2026-06-24 19:11:53
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Class of '26:
There are two things you must understand to make sense of graduation speeches.
The first is that humans are incapable of internalizing how different other people's experiences are. Every graduation speech is basically the life story of one specific person, masquerading as a universal truth.
If they just told their story, simply but honestly, it might be irrelevant for you but at least you could learn something. But instead of just admitting that we're talking about our own experiences and letting other people salvage whatever they can from it, the official Graduation Speech Register requires framing everything as a Truth of the Universe. You will face this repeatedly, and you will find that it sucks.
The tricky part is that people really do learn and grow from experience, and older people looking at you really do feel sometimes like they're looking at an oncoming disaster in slow motion, desperately wishing they could nudge the train onto different tracks, but not knowing how.
Ezra Pound used to critique all of TS Eliot's poems, supposedly, and Eliot said that wherever Pound made an edit he definitely needed to fix something, but the specific suggestions Pound made were always wrong. And this is basically my synthesis: try really, really hard to be open and un-defensive when people tell you that something you're doing might lead you to pain,[^1] but don't assume their solution is the right one for you. Pound and Eliot were two people successfully engaged in the same activity and they still didn't give each other good suggestions; "living the good life" is a far harder and broader activity, so don't expect anyone's specific suggestions to be good for you.
The second thing to understand about graduation speeches is that people LOVE giving advice. Look at what rich people do once they're rich and successful and can spend their time on anything: a surprisingly large share of them choose to go on the internet and shout unsolicited advice for free.[^2] [Leans forward on podium] Heck, people love giving advice so much that I'm pretending to give this graduation speech while actually writing a blogpost to a bunch of people who are decades past graduation! [Smattering of uncomfortable laughter].
More broadly, I think people give advice 1) to allow themselves to believe that the treasures they squandered through incompetence or cowardice might still have some positive consequences for someone, or 2) to convince themselves that what they did in life was Good, despite all the damage they caused along the way.
You don't have to take them seriously or literally, but please have some sympathy for the sinner. You are too young to have genuinely and irrevocably wasted your life yet, despite what it feels like when some godforsaken 16 year old becomes a celebrity and you think "it's too late for me, now; if you haven't done great work before puberty, it's never going to happen." And perhaps this is true at all ages, perhaps it's never too late for anyone, but man does the wreckage keep piling on wreckage. Maybe advice is more helpful if you treat it in that same Eliot-Pound way: not what specific things is this person suggesting I do, but what is the wound that this person is trying to save me from, and what is my personal version of a life that's less likely to cause this wound? [^3]
Alright, so. With more throat-clearing than an aging smoker, having claimed that there's no good universal advice: how can I now give any kind of advice at all? Of course, I'm giving meta-advice about how to receive advice, so that's completely different.
First, here's a story. When I was 22 I graduated from college and didn't have a job lined up. I truly thought I'd blown it in life, because all my friends were going to McKinsey or Goldman or Yale, and I didn't even know how to tell people I didn't have a job at all. So I spent a few months writing a book, since "I'm working on a book" seemed at least less embarrassing to a juvenile striver than "I'm not doing anything." And since this just so happened to be the moment in history when Amazon opened its platform to let random people put something labelled "a book" into the world, within maybe six months of graduating I had become a (self)-published Author. And then it took off much more than expected, and I got to live off royalties for a while, and got all kinds of other opportunities as a result.
And there's two normal ways that this experience would manifest as Advice:
1) "publish a book! I did it and look what happened."
2) "take a bet on yourself! I did it and look what happened."
That is: people will either advise you to do the exact specific thing they did, or an abstract embodiment of the thing they did. And I hate this for so many reasons, the biggest of which is selection bias: it's nice that it worked out for you, but you're speaking at this graduation, and if it hadn't worked out for you you wouldn't be speaking here. It's simultaneously true (I think) that more people should take more chances on themselves; that those of us who say "selection bias!" at everything are potentially harming you by lowering your ambitions instead of raising them; but also that "it worked for me!" is dumb and fatuous and I don't understand how people keep saying it.
But I digress. What I really wanted to say was: looking back, I think the real secret to my book's success was catching a wave at its beginnings. I got onto Kindle right after its glasnost, when uploading a book required formatting some kind of structured html file, which was fiddly enough that I bet it stopped lots of people from ever getting round to publishing. Within a decade it genuinely felt like everyone and their grandmother had self-published a book or two, and also many people had made careers out of gaming the algorithm, and I fear that the number of true surprise successes has gone down even while the number of books has gone up.
I was self-aware enough that even when I was succeeding my main thought was "maybe I got lucky here", in the sense that "many books never really take off and surely there's a lot of chance in which of them do."[^4] But I think most likely the way I actually got luckiest was a thing I didn't consider at the time: just being on a platform while it was in its growth phase. And even a few years later, in retrospect, the right advice to give someone in similar shoes would probably be "make YouTube videos" rather than "publish a book." But that wasn't obvious at the time: frankly, it felt already then like I was Too Late for YouTube, even though in retrospect I was there at the perfect time.
What's the lesson of all this? I guess don't take advice from guys who write imaginary graduation speeches on their blog works as well as anything [uncomfortable laughter intensifies]. But seriously folks: when Seamus Heaney was giving his Nobel Prize lecture – a kind of graduation speech for people who'll never graduate? – he said it's hard to repress the feeling that history is about as instructive as the abattoir. What did he mean by this? I don't really know. In the context of the speech, it's probably either something about how 1) violence is ultimately the force that moves the world, 2) violence ultimately isn't the the force that moves the world, 3) you can't learn much from history because it's a bunch of carcasses.
But my personal interpretation is something like: there's a limit to what we can learn from history, and to the extent we can learn from it it's by either 1) seeing a piece of steak and adding it to our mental library of possible steak outcomes, without over-privileging any one in particular, 2) having someone who truly cares about us AND has worked at the abattoir for a while actually come with us when we're killing the soft animal of our lives and try to help make the cuts better. Receiving a piece of sausage – pre-processed remnants of somebody else's life experiences, packaged to be palatable – seems not especially useful to me, despite what I'm doing now. [Confused, disturbed murmurs]. To the Class of '26!
[^1]: this isn't true exactly either: my big fear is that it acts as a kind of homogenizing pressure, and that some people are just sufficiently unique that the things they should do are indeed the opposite of what 99.9% of people should do. E.g. I know some people who are absolute workaholics, and I think in many people that's a sign of a deeper unhappiness that's being neglected, but maybe some people just really love working that hard for that long, and convincing such a person that they should Work On Themselves instead is actually kind of criminal? That's my fear, anyhow.
[^2]: there's a bit of selection bias here, admittedly, since the people who go online and shout advice are way more prominent than the people who quietly but happily frolic on their estates with their close personal friends and their collection of endangered animals.
[^3]: while knowing that we live in a 9 dimensional strait of messina, with scyllas and charybdis on all sides. Opportunity fleeting, experimentations perilous, judgment difficult.
[^4] to avoid false modesty: I did, and do, think the book was good! And I don't think it would have succeeded if it were bad. But I mostly thought it was 7/10 good not 9/10 good, and I don't think it succeeded primarily because it was good.
2026-06-23 19:11:12
A guest post from friend of the blog Kester
If you want to think about something complex, it really helps to be functionally literate. I mean "literate" in the most obvious sense: can you read and write? Do you have access to a pen and paper, or a keyboard? Take a grocery list, for example. Without the tools of literacy, I could probably maybe remember 7 items I want to buy...well ok maybe more like 5. Or 3 items to be perfectly honest. But with literacy, I can externalize my memory onto a piece of paper and access a grocery list that is much, much longer. I can even add recipes I copied from someone else's literacy, nutrition facts, poetry about plums in the icebox, etc. From there, you create all of civilization.
Letters aren't the only form of literacy. With the literacy tool of Arabic numerals, you can create an external workspace where you do long division, billable hours, and complex physics calculations. With visual literacy, you can read a bar graph or a street sign or a subway map. That subway map is a literacy tool that creates an external workspace for comprehending complex spatial problems. As you examine the subway map, your thoughts enter that workspace and follow along the lines that someone else drew, and you compare that information to your own experience of the city. You apply your information to the workspace, and the workspace in turn informs you of other possible experiences. This is literacy--participating in a shared external workspace.
So here is my question: if we use literacy to create shared workspaces for cooking and storytelling and physics and subway systems, why don't we have a shared workspace for understanding human emotions? Is there something about emotions that is inherently illiterate?
About ten years ago, I was a teacher at a school for neurodivergent teenagers (kids with ADHD, Autism, dyslexia, etc). One of our goals at the school was to increase our students' "emotional literacy". This is a worthy goal because when teens understand and can talk about their emotions, they gain self-awareness and calmness, and they can better advocate for their own needs. If you aren't aware of your negative emotions, they tend to blindside you and drag you down. And if you aren't aware of your positive emotions, how can you check to see if a situation is working for you?
The problem is, most adults expect teens to be able to spontaneously talk about their emotions off the top of their heads. They're teens, they have big feels, right? So they should be able to talk about them, right? But most teens can't do this! They just say that they are "ok" or "tired" or *shrug emoji*
In my opinion, asking teens to sit at an empty desk and talk about their emotions is like telling them they can only do math problems by intuitively understanding numbers and keeping track of them in their heads, without paper or pencils or formulas. Some incredibly gifted kids CAN do math in their heads, but it would be crazy to teach math as if everyone had that ability. So why were we asking these students to do the same thing with emotion? These kids needed an external workspace to label and understand and mark down emotions. These kids needed a subway map for emotions.
The emotional literacy materials that were available at the time left me deeply unimpressed. Most emotion charts are either for very small children or they are visually overwhelming and disorganized word salad. Surely, I thought, surely it is possible to think about and organize emotions logically and clearly? I just didn't believe that emotions and rationality were inherently opposites. As they used to say in '90s infomercials, "There's got to be a better way!!"
So I decided to make my own emotional literacy workspace, called the Emotion Awareness Board. (kesterlimner.com/emotion) The map is organized by type and intensity of emotion, using color and spatial orientation. Originally, these were printed on magnet boards so my students could hold them at their desks and mark multiple emotions with little magnetic game pieces.
Being able to mark multiple emotions at once is the most important aspect of this external workspace. For example, perhaps you are nervous and curious at the same time. You might be joking around, but also frustrated and critical. You might be embarrassed and proud simultaneously. Or maybe you are pleased and affectionate with a touch of jealousy and regret. Just like with a recipe or long division, it's so much easier to think about these complex states when you have an efficient way of notating them!
Once they had access to an external workspace, all of my students immediately had functional emotional literacy. Even the grouchiest Autistic teens in my class were willing and able to share three or four feelings they had experienced over the weekend, and talk about why they had felt that way. Maybe it's because they now had a workspace that made sense to their brains, or maybe it's because the Emotion Awareness Board was a physical invitation, a talisman that grants permission to speak (or a functional way to indicate things non-verbally, if starting with speech was too challenging.)
I designed this one tool for my students, and I think it's pretty good, but I don't think it's necessarily the best tool for all people or cultures. I just think there should be SO MANY MORE tools out there to help us understand how we feel, so that we can make better life choices and care for each other more effectively.
Literacy produces all of civilization, full stop. So, if we believe human flourishing should be the next frontier of civilization, we're going to need some emotional literacy tools to get there.
Ok, here's some questions for potential commenters: Do you have any other literacy tools to suggest? Charts and diagrams? Is poetry a literacy tool? Book quotes? Memes?!?! If so, which ones have been helpful for you? Does a literacy tool have to be participatory (read/write function) or is just receiving information enough?
Further questions: Do you have a "default" emotion that you feel most often? (mine are curiosity and annoyance!) Are there emotions you don't want to admit having, but you have them anyways? Is talking about emotions inherently embarrassing? If so, why??
2026-06-22 19:11:52
Part of my endless series of dating app ideas (part 1, part 2....)
Here's an idea for a dating app that I don't think has been tried yet. I was reading this piece about how the problem for dating apps is that if they immediately match you with the love of your life they've immediately lost 2 customers, so (even if they don't deliberately try to match you with someone meh who you'll go on three dates with and then come back to the app) the features they add that create "managed dissatisfaction" are ultimately the ones that do best for their business, and the apps that do the most of those features will ultimately stay profitable and sustainable while the other ones don't.
The article mentions that some people have tried monetizing dating apps through other means, e.g. an activity-driven app that would try to make money off the dates themselves (sends you to a bowling alley and takes a cut of the ticket price, I gather), which would mean they could keep making money even when you're happily married if you keep using the app to book your restaurants etc. Seems smart.
But it struck me that there's another activity that is 1) immediately complementary with dating apps, 2) sustainable even when you're not dating, which is matchmaking.
People love matchmaking other people, so the app could be designed such that
1) users who want to date create profiles,
2) every user is shown a screen with (say) 8 profiles, and asked to match the best couple from the 8,
3) users who correctly "called" good couples multiple times get some kind of award or bonus or recognition.
I am fairly sure that "people who want to matchmake others" is a more sustainable pool of customers than "people who want to date", and that if you play your cards right you can even monetize them through subscriptions or ads despite the fact they're nominally providing a service.
2026-06-19 19:11:55
I was walking in the forest recently when I came across a manuscript of political economy that (from the yellowing of the pages) I estimated with some precision had been published on or around Anno Domini 1962. While the front and back coverspieces had been torn away, leaving me no manner to discern the author or title of the work, the inner pages were in miraculously fine fettle, such that I found myself with a remarkable opportunity to compare and contrast the politics of that time period – now, how I marvel!, 60 years in our past – with the political economy of our own magnificent age.
The book begins by arguing that economic and political freedom are seen as different but often intertwined. "The citizen of Great Britain ... after World War II was not permitted to spend his vacation in the United States because of exchange control" – apparently British people weren't able to buy foreign currencies freely until 1979? This is so outside the overton window now that I thought I was misreading it, but apparently it's true. In 1966, Brits couldn't take more than 50gbp1966 (roughly $1500 today) out the country for holidays. And this was before MasterCard.
The author then talks about American cases: the Amish having their livestock confiscated because they didn't want to participate in social security (which they only got exemption from in 1965), and an American who would like to get a Swiss watch "but is prevented from doing so because of quotas." This was unintelligible to my modern mind, but apparently Swiss watches were too cheap, and also there was a Tariff Commission that could limit imports.
The book goes on to mention (in a context not important) a few wealthy patrons of radical movements: Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Anita McCormick Blaine, and Corliss Lamont, "to mention a few names recently prominent." It struck me to my surprise that I have no idea who any of those people are, and only just recognize a couple of the family names. And yet the prominent wealthy patrons of today seem so prominent, it is hard to believe they might be forgotten 60 years from now.
The book mentions in passing that Winston Churchill – already an MP and former cabinet minister – had not been allowed to talk on British radio from 1933 until the outbreak of WWII because the only available radio was the BBC, the BBC was a government monopoly, and Churchill was considered too controversial.[^1] Maybe I should have known about this, but I didn't.
From the other side of the ideological spectrum, the book talks about how 150 writers were blacklisted from Hollywood for their Communist sympathies, until Dalton Trumbo won as Oscar under a pseudonym while the producer pretended he'd bought the screenplay off a random "guy in Spain with a beard".[^2]
The book talks about how only the post office is legally allowed to carry mail. Apparently this is still kinda true today? Since 1979 there's an exemption for "extremely urgent letters", so UPS and FedEx get to do overnights, but regular domestic first-class mail is still USPS only. Also, only USPS can legally put things in your mailbox, so FedEx and UPS have to leave everything at your door. Weird.
The book mentions peacetime military conscription, in passing. I'm not confident if these numbers are right, but looking it up online I'm getting that 82,000 Americans were drafted in 1962 to serve 2 years active duty – that's 0.04% of Americans at the time, but 0.8% of men aged 18-25. And this was peacetime, before Vietnam – I'm not sure I'd internalized how many men were drafted so recently.
At this point, alas, an eagle descended and grasped the manuscript from my hands, before I could finish the book and my survey of comparison. Still, from these brief chapters, I got a strange feeling of the enormity of distance and change from the past: things that now seem outside the window of thinkable policy were not only thinkable but actually happening within one lifetime. (Of course, that means that things that are currently unthinkable may also come to pass within a lifetime from now).
[^1]: Claude says this is mostly true, but not precise: he was largely shut out but not entirely, and also it was partly because of his views and partly because the Director General personally disliked him.
[^2]: Claude says "mostly true" again, but that the 150 included directors, actors and musicians not just writers.
2026-06-18 19:11:32
One of the big questions of my life has been this: some things in life are difficult.
Sometimes, they're difficult in some sense "because" they're worthwhile.
Other times, the difficulty is a cue that you're doing the wrong thing (for you), and if you stopped trying to do it you could do easy things instead, and the easy things would also be more worthwhile.
How do you tell the difference?
I don't know. But here's an image that comes to mind for me: some projects are like pushing a big round rock across a hilly terrain. Others are like pushing a big cube across a hilly terrain.
Obviously on the downhill, the sphere is much easier to roll: every time you push it it gains some momentum and rolls forward on its own.
Whereas the cube requires pushing the entire time.
A lot of projects require activation energy, and that energy will be hard either way: on the uphill, pushing a sphere or a cube are comparably difficult [^1]. And (alas) few things are truly "runaway successes": the terrain of life is full of ups and downs and choices about which direction to go, so you'll rarely just get to coast: you usually have to do some uphill pushing, and that will be difficult.
But fundamentally, when I think about my successful projects, they usually felt like pushing a sphere. By contrast, I don't think I've ever succeeded with a project that involved pushing cubes. (Admittedly this is partly endogenous: I have not been the most perserverant person, so perhaps there's projects I could have succeeded with but gave up on).
In board game world, I meet a bunch of designers who are kind of incredulous at how "easy" things have gone for me with my first game. And on the one hand, it still took a ton of work to get it designed and produced and distributed; it was not an "easy" thing to do. But at various points along the way, people discovered the game and got obsessed with it and helped it develop its own momentum, without me having to push it every inch of the way.
[^1]: ok technically it is easier to push the sphere uphill than the cube, probably 2x as easy on average, but metaphors are difficult.
2026-06-17 19:11:12
When American political candidates run for office, they get inundated (so I understand) with Candidate Questionnaires from various interest groups sounding out their soundness on that group's key issues. So the questionnaire will ask whether the candidate supports or opposes [gun/abortion/upzoning] rights, and the candidates will answer, and the groups will give money to the candidates whose answers they like, or announce to the world that Jo Bloggs scored 94% and is rated A+ by Americans For This Issue.
I am not in a position to do this myself, but it might be nice if someone sent round a questionnaire asking candidates about some basic personal history questions. "Have you ever had sex with someone on your payroll?" seems like a good start; "Have you ever, as an adult, had a relationship with someone under 18?", similarly.
I think it should be possible to come up with 5-10 questions which are concrete, objective, and apolitical, and which could nicely get around the cycle of
"politician gets nominated by a party" --> "stuff comes out about their personal history" --> "politician's team insists that The American People don't care about X/Y/Z" --> "party's voters are pressured to go along with that, because at this point their choices are pretend to be ok with this thing or let The Other Team win the election," even though they would have rather picked another candidate for their team if they'd known the information sooner.
The questionnaire would get around that cycle by forcing the information out in the open earlier in the election cycle, while voters still have other choices.
The whole thing only works if enough politicians sign on to it that not-signing gets to be seen as a bad sign. How hard is it to get over the hill of the social behaviour curve? I'm not sure – in my head it feels like it should be possible to find a race where a few of the politicians are willing to do it, and then build up from there. In theory, any politician who has never done [bad things] should be happy to answer the survey. But maybe they'll figure that it sets a bad precedent and lead to more questionnaires with harder questions in future, or maybe their worse-behaving colleagues will pressure them not to answer the questionnaire so that it doesn't become normalized, I don't know.
Perhaps you could combine all this with an investigative reporting arm that credibly claims to investigate the highest-polling candidate who has not yet answered the questionnaire at any given time, though that's the kind of idea that seems to only happen in fiction and never in fact.
Presumably there's a reason that things like this don't happen, presumably the incentives don't line up. But hey, it's an idea.
This post was pre-scheduled. If something has just happened in the last few days, it is not specifically about that something – sadly this post seems to be evergreen.