Posts

Introduction The FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early—is built on a compelling premise: aggressively save and invest, minimize expenses, and buy back your time. For people whose mental health makes traditional employment exhausting or unsustainable, the appeal is obvious. But the relationship between financial independence and mental health is more complicated than the FIRE community often acknowledges. This post explores both the promise and the limits. Key Points What the FIRE framework actually offers people dealing with mental illness The ways financial stress compounds anxiety and depression Where FIRE’s assumptions break down for people with health-related income instability The psychological relationship with money, security, and future orientation Building financial resilience without making it another source of anxiety Conclusion Financial independence is a legitimate goal and a genuine buffer against certain kinds of suffering. But it’s not a cure for mental illness, and the intense optimization mindset of FIRE can become its own trap. The aim is enough security to give yourself options—not a new obsession to replace the old ones.

Introduction Looking back at yourself as a student is a strange exercise. You’re trying to understand someone who had less information, fewer skills, and a different set of pressures than you do now—but who was also making decisions that shaped everything that followed. This post is a reflection on what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I wish I had understood earlier about how to actually learn. ...

Introduction Ken Thompson’s 1984 Turing Award lecture, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” makes a deceptively simple argument: you cannot fully trust code you did not write yourself, because the compiler that built it might have been compromised. The implications reach far beyond computer security. Trust in complex systems is always, at some level, an act of faith—and understanding that shapes how you should build, operate, and rely on things you can’t fully verify. ...

Introduction Changing your mind is supposed to be a virtue—a sign of intellectual honesty and willingness to update on evidence. But in practice it’s uncomfortable, because our beliefs are entangled with our identity. Admitting you were wrong about something important can feel like admitting you were a different, lesser person. This post is about how to actually do it: update your beliefs without losing your sense of self in the process. ...

Introduction The explore/exploit tradeoff is a concept from computer science and decision theory: when do you keep searching for something better versus committing to what you’ve found? It maps surprisingly well onto how we read. Wide reading is exploration—building a broad map of ideas. Deep reading is exploitation—extracting full value from a rich vein. Both matter, and the tension between them shapes what kind of thinker you become. Key Points The explore/exploit framework and how it applies to reading and learning What wide reading provides that deep reading can’t, and vice versa How to recognize when you’re stuck in a rut versus appropriately going deep The role of serendipity in intellectual development Building a personal reading practice that balances both modes Conclusion The best readers do both. Exploration keeps you from becoming a narrow specialist who misses the bigger picture. Exploitation keeps you from becoming a dilettante who knows a little about everything and a lot about nothing. The skill is knowing when to switch.

Introduction In Brave New World, soma is the drug that keeps citizens content, compliant, and untroubled by the weight of real experience. When I started taking Zoloft, I worried about something similar—that I was trading authentic suffering for chemical comfort, blunting the edges that made me who I am. This is a post about why that framing was wrong, and what psychiatric medication actually does and doesn’t change. Key Points The soma anxiety: fears about medication changing identity or dulling experience What SSRIs actually do at a functional level The difference between treating illness and altering personality Reflections on before and after: what changed and what stayed the same The stigma around psychiatric medication and why it persists Conclusion Zoloft didn’t make me a different person. It made me more capable of being the person I already was. The soma comparison gets it backwards—it’s the illness, not the treatment, that narrows your world.

Introduction The debate between big and small government often misses the more important question: capable versus incapable government. A state that lacks the capacity to implement its own policies—regardless of their ideological orientation—produces bad outcomes. State capacity is the unsexy prerequisite to everything else in governance. Key Points Defining state capacity: what it is and why it gets overlooked The relationship between bureaucratic quality and policy outcomes How different governance philosophies handle the capacity question Historical examples of high and low capacity states The American case: capacity gaps and their downstream effects Conclusion Before debating what government should do, it’s worth asking whether it can do it. Capacity is the foundation. Without it, governing philosophies are just theory.

Introduction Anxiety and depression are often described in clinical terms—symptoms, diagnoses, treatment protocols. That framing is useful but incomplete. What they actually feel like from the inside is more like wearing shackles: a persistent drag on everything you try to do, a narrowing of what feels possible. This post is about that experience, and what it means to start removing the shackles one at a time. Key Points The difference between describing mental illness and inhabiting it How anxiety and depression interact and reinforce each other The specific ways they constrain decision-making, ambition, and relationships What “getting better” actually looks like from the inside The residue that remains even after significant recovery Conclusion The shackles metaphor matters because it implies agency. Shackles can be removed. Understanding what they are and how they work is the first step toward taking them off.

What This Series Is About State governments occupy a fascinating and underappreciated position in American governance. Unlike the federal government, they cannot print money, must generally balance their budgets, compete with neighboring states for residents and businesses, and face hard tradeoffs with finite resources. That combination of constraints makes state finance one of the most instructive places to study how political priorities translate into actual policy. This series examines each of the fifty states—organized by region—through the lens of public finance. The goal is not a dry recitation of budget numbers but an attempt to understand what each state’s fiscal choices reveal about its political economy, its history, and its relationship with the people it governs. ...

Introduction This post will explore the psychology behind habit formation and how understanding these mechanisms can help us build better routines. Key Points Explain the habit loop: cue, routine, reward. Discuss the role of dopamine in habit formation. Offer practical strategies for building positive habits and breaking negative ones. Conclusion Summarize the key takeaways and encourage readers to apply these principles to their own lives.