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.”
Someone had to blaze, and someone had to follow. Then, after a while, a path was born. The moment the trail is abandoned, however, the forest can fill the path again. There is something to be said for abandoning the old ways of doing things here. Further, nature finds a way to heal itself with time. Something must be said about the damage we have done and the miracle that heals.
What you do tomorrow is so much more valuable than what you did yesterday.
One of the glaring problems of the justice system is how easy it is to condemn someone rather than to prove their innocence.
We have to see where the arrow is pointing. Is it pointing toward dignity? Justice? Or perhaps swiftness? Profits? Or something more nefarious?
When we move toward a world we want to live in, we create that world, too.
With the life cycle of news being so short (instant in fact), it’s easier to make a headline clickable than to prove something to be factual. Compounded by our short attention span, it is no wonder that the internet pays attention to conspiracy theories.
The arrow, however, points both ways.
In a world where conspiracy theories can thrive, we don’t take into account how many of them die. For example, we have plenty of evidence to support the fact that the moon landing happened. But that won’t get the clicks when something new is drummed up to debunk it.
Lies are fiction. And we don’t have to accept everything that is presented as fact. We don’t need to take everything we hear as the truth either. Instead, we can hold the space of, “I haven’t done the reading yet, but tell me your thoughts.”
I can proudly say I have lost 35 pounds in the last year. And it wasn’t done with a fancy diet or pills. What was focused on was developing a strategy and selecting the corresponding tactics. Here is what I would recommend:
Train the mind. Read every day. Occupy that space so that when you are bored, you are not reaching in the cupboard.
Walk every day. 10,000 to 20,000 steps a day (sometimes more even). If you’re sore, there’s nothing wrong with taking a rest day. Buy a pair of comfortable shoes to wear for walking.
Have a go-to meal. For me, it was three eggs with an avocado, spinach, and feta cheese every morning. For lunch, I often went to Trader Joe’s frozen meals. If you’re starving, try eating a bite or two of something to calm your nervous system. In the summer, I grilled a lot of different meats for dinner.
Be patient and kind with yourself. I was pretty ashamed I had let myself go, which only perpetuated the eating habit. Letting go of who you used to be is the first step in becoming the person you want to be.
The problem with conversations about justice is how we seek it. Too often, it moves to the letter of the law, our biases and prejudices, and who has the resources to fight for it in court. Ultimately, we are not discussing justice in its purest form, but rather our particular form of justice. Justice is a series of tradeoffs. But those tradeoffs are not always fair. We don’t condemn a criminal to rape if a criminal has raped someone. Yet, we are quick to do the same for murder. A minor can be tried as an adult in some states if the crime is severe enough. Of course, the U.S. has a problem with private entities whose primary goal is profit, rather than rehabilitation, creating an incentive to keep beds full. A Judge or district attorney might say that justice is served by the letter of the law, while we can all simultaneously nod our heads in agreement that such a punishment is inhumane. I wonder if a better conversation isn’t about finding justice anymore. Since the current system doesn’t produce such outcomes, it instead focuses on how we can have a discussion around dignity for those involved. So many questions left unanswered, but the proper conversation starts here.
Zeno’s paradox states that any number can be divided in half. So, in order to travel 10 feet, you must go 5 feet, but before that, 2.5 feet. And so on until you get an obscure number. And the idea is, how can one ever close the gap? What’s interesting is that we can learn to zoom. For instance, scientists can zoom in at the microscopic level. What’s past an electron? Well, we know we go from structure to unstructured, where the rules of time and space no longer matter. And what’s past that? We don’t know. Probably nothing. But we can’t be sure since no microscope of that power exists.
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