If a rat is experimentally injected with infectious bacteria, it behaves a bit like I did after the dentist. It withdraws from social contact with other animals; it doesn’t move so much; its sleeping and eating cycles are disturbed. In short, infection reliably causes a syndrome in animals — called sickness behavior — that is roughly recognizable as akin to the human…

There’s a lot of confusion about the term Postmodernism. To people on the far left, it’s their shadow religion—basically a healthy disregard for any value system that has exerted influence (and caused suffering) in the last few thousand years. To the far right, it’s a rejection of all that is good in the world—like tradition, family, piety, and…

I have been drawn to questions of happiness and fulfillment for much of my adult life. I’m not sure the reason for that, but I think it’s a combination of some things in my family history, it being an extremely hard problem, and the fact that so many people I know are deeply unhappy. The suicide rate in…

We in the West are in the beginning—or perhaps the middle of—a catastrophic crisis of meaning. Many of us sense it. We know it’s happening. But it’s hard to corner and identify. And it’s even more difficult when authors like Steven Pinker use all of their intellectual powers to convince us that things are in fact getting better.…

The idea is that there are two ways for humans to derive happiness: This will be a stream of consciousness thought process that will likely lead to an essay later. By following tradition and ritual By being curious and evidence-based Humans have long been sustained by number 1. It’s what family and religion are based around, and to…

I think a lot about happiness and how to achieve it.—both as individuals, and as societies. I can think of nothing that’s as important, once the more tactical issues are out of the way. I believe I’ve come into some ideas recently, spawned by reading as usual, that I hope have brought me closer to the truth. That…

A while back I wrote a short piece called Addiction Caused by Isolation, where I talked bout research saying that the main cause for addiction to drugs is basically the lack of another meaning loop. The research, which has been done by a number of people now, essentially asked if we’ve been thinking about the problem of addiction…

For like the last 10 years I’ve been looking for a solid book summarization service. I occasionally see one and get excited about one, but upon inspection they usually turn out to have like eleven books, or the summaries are crap, or the interface is unusable. Well I think I might have just found an actual solution, and…

I think I bring this up every year or so, but the point is becoming more acute for me. Reading is life. I’m starting to believe that the most brilliant people in the world were, before and above all else, obsessed readers. Christopher Hitchens basically read and wrote constantly, and I’m now understanding why. When I am reading…

I’ve been thinking about the role of desire in the human identity, and I think I’ve identified a fundamental relationship between the two that isn’t appreciated nearly enough. Quite simply, I think the center of human identity is the presence of core desires. This is important for many reasons. Understanding this can help us pursue a more healthy…