Journal
This journal is a daily account of my creative labors and casual reflections. It’s intended to be frank, not entertaining. It’s also freewritten, quite unlike my other writing. The ideas jotted down here are thoughts going through my head rather than definitive views or even firm opinions. They’re often completely wrong. So don't take them too seriously.
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September 21, 2026
Building on the last entry… while life is not ultimately measured in dollars and cents, economic and finance analogies are quite often appropriate, because life is mostly about weighing some choices against others. Valuation, opportunity cost, etc.
I was musing on this last week with respect to the gender wars. Suppose women all decide to collectively do something retarded. For instance, get tattoos. What is the rational way for men to respond. If you don’t see the financial analogy, you can easily come up with false alternatives: either continue on, business as usual, paying what you always paid, or pull a reverse Lysistrata and go on strike or drop out. Those aren’t good responses, because both of them dodge the value question.
The whole situation becomes very clear if you understand it as a financial decision. If the counterparties selling product X degrade that product, and can’t be reasoned with, what is the correct response? Well: you should pay less for it. Because now the other things you could do with that same amount of money are better value in comparison. So for instance, if women decide to get tattoos, which are disfiguring and offensive, the rational response is just not to invest as much in chasing them. Not monetarily, but in terms of effort and care. Invest your efforts and interest more in other things instead. Again - not going to extremes, not, “drop out of the mating market.” Just stop paying for a degraded product the same thing you would have paid for a good one.
When your counterparty goes insane, a deal that would have been a huge positive for both of you just isn’t as great anymore, and consequently you shouldn’t invest as much in it. That it woulda coulda been a huge positive doesn’t change the reality that your counterparty has soured the deal.
An unfortunate further consequence is that if most women decide to do something retarded, you can’t fix it by chasing the remaining, less-retarded ones - because their prices are going to be inflated by the shortage, making them overpriced relative to the past. So, erotic demand destruction is a thing; and there’s not really a way to dodge it. Good luck keeping the birthrate above water.
And yes, anyone who argues “tattoos aren’t that bad” should have his head examined; but this point goes well beyond them. Tattoos are just the most nakedly egregious example, because girls are paying to be disfigured, much as people pay to make their houses darker and uglier by adding attached garages, but without any of the practical advantages!
September 20, 2026
Today I’ve been thinking about the nature of happiness. After some thought I came up with a toy model based on financial analogy that is simple but seems to work quite well. Happiness or unhappiness is a signal of how one’s present yield compares to a reference distribution of yields. A neutral mood is analogous to the risk-free rate. The reference distribution is a matter of evolutionary knowledge, but it’s partially hedged by personal and current circumstances, which generates the hedonic treadmill. I think this model explains what we observe very well.
So, for instance, suppose someone is swinging on a hammock feeling happy. This is a signal that: your current yield is excellent compared to the reference distribution. Or, if one is depressed: your current yield is poor compared to the reference distribution. A high-ability person in fortunate circumstances is going to have a higher reference distribution than the inverse person. That means if these two people get similar outcomes in life, we should expect the latter to be much happier than the former - because the former is getting a poor yield when judged by his personal reference distribution.
Now, with this model in hand we can ask if there’s any room for practical improvements to our happiness. Unfortunately not a whole lot. The main points are 1. to calibrate the reference distribution as accurately as possible and 2. to correctly estimate potential yields. Lifestyle social media tends to shift people’s reference distribution upward unjustifiably, because what you disproportionately see there are the most successful people showing off their most successful adventures. This gives you the impression that very high yields are much more common and attainable than they really are, leading you to be unhappy with yields that are good when judged by more reasonable standards. Regarding the second point, advertising routinely promises higher yields than actually eventuate. This is the consumerist problem. But it can happen elsewhere as well. We don’t always know whether the outcomes of our efforts will return the yields we expect, and often can’t know no matter how hard we think, because information is lacking. Something you believe will make you happy might turn out to not.
All this is very sensible, but it only goes so far. If your yield sucks compared to your adjusted evolutionary reference distribution, it sucks, and you can’t hypnotize yourself out of it while retaining your honesty. The hedonic treadmill hedges rather than erases. Also, it’s not legitimate to look at a low-ability person happy with outcomes that are below the population average and then tell a high-ability person they ought to be happy with the same outcomes, for the reasons just explained. False conclusion.
Finally, I was thinking about this with regard to Optimalism. Some religions try to game this system by faking yields. “You can be happy meditating and staring at a wall.” I don’t think that’s legitimate. It’s not right to promise a magic bullet for happiness because ultimately that amounts to an attempt to fake your yields or your reference distribution, which is malfeasance. What is legitimate, however, is to give larger context. For instance: if one is having a period of weak returns, one shouldn’t give up, because there might be a future period that will compound the returns of that weak period, and getting some return is still better than nothing. This provides helpful perspective without dishonestly pretending that a poor yield is a good one.
Thus, I don’t think Optimalism is missing anything legitimate by not promising: “Here’s this one weird trick to be happy right now regardless of your circumstances.” Given the nature of happiness, doing so would not be right. However, if you can say: “Yes, your yield sucks now; but your portfolio is going to compound over a much longer period so do your best regardless and keep your eyes on the prize,” then you’ve done something fair and helpful.
September 18, 2026
As part of my site refurbishment I’ve added a short piece called “An Introduction and Conclusion to my Essays.” You can find it here. I have also been busy with the interview I mentioned earlier, which is quite extensive. I am not yet sure when this will be available.
A friend has recently published a piece on feminine beauty drawn substantially from DBL. In my view, it errs by trying to compromise with other sources whose methodology is flawed. This is a point I already made late in section five of DBL. I was fully aware of these other sources at the time of writing, and after considerable reflection, concluded that the correct approach was to reject them outright. The methodology I developed for DBL is superior, and its accuracy will be borne out in the end. A Cochrane-style review that mixes right and wrong studies and aims between them sounds more authoritative, but is less. Now, in the past I would have engaged amicably, especially as I’m sure the intentions of the author are good; but my mind has been immersed in other topics, and I am not sure I want to revisit feminine beauty, especially in the form of disagreement, however friendly that disagreement might be. More generally, my disappointment over DBL’s reception is still sharp. So I prefer not to think about it any more than I have to. The amazing Carmen, who helped me find many of the images and put together the podcast, eventually reached a similar point of frustration and withdrew entirely. Nevertheless, I write this note to indicate my view.
September 16, 2026
I discovered the hover tooltips I added to Optimalism a few weeks ago were behaving oddly on phones and tablets. Apologies to readers who were affected by this bug. I have corrected it so they only display, as originally intended, on mousey devices. If you encounter any obvious display bugs when studying Optimalism on your device, please let me know.
Beyond that I have no particular thoughts to share today. Just making very slow and not particularly interesting progress. Hopefully I will be more enthused sooner rather than later…
September 14, 2026
Made some improvements to Optimalism today, this time mainly removing some superfluous passages to ensure it’s as concise as possible, but also minor tweaks to the meditation, for whose quickstart I also did some vibecoding yesterday. Also worked on the novel. Beyond that, not feeling super talkative…
September 12, 2026
Momentous events in the past few days. So, I am going to write a longer entry.