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.

Read the Full Article

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.

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

The post Are We the Last People at the Social Media Party? first appeared on Sevenelles.

A leaked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) security threats assessment suggests that the American public is now considered the country’s most significant threat. The document, obtained by journalist Ken Klippenstein, expands the definition of domestic terrorism to include individuals with “class-based or economic grievances,” potentially targeting a wide range of citizens.

The report indicates that domestic violent extremists have been the most active threat actors in recent years, motivated by various factors including anti-government sentiment, racial and ethnic grievances, and conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war. DHS claims the rise in potential threats has been fueled by ongoing global tensions and terrorist media.

The assessment appears to challenge constitutional protections of free speech and protest, particularly in light of recent controversial government actions. In Minnesota, for example, DHS branded protesters as “domestic terrorists” following the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, by ICE agents.

The new broad definition of domestic terrorism could potentially criminalize these acts of civic resistance, placing a more severe target on citizens challenging government actions. The report suggests a concerning shift in how the government perceives and responds to public dissent, potentially undermining fundamental rights to free expression and protest.

Link to the DHS document leak: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leaked-doc-homeland-securitys-domestic

Read the Full Article

The post DHS Thinks You Are Biggest Threat to America first appeared on Sevenelles.

Our Mission: Deradicalization

We are suffocated by a media matrix with no ethical framework. Selling clickbait for private profits. Promoting personalities over experts.

The result: Separation. Alienation. The escalation of crises. The loss of trust.

Survivors Guide to Earth is a call to deradicalize the way we report and reflect on humanity in 6 steps.

The Project: Background

One night Cooke was sitting in for media icon Larry King, and a guest stormed off set. Producers called it a great show. Cooke wondered “what the @#( are we doing here?” Not just on TV. But in general.

So, he wrote a 22-page note-to-self on how to report the news called “Survivors Guide to Earth in 6 steps.”

At the height of the first Covid outbreak, artist-philanthropist Sol Guy and James Walton used the booklet as the foundation for a program called “Healing Through Creative Practice,” where 160 artists created works using the 6 steps as prompts.

After the success of the program, Cooke began developing the project for public release.

About your host: Matthew Cooke

• Oscar-nominated filmmaker, writer-producer of critically acclaimed advocacy documentaries, science-fiction, comedy, and drama
• Writer-host of a top 30 / 5-star rated podcast covering history, politics, philosophy and technology
• Speaker and media artist known for viral docu-essays with over 285M views
• Longtime guest-host for Larry King, legendary TV news and politics icon
• Award-winning digital designer / creative director

Visit the Website

The post Survivors Guide to Earth first appeared on Sevenelles.

In this editorial, Mitch Daniels pays tribute to the late P.J. O’Rourke, a brilliant and hilarious writer who was a perceptive critic of American politics and culture. O’Rourke was known for his ability to puncture political pretensions with sharp wit and humor, drawing comparisons to H.L. Mencken and Will Rogers.

As a college-age leftist turned libertarian, O’Rourke directed his comedic talents towards both Democrats and Republicans, skewering the excesses and inefficiencies of big government. His pithy one-liners, such as “Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys,” became widely quoted.

The author laments the current lack of political humorists who can “encourage a little humility in its big shots and to inspire laughter at a government ever susceptible to the affliction of arrogance.” Figures like Mo Udall and Bob Dole, who could deploy humor effectively, are sorely missed in today’s polarized political landscape.

The author also notes that humor in politics serves to “remind us, in the end, that other things are more important” and can help heal divisions. He fondly recalls his last planned interaction with O’Rourke, where they had planned to share a bourbon together, a poignant reminder of the personal loss with the writer’s passing.

Article Excerpt:

Politics has always involved a degree of pretension, but never like today, when “performative” has become perhaps the sector’s most-apt adjective. The puncturing of pretensions is a noble profession, and nobody could puncture one like P.J. As in, “Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.”

[…]

But his shillelagh swung in both directions. “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.” He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016: “She’s wrong about absolutely everything, but she’s wrong within normal parameters.”

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The post America Needs Its Pretension Punctured first appeared on Sevenelles.