2026-10-15 23:11:00
First: a huge thank you to everyone who answered the August Survey, it was genuinely the highlight of my ATVBT-year. It's hard to express how weird it is to send these emails out to the world all the time and (mostly) have no idea what anyone thinks of them, so it was lovely to get so many interesting and intelligent observations from all of you.
Today I'm going to try something even weirder and more self-indulgent: I've been wondering for a long while what information about me "leaks" through the blog, so today I'm just outright asking you about it. I haven't explicitly said that many things about myself in the blog, but I suspect a lot of you can guess a lot of things about me just by the content of the posts.
So I'd be very grateful if you could answer this survey to let me know what you've thought or guessed. Please be as direct and presumptuous as possible – if you've ever thought "ohhhh, this guy is totally XYZ" while reading the blog I'd like to hear about it, even if you're (admirably) aware that it might or might not be true.
Thank you as always for reading! The conversations and interactions are what makes the whole thing worth while.
2026-10-14 00:11:22
When I was in my early twenties, I went through a best-friendship unraveling that absolutely devastated me. I remember telling my counsellor, with the appropriate amount of early-twenties melodrama, that I would NEVER FIND A BEST FRIEND AGAIN.
She asked me why I needed one.
Rude.
She introduced me to what she called the cup theory. The idea was that I have a lot of different facets in my personality and a lot of different cups I want filled, and there is no particular reason one person needs to fill all of them.
I can have a friend at the gym who I wave to and talk to about my upcoming sets. I can have a friend I barely see but travel with once a year. I can have people I call when I want to talk about ideas and completely different people I call when I want to complain about work.
At the time, this was mind blowing to me. My very black-and-white brain had been treating interpersonal relationships like there were a handful of available positions and each one had to be filled. BEST FRIEND. PARTNER. ACQUAINTANCE.
I learned to start seeing relationships in shades. People could fill different cups. Nobody had to be everything.
I learned this lesson but never managed to apply it to romance.
Despite being a fairly unconventional person who has approached very little of my life conventionally, I have maintained an oddly 1950s definition of a successful romantic relationship.
You meet someone. You fall in love. You live together. You raise children together. You travel together. You spend enormous amounts of time together. You merge your routines and your homes and your lives.
This is particularly strange because I am also a person who needs an enormous amount of time to do my own thing.
I've tried, though. I have really, really tried.
And I keep finding myself confused about why something that is supposed to make me happy can make me feel so trapped.
I'm starting to wonder if the lesson I learned about friendship ten years ago was one I was supposed to apply here too.
Romance doesn't have to fill all the cups.
I can travel alone or with the friend I see once a year. I can have gym friends. I can have people I talk to about work and people I call when something terrible happens. I don't actually need to find one human being who can be my lover, best friend, co-parent, travel companion, roommate, emotional support system, activity partner and preferred person to sit beside every single evening.
Maybe what I actually want from romance is much smaller and, at the same time, much more specific.
Sex. Intellectual connection. Someone I'm genuinely excited to see.
Someone who has their own very full, rich, sparkly life and doesn't need to be absorbed into mine. Someone I might see a few times a month and really, really want to see when I do.
There is something hilarious about spending my entire adult life rejecting conventionality only to discover that, in this one particular area, I've been relentlessly trying to make myself want the most conventional arrangement possible.
I'm learning that living together isn't the prize. That spending every night together isn't evidence that a relationship is more serious or more successful. Maybe two people can love each other a ton without creating one shared life on the backs of their two separate ones.
I don't think I want less love.
I think I might just want fewer cups assigned to it.
2026-10-13 00:11:26
There's various kinds of policy preferences where my actual opinion about them is something like "if this is a tiny niche belief then I'm glad it exists, it's a useful input to ultimate collective negotiation, but if it gained significant power in society I think that would be pretty bad."
This seems pretty banal when I write it, but I don't feel like I've heard it discussed much and I don't know what to do with it on a practical level.
Should I pre-emptively oppose a group who are still quite small because I think that if they got (significantly) bigger that would be bad? Or should I support the group's existence now, and if they get bigger deal with the consequences later? Neither of these feel great.
I suspect I have this problem more than many people do because I'm philosophically Millian, I really do think that even wrong arguments can often help other people improve their thinking, and also that "banning" views (to the extent that's ever possible) can often backfire. So I suspect a lot of people are much less likely to see a philosophy and think "I'm ok with some of that but don't want a ton of it", they either want it everywhere or nowhere?, I don't know if this is true.
Variety is the spice of life, but there's many spices that I'm happy to eat if they're <1% of a dish and yet not excited to gulp whole spoonfuls of. How am I supposed to relate to the people who are trying to fill my soup with their one spice, if I support them at their current level but oppose them if they got more successful?
2026-10-09 23:11:51
Here's a thing I wrote 15 years ago; I think it may have turned out roughly true?
What mostly strikes me is how mad it is that there was a time before I had a smartphone, and was predicting what would happen in a world full of smartphones, and that world wasn't mine. The past is a foreign country, and I used to live there, and even still it feels alien.
Suppose you're in a big, touristy city - let's say New York - and you want to buy some pizza.... If the majority of customers in a particular area are tourists (who won't return to the store), it's rational for most of the pizzerias at a given price-point to offer low-quality pizza: one place in each neighbourhood will serve good-quality pizza to locals, and every other pizzeria is better off using cheap ingredients and serving the tourist market. The high-quality pizzeria's profit margins will actually be lower, and they try to make up for it in volume (because they get all the locals, plus some random tourists, whereas everyone else just gets some random tourists). This is why touristy food in touristy cities will tend to be bad, relative to the same kind of food in non-tourist towns (which rely on repeat customers).
This is reason #20934092 that smart phones are going to make life much better, by making markets more perfect-competition-like. Once a significant number of tourists start checking out online reviews even before buying a $3 slice, big cities like New York will start to resemble touristless towns - even one-time visitors will act as if they were repeat customers (though in fact they're "repeating" someone else's visit). Expect the average (though not the maximal) quality of pizza in New York to increase significantly in the next ten years.
2026-10-08 23:11:48
Here are some things I've noticed in the romantic relationships I find most admirable, personally. Of course, you might care about about different things in relationships than I do.
It's biased towards people who have been together for longer, but sneaking in some things from relationships that are still fairly new. So I don't know how some of these relationships will work out.
(And who knows which relationships might have worked out but didn't because the partners gave up on them? – causal inference is as hard as love is).
The following was originally a preamble to this blogpost, but I've been told my preambles are way too long + I should get to the point better, so here it is as a post-amble instead:
I personally don't think anyone should brag about their relationship till they're 90 years old together; at minimum, surely until they've been together for a couple of decades and still going strong.
I realise this is partly just a quirk of my personality – maybe it's fine, overall, to brag about things and later recant – but I find it so incredibly off-putting: I see people posting or talking about how great their relationships are (and how you can be more like them), and then within a year or two they are no longer in those relationships, and I just don't understand.
To me the appropriate emotional response to finding yourself in a good relationship is 1% pride at whatever hard work you did (and keep doing) to make your partner's life better, and 99% awed amazement that the universe has bestowed this ridiculous gift on you, plus appropriate reverence and humility in the face of the unknowable future. (This is also, I think, the right response to all other good fortunes, including finding yourself alive in the universe to begin with, but that's another story).
And of course, this applies (although differently) to looking at other people's relationships from the outside and saying they are Good. There's so much we don't know about how couples live together, and who will still be glad of it 30 years from now.
2026-10-06 23:11:10
Selfish is one of those words we have decided is almost entirely bad.
Nobody describes their ideal partner as selfish. We don't compliment someone on doing a great job prioritizing themselves. If someone tells you they are "finally choosing themselves," there is usually an entire backstory needed to make this admirable. Hopefully one involving a sufficiently terrible other person.
This feels odd, because I'm not sure why choosing yourself should always require someone else to have done something wrong.
This gets especially complicated in relationships.
We are told that relationships take work. That the grass is greener where you water it and that long-term love is a choice rather than a feeling. That people give up too easily and that nobody is perfect. That there will be hard seasons, and if you leave every time something gets difficult, you will spend your entire life leaving.
I think some of those things are true. But I also think there has to be a line somewhere between the sentiment that relationships take work, and the belief you should continue doing something that makes you unhappy because stopping would mean you haven't tried hard enough.
I think you can leave a relationship three months in because you don't want to be in it anymore.
Or a year in.
Or ten.
You don't need to stay until you've collected enough evidence to make a case for leaving. You don't need a betrayal or a diagnosis or a pattern of mistreatment. You don't need to prove that you tried everything. You don't need the other person to have failed badly enough that everyone agrees you had no choice.
You can have a choice. And you can choose yourself.
And for some reason we are weirdly uncomfortable with that.
We are feel more at ease when someone leaves because they had to. He cheated. She was controlling. They fought constantly. He wouldn't go to therapy. She wouldn't change. Something happened that made staying unreasonable, and now the person leaving can do so without really being selfish at all.
But the relationship might have been fine. The other person might have been good. They might have loved you completely. They might have been trying. The relationship might even have been saved if you had been willing to keep compromising.
And maybe you still didn't want to. You're allowed to not want to.
That's a truly selfish belief, and I don't want to sanitize it into something nicer. Sometimes you will make a decision because it is better for you, knowing it is going to be much worse for somebody else.
Unfortunately social media disagrees with me. For every person scrolling on Instagram being told, "He never deserved you," "She was the best thing that ever happened to him," "He's going to realize what he lost," or my personal favourite, "One day she's going to regret leaving someone who loved her like that," there is another person on the other side of that story who may have simply decided they didn't want the relationship anymore.
They might not regret it. Losing you might not have been the biggest mistake of their life. You might really have been wonderful. You might have loved them well. You might have done everything you reasonably could have done. And they still didn't want you.
That is a brutal thing to accept, which is probably why we have built an entire genre of inspirational content designed to help people avoid accepting it.
We tell people that someone leaving them says something about the other person's inability to appreciate them. We tell them the person will eventually realize what they lost. We tell them they were too good for someone who couldn't see their value.
Sometimes that's true. And sometimes it isn't.
A person can look at the relationship, look at you in your totality, understand what they're giving up and leave anyway because the life they want isn't the one they have with you. I don't know that helping someone turn that into a story about how badly they were treated is actually helping them.
There is a difference between supporting someone through pain and helping them build an identity around having been wronged. The more useful thing might be much less comforting. They chose themselves, that hurt you terribly, and yes, their decision may have been selfish.
But they were allowed to make it.
Which brings me back to the idea that maybe everyone isn't treating you badly.
Someone can make a choice that causes you enormous pain without having committed an offence against you. They can decide they don't want to marry you. They can decide they don't want to keep trying. They can decide that the relationship you would happily spend the rest of your life in is not the relationship they want to spend the rest of theirs in.
That decision can be devastating for you and still be theirs to make. And if we're going to allow ourselves that freedom, then we have to allow other people to have it too.
That's where this gets much less fun.
As someone with anxious attachment, I find that part especially terrifying. Because if people are allowed to leave simply because they decide something isn't right for them, there isn't actually a way to guarantee that someone won't leave me.
I can't earn that certainty by being good enough. I can't make myself indispensable enough. I can't follow the relationship rules closely enough that leaving becomes something the other person is no longer allowed to choose.
There is something much safer about believing relationships only end when somebody does something wrong. At least then there are rules. Be a good partner. Communicate. Compromise. Go to therapy. Water the grass. Do ALL THE THINGS correctly and you get to keep the relationship.
Accepting that people are allowed to choose themselves blows a fairly enormous hole in that theory.
You can do everything right and someone can still decide they don't want the life they're living with you. And if I want the freedom to make that decision for myself, I have to accept the terrifying possibility that someone I love has exactly the same freedom.
Sometimes I will be selfish. Sometimes someone else will be selfish. Sometimes their selfish decision will be the best thing they could possibly have done for themselves and one of the worst things that has ever happened to me.
Both things can be true at exactly the same time, and I think we do people a disservice when we refuse to acknowledge that.
We are very good at comforting people by assigning blame. If you've been left, betrayed, rejected or otherwise deeply hurt, there is an almost immediate instinct to establish that the person who hurt you was wrong. Your friends do it. Instagram does it. Therapists sometimes do it.
But I wonder whether some of that comfort keeps us stuck.
Because now recovery requires maintaining the belief that something unjust happened to us. We aren't simply grieving something we wanted and didn't get. We are recovering from what somebody did to us.
Sometimes that is exactly what happened. Other times, somebody just made a decision about their own life that we desperately wish they hadn't.
Those are different things.
I'm not arguing that wanting something makes everything we do to get it acceptable. I'm arguing that sometimes the selfish part itself is acceptable. The best thing for you will occasionally be the worst thing for someone else. There isn't always a compromise where everyone gets half of what they need. There isn't always enough watering in the world to make you want the grass you're standing on. Sometimes one person gets the freedom to leave and the other person gets their heart broken.
And helping people through that shouldn't always mean helping them prove that the person who left was wrong.
Sometimes it means helping them survive the much harder truth:
Someone was allowed to choose themselves.
They did.
And unfortunately, they didn't choose you.