You know how you feel when you’re hungry? I’m not talking about moods or anything, I’m talking about the direct sensation, that pang at the top of your stomach with the rumble underneath. The gas light coming on for your body.

Imagine if you didn’t know what that meant. Imagine that you sometimes – often, even – got this feeling, but you didn’t know it was associated with needing food. You would get this pang, and maybe you’d take medicine or something. Maybe you’d lie down for a bit. Sometimes you’d eat because something tasted good or because you’d gone out with friends, and the feeling would go away – but you never put together the cause and effect.

That would be pretty miserable! You might even know that you need to eat, but if you never put the signals together you probably aren’t eating right, or eating enough. You might be surviving but you’d be hungry a lot without realizing that’s what you were. You’d not only have physical pain, but you’d have all the downstream effects, too – poor health, brain fog, mood swings, etc.

Our ability to correctly interpret the signals our body sends is paramount to a good life. We also need to temper and influence those signals, of course – but properly interpreting them in the first place is primary. All unpleasant signals from your body – all the pain, the discomfort, etc. – is your body warning you about something, hopefully changing your behavior. Your brain interprets those signals from your stomach as pain so that you’ll eat to relieve them.

Of course, that only works if you interpret the signals correctly. Okay, new hypothetical. Imagine a creature that has all those same signals. Hunger pangs when it needs to eat, yawns when it needs to sleep, and so on. But imagine this creature also gets random pains – signals not associated with any necessary behavior changes. Like a pain without a focal area.

This would clearly be bad! At best, it would cause the creature to doubt the true signals its body sends, and at worst it may cause the creature to pursue all sorts of bonkers behaviors in an attempt to get the signal to stop. In any case, the creature would have a pretty miserable life. So it stands to reason that “random, meaningless pain” isn’t an evolutionary advantage. Creatures with such a feature won’t exactly win the natural selection championships.

So it stands to reason that we probably don’t have random, meaningless pain.

Now sure, people can have individual damage and defects. If you’ve been in a severe car accident, you may have chronic pain for the rest of your life that doesn’t correspond to a specific, acute damage or necessary behavioral change. But if you find out that a huge percentage of the population of a species is experiencing the same kind of pain, it seems much more likely that this particular pain is a feature, not a bug. It’s pain that’s trying to warn you about increasing damage or necessary action, not the signals of a broken transmitter.

Remember my first example about the hungry person who didn’t understand what hunger pangs were? It’s not that they never ate, it’s just that they didn’t eat as much as they should because they didn’t realize they needed to. Without realizing it, they were accidentally doing what they needed to sometimes. So the pain comes and goes, but they don’t know why.

Well, modern life is, in many ways, totally different from the primary environment that shaped our evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. What if we need aspects of that environment and we haven’t realized that we’re not getting them?

Here’s an example: Humans need vitamin D. It’s really important, and there are plenty of health risks that come from not getting enough. But I’ll bet you can’t tell if you, right now, are low on vitamin D with the same level of accuracy and confidence with which you can tell if you’re hungry or sleepy. Why not?

Here’s my guess: You’ll die without water in a few days, so your “thirst” signals are strong. You can last longer without food but you’ll still see negative impacts quickly, so the same with your “hunger” signals. “Suffocating” and “cold” signals are likewise strong, because of how immediate the danger is. But the body’s signals are weaker when the condition is both A.) something that will kill you slower and B.) something the body expects you to get plenty of anyway, without much behavioral change.

So think about sunlight. You really will die without it (or without a lot of substitutes). In our evolutionary past, we got plenty of it without trying. But today, modern life is so weird from an evolutionary perspective that there are genuinely lots of people who don’t get enough sunlight.

So, a quick aside: among people who suffer from depression, there’s a sort of running joke. The joke is that despite the complex realities of the suffering caused by that condition, people who don’t understand it will often give the most basic and useless (albeit well-meaning) advice, along the lines of “Have you tried just going outside?” People with depression treat that comment (and those like it) with the same derision as comments like “Have you tried just not being gay?”

I was one of those people, for a long time. At some point, I realized that it’s bad to create a culture out of your flaws. But even beyond that, I realized that most of those well-meaning people asking about going outside were totally correct.

Look, some people really do have an actually damaged signaling system that is giving them pain signals when it shouldn’t. But it’s a tiny minority of the people who “suffer from depression.” In attempting over years to understand my own suffering, I’ve realized some facts I believe to be true.

When tech support asks if you’ve “turned it on and off again,” it’s a joke – but they ask that because it really does fix most problems, and if you haven’t tried the basics then you shouldn’t look for more complex solutions. General malaise and depression are signals that your body is sending – and if the underlying system is working properly (as we must assume it is in the majority of cases), then that signal means something. Before you take a bunch of meds to kill the signal, you have to at least try responding to it.

The basics aren’t that complicated, we’ve just engineered a lot of our lives such that we don’t get them automatically as much. We’ve hidden ourselves from sunlight. We don’t eat right. We don’t get physically exhausted every day. We don’t interact with physical people in the spaces around us. But those are all things we need as much as food, water, and oxygen.

When you ask a depressed person “Have you tried just going outside,” they roll their eyes and scoff. As if it were that easy! But in my experience, they almost never go outside. The problem is that going outside once doesn’t magically cure all depression, the same way one meal won’t cure a vitamin deficiency. So they go outside, don’t feel less depressed, and then go further back into a life without sunlight. It’s self-fulfilling.

Lifestyle changes sustained over time are about the only way to align your actions with the body’s signals.

An important note – This is automatically implied to be true with every one of my posts, but I’ll state it more directly here: I am not an expert on all of humanity. I write reflections of my own experience and things I believe to be true. If your experience with depression isn’t the same as mine, that is what it is. But if you’re open to advice, mine is likewise a reflection of my own experience. Before you assume your feelings are a medical condition that needs to be treated, get all the basics right. Go three months where you spend time in the sun every single day; have numerous conversations with real, physical people in your presence; eat a balanced and nutritious diet; cut out or severely minimize obvious poisons like nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and other drugs; sleep a full night every night; physically exhaust yourself at least once each day; hug someone every day; and do work that helps your community and provides some purpose.

You may do all of that and still feel depressed. If that’s the case, you may have an actual medical condition, but at least you’ll know. For a huge number of people though, I’m certain doing all of that, sustained for at least three months, will work wonders.

“Put the time in.”

Into what? There’s a sort of general sense that certain bad things get better if you do them more, and I’ve never understood it. From “Oh, this show gets good after Season 4, you just have to power through until then,” to “You have to stay with this company for at least five years to start seeing any real career advancement,” it’s all crazy to me.

If something is bad, disengage. You have a finite amount of time to deposit into various things in the world, and you really should know what the interest rate is. Some things are worth the time. But it’s certainly not a default.

Very few vices are vices in any amount. Most things that we consider vices are only such if they’re done excessively.

It’s not a vice to brag, only to brag too much. You can drink moderately, care about your appearance, have some ice cream, and chase a little money. You can do all of those things without them becoming vices.

But especially when it comes to the appearance of vice – namely, what our peers think of us – people seem often very afraid of being seen indulging even once. Why?

A big part of it, I think, is that we’ve changed who we consider our “peers.”

As we move into more and more “deliberate” and online communities instead of our local and circumstantial ones, there’s a sort of “tiny window” effect. If you consider your literal next-door neighbor your peer and talk to them every day, then that neighbor actually gets a pretty accurate picture of you. If you come home drunk one night it will look different to them than if you come home drunk every night. If you proudly brag about your big accomplishment over the picket fence to them one day, that will sound different than you proudly bragging about every little thing all the time. As such, your occasional vices aren’t likely to form an image in your neighbor’s mind that’s an over-exaggeration of your worst features, ignoring the moderation.

But be honest – you can name more celebrities than you can people who live on your street. Who you view as your “peers” has become less and less the people who see you every day and more and more the people who only get a curated view of you. They see you through a “tiny window” that only shows cultivated snippets. Through this window, every aspect of you looks like it’s all of you. If you make a post bragging about something, the people who read that post don’t have a long series of non-bragging normal interactions to hold in comparison.

As a result, people are more concerned about anything they do being “taken out of context” (and with good reason!), so more and more what they communicate is sanitized and curated with an exact image in mind. And there’s nothing wrong with that – as long as that world is just a world you visit, or use professionally, or keep light.

But more and more, people live there. They live in apartments or communities where they’ve never said a single word to a single neighbor. They don’t have any friends that live within a hundred miles. Their tribes have become entirely fictional, distant things with no real meaning in their lives. They may have thousands of people who feel the same way about issues that will never actually affect their lives, but not one person from whom they could borrow a cup of sugar.

That – like all vices – is very bad when excessive.

Today in the car, my oldest daughter told me that she broke her glasses during gym class.

“But you’re wearing your glasses now,” I replied.

“I know. I fixed them with the multi-tool you gave me.”

Someday, my daughter will win an Oscar or cure cancer or walk on Mars or something, and I will be very proud. But probably not as proud as I am today.

Am I being a diva right now? Am I a terrible parent? Am I bad at my job?

Probably not.

Self-awareness is tough. If you even have the inkling that you might be deficient in a particular category, then you’re already more self-aware about that category than about 90% of your fellow humans. Which means, statistically, you’re ranked well above average in the actual manifestation of that quality.

Bad parents don’t generally wonder if they’re bad parents. They just assume, without ever thinking about it, that they’re great ones. They lack the self-awareness to even question their behavior, so it doesn’t improve.

And this pattern generally holds. If you’re worried whether or not you’ve got some bad quality, then you also care whether or not you do. So you’re likely taking at least some steps to be better – and that’s more than most.

So don’t sweat that stuff. You can seek to improve without worrying that you’re currently bad. Even being aware of a scale likely puts you in the top half of it.

How realistic should you be?

Setting aside the fact that no one has a perfect grasp on the probabilities of the universe and so anyone’s personal view of “realistic” is naturally tempered by their own biases, I don’t even think it’s necessarily a benefit to be perfectly realistic all the time.

I think there’s absolutely such a thing as “having your head in the clouds,” and too much of that can hurt you. If you spend all your time wanting things that can’t happen, that’s a recipe for a lot of heartache and unfulfilled potential.

But the only things that are truly “realistic” are things that are already real. It’s realistic – neither optimistic nor pessimistic – for me to want a desk, because I already have one. Even the most mundane of ambitions, like “I want a new chair for this desk” might not manifest for a whole host of reasons, and even goals that seem ludicrous the first time you think of them (like “I should write a sci-fi RPG book and get it published by a gaming company that I love”) can turn out to actually happen at some point.

Your life becomes inoperable if you don’t spend most of it grounded on incremental, attainable goals. Lots of things about adult life just require daily maintenance “close to the action,” as it were.

But what is life without some dreams? We aren’t just calorie-processing machines, tunneling our way through our food like earthworms until the machinery breaks down. The very fact that we have the capacity to dream means we should, at least a little.

My oldest daughter, quite the artist, asked me to paint with her the other night. Painting isn’t one of my hobbies and I don’t find it more enjoyable than any particular other way to spend the time, but I readily agreed. Partially because I’ll almost always say yes to activity requests from my children, but also for another reason: my hands can paint, and my mind can think in pictures, and if I can do that, I should.

My body and my mind can make singing, dancing, painting, writing, dreaming. And so – at least on occasion – I should do all of those things. I should not spurn the gifts I have been given.

There will come a day when I cannot. When I can’t even dream anymore, let alone achieve the dreams I have. For that reason, I will let my head drift into the clouds, now and then.

I bought my oldest a new bike today. I got rid of the car seats for my two youngest, replaced by the next, lighter stage. I’ve now read Matilda to all three of my children (who all adored it equally as much).

Leaves fall, flowers bloom.

Tastes change. Pain moves around some, though its total quantity remains more or less constant. Your eyes soften a bit.

The steps are farther away. Yours and everyone else’s.

Today I’m going to teach you how to spot a certain kind of scam, and maybe even scam the scammers a little.

First, let’s talk about a nerdy economic term called “rent-seeking.” I won’t go into too much econ theory here, but basically rent-seeking is “bureaucratic parasitism.” It’s when a system is complex enough that you can make money off the complexity itself by taking advantage of how difficult it would be for the average person to recognize what you’re doing – notably without doing anything actually useful or valuable..

There’s more to it than just that (as I’ll explain), but let’s start with an example. There are some professions in which mistakes can be especially costly or dangerous, such as surgeons or airline pilots. For these professions, there are often lengthy certification or licensing processes to make sure that the people practicing these things have the proper skills and demeanor to do so safely. These institutions become a part of the background tapestry of our culture, and gradually people start to hear words like “unlicensed” or “uncertified” as very negative descriptions. You’d never willingly get operated on by an “unlicensed surgeon,” right? And this is true even though the average person has absolutely no idea what certification actually entails. It’s a rational decision for most people to outsource their evaluation of professionals doing a complex job to a complex system.

Okay, so that’s the system we have. Now let’s imagine our imaginary villain Joe. Joe figures out that the system of his society works this way and comes up with a scheme to extract value from that system without providing anything in return. Here’s the scheme: He starts a certification board for dog walkers.

Some people walk dogs for other people, either as a living or a side hustle. With all due respect to anyone who does this (and contra to situation comedies), it’s trivially easy. There is absolutely no need for anyone who does it to be licensed, certified, or have government oversight. Joe knows this. But he’s betting you don’t. He’s betting that he can scare people with terms like “unlicensed dog walker.” And he’s betting – critically – that anyone who initially recognizes this for what it is will have more to gain by playing along than by calling him out.

Step one is to get a few dog walkers on board, probably with some cheap or even free “courses.” These courses won’t provide any information at all, of course – but they’ll let the pros who take them call themselves “certified dog-walking professionals” or put CDWP after their name on LinkedIn or whatever. That, in turn, will let them command higher prices from customers who would rather pay a little extra to make sure their precious Labradoodle isn’t in the hands of some uncertified maniac, some loose cannon just out here doing God knows what with these dogs.

Maybe some noble dog walker recognizes this as a sham, but what’s he going to do? Say no? Joe even offers him “professional credit,” using his existing experience as a dog walker to automatically qualify for the certification. This guy can get CDWP for free, or he can raise a big stink and refuse it. But for what? So future employers who put “CDWP Required” on job descriptions will pass him over? It’s easier just to go along with it, and that’s part of why the scam works.

Once people start to realize that they can get higher wages as a dog walker by having this certification, it becomes worth money. Now Joe can start charging people to get certified, and they’ll pay it! They’ll pay it even though they know it’s bullshit. They’ll sit in those classes while some teacher pretends to teach them how to walk a dog. They know it’s bogus, but they also know that their customers don’t, and that getting this piece of paper is basically a ticket to increased future earnings indefinitely, so it’s worth rolling your eyes but holding your tongue.

So now Joe has created a little value-extraction machine that provides exactly zero benefit to society. He gets paid to certify dog walkers even though that process does nothing to make society better, and he artificially shifts wages away from some dog walkers (the ones that can’t afford the time or money for the certification) towards those willing (and able) to “play ball.” In every way, society is worse off – but Joe pockets the money.

Over time, this can become so embedded that people start forgetting they’re scamming people. The teachers at Joe’s “school” start to think they’re actually providing some benefit and that people who don’t attend their classes genuinely can’t walk dogs properly. The students believe it too. The classes get more arcane and complicated over time, because “arcane and complicated” is a great way of hiding the fact that it’s all bullshit to begin with.

If Joe is really successful at his scam, he can get the government to pass a law actually requiring dog walkers to be certified. Not everyone pulling this scam is this successful, but believe me, they’ll all try. After all, once it gets enshrined into law it becomes almost impossible for society to shift to any alternatives even if some disruptors see behind the curtain.

So that’s the scam. That’s “rent-seeking.” People like Joe take advantage of the way a system is structured to become a leech on the society supported by that system.

Now let’s introduce our unlikely heroine, Maya. Let’s say Maya is a young woman who wants to walk dogs in her neighborhood as a way of supporting herself. By this point, the “Certified Dog-Walking Professional” courses are thousands of dollars and take months to obtain, but people won’t hire a dog walker without CDWP behind their name. But Maya is a smart critical thinker with a nose for bullshit. She reviews the course lists and talks to a few other dog walkers and quickly figures out that absolutely nothing of value is taught in those classes. She recognizes a truth that has become an unthinkable taboo in her society: She knows perfectly damned well how to walk a dog.

This isn’t a matter of hubris; she’s not “too good for the rules.” She isn’t a dangerous maverick, putting society at risk by hopping into the cockpit of a passenger jet with no training. This is just someone who’s seen the trap before she got caught in it.

So what does Maya do? She figures she can scam the scammers in the same way. She can use the very nature of the scam to beat it.

How? She just… puts CDWP after her name. That’s it. She lists herself as a “Certified Dog-Walking Professional.”

How is this using the nature of the scam? Well, remember – this scam can only exist in the first place because people will outsource their evaluation of their professional service providers to a third party because that evaluation is too complicated to do on your own. Which means she knows that exactly zero of her customers are ever going to request to see her certification. She’s breaking the rules, but the rules were a massive, immoral scam to begin with.

Is Maya going to take down all the villains with this plan? Probably not. Even if she turns out to be the best dog walker in the world and wins the Nobel Prize for Canine Exercise and Transportation then dramatically reveals to the world that she did it all without official certification, she’d probably just be seen as an exception by most and as a cheater to a few.

Sadly, the Joes of the world are always going to exist. Which is all the more reason why you should be like Maya as often as you can. Sniff out the bullshit and opt out whenever you can. You can’t destroy every trap, but you don’t have to be like all the other insane people willingly walking into it, either.

This requires a level of personal responsibility. It’s not immoral to lie about being a “certified dog walker.” It is immoral to lie about being a licensed heart surgeon. Where’s the line? There isn’t one clear, bright one. Which is why the scam works in the first place; people don’t like having to take personal responsibility both for determining what they can do and for determining what others can do. They’d rather outsource all of that critical thinking, even if it means opening up a massive vulnerability to guys like Joe.

So the scam is always going to exist, and there will always be victims of it. But you don’t have to be one of them. If you can walk a dog and you want to, do it – you’d have to be certifiable not to.

“I can’t believe he gave it all up to go live on a farm!”

Really? You can’t?

I can’t wrap my head around people who don’t. I recently read a story about a high-level, long-tenured (more than two decades), and well-compensated executive at a major tech company who quit and became a goose farmer. There were all these shocked statements from industry colleagues who couldn’t believe he’d walk away from a high-paying, high-status job to do that.

But… really? You can’t?

Look, whatever your version of “goose farmer” is, that’s the goal. Not the thing you’d do if you were rich, but the thing you’d do if you didn’t have to care about money. Because those are very different thresholds! Long before you’re rich, you’ll reach a point where if you’re careful and wise, you can stop worrying about money anymore. At that point, whatever you do for work becomes a conscious choice in a way that’s fundamentally different from when your survival depended on your income potential.

Getting to that point might take a long time. And if we’re being truthful, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever get to it. It requires some luck, a lot of determination, a good strategy, and time. Enough time, in fact, that some people lose the thread. They forget why they were grinding in the first place, and they blow right past the finish line and never see it. They keep making more money and gaining more status until they die.

If that makes you happy, then do it. But I don’t think it does. I strongly suspect that people who could have long ago become goose farmers and have instead stayed in their command centers have something fundamentally wrong with them. I’ve seen the seed of that wrongness take root in me, sometimes.

Video games – old school video games, like from the 80s – had two ways they could end. You could die, or you could “beat the game.” Either way, the game was over. You weren’t supposed to play it forever. That’s what modern life is like. The goal of this life is to stop. And there are only two ways out: you can die, or you can beat the game. Either way, it ends eventually.

One way is better. On that farm or boat or mountain or non-profit or stage is who you really are. They’re waiting for you, with some geese. Don’t let them wait too long.

There’s a critical lesson in decision-making: patterns and rules are almost always better than human judgment.

(For an example, think about the book/movie Moneyball.)

Basically, if you create a list of criteria that determines what kinds of decisions get made, following that rule will almost always be better than trying to judge individual cases. People don’t like that, but it’s true. We don’t like being “impersonal.” Everyone thinks they’re the exception, or that they can spot exceptions, or whatever. But the measures work better.

But then again, here’s the caveat to that – the measures are written by people. And those people might be just as bad at writing the initial rule as they are at following it.

Let’s say I’m trying to predict which horses are going to win the Kentucky Derby. I know it would be a bad idea for me to just look at the horses and try to “get a feel” for which ones look lucky or fast. So instead I create a rule: I’ll sort all the horse names alphabetically, assigning a value of 1 for A-names, 2 for B-names, etc. Then I’ll do the same for the jockey’s last name. I’ll total the values and bet on the highest one.

That rule will definitely keep me from trying to make snap judgments if I follow it. But the rule is dumb!

So there’s the rub – you have to be sure that the measure isn’t, you know, terrible. And you can only get there by testing. So sure, use rules – they help cool your emotional bias, if nothing else. And they help you get actionable data that has some element of consistency to it.

But measures aren’t magic, and don’t forget it.