“Here’s to absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due.“

– Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

Jam:

You Haven’t Done Nothin’ – Stevie Wonder – 1974

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for May 15, 2026 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.

“May you be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you’re dead.“

– Traditional Irish

Jam:

Yell Fire! – Michael Franti & Spearhead – 2006

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for May 8, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

I spend a lot of time marinating in the doom-and-gloom AI discourse — the think-pieces about mass unemployment, the breathless predictions from Silicon Valley prophets who somehow always manage to profit from the panic they’re selling — so when a piece comes along arguing the job apocalypse probably isn’t coming, I want to believe it the way a hypochondriac wants to believe the lump is benign. This New York Times opinion piece offers a more measured take: that history, labor economics, and basic human stubbornness suggest AI will reshape work without simply erasing it. Maybe. Possibly. I’m not betting the house on it, but I’ll take ‘probably fine’ over ‘definitely screwed’ as a working hypothesis for a Tuesday.

Article Excerpt:

The AI job apocalypse has been predicted so many times, by so many confident people, that maybe — just maybe — the confident people are wrong.

Article Summary:

The argument, in short: we’ve been here before. Every major wave of automation — industrial machinery, computers, the internet — triggered the same existential dread about mass joblessness, and somehow the labor market absorbed the shock, mutated, and kept going. New jobs replaced old ones. The economy adapted. People complained a lot but mostly stayed employed.

The piece pushes back against the Silicon Valley consensus that AI is categorically different — smarter, faster, more generalized — and therefore uniquely destructive. The counterargument is that AI is still a tool, that human judgment, creativity, and interpersonal work remain stubbornly hard to automate, and that demand for labor tends to expand alongside productivity gains rather than contract.

There’s also the regulatory and institutional friction angle: companies don’t just flip a switch and replace their workforce. There are contracts, liability concerns, cultural inertia, and a persistent human preference for dealing with other humans in high-stakes situations. Automation takes longer to deploy than the hype cycle suggests.

None of this is a guarantee, and the piece isn’t arguing everything will be fine for everyone. Some jobs will disappear. Some workers will get hurt. Transition costs are real and tend to fall hardest on people who can least absorb them. But ‘painful and uneven transition’ and ‘total civilizational unemployment catastrophe’ are not the same thing — and collapsing that distinction is mostly useful for selling newsletters.

Read the Full Article

The post Maybe We’re Not All Getting Fired by a Chatbot first appeared on Sevenelles.

The burnout epidemic isn’t a personal failing — it’s a systems failure. Technology, especially the phone in your pocket, was engineered to colonize your attention, and it’s working exactly as designed. John Mark Comer frames this as a specifically Christian problem with a specifically Christian solution, and I don’t entirely agree with that framing. But you don’t have to share his theology to recognize that the diagnosis is correct: the gnawing sense that there’s always something else you should be doing, that quiet is a problem to be solved rather than a state to be sought. Whether your path to stillness runs through the Gospel of Matthew or a long walk with no earbuds, the destination is the same. Hurry less. Reflect more. Your soul — secular, sacred, or somewhere embarrassingly in between — will thank you.

Article Excerpt:

“Hurry is a gnawing sense that there is always more to do; a life spent hurtling oneself through each day; a schedule that makes little room for God. Technology has only exacerbated the problem. Comer calls the modern world ‘a virtual conspiracy against the interior life.'”

Article Summary:

John Mark Comer is one of the most influential pastors in America right now, which you might not have noticed because he doesn’t really want to be found. No contact page, no morning phone checks, auto-deletes his email over Christmas. His best-selling book, *The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry*, argues that the great enemy of spiritual life isn’t sin or doubt — it’s the frantic, grinding pace of modern existence, turbocharged by smartphones and social media.

Comer’s pitch lands somewhere between Andrew Huberman and the Sermon on the Mount. He preaches to packed rooms of burned-out millennials and Gen Z-ers in cities like New York, opens with Anne Helen Petersen’s famous burnout essay, and then pivots to Matthew 11. The practical advice — delete social media, go grayscale, observe a phone-free Sabbath — sounds like every digital detox article you’ve already ignored. The difference is he frames it as discipleship, not self-optimization.

His critics wonder if Comer is just selling baptized wellness: spiritual language draped over lifestyle content for affluent young people who can afford to slow down. His defenders point out that the practices he’s recommending — solitude, fasting, Sabbath, silence — are ancient, not trendy, and that the Church mostly forgot them.

The deeper question the article quietly circles without fully answering: Does it matter *why* you slow down, or just that you do? Comer would say yes, it matters enormously. Which is a reasonable position. And also a convenient one for a pastor.

Read the Full Article

The post Is Hurry the Enemy of Spiritual Life? first appeared on Sevenelles.

There’s a scene in Pluribus— one of the most thoughtful series on Apple TV about a hive mind that absorbs humanity — where all the consumed humans are practically begging Carol to write another book. Not because they’re bored. Because they’ve lost the ability to surprise themselves. They’ve pooled every thought, every memory, every scrap of creativity into one enormous collective intelligence, and it turns out that an ocean of shared knowledge is about as creatively fertile as Oklahoma farmland in 1935.

I thought about that scene a lot while reading Bright Simons’ essay “The Social Edge of Intelligence” in The Ideas Letter. It’s one of the most carefully argued pieces I’ve encountered on AI — not because it screams that the robots are coming (they are) or that everything will be fine (it won’t), but because it identifies a dependency so fundamental that most of Silicon Valley hasn’t bothered to look at it.

Here’s the thesis, and it’s worth sitting with: AI doesn’t really think. It remembers how we thought together. And we’re rapidly creating conditions where we’ll stop giving it anything worth remembering.

The Devastation Is Real — Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise

The economic carnage ahead is not speculative. IBM announced plans to replace 7,800 roles with AI. Duolingo cut a tenth of its contractors. Klarna’s AI assistant now does the work of 700 customer service employees, and the company’s stated goal is to shrink its workforce below 2,000. Jack Dorsey wants Block’s headcount flat while AI carries the growth.

This is not a drill, and it’s not a blip. The internal logic is merciless: routine cognitive work gets automated, junior roles evaporate, productivity gains compound. For any board reviewing cost structures, it’s the cleanest investment case since the internal combustion engine retired the horse. There’s even a moral momentum to it — hesitate and you fall behind, and nobody wants to be the last company still paying humans to do things a model can do for pennies.

If you’re in your twenties right now, entering a workforce that’s being systematically thinned at the bottom, I won’t sugarcoat it: the next decade is going to be brutal. Entire career ladders are being pulled up. The entry-level positions that used to teach people how to think inside an organization? Many of them are already gone.

But Here’s the Thing Nobody’s Talking About

Simons describes a 2024 experiment where roughly 300 writers were asked to produce short fiction — some with GPT-4’s help, some without. On the surface, the results confirmed the AI hype: AI-assisted stories were rated more creative by independent judges. Individually, every writer got a boost.

But when the researchers looked at the full body of stories rather than individual ones, a different picture emerged. The AI-assisted stories were more similar to each other. Each writer had been individually elevated. Collectively, they had converged.

The researchers called it a tragedy of the commons. I’d call it something more plainly terrifying: the slow-motion extinction of surprise. We will end up with the hive mind from Pluribus. Desperately craving Carol’s next novel because it wants something it hasn’t already seen.

AI Eats Its Own Tail

Simons builds his case on a chain of research that’s hard to argue with. In 2024, a team led by Ilia Shumailov published in Nature that AI models trained on AI-generated data start to collapse. The distribution narrows. Minority viewpoints, rare knowledge, unusual formulations — the weird, edge-case stuff that represents actual intellectual diversity — vanishes first. What’s left is statistically average. Fluent, plausible, and hollow. Or, as Bruce Cockburn put it, “the Trouble With Normal is it only gets worse.”

Meanwhile, Epoch AI estimates that the total stock of quality human-generated text available for training will be exhausted between 2026 and 2032. Most people frame this as a resource problem, like running out of oil. But Simons sees something deeper: the reservoir isn’t just being drained. The springs feeding it are drying up.

Because here’s the feedback loop from hell: AI replaces human workers. Fewer humans doing complex cognitive work means less diverse, friction-rich human language production. Less diverse language production means less valuable training data. Less valuable training data means AI systems start to degrade. The technology is quietly consuming the very substrate it depends on.

We’re not just outsourcing tasks. We’re outsourcing the effort of thinking. And effort, it turns out, is where the interesting stuff happens.

Is the Thesis Airtight? Let’s Push Back

Before we get too comfortable with this narrative, it’s worth stress-testing it.

First, the synthetic data problem may be solvable. Researchers are already working on techniques to filter AI-generated text from training sets and to generate synthetic data that preserves distributional diversity. It’s not unreasonable to think that clever engineering could mitigate model collapse — at least partially, at least for a while.

Second, the “exhaustion of human text” timeline assumes current architectures and training methods. Breakthroughs in reasoning models, multimodal learning, or entirely new paradigms could change the equation. We’ve been surprised before.

Third, there’s an argument that AI could increase cognitive diversity by lowering barriers to entry — giving more people from more backgrounds the tools to participate in complex knowledge work. That’s not nothing.

But here’s why I ultimately find Simons’ argument more convincing than these objections: every counterargument assumes human behavior will remain unchanged in the presence of powerful cognitive offloading tools. And we have decades of evidence that it won’t. A Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study of 319 knowledge workers found that in 40% of AI-assisted tasks, participants exercised no critical thinking whatsoever. Anthropic’s own research shows that users pause to double-check AI output only 8.7% of the time.

We’re not just outsourcing tasks. We’re outsourcing the effort of thinking. And effort, it turns out, is where the interesting stuff happens.

The Hope Buried in the Wreckage

So here’s where the Sevenelles brain kicks in — the part of me that refuses to let a clear-eyed assessment of reality collapse into the nihilistic need for another gin & tonic.

If Simons is right — and the research increasingly suggests he is — then the very things that make humans inefficient, frustrating, and expensive are also the things AI literally cannot survive without. Disagreement. Friction. The stubborn insistence of someone who sees the problem differently. The junior employee who asks the dumb question that turns out not to be dumb. The messy, ego-bruising, time-consuming process of humans actually engaging with each other.

The organizations that figure out how to use AI to create more human interaction — more debate, more cross-pollination, more productive friction — will be the ones that thrive. This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s a logical consequence of the dependency Simons identifies. If AI’s intelligence is a function of the social complexity of the civilization that feeds it, then protecting and enriching that social complexity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.

What This Means for You and Me

The transition is going to be ugly. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Millions of jobs will disappear before the correction kicks in. People will suffer real economic pain while executives learn the hard way that you can’t automate the source of your own intelligence.

But the correction will kick in. And when it does, the premium won’t be on people who can do what AI does — process, summarize, generate plausible output. The premium will be on people who can do what AI can’t: think in genuinely novel ways, hold productive disagreements, bring perspectives that haven’t been averaged into the training data, and do the unglamorous, essential work of keeping human knowledge diverse and alive.

Every consumed human in the Pluribus hive mind wanted Carol to write that book. Not because her prose was technically superior to what the collective could produce. Because she could still surprise them. Because surprise requires a mind that hasn’t been averaged.

That’s the edge the human mind holds. Not efficiency. Not productivity. The capacity to be unpredictable in ways that matter.

Read Bright Simons’ essay “The Social Edge of Intelligence” in The Ideas Letter

The post AI Will Devastate the Workforce. But the Human Mind Will Always Have the Edge. first appeared on Sevenelles.

In another great newsletter, my friend Curt Buermeyer summarizes Peter Diamandis’s three-phase roadmap from AI labor disruption to post-scarcity abundance. I’ll be honest — I want to believe it. Curt and I agree that the next five years are going to be rough. But where he sees a ten-year arc bending toward something beautiful, I see a timeline that assumes robotic construction, autonomous transport, AI healthcare, and vertical farming all scale and democratize faster than any infrastructure transformation in human history. But here’s the thing about being a pessimist: often you’re wrong, and that is a beautiful thing. Curt’s optimism is grounded and honest, not naive, and Diamandis has a track record of being right about exponential curves before the rest of us could see them. So I’m bookmarking this roadmap not because I’m convinced, but because I hope like hell they’re right and I’m wrong.

Article Excerpt:

I believe we’re facing a reality where roughly 40% to 50% of white-collar jobs—the knowledge work that college students and recent grads have spent years studying for—will likely be displaced almost overnight.

Article Summary:

Curt Buermeyer’s latest Smash Your Thinking newsletter summarizes a roadmap by Peter Diamandis (XPRIZE founder, exponential tech evangelist) for navigating the AI-driven collapse of the labor market without also collapsing the social contract. The core argument: the AI disruption won’t look like the Industrial Revolution, which reshuffled the workforce over 150 years. This one is compressed into a decade, and there’s no adjacent sector to retrain into because AI is eating every sector simultaneously.

Diamandis lays out three phases. Phase 1 (2025–2028): the fracture. Jobs disappear, identities crater, and the proposed floor is a $3,000/month Universal Basic Income paired with a 32-hour workweek to keep people attached to purpose and social structure while the shock absorbs. Phase 2 (2028–2031): the automation dividend. AI companies have extracted enormous value from public infrastructure — our data, our research, our systems — and the public deserves a share. Think Alaska Permanent Fund, but for the robot economy. Phase 3 (2031–2035): the great deflation. Housing drops from $2,000/month to $600. Transport falls to $225. Food, energy, and healthcare trend toward near-zero marginal cost, driven by robotics, solar, autonomous fleets, and AI diagnostics.

Curt adds his own caveat: he’s skeptical the Phase 3 deflation happens as fast as Diamandis projects. Prices in housing, healthcare, and food have never actually gone down for normal people, and he’d bet the timeline slips. The actionable close is straightforward: share the roadmap, audit what you’d do with your time if survival wasn’t the point, and pressure policymakers to build the bridging mechanisms now — before “the Valley” between 2026 and 2031 turns into something uglier.

Read the Full Article

The post Will AI Force US to Adopt Universal Basic Income? 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.

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

Somewhere between your first crush and your first real heartbreak, you probably experienced something that felt like love but operated more like a software bug. You couldn’t stop thinking about this person. Their lukewarm reciprocation would launch you into euphoria. Their silence would flatten you for days. You were convinced it was the most profound emotional experience of your life.

Congratulations. You may have had “limerence.” And if the psychology establishment wants to make that sound like a diagnosis, I’m here to push back a little.

The Word You Didn’t Know You Needed

Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term in her 1979 book Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love, after interviewing hundreds of people about romantic obsession. She needed a new word because the old ones — infatuation, crush, being in love — didn’t quite capture the particular flavor of madness she was documenting. Limerence, she argued, is involuntary, intrusive, and organized entirely around one terrifying question: does this person feel the same way about me?

The hallmarks are pretty recognizable: the obsessive thinking, the mood swings tied completely to the other person’s behavior, the magical thinking, the replaying of every interaction like game film. Tennov was clear that this isn’t a choice. It happens to you. You don’t decide to be limerent any more than you decide to be constipated.

Modern psychology has more or less kept the word around, and the internet has recently rediscovered it with the enthusiasm of someone who just learned that their chronic condition has a name. There are Reddit communities, self-help frameworks, and no shortage of articles suggesting that limerence is something you should identify, manage, and ideally cure yourself of.

Puh-leaze. That’s where I get off the bus.

Pathologizing Puppy Love

Here’s my actual take: limerence, at least in its garden-variety form, is just what falling hard for someone feels like when you’re young and unjaded. It’s not a disorder. It’s not a trauma response dressed up in romantic clothing. It’s the emotional equivalent of being a newbie — you feel everything at full volume because you haven’t yet developed the scar tissue that turns down the gain.

Worth noting: the American Psychiatric Association agrees, at least implicitly. Limerence does not appear in the DSM-5-TR — the official diagnostic manual for mental disorders. It’s not a condition. It’s an experience. There’s a difference. Tom Bellamy, a neuroscientist at the University of Nottingham and author of Smitten: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last, makes the boundary explicit: “People sometimes tie it with borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, OCD, and even stalking. None of that is grounded in research.”

We as a whole have become adept at turning normal human experiences into clinical conditions that require intervention. Sadness became depression. Worry became anxiety disorder. Now apparently, the gut-punch intensity of early infatuation is limerence, a state you should probably discuss with a therapist and track in a journal.

I’m not dismissing Tennov’s work. The research is real, the phenomenon is real, and yes — in its most severe form, limerence can become genuinely destructive. Journalist Amanda McCracken, who spent years cycling in and out of obsessive infatuations, put it plainly after finally seeking help: “Limerence was a safe place for me to hide from the vulnerability of real intimacy.” That version — limerence as a long-term avoidance strategy rather than a passing storm — deserves attention.

But most of us didn’t have that. Most of us had the version where you were seventeen, completely undone by someone, certain this was the most important thing that had ever happened, and then eventually — through reciprocation, rejection, or simple time — it passed. (Or it became that smoldering torch that flames back up whenever you have a row with your partner.)

Love Is the Follow-Through

The useful distinction Tennov actually drew — and the one that gets lost when limerence becomes a self-help buzzword — is between the obsessive “I want you to want ME” (tanks, Cheap Trick) state and the kind of love that shows up in the boring, unglamorous middle of a long relationship. Limerence is almost entirely about you and your internal state. Love, the kind that matters, is mostly about the other person.

Limerence asks: Do they want me?

Love asks: What do they need?

Bellamy, who experienced this firsthand when he met his wife, describes the transition well: “If you have two limerent people, it’s fantastic. Eventually, however, the limerence fades, and the two people must transition to a different form of love. This will involve affection, communication, respect — all the things we associate with healthy, mature love.”

That’s not a small difference. Limerence is a beautiful, consuming, somewhat selfish state. Love, as a practice rather than a feeling, is a decision you make on the days when you don’t particularly feel like it. Which doesn’t mean limerence is worthless. It’s the kindling. The problem is when people mistake the kindling for the fire and can’t understand why it keeps burning out.

A Word in Defense of Feeling Everything

There’s a version of emotional maturity that looks a lot like emotional deadening. You learn to recognize limerence, you label it, you manage your expectations, you don’t do anything rash. This is probably wise. It is also, at some level, a small tragedy.

Giulia Poerio, a psychologist at the University of Sussex who studies limerence, captures the paradox neatly: “It’s a real cognitive invasion of your mind. It’s also enjoyable, which makes it somewhat addictive.” That’s the thing about limerence that the self-help literature never quite admits — it feels terrible and wonderful at the same time, and some part of you doesn’t entirely want it to stop.

The completely undone feeling — the ridiculous, embarrassing, can’t-eat, checking-your-phone-every-four-minutes feeling — is one of the more vivid experiences available to human beings. It’s not particularly rational. It’s not particularly dignified. But it is alive in a way that’s hard to replicate once you’ve got enough experience to know better.

So yes, understand what limerence is. Know that it’s not a reliable signal of compatibility. Know that it can attach itself to people who are objectively wrong for you. Know that it will eventually end, one way or another, and that surviving it doesn’t mean something went wrong. And it is certainly not a mental affliction. It’s just a normal part of this thing we call life.

References

• What is limerence, and are you confusing it with love? — The Washington Post, March 2026
• Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love — Dorothy Tennov (Amazon)
• Smitten: Romantic Obsession, the Neuroscience of Limerence, and How to Make Love Last — Tom Bellamy (Amazon)
• Limerence — Psychology Today
• Love and Limerence: Dorothy Tennov’s Research into the Confusions of Bonding — The Marginalian

The post Is it Love or Is it Limerence? first appeared on Sevenelles.