“Everybody’s got to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another beer.“

– W.C. Fields

Jam:

Compared to What (Live at Montreux Jazz Festival) – Les McCann;Eddie Harris – 1969

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for July 31, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

“Here’s to the obvious.
It needed someone to say it.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

Basket Case – Green Day – 1994

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for July 24, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

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.

“To good company — the only thing that makes bad wine drinkable and good wine memorable.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

What I Like About You – The Romantics – 1980

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for July 17, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

“To the existential dread that drove us here, and the third drink that’s making it manageable.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

Baba O’Riley – The Who – 1971

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for July 10, 2026 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.

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.

“Here’s to summer — the season nature designed specifically for ignoring responsibilities.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

American Music – Violent Femmes – 1991

Have an excellent 4th of July weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for July 3, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

“Here’s to the friend who refuses to call it a night, and to the rest of us who reluctantly agree they’re right.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

Step On – Happy Mondays – 1990

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for June 26, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

“To all the fathers: By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.“

– Charles Wadworth

Jam:

Take A Picture – Filter – 1999

Have an excellent Father’s Day weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for June 19, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.