse?

Arguments happen in all relationships because high-stakes conversations happen in all relationships. Workplace conflict is not uncommon. Dealing with narcissistic and manipulative people is not always avoidable. Life offers plenty of expected and unexpected stressful situations. People flip when the barista gets their coffee wrong, flights get canceled, they get pulled over when in a hurry, are inconvenienced, dismissed, or challenged.

So, why do we emotionally erupt and often make things worse? Wouldn’t it be so much easier to just talk, figure things out, and move on?

From the outside, emotional outbursts and tantrums seem to be about entitlement. The behavior comes across as rude, belligerent, and threatening. But reactivity usually stems from a perceived threat, even if not fully understood.

Human egos want the world to confirm who we think we are, to feel safe, secure, and in control at all times. Even though egos can tolerate some ambiguity and uncertainty, situations beyond certain limits will trigger a reaction. Not everyone who is triggered becomes a Karen or a Kevin. But those who do seem to have those limits set pretty low.

There are many ways to explain the dynamics, but they all essentially organize the explanations around Identity, Control, and Safety triggers, with our past experiences, upbringing, and personality traits shaping our tolerance limits, conflict participation tendencies, and resolution skills.

Understanding how to recognize the underlying triggers makes us more able to sidestep potential issues, navigate, and de-escalate a Karen in progress. It also helps us avoid becoming one. Logic in heated situations does not work. The other person is in full limbic system mode. They are kindling, and your logic actually adds fuel to that kindling because it sounds to them like you are reinforcing the threat they perceive.

You need an extinguisher to put out the flame in real-time.

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Few actually test the idea.

Jim Rohn didn’t mean five friends. He meant your dominant environment, the people you’re most exposed to. It includes more than friends, but obviously, friends are in the mix, too.

Think in terms of influence and exposure, not labels. Start with your inner circle: your significant other, family, and close friends. They shape your beliefs, emotional patterns, and identity. That’s how entire families vote for the same party, while others end up being creative and artistic, proudly religious of some kind, into real estate, or whatever. Think about the old saying, “The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.”

Some apples end up rolling away from the tree under the strong influence of their functional circle: business partners, clients, and co-workers. If you spend 6–8 hours a day with them, they absolutely count. They influence your standards, ambition, and what is normal. In some cases, that environment can outweigh the inner circle environment.

And some apples can end up in a distant neighbor’s yard altogether, thanks to the influential circles we frequent online. Many of our mentors are people we’ve never met in real life. We listen to their podcasts, watch their videos, and read their Substacks. We consume their content for inspiration and understanding. They help us navigate the world and our own lives. Some spend more time with these voices than with real people. They shape thinking, values, and expectations. We inhabit online communities centered around them with thousands, and sometimes millions, of others like us.

If you want to amuse yourself, put pen to paper and write down the names of the five people you’re around the most. Now look at their habits, emotional patterns, ambition, worldview, and standards. That’s what shapes you every day, whether you realize it or not.

How do you like them apples? You represent the average.

Most people don’t choose their environment. They either inherit it or fall into it. But those relationships can either cap or accelerate your growth. They can either send you deeper into the fringe and the world of conspiracy theories or liberate you from your stereotypes, prejudices, and misconceptions.

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Every psychologically distressed woman over 40 gets handed the same explanation: menopause. Hormones do play a role, for sure, but a deeper look reveals a much less talked-about relationships-and-load-bearing story. The more interesting and more honest piece is about collision: intimate disappointment, family strain, caregiving, grief, role overload, and the emotional labor of holding everything and everyone else together.

The Guardian recently published a piece (‘You lose yourself’: inside the mental health crisis hitting gen X women) discussing Gen X women’s mental health struggles. It cited a BACP survey reporting that nearly two-thirds of women over 50 struggle with their mental health, and that 9 in 10 of the 2,000 women surveyed had not sought help. A separate 2026 Royal College of Psychiatrists poll found that many women still do not realize menopause can trigger new mental illness, which helps explain why so many miss the moment to seek treatment.

Yes, hormones can destabilize mood, sleep, and stress tolerance. But what often breaks women in this period is the interaction between biology and relational life. In the Midlife and Mental Health Study from Boston University(2022), women most often named changing family relationships, divorce/breakups, death of parents, and multiple co-occurring stressors as the hardest part of midlife; few named menopause as the main challenge.

In the Seattle Midlife Women’s Study, a longitudinal study spanning 23 years, the NIH identified “the most challenging aspects of midlife as changing family relationships, re-balancing work/personal life, re-discovering self, securing enough resources, and coping with multiple co-occurring stressors. Within these themes, the most frequently reported challenges were: multiple co-occurring stressors, divorce/breaking up with a partner, health problems of self, and death of parents. Few women mentioned menopause as the most challenging aspect of their lives.”

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Research consistently shows that relationship quality matters far more than relationship status when it comes to mental health. Being partnered is not protective if the relationship itself is strained, distant, or emotionally unsafe. In fact, low-quality relationships are strongly associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and chronic stress. The daily emotional climate matters more than the label, and that climate, for many women in midlife, has slowly been eroding.

Frequently, women in midlife realize that their own needs have not been met for years, or even decades. They feel necessary, obligated, and responsible, yet not cared for. They realize they’ve been accommodating and sacrificing their own health and resources for others’ sake, while explaining things away, rationalizing their partner’s behavior, hoping things will change, or simply believing that that’s how relationships are.

Strong evidence exists that chronic relational stress, especially in the form of conflict, hostility, or emotional disengagement and manipulation, predicts depressive symptoms over time. Overt conflict matters, but a partner who is physically present but emotionally unavailable creates a particular kind of strain. There is no clear rupture to point to, no obvious “problem” to solve. Just a persistent sense of being alone in the relationship.

Many women in midlife exist in neutral-at-best relationships, draining at worst. Intimacy fades. Conversations focus on logistics and tasks, the children, and finances, not on building intimacy and how anyone feels. Sex slowly disappears or is mundane and unenjoyable, even undesirable for many in menopause, but obligatory. For others, the issue isn’t a loss of desire but physiological challenges due to aging not accommodated by their partners, mismatches, resentment, or emotional disconnection that makes intimacy inaccessible. When affection fades and curiosity about each other declines, not only does sex go out the window, but couples become roommates.

So, even though a relationship has not failed outwardly, as far as a third person could see, many women grieve the loss of their partners and the affection of their early days. The grief usually goes unacknowledged because many don’t even know that’s what they are experiencing, and there is no real event they can point to marking that loss. Because the relationship continues, there is no closure either. Women continue to live with the person and in the relationship that they are simultaneously grieving.

Men experience relationship strain, too. But women seem to be disproportionately more affected. In menopause, because of the hormonal changes, what used to be manageable becomes exhausting and intolerable.

Women usually bear the emotional labor in a relationship, which tends to become more pronounced and more visible in midlife. Many women spent years managing not just their own emotions but also the emotional tone of the relationship: initiating conversations, smoothing conflicts, anticipating needs, maintaining connection, and providing emotional support. At some point, they recognize the imbalance more clearly. What once felt like voluntary care begins to feel like an expected responsibility, and the resentment builds and compounds from there.

From the outside, a woman may look anxious, irritable, low, or emotionally volatile. From the inside, she may be responding to years of unmet needs, accumulated resentment, and the dawning awareness that the relationship she organized her life around is not emotionally sustainable.

In addition, for some, menopause becomes a reminder of time gone and life passing relentlessly. It brings reckoning and lots of questions of purpose, abandoned dreams, personal potential, and fulfillment. When it coincides with filandering husbands, adult children conflicts, aging parents who need care, difficult economic conditions, and personal health issues, midlife might actually be the most challenging time in a woman’s life.

Instead of finding support from their partners, many women find criticism, ridicule, put-downs, and anger. After childbirth and years of caring for others, and while they struggle with biological changes causing sagging skin, extra weight, and thinning hair, they are told that they are no longer in their prime, no longer attractive, and no longer worth the attention they enjoyed in their youth.

At the same time, leaving a relationship may not be that simple. There are shared lives, financial entanglements, children, history, identity, and friends’ circles. Ending a long-term relationship in midlife carries a different weight than ending one in your 20s or 30s.

Some do it anyway and claim their independence. They choose their well-being, get divorced, and reinvent themselves despite what anyone around them wants or does. There is less appetite for waiting things out and less willingness to continue investing in something that isn’t reciprocating. So, it should be no surprise that for middle-aged adults (40-60), women are responsible for initiating 66-70% of all divorce proceedings.

As children leave home and careers are established, women often re-evaluate their lives and find they no longer wish to continue in an unhappy or one-sided marriage. Improved financial stability allows women to feel more confident in going it alone. Studies from organizations like AARP indicate that many men are blindsided by their wives’ desire to divorce, often believing the marriage was doing well or that their role as provider was sufficient.

Interestingly, while men and women both experience pain, women are more likely to report feeling “happier” or “stronger” after a midlife divorce, while men often report more regret.

I am not advocating for divorces. My intention is to explain the dynamics leading up to them. Many probably could be prevented. Others should have happened a long time ago. And some marriages should have never happened at all. Midlife is the time when women come to terms with their situations. They realize that the emotional math no longer adds up and try to figure out what happens next because they can no longer ignore it. But the process, amplified and complicated by hormonal changes, is never easy and unique to every woman.

Thanks for reading.
Val

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“Unbelievable,” he said to no one in particular.

He turned his phone slightly toward his companion. “Look at this. They don’t want you to know this. It’s not on the news. Who do they think we are?”

His friend leaned in. A pause. Then a slow nod followed by the Bulgarian version of “WTF,” but a lot more explicit.

No skepticism. No question. Just an immediate emotional reaction and total agreement.

I didn’t see what they were looking at. I didn’t need to. My own mother does this multiple times a day. She scrolls on her phone and periodically runs over to show me something with, “Look what they are saying here.” At least, I’ve trained her now to also say, “I don’t know if this is true,” which she inevitably follows up with, “But if it is…” So, I am not convinced that I’ve out-influenced Facebook’s algorithms.

You’ve seen these reactions too, and may have had them yourself. The details change—the cure, the villain, the urgency, the scandal, the outrage—but the structure stays the same. The content always resonates and masterfully hits a pre-existing mental trigger.

It reminds me of when the doctor tests my neurological reactions by hitting me at just the right spot below the kneecaps. My legs jump, and I can’t stop them. The visceral reaction is so automatic and fast that my brain has no way of preempting it.

In a world where more of our reality is mediated through screens, this isn’t a side issue. It’s the environment we’re operating in, and we absolutely must talk about it.

I am certain that no one thinks of themselves as “captured” and “exploited” and much less as the product of engineered behavior. But research shows that our ancient brains are no match for today’s technology-enabled business practices.

The quality of your daily life, relationships, and communities depends greatly on your ability to preempt targeted mental strikes and exploitations. You must remain yourself, now more than ever, and learn to recognize the Trojan horses before you let them in.

Long before algorithms and smartphones, before content could be produced by anyone and at scale, newspapers and magazines understood something simple: people don’t respond to information, they respond to emotion. Yellow journalism led the way successfully, not because of accuracy, but because it harnessed this truth. It was effective because it made people feel something quickly and intensely. Fear, outrage, and curiosity spread as news, and made people like William Randolph Hearst very wealthy.

A century later, the tools have changed. The wealthiest people’s roster holding our emotional triggers at their fingertips has too. But the psychology that makes that possible has not.

What’s different now is precision enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence, faster at detecting patterns than any human mind ever could.

Today, emotional triggers are not just understood—they are mapped, measured, and optimized. Entire systems exist to identify which inputs reliably produce which reactions, in which groups, at which times.

Nostalgia works. Fear works. Moral outrage works. A sense of lost control works especially well.

And it all works really well on the Baby Boomer generation. There’s even a term for it: “Boomer bait.” Usually said with a smirk and a kind of casual superiority as if the problem is obvious: older people, less tech-savvy, are easier to fool.

But what’s actually happening has very little to do with Boomers.

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Psychologists always want to know why we do what we do. In their pursuit, they’ve discovered multiple psychological quirks applicable to anyone with a “normally” functional brain and intact faculties. One of these, and personally relevant to me, is the Zeigarnik Effect. It states that people remember incomplete or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. It captures the human brain’s tendency to fixate on “open loops” or unfinished business.

I am a self-described member of the “Over 50 Club.” I’ve been there since my 20s. So, it has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the number of unfinished projects I seem to accumulate—home decoration, crafts, writing, and business ideas. It’s not that I am a good starter and never a finisher. But enough remains unfinished that my mind keeps nagging me.

I tell myself that not all starts should be finished, because some are not worth finishing. Sometimes, a start leads to something better that captures my attention and energy. Other times, I get distracted, or I just give up and feel bad, but not bad enough to do anything about it.

According to psychology research, while unfinished business messes with your head in ways sometimes hard to intuit, interestingly, it can also be used to your advantage.

There are many psychological and logistical reasons why people end up with “open loops.” I’ve written about The Psychology of Self-Sabotage, Analysis to Paralysis, and other reasons why we might end up with unfinished business. But today, I want to focus specifically on what happens to us when we do.

Where The Idea Came From

The story begins with Kurt Lewin’s concept of “life space,” the idea that behavior is shaped by both internal states and the psychological meaning of the environment. Lewin, a WWI veteran, observed that the same physical elements—rocks, trees, gullies—look different to soldiers depending on whether they were at the front or in the rear of the battlefield. Peaceful scenery in the rear becomes a potential shelter, a weapon, or a danger at the front. Everything that is psychologically relevant to a person, their goals, memories, social pressures, emotions, and expectations, occupies that life space, and competing forces within it create internal tension.

Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin, noticed a striking everyday example in a café: waiters remembered complex unpaid orders with ease, yet once the bill was paid, the details seemed to vanish. In the lab, Zeigarnik and colleagues had participants work on tasks such as puzzles, math problems, and craft projects. For some tasks, they interrupted the participants before completion. When questioned, participants remembered the interrupted tasks twice as much and in greater detail than the completed ones.

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In the 2021 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan Markle described feeling unsupported and struggling with mental health while in the royal family - an institution not exactly thrilled that Prince Henry was marrying a divorced outsider.

Meghan described feeling suicidal while pregnant, asked for help from senior palace officials, but was told it wouldn’t be good for the institution. But instead of ending her answer there, she overexplained, detailing whom she approached, the structural constraints, and why HR existed but wasn’t technically for family members, and how the hierarchy worked.

From a fairness standpoint, it made sense. She was trying to be accurate and to clarify. But rhetorically, this overexplaining shifted the focus away from her personal crisis.

Then she dropped another bomb - the royal family’s concern and conversations over Archie’s skin color. Again, she followed up with more clarifications. Harry added context. Oprah clarified off-camera that the Queen and Prince Philip were not involved. More interviews added more details. With each clarification meant to tighten the story, the debate widened.

In the end, she lost more credibility with people in the UK who found her claims unbelievable, as the British media dissected her story every which way, looking for inconsistencies and amplifying them.

This happens to all of us. Not getting married into a royal family, but definitely overexplaining and getting frustrated with the responses we get. Here we are, doing our best to clarify and not leave important details, yet still end up feeling misunderstood or watching the conversation go off on a tangent.

So, what gives? Why are we doing this, and why isn’t it working out the way we think it should? How can we do better?

Why People Overexplain

Overexplaining is a protective mechanism in psychology known as the “fawn response,” aka “people pleasing.” It is considered an overadaptation, in which an individual provides excessive detail to avoid being perceived as a “bad person” or to avoid conflict.

If you are intelligent, thoughtful, and empathetic, you also likely see multiple perspectives in the situation, you want to be fair, and you want to preempt objections. This, layered on top of childhood trauma-related insecurities and learned people-pleasing behavior, makes you a chronic overexplainer.

Many overexplainers grew up in environments where their feelings, thoughts, or actions were questioned, ignored, or dismissed. If a person was frequently blamed, punished, or made to feel at fault as a child, they may have learned to provide exhaustive explanations to defend themselves and justify their actions to feel safe. If love or approval were conditional on being “perfect,” “well-behaved,” or understood, one might over-explain to ensure acceptance.

Even growing up with unpredictable or volatile parents can lead a child to become hyper-vigilant, overexplaining to control situations and prevent anger or conflict. If a person has a history of being gaslit (having their reality denied), they may overexplain to create a concrete, un-distortable record of their words and intentions.

As an overexplainer, when you ask for something, you instinctively try to balance everything at once. You may feel anxious, and your mind may be racing under the pressure to get it right, to make sense, and to protect yourself and the other person’s feelings by softening your requests and responses.

However, overexplaining comes out as too many words and details, too long, and even confusing to the other person, whose brain is trying to distil your main point and requests. By the time you’re finished, you’ve built a whole essay instead of a sentence, and they might’ve gotten lost along the way or completely tuned you out, thinking of what they want to say to you.

Also, the more explanation you provide, the more places the conversation can go. If the other person is a manipulator, it gives them ample ammunition to hijack the focus in a direction of their choice.

This is exactly the paradox of over-explaining: you add information to make yourself clearer, but too much information makes the message easier to challenge and re-direct, leaving you feeling misunderstood and frustrated.

Women are more likely to overexplain themselves, particularly in professional and high-stakes settings, often as a result of social conditioning and a need to ensure they are heard or taken seriously. This behavior is generally not about a lack of confidence, but rather a coping mechanism against being dismissed, interrupted, or misconstrued. Ironically, it backfires as it is perceived as an insecurity or lack of confidence.

Many men overexplain to maintain a façade of being “the expert in the room,” fearing that not knowing something makes them look weak. They use “report talk,” which focuses on transmitting information, establishing status, and solving problems. It also backfires as they are perceived as “know-it-alls.”

Five Situations Where People Overexplain The Most

1. Saying No. This is the classic one. Most people find it really difficult to say “No” without justification. The intention is kindness, but the effect is that the other person hears uncertainty or a problem that needs solving and keeps pushing.

Case in point - my mom trying to get out of a meeting she doesn’t want to go to. Her friend invited her to hang out with another lady, my mom dislikes “because she drinks a lot.” My mom said yes, and for the last two days she’s been talking about not wanting to go. Today is the day. It’s raining out. My mom called her friend, offering a long-winded explanation of how the humidity hurts her bones, so she can’t go. So, her friend just changed the date to “accommodate” my mother.

2. Asking for What You Need. Requests often turn into speeches because we’re trying to prove the request is reasonable. We explain the background, the circumstances, the emotional context, and the logic behind the request.

But the more explanation we add, the easier it becomes for the listener to debate the reasoning instead of responding to the request.

3. Addressing Hurt Feelings. This is where many people begin apologizing for their own emotions. They soften the message before it’s even delivered and minimize their feelings before they even state them.

4. Setting Boundaries. Boundaries trigger over-explaining because we fear being perceived as selfish or unreasonable, and because, despite needing the boundary, we also need approval and to be liked. So we build a case and present evidence. We walk the other person through our thought process. Meanwhile, they just want to know if you will or won’t do something.

5. Ending or Redefining Relationships. This is the hardest situation for most people. Whether it’s a romantic relationship, a friendship, or a professional dynamic, people often try to soften the impact by explaining everything that led to the decision. Ironically, the extra explanation can create confusion and reopen negotiations. Clarity may feel uncomfortable in the moment, but it prevents long, exhausting conversations that never actually resolve the issue.

If you recognize yourself here, fear not. I recommend four things you can do to solve your tendency to overexplain. I’ve also put together a Hard Conversation Scripts Pack with examples on how to say “no,” ask for what you need, handle pushback and defensiveness, and respond to accusations without over-explaining.

Paid subscribers can access it below.
Free readers can purchase it HERE.

Four Things To Do Instead Of Overexplaining And Get Results.

Recognizing the habit is the easy part. Changing how you respond in real conversations is harder.

Fear not! You absolutely can replace the overexplaining habit and get better results communicating. Here is how.

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  + “stop explaining” protocol.

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But what if loneliness is less about availability and isolation and more about friction? What I mean by friction is the discomfort we feel when we try to communicate or when we hear things we don’t like.

Friction is inherent in human relationships. It always has been. Misunderstandings. Value differences. Annoyances. Political disagreements. Personality clashes. Competing needs. Subtle hurts. Repair attempts that don’t quite repair.

People hold grudges, judge, bully, criticize, and put others down. Some jump to fast conclusions. Others believe crazy things. And yet others are easily offended, take everything personally, and play blame games. Arrogance and entitlement don’t help either.

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For most of human history, we endured friction because we had to. We didn’t curate our village or tribe. We didn’t swipe left on neighbors we didn’t like. We didn’t block cousins and annoying snoopers. We were forced into proximity and had to figure out how to live with them all because survival depended on it. We learned not to fear or avoid discomfort, but to deal with it, which required skills, eating humble pie, and a big-picture attitude.

Now we hide behind fake names on social media. We ghost people we don’t want to answer calls and messages from. We can block numbers, emails, and social media users. We can move to another town, get another job, and get divorced. We have the luxury to pretend that discomfort from interactions with others doesn’t exist by avoiding them.

And that, more than anything else, is driving modern loneliness. But instead of talking about our intolerance, lack of social skills, and thin skin, we talk about loneliness as if it’s a numbers problem.

The U.S. Surgeon General reported in 2023 that about half of American adults experience measurable loneliness. Young adults report even higher rates. Similar patterns are emerging in Europe and parts of Asia. But this is happening in a world of constant connection. We have phones in our pockets, group chats, video calls, and thousands of “friends” on social platforms. We’ve never been more connected. We have an explosion of events, festivals, meetups, interest groups, etc.

So the issue can’t be a lack of access to people. The issue has to be the superficiality and fragility of these connections. Because we avoid discomfort and friction, we avoid going deeper and getting to know anyone or allowing others to know us. We have no patience for explaining ourselves or listening to others. It’s easier to accuse someone of stupidity, label them toxic, selfish, and delusional, and discount them altogether than to work on understanding and appreciating nuances.

Nowadays, one of the biggest contributors to the fragility of connections is politics. At some point, politics stopped being about policy preferences. It now signals identity. It tells you what moral tribe someone belongs to. It hints at whether they are “good” or “dangerous.” Pew Research shows that large portions of both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. view the opposing side not just as wrong, but as a threat to the nation. They see each other as dishonest and closed-minded. Nearly four in ten Americans report that political disagreements have damaged personal relationships.

When disagreement feels existential, friction feels threatening. And when friction feels threatening, especially to our identity, we withdraw.

You can see it everywhere. Families fracture over elections. Friendships dissolve after one heated dinner conversation. Dating matches evaporate over a mildly awkward comment.

The threshold for rupture is lower than it used to be. One wrong word and we’re done. So we force ourselves to keep things light. We avoid certain topics. We stick to small talk. We compartmentalize parts of ourselves depending on who we’re with. On the surface, interactions remain pleasant but thin.

Sadly, thin interactions do not build intimacy. Intimacy requires risk. It requires disclosure. It requires the willingness to stay in the room when something feels uncomfortable. It requires repair. Without repair, connection has no chance. It dies during the first disagreement or misunderstanding.

So people find themselves surrounded by others at work, in yoga classes, in dating situations, in family gatherings, and yet feel profoundly unseen. It’s this feeling of not being seen that is synonymous with loneliness.

The whole thing is one spiraling down, self-reinforcing cycle. Research shows that loneliness heightens threat sensitivity. It increases vigilance for rejection. It amplifies cortisol. The brain becomes primed to detect social danger. When we feel isolated, we become more attuned to cues that confirm that we don’t belong and that others are dangerous. In turn, this makes us more likely to avoid friction and social discomfort by avoiding other people altogether, or at least, by keeping interactions pleasant but not deep enough for us to feel seen and heard.

Interestingly, isolation makes us more suggestible, too. When we’re lonely, belonging feels urgent. Algorithms understand this even if not intentionally in a moral sense. They are optimized for engagement. And engagement rises when people feel outrage, moral validation, or threat.

Studies analyzing social media behavior consistently show that posts containing moral-emotional language spread farther than those containing neutral language. Hence, “rage-bate” was chosen as Word Of The Year for 2025.

If you’re lonely and scrolling, what captures you? Content that tells you:

• You are right.

• You are good.

• The problem is them.

• Your tribe is under attack.

• You are under existential threat.

• Your opponents are disreputable, immoral, and dangerous

Facts don’t matter, and frequently we don’t have all the facts. But this type of content simulates instant belonging. However, it also deepens division.

So the cycle becomes self-reinforcing:

Loneliness increases vulnerability.
Vulnerability increases tribal capture.
Tribal capture increases conflict.
Conflict destroys relationships.
Destroyed relationships increase loneliness.

We are caught in a loop.

There are other factors, of course. But those forces don’t fully explain why people with partners, friends, and active social calendars still feel lonely.

Evolutionarily, humans lived in small groups where exit was costly. They needed the group for survival and had to develop tolerance for conflict, skills in conflict resolution, and skills in relationship repair. Now survival doesn’t depend on the group in the same way. So our tolerance shrank. But the uncomfortable truth is that if friction becomes intolerable, isolation becomes inevitable. Connection without friction simply does not exist.

So, perhaps, loneliness is a symptom of our crisis of resilience in connection. We are less practiced at staying in unsettling conversations, at hearing different and opposing views, and at being misunderstood and trying again. At the same time, we’ve created technology to help us optimize for comfort, while also misunderstanding intimacy and connection to be nothing but comfort. So, we feel stuck and confused.

If we want to reduce loneliness, we don’t just need more events, more apps, more networks. We need thicker skin and softer hearts. We need conflict tolerance and conflict resolution skills. We need to decouple disagreement from moral annihilation. Without that, we will continue to mistake hyperconnection for belonging. And we will continue to feel alone even in crowded rooms and engaged social media spaces.

That’s just my two cents…

👉 In addition…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about running a small, structured 5-week group for people who feel disconnected. Maybe not dramatically unhappy or in crisis, but untethered from friendships, family, intimacy, and even from themselves.

This would not be a lecture series. It’s not meant to be group therapy either. It would be a guided, small-group process (max 12), real conversation, structured, practical, and will have an accountability element.

The focus:
Rebuilding meaningful connections in relationships, friendships, and your own inner life.

It will be held online.

Before I build it, I want to know if there’s real interest.

If you’d seriously consider joining, reply with YES so I can send early details when (and if) it launches. No one can see who voted.

After you vote, fill out this 1-question form, so I can get a better idea of what you would benefit the most from: https://forms.gle/UZGWKXGjbPzk3Pw88

Val.

I was also the smart kid. It went well together with the responsible bit. I got attention and praise for it, and the adults left me alone. As long as I kept my grades up, I could do whatever I wanted, and my parents would never know if I didn’t tell them. Thank God there were no drugs in communist Bulgaria back then. No gangs. No guns. Not many ways to get in real trouble.

I still have a scar on my right knee from falling off my bike and cutting it on a piece of glass. I could barely walk, but I managed to hide it, despite it bleeding profusely. I knew I wasn’t gonna be in trouble if I didn’t ask for help.

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It does help Lulu get some treats, though. That’s important because Lulu is the love of my life! So, thank you to all my paid subscribers! Lulu thanks you, too.

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We all have limitations and challenges - physical, mental, circumstantial. Most people, more or less, figure things out and move along through various life experiences without becoming their limitations. To their bewilderment and sometimes frustration, others define their entire existence by their limitation stories.

I am talking about the person who introduces and excuses themselves with a condition they have, or with something that happened to them a long time ago. Imagine a depressed relative who claims to have “tried everything and nothing helps.” They even seem to think of melancholy as a sign of intellectual credibility, or as evidence that they feel and care more deeply than others. Some even develop arrogance around their depression and feel entitled to special considerations.

You might know someone diagnosed with anxiety. At first, the diagnosis is a relief because it explains panic attacks, avoidance, and exhaustion. But over time, they start thinking of themselves and introduce themselves as “an anxious person.” They pre-emptively opt out of opportunities and expect friends and family to make special adjustments for them.

Some people get diagnosed with adult ADHD. They learn some tools, get medication, and feel some relief. But after a while, they begin to excuse their poor follow-through and planning, with the condition, blaming everything they mess up on “this is just how my brain works.” They expect lower relational accountability and pre-emptively seek forgiveness to avoid taking responsibility.

Some people who have experienced genuinely traumatic events seem to get stuck in a “what happened to me” loop and begin to organize every decision they make around it. For them, trauma explains their underfunctioning, boundaries, and relationship challenges long after the danger is gone, and they treat the psychological injury from trauma as an irreversible diagnosis akin to losing an arm or a leg.

A professional may define themselves by working long hours, being busy, and even by their exhaustion. Burnout becomes a badge of honor. A person with a chronic illness may define themselves by their limitation and purposefully avoid anything that could help them get better. Another one considers themselves “unlucky in love” and makes sure to chase away all good options. Someone else grows up in scarcity and remains there psychologically, regardless of how much money and resources they have. Others are in a permanent state of political resistance and activism.

I don’t want to invalidate people’s experiences, nor do I want to judge anyone. I do want to point out the process of “becoming” that which limits us, and the continuous choice to identify as the person who IS the limitation, thus causing ourselves more and ongoing suffering than the original condition.

Which brings me to Edith Piaf, the iconic French singer from the 1940s, known as The Little Sparrow. She wrote and sang what became her signature song:

Her story illustrates my point. She grew up in extreme poverty and sang for coins on the streets of Paris. When the nightclub manager Louis Leplee first “discovered” her in the mid-1930s, she had no proper stage clothes, no wardrobe, no money, no image. The story goes that for her first official club performance, she had to sew her own dress from hand-me-downs and was unable to finish it, so she showed up on stage with one sleeve.

This stark, simple black dress became her signature outfit. Nothing flashy or distracting, but also nothing luxurious. Her poverty defined her style, and that style became her identity. The black dress turned into her expression of authenticity, seriousness, moral gravity, and artistic purity.

Later in life, after she became famous and wealthy, she refused to change out of loyalty to suffering. It might seem trivial when it comes to stage outfits, but this same attitude persisted in the entirety of her life. Her early hardship gave her credibility and her intensity.

But it also locked her into a painful paradigm. She saw pain as truth. In her view, unless something hurts, it’s not real. Love wasn’t real unless it was devastating. Art wasn’t true unless it cost her physically or emotionally. Her audience reinforced this by revering her wounds, interpreting the rawness as honesty. The pain became her defining emotion.

Diviating from pain ceased to be an option because it meant she was no longer authentically “herself.” It meant betraying not only her style but her music lovers and their expectations of her.

Piaf grew up in poverty, neglect, violence, and unpredictability. Chaos was life for her, and it created multiple pain points. As an adult, she continued to live in these familiar ways despite her means, which reliably recreated pain, intensity, and emotional extremity. She gravitated towards unavailable or doomed partners and cycled in and out of fast, consuming, and destabilizing relationships. The death of “the love of her life” in an airplane crash while on his way to see her didn’t help either.

From her 30s onward, Piaf lived in near-constant bodily distress. She survived several serious car accidents and was left in chronic pain, having to endure long hospitalizations and continuously deteriorating health. She developed a morphine addiction, initially prescribed to her for pain, and became an alcoholic by today’s standards.

All of this while she kept a relentless and taxing touring schedule, always exposed to the public with very little time for herself. She became the performer of pain and suffering, living emotional extremes to sing about them.

According to her songs, she regretted nothing:

Interestingly, the French Foreign Legion adopted this song during the Algerian War, further enhancing its reputation as an anthem of endurance and defiance.

We don’t know if her musical career would have been different if she hadn’t suffered as much as she did. But we do know that she suffered a lot and refused to reinvent herself or change her life. She could have. She didn’t because the chaos and suffering were no longer happening to her. She became them.

If Edith Piaf illustrates identity fusion with suffering, Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist living with ALS, illustrates the exact opposite. Hawking refused to center his identity on tragedy. He was diagnosed with ALS at 21 and given 2 years to live with progressive paralysis, loss of speech, mobility, and privacy. Yet psychologically, he framed ALS as a logistical problem, not a metaphysical one. He saw his illness as context only.

Instead of focusing on the inevitability of his deterioration and dependency, he built a long academic career and created stability around himself as an antidote to the illness’s instability. Not only did he outlive his diagnosed demise by 50+ years, but managed to get married twice and have three children. He also made significant contributions to theoretical physics, most notably the discovery of what became known as Hawking radiation (the radiation emitted by black holes previously thought to be completely “black”).

He lived with extraordinary limitations, but did not organize his sense of self around them, and became famous for proving that even the most absolute limits in nature are not as final as they appear.

Why do some people become psychologically dependent on their limitations?

There are five reasons this happens. They are hard to hear for people who have already fused their identities to a limiting story, because it will sound like victim-blaming to them. But they are real and worth considering.

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You know about the boiling frog. The frog probably started by enjoying the water, but ignored that it was sitting in a pot. Not many good things can happen to a frog in a pot. So, frogs should avoid pots. That’s just basic frog wisdom.

What we can learn from frogs is to look around and pay attention to our surroundings and what we are about to jump into, because once you decide to do something, it is going to be really difficult to change your mind. You will defend and rationalize your decision, double down, get upset at any suggestion that you might be in a pot, and then suffer accordingly.

This is known as “escalation of commitment” or “commitment bias.” It’s a psychological phenomenon in which individuals (and even groups and organizations) continue to invest time, money, or effort in a failing course of action, driven by sunk costs, ego protection, and the desire to justify past decisions. They willingly, even diligently, ignore evidence of failure and continue to throw good resources after bad in hopes of a turnaround.

Sadly, most people are not aware of what escalation of commitment looks like in their own lives, how they double down, ignore facts, and stay the course. Most importantly, they may not realize how this psychological bias is causing grief and making them feel trapped and depressed. It may even lead them to retaliate in unskillful ways, misbehave, and cause more damage to themselves and those around them.

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No militarized, masked brutality. The police roll calmly around in black vehicles, somehow aesthetically pleasing and elegant, with a string of blue lights on top. I also see them in blue with white and yellow markings, resembling stylish race cars more than law enforcement. One of them stopped and let Lulu and I cross the street. When I turned to wave a “thank you,” I saw the two men inside smiling back and nodding. How polite! How novel for an American watching Minnesota residents dragged, maced, beaten, and killed by American law enforcement in tactical gear, faces hidden, with helmets and gas masks.

In the upside-down world we live in, I have dug my heels in reality and refuse to surrender my humanity. I refuse to normalize asking American residents for their papers and violating their constitutional rights, but most of all, I refuse to surrender my sanity to their military circus.

I believe that the strength to overcome the worst impulses of this Administration comes from a commitment to what we love, not from fear of the people terrorising American cities. We need to stay sane to keep the love alive. We need to emotionally regulate to avoid unnecessary escalation and to outsmart them.

The perspective from high above

Fear kills the prey in the jungle, not just the predator. We are in the jungle now. Our number one job is not to fall prey.

Imagine the advantage of a gazelle in the Savana, if it had a bird’s-eye view of its surroundings. Unlike the gazelle in the Savana, we can access information that gives us a bird’s-eye view if we resist the algorithmic pull that locks our attention and emotional resources.

From this perspective, the checks in the system are holding better than most realize.

Litigation Tracker enumerates 253 active cases challenging the Trump administration’s actions, as of the end of 2025. Fulcrum reports that 530 cases have been filed against the administration in 2025, far exceeding the number filed against previous presidents (as of November 2025). Just Security counted 583, as of Jan 16, 2026.

“,,, significantly more than the 133 multistate lawsuits against Biden across his entire term, and 30 to 40 against Obama in his first year, and fewer than 20 against George W. Bush in his first year.”

According to Just Security’s tracker, there have been 200 wins against the government, so far (Government Action Blocked 51, Temporarily Blocked 109, Blocked Pending Appeal 33, Case Closed in Favor of Plaintiff 7). The Government has won 110 cases in the same period.

That’s a pretty crappy track record for a government with unlimited resources. Among the cases lost by the government are some big ones, like the California redistricting case, the California and Illinois cases about the use of the National Guard by the president, etc. And just a day ago, a Federal Judge restricted ICE’s use of force on protesters because of what is happening in Minneapolis. These cases then become a precedent when other states find themselves in the same position.

Judges fight back in one other way. After the 2024 election, unlike previous post-election periods, fewer federal judges eligible for retirement or senior status moved to create vacancies that Trump could fill. Observers find this to be an atypical pattern, calling it strategic deferment likely driven by concern about who would be appointed as their successor, directly depriving Trump of the ability to fill those seats.

The Fed Chair is fighting back for the Federal Reserve’s independence, too, and the consensus is that it will be an easy win for him if the whole thing even goes to court. At the same time, other “retribution” cases were dismissed, like the James Comey and Tisha James cases. Subsequent grand juries reportedly refused to bring new charges against James after the dismissal.

U.S. senators introduced legislation to prohibit the Pentagon and State Department from using funds to occupy, annex, blockade, or assert control over the territory of NATO members (including Greenland). Parallel legislation was introduced in the House, and a Congressional delegation just visited Greenland to reaffirm the partnership and uphold its national sovereignty. A number of Republicans have spoken out publicly against this. Meanwhile, the European NATO countries and Canada are also standing up for Greenland. This is a developing story, but a good start.

As for ICE, I believe Spring will melt it. They are becoming a liability for Republicans in the midterms and the 2028 elections. Some state legislatures (New Jersey, California, Oregon) have passed or proposed measures to limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement, including banning local law enforcement cooperation with ICE under certain conditions. Also, Democratic lawmakers are pushing bills to allow civil lawsuits against federal officers for constitutional violations and keep immigration agents without warrants out of sensitive locations (schools, homes, hospitals). (AP News)

Cities like Seattle and New York are formally organizing their infrastructure and training people on how to productively and lawfully resist ICE. Some are running campaigns to educate their residents on the difference between the local police and federal immigration agencies, and urging them to sign up for ICE alert apps to help protect their neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, Progressive members of Congress have pledged to block or condition DHS funding unless major reforms to immigration enforcement are enacted. They propose reforms, including requiring warrants for ICE actions, banning masked agents, and ending private detention facility use, using appropriations as leverage.

Just like in the case of the ACA Healthcare subsidies, the House eventually passed a 3-year extension because Republicans finally folded under pressure from the public, I believe the same will happen with ICE. The ACA debate is currently in the Senate. Something tells me they will fold, too. Fingers crossed. Maybe, they just need a little more time, so the public will forget how Republicans laughed at Democrats for giving up on the issue just a couple of months ago when Trump declared victory.

Kristi Noem is already going on news stations declaring victory for ICE. She claims that in 2025, more than 2.5 million illegals have been forced out of the country, of which about 600,000 deported and the rest self-deported. The official numbers are not out yet, but independent monitors estimate the actual deportation numbers to be around 340,000. If Miller had his way, at 3000 removals per day, we should have seen over a million by the end of 2025.

Recent reports from January 2026 indicate ICE in Texas has been quietly releasing some detained immigrant families, including children, despite a public “zero-release” policy and without explanations, as per USA Today.

Just like everything else the administration does, they start out with bluster and end up with little progress but lots of self-praise. The point is to capture the news and stay there because impression matters more than facts.

Remember DOGE and the “chainsaw for democracy?” If you forgot, they promised to restructure, cut, and streamline the federal government, and to ultimately save the American taxpayers $2 trillion dollars. After Elon became more of an eyesore, aggravating pretty much everyone, DOGE was quietly dismantled. A government archive entry indicates that by November 2025, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (USOPM) stated DOGE “didn’t exist anymore.” Independent investigations by multiple outlets verified that only $1.6 - $2.5 billion was possibly saved.

DODGE’s failure was not as loudly advertised as its inception. But that’s how this Administration works. Remember the $2000 checks Trump announced he would send every taxpayer to help with the “affordability hoax”? Well, no one is talking about that anymore either. How about the astronomical tariffs Trump announced on “Liberation Day”? Most of them have been rolled back or completely disappeared quietly, which is why, despite prices rising, they haven’t risen as much as they could have if the tariffs were still in place.

Then there were the attempts by the Administration to stop funding for various programs, like SNAP benefits, NIH funding, etc. They have also been reinstated because, it turns out, you really can’t stop money appropriated by Congress. The Administration quietly folded instead of picking a fight.

The Trump administration sought to defund and dismantle the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which includes Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and other international broadcasting entities. Congress appropriated roughly $653 million for USAGM—far above the administration’s proposal—preserving VOA and related services.

NASA’s FY2026 budget is about $24.4 billion, far higher than the White House proposal and nearly restoring science mission funding the Administration previously crippled. The administration initiated steep cuts or rescissions to foreign aid and global health programming like USAID. Congress allocated about $9.4 billion for global health assistance in the FY2026 foreign aid bill, well above the administration’s requested level and signaling bipartisan support for sustained global health funding.

In early January 2026, health officials initially cut approximately $1.9 billion from mental health and substance use programs under SAMHSA to align with the administration’s restructuring plans. After bipartisan outcry, funding was reinstated within a day for most of those programs.

These are just a few examples of many. Even federal workers have been asked to come back after being fired. According to internal reporting, the Trump administration has scrambled to rehire many of these federal workers after recognizing that cuts had damaged core services like weather forecasting, drug approvals, nuclear site management, and many more, and faced legal, agency, and political pressure.

Almost all of the probationary workers fired under DOGE guidance were reinstated or at least placed on paid administrative leave as of March 2025. At the National Institute for Occupational Health, roughly 875 of about 1,000 staff were terminated in April 2025 as part of cuts. In January 2026, the administration reversed those cuts and reinstated nearly all of those employees at the agency after legal and public pressure. At the FDA Office of Regulatory Policy, nearly 50 workers were fired and then called back to work later in 2025. CDC reinstated at least 450 employees previously fired during workforce reductions. Additional rehiring occurred across CDC branches (HIV/viral hepatitis, environmental health, etc.), including over 200 at CDC’s National Center for HIV, STD and Tuberculosis Prevention and 158 at the National Center for Environmental Health.

Again, these are just a few examples across the government agencies.

From this bird’s-eye view, we can see where the predators hang out and how quickly they move from one target to another, but in most cases, their efforts are either unsuccessful, litigated, thwarted, and very unpopular.

The most important thing to remember is that most of what this administration is doing can, indeed, be undone.

They sometimes undo it themselves. Executive orders can be rescinded. Funding can be restored. Employees can be rehired. Trump’s government is making news and breaking norms, but not instituting lasting policy changes. This has been the least active Congress ever in American history, meaning fewer policy changes, laws, and legislation. They are letting Trump do deals, but deals can be redone, too. If anything, Trump and the Administration are exposing the weaknesses in the system and the importance of no longer relying on norms. They are creating an appetite for enshrining in law norms we’ve previously taken for granted.

How to stay sane and keep it together.

Now that you know what things look like from a big-picture perspective, you need to figure out how not to get caught in the newscycle, the next shit storm, the next outrage. Let me tell you what I’ve been doing.

Also, I want to tell you more about Sevilla and show you a few pictures. I have a story about Spain. And, finally, I know many of you are bewildered at how regular Americans can still find it in them to support Trump. I have a gifted article for you from the Atlantic at the end.

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Every year, I read the Eurasia Group’s The Top Risks report. The 2026 report just came out. This is a geopolitical report, if you haven’t heard of it. I strongly recommend you read it because it gives the big picture: America in the world and the world around it.

Most definitely, Americans will feel it financially, when traveling, and because of alarming changes in our political system. No ifs, no buts about it. And you won’t like it because, as much as Americans like to bitch about everything, we are likely about to see our world drastically change for our children and our communities, and wish we bitched louder and demanded more of our politicians while we could have.

How close does the Eurasia group get to reality with their predictions???

Pretty close usually.

Last year, they forecasted a deepening global leadership void, a worsening G-Zero world with power vacuums, emboldened rogue actors, rising miscalculations, and systemic instability. Well, we got it. Trump’s erratic politics, treatment of allies, and transactional, protectionist attitude reshaped international arrangements and disrupted established power lines, definitely destabilizing peaceful, cooperative leadership structures. We say international conflicts persist and deepen, and even the peace efforts Trump claimed were successful proved to be just another PR stunt. They are most definitely continuing on all fronts. Look them up if you don’t believe me.

The predicted “The Rule of Don” and the erosion of U.S. institutional norms under Trump, but mostly underestimated the scope and speed of these changes. Trump has been consolidating executive power, purging civil service, weakening checks and balances, weaponizing the government against his political opponents, past and present, and terrorizing the population far more than their expectations. Meanwhile, internationally, actions like withdrawal from international organizations and contentious foreign policy moves illustrated a personalized governance style that strained traditional consensus.

As predicted, in 2025, US–China tensions escalated, especially over trade and strategic technology. There were tariff battles and critical supply chain issues in sectors like rare earths. But even though decoupling pressures and economic competition increased, the overt breakdown was mitigated by negotiated adjustments late in the year, especially after the Trump - Xi meeting, when Trump found out that China has leverage on the U.S.

Russia remained a principal source of geopolitical instability with continuing conflict dynamics, threatening European security and more. They’ve been resistant to peace deals and slowing down negotiations, saying one thing and doing another, and overall not allowing Trump the victory of settling the conflict in 24 hours.

They accurately predicted the trend of AI governance risk continuing, even if headline crises did not ignite in 2025. However, climate and environmental risks did not feature as a top geopolitical risk in their forecast, yet record-breaking weather and climate impacts were major 2025 stories (e.g., extreme events recognized by global leaders).

So, basically, the Eurasia Group knows what they are talking about and has a pretty good track record of figuring things out ahead of time.

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Allow me to explain and include some things you probably didn’t know because the American media is likely not covering them, or at least not enough.

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What just happened in Venezuela is extraordinarily dangerous, legally weak, and strategically reckless, even if one accepts every criticism of Maduro’s regime. You can oppose Maduro and still see this as a major escalation that crosses lines the U.S. has generally avoided since the Cold War.

The legal problem is not a technicality. It is the core issue. The statement “we are going to run the country” implies de facto occupation.

This triggers three problems simultaneously.

First, U.S. constitutional law. Congress has not authorized war, occupation, or regime administration. The strike on Venezuela goes well beyond past gray-zone actions, like targeted strikes, hostage rescues, and limited operations. If allowed to stand, it sets a precedent for unilateral executive takeover of foreign states.

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7 life hacks backed by psychology.
5 health tips backed by science.
5 ways to simplify your life.

And BIG, influential stories and trends to watch for in 2026 – by experts.‘Tis the list-making season. We set goals and resolutions, and look forward to new starts, fixing old problems, and better luck next year. I like looking backward to see what worked and didn’t work last year and contemplate why before I turn my attention forward and try to commit myself to new things. Based on that experience, here are some ideas you may find useful.

• 7 life hacks backed by psychology.

• 5 health tips backed by science.

• 5 ways to simplify your life.

• And BIG, influential stories and trends to watch for in 2026.

I would love to know what you are contemplating for 2026. I will be working in a realm I am a little bit uncomfortable in – becoming more of a people person. It may seem strange for those who know me personally because you’ve seen me for years organizing community events and putting people together for various reasons. I present as a people person, but whoever really knows me can tell you that I am actually fiercely independent, self-sufficient, and pretty much living in my own world.

Increasingly, it seems the world needs more and more people’s people. Why do I say that? Because of these fine findings:

• The 1% Rule in cyber culture. It says that “1% of actors create the vast majority of new content.“ The other 90% simply observe, and 9% contribute sparingly. However, that 1% is not always the best and the brightest of us. Another study found that “individuals high in psychopathy and FoMO are consistently more likely to engage in online political activity.” And, “those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement.”
  
  Naturally I had to ask Google’s AI what is President Trump’s Truth Social posting rate, and it said this: “President Trump posts on Truth Social very frequently, often in intense bursts, sometimes hundreds of times in a single day or night, like his record spree of 158-160 posts in a few hours in late 2025, demonstrating a high-volume, sometimes near-constant engagement pattern. His posting frequency varies greatly, from rapid-fire outbursts to periods of less activity, but generally remains prolific, averaging many posts daily or even hourly during peak times.”
  

  Well, now, that’s just awkward.

• More articles are created now by AI than by humans, in something that used to be 100% a human creative activity, and many paid the bills as writers while others aspired to get there someday. Meanwhile, AI has proven to be more persuasive than humans. It apparently knows how to manipulate our emotions better than we do. You’ve probably heard the stories about people becoming convinced of things like inventing a new math, and others, unfortunately, finding validation in their suicide reasoning instead of help to prevent them. My own mom sent me a music video that made her cry, thinking it was real. When I pointed out it’s AI-generated, her response was, “Really? Oh, well. It’s nice though.”

  
  Research indicates that older adults (generally defined as 50+ or 65+) are more susceptible to AI-generated content and misinformation, with studies showing they are significantly less capable of detecting AI-generated text, audio, and images compared to younger demographics. A 2025 study revealed that adults aged 65+ scored 65.5% on AI detection tests, compared to nearly 80% for those aged 18–29, essentially performing only moderately better than a coin flip.

  
  This is one more reason not to argue with your elderly relatives about anything they saw on the interwebs. You are not going to be more convincing than the AI slop they’ve been consuming.

• The Friendship Recession is real and devastating for many. “The percentage of U.S. adults who report having no close friends has quadrupled to 12% since 1990.” I wrote about it in July of 2025. Also, discussed “The Shape of Modern Loneliness” earlier in the year.

So, I can’t help but conclude that, indeed, the world needs more people’s people. I may not be the best one for the job, but I am going to try. I hope you will join me, too.

On to the lists. Add to them whatever suits you.

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For yogis and Buddhists, love is less about an emotional attachment, which would be more akin to an affliction of the mind, a distraction, and more of a trainable orientation of mind and action, inseparable from ethics, clarity, and liberation. For the yogis, love shows up in “non-harming” (ahimsa), friendliness (maitri), compassion (karuna), and joy in others’ happiness (mudita). In other words, love is cultivated as clarity and goodwill without expectation or clinging.

The Buddhists called it compassion and extended it liberally to everyone and everything (meta) and made individual enlightenment (freedom from suffering) dependent on helping others reach theirs. They saw hatred and ill-will as direct causes of suffering.

Similarly, the Stoics of ancient Greece emphasize care, duty, and rational concern as essential to a good life, which they defined as “virtuous.” They believed that while we extend natural affection towards family, friends, and community, all humans belong to one moral community and we owe everyone fairness and goodwill. Stoic “love” is closer to benevolence plus responsibility, not passion or fusion.

Christianity makes a radical assertion: “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) and focuses on service to God and to others in the name of God. The teachings of Jesus Christ elevate love above law, ritual, purity codes, or spiritual achievement.

From the Gospel of Matthew:

1) Love God.

2) Love your neighbor as yourself

Everything else is subordinate. While you are at it, Christ commands, love your enemies, forgive without limits and conditions, care for the poor, sick, excluded, and morally despised, and prove your love through self-sacrifice.

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So, after 3500 years of yoga philosophy, 2500 years of Buddhism, 2300 years of Stoicism, and 2000+ years of Christianity, all point in the same direction – love as an action, we ended up selfish, chasing vibes, angry, isolated, and blaming each other for the suffering we experience daily.

I don’t think the world has ever been perfect, nor have humans, even those who chose to belong to and identify with these philosophical systems. Documented abuses of power, exploitations, and perversion of the spirit of these doctrines exist as dark stains on the paths of lightness. But it does seem that modern culture has now completely redefined love itself, and the results are sad and devastating for many.

In the 20^th century, we want to feel love but do not exactly want to serve or be responsible. And there’s evidence that people increasingly think of love as something others should provide for them. With it comes a set of expectations, but not necessarily coupled with responsibility for the well-being of others. When it comes to the kind of compassion, care, and rejoicing for those in our communities and even further removed, we fall even shorter of the philosophical recommendations we may profess to admire.

In the “spiritual but not religious” circles I used to hang around, spiritual bypassing, of which the Buddhists warned, was common. I witnessed people practicing what feels good to them, for self-care, identity, and community, but not because they feel compelled towards compassionate action or service to others. I watched as they used spiritual beliefs, practices, or language to avoid psychological work, emotional pain, relational responsibility, or moral accountability. Yoga, Buddhism, and spiritual practice have become places to hide from personal discomfort and lenses through which to judge others’ pain and challenges.

On the Christian side, the very fact that many Christians support Trump, a convicted felon proven to be a cheat and much more who still behaves with unsatiable greed, and the current administration’s push to limit the rights of groups of people (women, people of color) and brutally mistreat neighbors with made-for-social-media immigration raids is a testament to how corrupted their own beliefs have become.

Interestingly, Pew Research (2025) states: “The religious profiles of U.S. adults – how religious they are and what religion they identify with – are closely aligned with their partisan political identities, according to the new Religious Landscape Study (RLS).” 77% of the most religious in America identify as Republicans.

Pew Research also reported in May, 2025 that Americans’ trust in one another is at an all-time low. Only 34% said that most people can be trusted. That’s compared to 49% less than 50 years ago. Why would this matter:

“On the one hand, common sense tells us that people sometimes can be too trusting – falling prey to scams, for example. And distrust can be a rational response to a life full of hardship.

On the other hand, trust is the oil that lubricates the frictions of daily life. Trust makes it easier for people to work together to solve problems. It is beneficial for the economy because it’s related to confidence that other people will respect contracts, repay loans, and behave honestly. And higher trust is associated with better-functioning democratic institutions.

In short, overall levels of social trust seem to go hand in hand with many features of a healthy society, creating a “virtuous circle.”

It’s also hard to love someone or something you don’t trust. We avoid people we don’t trust. We are not compelled to extend compassion towards them or help them in any way. This might explain why otherwise good Christians feel animosity towards immigrants and non-Christians. Inundated with negative messaging about “liberals” and “immigrants” who somehow are out to ruin their way of life, they find it emotionally natural to abandon Christ’s own teachings.

But we also don’t fight for a country and a society we don’t love. If we see the government as corrupt and those in power as self-dealing, greedy, and shady, we don’t trust them to protect and preserve our rights and liberties, and fear retaliation if we speak out or make waves; we can’t love anything about that. The Guardian reports that applications for dual citizenship since 2023 have grown by 500%, mostly because people want a way out amid political uncertainty under Trump. 66% of Gen Z and millennials aspire to obtain dual citizenship.

At the same time, far more Americans say they’d like to live in the past than in the future. The majority of people who feel hopeful for the future are Republicans, but women are more likely than men to say they feel scared and sad about the future.

You draw your own conclusion about this last one, but this little fact may explain why women are avoiding relationships, prioritizing education and careers over starting a family, and not wanting to have children.

Statistics may be dry, but they tell a very interesting story. First, in the last few decades at least, many people’s worlds have shrunk to political identities and self-preservation while mistrusting others, which is contradictory to human flourishing.

We cannot be happy unless we surround ourselves with love and become the actions of love. Humans have been preoccupied with the concept for thousands of years (that we know of), intuitively grasping the idea and then codifying the prescribed process. And for most of that time, they have defined it in terms of action, service, and putting others ahead of ourselves. It’s only in recent history and modern, contemporary culture that we’ve narrowed the definition and focused on feelings and intimate, romantic love. While at the same time, we have become more isolated in a highly individualistic culture, prioritizing individual achievement over community and national contribution. We are bombarded with images of what love looks like – flowers, passion, gifts, companionship, with us on the receiving end of it. We are using technology to make dating connections in search of “the one” rather than falling in love with the many by volunteering, checking on neighbors, community organizing, or helping friends and strangers.

We’ve also completely isolated ourselves in our individual worlds, mostly in an antagonistic relationship loaded with expectations with our larger home, our country. We forgot the words of John F. Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”

We also choose vocations not because we love them, but because of what we can get out of them, and then we treat co-workers as steppingstones with the same utilitarian indifference. We choose friendships for their benefits. We let go of hobbies and leisure time we love because we feel obligated to do things we don’t love. The examples of choosing against love in our lives are literally endless.

We have shot ourselves in the foot by excluding sources and opportunities for love.

It behooves us to remember that we have the most control over things within our reach. That’s friends, family, pets, people you bump into at school, at the grocery store, in the local coffee shop. Politics is also local. Great leaders can rise from local communities when they understand those communities and care for their needs. Local volunteer organizations need our care and help. Local interest groups, clubs, craft circles, etc., are great places to meet people and fall in love with them and with what you do there, not romantically but with deep compassion and care. There are limitless opportunities for the one willing to practice love the way the old masters described it – unconditionally, compassionately, fullheartedly, and without attachment.

Maybe we should try this and see how our national politics changes over time to reflect us, rather than dictating who we should be.

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Happy holidays to all, and a better 2026 for sure!

Val.

If you missed my last three posts, they were:
What Survives When Empires Fall (a travel story with pictures)
Full Pockets, Empty Promises (on the politics of corruption)
Rage Bait – The Word Of The Year (cultural psychology)

George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, has spent decades tracking people after bereavement, disaster, and violence in his clinical research. He’s introduced innovations in trauma research, written books on the subject, and won multiple awards for his contributions to understanding trauma. In the last five years, he has been ranked among the top 1% of most frequently cited scientists among all science and social-science disciplines worldwide.

George Bonanno is not shy about busting the most common myths about trauma that most therapists and our therapy culture take as gospel. I don’t consider myself a trauma specialist, but I am reluctant to label anything and everything that people struggle with as trauma-related, if for no other reason than to avoid getting people stuck in what they think is an inescapable past.

A lot of science is on his side.

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After “brain rot” in 2024, it was only a matter of time before “rage bait” really got a hold of us. Brain rot describes the feeling of having a “dulled” mind from scrolling too much on social media platforms or other trivial online content. On average, people spend 2-3 hours a day on social media “consuming” content. Gen Z outperforms in this category, averaging 4-5 hours per day. Meaning some of them can’t put it down at all.

“Rage bait” builds on that theme of how online content affects cognition and emotion. In the “olden days,” sex sold everything – from vacuum cleaners to cars. These days, rage outperforms anything we’ve ever seen in audience engagement.

Oxford defines it as: Online content intentionally designed to provoke anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive — typically to increase engagement (clicks/comments/shares). Oxford noted that “rage bait” captures a shift from curiosity-based clickbait to outrage-driven engagement, often amplified by algorithms.

More eyeballs mean more advertising revenue for companies and content creators alike. But while it might all be about dollars, it makes terrible sense for us social media users, and for society.

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