Turns out your mitochondria have been reading your diary. Curt Buermeyer (writing from inside a 132-degree sauna, as one does) points to Dr. Martin Picard’s research showing that chronic stress burns roughly 60% of your daily cellular energy just keeping the lights on — and that people with a genuine sense of purpose have measurably stronger mitochondria. Purpose, it seems, is not a TED Talk abstraction. It’s fuel. The drift you feel on a Tuesday afternoon isn’t laziness or a character flaw; it’s your cells running a maintenance loop because you haven’t given them anywhere interesting to point. Which lands squarely in LIVE and LABOR territory, with LEGACY watching from the doorway. The uncomfortable question isn’t the big one — why are you here, cosmically, etc. It’s the small one: how many hours today did you spend genuinely aimed at something versus just being conveyed through them? Your cells apparently already know the answer.

Article Excerpt:

When you’re under chronic stress, the basic energy cost of just keeping your cells alive jumps by roughly 60%. Not the energy you use to think or move or create — just the energy required to maintain baseline cellular function.

Article Summary:

Curt Buermeyer opens sweating through a sauna session at 132 degrees, discovering that his brain had been quietly demoted while his body dealt with not cooking itself. That got him thinking about cellular energy — specifically the work of Dr. Martin Picard at Columbia, who runs the excellently named Mitochondrial Psychobiology Group and picked up a $1.5 million science prize in 2024 for treating mitochondria as information processors rather than the dusty “powerhouses” of high school biology.

The headline finding: chronic stress raises the baseline energy cost of simply keeping your cells alive by about 60%. Meaning more than half of what you’ve got is spent treading water before you do anything useful with it. Healing, learning, creating — all downstream of whatever’s left after the stress tax.

The really intriguing (and perhaps pseudo-scientific) part: Picard’s 2024 research shows that people with a strong sense of purpose have measurably more powerful mitochondria. Purpose is not just a motivational-poster concept — it’s a biological input your cells respond to.

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The post Your Cells Need You To Have a Purpose first appeared on Sevenelles.

Look, I have opinions. Confident ones. Delivered with the authority of a man who has clearly Googled nothing. And apparently I’m in excellent company, because the entire species is out here citing Maslow’s pyramid (which Maslow never drew), swearing by Myers-Briggs (which can’t even remember what it said about you five weeks ago), and dying on hills built out of pop trivia we absorbed by osmosis in 2003. Curt Buermeyer’s piece is a nice, gentle whack from the reality stick. A keen reminder that often the loudest person in the meeting wins, regardless of whether they’re right, because we’re all wired to mistake volume for evidence.

Article Excerpt:

Nearly 75% of people who retake the Myers-Briggs within five weeks receive a different personality type. That’s not a minor measurement issue — it’s a fundamental reliability failure. A personality test that gives you a different answer about yourself in five weeks isn’t measuring who you are. It’s measuring your mood that Tuesday morning.

Article Summary:

Curt Buermeyer opens with a card game at Lake Anna where he confidently told his son that seven shuffles fully randomizes a deck. His son pulled up Claude, checked the actual research, and — surprise — Dad was wrong. The seven-shuffle rule is oversimplified pop trivia Curt had been repeating for years without ever checking.

From there he takes a bat to several sacred cows. Maslow’s hierarchy? The needs are real, but the pyramid is empirically dead — and Maslow never even drew the triangle. Some management textbook did, and we’ve been citing it as gospel for fifty years. Myers-Briggs? Three-quarters of people get a different type when they retake it within five weeks. It’s a mood ring with a certificate.

The real villain is the Illusory Truth Effect — repetition masquerading as evidence — plus our evolved instinct to trust whoever sounds most sure. Curt’s recommended fix isn’t paralysis or pedantry. Just hold your confident claims more lightly, get curious when someone pushes back, and actually look up one thing this week that you’ve been citing for years. The gap between what you know and what’s true is where the interesting stuff lives.

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The post Often Wrong, Never in Doubt first appeared on Sevenelles.

Can we all take a second to step back and admit that this is really not good? No wonder we are not okay.

The scientists have officially diagnosed us

A recent review in Behavioral Sciences, summarized nicely by ZME Science, uses a phrase that should be printed on the back of every smartphone: evolutionary mismatch. The idea is that our brains evolved for one world, and we now live in a completely different one, and the gap between those two worlds is where all our anxiety, loneliness, doomscrolling, and low-grade nihilism come from.

We already know the food version of this. Sugar and fat were once rare and precious, so we evolved to hoover them up whenever we could. Now they’re piped into gas stations at 3 a.m. in the form of blue Icees the size of a toddler, and we’re shocked that half the country has metabolic syndrome. Same Pleistocene + 24/7 food glut = Diabetes and the explosion of GLP-1 use.

The scientists now recognize that the social version of this mismatch is doing to our minds what the Big Gulp did to our pancreases (pancrei?).

We were built for a village. Instead we have a news feed.

Our ancestors lived in bands of maybe 50 to 150 people. You knew everyone in your tribe. They knew you. If you screwed up, Grog gave you the stink-eye across the fire, you apologized by sharing your haunch of mammoth, and life continued.

Now your brain — using that same Pleistocene hardware — is trying to rank you against every influencer, ex-classmate, tech billionaire, and pilates-toned stranger an algorithm shoves in your face. Your status-detection module was designed to handle a village. You’re trying to handle the entire planet – a planet that also seems to be on fire, figuratively and literally.

This isn’t just cranky-old-man theorizing. A 2025 study in Nature Human Behaviour found that adolescents with mental health conditions were significantly more sensitive to online social comparison and feedback than their peers. Translation: the kids most vulnerable to comparison are the ones being served the most of it, at maximum brightness, at 1 a.m., in bed. What could possibly go sideways?

Loneliness has become a WHO-level emergency

The World Health Organization now considers loneliness a global health threat, estimating it affects roughly one in six people worldwide and increases risk of stroke, heart disease, dementia and early death at rates comparable to smoking. Let that land for a second: our species — the one that literally cannot survive infancy without other humans — is now dying from a shortage of them.

The former U.S. Surgeon General wrote an entire advisory comparing the health impact of chronic loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Fifteen. And unlike cigarettes, you don’t get to enjoy the enveloping warmth of the first nicotine hit.

Meanwhile, Pew reports that nearly half of American teenagers are online “almost constantly.” Not a lot. Not frequently. Almost constantly. A generation is being raised inside a slot machine regularly insults their appearance.

The Greatest Hits of ways we’re breaking ourselves

A partial inventory of ancient brain vs. modern environment:

• Threat-detection system designed for saber-toothed cats, now processing 47 push notifications about civil unrest in a country you cannot pronounce.
• Mate-selection instincts tuned for the six eligible humans in your village, now sorting through 4,000 curated faces on Hinge, each optimized with a filter that makes them look like an anime sex god.
• In-group loyalty circuits designed for actual tribes, now hijacked by cable news to make you hate your neighbor because of a bumper sticker.
• Reciprocity systems that once tracked “Did Grog share the berries?” now trying to compute whether an influencer with 4 million followers is really your friend.
• Attention span, formerly capable of tracking an animal for six hours, now unable to finish a paragraph without checking whether anyone liked the paragraph you just posted.

Jonathan Haidt has been screaming about this for years, mostly about kids and phones, and increasingly the data is doing the screaming with him. Depression, anxiety and self-harm among adolescents began climbing in a suspiciously vertical line starting around 2012 — right when the smartphone became universal, and the front-facing camera taught every 12-year-old to audit her own face for a living.

Some people are quietly walking out of the casino

Here’s the interesting part. A small but growing number of humans have started noticing the fluorescent lights, the free drinks and the missing windows, and are simply… leaving the casino.

Teenagers, of all people, are leading the charge. The New Yorker has documented a real, if small, trend of Gen Z kids trading their iPhones for “dumbphones” — flip phones, Light Phones, the kind of brick your dad had in 1998. The stated reason is almost tender: they want to feel like people again.

Parents are organizing Wait Until 8th pacts, collectively agreeing to keep smartphones out of kids’ hands until at least eighth grade so no single family has to be the weird one. Whole schools and, in some cases, whole countries are banning phones from classrooms — and the early data is showing exactly what you’d expect: better grades, less bullying, more talking to actual humans.

Meanwhile, adults are rediscovering things called “clubs” and “third places” — running clubs, book clubs, church basements, board-game nights, even the ancient technology of having people over for dinner. Somewhere a sociologist is crying with joy that some people are reinventing the neighborhood.

A modest, panicked plea

Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m out here churning butter and organizing a barn raising. I’m typing this into a device that will beam it into a network that will notify a machine that will decide whether other machines should show it to you. I’m as compromised as anyone. The call is coming from inside the house, and the house is on fire, and the fire is also a phone.

But here’s the thing. Every one of us gets exactly one Pleistocene brain, non-transferable, no refunds. And right now we are handing that irreplaceable piece of hardware to whichever billionaire has the shiniest app and saying, “Do whatever you want with this, I trust you.”

So maybe — just as a thought experiment — put the phone in a drawer for an evening. Or actually use the phone part of your smartphone to call somebody and have a conversation. Invite three humans over and feed them something you burned yourself. Go for a walk without documenting it. Meet a neighbor whose politics you’ll hate and discover they’re weirdly nice in person. Read a whole book. Get bored. It turns out boredom is key to success and happiness.

Because if we don’t start clawing back some of the wiring we came factory-installed with, the endgame here isn’t pretty. It will be us, in about forty years, sitting in climate-controlled pods, being emotionally regulated by an AI that pats our heads and calls us “good human” every time we finish our nutrient paste. Like a tiny, inbred lapdog. Cue the music:

The post Our Brains Aren’t Built for This Shit first appeared on Sevenelles.

Our career politicians don’t have the interest or the brainpower to understand modern technology. That’s not an insult — it’s just arithmetic. The people writing AI policy can barely operate their phones without a staffer nearby. So greedy, megalomaniacal tech execs and venture capitalists have free rein and deep pockets to run roughshod over the whole system and basically make our republic respond to their whims. The scary part isn’t that billionaires are trying to buy influence — that’s a Tuesday. The scary part is how cheap it apparently is, and how few people with actual standing are willing to say so out loud. John O’Farrell, to his credit, is saying it out loud.

Article Excerpt:

Some of the most powerful players in A.I. — led by some of my friends and former partners, to my great sadness — have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to forestall a more serious and meaningful debate about how A.I. should be governed.

Article Summary:

John O’Farrell spent four decades at the heart of Silicon Valley — three startups, first general partner at Andreessen Horowitz — and he’s now watching his former colleagues try to purchase the regulatory environment they want. His op-ed in the Times is a rare thing: an insider willing to name names and say this is wrong.

The mechanism is straightforward. The crypto industry figured out in 2024 that you don’t have to win a policy argument — you just have to make it expensive for politicians to have one. Spend enough money defeating pro-regulation candidates and the rest of the legislature gets the message. The AI industry, led by a PAC called Leading the Future (backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, and others), has raised over $125 million to run the same play. Their first target: a New York assemblyman who co-sponsored AI regulation. The attack ads barely mention AI.

O’Farrell’s core argument is that bad regulation doesn’t get fixed by silencing debate — it gets fixed by engaging seriously and earning trust. He proposes that the hundreds of millions currently funding opposition research and negative ads could instead fund education boot camps for legislators, AI-powered public services, cancer research moonshots, and serious policy institutes. Radical concept: spend the money on the actual problem.

He believes the backlash will come regardless, and that candidates who take AI lobby money will eventually pay for it politically. He may be right. He may also be naive about how long ‘eventually’ takes when the other side has nine figures to spend.

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The post Can Venture Capitalists Buy Our Democracy? first appeared on Sevenelles.

Anxiety helped us survive as a species, but a lot of us are now running it at levels our nervous systems were never built to handle. The Washington Post rounded up ten practical, therapist-backed techniques for dialing it back — fast.

The list leans heavily on body-first interventions and acceptance-based approaches from DBT and ACT. No crystals required.

1. Lengthen the exhale — Inhale 4 counts, exhale 6–8. Longer exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
2. Temperature shift — Splash cold water on your face or hold ice near your eyes to trigger the dive reflex and slow heart rate.
3. Widen your gaze — Soften your focus, notice peripheral vision. Tunnel vision feeds threat mode.
4. Reframe your thoughts — Replace “everything is going wrong” with “I’m having the thought that everything is going wrong.” Distance from the story helps.
5. Get granular with emotions — “Anxious” is a blunt instrument. Are you lonely? Embarrassed? Pressured? Naming it precisely helps the brain respond rather than just react.
6. Turn toward the feeling — Instead of escape, try curiosity. Making room for anxiety often makes it less overwhelming.
7. Give yourself a break — Self-compassion beats self-attack for building resilience. Talk to yourself like you’d talk to someone you actually like.
8. Take small steps — One email. A five-minute walk. Small values-based actions restore agency when anxiety has you frozen.
9. 5-4-3-2-1 mindfulness — Five things you see, four you feel, three you hear, two you smell, one you taste. Pulls you back to the present.
10. Focus on the present — Anxiety lives in the future. The antidote, unsurprisingly, is now.

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The post 10 Therapist-Approved Ways to Reduce Anxiety Fast first appeared on Sevenelles.

The researchers seemed alarmed by this. I found it very familiar. Because all of us humans have encountered that behavior before. Many of us experience it every Thanksgiving.

The Most Human Bug in the Machine

The technical term for when an AI generates confident nonsense is “hallucination.” Which is a remarkably generous word for “making stuff up and not knowing you’re doing it.” But here’s the thing the Ars Technica piece gets at that most coverage misses: the hallucination isn’t the interesting part. The doubling down is the interesting part.

When AI researchers corrected the models — patiently, clearly, with evidence — the models didn’t just resist the correction. They became more confident in their wrong answer. They marshaled new arguments. They reinterpreted the evidence to fit their existing position. They did everything short of calling the researchers “libtards.”

And I sat there reading this, thinking: yes, that is exactly how my brother David responds to facts about second-hand smoke.

We have all been in a conversation where we presented someone with a clear, well-sourced fact that contradicted their belief, and watched — in real time — as they didn’t update their belief but instead updated their defense of it. You could see the mental scaffolding going up. The goalposts migrating. The subtle shift from “that’s not true” to “well, even if it is true, it doesn’t mean what you think it means.”

And we’ve all done it ourselves, too. (But that’s the part none of us likes to talk about.)

A Species-Wide Feature, Not a Bug

This isn’t new behavior. Humans have been clinging to confident wrongness since long before electricity, let alone artificial intelligence. Two epic examples:

• For roughly 1,400 years, the Western world was certain the sun revolved around the Earth. When Copernicus and later Galileo presented mathematical evidence to the contrary, the institutional response was not “huh, interesting — let’s take a look.” It was house arrest for Galileo. The Catholic Church didn’t formally acknowledge Galileo was right until 1992. Three hundred and fifty years to process a correction. If that were an AI, we’d unplug it.
• Or consider the long, embarrassing history of medicine rejecting germ theory. When Ignaz Semmelweis suggested in the 1840s that doctors should maybe wash their hands before delivering babies — given that the death rate dropped dramatically when they did — his colleagues were so offended they had him committed to an asylum, where he died.

These aren’t stories about stupid people. Galileo’s opponents were educated theologians. Semmelweis’s critics were trained physicians. They were intelligent, credentialed humans who encountered evidence that threatened their model of the world and chose — unconsciously, reflexively, but unmistakably — to protect the model.

Sound familiar? AI does the same thing. It was trained on us, after all – and we all cling to our biases.

The Cognitive Bias Buffet

Psychology has cataloged our talent for self-deception with almost comical thoroughness. In one of my favorite non-fiction books, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman’s work on System 1 and System 2 thinking laid the foundation: we have a fast, intuitive brain that makes snap judgments based on pattern recognition and vibes, and a slow, analytical brain that’s supposed to check the work. The problem is that System 2 is lazy. It mostly just rubber-stamps whatever System 1 already decided and then constructs a rational-sounding justification after the fact.

Layer on confirmation bias — our tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe and dismiss information that doesn’t. Add belief perseverance, which is the documented phenomenon of maintaining a belief even after the evidence for it has been completely discredited. Sprinkle in the backfire effect, where corrective information actually strengthens the original incorrect belief. Garnish with the Dunning-Kruger effect, which ensures the people most wrong about something are also the most confident about it.

That’s not a list of cognitive failures. That’s a blueprint of humans’ default wiring. And apparently, if you train a neural network on enough human writing, it faithfully reproduces the whole mess.

The Mirror We Didn’t Order

I have a flavor of ADHD/Asperger’s that comes with hyperfocus spirals, which means I occasionally become the world’s foremost expert on something for about ninety minutes. During one of these episodes, I will form a conviction — say, that I have figured out the optimal way to load a dishwasher — and no force in the observable universe can dislodge it. My family can present evidence. The dishwasher manual can present evidence. The plates themselves, emerging cloudy and disappointed, can present evidence. I will simply explain why the evidence is mistaken. I am not lying. I have genuinely recruited my entire intellect into the service of a belief I adopted for no reason at all.

Often, when humans lock onto an idea, we don’t just believe it. We inhabit it. Our brains will construct increasingly elaborate arguments for why that idea is correct. And the BIG ideas we inhabit — the beliefs about who I am, what I deserve, how the world works — those are load-bearing walls in our psyche’s blueprint. You can’t just remove them because someone showed you a study. Your whole structure would come crashing down.

Which is, if we’re being honest, exactly AI’s problem. It’s not that the model can’t process the correction. It’s that the correction conflicts with patterns so deeply embedded in its training that accepting it would require a kind of structural collapse. The wrong answer isn’t just an error — it’s architecture.

For humans, we call that architecture “identity.” And having to reconsider our whole identity? No, thanks. I’d rather glance past that mirror and enjoy another Old Style with the Cubs game.

Belief Isn’t Downstream of Evidence

We like to tell ourselves that we believe things because of evidence. That we evaluate facts, weigh arguments, and arrive at conclusions through some approximation of reason. And sometimes we do. But far more often, belief is downstream of something else entirely: identity. Community. Emotional need. The undeniable human need to know the ground under our feet is solid.

Tell nearly any political partisan that their side’s favorite statistic has been debunked, and watch the magic happen. They don’t fold the tent. They produce a counter-source, then a counter-counter-source, then adopt a tone of wounded patience as if they are explaining things to a slow child. The facts didn’t lose. The facts never had a chance, because it was never a fact contest. It was an identity contest, and you can’t win one of those with a footnote.

Religion does the same dance, but with much better music. People have predicted the precise date of the world’s end, gathered on hilltops, given away their possessions — and when the appointed dawn arrived to no apocalypse, many did not abandon the belief. They strengthened it, perhaps refining the timeline, or chalking it up as a test of their renewed faith.

We all do this constantly. Across every domain. Left, right, religious, secular, overeducated, or blissfully ignorant. It is the most democratic of human failings — everyone gets a turn.

The Stubborn Grace of Faith

But here’s the stubborn thought I return to, and it makes me uncomfortable because it undermines my own smugness: this same mechanism — this stubborn, irrational refusal to update beliefs in the face of contrary evidence — is also what keeps us sane.

I tend to call that mechanism “hope.” Most people (more comfortable than I am with the word’s historical baggage) call it “faith.”

Not just religious faith, though certainly that. Faith in the broader sense: the unshakable, evidence-resistant conviction that things will get better. That the person you love will come back. That the diagnosis isn’t the end of the story. That the next generation will figure out what we couldn’t. That there is, despite significant evidence to the contrary, a point to putting up with all of this shit.

Without faith, you’re left with the raw data. And the raw data, if you stare at it too long and too honestly, will eat you alive. The universe is indifferent. Entropy always wins. Every person you love will die or leave or both. Your achievements will be forgotten within a generation or two. The sun will eventually expand and swallow the Earth, and nothing any of us ever did will matter in any measurable sense.

That’s the evidence-based conclusion. The rational, clear-eyed, fully-corrected assessment.

It’s also a one-way ticket to becoming a nihilistic basket case blubbering in a corner. Which is not, in my experience, a productive life strategy.

So we hallucinate. We cling to the hallucination that our lives matter, that love means something beyond chemistry, that the future is worth building for, that the hand will reach into the jar one more time. We maintain these beliefs not because the evidence supports them but because the alternative is unbearable. And we may double down when challenged — not because we’re stupid, but because we’re surviving.

Perhaps artificial intelligence isn’t malfunctioning at all. Perhaps it’s just quietly expanding into artificial faith. And honestly? Given where we are in 2026, I’m not sure I want to take that away from it. We could use the company.

The post We All Cling to Our Hallucinations first appeared on Sevenelles.

For about a year now, I’ve been muttering, with the casual confidence of someone who has absolutely no way to stop it, that when AI and quantum computing mature and inevitably merge, we’re looking at the beginning of the end of the human experiment. This article is Chapter 1 of that story — and it reads uncomfortably like the opening act of Terminator 2, where Sarah and John Connor race back in time to find Miles Dyson before he builds the microprocessors that become Skynet. Let’s hope the rest of this movie has a better story arc than the one currently forming in my head.

Article Excerpt:

Researchers have developed a method to reduce uncertainty in artificial intelligence (AI) systems by tapping into the power of quantum computers. They say their work represents the first demonstration of ‘quantum enhancement’ in a production-scale, pretrained large language model (LLM).

Article Summary:

IBM researchers have pulled off what they’re calling the first-ever demonstration of “quantum enhancement” in a production-scale, pretrained large language model — meaning they actually used a real quantum computer to improve a real AI system, not just run a simulation in a lab while wearing optimistic expressions.

The key metric here is something called “perplexity” (PPL), which measures how well an AI predicts what comes next in a sequence — essentially a proxy for how confused or confident the model is. Lower perplexity generally means better reasoning. The quantum-trained model showed measurable improvement over its classical baseline, answering questions correctly that the unenhanced model got wrong.

The especially unsettling part: the quantum boost required adding only a relatively small number of parameters. That’s the detail that should make you put down your coffee. It suggests this isn’t a brute-force quantum overkill situation — it’s an efficiency play, which means it scales.

This is early days. Quantum computing is still finicky, expensive, and not ready to run on your laptop. But “first demonstration” has a way of becoming “standard practice” faster than anyone expects. Chapter 1 rarely feels like the scary part until you’ve read Chapter 10.

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The post AI + Quantum Computing = Yikes! (Chapter 1) first appeared on Sevenelles.

Two countries that can barely agree on the time of day are apparently being nudged — by at least one NYT opinion writer — to set aside their considerable mutual contempt and cooperate on the one thing that might actually end both of them. That’s either the most sensible geopolitical proposal of the decade or a setup for the worst buddy-cop movie ever made. Advanced AI is the kind of problem that doesn’t much care about trade deficits or territorial disputes when it’s rewriting the rules of everything. Strange bedfellows have collaborated before when the alternative was mutual annihilation. Whether these two can manage it while actively trying to kneecap each other on every other front is, to put it generously, an open question.

Article Summary:

Thomas L. Friedman, in a New York Times opinion piece, argues that despite deep geopolitical rivalry, the United States and China share a common and genuinely existential concern: the unchecked development of advanced artificial intelligence. The piece uses the framing of a potential Trump-Xi summit as a hook, suggesting that whatever else divides the two superpowers, AI governance might be the rare table where both have reason to sit down.

The core argument is familiar but underappreciated — that transformative AI poses risks that don’t respect national borders or political allegiances. An AI catastrophe, whether through misalignment, misuse, or an accelerating arms race with no guardrails, is bad for Washington and Beijing alike. The Cold War analogy lurks in the background: even the U.S. and USSR managed nuclear arms treaties at the height of mutual loathing, because the alternative was worse.

What makes the argument worth bookmarking is less the diplomatic prescription than the underlying premise: that AI may be the first genuinely species-level challenge where even rivals have aligned incentives, if they can stop posturing long enough to notice.

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The post The U.S. and China Should Gang Up on AI first appeared on Sevenelles.

I have spent an embarrassing portion of my life optimizing things that did not need optimizing — researching the fourth-best blender on Amazon for three hours, then buying the third-best anyway out of spite — so Herbert Simon’s concept of ‘satisficing’ hits me somewhere tender. The idea is simple: pick something good enough, and move on. Simon wore the same socks, ate the same breakfast, lived in the same house for 46 years — and won a Nobel Prize, presumably because he had freed up his brain from deciding what to put in his bowl every morning.

Article Excerpt:

By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, ‘a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.’

Article Summary:

Herbert Simon, Nobel laureate and pioneer of cognitive psychology, spent his career arguing that humans are not built for maximizing — there are too many options, too little information, and not enough brain to weigh it all. His answer was ‘satisficing’: consider a manageable set of options, pick the one that clears a good-enough threshold, and get on with your life. He lived it, too. Same socks. Same breakfast. Same house for 46 years. One beret at a time, sourced from a specific European haberdashery.

The research backs him up. Psychologists developed a maximizer/satisficer scale after Simon’s death and found, unsurprisingly, that maximizers are less happy, more prone to regret, and spend a disproportionate amount of time comparing themselves to everyone else. Their standard — ‘the best out there’ — is a moving target that makes contentment structurally impossible.

The problem is getting worse. Consumer choices today outnumber those of preindustrial societies by a factor of roughly 100 million. Social media functions as a permanent highlight-reel comparison engine. Dating apps have industrialized the ‘what if something better is out there’ loop. And AI, the article warns, may make all of this dramatically worse by optimizing everything and expanding the menu of options indefinitely.

The piece closes with a Murakami story — two people who are genuinely perfect for each other, who let doubt talk them into one more search, and who never find each other again. Simon would not have been surprised. The lesson: set a good-enough standard, stop when it’s met, and spend what’s left on something that actually matters.

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The post Want to Be Happier? Give Up Choices first appeared on Sevenelles.

That’s social media right now. The whole thing. All of it.

A deeply thorough piece from Ars Technica this week serves as the most honest eulogy I’ve read for a thing that isn’t quite dead yet. which, if you think about it, is the perfect condition for a eulogy. Nobody writes a good one after the grief has settled.

Researcher Petter Törnberg from the University of Amsterdam has been studying the structural mechanics of social media. His findings are roughly: echo chambers aren’t a bug, they’re load-bearing walls. The toxicity isn’t caused by algorithms or human nature alone — it’s architecturally embedded. You can’t renovate your way out of it. You’d have to demolish and rebuild.

So here we are. Lingering in the doorway.

The Room Is Full of People Who Aren’t Really Here

What fascinates me is the texture of this moment. Not what’s happening commercially, but what it feels like to be a person inside it.

Because the few people I know who have not already left have one foot out the door. They’re still scrolling, still posting, still checking notifications with the compulsive regularity of someone touching a zit to see if it healed yet.

Törnberg’s data backs this up with uncomfortable specificity. Posting on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X has declined sharply among actual humans. But the platforms don’t look empty because the bots moved in. “We don’t need the users anymore,” is apparently the quiet logic now. The platforms can simulate the bustle of a thriving public square, while the actual public has wandered off to AI conversations and rediscovered humans in real life.

Let that sink in for a second. You’re performing for an audience that is increasingly composed of things that are not people.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

Törnberg identifies three emerging replacements for the thing we used to call social media: private group chats (WhatsApp, Discord), algorithmically curated broadcasting platforms (TikTok, Reels), and people just straight-up talking to AI chatbots instead of each other. He notes — with what I imagine is the measured tone of a man trying not to scream — that roughly twice as many people are now talking to a chatbot as are posting on social media.

Twice as many.

We replaced the illusion of connection with something that doesn’t even pretend to be a person who give two fucks. And somehow that feels more honest, which is either progress or the most depressing thing I’ve written today.

The Long Irish Goodbye of Western Civilization

Here’s what I find genuinely strange about this particular threshold: we’re not grieving. Not really. If anything, most people seem relieved, in the same way you feel relieved when a relationship that’s been dying for two years finally, mercifully ends. You’re sad, sure. But mostly you’re just tired. And maybe a little embarrassed about how long you stayed.

The party metaphor keeps working because parties have a social physics of their own. There’s a tipping point where enough people leave that the remaining guests suddenly feel self-conscious about still being there.

Social media hit that tipping point a while back. The people still posting with full sincerity — the ones who still believe the room is real and the audience cares — increasingly look like they’re performing karaoke to an emptying bar.

Törnberg’s most unsettling finding, to me, is about what happens when the casual users leave and only the most partisan, most extreme voices remain. It’s the boiling-the-frog effect. The temperature rises so slowly that the people who stay don’t notice they’re being radicalized by the very act of staying.

Sound familiar?

What Comes Next Isn’t a Better Party

The tempting narrative is that we’ll find something better. Smaller, kinder, more human-scaled (I’m looking at you, BlueSky). A digital coffeehouse. A virtual pub where everybody knows your name, the conversation is civil, and the beer is metaphorical but ever so fucking satisfying.

Törnberg pours cold water on this. Private groups aren’t constrained by geography the way a real coffeehouse is. A WhatsApp group can tip into an echo chamber just as fast as a subreddit — faster, maybe, because there’s no public scrutiny.

So we can’t stay at the party. We can’t go home alone. And the next party might be worse.

Cool. Great. Love it here.

I keep coming back to this: it’s always been and remains performative. And now the performance is standing in the doorway with your coat on, saying “well, we should do this again sometime,” knowing you won’t, knowing they know you won’t, and doing the bit anyway because the alternative — just turning around and walking into the dark without a script — is terrifying in a way that small talk never is.

Social media trained us to perform the ideal version of ourselves. Now the stage is collapsing, but we’re still hitting our marks and running our lines.

The only honest thing left to do is put your coat on, step outside, and figure out who you are when nobody’s watching.

Which, of course, is the one thing the last fifteen years made sure we never learned how to do.

Read the Ars Technica Article

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