“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.

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 the people who put up with us — and to the slow-dawning realization that we’re somebody’s people too.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

Everyday People – Sly & The Family Stone – 1968

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for June 19, 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.

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

Article Excerpt:

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

Article Summary:

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

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

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

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

Read the Full Article

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

“Here’s to the cocktail at the end of a long week, and the bartender who reads the room.“

– Anonymous

Jam:

She Cleans Up – Father John Misty – 2024

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for June 12, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.

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

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

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

Read the Full Article

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

“Here’s to love — the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.“

– Anonymous (traditional)

Jam:

Break the Chain – The Bridge City Sinners – 2024

Have an excellent weekend everybody!

The post Toast & Jam for June 5, 2026 first appeared on Sevenelles.