In 1902, Rudyard Kipling published a collection of children’s fables called “Just So Stories.” Each fable was a fantastical tale of how an animal got its unique feature. In Kipling’s imagination, a camel’s hump was a punishment from the Djinn of All Deserts for saying “humph” instead of working, and the rhino’s skin was the result of a prank by a Parsee who filled the rhino’s skin with cake crumbs while he bathed. All of the stories were like that. Kipling would take a known feature of an animal and invent a whimsical story to explain how it happened.

Historically, I have not been a fan of evolutionary psychology. It always struck me as a collection of Just So Stories meant to lazily explain the status quo world by coming up with an unverifiable, plausible-sounding but otherwise evidence-free explanation for how a certain human behavior could have been adaptive. But I didn’t get this impression from evolutionary psychologists. I got it from people on the internet, who do exactly the thing I’m describing. Here’s an example from Politics Is the Mind-Killer, a very well-known and well-respected LessWrong post:

People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation . . . When, today, you get into an argument about whether “we” ought to raise the minimum wage, you’re executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed. Being on the right side of the argument could let you kill your hated rival!

By now I’ve probably seen hundreds of examples like this. Someone notices something about human behavior and, with no evidence and no justification, they confabulate an explanation about how, “in the ancestral environment,” this behavior would have been critically important and necessary for our very survival! It’s easy and fun! I’ve done a satirical version myself, weaving a fun and plausible-sounding story about why women evolved to be self-sufficient.

I call this “armchair evopsych.” Its big problem is that it reasons backward. To follow the scientific method, you first make a guess (call it a “hypothesis” if you must), then you test it and interpret the result to see if it supports your theory. In armchair evopsych, you do this backwards. You get the result or the observation first (often a conclusion from a different study or just speculation about how people behave) then come up with a post hoc explanation about what the evolutionary mechanism was. And then you’re done! It’s a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that seems to add evidence for the existence of a behavior while actually adding nothing but a plausible-sounding Just So Story.

I held out hope that there was a more rigorous form of evolutionary psychology, where evolutionary theory would inform an educated guess about human behavior, but then it would be rigorously tested and add observational data to increase our understanding of human behavior. To that end, I read “The Evolution of Desire” (2016 edition) by David Buss. Buss is one of the most well-respected researchers in the field of evolutionary psychology. I figured that if I could find the good version anywhere, it would be in his seminal work.

The results were somewhat mixed. Buss is a serious researcher who does legitimate original research. In many cases, he does exactly what I was hoping. He uses evolutionary theory to come up with a hypothesis about human behavior, then designs an experiment to test whether it’s borne out by real-world observation. For instance, Buss had a theory that

a man’s efforts to guard his mate should be most intense when his mate is youngest and hence most reproductively valuable, because failure to retain a mate carries the most severe reproductive penalties when the woman has the highest value. The age of a husband, however, would not necessarily govern the intensity of a woman’s efforts to keep him.

Instead of just leaving it there like an armchair evolutionary psychologist would do, Buss designed an experiment to test the theory, which confirmed his expectations. This is the way.

Sadly, he also does plenty of the armchair variety. He draws unjustified conclusions, makes untestable claims, and invents plenty of Just So Stories along the way. The pattern is that he will discuss an observation about human behavior, then make up some evolutionary reason that “may” explain it. An example:

Anthropologists find that hunting ability peaks when a man is in his thirties, at which point his slight decline in physical prowess is more than compensated for by his increased knowledge, patience, skill, and wisdom. Women’s preference for older men may stem from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for whom the resources derived from hunting were critical to survival and reproduction.

He follows the armchair pattern perfectly. A different study’s conclusion → hypothesis → done. No test. No falsifiable predictions. Instead, a Just So Story straight from Buss’ imagination.

He does this every few pages.

The other issue is that the hypotheses that he supposedly got from evolutionary theory are kind of obvious. His big insights are claims like “women prefer men who are rich, emotionally stable, and tall” and “men prefer women who are beautiful, young, and relatively chaste.” That’s not a knock on Buss for testing them. It’s important to test the things that “everyone knows,” because sometimes you get an unexpected result. It’s to his credit that he tested a lot of his ideas.

But if the value of evolutionary psychology is generating novel hypotheses, it doesn’t seem to be adding anything here. Most of Buss’s hypotheses are well-established stereotypes. Do you really need a sophisticated evolutionary model to tell you that women want rich & powerful men? You could have gotten these from asking a random person on the street. To add meaningful value, evolutionary psychology needs to be a source of counterintuitive suggestions that wouldn’t be generated otherwise. Buss almost never does this. The valuable parts of his work are the psychological experiments and they don’t need the evolutionary theory. If you ran the same studies without a single reference to the ancestral environment, you’d get the same results. The evopsych is cosmetic.

The Hero’s Journey

Right from the beginning, Buss seems rather impressed with himself. He starts his book by casting himself in the role of bold underdog, fighting the good fight against the corrosive forces of ignorance and unreason. He explains that his previous work was controversial because humans (other than him of course) “don’t seem well designed for dispassionate intellectual discourse about domains that have profound personal relevance.” Some people even thought his work was so dangerous and subversive that it should be hidden away, shared only with the enlightened few who were properly prepared to receive this precarious knowledge. But no! Buss would not allow his momentous insights to be suppressed. He courageously shared his forbidden findings with the world, “based not on romantic notions or outdated scientific theories but on current scientific evidence.”

So what are these forbidden truths that Buss has come to bring us? The main thesis - the driving engine behind the entire book - is one idea: men’s evolutionary imperative is to mate with as many fertile women as possible and women’s evolutionary imperative is to secure a mate who will provide her and her children with resources. In the modern world, this cashes out as the observation that men typically want to have sex with lots of women who display signs of health and fertility (which correspond with traditional beauty standards) and women generally want to extract resources and commitment from men.

The bombshell insight is that men want to sleep with lots of sexy women and women want commitment from rich and high-status men. Someone get me a fainting couch.

Look, I have no doubt that Buss’ work drew a lot of criticism, much of it (though not all!) undeserved and small-minded. I credit him with standing up to it. But my blowhard alarm is deafening.

A Fantastic Voyage

A creative evolutionary psychologist can invent a plausible sounding story for literally any behavior. There exists no empirical finding that he can’t explain by referring to some reason it was adaptive in our distant past. Buss does this constantly. Many times he’ll point out a behavior that is clearly just a reasonable response to the circumstances of the modern world and claim that there is a secret evolutionary reason for it, even in the face of contrary evidence.

In fact, his main thesis is an example of this formula. Buss cites as foundational to his theory that women want commitment from wealthy men because they have ancient evolutionary programming compelling them to be attracted to resources. The obvious alternative is that it is a rational thing to do in a world where, until relatively recently, women were unable to participate in the most lucrative parts of the economy, and to this day they are still at a substantial wealth disadvantage. It doesn’t take any special understanding of evolution to suggest that.

In fact, Buss’s own data casts doubt on his conclusion. Buss found that in societies that are more collective or have a generous welfare state, women’s desire for commitment plummets. A hunter-gather tribe known as the Ache of Paraguay are a primary example. They share food communally, so “women receive the same allotment of food, regardless of whether they have a husband and regardless of the hunting skill of their husband.” In most societies, the vast majority of women prefer their relationships to be committed and long term. Among the Ache, about 75% of women prefer short-term relationships.

A similar result is seen among Swedish women. Buss: “Since food and other material resources are provided to everyone, women have less incentive to marry. As a result, only half of all Swedish couples who live together get married, and members of both sexes often pursue more casual relationships.” The data shows a pattern where the less women are dependent upon men to provide for them, the less they are interested in commitment.1

That strongly suggests that women’s desire for resources and commitment is just a reasonable response to a world where men tend to control the majority of the resources. Buss’s experimental data shows the effect evaporates under different social conditions, which is exactly what you’d expect from a cultural explanation and exactly what you wouldn’t expect from a biological one. Buss somehow manages to miss that his own findings undermine a load-bearing part of his central thesis.

The Other Kind of Evolution

Buss puts a lot of stock in the idea that if a behavior can be observed across most cultures, it must have evolved biologically. But biology is not the only thing that evolves. Culture also evolves. It is subject to the same evolutionary pressure that biology is. Cultures that allow their members to survive and multiply grow and other cultures die out. Scholars refer to this as “dual inheritance theory” - the idea that biology and culture co-evolved to produce modern human behavior. So even if an observed behavior is adaptive, that doesn’t mean it evolved genetically hundreds of thousands of years ago in the African Savannah. It could have evolved more recently as a matter of culture. This applies even if a behavior is observed across cultures because different cultures will converge on adaptive behaviors. The more adaptive cultures will outcompete the others, leaving only cultures that share certain traits. So if a behavior is seen across most cultures, that’s evidence that it evolved, but not necessarily that it evolved biologically. Cross-cultural persistence is a necessary condition to show that a trait is biological, but not a sufficient one.

Indeed, Buss himself sometimes seems to forget he’s writing from a biological perspective, such as when he notes that one reason women prefer high status men is that status comes along with “superior health care” - something obviously not the case 300,000 years ago (or even 300 years ago for the most part). He also notes that

In cultures where food is scarce, such as among the Bushmen of Australia,2 plumpness signals wealth, health, and adequate nutrition during development. In cultures where food is relatively abundant, such as the United States and many western European countries, the relationship between plumpness and status is reversed and the rich signal their status through relative thinness.

Buss tries to handwave this away by saying that men “do not have an evolved preference for a particular amount of body fat per se. Rather, they have an evolved preference for whatever features are linked with status” which seems a little too cute. I wish he would just admit that (given the well-documented effects of weight on health) the above finding is evidence against his theory that our minds evolved to be attracted to signals of health. The data on whether men prefer chastity is similar - it has huge differences based on culture.

This is important because whether a behavior is biologically or culturally determined has big implications for how we go about managing it. Buss argues that because certain preferences are genetically encoded, some conflict is “impossible to eliminate because the conditions that foster it cannot be avoided.” But remember - society is fixed. Biology is mutable. “Conditions” may be avoided, whether biological or cultural, but only if we develop a genuine understanding of how the two interact. Just So Stories of dubious accuracy are unlikely to help.

The Ancestral Environment

One of the biggest problems with evolutionary psychology, and Buss’s treatment of it in particular, is that we know very little about the human ancestral environment. There is precious little evidence about how early human societies functioned, and the evidence we do have shows that there was no single ancestral environment. The genus Homo evolved over millions of years in vastly different environments. We don’t even know how long ago Homo sapiens first evolved, and some evidence even suggests that we evolved from several different groups scattered across the African continent.

Despite this, Buss casually references the mating systems, gender roles, violence rates, and social hierarchy of early human societies as if they are fully known. Buss confidently proclaims that early human societies featured things like private property, long-term monogamous marriage, highly specific social hierarchies, and many other aspects of modern life. In particular, Buss is very confident that early humans did not share resources communally. His entire theory relies on the idea that women evolved to prefer men who would provide them with resources and men evolved to avoid spending resources on unrelated children. That idea would be completely undermined if early humans lived in societies where resources were shared. He may be right! But there’s really no way to know, and Buss is seriously overconfident about it. For a contrasting take, here is a passage from The Fourth Age by Byron Reese:

If modern examples of hunter-gatherers are any indication of life before agriculture, we can infer that sustenance was not something one could take for granted, and that any individual was just a few days’ illness away from death. As such, a general collectivism likely arose from each individual having a compelling self-interested motive for helping others…. For this reason, groups that shared were more likely to be more resilient than their more selfish brethren. Besides, what was the point of accumulating wealth? There was no wealth beyond the day’s haul of grub worms and no way to store wealth, even if there were.

Given the dearth of evidence, this view is just as plausible as Buss’s. The truth is that we don’t know how early human societies worked, and there is a great deal of disagreement among experts. This is a huge problem for Buss, because his theory completely falls apart without resource acquisition being the primary thing women look for in a mate. To be blunt, if the above passage is correct, which it very well may be, this whole book is bullshit.

Reduction to Resources

Throughout the book, any trait that women find attractive is spun as a proxy for resources. Buss makes the rather obvious observation that women prefer men who are dependable and emotionally stable. While a normal person might see that as a completely reasonable thing everyone wants in any social connection, Buss claims that it’s because “in ancestral times, women who chose stable, dependable men had a greater likelihood of ensuring the man’s ability to acquire and maintain resources for use by them and their children.”

On intelligence, Buss claims that “ancestral women who preferred intelligent mates would have raised their odds of securing social, material, and economic resources for themselves and for their children.” He claims women prefer men who love them because love is a “probabilistic cue” to commitment. “Women place a premium on love in order to secure the commitment of men’s economic, emotional, and sexual resources.” He claims women prefer kindness because “kindness is an enduring personality characteristic that has many components, but at the core of all of them is the commitment of resources.”

Buss even claims that women’s desire for their husbands to remain alive is all about resource acquisition:

One reason young women are not drawn to substantially older men may be that older men have a higher risk of dying and hence are less likely to be around to continue contributing to the provisioning and protection of children.

It’s honestly hard to believe he’s serious with some of this. There is no need to invoke evolution to explain why women prefer men who are intelligent, emotionally stable, in love, and alive.

When he’s not reducing everything to a proxy for resources, Buss reduces it to a proxy for good genes. He claims that women are attracted to traits like humor, artistry, creativity, and morality not because they are pleasant and life-enriching but because they are “costly signals” of genetic fitness. In Buss’s analysis, every female preference, no matter how rational, can be reduced to either providing material resources or better genes for their children.

Not all of Buss’ theories are objectionable. I don’t have much criticism of his theory that men are attracted to signs of health and fertility in women. The reasons behind physical attraction are somewhat mysterious, and Buss does a solid job connecting features that men find attractive to signals of health and fertility such as clear skin, good muscle tone, high energy level, and facial symmetry. But those kinds of insights are the exception. Most are examples of Buss wielding the evolutionary hammer at everything even loosely resembling a proverbial nail.

A Wasted Opportunity

I fear I chose the wrong book if I was looking for serious evolutionary psychology. I still have hope that there are thoughtful researchers doing good work, but the subject of human mating lends itself to a certain level of buffoonery. “The Adapted Mind” by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides may have been a better choice. Its purpose is to argue against the “blank slate” theory, which sees the mind as a purely social construct. Blank slate theory is obvious nonsense and needs a good refutation, so I suspect the arguments are much better, though I worry that it suffers from the same overconfidence about early human society.

“The Evolution of Desire” would have been significantly better if it had been called “The Science of Desire” and abandoned the evolutionary framing. It contains real insights about how people relate to one another in a romantic and sexual context. Buss presents legitimate data and cross-cultural findings about sex differences and how the typical member of each sex behaves. It’s valuable information even though it’s a bit gender-essentialist for my tastes.

Of course, it should also be noted that evolution aside, Buss is doing psychology, which is not the most reliable science. Buss cites a lot of studies, but the majority of his findings come from a 1989 survey he conducted of over 10,000 respondents across 37 cultures. The study has received partial replications in 2007, 2019, and 2020, so it’s on better footing than a lot of results from that time period, but it has the usual problems such as non-random convenience sampling, self-reported data, lack of preregistration, and a bias toward WEIRD respondents.

I don’t have the time or energy to conduct a comprehensive review of all of the studies in the book, so I asked Claude to do it. This is obviously not a substitute for a real meta-analysis, but it works as a quick sanity check. Specifically, I asked Claude to identify the studies relied on, review the methodology and any replication attempts, and assign a reliability score. You can see the spreadsheet here. Average reliability was pretty middling, and the studies Buss conducted personally only do a little better. LLM’s are not always the best judges of this sort of thing, so I’m not putting too much weight on this, but I am somewhat skeptical of Buss’s conclusions even when he doesn’t invoke the ancestral environment.

Even if Buss’s psychological findings are reliable, they are undermined by the unjustified claims about how all of these behaviors are actually biological imperatives from our distant past. Buss’s constant speculations about the ancestral environment, what is biological vs. cultural, and what would have been adaptive tens of thousands of years ago overshadow his legitimate findings. Ultimately, the evolutionary ideas don’t add any extra explanatory power to anything he’s saying. The valuable evidence is the survey data, cross-cultural studies, and observations of modern behavior. The speculation about evolution adds almost nothing but a cute Just So Story about how the human got his sexuality. It’s a bit edgier than Kipling, but just as imaginary.

Wednesday

I continued my yearly tradition of hosting a pre-party at my house in South Jersey. The party means a lot to me because I love hosting, and hosting the party was my first introduction to Vibecamp. VC2 was my first, and thanks to , I invited like 50 strangers over to my house ahead of time. It was an amazing introduction and made me feel much more confident that I would have a good time.

smoked brisket and pork, I made a cheese plate and coconut mojitos. We put out some other snacks and drinks and welcomed people over. As usual, was the life of the party, despite the fact that our hot tub was broken and the new one wouldn’t be delivered until the Monday after vc (it’s not my fault! I ordered it 4 weeks ago). He jumped in the pool instead.

A bunch of old and new friends showed up, and I think everyone had a good time. It was more chill than in previous years, which Gina thinks was due to the lack of the aforementioned hot tub, but people ate, drank, and be merry’ed. I got in the pool, even though it wasn’t really great pool weather. All weather is pool weather if you drink enough! Eneasz, after several delays of his flight, got here late in the evening with , which was the icing on top for me. It’s not Vibecamp until they arrive.

Everyone started leaving around midnight, which I always appreciate because Thursday is a big day. I was in bed by 1am.

Thursday

I woke up and wasn’t even hung over! In fact, I managed to avoid hangovers the entire weekend with my brilliant strategy of drinking twice as much water as alcohol. Thursday is always rough, because I spend Wednesday doing party stuff and don’t even bother starting to pack until Thursday morning. And we bring a lot of stuff, including a very heavy PA system. We managed to pack everything into the little Honda Fit, make it to camp, and then unload everything with the help of several friends. Then it was time for the Thursday tradition of spending all afternoon in the pool after being overheated from all the schlepping. Kids aren’t allowed in the big pool, so I always bring a kiddie pool for Roxie & her friends. This time, it came with a slip & slide! The kids played with a slip & slide for a bit, but it wasn’t that exciting. They mostly liked the kiddie pool.

After dinner and the opening ceremony, Gina put Roxie to bed and I attempted to host karaoke. Due to opening ceremonies going late and some technical difficulties with the sound system, we only had about an hour. We also had no internet, so I couldn’t play anyone’s songs! I ended up asking everyone to download their own songs, then connect to the bluetooth speaker. It mostly worked! The crowd was spectacular. They cheered. They sang along. They rolled with all the difficulties. They danced. They clapped. It was an audience that you dream of.

I stayed sober Thursday, which I think was a good decision. I drank every other night and didn’t suffer too badly for it. After karaoke, I wandered around for a while, then hung out with Gina, Eneasz, Jen, , and on the swings, then went to bed.

Friday

Friday, like every other morning, started with a visit to Ground Truth. If you don’t know, Latent Space Marine and his crew spend all morning brewing excellent coffee on camp stoves and handing it out to all comers. It’s so much better than what you can get at the dining hall. Then they spend all night making fancy cocktails, including my favorite - the sazerac. They do this entirely for free. They are absolute heroes. Throw them a few dollars if you can spare it.

Roxie mostly took care of herself all weekend. She formed a little kid crew with Dancing Horse and ’s kids, and they required very little supervision. We first brought her at age 4, and we needed to keep an eye on her that year, but the past two years we’ve been comfortable letting her run around on her own. The playground we build last year was still up and looking great. The kids used it as their fortress and defended it with pinecones from any interloping adults.

Once we had our coffee, Gina set up her bubble-blowing event. She really went all out this year, with a high-quality bubble machine, gallons of high-color bubble solution, a half-dozen giant bubble wands, and a case of differently shaped bubbled blowers. The kids had a great time for the first hour, then right as they went off to do something else, a bunch of adults showed up and soon there were like 10-15 adults all blowing bubbles in front of our cabin. It was perfect.

Lunch was eggs, biscuits, and sausage, which I thought was great, but Gina didn’t love. It also reminded me that I had brought homemade hot sauce and my “essence of pure flavor” spice blend, which improved things immensely.

After lunch, we checked out one of the the coolest events all weekend - VIBErant colors by Bijan and husband. They started out by showcasing a collection of colors that can’t be rendered on screens and can only be experienced IRL. But the main event was a lab spectroscopy setup. They turned the meeting room into a dark room, and showed what colors different elements displayed when excited in a little beam. And they had glasses that would split apart the spectrum so you could see exactly which wavelengths were being emitted. It was SO COOL. Gina already has plans to bring in her florescent rock collection next year to add to their showcase.

Then we went to see the petting zoo! Roxie was not terribly interested. She’s just not that into petting animals. She has the same ambivalence at our local zoo. I, however, love it - especially the duck. She wouldn’t stop really loudly quacking. It was great.

That afternoon, Dancing Horse heroically found a lifeguard so the kids could be allowed in the pool for an hour each day. Tbh, they tend to like the kiddie pool better, but Roxie appreciated being allowed to go in the big pool for at least a little bit. She’s a good swimmer and loves being in the water, even if she’s actually much more interested in shooting people with water guns. I also appreciate Dancing Horse insisting that kid pool time occur during the official pool party. I strongly approve of her attitude that kids and adults should be mingling more, and that the ingroup especially needs some exposure to children.

Friday night is my favorite event to host - the summer solstice celebration. It’s based on the rationalist winter solstice events, and follows a similar format where someone gives a speech or some kind of introduction, followed by a thematic song. But unlike the winter solstice, we focus on living in the moment and appreciating how good we’ve got it. We try to keep it lighthearted and positive, though apparently we keep making people cry.

For years, I dreamed about doing a summer solstice show, but it seemed so logistically difficult. I would have to book a space, recruit musicians, advertise, somehow motivate people to show up, etc. Vibecamp was the perfect opportunity. The audience is already there. The musicians are there. I just have to post it to the schedule. That lets us keep the focus on putting together a good show. This was the best one yet, despite having a grand total of two rehearsals. Gina and Gubes are incredible musicians that just make it work.

Timing is tough because it’s meant to coincide with the sunset, and we need to start by 7:45pm, but a lot of people are still at dinner at that point. I keep trying to get the vc team to move dinner to 6-8pm (is anyone still eating at 9pm??) but so far, to no avail. Regardless, solstice went great! I think this was our best one yet. We really leaned into the “finding your inner five-year-old” theme. Gubes is locked in as the third member of our trio, on vocals and uke, and he really holds it down. He did a speech this year where he played the “Why?” game with the audience, and encouraged everyone to nurture their curiosity. came up and gave a speech about how a good friend of his died young, and it inspired him to stop waiting for permission to be happy (which gave us a perfect excuse to perform “Happiness Runs” by Donovan). Gina talked about how she finally found the strength this year to cut off her parents, and how she’s felt like she’s aging in reverse ever since, and it made me tear up a little bit. I had trouble singing the next song. These were all beautiful speeches, and I hope they all post the text somewhere (update: you can read Gina’s here!). I talked about how Roxie is my hero.

The show climaxes with a performance of “There’s So Much Energy In Us” by Cloud Cult, which is the song that gave the show its name. It’s really the perfect song for the occasion. Then we’re really self-indulgent and play an obscure David Bowie song called “Memory of a Free Festival” that nobody knows but us. But it’s the perfect song. The verses all basically describe Vibecamp, and it ends by repeating the line “sun machine is coming down and we’re gonna have a party,” which I time to coincide with the sunset. It’s so vibes-appropriate. We finished with “Heroes,” a much better-known Bowie song, and encouraged everyone to be heroes, just for one day (and at least one person appreciated it).

Once Solstice is over, Vibecamp for me shifts from host mode to party mode. I have way fewer responsibilities, so that’s when I take an edible, have a few drinks, throw on my shiny suit, and just focus on having a good time. The first stop was to Bitter Lesson for a sazerac. As I was sitting there, I had this interaction with a random guy in line (paraphrased from memory):

him: are you Wes?

Me: Yes

him: you yelled at me on Twitter for not having my dating doc in my profile, so I put my dating doc in my profile. <gestures> this is my girlfriend! She saw it and DM’ed me! I’m going to be moving soon to be with her!

Sadly, I can’t find the Twitter convo, but I was so happy and wouldn’t shut up about it for like 2 days. More people should listen to me! Good things happen when you listen to me!

So now, with party mode in full effect, it was time for emo night. Octocuss did my eyeliner, which was so high quality and waterproof that it did not come off until I got access to genuine makeup remover on Monday morning. I’ve been told this was intentional. Brudolf put together a killer playlist, but more importantly, he didn’t try to do anything ~creative~ other than picking good songs. No EDM. No remixes. No crossfading. No samples. No “creating an auditory experience.” Just songs people liked, played from start to finish. I’ve never seen people more into a dance party in my life. Also there was a very active mosh pit. We all loved it. Everyone literally applauded after every song. Other DJ’s take note! Shoutouts to Melody, , and Gubes for being especially into it.

After the Vibe Parade, I got another cocktail at Bitter Lesson (have I mentioned that those guys are heroes?), then got midnight ramen from , which was every bit as delicious as last year. I skipped vibedip this year. I did not drink enough to make jumping in the pool in 65 degree weather sound enticing. I don’t quite remember what I did after that, but I’m pretty sure I stayed up another few hours just chatting and vibing with Eneasz, Mary, Gina, and others. I was going to go to bed at 2am, but Eneasz convinced me to stay out another hour. I think I was in bed by 3.

Saturday

Saturday was pajama day! I wore my purple silk bathrobe all morning. As always, the first stop was Ground Truth. Then I grabbed a bagel and sat in for a little bit of Mary’s “Love Your Lust” event. I don’t really need the workshop (I already love my lust!), but I love watching her draw people out and work her magic.

After lunch, it was time for our live recording of the ! We each gave our #1 piece of sex or relationship advice, then invited the audience up to share their advice. Eventually people just started asking questions, so we had some interesting discussions. Christian hasn’t sent me the audio yet, but he assures me it will be soon.

Then I stopped by Gubes’ improve games event for a minute. That guy is good at improv! In general, Gubes was vibing his heart out all weekend. Since vc ended, I’ve seen several Gubes appreciation posts, and I’ve happy that he’s getting some recognition. We’re all lucky to have him.

I also tried dodgeball with Ari. Except plot twist! Ari didn’t love how dodgeball went on Friday, so he decided we were going to play capture the flag, but combined with dodgeball. I was skeptical, but it actually worked great. It added a move where you could take someone out from your side, then run through the hole in their defenses.

After getting overheated running around the far field, it was time for the kid swim. We hung in the pool for a while, then Eneasz, Steven, Gina, and I decided we wanted more coffee. It was almost 5pm, so we figured it was a long shot that Ground Truth was still open, but we decided to check anyway. As we suspected, they were gone, but the Steven just walked back behind the table, fired up the burners, and made coffee for everyone! It was a very “you can just do things” moment.

On our way back, we ran into the Vibecamp trials. This had been going on all weekend but none of us had participated. One of the trials was to find four people participating and match up puzzle pieces. There were for of us, so we said what the heck and signed up. We got a little badge and a neat metal card holder thing to keep it in. The other tasks were to find books and decode a secret message, find hidden rats around camp, and discover secrets at the question marks on the map. There was also a “you can just do things” trial, which just required you to reach out and take a badge. So that was two down!

We decided to go look for rats. The clue was that one of them was “doing farm work” so we decided to check the barn. It was around that time that we saw Roxie and she was not doing great. She was irritable and did not look like she was getting frustrated with her friends. We invited her to come look for rats with us, and she agreed, so off we went. We failed to find the rat in the barn, and Roxie was upset about that. But it was about that time we realized what the issue was: she was starving. She’s kind of a picky eater, so she hadn’t been eating much at meal times. She was mostly living off of chips and Oreos, and it had caught up with her. Thankfully, it was almost dinner time and they were serving burgers - one of her favorites. We loaded up a bun with two patties and she ate the whole thing. She felt much better after that and enjoyed the rest of her evening.

After dinner, we got some Secret Third Drinks and hung out at the cabin while Hazard, Disco, and crew set up their Tesla coil to show the kids! It was SO COOL! Roxie got to hold a metal pole and direct the electric current around.

It was about this time I really started to hate the vc media consent policy. I pulled out my phone to take a photo, but realized it wasn’t allowed because there were a few other people in the shot and I didn’t have time to ask everyone. I could easily edit them out later, but that’s not allowed. Now I don’t have a photo of this really special moment to show her grandmother and her uncle, or to show Roxie later to remind her of how much fun she had. One of the ways Roxie remembers things is through photos. She’ll often point to a photo to reference an experience she had when she doesn’t know the right words for it. Now I’m afraid she won’t remember, or we won’t know how to describe it well enough so she knows what we’re talking about. I actually don’t have any photos of any of my favorite moments from vc because there was always someone around and by the time you ask for permission, the moment’s passed. It’s pretty disappointing. I’d much prefer a policy where you can take photos for personal use, but need permission to share them.

Then it was time visit Bitter Lesson again, where Eneasz and ran into a third goth dude with long hair, and they bro’ed out for a while. We briefly stopped into the pavilion for ’s set, but EDM really doesn’t do it for me, so we didn’t stay long. Also, the lack of sleep, dehydration, drinking, and general overwhelm from the weekend was catching up with Gina. We went to Waffle House instead, which was excellent. I love how every night someone volunteers to feed all comers. It’s so wholesome, and yet another reason we don’t need dinner to be late!

Gina went to bed and I went to Tim’s midnight sing-along on the balcony above the pool. It ended up being one of my favorite events of the entire weekend. Tim is a wizard with a guitar. You just call out a song and within 30 seconds he can play the whole thing. I sang for two hours straight. The crowd kept growing. People were spontaneously doing harmony. My friends kept texting me and I kept being like “I’m going to stay for a few more songs” and eventually they realized I probably wasn’t leaving and showed up to sing too. It was over too soon! Nothing was going to top that, so I went to bed shortly after.

Sunday and Beyond

Sunday was mostly packing up, traveling home, unpacking, and lying around exhausted. The closing ceremony was nice, especially Bashu’s song. Getting home was uneventful. I drove Eneasz and Jen to the airport, where instead of flying home they flew to Paris! I tend to just want to sleep after vc, so the idea of taking a whole other vacation directly afterwards sounds exhausting to me, but I hope they had fun.

Monday was back to work (“business bitch” as Alex put it). Then I got a DM from Octocuss that her flight was delayed and she needed a place to stay, so I went and got her, and she stayed that night with us. It was really nice to connect with her more, and it felt like vc lasted a little longer.

It’s really hard to compare, but this might have been my favorite Vibecamp yet. I’ve been coming since vc2, and they’ve all been pretty special in their own way. It wasn’t until I wrote it down that I realized how much I actually did. My one regret is that I have so many friends at vc now that I barely meet anyone new. Next year I’m going to make an effort to talk to people I’ve never met, and might even cordon off some kind of “no friend zone” where you’re not allowed to talk to anyone you already know.

Speaking of next year, tickets are live for a limited time! I already got mine, and I hope you will too. I have a feeling vc6 is going to be even better.

In case you didn’t know, we have a six-year-old daughter named Roxanne, and she is my hero. I want to be just like her when I grow up, and I think we could all stand to be a little bit more like her.

Roxanne never has a bad day. When something bad happens, she gets upset for a minute or two, fully feels her disappointment or upset, sometimes cries a little, then moves on. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her get upset for more than five minutes before she’s ready to feel better. Often she’ll be able to feel better on her own, but if she can’t she’s never too proud to ask for help.

That goes for other things too. She recognizes her limits but is always trying to improve. She craves independence and likes to be able to do things on her own. When there’s something I help her with, I know it’s only a matter of time before she’ll be able and enthusiastic about doing it herself. At the same time, she’s not afraid to ask for help when something is beyond her, or to admit when she’s scared. She waits until she’s comfortable before striking out on her own. Often I’ll tell her I think she’s able to do something on her own, but she’ll keep asking for help the next few times. Then out of the blue she’ll say she wants to do it herself.

She’s a great traveling companion. Wherever you take her, she immediately adapts to what the situation is. She looks around to see what’s there, and finds a way to enjoy herself. If we don’t have the toy she wants, she’ll be sad for a minute, then find something else fun to play with. If there’s nothing but an empty room, she’ll do cartwheels and power slides. If there are no other kids, she’ll play with her parents. If her parents are too tired, she’ll amuse herself.

People like to talk about how children are fascinated by everything. Roxanne is not fascinated by everything. She is fascinated by some things, like a cool stick or a pile of gravel. But she is also completely uninterested in other things that I think are really cool. And she’s totally unashamed of her preferences. She feels no pressure to conform or pretend. She is fully in touch with her own desires and preferences in a way that you almost never see from adults.

When she plays with other kids, she is immune to peer pressure. She plays with them as long as it’s fun, and when it stops being fun, she stops. She loves playing with other kids but she’s also comfortable doing her own thing. And whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it because it’s the most fun thing to do.

She has a very healthy relationship with vices like junk food, candy, and screen time. She’s always been able to have as much as she wants, so she never developed a scarcity mindset around any of it. She has some candy every now and then, but rarely too much. She eats intuitively when she’s hungry, and almost never overeats. She uses her phone mostly as a last resort if there’s not anything else fun to do, but is happy to put it down if we offer her almost any other activity, so long as it sounds fun.

The running theme with all of this is that she’s independent, she’s not overly attached to any specific outcome, and she’s always having a good time. I am not always having a good time. I am not always doing the thing I want to do. I often let the weight of social expectations and anxieties pressure me into conforming when I’d rather do something else. But I take inspiration from Roxanne, and if I’m ever not having a good time, I ask what she would do, and it usually points me in the right direction.

Sex and Sensibility Podcast

Episode 1 - The Pain and Glory of Nonmonogamy

Mary Zoso, Holistic Wholesome Sex Coach is joined by Wesley Fenza and Gina to make sense of sex and relationships…

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3 months ago · 1 like · Wesley Fenza

Mary Zoso, Holistic Wholesome Sex Coach is joined by Wesley Fenza and Gina to make sense of sex and relationships.

In this inaugural episode, they will be discussing The Pain and Glory of Nonmonogamy by Aella.

Mary Zoso is available for hire! She offers one-on-one counseling, multi-week courses, and one-day workshops, all available to attend remotely. She charges on a sliding scale, so anyone can afford her services. Click here to see her current offerings.

Intro and Outro music: Spectre by The Fine Vintages

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from the final episode of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, don’t subscribe because it’s over!

The Mind Killer

157 - The End of the End

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community for ONE LAST TIME…

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3 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

Now that the greatest and best news show ever made is ending, many of you are probably asking yourselves “where am I going to get my news from?” Here’s my suggestion: don’t. If you aren’t already following the news, don’t bother.

I started a news show because I am a sicko and I enjoy reading about news and politics. It’s fun. It’s engaging. It’s how I enjoy spending my free time. It’s not because it’s actually important to be “well-informed” or to know what’s happening in the world. That is not important. National and international news almost never has much of an effect on your daily life, and when it does have an effect, you’ll hear about it soon enough.

If you’re a sicko like me, or if you have a job where you need to follow the news, or there’s some other reason why you have a particular need to know what’s going on, I’m going to guess that you already have a wealth of other news sources that you follow, so this advice isn’t for you. But if your primary source was, up until now, the Mind Killer podcast, then you’re probably safe to live in blissful ignorance of all the stupid things happening around the world.

Instead of following the news, consider starting a new, more rewarding hobby. I recommend cooking. It’s ridiculously easy to level up your cooking skills so every day you’re eating something more delicious than you could get in most restaurants. Or what about gardening? If you get serious raised beds, you can do it without all the bending over, crouching, and kneeling, which is the worst part. Or watch football! It’s all the tribalism and excitement without any real-world stakes whatsoever. Or do something that’s fun but doesn’t accomplish anything, like video games. Or gooning. I hear the kids are into gooning these days. And that’s probably a better use of your time than paying attention to whatever shitty thing Donald Trump, or our shitty future president, did today.

The only thing being well-informed actually matters for is voting, but as David often reminds us, voting is irrational on an individual level so you don’t have to do that either. But if you want to, it’s usually pretty obvious who the better choice is, and you can figure it out in like 20 minutes by Googling or asking your LLM of choice who is more aligned with your values. And if you still don’t know, follow my blog at livingwithinreason.com. I’m sure I’ll issue some kind of endorsement in major elections. And if not, you can check my tweets or just DM me.

If you actually want to stay well-informed in a way that might make a difference, follow your local news. You might be able to affect things in your town, so that’s where you should spend the most attention if you want your voice to matter. Or don’t, because you probably won’t affect anything there either and most of the time the news just makes people angry.

Either way, you don’t need the Mind Killer! Of course it was an incredible podcast and gave you hours of entertainment and it was the only place for thoughtful analysis of current events, but aside from the Troop Deployment section, I doubt you learned anything that improved your life much. My advice is, if you don’t enjoy following the news, don’t worry about it. Just live your life.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 155 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

155 - Liberation Day is Canceled

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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4 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

The 2026 winter Olympics ended last night, and it was awesome. One of the reasons is that sports are one of the last bastions of meritocracy in modern society. You can’t win by knowing the right people, saying the right thing, or having the right look. It doesn’t matter who your parents are, whether you’ve got the right demographics, or how many people follow your Insta. Outside of a few isolated controversies (looking at you, French judges), you win by being the best. And it’s inspiring to see the people who are the best at what they do get showcased for a couple of weeks. These people are amazing and they are doing amazing things. Half of the ski & snowboard events involve crazy people launching themselves as high in the air as they can, and doing ridiculous combinations of spins, flips, and grabs before landing on their feet.The other half involve falling as fast as possible down a mountain while staying in absolute control. The ice skaters are all doing quadruple spins and backflips. There’s an event where cross country skiers propel themselves across a snow-covered arena for over two hours. In a couple events, speed skaters start in a big pack, and sometimes they collide and multiple skaters get taken out! There’s an event where people dive headfirst onto a bladed sled and careen down a mountain at over 90mph. It’s incredible.

It’s also fun to root for America, because America is the best, and America kicks ass at sports. In the past two weeks, America won more gold medals, and more total medals, than any country except Norway. And Norway doesn’t count because they made up like half of these events to be things only they do. China didn’t even finish in the top 10 (pathetic!). American athletes embody the best values of our country - individualism, excellence, and ingenuity.

Of course it’s just a bunch of silly games, but what is life if not a series of silly games? So I say enjoy it. Indulge in a little bit of harmless tribalism. Watch some impressive people do impressive things. Feel some national pride for once in your miserable life. It’s fun! And it’s good for you. Go USA!

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 154 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

154 - Hooray for Markets!

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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5 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

Healthcare costs too damn much. Everyone knows it, but nobody knows what to do about it. But recently we’ve gotten a great example of how drug prices can come down fantastically in a short amount of time. Specifically, you make consumers pay for it.

The thing about GLP-1 drugs is that most of the time, insurance won’t cover them for weight loss. While GLP-1-induced weight loss tends to improve health and save insurance companies money over the long run, they still tend to view weight loss drugs as elective and thus not covered under most plans.

I first got a prescription for semaglutide in 2023, but I didn’t start taking it until 2025 because the price was too high. Novo Nordisk was charging about $1,300 for a one-month supply. I do not have a spare $1,300 to spend every month on what’s mostly a vanity project, and my insurance wouldn’t cover it, so I passed.

Between 2023 and 2025, people caught on that these drugs were basically a silver bullet for weight loss. They got wildly popular, and competitors entered the market. Eli LIlley developed and released Tirzepatide, but that just changed the situation from monopoly to oligopoly, and the price was still out of control. What really changed things is that compounding pharmacies exploited a loophole in the drug patent system which allowed them to make their own drugs and sell them for much cheaper. Gray-market suppliers also started selling peptides “for research purposes” so people could mix their own. Suddenly instead of $1,300 per month, I was able to get a six-month supply for that price. Now the situation is even better, as competition has forced Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly to lower their prices. They both recently signed a deal with the government to make name-brand Wegovy available for $200/month and Mounjaro for $300/month on trumprx.com (or so they say. I tried to check and the site refuses to load). That’s less than ⅙ of the cost I was quoted 3 years ago. The invisible hand of the market worked out to benefit the consumer yet again!

The reason this doesn’t happen with other health-related goods and services is that consumers never pay for them. Insurers do. And insurers aren’t the ones making the purchasing decision. So you get into the situation where the consumers of healthcare don’t really care what it costs, and can’t find out even if they do care. So prices stay mysterious, consumers are extremely price-insensitive, and costs keep increasing.

The GLP-1 situation shows us that there is nothing magical about healthcare which exempts it from normal market dynamics. If consumers are charged a legible price for it, they will do the normal consumer thing, comparison shop, and generally follow a demand curve. This probably doesn’t apply to life-or-death medical care, but let’s be real, most healthcare spending is not life-or-death. So if we want to lower costs, we need to end the system where the person making the purchasing decision isn’t the same person paying the cost. I’m not sure exactly how to do that, but I’m sure the eggheads could figure it out if they really tried.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 153 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

153 - ICE Storm

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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5 months ago · 1 like · The Mind Killer Podcast

I know it’s cool and based and edgy to say things like justice, the rules-based international order, honor and integrity in our representatives, and anything but the Nietzian will to power are fake and gay. And to some extent, that’s true. International and political norms are in some sense polite fictions that get violated all the time. But they’re also ideals, and we’re all better off when our leaders feel at least a little obligation to follow them.

Trump is ruining that. When he does things like pardon the January 6th rioters, random fraudsters, and people who pay into his crypto slush fund, it shows he doesn’t even feel any need to maintain the pretense that it’s anything but a corrupt exercise of pure power. People point to things like Biden pardoning his son or Bill Clinton pardoning his campaign donors, and say it’s the same thing. But it isn’t. Those were corrupt pardons, but they were embarrassing and damaging, which is why they did them right before they left office. The fact that Trump does his corruption out in the open and receives no punishment for it is a meaningful difference.

Ideas matter, and the idea of America matters. It matters that America will defend its allies and never use our military force against them unprovoked. It matters that the President doesn’t tell the Justice Department who to prosecute. It matters that the Fed is independent and often does the opposite of what the President wants. It matters that law enforcement shows their faces. It matters that political allies and even family members of the President can be prosecuted by his attorney general. It matters that the President isn’t open to obvious bribery. It matters that he is polite to other world leaders.

Trump has destroyed all of that. Both in the eyes of the rest of the world, but even more importantly, in the eyes of Americans. Americans now expect our leaders to be crass, corrupt, fraudulent buffoons, and won’t demand anything different in the future. That’s Trump’s real legacy, and it’s a tragedy.

My friend Cyn has written a post disagreeing with me on whether women should ask men out. Her main points are ones I’ve heard many times before. Read the whole thing if you want the full argument, but here’s the one-sentence summary of each:

1. Asking men out filters for men who are passive and/or don’t really like you

2. The wrong initial approach can doom a relationship

3. Not every relationship starts with an “ask out” moment

Point 3 is the easiest to address. If you manage to get into a relationship without anyone doing any asking out, that’s great! You do not need to ask anyone out unless you’d like an additional relationship. My advice to ask people out is only for those seeking relationships or other romantic and/or sexual connections. If it “just happens” for you, that’s wonderful, but it is not the common experience. Usually someone has to take the initiative.

Point 2 is baffling to me. I know everyone likes a good meet-cute story, but it really doesn’t matter. If you find yourself on a date, then congratulations! Your strategy was successful! As long as you didn’t do it in a way that was deceptive or otherwise going to cause problems later, it doesn’t really matter how it happened. The date is where you do the actual discovery about the other person. If the date goes well, neither person is going to care how it came about. I know there’s a persistent myth that the wrong approach can poison the whole relationship, but I don’t know where it comes from or why anyone would think that.

Your Filter is Broken

Point 1 is the real issue. It’s true that if you ask people out, you’re giving up a filter, though I doubt it’s a particularly valuable one. It’s true that there will be some correlation between a person’s willingness to ask you out and how much they like you, but it’s a pretty weak correlation.

First off, you’re not really filtering for men who like you. You’re mostly filtering for men who ask out a lot of women, like Brangus:

At one point, not that long ago, I was asked to speak on a panel for people with body counts over one hundred. At one point I was asked some question I don’t remember, but I asked all of the women in the room to raise their hand if I had ever hit on them. Approximately every woman I had ever met before that day raised their arm.

Brangus is great! But when he asks you out, it is not an indication that you are a unique, special snowflake. As he says, you “play the numbers.”

But more importantly, there are a lot of reasons a person might decline to ask someone out. In fact, Cyn gives several in her post! It’s ironic that she lists all of her reasons why she doesn’t ask men out, but assumes that a man who doesn’t ask her out simply isn’t that interested. And that is, of course, because she doesn’t directly address the elephant in the room: gender essentialism.

The Filter Cuts Both Ways

Cyn claims that if women ask men out, they will often end up with men who are passive, cowardly, or don’t like them very much. But that’s a symmetric problem. If it’s true, then if men ask women out, they will often end up with women who are passive, cowardly, or don’t like them very much. Thankfully, I don’t believe that either is true.

Cyn’s reasoning rests on the assumption that a man who likes a woman will ask her out, but a woman who likes a man simply pines in silence (or gives a few subtle-but-deniable hints so she can tell herself she’s being “yin” which is ~totally different~ from being passive1). But, of course, that’s ridiculous. It’s not the 1950’s anymore. Women can and do ask men out all the time, and very large numbers of men are reasonably apprehensive about expressing sexual interest outside of dating apps ever since doing so imperfectly got declared a reason to socially shun someone. Aside from that, there are still many reasons why a man might not ask a woman on a date despite being interested. In the modern world, in-person asking is no longer the norm.

A First Date Doesn’t Imply a Second

Cyn claims that she used to ask men out, but she ended up with a string of men who said “yes” but weren’t particularly interested in her. But the relationship persisted because they were too passive to break up with her. I notice I’m confused. She yada-yada’d the important part! How did she go from asking a man on a date to being in a relationship with him that would necessitate a difficult breakup? That’s the part of the process to address.

I want to be clear about something: I’m only advocating asking people on dates. Asking a person on a date in no way obligates you to start a relationship with them or to be the only one taking an active role. If you go on a date and your date doesn’t seem that interested in you, just don’t go on a second. Finding out how you relate to each other is what the date is for!

Courage is a Virtue

I’ve read dozens of defenses arguing why it’s Right and Good that women rely on subtle signals instead of just asking, and they almost always strike me as cope. The real reason is pretty obvious: cowardice. Asking people out is hard. It requires vulnerability, agency, and courage. It can make things awkward. It can lose you status. People (men and women) who don’t have to do it to get dates mostly don’t, despite the fact that they would probably have better outcomes if they did. It’s uncomfortable, and people tend to stay in their comfort zones if they can.

There is one exception: being passive is a strategic move for women who are very into traditional gender roles. While the overwhelming majority of men are fine with being approached, there is a certain type that will be off-put by it. If you’re looking for a relationship that reflects midcentury gender roles, it’s best to stick to those roles. Of course, if you’re reading this blog, it’s very unlikely that you actually want that.

So my advice for both men and women remains: if you like someone, ask them on a date. Don’t play silly games where you send subtle signals and hope they’ll pick up on them. Don’t try to do too much filtering before your first date. If someone is available and you think you’d enjoy a date with them, that’s all the filtering you need. Do the real evaluation on the date.

What Is the Actual Disagreement Here?

This is what Cyn describes as “not asking men out”:

My current relationship started like this: we were introduced at a party. We talked. I asked if he wanted to find a quieter room upstairs to keep talking. We did. He initiated a kiss. After that there wasn’t really an official “ask out” - we just texted, we knew we liked each other, and things progressed from there.

10/10 no notes. Though that seems pretty yang for a person who describes her approach as yin. By my scorecard, asking to go find a quieter room is the functional equivalent of asking a person on a date. It’s like asking someone up for coffee, so I’m not even sure we disagree. You don’t literally have to say the words “do you want to go on a date with me?”

The point is to take responsibility for things happening. You don’t “set the table” and wait for the other person to act. If things aren’t where you want them, you act to make them different.

Sometimes You Don’t Know

My advice to ask people out is for situations where you want to go on a date with someone. Cyn makes the point that attraction for women is often reactive. A man being very into a woman can make her more attracted to him. As with most things phrased in gendered terms, it applies to both men and women. And that’s fine! If you don’t know if you would enjoy a date with someone, then it’s perfectly reasonable not to ask them on a date. Personally, I ask very few people on dates because it’s rare for me to meet someone I like. But when I do like someone, I ask her out (and you should too).

But sometimes you don’t know how you feel about someone, but an expression of interest can push them over the line.

Human romantic preferences aren’t static rankings. They’re more like differential equations - functions that include a term for how much the other person likes us.

If you genuinely don’t know how you feel about someone, I lean toward just asking them out and seeing what happens. But if you’re truly on the fence, it’s also fine to wait for them to take the initiative. If their interest and enthusiasm could push you over the edge from “no” to “yes,” then it’s the right move to wait for them to show it.

UPDATE (1/30/26):

Sympathetic Opposition has written a post agreeing with Cyn and disagreeing with my position. She goes into a number of reasons why the stable marriage problem is different from real life, all valid. It convincingly argues that women looking for marriage need to be choosier than men, largely because of biological realities. But the main point of the article is the same as Cyn’s - that who does the asking is an important filter.

She also goes through a number of circumstances where it does make sense for a woman to ask men out. The key paragraph is this one:

You should expect asking a man out to be more likely to work if you have lower transaction costs: if it’s easier for you to date multiple people at once, easier for you to break up with people, if you rarely get hung up on a man.

These are not personality traits. You are not born with them. These are skills that you can develop. I know because I had to develop them! In my adolescence, much like most boys, the idea of asking a woman out was terrifying. It was equally terrifying to reject a woman who expressed interest. The transaction costs of starting or ending a relationship were huge. The solution was courage.

As I grew up, I had to learn that a woman accepting a date wasn’t a reliable indicator of her interest. I had to learn how to tell if a relationship was developing in a direction I liked, and how to end a relationship early if it wasn’t. I had to learn how not to idealize a woman just because we were dating, and not to get tunnel vision. Women can learn these skills too! And the ones who do typically have more success, or at least avoid the failure mode where they get “stuck” in a relationship with an unsuitable partner.

UPDATE (2/5/26): Cyn has written an additional post. See my response in the comments.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 151 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

151 - Bullshit Trump News

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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6 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

If you’re on Twitter, you know that one of the favorite pastimes on Twitter is complaining about the “for you” feed, which is the one where you get served an infinite scroll of algorithmically chosen content. People complain about it constantly. “It’s goal is to make you angry” they say. “It only gives you content that upsets you” they say. “The algorithm is your enemy” they say.

These people are telling on themselves. The algorithm rewards engagement. It’s showing you the content that you engage with the most. When you reward rage-bait with attention, you get more rage-bait. If your feed is full of garbage, it’s because you keep interacting with garbage. My “for you” feed is great, because I only engage with content I like, so it gives me content I like from people I like.

The thing is - this is not just a twitter thing. It’s how all of life works. Whatever behavior you reward in the people around you is what you’ll get more of. If you reward people being calm and reasonable, the people in your life will be calm and reasonable more often, and you’ll attract people who like being calm and reasonable. If you reward histrionics, you’ll get more histrionics.

My friend Paola recently wrote a very good blog post (if you’ll ignore the evospych) about how a lot of mental health issues develop as a way of controlling one’s environment. If the only way to get someone to care about you is to kick and scream, you will (often not consciously) kick and scream when you need someone to care about you. If you’re the other person here, the play is to never create that situation. If you genuinely care about someone, make sure you demonstrate that care before it gets to that point. And if you don’t care, don’t jump into action just because they’re upset. It’s not your responsibility to “be there” for every person who is throwing a tantrum.

Your social life operates by the same algorithm as your social media. Whatever you give attention to, you’ll get more of. So make sure you’re giving your attention to the content you actually want.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 150 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

150 - Artisanally Crafted Phonemes

Wes and Eneasz are joined by Will Eden to keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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7 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

Pronatalism is big these days. Everyone is trying to urge young people to get married and have families. And almost all mainstream thought on this issue is that to encourage family formation, we should encourage people to stay together once they’ve started dating. Breakups are bad according to the conventional wisdom. What they want people to do is settle for the person they’ve got.

The problem is that’s backwards. Falling victim to the sunk cost fallacy is not virtuous. I know a lot of people who want kids but are in danger of aging out of that being possible. Every single one of them is in this position because they wasted their younger years on a partner who was not right for them. They stayed together far too long because people told them things like “relationships take work” or “compromise is key” or “there’s no settling down without settling for.” Predictably, it didn’t work out, and they can never get that time back. Other people had kids with a partner, but split up later and wish they had picked a better matched coparent. The common theme here is that they stayed with their partner too long when they knew they should leave, and ended up investing their time, energy, and resources in a relationship that didn’t pay off.

Meanwhile, the people I know in the best relationships, who feel happiest and most fulfilled, have refused to settle. I’ve had several friends who set out to find a spouse. Some of them did serial monogamy, dating one person at a time, and sticking with anyone who seemed ok, even if they didn’t inspire strong feelings or treat them the way they wanted. Predictably, none of those people are married. My most successful friend just dated as many people as possible. She was very liberal with first dates, and often had a new first date every day. But she would only schedule second dates if she felt drawn to a person. She ended up finding her husband in under six months. My theory is that by exposing herself to so many people, it was easy for her to recognize it when she found a really good match. She had so much experience meeting men that she instantly noticed the man who wasn’t like the others.

Traditionally, the ideal is to only date one person. You marry your high school sweetheart and you’re a virgin on your wedding day. But we’re not stuck in that world now. Thanks to modern communication technology, there is an abundance of potential dates. You don’t have to settle for a person who isn’t what you’re looking for. But the dark side of abundance is that there’s often a “grass is greener” effect, where you imagine a checklist of (often superficial) traits you’re looking for in a partner, and you’re never happy with anyone because you think your perfect partner is just a swipe away. And you don’t have enough experience dating to know what actually matters and actually makes you happy. The way to split the difference is to actually date a lot of people. Get a truly visceral sense of what your dating pool is like. Develop an intuitive sense of what you like and don’t like. And when you realize someone isn’t right for you, break up. Then when you meet a person who stands out of the pack, you’ll realize it and hang on to them.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 149 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

149 - Steven & Ross Return!

Wes is once again joined by Ross and Steven keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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7 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

It’s basically common knowledge at this point that The Kids These Days are terrible students. Every week there’s a new essay by a teacher claiming that kids are showing up to class without knowing anything or kids not willing to do the work they assign. By some reports, kids are graduating with A’s in math, getting into prestigious schools, and not even being able to do elementary school arithmetic. The latest is a viral Bluesky rant that kids aren’t even reading the syllabus, following guidelines, engaging with material, or meeting deadlines. All the usual suspects are, of course, blaming smartphones, because smartphones are an easy target. In a few years, you’ll be reading the exact same takes but it will be blaming AI instead.

The tell comes in the next skeet. Bleet? Blueberry? Whatever they call them now. The nonbinary professor says “We keep adjusting our goalposts, trying to meet students where they’re at.” Well, hey, genius, I can’t imagine why the kids aren’t willing to do the work you keep assigning if you keep “adjusting your goalposts.”

I was a great student. I got mostly A’s in high school and college. But I always did the minimum amount of work possible. I did my homework in class. I never studied. I didn’t read the assigned books. You know why? Because it’s boring, and it wasn’t necessary for good grades. The standards were low enough that I could get good grades without putting in much work, so I didn’t put in much work.

Then I went to law school, and you can’t get away with that shit in law school. I didn’t even try, because my professors made it clear in class that we were expected to do the assigned reading, and we wouldn’t be able to follow if we didn’t. So I did the assigned reading. My first semester, I didn’t study enough for my criminal law final and got a C-. The next semester, I studied more and got much better grades.

If Kids Today aren’t willing to do schoolwork, it’s because you lowered the standards so much that they don’t need to. If kids aren’t willing to do the reading or engage with the material, why are you passing them? Just give any kid an F who doesn’t learn the subject matter. I guarantee you that you’ll see improvement.

Of course, the real solution is to stop making school so fucking boring and lame. Every educator in the country should be required to take a few classes on scienceisweird.com to learn how to teach in a way that makes kids actually want to learn. Kids love learning! They want to know things! They are naturally curious about the world! If you think they don’t, show a 4yo a few episodes of Numberblocks. It’s an amazing show that gives each number a personality and shows how different numbers interact with each other. That kid will know more math watching a few hours of Numberblocks than they will by spending six months in preschool. Want kids to read? Assign them books that don’t suck. It’s not a secret what books kids like. Just give them those books! Stop teaching them that reading is something you force yourself to do for “education.”

But if you’re not willing to do that, the least you can do is stop complaining that kids are only willing to put in the minimum amount to get good grades. Throughout history kids have always been putting in the minimum amount to get good grades. The only new thing is that you, the teachers, are afraid to give them anything less than an A, let alone fail them. So shut the fuck up.

In the pre-modern world, there was no social contract, police force, or court to enforce property laws. People owned only what they could protect. And for women, that was not much. Any woman who amassed significant resources was in immediately danger of having those resources taken by the first man who passed by. Even if she had a man to protect her, men were constantly out hunting or foraging, leaving women at home and vulnerable. In the eternal game of “makers and takers,” evolution optimized men to be takers and women to be makers. Men can be productive, of course, and many are. But in the ancestral environment, men had the option not to produce anything and instead appropriate resources produced by others. One of the most masculine societies in history sustained itself almost entirely through theft. That was not an option open to women.

Women are built for ongoing productivity. While men had the option to amass wealth created by others and live off of it, women’s strategy, by necessity, focused on continuous production. When you have no option to hoard resources, you’re forced to produce what you need and consume it immediately to minimize the chances of anyone else taking it. Even women’s biology is built to be productive. During pregnancy, women produce a placenta to feed their unborn child that is literally kept inside their body where nobody can get to it, then expelled as soon as it’s not needed. After pregnancy, women continuously produce extremely nutritious milk - a very valuable resource - to be fed to their children every few hours. Ignoring this biological imperative is painful and can be dangerous. Women’s bodies literally force them to be productive.

Culture is downstream of environment and biology. It is a feminine virtue to be self-sufficient and continually produce resources. Men can have value by amassing large fortunes, which is why 85% of the world’ richest people are men. We naturally respect these men, due to the realities of biology. Rich women don’t get a similar level of respect. Can you name the richest woman in the world? I can’t. But I bet you can name a good handful of the ten richest men.

This has observable consequences. Women absolutely dominate service industry jobs (despite being substantially less than half of the labor force) - the type of jobs where products are created continuously. Finance - a field that creates nothing but merely appropriates wealth created by others - is overwhelmingly male.

This extends to the personal. Women find men attractive when they’ve gathered large amounts of resources, regardless of how they did it. In fact, historically, the most attractive thing was for a man to inherit his wealth without producing anything. Men can be successful and loved even when entirely dependent on the produce of others, because that is not where their social and cultural value lies. By contrast, men find women attractive when they are highly educated and accomplished, showing that they can be productive and self-sufficient.

Could we destroy all this and flatten the sexes? The practical differences are lesser in the modern day. We now have police, courts, and a social contract that means women can hoard wealth and don’t need to continually produce. There are far fewer roving bands of ruffians who will steal everything you have if you can’t physically defend it. Resources can be stored in banks and locked homes where they are largely safe to keep.

And yet the instincts remain. We’ve been programmed by millennia of evolution to demand competence from women. It remains the case that almost any man can overpower almost woman and take whatever property she has with her.

For a woman to be productive is beautiful. To learn skills in the service of this work is noble. The pursuit of these ideals makes the world a more beautiful and romantic place. Lives filled with striving after virtues are richer.

[Evo]Psych!

If you haven’t noticed by now, the above section was complete horseshit, and written as a parody of my best friend Eneasz’s defense of gender normativity. It’s meant to illustrate that a sufficiently motivated person can invent an evolutionary story to explain anything. And hey, it’s plausible! Why do men prefer highly educated women? Why is it considered so high status for a man to live off his inheritance? How did women in the ancestral environment defend their resources? Nobody knows! So we’re free to make up any dumb story we want! After all, everything about how our brains work must have had an evolutionary advantage at some point, so there’s got to be an explanation for everything.

My most fervent hope, reader, is that you’ll think of this essay next time someone tries to explain gendered behavior with references to “the ancestral environment” or “evolutionary programming” or other such foolishness, and you’ll recognize it for what it is - a work of fiction.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 148 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

148 - News You Can Fight About

Eneasz and David are both being whiny babies, so Wes is joined by Ross and Steven to keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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8 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

Sycophancy. It’s a big topic right now. Everyone is worried about AI’s being too sycophantic. Egirls are constantly inundated by sycophants. There’s a real problem where the rich and power…

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The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 147 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

147 - The Shutdown Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Wes and Eneasz are once again joined by Jimmy to keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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8 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

There’s been some internet discourse recently about Philly, and people tend to agree that it’s got a lot of A-list features. We’ve got amazing architecture, world-class restaurants, a walkable urban core that’s also not a traffic nightmare, a fantastic park system, championship sports teams, revolutionary history, museums and culture, access to the rest of the Northeast corridor, and great people. What we really need to be a top-tier city are high-paying jobs.

By the time you’re hearing this, Zoran Mamdani should have been elected mayor of New York, promising a millionaire’s tax, a higher corporate tax, and higher property taxes in affluent neighborhoods. At the same time, California voters are planning to place a proposal for a one-time 5% wealth tax on the ballot next year. Of course it will only be a one-time tax. I’m sure voters will be satisfied just doing this one time.

So billionaires - if you’re looking for a new home, or even better, a new place to locate your corporate HQ that’s not California or New York, might I humbly suggest Philadelphia. The finances make sense. We’ve got lower corporate taxes and no plans to raise them. For individual taxes, both Pennsylvania and Philadelphia have a legitimate flat tax on income of under 7% total - much lower than NYC or California. And Pennsylvania is a purple state, so you don’t have to worry that the socialists are going to take control and seize the means of production.

And we need you! As I said, what Philly really lacks are high-paying jobs. If you move your businesses here, we’ll actually appreciate you! Not like those ingrates that are currently taking you for granted. We’ll welcome you with open arms and we’ll be rooting for you to succeed.

So if you’re fed up with being underappreciated and exploited by your current location, consider moving to Philadelphia! You won’t regret it

And hey, if you’re a real risk taker, there’s always Camden!

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 146 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

146 - Jimmy Meet World

Wes and Eneasz are joined by Jimmy to keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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8 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

The usual dating advice tells people to cultivate an “abundance mindset.” It’s a way of encouraging people to take rejection gracefully because there are, as they say, plenty of fish in the sea. Each individual connection is low-stakes because there are lots of lots of potential dates out there.

For some people, maybe that’s true, but for more discerning people it doesn’t really work that way. Personally, there just aren’t that many people out there I can date. Once you get past the ordinary criteria like age, sex, and location, I’m only interested in dating people who are nonmonogamous and not looking for a primary. I also won’t date anyone who believes that dating or sex comes with extra unspoken obligations. She has to share my sense of humor, at least somewhat. She has to value honesty, reason, and equanimity. She has to be brave and independent. We have to be attracted to each other. We have to admire one another.

Those women are not abundant! I’d say they are one in a million, but that’s probably far too high of a ratio. When I meet someone who is a good match for me, I do not try to manufacture an abundance mindset. I know how special she is.

You might argue that this is personal to me, and that most people have a much bigger dating pool, but I’m skeptical. Doesn’t everyone want to date people who share their values and fit with their lifestyle? Monogamous people start with a larger dating pool, but the stakes are even higher if you’re looking for one person to exclusively be with forever. In that circumstance, it’s important to be even pickier about compatibility.

My advice is to adopt the opposite of an abundance mindset. Realize how scarce your best matches are, so don’t assume any potential partner is a good match until you actually know. Don’t invest a lot of your hopes and dreams in someone until you get to know them and find out if they’re truly a good match. That will do the main job of abundance mindset, which is to prevent you from being desperate, but it also has the benefit of being accurate.

The other benefit of adopting a rational scarcity mindset is that it lets your partners know how special they are. Few people find it inspiring to be with someone who views them as just one of many interchangeable options. People want to be with someone who recognizes and appreciates what they uniquely bring to the table. We all want to be loved for the things that make us who we are. Don’t trick yourself into developing an attitude that communicates the opposite.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 145 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

145 - Shutdoooooown! Or Did Trump Bring Peace to the Middle East?

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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9 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

It’s well documented how LLM’s are pretty bad at giving you interpersonal advice because they always take your side. If you tell Claude about a conflict you have, it will reassure you that you’re totally in the right and the other person is being unreasonable and crazy. They’re like most therapists this way. They want to keep you coming back, so they’re going to tell you what you want to hear. And what most people want to hear is “you’re so right; that other person is being a total jerk.” There are already tons of stories out there about people wrecking their relationships because they were trying to use an LLM as a therapist, and it refused to ever suggest that they might be the problem. For that matter, there are plenty of stories about human therapists doing the same thing.

But unlike with therapists, LLM’s don’t remember your previous conversation, so you can use that to your advantage. Go ahead and get that sweet, sweet validation. But after you do that, open up a new chat and tell it the story again, but this time, tell it you’re the other person. Even if you bias things pretty heavily, it will still try to take your side and explain your actions in a sympathetic way.

Sometimes, in my law practice, I provide mediation services. And the key to resolving a conflict in mediation is getting the parties to see things from the other person’s perspective. A big part of my job as the mediator is trying to figure out what each party actually wants, especially if they’re being cagey about it. If you can get to the actual needs each party has, you can much more easily craft a positive-sum solution. But it’s hard when you don’t have direct access to that. LLM’s can help by giving a steelman for the other person’s actions. Maybe it’s not completely accurate, but it will at least give you an idea of how the other person is probably interpreting their own actions. It’s much easier to be sympathetic if you have a third party giving you a sympathetic explanation.

So make that sycophancy work for you! Instead of wrecking your relationships, use its bias to help strengthen them and encourage you to feel sympathy. Your conflicts will go much better.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 144 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

144 - Bummer Time

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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9 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about banning phones in schools, and I hate this whole conversation. First off, I hate it because there’s an underlying assumption that school is good and paying attention in school is a good thing, which is highly questionable. But mostly I hate it because of how everyone talks about kids as if they are NPC’s with no agency and no preferences that matter even the slightest bit. The conversation is all about how we stuff as much information into their heads as possible, and almost nobody even brings up the idea that the kids themselves might have opinions.

The other thing is that everyone jumps right from the premise that phones are distracting to the conclusion that they need to be banned. Which is crazy. Banning things ought to be a last resort, after you’ve tried everything else to deal with the harm. Bans are awful. They have serious costs. When you ban something, you are, by definition, denying people what they want and forcing them into a situation they didn’t choose. With adults, we intuitively understand that, which is why we don’t ban all bad things. Lying is legal in most situations. Cowardice is legal. Cheating on your wife is legal. Hate speech is legal. Moving to Kansas is legal!

Banning phones teaches a kid a number of lessons:

1. You are my enemy. I cannot trust you and I should do everything I can to undermine you

2. The way to get what you want is to amass power and use it to dominate your opponents

3. My preferences don’t matter to anyone in authority

4. I can’t be expected to control myself. I am weak and I need to be protected from my own choices

There’s also the issue that once you ban something, you have to enforce the ban, which necessarily requires a hyper-vigilant police state to be effective. Or else you enforce it inconsistently, and everyone learns that your rules are arbitrary and don’t need to be taken seriously.

Honestly? Banning phones in class might be worth it. They are distracting! They’re mostly incompatible with paying attention. If teachers were using class time well and teaching worthwhile skills, it would probably make sense to ban them. But I hate the whole conversation because I have yet to see anyone acknowledge any of the real downsides or even make any baby steps in the direction of viewing children as people.

If we’re going to be talking about this, let’s at least mention that bans come with a ton of side effects that we probably don’t want, and try to actually address that.

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 142 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

142 - More Boat Touching

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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10 months ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

Scott Alexander introduced the idea of the “scissor statement” in his short story “Sort By Controversial.” The idea is that there exist some concepts that are so extraordinarily divisive that they have the potential to alter world history. The thing about these statements is that nearly everyone sees their position on them as blindingly obvious, a position that any decent person would have, but roughly half of the populace are diametrically opposed to the other half.

I don’t encounter too many of these out in the wild, but recently I’ve been seeing some commentary on Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program, or “MAiD.” This is a program by which Canadian doctors will assist people in committing suicide. When it started it was limited to people whose death from disease was imminent, but was later expanded to include other people with incurable physical diseases experiencing an irreversible decline. In 2027, the practice is scheduled to expand to people whose only underlying condition is mental.

To me, this is obviously, without a doubt, a good thing. It is horrifying to me that a person would want to die with dignity and we wouldn’t allow it. The MAiD program has lots of safeguards, including a 90-day waiting period, to make sure people aren’t acting impulsively. But if some has an enduring, consistent wish to die, as much as I agree with Eneasz that death is bad, forcing people to live is worse. I read my friend Amanda’s review of Two Arms and Head and couldn’t believe anyone would think the state should try to prevent this guy from ending his life on his own terms.

And yet, when other people talk about it, they find it obviously, without a doubt, a travesty. They’re horrified that doctors, whose number one priority is “do no harm,” are using their medical knowledge not to save, but to kill. Most people recognize that it can be appropriate in certain circumstances, but are scandalized by statistics like - and I’m quoting a recent piece in the Atlantic:

As of 2023, the last year for which data are available, some 60,300 Canadians had been legally helped to their death by clinicians. In Quebec, more than 7 percent of all deaths are by euthanasia—the highest rate of any jurisdiction in the world.

I don’t know how to handle this. While I find it tragic that so many people want to end their lives, I don’t actually know how this compares to the unassisted suicide rate (and nobody does, because lots of suicides get classified as other things), and I would never respond to that by trying to deny people their chosen ending. But other people feel the exact opposite. They see these statistics and can’t believe that Canada is allowing it. The title of the Atlantic piece is “Canada is Killing Itself.”

What is the reconciliation here? I honestly have no idea. It seems intractable. If you have ideas, let me know

The following is the transcript of my closing editorial from episode 140 of my news podcast The Mind Killer. If you like it, please consider subscribing to the podcast

The Mind Killer

140 - You're Welcome

Wes, Eneasz, and David keep the rationalist community informed about what’s going on outside of the rationalist community…

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a year ago · The Mind Killer Podcast

There’s a popular view of relationships whereby the only way they’re successful long-term is to put obstacles in the way of ending it. A twitter friend recently described it this way:

Blocking the exits is important, everything I’ve seen in life tells me that people mature at the rate they must, and the downside of having options is that you don’t have to fully cope with your separateness

This is a very common attitude. When people in popular culture talk about the keys to a lasting relationship, they talk about commitment. They act like it’s normal to want to leave your spouse and it takes extraordinary measures to stop you from doing it.

This sounds insane to me. Good relationships don’t work that way. Whether it’s romantic, employment, social, or otherwise, the most important thing in any relationship is to have healthy boundaries. The thing that makes something a boundary is that you’re defining for yourself what you will and will not put up with. You can’t have good boundaries if you don’t feel free to leave. Leaving is the ultimate recourse if your boundaries are not respected. You can’t have boundaries without it.

Far from creating good relationships, blocking the exits perpetuates bad relationships. When the exits are obstructed, people stay in relationships that aren’t good for them. They feel stuck. They feel like having boundaries isn’t an option. In my family law practice, you can’t imagine how many people I’ve met who felt like they were trapped in a life they didn’t want, but had no legitimate escape from. I’ve met very very few who ended things and later regretted it.

If people want to leave, there should be as few barriers in their way as possible. Some gentle encouragement may be appropriate to prevent people from making rash decisions or falling victim to "grass is greener" styles thinking, but overall the exits should be clearly marked and always available.