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.

Read the Full Article

The post Your Cells Need You To Have a Purpose 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.

Read the Full Article

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

Article Excerpt:

I’m not asking you to adopt a religion or abandon your skepticism. I’m asking you to consider that having faith in a direction — faith in a future self you can’t yet prove exists, faith that the work you’re doing now connects to something that will matter — isn’t mysticism. It’s the operating system underneath every meaningful human life.

Article Summary:

Curt Buermeyer posits that most people avoid discussing life’s fundamental questions—purpose, meaning, existence—because these conversations feel uncomfortable and potentially contentious. Unlike topics with clear answers or scoreboards, existential questions seem “soft and squishy” yet genuinely difficult, so people redirect to safer subjects.

But this avoidance has significant consequences: without confronting these questions, your goals feel “slightly borrowed,” like executing someone else’s vision. High-achieving people often excel at measurable metrics—career advancement, performance goals, net worth—while leaving deeper questions perpetually unanswered.

Curt’s call to action is simple: stop postponing the question “What do I actually want my life to mean?” You don’t need complete answers, but avoiding it means moving in directions you didn’t consciously choose. Meaningful, energizing goals only emerge when rooted in honest self-understanding about who you are and why you’re here.

Read the Full Article

The post Set a Goal That Really Matters first appeared on Sevenelles.

I don’t write that as a provocation or clickbait. I write it because it’s true, and because those two facts — one personal, one systemic — sit heavier on my chest than even our orange-faced, lard-ass, petulant golfer does.

My children are smart, compassionate, thoughtful people. I don’t think they are making this decision out of laziness or selfishness. I can see why bringing new humans into our world might be considered somewhere between irresponsible and cruel. The general vibe I pick up from them, my friends, and our leaders is that the future is a burning building and nobody’s even pretending to look for the exits anymore.

They’re not the only ones picking up this vibe. In a recent New York Times analysis (Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.), Anna Louie Sussman explored why global birth rates are plummeting. Her conclusion wasn’t what most pundits trot out — it’s not just about the cost of childcare or student loans or housing prices, though those are real. The deeper driver, she argues, is something more existential: people have lost faith that the future will be better than the present. Or even tolerable. When you strip away the policy debates and economic models, you’re left with a species that is, on some fundamental level, losing the will to perpetuate itself.

Read that last sentence again. Let it land.

A species losing the will to perpetuate itself. That’s not a policy problem. That’s a hope problem.

The Dual Reading of Exhausted Hope

I chose the title of this post deliberately. Take a few seconds to consider it: “Perhaps we have exhausted hope.” If you roll it around your mind a few times, you will likely discover there are at least two ways that statement can be interpreted.

Take a moment to decide how you read “exhausted hope.” We will check back in with it at the end of this post.

Oh, Relax – We Have Been Here Before

But wait a minute. Haven’t we been here before? Well, not exactly here — history doesn’t repeat, it just plagiarizes poorly. Historically, there have been numerous dark times when humanity had every reason to believe the game was over. Two obvious examples:

Europe, 1347. The Black Death rolled across the continent like God had decided to cancel the whole project. Within five years, it killed between 75 and 200 million people — somewhere between a third and half of Europe’s population. Entire villages vanished. The social order disintegrated. Flagellants roamed the roads whipping themselves bloody, convinced the end of days had arrived. And yet. The labor shortage that followed gave surviving peasants unprecedented bargaining power. Feudalism began to crack. Wages rose. The Medici family led the Renaissance — arguably humanity’s greatest creative flowering — that emerged from the ashes of the worst catastrophe in recorded history.

Europe, 1945. The continent lay in literal rubble. Sixty million dead. The Holocaust had demonstrated that industrialized evil was not a hypothetical. Japan was irradiated. Half the world’s cities were cratered (well, outside North America anyway – we continue to benefit from geographic isolation). There was no rational reason to believe that the species deserved another chance, much less that it would get one. But the Marshall Plan was conceived, the United Nations was chartered, and within a generation, former enemies were building cars together and arguing about cheese regulations. Not utopia — far from it — but an improbable resurrection from a depth of darkness that makes our current moment look pretty tame.

In each case, the turnaround didn’t happen because circumstances improved on their own. It happened because someone — a leader, a movement, a collective decision — introduced the possibility that things could be different. That the darkness was not permanent. They found the Hope people needed to believe in a brighter future.

Let’s Find Hope by Drowning Rats!

Which brings me to a study that’s been rattling around in my head since Curt Buermeyer asked me to review a manuscript for his upcoming book. It included a discussion of what I call the “Let’s See What Happens If We Drown Rats” experiment. (The 40’s and 50’s saw some really cruel experiments)

In 1957, Dr. Curt Richter — a Harvard-educated professor at Johns Hopkins — conducted an experiment that would be wildly unethical today but produced uncomfortably relevant findings. He dropped both domesticated and wild rats into jars of water to see how long they would swim before drowning.

The domesticated rats — the ones accustomed to human care — mostly swam for 40 to 60 hours. They fought like hell. A few, though, quickly assessed the smooth glass walls, the impossibility of escape, and gave up within minutes. They just… stopped. Many of the wild rats didn’t even make it into the water — they died of cardiac arrest from the sheer terror of being handled. The ones that did make it into the jars? Dead within one to fifteen minutes. No struggle. No fight. They simply accepted their fate and sank.

Here’s where it gets interesting — and where I need you to pay attention, because this is the part that matters.

Richter ran the experiment again. But this time, just as the rats began to give up, he reached in, plucked them out, toweled them off, let them rest, and then put them back in the water.

Every single group — domestic, wild, all of them — swam for 60 to 80 hours.

Not because their physical capabilities changed. Not because the water got warmer or the walls got shorter. Because they had been shown, once, that rescue was possible. That a hand might appear from above. That their situation, however desperate, was not necessarily the end.

Hope. That’s all it was. The memory of being saved, converted into the belief that being saved might happen again. And it was worth 60 to 80 hours of desperate swimming.

Who’s Doing the Plucking Now?

In Richter’s experiment, it was the scientist who reached in. In history, it was the leaders — the Medicis, the Marshalls, even the ordinary everyday people — who organized and said not yet, we’re not done yet. They stepped up to find hope. And many of them made mistakes. The point wasn’t perfection. The point was the hand reaching into the jar.

Where are those kinds of leaders now? I am sure they are out there, is just that our partisan, social-media algorithm-driven world makes them impossible to find. The current crop of “leaders” demanding our attention is selfish and corrupt.

Of course, leaders have always been selfish and corrupt to varying degrees. That’s not new. But there used to be a baseline expectation that part of the job was giving people a reason to keep swimming. FDR told a terrified nation that the only thing to fear was fear itself — and then actually built things: infrastructure, institutions, safety nets. Even during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was arguably more existentially dire than anything we face today, our leaders built bomb shelters, ran civil defense drills, and told us to duck and cover. Was duck-and-cover going to save you from a nuclear blast? Of course not. It was absurd. But it was a signal: we are trying. We have not given up on you. There is a plan, even if the plan is mostly theater.

That theater mattered. It was the hand reaching into the jar.

Now look at where we are. In 2008, a presidential candidate ran on a single word: Hope. Whatever you think of him or his policy record, his aspiration for hope was clear, and it resonated with millions. People lined up for hours to vote for the idea that the future could be better.

Fast forward to today. The current president’s entire rhetorical framework is built on the opposite premise: everything is broken, the country is a disaster, the world is laughing at you, and only one man — one singular, irreplaceable man — can fix it. That’s not hope. That’s a hostage negotiation. It’s a message designed not to inspire swimming but to make you grateful someone is holding your head above water — while conveniently ignoring that he’s also the one pushing it under.

And it’s not just one leader. Across the political spectrum, across the globe, the dominant mode of leadership has shifted from “here’s where we’re going” to “here’s who to blame.” We’ve replaced vision with grievance. In the U.S, our leaders can’t even agree on basic measures to reduce gun violence in schools — even a clear majority of voters wants them to do something. Our leaders won’t even perform the theater of trying anymore.

No hand is reaching in. And the rats are noticing.

The Accumulation Problem

It’s not any single problem that has exhausted hope. It’s the accumulation.

Climate change alone might be manageable. Political polarization alone might be survivable. The erosion of institutional trust, the loneliness epidemic, the housing crisis, the healthcare catastrophe, the rise of authoritarianism, the AI disruption, the gun violence, the opioid crisis, the microplastics pollution, the continued loss of pollinators, the student debt trap, the slow death of local journalism, the algorithmic radicalization of the disillusioned — any one of these, in isolation, is a problem a healthy society could theoretically address.

But we’re not facing them in isolation. We’re facing all of them simultaneously, while our institutions are weakened and our leaders are either absent, incompetent, or actively making things worse. It’s not one disease. It’s comorbidity. Each condition worsens the others. And the cumulative effect is a kind of civilizational exhaustion that makes even the optimists grab the tequila bottle and stare into space.

Our kids aren’t reconsidering children because of climate change or because of politics or because of economics. It’s because of the weight of everything, everywhere, all at once. Because when you add it up, the sum looks less like a problem to be solved and more like a verdict to be accepted.

And when a generation looks at the future and decides it’s not worth populating — well, that’s not a demographic trend. That’s a species-level loss of hope.

The Dual Reading of “Exhausted Hope” So Which Is It?

I promised you two readings of this post’s title, Perhaps We Have Exhausted Hope. Here are the two that continually tax my mind.

“Perhaps we have exhausted hope” could mean there is a finite and we’re scraping the bottom. The universe allotted us a certain amount of optimism, and we’ve spent it on wars and recoveries and moonshots and civil rights movements, and now the account is overdrawn. If this reading is correct, we’re in genuine trouble. You can’t manufacture a resource that’s been depleted. All you can do is watch the gauge drop.

“Perhaps we have exhausted hope” could mean that the entity known as hope is simply tired and needs time to recover. It is beaten down by the sheer volume of things working against it, but not dead. Just in desperate need of rest, of care, of someone to pluck it out of the jar and towel it off and give it a reason to believe that rescue is still possible. If this reading is correct, then recovery is at least theoretically possible — but it requires something we’re critically short on: leaders willing to do the plucking.

I want to believe the second reading. Badly. But I can’t ignore the evidence for the first.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

I think a lot about my kids. I think about the wild rats — the ones who’d never been rescued, who had no framework for believing rescue was possible, and who simply sank without a fight. I think about a generation deciding the future isn’t worth inhabiting. And I think: is this what the early stages of giving up look like? Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a quiet, rational decision not to bring children into the world?

Hope has been exhausted before. Many times. And every time, some stubborn, irrational, beautiful fool decided to reach into the jar anyway. It may be the neighbor who organizes a school board meeting, the teacher who stays late, the kid who registers voters, the friend who calls to check on you when the news is especially dark. Sometimes the hand that pulls you out of the water belongs to someone who’s barely swimming themselves.

We may have exhausted hope. But hope has been exhausted before, and it has this stubborn, infuriating habit of refusing to stay dead.

Whether that’s enough — I honestly don’t know. But I’m still swimming. And if you’re reading this, so are you.

That’s not nothing.

The post Perhaps We Have Exhausted Hope 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.

There was a version of the ultra-wealthy that at least felt some obligation — real or performative — to the world that made them rich. That version is being quietly escorted out. What’s replacing it is a cohort of ideological mercenaries who’ve convinced themselves that hoarding capital and influencing elections is philanthropy, and that Warren Buffett passing around a philanthropy pledge card was somehow the real corruption. What happens when “giving back “is no longer fashionable? I’m guessing “not good things” , and we will all soon find out.

Article Excerpt:

Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and a frequent Gates critic, said in an interview that he had privately encouraged around a dozen Giving Pledge signers to undo it. ‘Most of the ones I’ve talked to have at least expressed regret about signing it,’ he said.

Article Summary:

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates launched the Giving Pledge — a moral commitment for billionaires to donate more than half their wealth to charity. It was, briefly, the fashionable thing to do. Oval Office visits happened. Fortune covers happened. Over 250 families signed on, including MacKenzie Scott, Mike Bloomberg, and Sam Altman.

The vibe was: big capitalism and big philanthropy can coexist, and being seen as a ‘good billionaire’ actually mattered. Fast forward to now, and the whole thing is being treated like an embarrassing yearbook photo.

Signups have cratered — 113 in the first five years, down to just 4 in 2024. The Trump administration views the Pledge as roughly a punchline. Peter Thiel has been actively lobbying signers to bail, calling it an ‘Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club’ (again — the man has his own Epstein ties, so that’s a bold rhetorical swing).

One signer actually unsigned it, which the article notes is ‘without precedent,’ which tells you something about the current climate. The new dominant ideology among ascendant tech billionaires holds that philanthropy is basically a PR scam, and that the real gift to humanity is just making more money and letting it trickle somewhere.

Elon Musk has said his “businesses are philanthropy.” That sentence exists. Meanwhile, the Gates Foundation’s causes — global health, gender equality — are being actively dismantled by the administration that many of these same billionaires helped elect. Also worth noting: the Pledge has no enforcement mechanism whatsoever. It’s a moral commitment.

Which, given the moral inventory of some of its critics, may be precisely the problem.

Read the Full Article

The post Fuck Philanthropy. Our Billionaires Want More Toys! first appeared on Sevenelles.

A recent Pew Research Center survey reveals that the United States is the only country among 25 polled where a majority of residents view their fellow citizens as morally or ethically “bad.” Fifty-three percent of American adults hold this negative view, contrasting sharply with other nations like Canada, where 92 percent see their compatriots as good.

Experts attribute this phenomenon to several factors. Political polarization plays a significant role, with 60 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans viewing fellow Americans negatively. This partisan divide has intensified over time—a 2022 Pew poll showed substantial increases in Americans describing opposing party members as immoral, dishonest, and close-minded compared to 2016.

Scholars suggest that nearly every moral issue has become politicized in America, with political leaders and social media amplifying divisions. Christian author Karen Swallow Prior notes that antagonistic political parties demonize each other, lowering perceptions of collective goodness. Additionally, America’s religious diversity has historically prevented agreement on shared moral standards, allowing morality to be weaponized politically.

Sociologist Scott Schieman observes that Americans exhibit a stronger “negativity bias” than Canadians, who tend to direct criticism toward elites rather than fellow citizens. Scholar Victoria Barnett argues that intense political polarization, especially when framed through religious teaching, erodes trust across society.

Historical Gallup polling confirms Americans have consistently rated the nation’s moral values negatively since 2003, suggesting this pessimistic outlook isn’t entirely new but has deepened amid current political contradictions.

Read the Full Article

The post U.S. Is the Only Country to Say Most Fellow Citizens are Bad People first appeared on Sevenelles.

Daniel Smith’s essay in The Atlantic explores the author’s struggle with the profound boredom of parenthood despite experiencing fierce, protective love for his children. When his first daughter was born, he discovered an unexpected paradox: while his love was instantaneous and complete, he disliked being a father. The activities that once sustained him—reading, seeing friends, solitude—vanished, replaced by exhausting routines and mind-numbing repetition.

The author confesses that much of parenting consists of “blunt, basic, run-of-the-mill boredom”—playgrounds, picture books, endless requests to “do it again.” He felt deficient for finding child-rearing tedious when society celebrates it as life’s greatest adventure. After divorce and remarrying, he now has three children and confronts the same feelings again.

Drawing on philosophers and poets like Kierkegaard, Frost, and Joseph Brodsky, the author reframes boredom not as something to suppress or escape, but as an emotion to move toward and understand. Brodsky’s commencement address argued that boredom teaches us our “utter insignificance” and that the most meaningful aspects of life—enduring relationships, serious work, art—all display patterns pregnant with boredom.

The essay concludes with a tender Sunday morning scene: the author shopping with his young son, noticing small moments of connection over hot chocolate. He realizes that boredom and meaning are inseparable—boredom is “the price we pay for a life rich with meaning.” Accepting rather than fighting this reality makes the feeling more endurable, transforming it from a shameful deficiency into an inevitable companion of love and commitment.

Read the Full Essay

The post Boredom Is the Price We Pay for Meaning first appeared on Sevenelles.

President Trump has leveraged his second term to profit extensively from the presidency, amassing at least $1.4 billion—a figure likely underestimated due to undisclosed earnings. This total represents approximately 16,822 times the median U.S. household income.

His revenue streams include: $867 million from cryptocurrency ventures, with foreign investors secretly buying Trump family coins to gain influence; $90.5 million in settlements from major tech companies like Amazon, Meta, and ABC News for questionable legal claims; $28 million from Amazon for a Melania Trump documentary (far exceeding typical payments); $23 million from overseas licensing deals for Trump-branded properties in countries like Vietnam, Oman, and Saudi Arabia; and a $400 million Boeing 747 gift from Qatar that he’ll use as Air Force One and keep afterward.

These financial arrangements raise serious corruption concerns, as favorable policy decisions often follow payments. Vietnam received reduced tariffs after fast-tracking a Trump golf project, while the UAE gained chip access after committing $2 billion to a Trump firm.

Historically, presidents avoided even the appearance of profiting from office—Harry Truman left the White House without a car and refused jobs that would commercialize his service. Trump’s conduct represents a stark departure, with influence-seekers—including foreign governments—openly purchasing access through his businesses.

This corruption undermines democratic legitimacy and public trust. When leaders prioritize personal enrichment over public service, citizens lose faith in government institutions, creating a cynical spiral that threatens democratic participation and the rule of law.

Article Excerpt:

“The demands of avarice gradually corrupt the work of government as officials facilitate the accumulation of personal wealth. Worse, such a government corrupts the people who live under its rule. They learn by experience that they live in a society where the laws are written by the highest bidder. They become less likely to obey those laws, and to participate in the work of democracy — speaking, voting, paying taxes. The United States risks falling into this cynical spiral as Mr. Trump hollows out the institutions of government for personal gain.”

Read the Full Article

The post How Trump Has Pocketed $1,408,500,000 first appeared on Sevenelles.

Perhaps it is because I still think like a biologist. Or, perhaps it’s being an agnostic/atheist. But I still don’t get why people avoid the discussion of death. I guarantee you none of us is getting out of here alive. Most people avoid discussing death like they do bowel movements or masturbation. But unlike those, your death will be very public and completely unavoidable.

I used to think that one of the selling points for religious faith was that it made death more palatable. But now I think it mostly gives us permission to repress our fears of death. Dana Milbank’s article illustrates that if we can discuss death openly, we can make peace with it and, thereby, improve our lives and our legacy.

Article Summary:

In another great article, Dana Milbank tell us about a group of seven women aged 78-89 in Virginia’s Rappahannock County meet monthly as the “RONettes” to discuss death, end-of-life planning, and aging. What began as participation in a local “Ready or Not” program—helping seniors draft advance directives and organize their affairs—evolved into a close-knit support group that has continued meeting for three years.

During their gatherings over potlucks, these widowed or elderly women candidly discuss topics most avoid: green burials, body donation, do-not-resuscitate orders, and even property values with backyard graves. Rather than being morbid, members describe the experience as life-affirming and fear-reducing.

Research supports their approach: planning for death reduces psychological distress and improves well-being by prompting reflection on life’s meaning and legacy. The women have written their own obituaries, completed “Five Wishes” advance directives, and openly discuss medical decisions, downsizing, and cognitive decline.

Their remarkable honesty extends to personal struggles—one member is moving to assisted living due to cognitive impairment, another worries about unfinished research, and several keep deceased relatives’ ashes in their bedrooms. Most eschew cremation for environmental reasons, preferring green burials or body donation.

The group’s demystification of death has brought unexpected peace. Members report that confronting mortality directly has eliminated nightmares, reduced anxiety, and helped them focus on enjoying their remaining time. By creating a safe space to discuss the undiscussable, these women have transformed their final years into a period of meaningful companionship and purposeful living.

Article Excerpt:

“It may sound macabre, and terribly depressing. But the women, all but two of whom have been widowed, say it has been just the opposite for them: a life-affirming exercise that has given new meaning to their final chapters. It seems that by demystifying death, by refusing to deny that their lives are near the end, they have freed themselves from some of the fear of dying. Instead, they are able to focus on “how we enjoy these last few trips around the sun,” as one of them put it. And it’s no surprise that those final years are more enjoyable if filled with companionship — in this case, a group of peers with 600 years of combined life experience.”

Read the Full Article

The post One Path to a Happier Life: Thinking More About Death first appeared on Sevenelles.