2026-08-18 19:11:12
Guest post!
I tell my kids they're extraordinary. For now.
I have four of them, so statistically this is probably unlikely. And given that all four have more than a sprinkle of neuro spice, they're not extraordinary in the ways we traditionally measure these things. That might make some people mad. Yes, I'm aware that autism and the like don't disqualify people from being traditionally extraordinary.
My third born is nine and can't recognize letters outside of her own name. I've been told this is due to memory issues connected to her cognitive delay. The same child changes the passcode on an iPhone weekly to a new six-digit number and has never once forgotten it. To me that's pretty cool.
But I do wonder about the encouraging words. Whether we should, as parents, be telling our kids they're special at all.
There seem to be two fairly opposing schools of thought.
The first is that our kids should grow up absolutely certain that they are special. That home should be the place where they are always believed in. Tell them they're brilliant. Tell them they're talented. Tell them they can do anything they put their minds to.
While I was being relentlessly bullied at school, my dad told me it was because I was too pretty (I literally had a bowl cut, so that was false) or too smart (probably closer to the truth, since my constant questions during class did nothing to endear me to my peers, and I wasn't going to stop pointing out the teacher's errors, so, impasse).
Either way his words missed the mark. They didn't make the bullying feel any better. If anything, I started telling myself that being extraordinary was the reason I was being bullied, which made the obvious solution to become far more ordinary. Turns out I wasn't very good at being ordinary, but that's beside the point.
I was an odd child. At Montessori school I mastered reading at the age of three and then quickly moved on to my next challenge, window washing. I washed windows day in and day out for almost a full year. I had a squeegee and a bucket, and because Montessori is child-led learning, no one redirected me. I wasn't even particularly talented at it.
My mom used to tell me I was a free spirit. I remember her saying it the day we went to a flea market and she bought me a crop top popcorn shirt (they were all the rage) and I spent the next half hour pulling it down trying to cover my stomach, until she finally gave in and we returned it to the vendor. In that context I understood "free spirit" to mean that I didn't like crop tops, although my mom's message was probably that I was rejecting fashion norms.
Her message and my dad's played on a loop during my ruminations as I grew older. Frustrated by my inability to fit in or just be "normal," I would try reminding myself that I was a free spirit, that I was too smart for my peers to get me. It wasn't a soothing thought. And due to probable extraordinaryness I was far more prone to dissect both my own thoughts and the thoughts of my peers, everything a puzzle I just needed to understand. I think for someone like me, a concrete answer about why my brain worked differently would have been far more useful, both for understanding myself and for understanding the motivations of the ones othering me.
The other school of thought is that telling children they're exceptional is how we ended up with a bunch of people who were told they could be anything they wanted and are now deeply offended that the world has failed to recognize their specialness.
There may even be research explaining the random guy at the bar who is absolutely certain every woman in the establishment would be honoured to have him buy her a drink. Researchers have found a relationship between parental overvaluation and narcissism in children. Overvaluation isn't loving your kid a lot or thinking they're wonderful. It's believing, and communicating, that your child is more special and more deserving than other children.
There probably is a difference between raising a child who thinks:
My mom thinks I'm extraordinary.
And raising one who thinks:
I am objectively extraordinary and it's concerning that the rest of you haven't noticed.
I'm just not entirely sure where that line is.
It does seem to me that the people most convinced of their own extraordinariness aren't always the people I find particularly extraordinary. Some of the most genuinely extraordinary people I've met seem to have no idea just how special they are. Which makes me wonder if believing you're extraordinary and actually being extraordinary have much to do with each other at all.
But if we don't tell our kids they're extraordinary, who does?
Not every kid is going to be exceptionally intelligent or athletic or artistic. That's literally not how exceptional works. We can't all be above average. Some of our children are going to be extremely, aggressively average.
Do we need to be the ones to let them know? I'm not sure. The world seems pretty well equipped to eventually deliver that information.
There will be grades and jobs and promotions they don't get, unrequited love and broken hearts. There will be other people who are smarter and prettier and funnier and more successful. At some point they will discover that their parents' assessment of them was perhaps not conducted under strict scientific conditions.
Then there are the kids who really are extraordinary at something. Being told that constantly can probably create its own set of problems.
Maybe you work harder because you believe you're capable of more.
Maybe you stop trying because being brilliant is supposed to come easily.
Maybe being "the smart one" or "the talented one" becomes so much a part of who you are that failing at something feels less like failing and more like finding out you aren't who everyone said you were.
Or maybe, like me, you discover that the thing everyone keeps telling you makes you special isn't necessarily making your life any easier, and you start trying to make yourself a little less special instead.
Some people seem to do remarkably well when the safety net is enormous. They take risks because failure isn't catastrophic. Other people seem to need just enough discomfort to make succeeding feel urgent.
Maybe believing you're extraordinary gives you confidence. Maybe it gives you entitlement.
I don't want my kids to think the world owes them anything because I think they're special. I also don't particularly want to be the person responsible for making sure they're appropriately humbled before the world gets a chance. There will be plenty of people willing to do that.
Maybe the goal isn't actually to convince our kids that they're extraordinary. Maybe it's to make sure they grow up knowing that we thought they were.
I'm not sure those are the same thing.
2026-08-13 19:11:36
A friend once told me about a quirk of girl-code in her friendgroup: whenever one of the girls got a new boyfriend, it was obligatory for all the other girls to say 1) how great and attractive he was, plus 2) an inoffensive reason why she would never be able to date him. E.g. "oh wow, Alfred is so great – funny and kind! But I could never date him, I can't do men who have dogs." The concept was (approximately) to assure everyone that you weren't a threat towards their partners.
But my instinct on hearing this was: come on guys, you're polluting the information environment! What if your friend runs into someone who seems perfect for you, and she's about to introduce you, but then it turns out he has a dog, and you've made up this nonsense about not-liking dog-guys, so she doesn't? Wouldn't it be better for everyone if you just said "hey your boyfriend is great in every way, but also I'm a loyal friend and OF COURSE I will not hit on your boyfriend, regardless of whether I might abstractly have gone for him otherwise?"
In a sense this is a mirror of the carrot problem: every lie you tell in life has an additional consequence of polluting the information environment, which is independently bad.
If you must tell lies, I think it's important to design them to be minimally information-polluting. Which I think in this case means they have to be 1) only applicable to you, 2) judgeable only by you. E.g. "oh Alfred is so wonderful, but I could never date him myself because his aura is too purple. I am not answering questions at this time about how to evaluate the colors of people's auras; if you meet someone seemingly-similar to him please send them my way."
2026-08-12 19:11:34
We will all be eating food, God willing, for almost-every day for the rest of our lives. As such, the alpha from discovering new foods you like is exceptionally high. Here are some things I'm into lately, that (depending on your similarity to me) you may be into too.
If you have any foods you are into, please add them in the comments below.
This post dedicated to friend-of-the-blog A.
2026-08-11 19:11:09
Here's a major tension I see at the heart of modern media:
I don't see how we can consistently get all three.
There's only a few possible models (that I can see) for media.
The first model is the fabled broadcast television oligopolies of the 50s-80s: there was a technological bottleneck (the genuine scarcity of usable broadcast frequencies), which meant that there were only a handful of channels in each country,[^1] which meant that
1) people who wanted to make shows were gatekept by the few, powerful producers of these channels
2) people who wanted to watch shows could only (easily) watch the things that the channels chose to broadcast
3) people could very, very easily co-ordinate to watch The Same Things Your Friends Were Watching, and have common ground to discuss with strangers at the pub.
The second model is what now exists with books, since Kindle and self-publishing came around: there are an unbelievable number of books, supposedly 4 million each year, of which 500k are traditionally published and 3.5m are self-published. This means that
1) anyone who wants to can write a book
2) you can find a book for any particular eight-modifier personal interest
3) it's maddeningly rare to have any pieces of media that are popular enough to be co-ordination points for any meaningful % of the population.
In a sense, this whole thing is just a microcosm of the problem of modernity: the conflict between individualism and community, with everyone wanting the privilege of doing the things they like at the time that's convenient for them, but also wanting the community of doing things with other human beings. I don't see how we solve this, truly? I don't see how we can get both.
[^1]: This might be a fake memory but I'm pretty sure I remember the launch of UK Channel 5, which happened only in 1997 (!), and required a massive campaign to fix 9 million home video recorders that used the necessary bit of spectrum they were budging into before the channel could go live.
I don't remember this directly but the first broadcast was apparently The Spice Girls doing a cover of Manfred Mann's 5-4-3-2-1, which is nice.
2026-08-06 19:11:52
In the Terry Pratchett novel Men at Arms, the character Sam Vimes proposes the ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, which goes as follows: a bad pair of boots costs ten dollars, and only lasts a year or two, while a good pair of boots costs fifty dollars but lasts forever. Poor people can't afford the expensive boots, only the cheap ones, but over time they end up spending more than the rich, and they get soggy feet to boot.
I find this theory plausible about positive/negative spirals in general: one of the most radicalizing moments of my adult life was finding out the special mortgage rate my wealthy friend was paying, seemingly because the bank wanted to make sure he gave them all his money later in life when he went from wealthy to ultra-wealthy. There are definitely domains where rich people can afford to take a large one-time cost that saves them money in the long run.
But I don't actually think Vimes Boots theory is true about boots, at least not at any level of spending that I have yet been able to access. As best I can tell, 80% of manufactured clothes at this point in history are trash, and maybe 20% are actually good, and that this is weirdly true across many different price levels. As I get richer I have nicer stuff on average, which I appreciate, but it's still luck-of-the-draw whether a given pair of shoes will last 6 months or 6 years, and going from $15 to $150 for a pair of shoes doesn't seem to affect the odds much.
Maybe if you can spend $1500 on boots you do get a guarantee of quality – readers in the know please shout in the comments.
2026-08-04 19:11:35
One thing I've always found pretty neat is Jane Austen-era collar-and-cravat combos – you know, like Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Every so often I think of buying this getup and wearing it around. It's not that weird, I tell myself – at the end of the day, it's a white neckerchief on a white shirt.
But this is obviously lies. If I wore this in public in 2026, people would notice and question it. Which makes dressing like this (or any other kind of interesting way) a bundle of two preferences:
1) do I like how this style feels/looks?, and
2) do I like the amount of attention it would get me?
Similarly I have lived for a time in places where it's common for men to wear skirt-like wraps, and I have worn those wraps, and they are far more comfortable than pants.[^1] And then I have returned to pantsylvania and immediately ditched my wrap, because my desire to be normal is greater than my desire to be comfortable.
This is reasonable! You can very reasonably decide that, even though you like the style, the attention that goes with it isn't worth it for you. And therefore go back to wear khakis and plain-colored tshirts.
Of course, other people who would like to wear non-normative items but don't like being a cynosure will also constrict themselves as a result, and therefore the Overton window never expands, and we will remain collectively in the gutter. I therefore think it is an act of supererogation to dress (where possible) further towards the edge of weirdness that your personal comfort level allows, thereby nudging the window open, and encouraging the world towards freedom.
[^1]: cf David Foster Wallace on the Cool and Genitally Unsquishy American Tomorrow, skip to halfway down p.14, A key point..... Now that I look it up that whole essay basically prior-arts basically everything in this blogpost, oh well.
