Month: May 2025

We can mourn for the things we don’t have. And it can be tough when we think we are entitled to specific outcomes. Safety, security, affection…for example, are things all humans deserve. Except we don’t always get those things. Again, we can be sad that the thing we think we deserve doesn’t work out. But a better alternative is to look at things you do have. Celebrate them. If you don’t have the family you think you deserve, make one. If you don’t have the career you think you have earned, create it. And on and on. Focusing on the things you can control is a much more productive use of energy than focusing on the things you cannot.

In the end, specific outcomes are tied to our expectations of the world.

Which means they can be moved. The person setting boundaries is often seen as the villain. But boundaries don’t just show what is acceptable behavior–what we consider normal around here–they also define what isn’t allowed.

Boundaries vary based on context and relationship. The boundaries for an 8-year-old are different from those of an adult. A parent requiring their teenager to come home by curfew isn’t being controlling–they’re establishing safety. But to the teenager, it feels unfair.

A world with boundaries can feel restrictive to some individuals. Toxic individuals see any boundary as an infringement on their personal freedom. They can’t comprehend that their actions affect others. To them, being asked to consider consequences feels like oppression rather than basic consideration.

Dysfunction occurs when no one holds any type of boundary. Without them, chaos ensues because anything goes becomes the standard. What’s interesting is that the boundary-holder often gets portrayed as the bad guy, even when they’re preventing problems others refuse to see.

Perhaps some boundaries can be negotiated. They may occasionally be unreasonable. Boundaries can evolve and change as relationships and circumstances do. But someone has to be willing to establish them in the first place. (The absence of boundaries is much more dangerous than setting them in the wrong spot.)

If you choose to hold boundaries, don’t expect to be praised for it. Expect to be misunderstood. You won’t get credit for preventing problems that never happen because of your boundaries–in fact, you might get blamed for being “difficult.” Best advice: You’re not the problem. You’re often the solution to problems others refuse to acknowledge.

Life cycles depend on the stickiness of an idea to begin with. For instance, even though slavery ended, Jim Crow laws continued. So did redlining and caste systems. Racism didn’t die—just the outright treatment of owning another human. So much focus goes into changing one policy or another. But rarely does policy change the hearts of the people. The tricky part of managing a democracy is that everyone has a voice, even when we don’t agree with them, even when their take is despicable. The shortcut here is to censor. Perhaps a better path is questioning why someone draws these types of conclusions. No one is born racist. You become a racist over time, over many decisions.

Of course, this isn’t just racism. Xenophobia, homophobia, sexism…again, these are all ideas that stick in our culture. Why do ideas like this continue to hang around in 2025? The stories we tell do indeed persist because of the stories we tell. “How things are done around here” truly is a power we can’t negotiate in each individual life.

But not all hope is lost. As I mentioned above, slavery was legal until one day it wasn’t. We got rid of “Us vs. Them” and stopped scapegoating—in other words, we stopped fooling ourselves in what story (often market-related) we were telling and began to tell a better one.

Minecraft is one of the most successful video games of all time. And when you look at it, you are dropped into a block world where you gather material to build whatever you want. A digital sandbox. Some may ask, what’s the point? There are no objectives, no damsel in distress, no final boss, no village to save. That’s precisely the point of the game: you make it how you want to. The game’s value is in how you play it. Playing a little or none, well, there is no value. Verses the one who builds a Titanic replica, who sees tremendous value.

Sometimes, the reason is to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Other times, however, it is because someone imagined how someone could misuse the tool.

Imagining the worst-case scenario is a useful tool until it isn’t. Indeed, our imaginations run wild.

Capitalism isn’t magical. It’s both an economic and political system. It is a way to organize people, not the way. And the balance we can’t seem to achieve is this:

Social progress is often left at the expense of capitalism. If there is no market incentive (profits), why bother? But of course, we can’t live in that world. People exist in it. And we are not here to serve capitalism. Capitalism is here to serve us. When critiquing capitalism, we recognize the benefits it can bring and the areas it also exploits. I’m proposing to tip the scale back toward social progress, and yes, at the expense of capitalism.

Sometimes, we don’t get the thing we think we deserve. An abusive spouse would need treatment. And once they are better, they may not be able to return home. Its tragic and reality at the same time. Entitlement however can blind us from seeing things as they really are.

Stay with the feelings and the pain. We suffer twice as much, wishing for this to go away, to escape this moment. But when we do, when we don’t feel the feelings through, they linger and often manifest down the road as trauma. It may feel unbearable, but it is also an opportunity to remember why life and relationships are so precious.

All the information you need is available. So what matters now?

Asking the right questions.

Asking better questions.

Patience to read and learn the material.

Understanding the point.

Understanding the context of the information.

Being willing to be wrong.

Being willing to change one’s mind.

Most importantly, how does this information enable action?

In the wake of the Reagan era, a profound shift occurred in our economic landscape. Since the 1980s, core living expenses—housing, education, healthcare, childcare, transportation, and food—have dramatically outpaced wage growth. While median home prices have increased by over 160% since 2000 (more than doubling relative to income), college tuition has risen nearly 1,200% since 1980², and healthcare costs have grown at twice the rate of general inflation, median household incomes have grown by only about 30% in the same period.

To put this in concrete terms: if a typical family in 2000 earned $50,000 and could purchase a $150,000 home (a price-to-income ratio of 3:1), by 2022 their income might have grown to $65,000, but that same house would cost $390,000 (a ratio of 6:1). What was once the cornerstone of middle-class stability—homeownership—has become increasingly unattainable, forcing more people to either take on crushing mortgage debt or remain permanent renters in a market where rents have also skyrocketed, increasing by over 70% in the past decade alone.

The urban housing crisis that Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson examine in their book Abundance illustrates this problem perfectly. In 1950, the median home price was 2.2 times the average annual income; by 2020, it had risen to 6 times. This radical disconnect doesn’t just price young people out of homeownership—it fundamentally alters cities themselves. Where does the local barista live in Silicon Valley? How about the teacher, the firefighter, or the nurse? Cities that were once engines of economic mobility have become engines of exclusion. As Klein and Thompson note, when housing is unaffordable, cities may still function as centers of innovation but fail in their historic role of providing pathways into the middle class. The wealthy and high-skilled can still afford to live there, but ordinary workers are priced out, destroying a traditional avenue to economic advancement.

This widening gap isn’t random chance but the predictable outcome of an economic system whose core features—from tax policy to financial deregulation to corporate governance—systematically channel gains upward while distributing costs downward. It’s not that shadowy figures gathered in a room to design inequality, but rather that the combined effects of thousands of policies, court decisions, and market structures have created a game where debt is the central mechanism keeping the whole system running. When wages can’t keep up with costs, debt becomes the bridge—student loans for education, mortgages for housing, credit cards for daily necessities—ensuring that even as people fall behind, the payments keep flowing upward. It’s a game where someone has to lose for others to win. And if you’re wondering who the designated loser is in this arrangement, just look at who’s drowning in debt while being fed the mythology of the American Dream to keep them playing. As legendary poker player Amarillo Slim observed, “Look around the table. If you don’t see a sucker, get up, because you’re the sucker.”