I think we often categorize people based on their station, rather than their behavior. And I think maybe we should lean a little bit more the other way.

You owe loyalty to people who deserve loyalty. If someone who should be on your side is constantly causing you to have to fight for basic respect and decent treatment, then you shouldn’t necessarily try to win those fights. You should just recategorize that person as not your ally and move on.

I don’t want to say, “You’re supposed to be my friend, why are you always treating me badly?” That’s a painful fight, and it never ends. Instead, I’d rather say – just once – “Oh, this person always treats me badly. I should stop considering them to be my friend and remove them from circumstances where they can do so.”

I don’t like to fight. Nine times out of ten, someone forcing you to fight immediately means they aren’t worth fighting for.

A weird incidence of status quo bias: Let’s say you step outside and it feels hot. You look at a digital thermometer you have outside and it says 95. The next day it feels hot again, and again the thermometer says 95. The third day you step outside and it still feels hot, but the thermometer says 88. You immediately think “Oh, that can’t be right, it must be on the fritz.”

I’ll bet it never even occurred to you that it might have been incorrect the first two days. That hypothesis never crossed your mind, even though you have no idea how accurate it was. You stepped outside that first day, felt the heat, and looked at the number “95.” Immediately your brain connected the amount of heat you were feeling with that number, and the next day solidified it. On the third day, therefore, you said “Oh, it can’t be 88, because it feels like it’s 95.” But you have no idea what 95 feels like!

With a sample size of only three events and zero actual testing, you don’t have enough information to decide which temperature reading is the accurate one. But almost universally we’ll go with the first one.

In other words, we don’t question the first piece of information we get nearly as much as we question subsequent information that disagrees with the first piece, even though we have zero reason to trust one over the other.

Just a quirk to be aware of – don’t default to believing something today just because you believed it yesterday. Unless there’s something deeper under that first belief, then it’s skepticism all the way down!

If you see a train chugging along at a good speed and one or more of its wheels are off the track, you would probably be very frightened. I know I would, especially if I was near – or even on! – the train. That’s a lot of power and potentially destructive force just barreling along without anything keeping it from suddenly lurching off the track and into a suburban neighborhood or adjacent highway.

Some people remind me of that. There are some people who just make absolutely wild decisions, while simultaneously wielding quite a lot of power over the lives of others. If they were trains, they’d be doing 90 MPH with eight wheels out of twelve off the track. Choo choo.

Once, a long time ago, I worked in the service industry. On a break one day, a handful of my coworkers and I were standing around telling each other jokes. If you’ve ever worked with young people in the service industry, you can guess that some of these jokes were pretty rough. Nothing terrible, but definitely not jokes you’d tell to grandma. One of the guys in the group spoke up, like it was his turn to tell a joke. Instead, he went on a ten-minute rant about his extremely racist views on the problems of society and the sickening “solutions” that he would implement. Our eyes were wide with horror the entire time. He didn’t work there much longer, obviously.

But here’s what rattled me. It wasn’t that he held those views. I’ve read, you know, books. I know that there are people in the world with horrifying views, some even worse than his. What rattled me was that this guy had such an incredibly frightening lack of self-awareness that he thought it was appropriate to share them. Like, he looked around at a group of coworkers, at his job, that he didn’t know very well and that notably were not all of the same race, standing around telling jokes, and his brain went “Yup, this is the time and place for this screed I’ve had in my back pocket. This is going to go great!“

Of course, I know he didn’t think that. That’s what’s frightening – the only way he could have said that stuff at that moment is if the part of his brain that should make those decisions just didn’t work at all. In other words, wheels off the track. The part of his brain that controls his body wasn’t being held back by the part of his brain that’s supposed to control the other parts of his brain.

People have dark thoughts. I have dark thoughts sometimes! What makes that not worrying is that most people have a dark thought and go “Ugh, that was dark. Better stick that one in the vault and not act on it or say it out loud, and maybe go take a shower.” That’s an important safety feature of the human brain. Let’s call it the “Nope Impulse.” I like people whose Nope Impulses are in good working order. Those people are capable of looking at actions they’re about to take and say “Nope!” to the ones that shouldn’t be done.

There’s a concept in psychiatry called an “intrusive thought.” It’s just the term for the random thoughts that pop into your head that absolutely do not reflect any of your real views, opinions, or intentions. If you’ve ever leaned over a high ledge and some part of your brain said “jump,” that’s an intrusive thought. You don’t want to jump, you never would jump, but your brain is doing all sorts of A/B testing with thoughts and neurons all the time, so sometimes you see a Lego and your brain just suggests that maybe you should eat it.

If you have a good Nope Impulse, intrusive thoughts aren’t really a problem. They pop up, you go “nope,” and they vanish. That racist co-worker did not have a Nope Impulse. And that’s frightening, because if he didn’t say “nope” to that, what other things might his brain suggest to do that he has no defense against?

Choo choo.

Sometimes the examples are more mundane, but they still draw attention to the same mental defect. One of my clients, who had worked for his boss for fifteen years, asked for a week off for the birth of his son. The boss responded with: “A whole week?”

Think about that. This guy, who manages an entire factory and 200 employees with huge spinning machines and trucks and thousands of tons of cargo – this guy’s Nope Impulse wasn’t sharp enough to tell him not to say possibly the stupidest sentence he could have uttered at that moment. (The client quit, enjoyed 3 months off with severance with his wife and son, and then started his new job at double the salary, while the boss sent him numerous texts asking him to come back, in case you wanted the dopamine hit of the extremely happy ending to that story.)

But that boss still manages that factory. What if one day his brain says “Push that guy into that machine,” and he just doesn’t have the mental defenses to not give in to that idea? I know that sounds like an extreme example, and it probably is. But my point is that every time you see some inexplicably stupid action done by a human, I think they mostly trace back to that choke point.

Sometimes people do bad things for sensible reasons, at least in their context. A premeditated murder is a bad thing, but the person who did it at least planned to get away with it, whether they succeeded or not. But the person who just rams his car into a bunch of people because one of them flipped him off? There was a moment, however narrow, where his brain said “Oooh, step on the gas and turn right,” and most other people would have just gone “Nope.”

So that’s a frightening thing to me. More frightening to me than actual malice, which is at least held somewhat in check by the realities of a society that punishes those who try to harm it. More frightening than just stupidity, which is at least usually somewhat predictable and the places where stupidity can do the most damage have the most insulation against it – they don’t let absolute morons fly planes or build bridges.

But missing the Nope Impulse? You don’t have to be evil or stupid to have intrusive thoughts. And if you’re generally good and reasonably intelligent, you may have made your way to a position in society that gives you a lot of power over a lot of people. And if you’re the kind of not dumb, not evil person who nonetheless sends an email to a female co-worker telling her that she should wear heels in the office because you like watching her walk around in them, then I’m really afraid of letting you get near any big red buttons.

Choo choo.

Maybe this isn’t true of everyone, but for me, one of the highest compliments I can receive is: “Hey, can you help me with this thing?”

A sentence like that does everything for me. First, it’s a compliment about my competency; especially if the task is somewhat specialized, then I’m flattered that the person thought of me as the right person among those they knew to do it. Secondly, being able to help someone I care about makes me feel wonderful. I derive a lot of personal satisfaction from the thought that I’m a net positive in other people’s lives, and being able to help with something directly brings that thought into the light.

Plus, there’s always the satisfaction that comes from accomplishing a specific, narrow task. As far as that sense goes, you just can’t beat “the cabinet door was broken and now it isn’t, because of me.”

My overall point is this: doing things in service to others is remarkably good for your mental health. If you’re asked, that means you’re seen as one of your community’s Helpers, one of the people who holds it together. That’s worthy of respect. And even if you aren’t asked – volunteer. Do a few things in service to others and watch all your other woes begin to melt away. The inconsequential ones will evaporate from your worry, and the few truly meaningful ones will be easier to tackle with the help of the friends you make.

My son, at five years old, already prides himself on this behavior. He rushes to every door to make sure he gets a chance to open it for people. He won’t let anyone else carry anything that he can lift. Yesterday my mother needed the old swingset disassembled from her yard, and she asked me to do it. (So we’re already off to a great start, as the request immediately put me in a good mood.) Since my son was with me, I said: “Hey, I could use the strongest boy in the world to help me, do you know who that is?” He rushed to my side and together we took the thing down, me showing him how to use the tools and him helping me carry the old metal away.

We both beamed with pride, the chain of service continued. You just can’t beat it.

Many people seem to have a big blind spot when it comes to reading people. Not just that they can’t do it, but they don’t believe it can be done.

Let’s say two people sit down to play some Texas Hold’em. They decide in advance to play 10,000 hands, because they’re both immortal and don’t need to eat or sleep. The law of large numbers says that over 10,000 hands, pretty much exactly 50% of them will give the better cards to Player A, and the other 50% will give the better cards to Player B. So if “who has the better cards” determines who wins, then the players should come very close to breaking even at the end of the game.

In reality, if one of those people is a professional poker player and the other is not, the pro will absolutely wipe the floor with the amateur.

Why? Does being a professional poker player give you the ability to get dealt better cards from a shuffled deck? Of course not. But the pro will know when his opponent’s hand is better and when his own is, and he’ll bet accordingly. He’ll bait his opponent into bad moves and he’ll maneuver around unbeatable hands. He’ll completely rob the other guy.

And in my experience, at the end of the night, the other guy will say his opponent “got lucky.”

People just absolutely do not like to admit they got tricked, manipulated, or bluffed. They hate the idea of ever losing a battle of wits (probably because we equate being smart with moral worth), to the point where they won’t admit that’s what happened. And as a result, they force themselves to ignore the fact that this is a skill that can be developed.

So the cycle continues. That same person will never be able to read people – or bluff – because they don’t want to acknowledge that other people might already have that skill and be better at it than them.

And I get it. Being tricked, especially outside of a game, feels very bad! And if we acknowledge that we got tricked because of a lack of our own ability to detect the trick in the first place, it’s like taking on the blame, and calling someone else smarter than you. Most people’s egos can’t handle it. Some people won’t even report scams to the police because it hurts their pride too much. If you get robbed at gunpoint, that doesn’t feel as shameful as getting taken in a confidence scheme.

But the only defense against this game is to play it. If you don’t recognize it as real, it’s a huge weak spot. You aren’t immune to it – and if you think you are, you’re even more susceptible. Watch a few poker games, then play a few. It might be frustrating, but it’s a skill worth learning.

Leadership shouldn’t be a bidding war.

Like literally everything in life, there are trade-offs involved in leadership and there’s a price to pay for it that’s simply too high. If you want to lead a team or group, that’s great! But you need to know that at some point, the cost is simply too high.

Here’s what I’ll see: a team forms unofficially in the office. It has maybe eight people. Right away, two or three people decide they want to take charge. And they’ll start this huge pissing contest with each other, trying to one-up and puff chests and whatever else until it’s all chaos. Nobody gets what they want and the team is a disaster. Because all parties treated leading the team like an auction – each one trying to out-bid the other with the currency of their social capital.

Leadership needs to be thought of as having a static price. If I’m on a team and I think I should lead it, I’ll start leading it. I’ll just assume it. But if someone wants it badly enough to try to jockey, I won’t immediately and automatically get into that bidding war. Instead, I’ll assess my price preference. How badly do I want it?

Nine times out of ten, I don’t. So I save my social capital (and my mental energy) for when I do. Knowing when someone is willing to cut their own arm off to outbid you on something is a keen skill to develop, and it’ll save you a lot of headaches. And when you do need to assume command – you will.

There’s a little game I like to play with my kids. I call it “The Wrong Game.”

It’s a game where I’ll deliberately say something incorrect so that my kids will react. They’ll tell me the correct thing, but then I’ll act like I don’t understand and make them explain it to me more thoroughly until I “get it.”

For example, I was reading a book to them that had the word “robot,” and I kept intentionally mispronouncing it as “rowboat,” “rabbit,” or “reboot.” I acted like I didn’t understand the difference until they wrote down all four words and walked me through why they each sounded the way they did.

When you can teach something to someone – with patience and grace – that’s when it really internalizes. We “learn” a lot of things that we actually just memorize. We learn to drive a car by remembering the steps, not by understanding why the rules of the road exist or how an internal combustion engine actually works. But giving people the opportunity to teach, especially in a way that’s different from how they learned it themselves, is a wonderful way to approach true understanding.

I’ve found this same technique, applied in a less silly manner, works wonders with adults as well. If I really want to see if someone has absorbed something they’re trying to learn, I might say: “Okay, pretend I’m the new colleague you’re training next week, so I have no prior knowledge of this process. If I started by doing [this incorrect step], what would you tell me?” And then bam, the gears start turning in a whole new way.

The Wrong Game is often the right one – have fun playing!

May this day be not only a day about freedom, but a day to remember that even if someone following an ideal has lost their way, that does not tarnish the ideal. The yoke of tyranny should fall on no human shoulders, and all human hands should lift them from those who have forgotten.

You can’t fix a traffic problem by improving the roads.

Let’s say that Main Street is very crowded. It’s a single-lane road and a thousand people per hour drive on it, making it a congested mess. People complain about it all the time the general consensus is that “something should be done.” So at great taxpayer expense, the city spends a ton of time and effort widening Main Street to two lanes. Now a thousand people per hour won’t congest it at all, and it would take twice as many people to bring it back to the level of traffic it had before.

That is what happens immediately.

Within the span of a few weeks to a few months, the road is every bit as congested as it ever was. The question is: why?

Well, we have to look at “what is unseen.” In the initial situation, a thousand people per hour drove on Main Street. But ten thousand people per hour made a conscious decision not to. Those other ten thousand people decided that they’d take an alternate route rather than face the traffic, or they’d choose an alternate destination entirely, or they’d stay home, etc. They might not take jobs at the other end of Main Street or eat at different restaurants or whatever else, because the traffic is so bad. The thousand people per hour who do drive on Main Street are those ones who have made the calculation that (even though they obviously don’t like the traffic) all their alternatives are worse.

But that calculation is ongoing, and the ten thousand potential drivers had different levels of commitment to the idea. For some people, the traffic was only just bad enough to make them choose an alternative (maybe the alternative is a road that also has traffic, but slightly less!). For others, the rest of the city would have to fall into the ocean before they’d ever drive on Main Street.

When the new construction is finished and the road is wider, the calculation changes.

Now Main Street has “openings,” let’s say. The next thousand people – the ones on the weakest end of the objection scale – now find that their objections are no longer sufficient to force them to choose alternatives. So they swap from whatever alternatives they had previously been choosing back to Main Street. And Main Street fills right back up.

And as the same amount of traffic congestion can now bring more people up Main Street, there’s further incentive for people to do things like open restaurants on the far end of Main Street and get jobs on that end and so on, so the incentive to go up that way intensifies – enough to counteract the negative response when the traffic starts to worsen again. An equilibrium is always reached, and the equilibrium will always be a lot of traffic.

There’s a lesson here, of course, well beyond just the lesson to civil engineers. The lesson is that whenever you see a problem that’s affecting a group of people, you need to understand that the group of people you see is only part of the overall situation. The problem itself is acting as a barrier to the people you don’t see – the potentials. That can work in your favor, if you want more people – if the congested checkout line at your store is preventing people from buying your stuff, then improving that line can make you more sales, even if the individual wait times don’t change.

But it can also be a danger. If you think that you can reduce the wait time at your free health clinic by adding more doctors, you can’t – because the reduced wait times will entice more people to show up until the wait times reach their previous equilibrium. There’s theoretically a number of doctors – or traffic lanes, or anything else – that can’t be overwhelmed in this way, but in practice that number is so high as to be impossible. You could reduce wait times to zero at your health clinic if there was one doctor for every citizen in your city, but that seems as unlikely as finally making that 40-lane-wide highway that no number of cars can clog.

The trick here is not to try to solve all problems of congestion. It’s to optimize the equilibrium. There is no perfect solution, but you can balance the needs of movement against everything else. Unfortunately, that often means not building more roads – which people tend not to like. But they only don’t like it because they believe (incorrectly) that traffic is a result of there not being enough roads. The reality is that as long as there is something people want, someone will be in line ahead of you to get it.

Optimize your patience, choose your own best alternatives, and live your best life.

We can chase something forever, only to find that it isn’t worth it when we catch it. But the chase itself can still have been worthwhile!

Of course, the chase for some white whales is inherently destructive – after all, the source of that name isn’t a happy tale. But you can set your sights on some unattainable goal whose pursuit actually improves your lot in life.

Imagine yearning your whole life for a perfect picture of a sunset. You can never get it exactly right, but the pursuit takes you all over the world, watching nature’s beauty, and practicing a fun hobby. There are worse things than never attaining a goal like that.

Pick your whales carefully, is all I’m saying. Then pursue them to your heart’s content!