A typical room at Suan Mokkh. I filmed a short tour of the dormitory when I came out of the retreat in February 2020. You can watch it here.

There wasn’t anything to figure out, no secret technique or puzzle I needed to solve. I understood what I was supposed to do right away. I just couldn’t do it. The problem wasn’t understanding. It was doing. Meditation wasn’t something you mastered by thinking about it. It was something you practiced.

We tend to assume that understanding leads to action. If you figure out why you drink too much or get angry, or understand what you’re doing wrong when you hit your forehand, the behavior will follow. But the solutions to most of our problems don’t come from more information. I already know that exercise is good for me, that I need more sleep, that I should spend less time on TikTok and be more patient with my wife and kids. I know that I should gossip less, care less about what others think of me, and mind my own business more. I know all of this. Doing it is something else entirely.

We routinely mistake understanding for change. Someone can understand that their fear of intimacy comes from being abandoned by their parents and still never commit to a relationship. Why does understanding our behavior, knowing what we ought to do, and even sincerely intending to do it so rarely result in our actually doing it? Because knowing can be easy and insight can arrive in a moment. Real change is hard. It’s often tedious, boring, and repetitive. It requires doing something differently, again and again.

The Allure of Insight

I love quotes. Almost every day I copy things that I read or hear into my journal. At an AA meeting yesterday, a guy I like named Chuck said, “I can’t control the wind, but I can just adjust my sails.” I recognized it as good advice right away, so I wrote it down. But what happens two hours later when my wife asks me why I still don’t have a job or my twelve-year-old daughter tells me to fuck off, says she hates me, and refuses to go to her tennis lesson? Do I adjust my sails, or do I tell my daughter I don’t give a shit if she hates me—she’s going to her goddamned tennis lesson? And how can I suppress my rage and resentment at academia long enough to calmly explain to my wife that I have applied for ten jobs a day for the past three months and still haven’t gotten any responses? I’m good at writing down good advice. Taking it is another matter.

There is something deeply satisfying about realizing how little of life I can control and that the best thing I can often do is simply accept what I can’t change. The realization can be calming, but putting it into practice is a different story. Insights can make the solutions to messy problems seem both obvious and manageable.

Understanding something also feels good. There is a little rush that comes with finally getting it, and for a moment the problem can even feel like it’s been solved. I need to be more present with my kids is a gratifying realization. Putting down my book to play a mind-numbingly boring game of Candy Land with my five-year-old when I’m exhausted is not.

Intention helps, but far less than we think. In a large meta-analysis, psychologists Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran found that substantial changes in what people intended to do produced far smaller changes in what they actually did. Insight is also cheap. Doing things requires effort, and humans and other animals generally avoid unnecessary work. When two paths provide the same reward, we tend to choose the easier one—a tendency psychologists call the law of less work. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense because organisms that can get the same payoff while expending less energy have an advantage. But this strategy has limits. For most of human history, the things that mattered—finding food, avoiding danger, securing mates, raising children—required effort, so effort became a reliable signal of value. If something was hard, it was probably worthwhile. Natural selection therefore left us with a basic tension: conserve effort whenever possible, but spend it when it’s worth it. That tradeoff produces what psychologists call “the effort paradox.” We tend to avoid the very effort that makes achieving something feel more valuable. The same mountain view feels more rewarding after a twelve-hour hike than after a ten-minute gondola ride. That’s why moments of insight are so appealing. They offer the satisfaction of progress before we’ve done any of the work.

The realization that I need to quit drinking or spend more time with my kids provides an immediate reward for something I haven’t done yet. The transformation can take years, but the epiphany arrives in a moment and can make me feel like I’ve already accomplished something. And sometimes I have. An insight can change what I notice or show me what I need to do differently. It can start the process, but it can’t substitute for the work of turning insight into action, again and again. Knowing can tell us where to go but it doesn’t get us there.

From Knowing to Doing

If understanding something were enough, I would have a much better forehand. I’ve known for at least forty years that I’m supposed to keep my wrist and grip loose when I hit a tennis ball. I tell myself this at the beginning of almost every point. Then the ball comes at me, I tense up and squeeze the racquet like a hammer. Andre Agassi’s father made him hit 2,500 balls a day—a million a year—while yelling, “Hit the ball on the rise!” The point wasn’t to make sure that Andre understood that he needed to take the ball early. His father didn’t think his son was retarded, and Andre probably understood the instruction after the first ball. The next 999,999 were to turn it into a reflex.

Practice is what converts knowing into doing. It turns conscious understanding into a habit we can do automatically when there’s no time to think. It turns it into something we can still do when the conditions are no longer ideal. Researchers have found that about 43 percent of what people do each day is done automatically. And the things that matter even more than flossing or hitting the ball on the rise often rely on the same reflex.

It’s easy, for example, to understand that I should give my wife a break when I’m rested and everything is going well. It’s harder when I’ve spent all day cleaning up half-eaten hot dogs left behind by a classroom of eighth graders, done the laundry, mowed the lawn, wasted another three hours on a job application where my thirty first-author publications matter less than knowing the department chair, and then get reprimanded for leaving a plate in the sink. I don’t need to call my sponsor to ask them if I should tell my wife to fuck off. I know exactly what I should do. Shut my mouth, find the leash and take the dog for a walk. Like a good forehand, restraint has to be practiced so when the pressure is on you don’t need to think about it. You just do it.

And sometimes thinking about what you’re doing can actually make you worse at doing it. Psychologists Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr, for example, found that expert golfers relied on a process that operates outside of conscious, step-by-step attentional control. Under pressure, however, they often reverted to paying conscious attention to movements that normally happened automatically, and performance deteriorated. In other words, once you’ve learned something well enough, consciously telling yourself how to do it can actually interfere with doing it.

Telling myself to loosen my grip before every point still does something important by reminding me what to practice. But the value comes from actually doing it — flipping the racquet in my hand between points, shaking my wrist, or taking a few easy swings to practice keeping the grip relaxed. The words don’t turn the instruction into a great forehand; repeatedly hitting the ball with a loose grip does.

Becoming a better person may work the same way. I can enthusiastically nod along as someone extols the benefits of patience, humility, generosity or courage. I bloviate about inequality and all the greedy pricks who don’t pay their taxes, but give embarrassingly little of my own money to charity and take every tax break I can find. I’m not alone. The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel tested whether ethics professors behave any better than the rest of us and found that they don’t. They are, for example, far more likely to say that eating meat is wrong, but no less likely to eat it. Practicing virtue is hard. It’s easy to believe that I’m a good person “deep down.” But what does that mean if none of it ever makes its way into my behavior? Whatever character is, it isn’t what I think, say, or believe. It’s what I do.

The Map Is Not the Territory

Therapy culture is one place where the difference between insight and action is especially blurred because so much of therapy revolves around language. We identify our triggers, establish boundaries, label people toxic, process our trauma, and learn to recognize gaslighting, codependency, and attachment styles. As Katy Waldman wrote in The New Yorker:

“We project and decathect; we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word; we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We diagnose and receive diagnoses… We’re enmeshed, fragile. Our emotional labor is grinding us down. We’re doing the work. We need to do the work.”

The problem with therapy-speak isn’t that the concepts are necessarily wrong. Putting an experience into words can help us to recognize patterns we couldn’t see before. The problem is that a useful description can start to feel like we’ve done something about it. Concepts are maps that simplify the messy complexity of reality so that we can make sense of it. The danger is when the map starts to feel more real than the territory—when labels like “avoidant,” “codependent,” “toxic,” or “narcissistic” stop being a description of a person and start becoming the person.

For years I interpreted my ex-wife’s behavior through an armchair diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. In an earlier era, I might have said that she was crazy or fucked in the head, but the new vocabulary felt more scientific and precise and left me feeling far more certain that I understood her than I actually did. The diagnosis might have described a real pattern but it didn’t describe a real person.

The trouble begins when something that starts out as a useful description masquerades as a complete explanation, replacing complexity with a simplistic narrative. Psychologist Ahona Guha distinguishes between the work of therapy and the therapy-speak that has permeated popular culture. When she works with trauma patients, she wastes little time talking about fashionable concepts like gaslighting, attachment styles or trauma and focuses more on practicing discomfort, reassessing threats, stepping back from thoughts, and learning to respond differently to difficult emotions. Those skills take years of practice and are, as she puts it, “deeply unsexy.” The work is acquiring the skills, not merely possessing the vocabulary.

None of this is to say that insight is useless. A meta-analysis of psychotherapy studies found a moderate association between greater insight and better treatment outcomes, so understanding ourselves can clearly help. The harder question is when understanding becomes an impetus to change and when it becomes a comfortable place to stop.

Real people are messier than the categories we use to understand them. We can love and hate a parent at the same time; someone can be both victim and perpetrator, generous and selfish. A map can help me understand why I pull away when intimacy feels threatening, but it doesn’t make the fear go away. And it can’t make me stay.

Again and Again

In Alcoholics Anonymous people often say “think with your feet,” which means do the next right thing or sometimes just go to a meeting. I don’t need to spend twenty minutes figuring out if I feel like it. I need to put on my shoes and walk out the door. We often assume that we have to feel differently before we can behave differently, but it often works the other way around. You can’t think yourself into the right action, but you can act yourself into right thinking.

If you want to change your behavior, a good place to start might be to change your behavior. One of the best-known practices, described on page 552 of the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, is called “The Resentment Prayer.” If there is someone you can’t stand, you are told to pray for them every day for two weeks, asking that they receive all the things you want for yourself. Whether you mean it at first is beside the point. Do it anyway. The exercise doesn’t ask you to wait until you feel like forgiving someone before you do it. You perform the behavior first and the feelings begin to follow.

The Twelve Steps aren’t a philosophy you agree with or a collection of ideas about how to live, any more than meditation is a theory you master by thinking about it. Both are disciplines. You sit down and watch the next breath come in and go out. You notice your mind wandering and bring it back. You go to a meeting and call your sponsor. You make amends and do the next right thing. They aren’t problems to be solved or games to be won, and you don’t have to figure out what it all means. You do the next thing. Then you do the next one.

Meditation is a practice. Tennis is a practice. Sobriety is a practice. So are patience, gratitude, restraint, and most of the other qualities we claim to value. None of them are things we figure out or achieve and then get to keep. They are things we do—badly at first—and then keep doing.

At Suan Mokkh, my mind wandered and I brought it back. Then it wandered again and I brought it back again. Maybe that was the part I had misunderstood. I kept expecting understanding to finish the job. But there was nothing else to figure out. There was only the next breath, and then the one after that. Again and again.

****

I love writing these essays. I’m also broke and trying to get a book about evolution and how America lost its sense of humor published, so building a readership really helps. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe. Free is great. Paid is really, really great and helps me keep doing this work. If you can’t pay, I get it. I can’t either. But if you liked it could you restack it or share it with someone who might like it. I’d really appreciate it.

We also talked about my time on Wall Street, becoming a substitute teacher after a PhD and postdoctoral work, and the eighth grader who took a Sharpie to my fossil.

You can watch the full interview below.

Originally published by Quillette. Episode page and audio.

On Monday, I’ll also be sharing my essay on the gap between knowing and doing.

The ascent of man

One of the biggest challenges in teaching natural selection is disabusing students of the idea that it produces a hierarchy. Evolution is neither a march of progress nor a ladder of increasing complexity. The iconic image of a hunched and hairy ape gradually straightening up into a modern human has been reproduced so often that it has become the default picture of evolution. The question “If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?” captures this misunderstanding of evolution as a procession of steady improvement, each new form replacing the one behind it.

The idea of the Great Chain of Being is ancient. It organized living things on a ladder, from the lowest organisms through animals and humans and ultimately up to God. Darwin replaced this ladder with a branching tree, but the old picture has been remarkably difficult to dislodge.

Darwin put it bluntly in a notebook, “It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another.” Every living thing on Earth lies at the end of an uninterrupted line of survival and reproduction stretching back to the last universal common ancestor (LUCA). One of my favorite questions to ask students is, “How many of your direct ancestors failed to reproduce?” None. Not one. Not once in nearly four billion years! And the same is true of everything else alive today. Your dog, your cat, the oak tree outside, the bacteria in your gut. We’re all the latest link in the same impossibly unlikely, unbroken chain.

Most organisms never produce offspring. Most acorns never become oaks and most tadpoles never become frogs. But every single ancestor of every living organism survived long enough to reproduce. All living things are the winners of the greatest lottery the universe ever held, all of us riding the longest winning streak in the history of the universe. Humans are not better because we build cities. In the currency of evolution, a bacterium’s streak is just as long as yours.

“Which species is better?” is an incomplete question. Different species evolved to solve different problems and adapted to different ecological niches. A bacterium doesn’t need to outsmart a chimpanzee to kill it. Am I better than my cat? Better at what? She is, by far, the greatest athlete in our house. An indoor cat her entire life, she once snatched a bird out of the air through an open window. I am pretty sure that if she escaped into the woods she’d survive just fine. I’d be dead in a month if I had to catch all my own food. But my cat couldn’t write this paragraph, do the dishes, or ask a stranger for directions. I’d make a terrible cat and she’d make a terrible human.

I’d also make a terrible woman.

Two Species, One Genome

Men and women are not different species. But neither are they interchangeable versions of a sexless human template. It can be helpful to think of them as two species that happen to share a genome, each facing different demands and evolving different solutions. Neither is a defective version of the other.

The divergence begins with the biological definition of sex itself: males are the sex that makes the small sex cells and females the sex that makes the big ones — sperm and eggs, in our case. That initial cell-sized difference leads to a cascade of divergent genetic interests and evolutionary strategies for men and women. In 1972, Robert Trivers, who later became my PhD advisor, threw down the gauntlet with one of the most famous sentences in all of evolutionary biology: “What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring.” Out of that insight came one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in evolutionary biology: the sex that invests more in offspring will tend to be choosier about mates, while the sex that invests less will compete harder for them.

In humans the asymmetry is stark. A child costs a woman nine obligatory months, two or three years of breastfeeding and, before modern medicine, a one percent chance of dying in childbirth per birth. For men the costs can be trivial. These differing costs change what each sex stands to gain, and lose, from mating. Two sexes. Two strategies. Neither better nor worse: natural selection’s two answers to two different problems.

The two strategies are rarely harmonious. An adaptation that improves one sex’s reproductive success can impose costs on the other. Geoffrey Parker, who founded the field of sexual conflict, defined it as arising whenever “the optimal outcomes for each sex cannot be achieved simultaneously.” William Rice and Brett Holland described it as an arms race that resembles that between a parasite and its host. The conflict runs so deep that it is even fought inside the child. Some genes are switched on or off depending on which parent they came from. This is called genomic imprinting, and the pattern is exactly what you would expect from two parties with different interests.

In the anglerfish the relationship is so exploitative that scientists originally thought the tiny male fused to the female was a parasite. In some marine flatworms the conflict is literal combat. Each animal has both male and female reproductive organs, and they engage in something called “penis fencing,” each trying to pierce the other’s body and inject sperm while avoiding being inseminated itself. The winner swims off a father. The loser is stuck being the mother, and carries the eggs. Here, the question of “which sex is better?” has an actual answer, and the animals themselves prove it by fighting to be the de facto male. But both roles are essential for producing offspring, so a preference for one reproductive role tells us nothing about the relative value of the sexes overall.

A female anglerfish (Photocorynus spiniceps) with a male attached. He will spend the rest of his life feeding from her bloodstream. Would becoming more like the female make him a better anglerfish? Photo: Ted Pietsch / University of Washington.

Sex differences in humans are nowhere near as dramatic as they are in the anglerfish, but they go far beyond the reproductive organs. They begin with a difference in our chromosomes and are amplified through hormones, timing, tissues, environments, incentives and sex-biased gene expression. Forty-five of our forty-six chromosomes are the same in both sexes; the forty-sixth is a second X in females and a Y in males. After puberty, men’s testosterone levels are fifteen times women’s, and the two distributions don’t overlap. One 2020 study of 44 human tissues found sex-biased expression in 37 percent of genes.

Downstream, these biological differences are reflected in behavior as well, including sex differences that appear early in development, across cultures and in other primates. As David Geary wrote in Quillette, “People have many stereotypes about boys and men and girls and women and most of them are accurate and, if anything, underestimate the magnitude of actual sex differences.”

But the analogies to parasite and host, or to different species, only go so far. Species can go their separate ways while men and women keep dumping their genes back into the same pool in one generation and pulling their children out of it in the next. The sexes are bound together in an interminable dance — sometimes moving in step, always watching for a chance to exploit the other — and neither can leave the dance floor, because neither can reproduce alone. Each sex, the other’s hostage: cooperating as much as it has to, and cheating as much as it can get away with. Friction and conflict are the hallmarks of this relationship. Neither sex will get exactly what it wants and expecting perfect harmony makes ordinary compromise feel like failure.

Different interests, different incentives, different costs and different advantages. None of which offers a single scale for ranking men and women. When we defend equality by denying differences, we can never see them for what they are. We concede that any real difference would threaten equality and never question the assumption that underlies it — that every difference implies a superior and an inferior. In other words, we never get around to challenging the habit of ranking itself.

Man the Hunter

In 1966 Richard Lee and Irven DeVore held a symposium at the University of Chicago called “Man the Hunter,” and published a book with the same name two years later. Neither the conference nor the book was a monolith of belief, and hunting was mostly used as a shorthand to refer to the hunter-gatherer way of life: small, mobile bands subsisting on wild foods, which characterized most of human history. Lee’s own data showed that among the !Kung of the Kalahari most calories came from plants gathered by women and Lee later said that the book could just as easily have been called Woman the Gatherer. But the popular image that emerged from it was that male hunting was what separated us from the other apes and made us human.

In 1981, Frances Dahlberg edited a volume called “Woman the Gatherer.” Although her introduction argued for “interdependent cooperation between the sexes,” many of the other contributors to the volume were less conciliatory. One chapter, “Women as Shapers of the Human Adaptation,” argued that the first human tools were used for digging out roots, that the first sharing was a mother feeding her child, and that it was women, not men, who made us human.

The debate came full circle in 2023 when anthropologists Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock argued that women had hunted in the Paleolithic and were even better suited to endurance hunting than men, an argument featured on the cover of Scientific American under the headline “Woman the Hunter”. The abstract of their paper in American Anthropologist ended with a broad prescription: “Going forward, paleoanthropology should embrace the idea that all sexes contributed equally to life in the past, including via hunting activities.”

But what if women hunted less than men? Would that make their contribution to human evolution less important? Why should either sex’s importance depend on our insisting that the evidence always show that men and women did all of the same things?

Criticizing this cycle of one-upmanship, anthropologist Kathleen Lowrey said, “whatever men do is the standard of humanity and then the insistence that women do whatever that is as well.” There is something strange about this defense of women’s importance. When hunting or getting the corner office becomes the only proof that women matter, other contributions become harder to see. Gathering food and raising children are no longer enough and women must pick up a spear before we can give them credit.

Who hunted, how often, and how successfully are legitimate questions about our past. But turning the answers into a verdict on the relative importance of men and women turns human evolution into an awards ceremony. Different contributions become competing claims about which group is better and we’re always left arguing about who belongs on top.

From Woman the Hunter to Ted Lasso

Sometimes we reverse who comes out on top without ever questioning the standard itself. None of this is particularly new. I grew up watching sitcoms like The Cosby Show and Home Improvement, where the husband was depicted as a childish bonehead who needed to be brought back into line by his hyper-professional and sensible wife. We went from the authoritative sitcom dad of the sixties to the incompetent one in the nineties. The traditionally masculine virtues of competence, authority, and sound judgment still set the standard, but it was now the woman who embodied them. Rather than stopping to question whether either sex needed to measure up to the other, we simply changed the standard. Today, instead of asking women to measure up to a masculine ideal, we ask men to measure up to a feminine one.

Apple’s hit series Ted Lasso offers a modern vision of the ideal man. Although he’s a former American football coach — what could be more manly than that? — his model of masculinity would have been almost unrecognizable to previous generations and to many men today. Conor Fitzgerald describes him as “a folksy people-pleaser, emotionally attuned, gentle and encouraging.” He seems more like a progressive female fantasy of what some women want men to be rather than a representation of how men actually are. Stereotypical male locker room banter is replaced by emotional sharing, team therapy sessions, group hugs and passing out tissues in the locker room.

Gentleness, emotional openness, attentiveness, and tact can be admirable in either sex. So can having the patience to cultivate relationships. But valuing these traits doesn’t require us to make them the universal test of a good person. Therapy’s central premise, that talking about your feelings is the hallmark of psychological health, has taught us that the person who wants to talk (usually the woman) is emotionally mature, and the person who may not (usually the man) is seen as inhibited or repressed. Yet for many relationship problems, more talking is unhelpful and therapy culture tells us to drive ourselves crazy trying to bridge abysses between the sexes that often cannot be bridged. Does that make men who aren’t always eager to share their feelings toxic? Do men who express their affection through loyalty, honor, practical help, or quiet dependability need to be corrected? Is Kipling’s advice to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs just an old-fashioned throwback to the patriarchy? Or does it describe the kind of qualities you’d want in someone you depend on?

Strength can be used to protect people or intimidate them. Self-reliance and emotional restraint can help someone through a crisis or prevent them from asking for help. None of these qualities belong exclusively to either sex, but becoming a better man or better woman doesn’t require becoming less like one. A woman shouldn’t have to prove her worthiness by becoming a girl boss or ass-kicking superhero, and a man shouldn’t have to prove his by discussing every feeling or crying in the bathtub. We have reversed the ranking without questioning the habit of treating one sex like an imperfect version of the other.

Five Extra Years

Of all the disparities between the sexes that get ritually recited — pay, representation, prestige — one of the largest rarely gets mentioned: lifespan. Women outlive men in every country on Earth, and in the United States they get an extra five years (81.4 years for women versus 76.5 for men). If you’re a man, you might feel aggrieved. That’s five more birthdays, five more years with your grandchildren. When I hear these numbers I wonder what the hell women are complaining about and imagine all the outrage if these numbers were reversed. If you’re a woman, you might be preparing your rebuttal. Men drink more, take more risks, die more often in accidents, are less likely to go to the doctor, and are more likely to kill and be killed by other men.

Either way, you probably heard “different” and automatically saw a hierarchy. We rank colleges, students, teams and ourselves. U.S. News publishes university rankings. Schools assign grades. The SAT converts a teenager into a number. Sports fans obsess over preseason rankings before a game has even been played. The Joneses may have a nicer car or house than me but I’m smarter or more cultured than them. This instinct is so hardwired that we rarely notice it. One of the most robust findings in the social sciences is called the minimal group paradigm. Humans will form groups and discriminate on almost any arbitrary or trivial basis, from whether hot dogs are sandwiches to being randomly assigned a “preference” for certain types of paintings. We reflexively start to rank them. “Fuck those Picasso bitches!”

A lot of the time, ranking is fine. Some people — some groups even — are smarter or stronger or more accomplished than others. Is it better to live longer? Yes, assuming those are healthy and happy years. But the difference doesn’t necessarily mean that men are getting fucked over, any more than the male advantage in strength means that women are getting screwed by the patriarchy.

Some of these differences arise from natural selection rather than systemic injustice or mistreatment. Females outlive males in most mammals, from bats to elephants, with an average gap of 18.6 percent. Because females tend to invest more in offspring, males — as Trivers showed — compete harder for mates, take more risks, and are more likely to die in the process. Some of this starts even before sex differences in competition begin. Males only have one X chromosome, so a bad gene on it always gets expressed, while females have two, so a healthy copy can mask a bad one.

There’s a scene in Kicking & Screaming where Will Ferrell tries to compliment a lesbian couple without implying they’re better than the other parents who are standing right there, and can’t quite manage it: “I mean, you’re different because you’re better. You’re both better different ... in a different but better way!” Two sexes, shaped by natural selection, with different strategies and trade-offs. And it’s trade-offs all the way down. Which one’s better? It depends on what you’re measuring. Better at living longer? Women. Better at being human? The question doesn’t even make sense. Still, five extra years is definitely better.

Equality Ruthlessly Enforced

Human sex ratios make the evolutionary case for equality even more starkly. At birth slightly more males are born — about 105 boys for every 100 girls — but by the time the sexes reach reproductive age, more boys have died and the numbers even out. But if one male can have kids with a nearly unlimited number of females, why wouldn’t evolution select for the production of more girls? In 1930 Ronald Fisher finally solved this puzzle: whichever sex was less common had an advantage. Because it takes one male and one female to produce a child, the rarer sex will have greater reproductive opportunities. So at equilibrium, a son and a daughter are, on average, equally valuable reproductive investments and, on a population level, neither sex can ever be worth more than the other.

This became known as the principle of equal investment in the sexes. So long as the costs of producing sons and daughters were the same, natural selection would favor equal investment in males and females. In other words, in evolution, both sexes are equally valuable.

This doesn’t mean that some individuals aren’t more reproductively successful than others, or that males don’t have a much higher variance in potential reproductive success. Profound differences can coexist with equivalent average returns on investment, and the sexes do differ dramatically in variance, strategy, constraint, and design. It’s estimated, for example, that about 1 in 200 men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan. Whatever the differences between individuals, the sexes’ total reproductive contributions to the next generation are always the same: every child has one mother and one father. Evolution has no ideology.

Sex is different from almost every other ranking system for one fundamental reason. Groups, populations and even species can outcompete one another and leave more descendants behind. The sexes cannot. Males and females are bound by basic arithmetic, two sides of the same equation. They aren’t equal because they’re the same. They’re equal because they’re different.

Equal Doesn’t Always Mean the Same

But the equality imposed by evolution tells us nothing about how we should treat each other. As Steven Pinker wrote in The Blank Slate, “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.” The principle that all men are created equal is not an empirical claim that all people are identical, but a reflection of our belief in the inherent dignity of each person. If our respect for one another is captive to the certainty that there are no differences between groups, we will live in constant fear of every new discovery and be in denial about the last one.

Sometimes, however, the denial isn’t that a difference exists; it’s that the difference doesn’t mean anything. Some disability advocates, for example, prefer the phrase “differently abled.” But if a disability prevents someone from walking or speaking, calling it “different” doesn’t tell us whether the difference is an advantage or a disadvantage. Insisting that every difference is a rank is one mistake but insisting that nothing is ever worse, just to avoid the stigma, is another. Even ideologies that are supposed to end ranking often smuggle it back in. Oppressor versus oppressed, for example, is also a way to rank.

Elite progressive culture celebrates diversity with almost religious fervor, but beneath the celebration is often a deep anxiety about difference—a fear of difference masquerading as a celebration of it. Real diversity, as opposed to Benetton-ad choreographed diversity, means real differences: different cultures, different aptitudes, different beliefs about the best ways to live. Real diversity can be uncomfortable. It means living next door to people whose customs you don’t understand or like, not just admiring photographs of people who look different from you. The fear is that if we acknowledge too much difference, we might start ranking groups —some better, others worse. And so even a philosophy that claims to be devoted to ending hierarchy can become preoccupied with policing which differences are acceptable to acknowledge.

Women can’t “have it all” because neither sex can. We cannot seize every advantage while escaping every cost, and pretending otherwise is a blueprint for misery. Tradeoffs are a part of the deal and denying differences doesn’t free us from them. It just makes them harder to recognize and accept.

We are all prisoners of our own experiences. I can observe my cat’s behavior, but I can never know what it is like to be a cat. Understanding other people is hard too. Accepting genuine differences between humans doesn’t just mean having more empathy or embracing an aesthetic or superficial idea of diversity. It means accepting differences we may never fully understand — and having the humility to admit that other people are fundamentally unknowable.

The iconic image of human evolution is wrong not because it reveals differences between species or even a real evolutionary history. It’s wrong because it displays differences as rungs on a ladder. The person who insists there are no differences between the sexes and the one who insists that one sex is superior to the other agree on the only thing that matters. Any real difference would mean admitting that one group is better than another. This is why we nervously toggle between two claims: there are no real differences between men and women and one sex is better. Both claims are the same scared child, refusing to look under the bed. The only way to find out what’s there is to look and maybe discover that the differences aren’t as scary as we’d imagined. So in the end we arrive back where we started, realizing again, and for the very first time, that men and women are equal, but they aren’t the same.

****

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I was ordering my seven-year-old daughter a banana split at the Ritz-Carlton in Puerto Rico on Christmas Day, 2022. Then, my phone rang. It was my wife calling from the pool in a panic. She was there with our four-year-old, William.

It started the way it always did. She told him to get out of the pool. He called her stupid. “We don’t talk to Mommy that way,” she said. He called her an idiot. She knew what was coming. “I’m going to count to three,” she said. “One. Two—” He called her a motherfucker. “Last warning.”

Then he used the word.

I was still holding the banana split when she tried to tell me. She couldn’t get it out— just “You have to come.” I put the banana split down and ran.

***

In 1934, the linguist Allen Read wrote about a word he couldn’t bring himself to print. The word, he explained, held “the deepest stigma of any in the language.” The word was “fuck”. The paper was called “An Obscenity Symbol“ and Read never printed the word once in all fourteen pages. The Comstock Act had made distributing obscene material a federal crime. His related study of American bathroom graffiti was too filthy for U.S. publishers and had to be privately printed in Paris.

Less than 40 years later, by 1972—‘shit’, ‘piss’, ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, ‘cocksucker’, ‘motherfucker’, and ‘tits’— were the stars in George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” bit. Asked why he focused on those words, Carlin explained: “It’s superstition. These words have no power. We give them power by refusing to be free and easy with them.” Today, those words barely raise an eyebrow. Because of comedians like Carlin, what once shocked the nation is now background noise. And in some ways this is a good thing. Because when comedians normalize what is forbidden, they demystify it. They pop the balloon—and once the fear is gone, we can talk about things more honestly, without euphemism or shame.

Another way to gain perspective on taboos is to step outside your own culture. I trained as a biological anthropologist under Napoleon Chagnon, who spent more than a decade living with the Yanomamö, an indigenous tribe in the Amazon. One of their strongest cultural prescriptions is against naming people who have died — the taboo is so strong that even the slightest, unintentional utterance can lead to violence or even death. This might seem like a curious fact about a remote tribe — until you realize we do the same thing. Our own taboos feel so rational from the inside, but from the outside, they’re just as strange and magical as anything the Yanomamö hold sacred.

But prohibitions don’t just vary across cultures—they change across time too. Today’s taboos feel self-evident only because they’re the air we breathe—unnoticed because they’re everywhere. What we hold sacrosanct now was invisible to us a decade ago. What we will hold sacrosanct a decade from now is invisible to us today. It’s hard to imagine now, but for most of American history, a man seen in public without a hat would have been like walking around with your cock out. Although most of the old American taboos around profanity, sex and violence have vanished, new ones have popped up to replace them, and one word has risen above all the others.

That word is nigger.

It’s so toxic we can’t even say it — we’ve had to build a euphemism just to talk about it — “the N-word.” No other word in the English language has this kind of power. It’s been elevated to a sacred status, becoming our culture’s Voldemort. Even words that sound like it spark panic. In 2015 at the Comedy Cellar in New York, I saw Aziz Ansari perform a bit on the word “niggardly,” which means stingy, that I can no longer find. The N-word has become so unutterable that we may soon need a euphemism for the euphemism. Maybe something like “the letter-after-M-word.” If you think this is far-fetched: in 2017, after the Charlottesville protests, ESPN barred Asian reporter Robert Lee from covering a football game because his name resembled a Confederate general’s.

The word wasn’t always this radioactive. Lenny Bruce, in the early 1960s, opened one of his most famous routines with “Are there any niggers here tonight?” He went on to use the word twenty-two times in less than a minute, believing that its unsayability gave it its power and that exposing the taboo to sunlight would drain it of that power. That same year Bruce was arrested for talking about sex — not for using the word “nigger.”

By the 1990s, talking about sex was fine, but the N-word was now a moral tripwire with real consequences. Although it had become America’s biggest taboo, the word was still allowed, within reason— usable to make a point, or as dialogue in Huckleberry Finn or Pulp Fiction.

In other words, context still mattered. Words, after all, are just noises we make, and we give them all their power. In a New York Times piece titled “How the N-Word Became Unsayable,” linguist John McWhorter wrote:

“What a society considers profane reveals what it believes to be sacrosanct. The emerging taboo on slurs shows the value our culture places — inconsistently or not — on respect for marginalized groups.“

He calls slurs “magic words”—and every culture has them.

***

The banana split was still melting back at the counter when I got to the pool. We were at DEFCON 1 and I knew the drill. I rushed into the pool in my clothes and put my son, who was now calling me a ‘nigger’, in a football hold as a dozen or so guests, some of whom were black, watched in horror. I was afraid that someone was going to beat me up.

How did this all start? I should take some of the blame. I never really cared if my kids swore and actually thought it was kind of funny when my three-year-old said “motherfucker.” That was probably a mistake. At some point, though, he picked up the word. His preschool was half black, so I think he learned it there. My wife, however, thinks it’s because I yell “nigger!” every time I stub my toe. Anyways, let’s not blame anyone. Then one day, William casually called his sister a “nigger,” and my wife and I both freaked out. Of course it was our reaction that was the problem. We had handed the word and all of its power over to a four-year-old. If we’d stayed calm, it might have simply passed—a meaningless sound, no different from “motherfucker.” But we didn’t. We panicked, yelled, gave him time outs, and turned the whole thing into a hostage negotiation. And William, being a smart four-year-old, realized he’d found something that could freeze adults in their tracks.

Eventually, my wife and I managed to stop him from saying the word. But the whole ordeal left me wondering what we were really reacting to. On one level, this is just a story about learning a hard parenting lesson. But on another, it reveals our culture’s obsession with language stripped of context. A word, out of context, is just a sound. And coming from a four-year-old, that’s all it was — a noise that triggered a reaction. William had no idea what the word meant, no knowledge of slavery or racism. He didn’t even know that the word referred to black people. All he knew, and all he needed to know, was that it made adults lose their minds. McWhorter distinguishes between an obscenity and a slur. An obscenity is profane because of what it describes, while a slur is profane because of who it demeans. You can shout an obscenity at nothing; a slur needs a target. William was using the word as an obscenity, not a slur.

Our culture has turned the syllables themselves, rather than the intent or meaning behind them, into the problem. On January 30, 2022, the Twitter account @patriottakes posted a video showing Joe Rogan saying “nigger” again and again — no sentence, no context, nothing, just the word: nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger. Bruce had said the word twenty-two times in under a minute to strip it of power. Patriottakes said it twenty-four times in twenty-nine seconds to restore it. Singer India Arie started a boycott by announcing she was pulling her music from Spotify. One of those twenty-four instances, however, was taken from a segment in which Rogan had made the exact argument the video would inadvertently prove:

“The problem is when words get hyper-powered — like ‘cunt,’ or ‘nigger,’ or ‘faggot.’ ‘Faggot’ is the new one. Even ‘love.’ ‘Love’ is a hyper-powered word too. The word itself becomes more important than its meaning.”

They turned his own words about the dangers of taking words out of context and stripping them of their meaning down to a single word, and used it as evidence against him. Still, he was forced to apologize.

By getting too caught up in labels, we mistake the map for the terrain and blur the line between attacking someone for merely vocalizing a taboo word and using it to actually demean other human beings. In some cases, you have to bowdlerize history just to steer clear of these prohibitions. Joe Biden, for example, was criticized for quoting another legislator who said “We already have a nigger mayor; we don’t need another nigger big-shot” in order to condemn racism. But it didn’t matter. The word alone was enough to trigger outrage. Bernie Sanders was attacked for doing the same thing in one of his books — using the slur to illustrate the ugliness of racism. The syllables now matter more than intent or context, and uttering them is treated no differently than committing the offense itself. We’ve moved from judging meaning to policing phonemes— back to the days when people said “the F-word” to avoid saying “fuck.” Regulation itself isn’t the problem, and some lines are worth holding. We’ve just become better at policing the sound of a word than the intent behind it.

Good comedy can remind us how absurd it is to forget that distinction. The height of race relations in America may have come in a 2011 interview with Patrice O’Neal and Louis CK on ‘The Opie and Anthony Show’. O’Neal, who is black, was explaining the origin of the word ‘kike’ when Louis, whose father is Jewish, responded by explaining the origin of ‘nigger’. Louis asked,

“Do you know where the word nigger came from?… Originally? It was some black guy who was being a nigger. So they called him a nigger. He was being a real nigger. And he said, what a nigger. And that’s where it started.”

O’Neal, laughing uncontrollably, then interjected with “So nigger was a feeling!” Louis doesn’t back off from the joke or try to protect himself by saying he was just joking or by pretending that the word could apply to anyone. He acknowledges the obvious association of the word with black people — ‘some black guy who was being a nigger.’ And we all kind of know what he’s talking about too. The word (or concept really) is more likely to evoke the image of some pimp in Oakland than it is Barack Obama. But in the end, it’s funny precisely because it is so absurd. The joke tells us absolutely nothing about the word’s origins, because Louis and Patrice aren’t etymologists. They’re comedians, and their job is to fuck around.

Louis didn’t need to protect O’Neal from the word, and O’Neal didn’t need anyone telling him what he was allowed to find funny. There’s something condescending about assuming that Black people need to be protected not just from racial abuse but from ever hearing a word at all—as though they can’t distinguish between someone using it to demean them and someone quoting it, discussing it, or making a joke about it. In The Atlantic, McWhorter argued that requiring Black people’s feelings to be stepped around with such exquisite sensitivity hasn’t been required of any human beings, and that doing so is condescending. He wrote: “In supposing that Black people have no resilience, you are saying that Black people are unusually weak... [they], because of the circumstances of American social history, cannot be treated as adults.” Of course, another Black comedian might have found Louis’s joke offensive. But that’s precisely the point. Let people make that judgment for themselves rather than appointing ourselves as their protectors. If you’re feeling that instinct as you read this essay, or wish that I’d summarized Louis’s joke instead of quoting it in full to spare someone else from reading it, that might be worth examining too.

Louis explored the absurdity of a culture that hides behind euphemisms in ‘Offensive Words,’ a routine from his 2008 special ‘Chewed Up’:

“They found a way to say nigger, ‘N-word’, it’s bullshit because when you say ‘the N-word’ you’re putting nigger in the listener’s head. That’s what saying a word is.”

Later in the set, he highlights the importance of context through the multiple meanings of another taboo word, imagining someone hesitating before a blowjob by pontificating about how ‘people from Phoenix are called Phoenicians,’ before cutting him off— “Quit being a faggot and suck that dick.” (1:45-2:03). The bit isn’t about being crass — it’s about how context, tone, and intent matter more than the words themselves. There is a direct line of succession from Bruce and Carlin to Louis. Carlin dedicated ‘Class Clown’—the album with his ‘Seven Dirty Words’ bit—to Bruce, and Louis dedicated ‘Offensive Words’ to Carlin. The bit was nominated for an Emmy in 2009. In an illustration of just how quickly cultural prescriptions can shift, it disappeared from YouTube for five years while I was writing this book, only to reappear recently. I still don’t know why it left or why it came back.

None of this, however, is to say that words are just meaningless noises. There are good reasons I don’t yell “Cunt!” when I hit a backhand into the net or use profanity in church. Taboos are the adaptations of a species whose survival depended on signals of loyalty to the group. Muslims don’t draw the Prophet Mohammed, gentlemen remove their hats in the presence of women and Americans stand during the national anthem. When we turn ideas and words into sacred objects, we no longer have to defend them, and the group automatically attacks anyone who questions them. They mark communal boundaries of purity, loyalty and danger. Violating these norms isn’t just breaking a rule. It’s revealing yourself as a dangerous person. Taboos give individuals ready-made, culturally-tested responses to complex threats such as disease, corruption or violence.

These rules are both our superpower and our curse. While they let us cooperate at scale (money, nations and religions are all fictions we’ve agreed to believe), they also disconnect us from the world as it actually is and allow the symbols to become more important than reality. What do you think would be worse: an air strike on Gaza that kills real human beings, or the desecration of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? If you hesitated, you understand the power of symbols. The N-word holds the same power over Americans as depicting the prophet Mohammed holds over Muslims or that mentioning the name of a dead relative holds over the Yanomamö and none of these taboos feel arbitrary to the people who hold them. The Yanomamö’s prescription is tied to the spirit world, the Muslim prohibition is wrapped in religious belief, and the N-word is associated with slavery, lynching and Jim Crow. So maybe this sacredness is a good thing. After all, do we really want a society where nothing is sacred? Do we want profanity or slurs in schools, churches or courts? When filth is everywhere, it makes it harder to see what is true, good or beautiful and everything starts to sound like a bit.

Still, not all sacred boundaries deserve our reverence. Sometimes taboos and social norms are just a way to control people or protect the powerful. We’ve had taboos against women speaking in public, against gay people holding hands, and against having honest discussions about race, sex or religion. Some of those lines held communities together and some just humiliated the people who crossed them. A healthy culture needs a place to test these boundaries and in America that’s comedy clubs where we temporarily suspend reverence so we can see behind the curtain what we’re actually worshiping. Comedians pull back the curtain and let us see the world as Chagnon saw the Yanomamö, exposing the strangeness of the familiar. They remind us that our taboos might not be sacred truths, but passing customs—and that maybe, just maybe, we don’t need to be so afraid of the words themselves.

The Overton window moves quickly — what was unthinkable five years ago is commonplace today. But either side can overplay its hand. In 2022, a comedian using slurs on stage was unthinkable; in the post-woke era, doing so has become what Freddie deBoer calls ‘the rebel yell of the aggrieved normie.’ Normalize the transgression and it stops mattering. Police it too hard and you hand the transgressor all the power.

In 1995, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Mark Fuhrman’s use of the word ‘nigger’ — and then lying about it under oath — mattered more than the DNA, the blood trail, a shaky alibi, or a glove found in O.J.’s own yard carrying his blood and both victims’. A racial slur was more important than a double murder, and a man who’d nearly cut off his ex-wife’s head and stabbed an innocent waiter returning her mother’s glasses more than twenty times went free.

In the end though, I don’t really care about the juice getting framed or Rogan not being able to buy a better private jet. What I do care about is my country, our culture and what happens when a word starts to matter more than the reality underneath it.

A few weeks after we got home from Puerto Rico, I was putting William — who’d started calling it ‘the N-word’ himself now — in his car seat on the street when he asked me what the word meant. He asked it the same way he asks why I’m always pissing in our next door neighbor’s yard. I told him it was a word people used, and occasionally still use, to be mean to Black people, that it might hurt someone’s feelings, and that’s why we don’t say it. Then I stubbed my toe on the curb.

On October 15, 2020, Jeffrey Toobin was on a Zoom call with colleagues when he took out his penis and started masturbating. Toobin had reached the rarefied heights of the cultural aristocracy: a graduate of Harvard Law School, a former federal prosecutor, CNN’s chief legal analyst, the author of a series of New York Times bestsellers, and a staff writer at The New Yorker for nearly three decades. Four days later, Vice broke the story. Toobin apologized, saying “I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”

Nobody disputed Toobin’s claim that this was an accident, and not even Toobin’s harshest critics argued that he intended for his colleagues to see him masturbating. Still, the judgment was swift. Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian called his behavior “dangerous,” wrote that “some men have learned nothing from the #MeToo movement,” and accused his defenders of “minimiz[ing] bad male behavior.”

In Salon, Erin Keane referred to Toobin’s masturbation as “abusing himself” and dismissed the sympathy offered by writers such as Conor Friedersdorf and Malcolm Gladwell as “himpathy”—the disproportionate sympathy afforded powerful men accused of sexual misconduct. It was October 2020, so race soon entered the discussion too, and, in a display of conspicuous self-indictment, Keane wrote that she herself even bore some responsibility, having been conditioned by society to extend sympathy “to men, and to white men in particular.”

Albert Burneko went further, using the term “creepy sex-weirdo” seven times in an article he wrote for Defector. “Those people are sex creeps who open their pants and masturbate during work meetings,” he wrote, adding that most readers “would never consider doing [what Toobin did] because they are not animals.” Burneko argued that Toobin should have been fired even if his webcam were off and nobody had any idea what he was doing. Three weeks later, The New Yorker did exactly that, ending Toobin’s 27-year career at the magazine.

Toobin’s colleagues had the right not to watch him masturbate. But if Toobin should have been fired even if nobody saw him, heard him, or knew what he was doing, what exactly was the offense? Are some people simply angry that he masturbated at all? There is something strange about treating one of the most ordinary and common human behaviors as something that only “animals” and “sex creeps” do. Calling something weird or disgusting is a way of distancing ourselves from all those other freaks who do it. I would never do that. But Burneko’s disgust may point to something far deeper. We are animals. We are suit-wearing apes who spend most of our lives pretending we’re not. Perhaps our discomfort with masturbation comes from how difficult it makes that pretense to maintain. Strip away the books, the Harvard degree, the New Yorker byline, and the title of chief legal analyst on CNN, and you are left with an ape who thought the camera was off, alone in front of a screen, doing something primates have been doing for tens of millions of years.

Masturbation is not unique to humans. It has been documented in more than a hundred primate species, as well as in animals ranging from horses and ground squirrels to dolphins, iguanas, and penguins. We don’t need an elaborate evolutionary story to explain why animals masturbate. Natural selection favored organisms that reproduced, and one effective way of getting animals to have sex was to make sex feel good. The system is ancient: even fruit flies, whose lineage diverged from ours more than half a billion years ago, find ejaculation rewarding. Once an ape with hands came along, it wasn’t going to take long to figure out how to hijack that system and cut out the middleman. Masturbation doesn’t produce any babies. But it does produce pleasure, and, in humans at least, a little bit of shame.

Accurate data on human masturbation are surprisingly hard to get, but an old and endlessly repeated statistic is that thirty percent of all internet traffic is pornography. That number, when it came out in 2012, was almost certainly an exaggeration. As Wired noted, no reliable organization had ever actually tracked porn’s share of internet traffic and more careful estimates have come in far lower. But this probably tells us more about what happened to the internet than what happened to our desire to watch pornography.

In 2004, when Americans spent about an hour a day online, adult sites accounted for 18.8 percent of all website visits. By 2010, when Americans were spending about two and a half hours a day online that share had dropped to six percent. So when bandwidth was scarce and phones still weren’t everywhere, we prioritized our limited time online by watching porn. Give humans a private screen and anonymity, and one of the first things millions of us will do is beat off. Porn didn’t have to become less popular for its share of the whole to shrink. I mean, how many times a day can you jerk off?

Still, the raw numbers are staggering. In May 2026 alone, there were 875.4 million U.S. visits to just four porn sites. As of 2024, internet users worldwide were spending more than three billion hours a month on adult sites—about 80 percent as much time as they spent reading the news.

If these data are any indication of how humans spend their time, the planet is filled to the brim with “creepy sex-weirdos.” But traffic numbers count clicks, not people, so who exactly is making all these visits and what are they doing on these sites? One answer comes from surveys asking people directly. In a nationally representative survey in 2015, 91.8 percent of American men and 78.2 percent of women said they had masturbated at least once in their lives, while 64 percent of men and 40.8 percent of women had done so in the previous month. A 2026 study found even higher rates: 76.7 percent of men and 59.4 percent of women had done it in the previous month. The numbers move around depending on how the question is asked and how masturbation is defined, but the basic pattern is that almost all men masturbate at some point in their lives, most do it regularly, and a large majority of women do it too.

Still, these figures are based on self-reports and are almost certainly underestimates. Masturbation is not the sort of thing people boast about or mention in eulogies. Bob really enjoyed beating off. Although the masturbation economy generates tens of billions of dollars every year, it exists almost entirely hidden in bedrooms, bathrooms, and basements, out of public view.

Google search histories, however, provide one way around the problem of self-reports. In a 2014 paper, the former Google data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reports that “porn” appears in more searches than “weather” — though only about 20 percent of Americans will admit in the General Social Survey that they watched any pornography in the past year.

What are your favorite porn search terms? Mr. Rogers had his, just like Obama and Yo-Yo Ma have theirs. Mine were once inadvertently cast from my laptop onto a screen in a lecture hall filled with more than 100 college students. I typed the letter “a” into Google and autocomplete supplied the rest: Asian amateur pussy fuck. After extensive experimentation, however, I have since learned that “pussy” and “fuck” aren’t really necessary. They’re assumed.

Researchers call the tendency to lie on survey questions when the truth might be embarrassing the social desirability bias. In 2003 psychologists ran an experiment on college students, who filled out a questionnaire about their sexual behavior. Some answered anonymously. Some believed that someone else might read their responses afterward. And some answered while hooked up to what they were told was a lie detector. Sex differences in reported masturbation frequency and the use of pornography were greatest when students believed someone else might see their answers, moderate when the answers were anonymous, and lowest when they believed a polygraph would catch them lying.

But this doesn’t mean that sex differences in masturbation frequency disappear once people start telling the truth. When researchers pool much larger datasets and account for social desirability bias, substantial differences remain. A 2022 meta-analysis, for example, analyzed more than 200 studies with 621,000 people and found that men report a much stronger sex drive than women — a difference about as big as the sex difference in body weight. Indeed one of the largest, most replicable and consistent differences between men and women is in how much they want sex. Baumeister’s 2001 review found men reporting the stronger drive on every measure, and even Janet Hyde, who has spent her whole career arguing that differences between the sexes are small, acknowledges that sex drive is a big exception.

I don’t know what the female sex drive feels like, any more than I know what it is like to be pregnant. I am, however, the world’s greatest expert on what my own sex drive feels like, and, I presume, on what it feels like for millions of other men who are like me

In seventh grade I made a crude vagina out of a shoebox, two sponges, duct tape, and some shag carpet I cut out of the basement floor. When I was in high school I had a copy of High Society with a foldout of a woman lying in the middle of a highway, showing her bush spread across the dotted line of the passing lane. One night I walked out to the main road in my neighborhood at three in the morning and beat off in the middle of it.

None of this was fun. And it sure sounds more like something a “creepy sex-weirdo” would do than just beating off to a video in the privacy of your own home. But for me, sexual desire was never simply an attraction toward something pleasurable. The feeling has always been closer to that of being possessed. My friend once told me that he sometimes had to beat off three times before he could even leave his Manhattan apartment, just so the women he passed on the street would have nothing on him. It was a kind of freedom, he said. But it never lasted and the fever always came back. In Plato’s Republic, someone asks the elderly Sophocles whether he can still make love to a woman. “I am very glad to have escaped from all that,” he says, “like a slave who has escaped from a savage and tyrannical master” (Republic 329c).

Masturbation is not a substitute for sex. When you’re doing it you are imagining someone else and are probably not picturing yourself masturbating. Indeed the whole trick is to keep what you’re actually doing — a man alone in a room with a dick in his hand — as far out of your mind as possible. This is why masturbating doesn’t satisfy the sex drive so much as briefly disable it. A few minutes of quiet from the incessant drumbeat of a half billion years of evolution’s prime directive. It’s almost as if this sex drive thing was designed by natural selection to be the whole point of being alive — the money, the job, the car, the status, all of civilization piled on top of an animal trying to get laid.

It’s pretty easy to explain the behavior biologically. The harder question is why we are so ashamed of it. Some sexual taboos, like incest, make obvious evolutionary sense. Mating with close relatives carries genetic costs, so evolution appears to have designed simple rules of thumb to prevent it.Two childhood cues do almost all the work. For older siblings, the rule is simple: never be attracted to anyone you saw your mother breastfeed. For younger siblings, who weren’t born yet to see their older siblings nurse, the sexual disgust rises instead with the number of years spent in the same household.

Masturbation is different. There’s no pregnancy, no cuckold, no competitor, no wasted investment in offspring unlikely to survive or reproduce, and rarely even a victim. There’s no fitness cost, and so nothing for selection to have built a rule against — and our shame isn’t even culturally universal, which suggests it isn’t hardwired. In seventeenth-century New England, certain forms of masturbation were categorized as a capital offense. In other places and times it has been treated as a sin, as a sickness, or as hardly worth mentioning. So although we are unlikely to discover some specialized psychological mechanism or gene that makes people ashamed of jerking off, there are general features of human psychology that might produce contempt in the people watching and shame in the person doing it.

The first is status. Status comes from being desired, and having sex with someone, especially if you’re a male, provides evidence that someone chose you. Masturbation does no such thing. It advertises wanting without being wanted. You might boast about sleeping with a beautiful woman, but nobody boasts about beating off to one. When the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski lived among the Trobriand Islanders in the 1920s, he found a people about as sexually permissive as any Westerner from that time period could have imagined. Premarital sex was both expected and seen as unremarkable. But they still regarded masturbation as pathetic—something for people who couldn’t get a partner. The Greeks and Romans also considered it a lowly and humiliating thing, tolerable in a slave but not in a free citizen.

My freshman year at Michigan, in 1989, my roommate asked two guys on our hall if they “beat their meat.” They laughed and said they didn’t need to because they had girlfriends and got laid all the time. Recently, I reminded them of that conversation, and they both denied ever having denied it. What embarrassed them in 1989 was masturbating. What embarrasses them now is having once denied it.

In the thirty-seven years since, much of that shame has receded. But not all of it. Last week I was showing my journalism undergraduates how to download R and load a dataset, while sharing my screen at the front of the room. I had forgotten to close a browser tab at the top of the screen. I was working on this essay and it said Masturbation. The students photographed the screen, posted it on social media, and heard nothing else I said for the rest of the class. That afternoon I was called into an “urgent” meeting with my dean and department chair.

Nobody had masturbated and nobody had discussed masturbating. The word was just sitting there in a browser tab. I have no idea what the students imagined I was doing—researching how to masturbate, watching videos of people beating off, or engaging in some other pervy-ass middle-aged-professor shit—but whatever they imagined, I’m reasonably certain my status did not go up. I’d been trying to present myself as a badass anthropologist who had traveled the world—something like Indiana Jones. But Indiana Jones doesn’t get caught with an open browser tab labeled Masturbation.

Status also explains why Toobin’s fall was so satisfying for so many to watch. After accumulating every marker of elite status available to an American intellectual, he was suddenly just some “creepy sex-weirdo.”

Status may explain the contempt. But it can’t explain the disgust. When I read that a man had lost a twenty-seven-year career for something I’d done myself earlier that same day, I laughed, and probably felt a little smug. But a part of me also went yuck—the same feeling I got walking around a bush at a field site and seeing my PhD advisor taking a shit.

Social psychologists Paul Rozin and Jonathan Haidt proposed that many aspects of disgust are just reminders that we are animals — body odor, dirty fingernails, an open wound, a dead body, anything that turns a person into a sack of meat. Few things remind me that I am an animal more than masturbating to pixels on a screen. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum takes this further and argues that disgust is at its root a revulsion at our own animality. And because we can’t bear finding that animal in ourselves, we often go looking for it in someone else. From now on, whenever I see Toobin pontificating about something on a podcast or television, I picture him hiding in a basement, pants down, dick in hand.

For most of Western history, masturbation was more likely to evoke contempt than panic. Jewish and Christian moralists reserved their more serious judgement for things like sodomy, incest, bestiality, and adultery. The modern panic over masturbation is typically dated to 1712, with an anonymous London pamphlet, Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences..., a reference to the Bible’s Onan, who pulled out early and spilled his semen on the ground. He was slain by God for his sin. Within a few decades of its publication, masturbation was seen as a disease.

Although God stopped killing people for beating off, doctors warned about the harmful effects of what they called “self-abuse.” Victorian newspapers featured ads for male chastity belts, pills to reduce desire, and metal clamps designed to dampen any unwanted “excitement.” A medical text from 1903 advised:

“Teach your boy that when he handles or excites the sexual organs, all parts of the body suffer... The sin is terrible, and is, in fact, worse than lying or stealing... This loathsome habit lays the foundation for consumption, paralysis, and heart disease. It makes many boys lose their minds; others, when grown, commit suicide.“

We’d been masturbating since we grew hands. So what was it about the eighteenth century that gave rise to this hysteria? The historian Thomas Laqueur, in the definitive account of the topic, Solitary Sex, argues that the answer had less to do with the act itself than with the rise of modern individualism. What made masturbation uniquely threatening was its combination of privacy, fantasy, and potentially limitless gratification. It took sexuality out of society and placed it in the hands of the private individual. There was no reciprocity, no pregnancy and no one to say no.

Although the Enlightenment celebrated the man who could think for himself, it also feared him. Masturbation took all the lofty ideals of the self-made man and reduced them to their most primal and least dignified conclusion. Privacy without witnesses, sexual partners who existed only in the imagination, and appetites with nothing to stop them. The eighteenth century was terrified of a man who didn’t need anyone else. Three hundred years later, we have built a world for him. We work without leaving the house, eat without speaking to anyone, and treat our own “lived experience” as the highest authority.

You might expect all of this to have faded along with the world that produced it. The taboo has weakened, but the shame hasn’t disappeared. In 1992, Seinfeld built an entire episode around a masturbation contest. The censors at NBC told Larry David he could not use the word, so he euphemized it, inventing “master of my domain.” Two years later, Bill Clinton fired his Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, after she suggested masturbation might be worth mentioning in sex education classes.

Masturbation might no longer make you go blind, make you go insane, or make you kill yourself, but it was still not something you really talked about. It had become something everybody could do, as long as nobody had to watch you do it, hear about it, or think about the fact that you had done it. This lack of discussion is what makes it a taboo instead of a crime. A crime is something the law tells you not to do. A taboo is something everybody knows people do, but nobody is supposed to mention. But even if you do talk openly about it, you probably don’t want people walking in on you doing it. You still lock the door.

The contempt comes from what masturbating says about you: a loser who nobody wants. The disgust comes from how it reminds us that we are animals: a full-grown man feverishly stroking his penis. And what a man does when he is alone and beyond the reach of society is an ancient and primal fear. All three feelings prop up the same wall — the man in the suit on one side, the animal wearing it on the other.

Technology has allowed us to hide more of our lives behind that wall than ever before. We carry unlimited pornography in our pockets. I can see more naked women on my phone in an afternoon than my ancestors would have encountered in their lifetimes, and we take meetings from our bedrooms. But it has also made the wall more porous. All it takes is one autocomplete suggestion, one browser tab you forgot to close, or a camera you forgot was on. When Toobin took out his penis in front of a camera he thought was off, the wall came down, and for just a moment we could no longer deny it. The eighteenth century was afraid that masturbating would turn us into animals. We are afraid it will reveal that we always were.

The best-known story about the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope involves an interaction he had with Alexander the Great. When the Greeks assembled at Corinth to confirm the twenty-year-old as his father’s successor, statesmen and philosophers came from everywhere to line up and congratulate him. But Diogenes, a homeless beggar who slept in a large ceramic jar, didn’t bother. So Alexander went to him instead, and found him lying in the dirt, sunning himself. Asked whether there was any favor he could do him, Diogenes said, “Stand a little out of my sun.”

Diogenes belonged to a school of philosophy called the Cynics, from the Greek word for dog. He argued for living shamelessly, according to nature rather than social conventions and often masturbated in full view of the public. It’s hard to imagine that kind of courage today. Really, try to picture someone having the balls that Diogenes had to make some philosophical point. Not saying the unsayable thing on a podcast or X and then waiting for the applause from your fans, or rage baiting people on X because you’re the only one who has the nerve to do it. No, doing what a deranged homeless man does in Grand Central at rush hour, and then going back to your philosophy department at Harvard.

Diogenes demolished the wall between the public persona and the private animal. He did it on purpose, inviting everyone to see, and we mainly remember him as some Greek weirdo. Toobin did it alone, by accident, and lost a career.

The easiest response to Toobin is to laugh, to call him disgusting, and reassure ourselves that we are nothing like him. But how many of us would want our own private lives projected onto a screen for everyone to inspect? We close the bathroom door when we take a shit, clear our browser histories, and hand people our phones already open to the one photo we want them to see. There’s nothing wrong with any of this. We all need a place where we can take the suit off. The problem is when we pretend we’re not wearing one.

For a few seconds on a Zoom call in 2020, the suit came off. The brilliant legal analyst and cultural critic took out his penis and disappeared. The ape in the basement took his place.

***

The Laughing Ape is reader-supported. I’m keeping this series free because essays like this should be easy to share, argue about, and pass along. If you enjoy this kind of work, please subscribe—and if you’d like to support more of it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks, as always, for reading. If you missed the first essay in this series, “Naked in America,” you can read it here.

I lived in Reykjavík for a year in 2011, doing fieldwork for my PhD. The best thing about living there—better than the Northern Lights, better than the glaciers and volcanoes, better even than the fact that nobody locks their doors—was the public pools. They’re geothermally heated and open all winter, with ice coating the decks and steam rising off the water like the River Styx with lap lanes. The smell of sulfur rises with the smoke. It seeps up from where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is slowly splitting the island in two.

The Icelanders don’t put any chemicals in their pools. So in order to protect them, a sundlaugarvörður — literally “swimming-pool guard” in Icelandic — stands outside the locker room to make sure everyone showers naked before they get in the water. In the summer, when tourists outnumber the locals two to one, I’d hear her shouting, always in Icelandic, usually at some American trying to sneak past with dry hair.

I used to go to these pools every day before work. One morning I walked out onto the deck when, suddenly, one of the older guards started shouting at me. Confused, and a little irritated — I wasn’t a tourist, I’d been coming to this pool for months — I pointed at my wet hair. When that didn’t seem to help, I held up my goggles to show her I was ready to do my laps. I’d left them behind in the locker room so many times that I decided if it wasn’t about the showers, it had to be about the goggles: I have my fucking goggles, Gudrun! It took a full minute of her yelling in Icelandic and me flailing my arms around indignantly before I noticed a half dozen people staring at me from the edge of the pool.

Then I looked down and realized I was standing on the deck completely naked. I’d gotten so used to being undressed in the locker room and the communal showers that I’d forgotten to put my bathing suit back on.

Even in a Nordic country where everyone was comfortable being naked, this was a bit much. Still, compared to America, Iceland might as well have been a nudist colony.

When did Americans get so uncomfortable being naked in front of each other? In the eighties most kids who went to public school had to take a shower after gym. I was born in 1969, and most men my age have some story about a kid who supposedly got a boner in the communal showers or locker room. I remember a friend of mine in seventh grade looking over at me and smiling as he pissed on the back of the kid showering next to him.

Showering after gym vanished in the nineties. My son, who was born in 2001, told me that in high school he never showered and no shower gym classes are now the rule. After the second world war schools were built with the same open layout as the military and prisons. Starting in the nineties schools started replacing these communal bays with private stalls, and leaving the showers out of new buildings. Today American kids getting undressed in front of each other in gym locker rooms feels as ancient and alien as hitchhiking or kids playing outside until dark. Nobody announced the change. They were there, and then they were gone.

Even streaking — that strange, testosterone-fueled rite of passage for college kids, and a fixture at American sporting events — has largely faded from our culture. By 2003 it was dated enough to be used as a joke in the movie Old School. Will Ferrell gets wasted, announces “we’re going streaking,” and runs naked through the quad alone. When his soon-to-be ex-wife pulls up alongside him in a car he yells “everybody’s doing it.” It’s supposed to be a callback to college in the early nineties but even then streaking was on its way out.

You could argue that all of this dread about being seen naked is about sex, or shame about our bodies, or the fear of being looked at and judged. But it now extends to toddlers. In early-seventies Detroit, my sister and I ran around naked outside half the summer. I have the pictures to prove it. In 2021, my two-year-old cleared out half the people at a fountain in Greensboro, North Carolina, when he pulled off his own diaper

and ran around with the other kids, who were in bathing suits and wet clothes. I didn’t bother to put it back on and watched with fascination as the crowd slowly thinned. I doubt if anyone at that fountain was turned on by a two-year-old but they might have thought somebody else was. It’s easy to chalk this all up to phones that became ubiquitous in 2011. But the same thing happened at Orchard Beach in the Bronx in 2005, when my oldest kid was four and someone yelled at me to “put some clothes on that kid.”

But this growing discomfort doesn’t need strangers, or even cameras. It happens in our homes too. My parents weren’t nudists, but I saw my dad’s dick more times than I can count. You closed the door if you were taking a dump but would walk naked from the shower to get the clothes out of your dresser. A friend of mine told me recently that her husband puts his boxers back on the second they’re finished having sex. Not on his way to the kitchen. Immediately. They’ve been married fifteen years and have two kids. It isn’t the sex that embarrasses him — that already happened. It’s the twenty minutes afterward, when he can’t bear just being a naked man in a room.

Male lions have penises, but in the 2019 Disney remake of The Lion King, made using photorealistic CGI, the animators left them off. They showed the veins and muscles moving under the skin. They got the flies right. They showed the individual hairs in Mufasa’s mane and the dust coming off his paw. But someone somewhere decided that a family movie showing the penises of animals was obscene. In some ways this is just the natural progression of our discomfort with nudity being extended to animals. In Utah in 2015 a restaurant owner put up a copper statue of a bull that showed his penis. But after residents complained, and the city council threatened to revoke the restaurant’s license, the owner cut it off. A town in southern Utah surrounded by real cattle with real penises didn’t want to see one made of copper.

This is not entirely new. When Queen Victoria was given a plaster cast of David, a fig leaf was hung on it whenever she visited. Some of it, though, seems genuinely unprecedented. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment hung in the Sistine Chapel for more than twenty years before the genitals were painted over. Renaissance painters regularly showed Christ’s penis. And nobody ever thought to cover the animals.

So why has this all happened? We think of ourselves as the loosest, most liberated people in history — more open about sex, our bodies, and our mental health than any generation before us. But underneath lies a deep fear. Fear of being sued. Fear of pedophiles. Fear of being judged. Fear of someone you don’t want to fuck wanting to fuck you. The Puritans thought nakedness was a sin. Nobody says that anymore — a moral panic without the theology — but they’d recognize it just the same. It’s the same craven fear, dressed up as moral conviction. Some of it we’ve seen before — covering statues, showering in clothes. But some of it is genuinely new: treating a toddler who stripped off his diaper like a moral emergency, and protecting our fragile kids from naked lions.

Today, and in part for some good reasons, locker rooms are seen as the remnants of a toxic male culture. When Trump says something was just locker room talk we all know exactly what he means. We are a litigious nation, and some of these changes are the natural result of institutions simply trying to protect themselves from lawsuits. Others are about changing norms around acceptable male behavior, and about a slower realization — culminating in 1993 with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — that single-sex spaces were never actually asexual. But no school board or HR department ever dictated what a person does in their own bedroom.

And it wasn’t the police who told me back in 2005 to put clothes on my four-year-old. And it wasn’t the camera phones either. The fear had started twenty-five years earlier when two kids went missing — Etan Patz in New York City in 1979 and Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida in 1981. The next decade saw the faces of missing kids on more than five billion milk cartons. In 1983, one of the biggest moral panics in our nation’s history followed false allegations of sexual abuse involving 360 children at the McMartin preschool in Manhattan Beach, California. Over the last half a century fear of others has been steadily rising and the General Social Survey, a widely used measure of American attitudes, shows that the share of Americans who believed most people could be trusted fell from 46 percent in 1972 to 34 percent by 2018.

Although the fear of some pervert leering at my kid might explain why we no longer let our children run around naked, it doesn’t explain the fear of being naked in your own house. Your wife or kids aren’t leering at you. Mine might call me a fat fuck, or tell me I’ve got a disgusting rash on my ass. So what — I am a fat fuck, and I should probably do something about that rash. It’s not really about the rash. It’s that if you grew up looking at photoshopped, filtered, and retouched images of yourself and everyone else, you never built up a tolerance for the unedited version — you learned to see yourself in the third person, an object other people are always about to judge.

This much self-consciousness is not universal, though. In Finland the showers in the locker rooms are communal and being naked in the sauna is practically mandatory. After living there for three years, I experienced a kind of reverse culture shock when I went back to an American gym. Millennials stood facing the wall, struggling to slide their underwear on underneath towels tightly cinched around their waists. At first, I assumed they were simply threatened by my fourteen-inch cock. And yeah, I’m sure some of them were. Although, really, it’s not the eighteen inches that are so intimidating so much as the two-and-a-half-inch diameter. Picture an unusually long tuna can. So obviously, watching me trot around the locker room with that schlong swinging around can be a little unnerving. But that’s not really the point because even before I took it out and showed everyone, I’d noticed something odd: the only men who were ever naked were the old guys—over sixty. Everyone else acted as if getting caught naked in a locker room was like that time I showed up for a date and Chris Hansen jumped out of the bushes with a camera crew and a printout of my texts.

We think of ourselves as the most liberated people in history and we’re certainly more sexually explicit than ever before: OnlyFans, dick pics, Tinder, porn available anywhere, anytime. Most of the old rules about who we’re allowed to sleep with have fallen away, even as the rules surrounding power and consent have gotten stricter. And yet we still cannot take our clothes off in front of each other. We can stare at naked strangers on a screen all day, but seeing some naked guy blow-drying his balls three feet away now feels weird.

Naked bodies have become things we have sex with, or privately masturbate to on a screen. It’s why a naked toddler playing in a fountain clears out a park and why my girlfriend’s husband reaches for his boxers seconds after sex with her. When every naked body is an invitation, a temptation, or a threat, we lose the possibility of it meaning nothing at all: a body that’s just a body before anyone was watching.

Perhaps the strangest part about all of this, though, is how thoroughly Americans now agree that nobody should be naked in front of anyone else unless they are having sex or alone staring at a screen. Conservatives used to insist that bodies had to be covered because being naked was lewd. Progressives invoke another vocabulary: consent, objectification, vulnerability, and safety. Some of this new language addressed past abuses, but all of it presumes that a naked body is inherently sexual.

The last remnants of ordinary, nonsexual nudity are toddlers and old people—the two groups who used to be most clearly outside the sexual economy. But even that is disappearing. Toddlers are being covered up, and the old guys are dying out. My students have told me that seeing older men walking naked around their gyms is creepy. After living in Finland, however, it strikes me less as creepy and more as freedom. It’s the kind of freedom that comes from treating a naked body as unexceptional. Our discomfort says more about us than it does about them.

This is a symptom of a much deeper sickness. We haven’t lost the freedom to be naked. We’ve lost the freedom to stop performing. To be naked is to give up obsessive self-presentation and take off the mask—as Dylan sang, “even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.” It requires being comfortable in our own skin—in our ordinary, imperfect bodies—and being able to exist without constantly seeing ourselves through someone else’s eyes.

Strip off the sanctimony and the priggishness and what’s left is simple: we’ve become more anxious and self-conscious than ever before, and the thing we’re most afraid of is each other’s judgment. At some point, growing up requires being able to encounter a sagging nutsack without turning it into a moral emergency. The Finns and Icelanders still know the difference between nakedness and indecency. We used to, too.

***

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Listen/read here: An Anthropologist Walks Into a Bar and Asks, “Why Is This Joke Funny?”

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It’s Funny Because We Think It’s True

30 Second Science

10 Questions for Robert Lynch

Listen here: How What Makes You Laugh and Cringe Reveals Your Hidden Biases

I’m Robert Lynch, a biological anthropologist. I publish a new essay every 7–10 days, with audio narrated by me.

New here? Start with one of these.

The Status Series

Three essays about downward mobility, humiliation, teaching, credentials, and the strange ways people find out where they actually stand.

1. I Was Wearing a Tutu When I Started Bragging About My PhD

2. I Was a Scientist. Then I Became a Substitute Teacher

3. What an Eighth Grader Who Drew a Penis on My 510-Million-Year-Old Fossil Taught Me About Status

   ****Here is a link to an excellent video that Quillette made for my 3rd status essay:

Anthropology, Human Nature, and Academic Self-Deception

How Anthropology Lost Interest in the People It Was Founded to Understand — On Napoleon Chagnon, the American Anthropological Association, and what happens when a field built to understand human beings thinks it already knows everything about them.

Humor and the Book

These are the essays closest to the book itself: on the biology of laughter, American comedy, taboo, and why humor is one of the best ways human beings tell the truth without admitting that’s what they’re doing.

1. How America Lost Its Sense of Humor

2. Why Is Funny?

3. Chapter 3: What Is Funny?

Other Good Entry Points

The Ape in the Basement — An essay about masturbation, shame, privacy, and our determination to pretend we’re not animals.

The Forgotten Virtue — An essay about money, virtue, self-control, my mom and the old-fashioned idea that wanting less might be one of the last real forms of freedom.

Everyone Knows Soccer is Boring — An essay about why soccer is such a poorly designed sport, why it sucks to watch, and why so many people pretend it isn’t.

If any of this sounds interesting, subscribe. If you’ve already subscribed, thanks for reading. And if you know someone who’d like this kind of thing, send them one of the essays.

“He who only knows his own side of the case, knows little of that.” — John Stuart Mill

By Robert Lynch

I started graduate school in 2006. Like a lot of anthropology departments at the time, Rutgers was split between the biological anthropologists and cultural anthropologists. Although we were all supposedly in the same department and were required to take some of the same classes, the differences could not have been greater. It was like putting the math and the art departments together except they hated each other.

In anthropology, graduate students have to do field research, and your first few years are spent figuring out a topic and where to go. I had come to Rutgers to study under Robert Trivers, a well-known evolutionary biologist who died a few months ago (here is a memorial I wrote), and I decided to do mine in Iceland, analyzing centuries of genealogical and genetic records to test hypotheses based on Trivers’ theories on parental investment and sexual selection. What was the trade-off between having more children and investment in each one (i.e. quantity vs quality)? How many kids should parents have when mortality was high (e.g. after a massive volcano) vs when it was low? How did a parent’s wealth and resources predict whether they invested more in boys vs girls?

In our second year, all the graduate students had to present their hypotheses at something called the Dissertation Proposal Defense. It was a crucial moment in the process of getting your PhD in anthropology. All of the biological anthropologists presented research questions that they were planning to test. My wife, for example, was planning to go to Kenya to study whether male olive baboons recognize and invest in their own offspring using DNA and thousands of observations of baboon behavior in the wild. It turns out they can and do. Another student, Drew Gerkey, was proposing to spend two years studying cooperation among reindeer herders in Siberia, using public goods games where people decide how much to put into a shared pot that grows and gets split evenly among the group. It turns out that these herders are some of the most cooperative people ever studied.

I was already used to the massive differences between the two wings of anthropology, and all the jargon (e.g. embodied subjectivity, intersectionality, structural violence, hegemonic knowledge production), but was still surprised when the cultural anthropology students went up one after the other and explained what they were going to find. Not what they were hoping to understand, or learn, or test, or discover, but what they were going to find. Here is an excerpt from a typical defense that was read1 to us called “Portside Synaesthetics: Sensing the Politics of Place”:

“Architectural models and projections in Marseille are experienced as uncanny, rather than as communicative… Based on the ethnographic evidence, I argue that there is progressive potential in taking seriously the impacts material ‘objects’ have on human ‘subjects.’”

There were no questions. No hypotheses. No data to be collected, let alone analyzed. There were claims about arguments being “based on the ethnographic evidence,” but no evidence was ever cited. Conclusions were drawn from a series of assertions. It sounded like they were all already done and weren’t seeking to learn anything at all. I remember asking one why they were even bothering to go into the field at all.

I had been trained to always ask what’s the evidence? My advisor would never let me get away with any vague bullshit about “the research says” or “studies say” — and would immediately interrupt me. What studies? He wouldn’t even give a result of a paper without explaining exactly what was being measured. Instead of saying that an Implicit Association Test (IAT) was a measure of unconscious biases, he would spend eight minutes explaining exactly what was measured — e.g. how quickly people categorized words and pictures associated with black people and white people, using a keyboard, alongside words and pictures widely seen as good or bad, like horrible versus beautiful. It was exhausting, but it was a discipline I never forgot. He actually wanted to know the answer. In short, he was curious. The idea that people might hold different beliefs, and that data could adjudicate between these beliefs was as foreign to my cultural anthropology classmates as “examining semiotic posttextual theory” was to me.

The founding premise of anthropology was audacious: you could actually go and find out what humans are like, rather than simply assume it from the comfort of your own tiny corner of the world. Franz Boas, the discipline’s American founder, rejected the racial hierarchies earlier scholars had simply assumed instead of testing, and demanded that anthropologists spend years in the field before making any claims about a culture.

My postdoc advisor at the University of Missouri, Napoleon Chagnon, came straight out of that tradition. He spent more than a decade among the Yanomamö in the Venezuelan Amazon, testing fundamental questions about kinship, violence, and reproduction. He once told me he woke up in his hammock to find the village headman standing over him with an axe raised over his head ready to strike. Do more violent men have more wives and children? It turns out that, in Yanomamö villages at least, they do. I spent three years working and publishing with him, and in his day he was one of the most famous anthropologists alive — because that’s what anthropologists did in the 1960s and 70s. They asked the most interesting questions they could about humans and culture, then went and tried to answer them. Today, asking those same questions gets you labeled a racist or colonialist, and studying small-scale societies at all is dismissed as cultural voyeurism.

What are universities for? They used to be places where humans would search for truth. Karl Popper put it this way: “It is well worth searching for truth; and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them.” To my cultural anthropology classmates, people like Chagnon, Trivers, and Popper had it backwards. Truth wasn’t something you searched for — it was something you already knew, and the search itself, the demand for evidence, was just another tool for the powerful to oppress the powerless.

Carolyn Rouse is the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Earlier this year, a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter gave her the chance to rebut a report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences that named anthropology the single most extreme case of politicized scholarship among the disciplines it studied. The authors charged anthropology with “a widespread deterioration in scholarly standards grounded in a pervasive repudiation of ideals of objectivity together with a toxic intellectual climate in which reasonable dissent on politically charged topics is routinely suppressed and punished.” By the time of the interview, Quillette had already published the report almost in full.

Rather than reckon with it, most anthropologists doubled down on the very claims the report had flagged as most absurd. No criticism I could offer — not this essay, not the report itself — was as damning as simply letting the discipline’s most august defenders speak for themselves. Perhaps the most self-incriminating moment of the interview came when the AAA president was asked whether she regretted her organization’s decision to cancel a panel discussion called “Let’s Talk about Sex Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology” at its 2023 annual conference on the grounds that it would have harmed members’ “safety and dignity,” and that its premise contradicted “settled science.” Rouse said,

“All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually, that there are different types of ‘sexes’ and ‘genders.’ You can have XY and you present as a woman, you can have XXY — they’re all variations, genetic variations. So the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that.”

Rouse goes on to call the belief that biological sex is binary “nonsensical” — while admitting, in the next sentence, that she doesn’t actually know what people mean by the claim, or “why that matters to people so much,” calling the whole thing “very strange.”

What was strange, though, was that the president of a field built on the idea that people could be trained to understand beliefs they didn’t share, and make sense of worldviews unlike their own, couldn’t define the very position — one of the most widely held convictions in human history — she’d just dismissed as “nonsensical.”

Rouse’s response was the culmination of something that had been building in social science departments for the past two decades. In 2006, I was at a colloquium at Rutgers where the primatologist Ryne Palombit was giving a talk on infanticide in Chacma baboons, a lot of which was devoted to sex differences in baboon behavior. When it came time for questions, the chair of the department, a cultural anthropologist, raised his hand like someone about to blow a gaping hole through the whole talk, and asked, “What exactly do you mean by these so-called males and females?” The scientific answer is simple, and it’s got nothing to do with chromosomes.

Biological sex is defined by gamete size: males produce huge numbers of small, cheap sperm; females produce a small number of large, costly eggs. That asymmetry — called anisogamy — is what biologists use to tell males and females apart in every sexually reproducing species on Earth, and it drives the different evolutionary strategies of the two sexes. My PhD advisor, Robert Trivers, was at that colloquium and had worked out why this matters in 1972, in one of the most cited papers in biology. Explaining something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin, he famously wrote, “What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring.”

It all begins with these differing initial costs, which lead to a cascade of evolutionary effects, which often result in fundamentally different developmental and behavioral trajectories for the two sexes. Because males can produce sex cells (i.e. sperm) cheaply, their reproductive success is largely limited by their ability to attract mates; whereas females, who bear the far larger cost of pregnancy, are limited by their ability to obtain resources. Whether you call the two groups A and B, Big and Little, or Male and Female, this foundational cell-sized difference in gamete size has profound effects on evolution, morphology, and behavior, and it sets the stage for characteristic, and frequently stereotypical, differences between males and females.

But Rouse knows none of this. She doesn’t just fail to understand the position she’s dismissing — she doesn’t even know her own field’s actual definition of the thing she’s talking about. Still, even setting aside the biology — Rouse isn’t a scientist, and neither are most of her cultural anthropology colleagues — there’s a more fundamental problem. When her interviewer, Stephanie Lee, pointed out that a 2022 survey of forensic anthropologists found 42 percent agreed sex is binary and 56 percent disagreed (hardly evidence of “settled science”), Rouse dismissed the survey outright: “I don’t believe in opinion research,” adding that forensic anthropologists are mostly coroners who “haven’t had advanced schooling.” That’s a strange stance for someone whose entire professional training is built around taking people’s stated beliefs seriously, asking them what they think, and treating their answers as data. It’s also wrong. As Conor Friedersdorf pointed out in The Atlantic, the survey’s own published data showed 57.9 percent of respondents held a doctorate and another 25.7 percent held a master’s — only 20.5 percent worked in a coroner’s office at all.

Rouse’s utter lack of curiosity about what other people think or believe was starting to look less like a series of bad answers and more like a personality trait. When Lee asked her about Joseph Henrich — the one anthropologist among the report’s authors, and the closest thing the field has to a Jared Diamond or Steven Pinker — Rouse said she’d never heard of him. Even after Lee mentioned Henrich for a second time — referencing the unreleased internal report on anthropology he was said to have written — Rouse called him one of “these people who are philosophers or whatever,” then retreated into her comfort zone and started riffing on the patriarchy, ancient Greek slavery, the oppression of women, and what social justice really means. She wasn’t even listening.

Rouse’s colleague at Princeton, Agustín Fuentes, took a different approach. Instead of ignoring the report, he attacked it. What he left out of his Chronicle op-ed, which called the report “politely worded McCarthyism,” was his own role in canceling the AAA panel on sex — a cancellation he describes as something that just happened. But it didn’t just happen. Fuentes was one of three anthropologists who wrote the letter that got the AAA to cancel the panel, arguing that “the overprescription of the idea of a biological binary for something like sex not only ignores the evidence, but goes against the most basic empirical underpinnings of our field.”

At another point, Lee asks Rouse whether she agrees with a previous AAA president, Akhil Gupta, who said in his 2021 presidential address that anthropology’s “political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism.” Rouse responds:

“Anthropologists love to disagree with one another, so I’m not gonna say I agree or disagree with Akhil… I’ve read it, I’ve quoted from it. But just because something’s quoted, there’s a whole context. There’s so much more than that. This is the problem with absolutist free speech. We talk in contexts. Speech is never free. Speech is always connected to something else.”

Not only does Rouse refuse to say whether she agrees with Gupta, she refuses to accept that a previous AAA president’s own public words even count as evidence of what he believes. This is Rouse’s get out of jail free card. If quoting a public statement made in a named presidential address and asking whether someone agrees with it is “the problem with absolutist free speech,” then no quote, from anyone, in any interview, can ever be fairly asked about. That’s not a nuanced point about context — it’s a universal solvent that dissolves the possibility of accountability itself. Does this mean we can never believe what people say? What’s the point of saying anything, including Rouse herself even answering these questions, if it can always be waved away as “lacking context” the moment it becomes inconvenient?

What is the point of a university? Of a field like anthropology? Are they supposed to be places grounded in humility and curiosity, where we try to understand the world and the people in it? Or are they just political action committees that already know the answers and only need to advocate for justice? Universities used to be places people went to find answers, not to confirm the ones they already thought they knew. The people who trained me were some of the most curious people I have ever known. They were people like Robert Trivers, whose observations of pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his Cambridge apartment window led to deep insights into parental investment and sexual selection — and why “male” and “female” were never about chromosomes. They were people like Napoleon Chagnon, who at age 26 crawled through a low gap in a palisade wall — built that way to expose anyone entering — into a shabono of “burly, naked, sweaty, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows,” and lived with them for more than a decade.

Anthropologists never used to need to be reminded that the core of their discipline was curiosity. The Vanderbilt report accused them of losing it. An hour with its president was all the confirmation anyone needed.

My mother was a visiting nurse, and my father, who died twelve years ago, taught high school history. She is eighty-three years old and has two and a half million dollars in the bank. None of this is about the money. For my mother, thrift isn’t a means to an end or an identity. She isn’t running the numbers or turning thrift into a self-improvement project. She has no real philosophy, and couldn’t articulate one if she did. It’s closer to a reflex—the visceral reaction of someone who can’t stand to watch a plate of food go in the trash.

As a kid, I thought my parents were idiots. Why would two working adults spend twenty minutes scrounging around in a ditch or risk getting carjacked at a gas station in Detroit? And it wasn’t that they were all that cheap. They may have spent a lot of time arguing about which gas station didn’t charge for air, but they’d drop seven thousand dollars on a family trip to Europe every summer.

But what I didn’t understand until I was much older was that I’d had it backwards. It wasn’t a calculation—it was a discipline. And it leaked into every aspect of their lives: what they threw away, what they let stay broken, how they treated the people around them. What I’d mistaken for stinginess was a practice. There’s a word for it, though we mostly use it now to mean cheap. The word is frugality—and we’ve forgotten it was ever a virtue at all. I caught the tail end of it, just before our culture stopped treating wastefulness as a vice and before anyone thought there was such a thing as wanting too much.

My grandparents would have recognized it instantly. My children have no idea it exists. My father was born in Detroit during the Depression. My mother’s parents were Mennonites who grew up in Ukraine during the famine of 1921 that killed as many as a million people. My Oma told us stories of eating grass and the straw from the roofs of their houses, during a civil war. They survived in part because fellow Mennonites in America and Canada sent food. A few years later they emigrated to Canada.

When my mom was little, her opa would ask her if she was the biggest one in her class. Not the smartest or the prettiest. The biggest. My parents were raised by people who had starved—for whom waste was unthinkable, and saving was never only about yourself, because giving meant survival. Waste was a sin.

Today the word “sin” survives mostly in advertising—”sinfully delicious,” “wickedly good,” “guilt-free,” the last one a faint vestige of a lost world where there was still something to feel guilty about. Although the word carried poison—the hellfire, the terrified children, the way it was used to damn people for who they loved—throwing it out cost us the whole moral vocabulary that came with it: sin, virtue, vice, grace.

Trying to talk about how to live the only life you get—what’s worth wanting, how to spend it—without these words is like describing a painting when half the colors have no names. You can point and say “blueish” or “kind of dark,” but you can’t say navy, or the color of a rusted-out fender. Without them you can still feel that something’s not right—that you have everything and somehow it isn’t enough—but you can’t put your finger on it, or even tell whether it’s a real problem or just a passing mood.

Sin was abused. It was used to declare war on pleasure, to make ordinary desires feel dirty, to let scolds feel righteous. And a lot of what got called sin was just being alive: a good meal, a day off when you weren’t really sick, dancing, sex, a joke that went too far. Every age has its own list of forbidden pleasures and taboos. The church had one. We have ours—we’ve just stopped calling it sin and dropped the God part. Not every indulgence is a vice, and not every denied pleasure a virtue—the miser starving himself to die rich is no closer to a life well lived than the glutton. But the poison and the purpose were tangled together and in throwing out the one, we lost the other.

The function sin served was older and deeper than anyone who used it understood. We decided the story was bullshit and assumed that meant it wasn’t doing anything. But practices that survive for centuries often carry an implicit wisdom. They solve problems the people performing them can’t see and couldn’t have invented on their own. This is what Edmund Burke saw in inherited custom — and what anthropologists mean when they call a cultural practice an adaptation: an order no one designed and no one fully understands, carried forward simply because the people who kept it out-competed those who didn’t. Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek made the same case about markets: the knowledge a price encodes is dispersed across millions of people and can’t be figured out by any single individual. A practice can rest on a myth and still tell us something true. The talking snake was nonsense; what it revealed about us was not. It’s what Chesterton meant by the fence in the field: don’t tear it down before you know why it was built. To reject something simply because you don’t like the story attached to it, without asking what it was doing, isn’t boldness. It’s arrogance—a failure of humility that assumes that because you can’t see the reason, there isn’t one.

So what was sin actually doing? It reminded you that you were a divided creature—that part of you wanted things you shouldn’t want and would lie to you about it—and that becoming a decent person meant struggling against that part instead of just giving in to it. Lose the words and you lose the struggle. The divided self is still there but you stop seeing it. Without the fight, there’s no character to develop—nothing left to shape you but your own appetites. It’s all id and no superego—a self to satisfy instead of one to get over.

All of this reflects a much bigger shift. The old moral language assumed the self was a problem to be worked on; the modern one treats it as an oracle: live your truth, trust your gut, you’re perfect exactly as you are. And once the self is sovereign, there’s no place left to stand from which wasting something, or wanting too much, could register as a failing at all. It’s just a choice.

My mother doesn’t understand any of this. If you tried to explain the divided self, or the implicit wisdom of an ancient cultural practice, she’d get irritated, say “oh, Robert,” and go back to wrapping the heel of the bread and putting it in the freezer. Last Thanksgiving I watched my sister scrape half a roast chicken into the trash. My mother called it a sin. She wasn’t moralizing. There was no thought behind it at all—the words just came out of her, the way “ouch” comes out before you’ve decided if anything hurts.

This is exactly how a good adaptation works. You don’t need to understand why waste is wrong any more than you need to understand why you flinch at a snake. Understanding was never the point. My mother is carrying instructions written by people who ate grass to stay alive, and she has no idea they’re there. She just knows you don’t throw food in the garbage.

We forgot that frugality was once a virtue the same way we forgot what sin was for. Both were ways of telling ourselves that we are imperfect, divided creatures, and that appetite is to be mastered, not indulged. It’s something a self that sees no dirt on its own side of the street can’t bear to hear.

My AA sponsor used to start all his shares the same way: “I’m Gill, and I’m a grateful alcoholic—because today I have a choice about whether to drink. Before, I didn’t choose. I just drank.” Gill was expressing a truth that humanity’s wisdom traditions have discovered across the ages—from Buddhists in India to Stoics in Greece to Christian monks in the Egyptian desert: the paradox of freedom. The freedom to satisfy every desire is its own kind of bondage, because a self that can’t say no to anything isn’t free; it’s just at the mercy of whatever it happens to want next. Viktor Frankl rediscovered this truth in Auschwitz, where, stripped of every other freedom, he found that freedom lies in the gap between stimulus and response. It is in the space between wanting something and reaching for it that we recover the power to choose.

Modern society has turned this logic on its head by thinking we’re most free when nothing stands in the way of our impulses. But a self with no gap between impulse and act isn’t free; it just does the next thing its animal appetite demands. This is the oldest trap in the business. Satisfying a desire doesn’t get rid of it; it feeds it. Desire begets desire. All the donuts in the world will never be enough.

Philosophers from Aristotle to the Stoics and Aquinas organized a life around virtue and asked what a good life was; we have organized ours around freedom and ask only what we want. They feared that a people without limits would become tyrants or hedonists. But the truth was smaller and more pathetic. We became consumers—reaching for the next thing, driven by appetites we mistake for choices.

So we keep reaching. But we’re no longer chasing pleasure; we’re trying to fill something. Waste isn’t bad because it’s inefficient. It’s bad because of what it reveals: the residue of a self trying to fill a hole, in a culture that has engineered the friction out of wanting. A click on Amazon, a tap on DoorDash, one more scroll—each shrinking the gap where you might have sat with the hole long enough to ask why it was there to begin with. But the hole was never an appetite. It was the place where meaning, a sense of purpose, and what your life was for were supposed to go. We’ve been trying to fill it with stuff because we lost not just the words for what belongs there but the whole moral order they described. You can see it in what we consume and what we throw away. My grandparents ate grass and the straw off their roofs to stay alive. Two generations later, the average American throws out more than three hundred pounds of food a year.

When the self becomes the highest authority, when nothing stands between wanting and getting, and everything is permitted, the shared moral order dissolves. We lose any agreed-upon sense of better and worse, and can’t even talk about how to live a good life without feeling embarrassed. This is nihilism—the collapse of any belief that something might be true, or that one way of living might be better than any other. The culture’s answer has been to wave the problem away: follow your passion, do what you love, and let the hard parts take care of themselves. But that misunderstands what life is. Meaning isn’t waiting with a margarita in the hot tub once all the dissatisfaction and pain are gone. It’s inside them. The struggle isn’t the obstacle to a good life. It is the good life.

You can put that struggle off, or paper it over by buying something every time you feel restless, irritable, and discontent so that you never quite have to feel it. But you can’t escape it, and if you keep putting it off, you never grow. (Imagine how good a person I would be if self-knowledge were enough.) You will always be ruled by your appetite, wanting what you want the instant you want it, unable to bear even the smallest gap between wanting and having. And you will never be free. Effort is what separates living a life from consuming one. It’s the price of meaning—and when you remove it from everything that matters, you don’t get a better life. You get one that isn’t worth living.

This is why so much of what we buy ends up in the trash. We were never really after the stuff. We mistook getting more for meaning, but were really after distraction—any way to put off the struggle. The thing itself, once it was ours, was just one more thing to throw away.

Nihilism produces narcissism, because it removes every standard you could be measured against. If nobody is better and nobody is worse, then we’re perfect exactly as we are. Frugality is the practice of admitting that we’re not. It tells us that sometimes what we want isn’t good for us, and that some cravings are better left unfed. It’s the rejection of the consumer’s answer to this sense of emptiness—an itch that only gets worse the more you scratch it.

But spending less is still not a virtue. The miser hoards out of greed, the man saving to retire at forty does so out of ambition, and the minimalist shows off his bare apartment out of vanity. All three spend little and waste less, but they’re as ruled by the self as any Amazon shopper—still wanting.

Real frugality—what the word used to mean, before we turned it into a synonym for cheapness—is what all three of them are missing. It’s thrift without ego. Not being stingy to add to your pile, not saving so you can quit your shitty job, not driving a 12-year-old Honda so people will admire your values. Frugality is a practice. You don’t throw half a chicken in the garbage, because waste is a sin. Because what you’ve been given is a blessing that was never only yours to throw away. It is the virtue we forgot. It’s what turns the small daily acts—the cans, the cheap gas, the heel of the bread—into a way of living.

The food you scrape into the trash was grown by someone, on land that could have fed someone, and it ends up in a landfill someone else has to live beside. Nothing you waste disappears—it just becomes someone else’s problem. This is what we forgot: frugality was never about you. It’s about everyone else—the recognition that you are not alone in the world, that you are one of eight billion, living, as my father used to say, in your own small corner of the universe.

On Ben Franklin’s list of 13 virtues, frugality was number 5: “waste nothing, but to do good to others or yourself.” Number 13 was humility, which many, including Franklin, saw as the governing virtue because it’s the one that keeps the others honest. Without it order can become tyranny, temperance joyless asceticism, and conviction zealotry. Hitler was courageous, and the Jacobins thought themselves just. Humility reminds us that we are not the measure of all things.

But you can’t practice humility directly. There’s no drill called “being humble.” That’s the problem with most of the virtues: they’re hard to get your arms around. How do you practice courage while filing your tax returns? Wisdom while doing the dishes? Generosity while mowing the lawn? The occasions come rarely, and never when you’re ready for them. It’s hard to schedule an hour of moderation.

Frugality is different. Its occasions are everywhere, woven into the most ordinary parts of the day. Every time you stand at the gas station, or fill a grocery cart, or scrape a plate, the choice is right in front of you: waste or don’t, spend or don’t. You don’t have to wait for the moment. It comes to you, a dozen times a day.

And practice, it turns out, is everything—because knowing a thing and doing it are almost entirely unrelated. I can tell you in great detail how to hit a backhand: get the racket back early, turn your shoulders, watch the ball all the way onto the strings. But in the middle of a point I rarely do any of it. What could be simpler than watching the ball? I’ve told myself to do this thousands of times. And still I find myself looking at my racket, where I want to hit it, my opponent, or something happening on the court next to me.

Our deep capacity for self-deception also often severs the relationship between knowing and doing. Fifteen years ago, I came up with what felt like an ingenious solution to my heroin addiction: I would lock the drugs in a timed safe and wean myself off. The first time I set the timer for six hours and spent the last ninety minutes staring at it, snorted my ration, and then reset it for ten hours. Three hours later I smashed the safe open with a hammer. No one understood my addiction better than I did. I understood everything except how to stop.

Self-knowledge didn’t get me sober. Going to meetings, making amends, and helping others did. Doing those things ten thousand times, until the doing took root somewhere in the unconscious parts of me that act on their own, without asking permission.

Frugality works the same way. It isn’t a philosophy you study and adopt; it’s a practice you repeat until it stops being something you do and becomes something you are. My mother never decided to be frugal. It wormed its way into her long before she could question it, put there by people who had no choice—and it’s still there, running underneath everything, quietly doing its good work whether she thinks about it or not.

But like the other virtues, frugality can be hijacked by the very self it was meant to discipline. Like meditation—a practice meant to dissolve the self, repackaged as a way to improve it—it can get enlisted to serve the ego. Frugality is meditation for the marketplace. What protects both of these practices is the one virtue the self can’t conscript. Every other virtue can be hijacked by pride—you can be proud of your courage, your discipline, your generosity, and they survive, just more stuff the ego admires about itself. Humility is the exception. The moment you’re proud of it, it’s gone. It is the one virtue that can’t be conscripted, because to claim it is to lose it.

Humility is what turns thrift into frugality. It’s the difference between hoarding for yourself and saving for everyone else. Thrift only becomes frugality when it stops being about you. Humility tells us we are not gods, but frugality allows us to practice it. It’s what self-forgetting looks like at the gas pump, on Amazon, and in the thousand small moments when desire disguises itself as need.

Frugality resists several sins at once—greed’s hunger for more, gluttony’s worship of appetite, pride’s need for display, sloth’s love of convenience—which is why a culture built on all four can no longer see it as a virtue at all. We can still see budgeting as prudence and minimalism as taste, but we’ve lost the moral core: frugality as a way of decentering the self, of admitting that you aren’t the only thing that matters, of leaving the last slice of pizza for someone else. We didn’t lose the virtue by escaping poverty or getting richer. We lost it by building a culture where the self is sovereign and getting what you want is the highest good—because a culture organized around endlessly feeding the self can’t recognize a virtue whose entire purpose is to feed it less.

The founders would have recognized the problem immediately. They saw restraint of the passions as the central human struggle, and understood that freedom was not getting whatever you wanted, but was the capacity to govern yourself. What separated human beings from the other animals was the ability to subordinate appetite to reason. It was an ancient idea that they had inherited. Milton had put it a century before them: “He who reigns within himself, and rules passions, desires, and fears, is more a King.” The man who cannot govern himself, he warned, is “subject himself to anarchy within”—ill-fit to govern anyone else. Madison made the same case for nations in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” A government has to first be strong enough to control the governed, he wrote, and then “obliged to control itself”—the same restraint we ask of a person, asked of a country.

Today we have done the opposite: built a culture that calls the ungoverned man free and the disciplined one repressed, that treats appetite as authenticity and restraint as cowardice—and then acts surprised by the leaders it produces. But these leaders are only symptoms. The rot is the sovereign self we’ve spent decades celebrating: a self that answers to nothing but its own desires.

My aunt Betty was ten years old when she left Ukraine. She never married and never had children of her own, but she had nine nieces and nephews. She spent most of her life bottling ketchup at the Heinz plant in Leamington, Ontario. She lived in a one-bedroom house and often ate cornflakes for dinner. A few days after Christmas every year — what we called Aunt Betty’s Christmas —she had everyone over, cramming all the families into that little house. Every family went home with the same two gifts: a big bottle of Heinz ketchup and a five-gallon jug of Tide. No wrapping. No plastic, nothing shiny, nothing you’d throw in the trash by February. When she died, she left more than a million dollars, divided among some twenty-five grand-nieces and grand-nephews.

I caught the tail end of it. I freeze the heel of the bread and get upset when food gets thrown in the trash. But I’m the watered-down version. My grandparents ate grass to stay alive; I was raised with coupons but a refrigerator that was always full; my kids think whatever you want shows up on the porch the next day.

In the end, you are what you do, not what you think or believe. Repeated across a lifetime, these small acts harden into what we used to call character. My mother knows none of this, and if she ever read this essay, she’d quit somewhere around the word “nihilism.” She didn’t send us to the movies with our own popcorn, give us powdered milk, or jam the nearly empty bag of chips into our lunchboxes rather than waste a Ziploc because she wanted to embarrass us, or because she’d thought about appetite or stewardship or the bondage of the self. She did it because waste is a sin. Because there are hot dogs in the freezer.

“Julia Roberts told reporters today that her marriage to Lyle Lovett has been over for some time. The key moment, she said, came when she realized that she was Julia Roberts [a photograph of a beautiful Julia Roberts appears], and that she was married to Lyle Lovett [a goofy asymmetrical Lyle Lovett appears]” — Norm Macdonald

I think farting in my dog’s face is funny. My wife doesn’t. But she doesn’t just think it’s not funny; it really upsets her. To settle the matter, we asked her friend, Abbey, whose sense of humor we both respect. Abbey sided with me, but said that farting in a baby’s face is even funnier, which upset my wife even more.

If farting in a baby’s or dog’s face strikes you as the humor of a twelve-year-old boy, fair enough. That’s the point. A theory of humor can explain why we laugh, but it cannot predict what any given person will find funny. That depends on temperament, experience, tolerance for risk, and what a person is willing to see, admit, or recognize as true. As comedy writer Jesse Fox put it, “The sense of what is funny is so subjective—so completely built into your persona—that it feels objective.”

This is why a disagreement over a joke feels so personal. It’s not like preferring the Beatles to the Rolling Stones; it feels more like an argument about reality. Less a difference in taste than a mistake in perception. A joke is either funny or it isn’t. You get it or you don’t. Because what we find funny is so central to our identity, our sense of humor becomes a battle over what is obvious, what may be acknowledged, and what kind of person you are willing to be. Good jokes bring into focus something we had noticed, suspected, or dimly understood but had not yet put into words. The experience feels less like invention than recognition. As Simpsons writer George Meyer put it, appreciating humor is “like seeing in two dimensions and then opening the other eye or looking through a View-Master and suddenly seeing in three.”

This does not mean that whatever gets a laugh is objectively true or even defensible. People laugh at all kinds of things—stereotypes, paranoia, and flat-out stupidity. But humor is often strongest when it captures something the audience resonates with, even if uncomfortably so. The truth might be observational, as in the familiar “you ever notice” structure of stand-up. Or it might be social—exposing the hypocrisies, status games and taboos everyone pretends not to notice: that even Mr. Rogers has a favorite porn category, or that Bill Clinton has a bent dick. Or it might be psychological, revealing the vanities and the gap between who we want to be and the animals we actually are.

This chapter examines the folk wisdom that things are funny because they are true—or more precisely, because they express something we recognize, however reluctantly, as true.

Laughter Is a Signal

Why do we laugh so much more in the company of others? If laughter were merely a private reward for recognizing patterns, it would be a silent, internal affair. But it isn’t. It’s loud, contagious, and social. Where the previous chapter examined humor as a private cognitive phenomenon, here we turn to its social function. In a social species like ours, the same mechanism that helps an individual update their model of the world can also help establish a shared perception.

While many animal species laugh—over 60 as we saw in Chapter 1—human beings are the only ones that can fake it. Biologists call it non-Duchenne laughter. And as opposed to Duchenne laughter, which is involuntary and honest, non-Duchenne is tactical. It is deliberate and carefully timed; and it evolved because we are the only species with language. In a world where deceiving others has obvious survival and reproductive advantages, language enhances our ability to manipulate beliefs and influence other people’s behavior to our benefit—whether by lying about resources, alliances, or why the basement smells like bleach. It gives us the ability to influence each other not just through force; but through stories, symbols, and imagination. Try convincing a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising eternal paradise or warning of a mythical curse and see what happens. Tell the right story to a human, however—and they will give you all of their arable land.

In other words, once we have language, we have bullshit; and once you have bullshit, you need a way to tell who’s full of it. Biologists call it an “honest signal”; and for a slick-tongued species of tricksters, the best we’ve got is Duchenne laughter. Less corruptible than speech and harder to counterfeit, it works as a backchannel of communication—showing the feeling inside, unfiltered by words. Studies suggest that few people can voluntarily produce crow’s feet in their eyes—the tell-tale sign of Duchenne laughter—without feeling genuine joy; that it is easy to identify and that we respond more positively to it than the fake stuff. In a species that depends so heavily on cooperation, Duchenne laughter serves as a reliable way to say “I’m with you”—a non-verbal cue that builds trust and social cohesion.

But laughter doesn’t merely allow people to signal agreement; it allows them to signal agreement selectively, under a cloak of ambiguity. A joke works like a shibboleth or a coded message, allowing insiders to recognize each other while keeping outsiders in the dark. In this way humor became a powerful way of sorting allies from outsiders, cooperators from free riders, and genuine recognition from empty performance.

Anthropologists call it the encryption model of humor, and it explains one of humor’s widest social functions. Jokes depend on shared knowledge: like the German Enigma machine of World War II, they only make sense to those with the key. To get a joke, you need enough background knowledge to decode it. When people laugh at the same thing, they are signaling that they have the same information and preferences, marking themselves as members of the same in-group: “You had to be there.” “If you know, you know.” In this sense, all jokes are inside jokes.

Research by Thomas Flamson and Clark Barrett showed that the more encrypted a joke is—the less that is stated explicitly—the funnier we find it. Ambiguity is the point. It allows us to transmit sensitive information—about loyalties, taboos, and perceived truths—while preserving plausible deniability for everyone involved.

Whether we’re making fun of someone else, ourselves, or the situation, we laugh because in some hidden, half-said sort of way, the joke forces us to connect the dots already in our heads. It is an unspoken reality suddenly made obvious—but only to those laughing. Much of human communication works this way, depending on shared experience, tacit knowledge, and things left unsaid: “Want to come up for a drink?” But jokes make this structure especially visible. Part of the pleasure is that not everyone gets them. This is why comedy engineered to offend no one so often feels broad, obvious, and boring: “Working hard or hardly working?”

It’s also why being offended by a joke is often the same as not getting the joke — the listener hears the transgression, but can’t decode the message. Sarah Silverman’s joke, “I was raped by my doctor — which is bittersweet for a Jewish girl,” works only if you understand the old stereotype of the Jewish girl whose family dreams of her marrying a doctor. Explaining the stereotype would ruin the joke; Silverman assumes the audience has the key. Without it, all you hear is that she was raped—and what’s funny about that? At the opposite end of the spectrum is comedy that requires no key at all, like America’s Funniest Home Videos, which explains both its popularity and why it’s predictable stupidity: kid fell off his bike again, but don’t worry, nobody got hurt.

Not every joke is for everyone and part of humor’s power lies in the fact that it is selective. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes good sense. Human social life depends to an extraordinary degree on cooperation among unrelated individuals, a problem Robert Trivers famously addressed in his 1971 paper “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” Trivers proposed that cooperation among non-relatives could evolve when the same individuals interacted repeatedly, making it advantageous to help those who were likely to help in return while avoiding cheaters who took benefits without reciprocating—i.e. “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The theory offered an elegant solution to one of social life’s central problems: how to identify trustworthy partners, avoid free riders, and keep the whole system from collapsing.

Although humor does not solve cooperation by itself, it is part of this social machinery: a low-cost way to test whether others share the same assumptions, loyalties, and moral boundaries. By allowing people to communicate recognition and shared understanding in coded form, jokes help solve the problem of identifying trustworthy partners. Laughter is not just a reaction to the joke itself; it’s evidence that the signal was received, the code was cracked, and that, at least for a moment, we’re on the same team. Nothing is objectively funny in itself, and as much as it pains me to say it, not even farting in a dog’s face. What lands depends on the person—on their temperament, their experience, and on what they are prepared to recognize as true.

This is why the loss of shared laughter matters. As we will see in Part Two, the recent collapse in happiness across the United States and much of the Anglosphere is largely a crisis of loneliness and declining trust—two problems humor is unusually well equipped to answer.

Humor Reveals What We Secretly Think Is True

Humor works by exposing the gap between our concepts and our perceptions: the friction between the world as we frame it and the world as it is directly experienced. If laughter evolved to help us navigate a social world full of ambiguity, deception, cooperation, and inference, then what people laugh at may reveal something about what they believe.

Although Flamson and Barrett had shown that jokes function as encrypted signals of shared knowledge, the idea that things are funny because we think they are true had never been tested. To move beyond what people claimed to believe and study what they actually felt, I brought Rutgers students into the lab to watch a half-hour HBO special by Bill Burr, whose jokes played on stereotypes about gender and race. While they watched, I filmed their reactions, coding for Duchenne smiles, the involuntary facial movements of genuine laughter. Afterward, participants completed explicit survey questions and Implicit Association Tests (IATs) to measure their underlying preferences regarding gender and race. A clear pattern emerged: laughter was content-specific. Participants didn’t just laugh at “good” jokes; they laughed when the punchline validated an intuition they already held. What people found funny was not just an abstract matter of taste; it was a map of their hidden assumptions about the world.

This doesn’t mean that whatever gets a laugh is objectively true. Jokes aren’t truth detectors. The “truth” humor reveals is recognition—a felt agreement between the punchline and some half-conscious sense of how things really are. Sometimes that truth is just an observation; sometimes it exposes a hypocrisy, a taboo, or some bullshit hiding in plain sight that people are pretending not to see, and sometimes it’s just about reframing the way we are choosing to look at something.

What is “true” about farting in a baby’s face? Perhaps only that most of the outrage belongs to the adults. The baby isn’t thinking, How disrespectful. We are. It’s funny because it momentarily makes our own moral seriousness look ridiculous. Or maybe I’m just an asshole who likes farting in babies’ faces. And, well, even that’s kind of funny too.

The “truth” humor reveals doesn’t have to be profound. One of the headlines I submitted to the Onion read “Man brings herpes home to his wife, mistakenly believing that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” The truth there is simple: what happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas. The herpes you got from a hooker comes home with you.

This tension between how we think about the world and raw experience lies at the heart of nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s theory of humor. Schopenhauer argued that laughter arises when we notice a discrepancy between our concepts and our perceptions—when our abstract conceptualization of something is suddenly “corrected” by the thing itself. He described humor as:

“The victory of knowledge of perception over thought... For perception is the original kind of knowledge inseparable from animal nature.”

This is why the subjective interpretation of a joke is critical: a violation only exists if there is a point of view to be violated. When I fart in my dog’s face, Ham may appear alarmed, saddened or confused, but she is definitely not enjoying the joke with me. She lacks the conceptual framework of adult manners and social status (e.g. how infantile or inappropriate it is for a fifty-five-year-old man to bend over and fart in the face of a Golden Retriever), so for her, there is no violation— just the raw, sensory reality of the smell. It’s either stupid or funny; but if you’re laughing, it’s probably because on some level you’ve recognized that it’s stupid too. And whatever Ham is feeling about it, just like the baby, she’s definitely not “insulted.”

Comedians so often begin with some version of “you ever notice...?” because they first have to get us to see the world as they do. Chris Rock says this ability to get the audience to adopt your view of the world is what separates the best comedians from everyone else. As he puts it, a lot of comics have great jokes that fail for one simple reason: “the audience does not understand the premise.” Before the audience can laugh, they have to see the situation the same way the comedian does. As we saw in the previous chapter, humor is logic-chomping; it works by forcing a shift in perspective. But surprise is not enough. What gives the incongruity its force is that the new angle feels truer than the old one. Take Homer Simpson’s toast: “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” It forces us to admit a messy, contradictory truth that we usually try to keep separate. The laugh comes when that shift clarifies something we were already ready to see.

As Erving Goffman argued, social life is performance, and humor works by exposing the sweaty guy backstage trying to hold the whole thing together. This is why comedy is about stripping down rather than elevating. The Greeks understood this and for them, comedy was a literal unmasking. In The Frogs, Aristophanes has a god and a slave switch roles, mocking the fragile hierarchies that structure society. Their comedies used masks, but those masks didn’t just hide—they revealed. By exaggerating, flipping, and distorting, they exposed the ridiculousness of all the different roles we play.

We’ve All Got a Little Jeffrey Dahmer in Us

Trivers’s theory begins with a simple but unsettling idea: natural selection did not design minds to perceive objective truth. That is not evolution’s goal; reproduction is. The mind was shaped less to understand the world than to navigate it effectively in pursuit of the kinds of grubby rewards you would expect of apes forged in Darwinian competition: power, sex, status, and resources. In pursuit of such ends, our lofty moral language is often just a self-flattering public relations department—the mask we wear to hide our baser motives from the world and, more importantly, from ourselves.

Self-deception evolved in the evolutionary arms race between liars and lie detectors. Trivers’ key insight was that we deceive ourselves so that we can better deceive others. A conscious liar often gives himself away through what he called “leakage”—shifty eyes or a strained voice. But if the liar believes his own lies, those avenues of detection become harder to exploit, allowing lies to roll off the tongue with the same fluency as the truth. This internal filter protects us from admitting to beliefs that might expose weakness, lower status, or trigger shame (e.g. ninety-five percent of professors think they are in the top half of their field). It allows us to insist that our motives are pure, our marriages are sacred, and our politics are about justice rather than status.

But if self-deception works by keeping certain thoughts, motives, and perceptions safely out of view, comedy works by yanking them into focus. As the philosopher Alan Watts once put it, “Humor is the awareness that you yourself inwardly are very incongruous with what you appear to be outwardly.” Chris Rock’s joke that “a man is as faithful as his options” plays on the tension between grandiose theories about marriage as a sacrament and the messy reality that it’s a lot easier to be faithful if nobody wants to fuck you. He’s not trying to convince you; he’s asking if you’ve noticed what nobody is supposed to mention. If humor is one way of revealing truth, then those practiced at hiding uncomfortable truths from themselves should have the hardest time laughing.

The study testing this hypothesis started with an observation. I used to end all of my anthropology talks with a related headline from The Onion, and noticed that while the biological anthropologists often laughed, the cultural anthropologists usually sat in grim silence. College campuses these days are some of the most inhibited places in America— filled with some very smart people who are desperately afraid of being misunderstood. Humor dies in this kind of risk-averse environment where people feel watched and ambiguity is dangerous. At first, I dismissed the cultural anthropologists as humorless prigs. But the better question was whether their failure to laugh revealed something more basic: an inability, or unwillingness, to recognize the truths that a joke smuggles into the room.

In 2012, Trivers and I brought this question into the lab. Participants first completed a self-deception questionnaire—which asked them to admit or deny minor impulses like “I sometimes feel irritated when I don’t get my own way” and uncomfortable taboos like “Do you have sexual fantasies?” Once again we filmed them while they watched stand-up, using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to measure their Duchenne smiles—the involuntary facial movements of genuine laughter. The results were staggering. The data produced a correlation of r = -0.47—a statistical relationship that is virtually unheard of in the noisy world of social science research. To put it in perspective, this relationship is nearly as strong as the correlation between a person’s height and their weight. The more you lie to yourself, the less you laugh.

This helps explain why comedians are so attuned to seeing through our bullshit. Larry Wilde, author of Great Comedians Talk About Comedy, wrote that the key characteristic shared by the comedians he interviewed was “extraordinary self-awareness.” That makes sense. If humor depends on seeing the gap between who we pretend to be and who we are, then comedians are likely to be unusually good at noticing the evasions, hypocrisies, and self-flattering lies that keep that gap hidden.

Laughter reassures others because it signals that we are not entirely trapped inside our own self-presentation. Studies find that laughing with another person predicts greater intimacy, positive emotion, and enjoyment in later encounters and recent work on self-deprecating humor shows that people who laugh at their own mistakes are judged as warmer, more competent, and more authentic. People who can laugh at themselves are telling us something important: they are still in contact with reality and can see how they are being perceived.

This helps to explain why we are often unnerved by public figures who lack a sense of humor. Leslie Savan once speculated that Donald Trump was likely highly self-deceptive because he is almost never seen laughing. Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, noted that his father drilled into him that “laughing is to make yourself vulnerable, it’s to let down your guard... and that can’t happen.” Where self-deception narrows the field of vision, humor splits it open. It lets you hold more than one perspective at once. Crothers wrote:

“The pleasure of humor is of a complex kind... To enjoy humor one must have at least two ideas. There must be two trains of thought going at full speed in opposite directions, so that there may be a collision.”

It is what the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’—an ability to keep in mind two incompatible truths which circle one another without resolution. Shakespeare, he argued, forced his audience to hold both the positive and negative aspects of a character in view, denying them the sort of facile judgment most of us make all the time. This also might explain why people who laugh less are seen as less trustworthy. Laughter is a social signal of warmth and shared understanding. Failing to laugh withholds a signal that reassures others that you see what they see.

But humor does more than reveal what we know individually; it reveals that everyone else knows it too. Consider the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu. In December 1989, the Romanian dictator was giving a typical televised speech when a single person yelled “Boo” before the cameras could cut the live feed. Within four days, the “living god” was executed. That single jeer created “common knowledge,” doing what the little boy who said the emperor was naked had done.

Political discourse today is often a protective shell—a competition to see who can be the first to turn any public event into an excuse to talk about themselves. Humor breaks this cycle. This is why authoritarians are so afraid of comedians: they don’t just reveal the truth, they reveal that everyone else knows it too.

Tell the Truth, but Tell It Slant

My sister, a high school counselor, once had a parent come to her looking for special treatment for her daughter. The mother claimed the girl suffered from “test anxiety.” My sister replied, “Yeah…my daughter doesn’t know the answers either.” It was blunt and arguably mean, but it landed as a joke rather than an insult because it was self-deprecating. Hiding behind a euphemism like “test anxiety” was the mother’s way to avoid acknowledging that her daughter might not be that smart or didn’t study hard enough. And my sister admitting her own daughters’ struggles was a way to soften that harsh truth. Without a sense of humor, the conflict ends in either servility or cruelty.

Humor is often better at getting people to see another side of an issue than by making the same argument with evidence—facts, figures, etc... Facts matter, but people are not passive truth-receiving machines. We are strategic, defensive, status-conscious primates with a genius for motivated reasoning—using our intelligence to defend our preferred narratives—and a talent for self-flattery. We do not like being told, by someone else, what is obvious about us. Decades of research on self-persuasion and cognitive dissonance have shown that we are more open to changing our minds when we feel that we arrived at the insight ourselves. Someone else may have planted the seed, but we rarely experience that outside influence as the real cause of our change. I know that I am an alcoholic, but even after twelve years sober, I still get defensive if someone else calls me one. But when I laugh at Homer Simpson making a toast “to alcohol: the cause of and solution to, all of life’s problems,” nobody is accusing me. The joke lets me arrive there on my own.

By delivering an encrypted punchline, a good joke lets the listener make the connection. The comic leads us to the stream, but we have to decide whether to cross. This is why jokes die when they are decoded. As E.B. White wrote, “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. [We] understand it better but the frog dies in the process.” The explanation robs the listener of the pleasure of discovery and takes the half-buried recognition and turns it into a lecture. Or even worse, it makes explicit what the joke needs to keep partly hidden. The point is to experience the recognition without revealing, or perhaps even admitting to ourselves, why something feels true.

Ronald Reagan’s line that “everyone in favor of abortion has already been born” and George Carlin’s question, “Why is it that most of the people who are against abortion are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” favor different views of abortion, but they both work the same way rhetorically. They each expose a hidden motive or frame the audience may not have fully admitted to itself. The power of a joke is that you don’t have to admit anything to anyone to laugh. A joke’s wisdom is ambiguous; but it’s also more accessible.

Some truths are easier to hear when they arrive indirectly. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Where a sermon tells you what to think, a joke lets you entertain a thought before you drop into a defensive crouch. It doesn’t batter down resistance so much as slip around it. By the time your ego realizes it has been challenged, you may already have laughed.

Humor is also a powerful antidote to self-deception. In the summer of 2012, I came up with an “ingenious” solution to my heroin addiction: I would lock my drugs in a timed safe and gradually teach myself moderation. I was close to achieving every addict’s fantasy—controlling and enjoying drugs without being addicted. For alcoholics this is the dream of becoming a “social drinker”; for heroin users it’s called “chipping”—using just enough to get high but not so much that you go through withdrawal if you can’t get more. I set the timer for six hours. After spending the final hour and a half staring at it, I snorted the two bags I had allotted myself, locked up the rest, and extended the timer to ten hours. Three and a half hours later, I smashed the safe to pieces with a hammer and snorted six more bags. The absurdity of my plan had eluded me in the fog of addiction. But once I saw my fantasy literally smashed to pieces in front of me, I laughed. Humor did what sermons and resolutions couldn’t: it made the absurdity impossible to ignore.

When Truth Needs Cover

Sometimes, humor highlights obvious truths that still need to arrive indirectly. Brandon Vestal has a bit about the absurdity of ads pretending that tequila makes you smooth: “Nothing smooth has ever happened to anybody after they drank tequila... You don’t wear a $3,000 suit if you know you’re going to be drinking tequila. I think all tequila should come with a 99-cent gas station poncho.” The joke punctures the fantasy without scolding. It doesn’t merely restate what’s true; it lets us examine the fantasy from a less guarded angle. It cuts through the social performance and reveals when the emperor has no clothes.

Sometimes, however, the truth that is exposed is hard to state directly at all. Direct speech invites punishment, argument, or denial. Humor provides cover. It allows the teller to hide behind the joke and the audience to hide inside the laugh—it was just a joke. Often this is the only way to communicate awkward or disturbing truths. I have a bit in my stand-up that plays on this: “Like everyone else I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to survive the first twenty-four hours in prison. My plan is to walk straight up to the biggest, baddest fucker in there and start sucking his dick.” The joke swaps the familiar tough-guy fantasy of establishing dominance on your first day in prison with the reality that I am a pussy whose best move is strategic submission. Stated directly, it would be depressing and humiliating. As a joke, it becomes sayable and sneaks an ugly truth into the open.

This is one reason court jesters had a limited license to mock power. Their insights were coded in humor, which made dangerous criticism seem less offensive and confrontational. Beatrice Otto’s history of court jesters shows that fools across cultures often survived by saying dangerous things indirectly, while Ralph Lerner describes the fool’s task as provoking the powerful to question their convictions “preferably while avoiding a beating.” Will Somer, Henry VIII’s fool, once told the cash-strapped king that his problem was all the “Frauditors,” “Conveighers,” and “Deceivers” around him—a pun on auditors, surveyors, and receivers. The joke is an accusation of corruption disguised as wordplay. Jesters couldn’t just say anything but through satire and subtle insinuations, they could point out flaws, poor decisions, or hypocrisies in the king’s actions without as much fear of reprisal. Like comedians today, it could be dangerous to tell the truth to the king, but it was just as dangerous for the king to ignore what the jester was saying.

Not every truth needs humor because it’s obscene or embarrassing. Some truths require a frame shift we would never make on our own. Larry David asks “Who is more free? The married man in America or the single guy in communist China?” Freedom is supposed to be an abstract political concept: China is supposed to be unfree and America free. But by introducing marriage, the comparison changes, and so does our sense of what freedom means. A lecture about the burdens of domestic life and the difference between formal political liberty and everyday personal constraint would just sound like a man complaining about his wife. The joke gets there sideways and does it fast. Humor can move us between frames before our defenses have time to organize.

There’s an old Soviet joke about a dissident handing out blank leaflets in a public square. When the police arrest him and demand to know what the papers mean, he replies: “What’s there to say? It’s so obvious.” Jokes rarely tell us anything new. They reveal what people already suspect but are afraid to say aloud. Things are funny not because they are objectively true, but because they express something we are already prepared, however reluctantly, to recognize.

We are too vain, too tribal, and too self-deceived to face our own absurdity directly. Humor provides the mask that allows the truth to show its face. It lets us notice what we already suspect without immediately defending ourselves against it. When we can no longer laugh at ourselves, and when comedians are no longer willing to risk offending us, that small act of recognition disappears and there’s nobody left to break the spell. Before humor becomes a democratic force in public life, it begins as something smaller and stranger: a flash of shared recognition and a glimmer of truth.

It’s “the beautiful game,” and for most of my adult life I’ve been patiently informed, usually by someone who calls it fútbol, that I simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it. But they’re wrong. Soccer isn’t beautiful. It’s boring—and it has nothing to do with sophistication.

The Better Team Loses Almost Half the Time

One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. If the favorite wins 80 percent of the time, that’s a high-skill sport: the better side reliably prevails, and the remaining 20 percent is luck. If the favorite wins 55 percent of the time, you’re watching something closer to a coin flip.

By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favorite fails to win 45 percent of the time—higher than baseball (44.1%), hockey (41.4%), basketball (36.5%), and football (36.4%). Compare that to tennis, where over five sets the favorite loses only about 21 percent of the time. In other words, play long enough and skill wins out. In an average ninety-minute soccer match, the better team is only slightly more likely to win than the better player is in a single hand of poker. Both are basically coin flips.

The main thing that drives the randomness is low event count. A basketball game, for example, has around a hundred possessions per team. A tennis match has hundreds of points. But a soccer match can turn on a single shot hitting the crossbar, one bad call, or a ball bouncing off someone’s shin. There’s simply not enough scoring for skill to drown out luck.

But take a look at the order of those upset numbers, because it’s not random. The more a sport leaves to chance, the more boring it is to watch—because the whole pleasure of sports is watching effort and skill get rewarded, and a coin flip rewards nothing. Soccer sits at the very top, but baseball is right behind it, which is exactly why baseball is also so boring—three hours of it, and then, oops, the ball clears the wall by a foot. The worse team wins again.

You saw it this month. Spain—European champions, ninety times the population—controlled the ball for 70 percent of the first half and took twenty-seven shots at Cape Verde, who were playing in their first World Cup ever, and could not score once. Cape Verde, a nation the size of Guilford County, North Carolina, then drew all three of their group games and advanced to the knockout round. If this were a one-off, it’d be a great underdog story.

But it happens all the time. In 2018, Iceland, population 350,000, tied Argentina. If tennis worked this way, nobody would ever win more than one Grand Slam, and there’d be a new group of people you’d never heard of in the quarterfinals every time. Which is to say, with soccer, most of what you’re watching is luck. It’s like watching professional roulette on television.

It Bans the One Thing Humans Are Good At

The most basic problem with soccer is even simpler than the fact that it’s mostly luck. The sport’s founding rule is that you can use every part of your body except the one humans are best at. Homo sapiens are tool users. Using our hands is one of the basic traits that separate us from the other apes—we’re extraordinarily good at it, and our entire hunting strategy once depended on it. Our primary evolutionary edge is throwing things. No other animal can hurl a rock or spear with anything like our speed and accuracy. Our legs and feet evolved mainly for running. Soccer takes away the single greatest advantage of an ape that stood up on two legs partly to free its hands. It would be a great sport for a species that hunted by kicking rocks at its prey.

It’s not that dribbling, passing, and shooting with your feet is unimpressive. It’s that it’s impressive the way a dog walking on its hind legs is impressive: the miracle is that it can be done at all, not that this is the highest use of the organism. It would be like a version of basketball where you’re only allowed to dribble with your head. The best players would be some of the best athletes on earth—and they’d be demonstrating nothing except how much human talent can be squandered by arbitrarily banning the one thing we’re good at, provided you force enough children to practice.

Soccer Is All Middle

“Soccer! Fast kicking, low scoring, and ties? You bet!” —The Simpsons

All good sports are stories. They’re built out of discrete units—at-bats, downs, points, possessions—each with a beginning and an end: something is attempted, something is resolved, and then you get another. The historian Michael Oriard, an NFL lineman before he was an academic, put it simply: American sports have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Soccer just drones on—pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again—for ninety minutes, and almost nothing ever finishes. It’s all middle.

It’s not that nothing happens; it’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.

And on the rare occasion that someone does score, there’s a good chance it gets called back because an attacker’s shoulder was eighteen inches too far forward. The offside rule is almost perfectly engineered to erase the only moment worth watching.

The problem isn’t just that scoring is rare. Hockey is low-scoring too. The problem is that effort and reward have almost nothing to do with each other. In basketball, a good pick-and-roll gets you an open shot. In football, a well-executed drive moves the chains. In soccer, twenty beautiful passes end with the ball rolled gently back to the goalkeeper.

But the worst part—the thing that should disqualify soccer as a sport at all—is that a huge share of games end in a tie. Nobody wins. It’s the most anti-competitive outcome in sports—two hours of intense effort that fails to produce a winner—and in soccer it’s not a fluke, it’s routine. More than a quarter of World Cup matches end in a draw, and in some leagues it approaches forty percent. Imagine a movie that just stops at ninety minutes, wherever the plot happens to be— sometimes at the ending, sometimes not — because that’s the rule.

Most matches are decided by a single goal, and many by none at all. One goal is the whole game. And goals almost never come (only about one shot in ten finds the net), and the team that scores first wins two-thirds of the time. Put these statistics together and the incentives are perverse. Giving up a goal is catastrophic, and the chance of scoring isn’t worth the risk of getting caught upfield when the other team counterattacks. So from the opening whistle the smart play isn’t to attack—it’s to play not to lose. Hold your shape, keep everyone back, pass it sideways, and wait for a mistake. Every other sport rewards you for trying to score. It’s boring by design.

Methinks the Beautiful Game Doth Protest Too Much

The more a sport has to be intellectualized, the more boring it is to watch. And with the exception of baseball—the world’s second most boring sport—no sport is intellectualized like soccer. Tell a soccer fan how bored you are at 0-0 with five minutes left and you’ll be told you don’t understand the buildup, the spacing, the shape, the press, the movement off the ball. Sometimes that’s real—sometimes the spacing is genuinely impressive. But most of the time it means nothing happened and you’re being asked to admire it anyway. It’s a status move: the less obvious the entertainment, the more refined you get to feel for claiming to see it. It’s wine culture applied to sports: the fewer the pleasures available to the ordinary senses, the more elaborate the vocabulary required to appreciate them.

A soccer fan will almost certainly tell you it’s the scarcity of goals that makes each one so precious. The endurance, the geometry, the flow. The global passion is unmatched. It’s all a rationalization for the fact that nothing happened. And if you still don’t see it, that’s not the game’s fault—it’s yours, because you’re an unrefined American buffoon.

Notice that the elite magazines never write about the actual games. Every World Cup, the Times and the Atlantic and the rest fill up with gorgeous, soaring essays about the tournament—and almost none of them are about the tournament. They’re about the Senegalese and Scottish fans singing together, the Texas town that adopted the Algerian team, the multicultural miracle, the world united for a month. It’s often moving but it’s always a tell. Nobody bloviates for two thousand words about the hidden genius of a zero-zero tie. When a sport is genuinely thrilling, the writing is about the sport. When it isn’t, the writing gets very spiritual fast—suddenly it’s about mortality and belonging and the human capacity for grace, the prose swelling to fill the silence where the excitement was supposed to be. When the most moving thing about your sport is the friendliness of the parking lot, the crowd isn’t the story. It’s an alibi.

Baseball does the same thing. It’s another slow, boring sport that someone will explain is really a meditation on democracy, on America, on fathers and sons, or the passage of time. It’s like an NPR host walking into a bowling alley and discovering the real America.

And most of the time you can’t even tell who’s good. Turn the sound off and my mother could pick Michael Jordan out in a minute—he’s the guy taking over the game in the final minutes. Put her in front of a soccer match and she’d have no idea that Lionel Messi was even on the field. No one ever has to explain why a buzzer-beater, or a receiver dragging one foot in bounds in the corner of the end zone under double coverage, is exciting. It’s obvious.

***

I get that arguing that soccer is boring is both obvious and a little tedious. But watching soccer sucks, and everyone has quietly agreed to pretend it doesn’t. None of this is a criticism of the players. Soccer players are probably some of the best athletes on the planet. FIFA counts 265 million players worldwide, and only about 0.04 percent of them—one in 2,300—ever sign a professional contract of any kind. The fraction who reach the top five European leagues is around 0.001 percent. One in a hundred thousand. No height requirement, no equipment—just any kid who can afford a ball, and the planet sorts them down to a few hundred. Compare this to basketball, where height is such an enormous filter that one widely cited estimate put the odds of a seven-foot American man playing in the NBA at 17 percent.

But that’s why it’s so tragic. Soccer takes the largest, most brutally filtered athletic talent pool on earth—and wastes it by paying players millions of dollars to prance around in circles for ninety minutes and try to score once with their feet. Soccer was never designed to be watched. It just grew—cheap, simple, fun to play, and carried around the globe by an empire that owned a quarter of it. By the time anyone thought to ask whether it was fun to watch, it was already everywhere.

Soccer’s rules were written down in England in 1863, before any of the good sports existed. By the time someone built a game where you could use your hands, where scoring was common and luck was rare, soccer already had a half-century head start and most of the world’s children. It isn’t popular because it’s the best. It’s popular because it got there first.

I could recite all the tedious, oft-repeated ways to make soccer less boring—widen the goals, shrink the field, add hockey-style power plays, lose the goalkeepers, and give one player per side (the Reaper) a metal pole he may use to strike an opponent in the face no more than five times per game, provided he isn’t offside. But I don’t have time to solve all of soccer’s problems.

Soccer’s greatest trick is convincing a billion people that frustration is suspense, that scarcity is beauty, and that being bored stiff means you’ve finally become sophisticated.

I brought in a 510-million-year-old trilobite I’d split out of Cambrian shale in a desert four hours north of Las Vegas to show a class of eighth graders. I passed it around the room and explained what it was: an ancient arthropod called Bristolia, from the same branch of the tree of life as every insect and crab alive today, that lived in a warm shallow sea that used to cover Nevada when the continent sat near the equator. It predated the dinosaurs by 250 million years. It was older than fish, older than plants on land, older than backbones. It had what was probably the first real compound eyes that ever evolved on Earth — and when I split the shale, I was the first thing that had looked at it since it died. A few kids looked at it with interest but most passed it along the way you’d pass along a co-worker’s vacation photos. At the end of the day I picked it up off my desk to put it in my bag and saw that one of them had drawn a penis on it in permanent marker. Two balls, long shaft, black Sharpie. It wasn’t going to come off.

I’d spent a week in 110-degree heat with a pry bar and a rock hammer. When it comes apart and there’s something inside, it’s a religious experience. I spent two decades studying evolution and most of it was theory. This was the imprint of the animal in my hand. Eighteen months ago I was a scientist; now I was the guy whose stuff you drew on.

Everyone wants to matter. My great-aunt Laura, born in 1896, used to boast about being listed in Who’s Who. The book was several inches thick, full of names nobody remembers, and she was an entry on page something or other. At age ten, I thought that sounded pretty important. She was doing the same thing humans have always done. Thirty thousand years ago people put their hands on the walls of caves and blew red pigment around them. I was here. Now we count likes, refresh followers, and check if anyone responded to our hilarious comment at 2 a.m.

For a while I thought I mattered too. Ten years ago I was a Wall Street trader with a PhD in evolutionary anthropology who had trained under Robert Trivers, one of the most important evolutionary thinkers since Darwin. Now I substitute teach for $160 a day in North Carolina where nobody gives a shit about my credentials. Full-time teachers walk past me and look through me the way you don’t look at people who clean the bathrooms.

Status is funny though. You can be Norm in Cheers one minute and the guy cleaning up someone else’s half-eaten hot dog the next. Anthropologists who study status hierarchies in small-scale societies measure at least four types—relational (how many important relationships you have), material (how much stuff you have), somatic (literally how strong you are; we measure grip strength), and what we call noetic (the stuff you know that other people don’t). You can rank high on one and low on another.

I might not care about your golf handicap, but I’ll find a way to mention I bench 280, which is pathetic at the gym I go to. Last week I lost 2-6, 0-6 in tennis to a guy I should have beaten. I threw my racket four times. What kept me from walking off the court were the women playing doubles next to us, who had noticed how unhinged I’d become. One of them was my neighbor.

Status is also zero-sum. In capitalism the pie can grow — there’s more money in the world today than there used to be. But status is fixed. Even in Star Trek‘s post-scarcity utopia, where they’ve abolished money and ended hunger, not everyone gets into Starfleet Academy. Like Harvard, if everyone got in, it wouldn’t mean anything.

Of course, it’s hardly a revolutionary insight that people buy things to show off, or that getting into Princeton is prestigious. What’s harder to admit is how much of what we say and do is reflexively playing the same game. It’s easy to spot the asshole with the Ferrari or Rolex but harder to acknowledge the NPR tote bag, the pronouns in your email signature, the dog you rescued, or the copy of Anna Karenina on your coffee table. Or the “we made fools of ourselves after finishing a bottle of mezcal at this place in Oaxaca a friend kept saying was the real deal — my Spanish absolutely fell apart” anecdote you’ve been telling for two years. The Atlantic article you casually mention at dinner. The lifted F-150 and prison tats you need for your job as assistant manager at the T-Mobile store. Me wearing a Dartmouth sweatshirt at the airport because it’s comfortable, while secretly hoping I get asked who went there. Or mentioning that I trained under Robert Trivers, which if you’re counting is now the third time I’ve mentioned him in this essay.

But playing the status game isn’t even the worst part. It’s handing my worth over to people and circumstances I don’t control. As my AA sponsor says, “What other people think of me is none of my business.” Of course I can’t just mind my own business and I am constantly measuring myself against others. I once Googled a guy from high school who I hadn’t seen or thought about in thirty years. He was a hedge fund manager in London, probably worth hundreds of millions. It ruined my week.

Comparing yourself to others doesn’t just surrender your happiness to strangers, it locks you into a contest you can never win and makes other people’s wins feel like your losses. Whatever you measure yourself by will be the thing that eventually breaks you. Chase money and you’ll never have enough; bank on being smart and you’ll spend your life afraid of when you’re not; trade on your looks and you will lose, because everyone gets old.

My mother is eighty-three. She was raised by a Mennonite farmer who used to say that if you wanted to know who was in charge, start something. Her whole life has been figuring out where she ranks—above her 350-pound sister who had meningitis as a baby and a low IQ for the rest of her life but below the families who go to Birmingham First Methodist, who she’s sure look at her like she’s holding a pitchfork. She watches Judge Judy religiously and loves it when Judy sizes up some fuck-up, asks how many kids he has and by how many women and how he’s not paying a dime for any of them. Do you see “stupid” written on my forehead? Put your hand down. Get a job. Get two. There’s always someone in that courtroom below her.

My mom has two and a half million dollars but thinks that she’s broke. She shops for the cheapest chicken breasts, eats cornflakes for dinner, and lives on less than thirty thousand dollars a year. She’s tougher than I will ever be and has never once asked me for anything. When an ice storm took out the power on her street, the neighbors all moved to hotels, stayed with relatives or bought generators. My mother sat in a chair in the front room under a blanket, no heat, no television, and waited it out. My sister and I didn’t find out until months later. As I write this she is sitting in that same chair with Judy blaring in the background, terrified that someone from Birmingham First will notice that she isn’t reading the New York Times. This summer she will move into the Mennonite home in Canada near where she grew up.

The game never ends until you do, and even then the people who won die in a slightly better nursing home with a fancier breathing tube than the people who lost. My dad ran track at the University of Michigan and died in a bed having his diaper changed by a kid he’d once flunked.

We all end up where my father did. You can wait for it all to be taken, or you can begin handing it over now. Let go or be dragged—or, as the Buddhists put it, die before you die. The self you’ve been defending—the identity, the position, the proof that you matter—was always going to be taken from you. It’s the joke that takes a lifetime to get: none of it was ever as serious as it felt.

How do I feel about my own status decline? It depends on the day, sometimes the hour. Sometimes it’s simmering resentment and another fight with a principal who’s trying to tell me how to run my class. Other times I reframe it as just another of life’s challenges. Bitter or better, my sponsor used to say. I’m learning the same lesson alcohol taught me: the thing you’re most afraid to lose is the thing keeping you in prison. And sometimes the loss does something I never expected: it loosens the knot between who I am and what I do, and frees me up to be the other things I might have forgotten—father, neighbor, son, brother, friend. Not better, not worse. Except, of course, I’m better. Don’t you know who I am.

I laugh when Dwight weeps with joy as Michael promotes him from 'Assistant to the Regional Manager' to 'Assistant Regional Manager' on The Office — an example I borrowed from Paul Bloom, whose essay on status inspired me to write this series. But last month I filed a lawsuit against the University of North Carolina for not hiring me into a job that pays slightly more than subbing. And I spend part of each day fantasizing about caving in some smug cultural anthropologist’s face with a shovel.

I’m writing a book. I think it’s good. My agent thinks it’s good too. But I’m noticing that the I am someone feeling I used to hang on my CV is migrating to the book. These days I introduce myself as a substitute teacher, no preamble, no Trivers, no Wall Street—but part of me is still deciding whether to mention the book and wondering what I’ll cling to next if it doesn’t sell. I’m watching the show and I’m in it.

In the classroom I rank below the lunch ladies. Among my college friends I’m the guy who called the cops on himself after smoking crack for two days straight. With my neighbors I’m the guy who thinks bullies build character and that kids should get off their screens, go outside, and break an arm now and then. To my own kids I’m the funniest man alive, which mostly just tells you they’re seven and eleven. On the tennis court I’m a full-grown man who still throws his racket. In every one of those rooms, some part of me is still working it. I’m writing a book.

The kid who drew the penis wasn’t thinking about me, or even the fossil. That would have required noticing me. He was thirteen, performing for the other kids. In every room someone is going to be the punchline, and your job is making sure it isn’t you. When I was in middle school I made fun of the nerds so that no one would notice I was one. My friends and I spray-painted LIBBY SPANKS THE MONKEY on the bridge everyone passed under on the way to school after Libby got caught beating off with a girl’s panties at a party I wasn’t invited to. He didn’t come back to school for a week. I’d like to tell you that I grew out of it. I didn’t. I just got better at hiding it—the Dartmouth sweatshirt, the book I keep mentioning, the casual I trained under Trivers.

My decline is hardly unique. It’s the oldest story there is—the cab drivers in New York who used to be surgeons in Uzbekistan, and soon enough the rest of us, when the machines turn out to be better at our jobs than we are. If it hasn’t come for you yet, don’t worry—it’s waiting, patient, colostomy bag in hand.

That summer I was at my swim club and ran into the kid who’d drawn the penis on my fossil. He was thrilled to see me. He said I was his favorite teacher, that he loved my class. Then spent the next hour teaching my six-year-old how to dive.

This is the third in a series on status and downward mobility. The first is “I was wearing a Tutu when I Started Bragging about my PhD” and the second one is called “I was a scientist then I became a Substitute Teacher.”

Teaching is a grubby profession. The romantic fantasy — Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society or Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds — gets beaten out of you pretty quickly. Kids tell you to fuck off in the hallway and a lesson you spent three hours preparing can go down the toilet in ten minutes because half the class is checked out and the other half is staring at a phone hidden under their desk.

I’ve taught for over 20 years in universities, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. The most common response I hear from teachers to “How’s it going?” is “Living the dream.” It’s a dumb cliché but it conveys how actual teachers — especially in working-class public schools — view their jobs. The prime directive lurches unpredictably between save the kids and fuck the kids within the same hour.

I am not the first person to experience social mobility in reverse. But there’s a sobering humility to it when it happens to you — to someone who had always assumed they were on the way up. I have a PhD in biological anthropology and trained under Robert Trivers, arguably the greatest evolutionary thinker since Darwin. Before academia, I traded derivatives on Wall Street. I’ve published in journals with names impressive enough to impress people who are impressed by that kind of thing. After several postdocs and hundreds of failed applications for tenure-track jobs, I taught high school chemistry. Then my certification expired. A PhD, it turns out, is not enough to teach public high school. So now I substitute teach for $160 a day in North Carolina. If teaching is grubby, subbing is grubbier.

The job does have its own rewards, though, and they’re not the ones you might expect. Substitute teaching provides a bird’s-eye view of childhood — it’s thirteen years of human development in microcosm. Where the classroom teacher knows her own kids intimately and barely registers the rest of the building, the sub sees the whole show. We bounce between gym and art. We hang out with kindergarteners trying to hug us on Monday, seventh-graders trying to make fun of us on Tuesday, and twelfth-graders trying to ignore us on Friday. You don’t need to watch 7 Up. You see it every week.

Watch fourth-graders hit the playground at recess sometime. They don’t walk — they burst out the door like caged animals released into their natural habitat. Within seconds, games appear out of nowhere and the rules invent themselves. Someone is “it,” though no one is entirely sure who or what the game is. Give second-graders pool noodles in gym and they know exactly what to do: hit each other.

If you watch closely, the way you might watch a recently discovered tribe in the Amazon, you notice they are doing something that most adults have forgotten how to do. They don’t need to be told to be in the moment. They’re consumed by it. The game is everything. Adults see life as chess — something to be studied, mastered, won. But children know it’s really Tetris — something to be experienced. The pieces arrive unannounced, they fall faster than expected, and the game never stops long enough for you to figure it out.

Last week I subbed for a band teacher at a tough middle school. On the way in I saw two fights in the parking lot. A girl told the principal to go fuck himself and walked away like nothing happened. I got to the classroom and set up my laptop. I had work to do — applications to fill out, a chapter to edit, emails to answer. But then the band kids started showing up. They had a concert coming up in three days and the playlist on the whiteboard.

When they started “My Favorite Things,” I dropped everything. A girl with braces played the flute: raindrops on roses. Five girls on clarinets came in after: whiskers on kittens. The French horns came in on girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, then the trumpets on snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes. Finally the whole band: when the dog bites, when the bee stings, when I’m feeling sad. I sat there mesmerized, while a room full of twelve-year-olds played The Sound of Music all the way through.

The best and worst part of subbing is the same thing: you don’t get to know any of the kids. You don’t know their names and you’re not coming back tomorrow. And after about fourth grade, the kids know it too. The sub occupies the lowest rung in the school. The lunch ladies get more respect. Last month a kid told me I looked like Palm Beach Pete — an Epstein doppelgänger I looked up later. You haven’t experienced status decline until a sixth-grader has decided that you’re a joke while his buddies giggle behind him. We get $160 a day for the freedom of not caring whether they learn anything, remember our names or spend the whole day on TikTok. Their regular teacher doesn’t get that freedom and pays for ours.

The rules and rhythms that let kids switch from the hallway, the cafeteria, or a rough morning at home into doing math are fragile. They depend on a classroom culture that can take weeks to build. The same kid plays on his phone in a lazy biology teacher’s class and then enthusiastically discusses Emerson in the master English teacher’s room across the hall. The substitute is the natural enemy of classroom culture. We don’t know which kid can take a joke, which kid is one bad look away from crying, and which kid might throw a chair. By the time we figure it out, the day’s over. The sub’s motto is the same as Homer Simpson’s: “That’s a problem for future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy.” The regular teacher has to rebuild whatever the sub destroyed in a day.

I’ve spent years pretending I didn’t care about status, which is the main way people who care about status manage the shame of caring about it. Everyone wants to matter somewhere. To be taken seriously. To not be the worst parent in the neighborhood. To not be the least interesting person in the room. Losing the status you pretended not to care about is embarrassing, maddening, and a daily reminder that you cared a lot more than you admitted. But it has also taught me something a career in academia never could have. When you’re consumed by how you appear to others, you can’t actually see them. When you stop caring, they come into focus. A girl with braces playing the flute. Second-graders hitting each other with pool noodles until somebody starts crying. A room full of twelve-year-olds playing a song from The Sound of Music even though no one’s grading them.

Then the bell rings. There’s an empty bag of Doritos and a half eaten hot dog smeared on the floor. In the hallway, the middle-schoolers walk past me like I’m not there.

Living the dream.

When I introduced myself to the fourth-graders that morning, I said, “Hi, I’m Dr. Lynch.” Not Mr. Lynch. Not the substitute. Doctor.

Later, a kid approached me holding up his thumb and asked, “Dr. Lynch, is this broken?” I told him I had a PhD and started to mutter something about how I wasn’t a medical doctor. I was an academic doctor — a biological anthropologist to be exact. He stared at me blankly. I told him it wasn’t broken.

Substitute teaching pays one hundred sixty dollars a day in North Carolina. The good assignments are the ones where the teacher leaves a worksheet, the kids are mostly on their laptops or phones — because who cares when you’re a sub — and you can quietly write or apply for jobs.

Fourth graders are usually a pretty good gig, but they’re not always the easiest. They’re sweet and they burst onto the playground at recess as if released into their natural habitat, making games out of nothing, with rules that invent themselves. They still haven’t figured out that having a substitute is a license to screw around and they keep wanting to talk to you and asking questions. School hasn’t beaten the curiosity out of them yet and this is all great unless you’re trying to finish a book proposal.

At lunch I learned that there would be an assembly in the afternoon. Perfect. I’d hide in the empty classroom and write.

Before going any further, I should mention that I hate dancing. It’s probably my single biggest fear. I get tight, self-conscious, and start to sweat. I imagine that everyone is looking at me, which they probably are, because I look like a fool and suck at it.

I also hate forced goofiness. Some people are naturally up for anything. Footloose and fancy-free. My motto in life is closer to Groucho Marx’s — “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” My wife bought me a shirt that says, “You’re not my mom. You can’t tell me what to do.” Before you have even finished stating your opinion, I am forming a rebuttal — “That’s not quite right.” In improv terms, I am the opposite of a yes-and-er. I am a no-but-er.

After lunch, just as I was opening my laptop to write, a teacher came in to tell me that I needed to come to the gym. The teachers were playing a volleyball game. “I don’t really play volleyball,” I said, and then added, as though this clarified something important, “I play tennis.”

Outside the gym, another fourth-grade teacher who I hadn’t met yet was wearing a blue tutu. She handed one to me and suggested that when our team was announced, the three of us should run out onto the gym floor like we were fly fishing — casting and reeling imaginary rods.

I looked behind me for a way to get to the parking lot, drive home, and tell my wife that I didn’t have time to sub anymore because I was now a professional writer who had 187 followers on Substack — five of whom paid. But by then the hallway had filled with children, the principal was standing near the door, and the other teachers were already grinning with the earnestness of joiners who thought this would be a great time for everyone.

This was around the time I decided to start bragging about my PhD.

While the fourth-grade teacher I had just met was adjusting her tutu, she asked if I had subbed there before. “Not really,” I said. “I’m mostly writing now.” She made the mistake of nodding politely, which I took as a follow-up question. “I’m actually writing a book,” I added, just to make sure she didn’t think I was journaling or something. I was about to explain that I was also a scientist, that I had a PhD in biological anthropology — not cultural anthropology, which is something else entirely, not even a science really — when someone shouted over the sound system, “Fourth-grade teachers!”

The three of us ran into the gym in our tutus, pretending to fish while four hundred hysterical elementary school kids screamed from the bleachers. I was still wearing my temporary sticker that said SUBSTITUTE, with no name on it. I scanned the first-grade section for my next-door neighbor’s daughter, Poppie, hoping she was sick.

The only other man, the gym teacher, served first. The ball came directly at me. I lunged and missed. I mean missed. Like an airball but with my arm.

I really wished I had brought my tennis bag. Not because it would have helped but because I could have placed it close enough to the court for everyone to know it was mine. Six racquets! A man doesn’t carry six fucking racquets in a Wimbledon bag unless he’s really good.

After a couple more spikes by the gym teacher I learned that the losers would have to dance in front of the whole school. I glanced at the exit and started to sweat even more. A few minutes later, I got another chance and smashed the ball into a second-grade teacher’s face. There was a pause and I apologized. The children screamed and the gym teacher kept scoring. As the ball came toward me again, I had only one thought: If this were tennis, I would destroy him.

We lost.

As I was walking toward the gym door, already peeling off my nametag, the principal stopped me. “You have to dance with the fourth-grade teachers,” she said.

Then the Macarena started.

It was not the most humiliating moment of my life. That was after a whiskey tasting in 2009 at deCODE genetics in Reykjavík, Iceland, where I was completing my dissertation and ended up pissing in a fish tank. The next morning I was called into the office of Kari Stefansson, the CEO and founder — the only interaction I ever had with him — and instructed to apologize to all 900 employees.

But this was a close second. I stood there in a blue tutu, drenched in sweat, surrounded by screaming children, awkwardly jerking my arms around in a pathetic approximation of a dance I had hoped to live the rest of my life without performing.

In the parking lot, I passed the gym teacher. I considered telling him I was actually a scientist. That I had a PhD. That I had published in serious journals. That I was writing a book. That I’d lived in New York, Finland, and Slovakia. That I had once made a shit ton of money on Wall Street (so what if I’d blown it on hookers and drugs). Instead, I opened my trunk, took out my tennis bag and pretended to look for something, hoping he might notice the six racquets.

He didn’t.

Later, I found out that Poppie had seen the whole thing. She hadn’t noticed the tutu, or the missed serve, the second-grade teacher I’d hit in the face, or even the Macarena. She told her parents that her next-door neighbor was a professional volleyball player.

My grandparents were Mennonite farmers from the Ukraine. They emigrated to Canada when they were 11 and 12 years old, shortly after the Ukrainian famine of 1921-1922, during which they survived on the straw from the roofs of their houses. My mother was raised on their farm in Canada with her four siblings. She went to a Mennonite school with only 25 other children in her grade level until she graduated high school. The women in each grade were organized into quilting circles called ‘Varanes’ which become the central hubs of their social networks for the rest of their lives. Life on the farm is a solitary existence, especially for women, and these groups offer an important form of social support connecting women to the larger community in intimate ways that evolved over time. At funerals, for example, each Varane is charged with a specific task such as cooking, providing the pastries, or serving coffee. The Mennonites in Leamington, Ontario are an extraordinarily religious and family focused community. They all attend the same church and most of the older generation end up in the same retirement home, where they all either speak German or a Mennonite derivative called Plattdeutsch.

My mother was the only one of 5 siblings who moved away from this insular community when she married my father, a Scotch-Irish American. Although my sister and I were raised across the border from this rural community in neighboring Detroit, we spent most of our summers and holidays with my Canadian relatives. When I was young, I assumed that this was how all kids grew up—that everyone had a lot of cousins who they saw all the time. From a young age I learned the difference between 1st, 2nd and even 3rd cousins, what ‘once removed’ meant, and other kinship terminology that would serve me well later when I became an anthropologist. By the time I left for college, however, I had put this idyllic family-centered childhood behind me and saw my cousins less often. After moving to New York City and living in different Nordic countries over the next several decades, I lost touch with most of my extended family, and any interaction with them was restricted to asking my mom how my Aunt Agnes or my cousin Roy were doing when I came back to Detroit. My only connections to them now are nostalgic childhood memories of running around on the farm, discussions with my 80-year-old mother, and reading about the ‘Mennonites’ on Wikipedia. I have lost both my religious beliefs and any connection with my extended family. Eventually I became an anthropologist and as the bonds with my cousins faded, I replaced them with more ephemeral links all over the world, substituting a strong kin-based social network with a much larger, but far weaker network of colleagues and occasional friends.

The transition from my mother growing up in a highly religious, family-centered, farming community to my secular, ‘citizen of the world’, urban experience is a microcosm of globalization – a multi-generational story that has happened to hundreds of millions of families across the world. Religion, kin networks and urbanization are connected in complex and intricate ways, and globalization has had some of the deepest and most rapid effects on social relationships the world has ever seen. Human social life has been centered around kinship for most of our history, but this foundation began to change as humans made the transition from agricultural to market-based economies. As people move away from their families in search of jobs, social organizations previously structured around families become increasingly dependent on ties between unrelated individuals living in vast, anonymous societies and on collective identities based upon language or nationality.

Much of my research as an evolutionary anthropologist is focused on social networks, and more recently, on how social relationships are impacted by globalization. My most recent research seeks to understand the impact that religious beliefs have on social networks in Bangladesh, a country which in recent decades has undergone some of the most rapid economic development on the planet, and thus lies at the center of many of these massive global changes. Anthropologists have long recognized that religion is likely to have played an important role in cultural evolution by promoting cooperation, and that a person’s religious practices will have an important effect on their social relationships. However, whether religion strengthens ties between family members or broadens social networks to include more non-kin co-religionists remains an open question, and even less is known about how these relationships are impacted by globalization.

Our research provides evidence that religion strengthens the bonds between kin but not non-kin. Our basic finding is that more religious women have larger and more kin dense social networks despite the fact that they live further away from one another. In other words, being more religious is associated with having more connections with increasingly geographically distant family members, who in turn provide more emotional support. In contrast, we found no evidence that religiosity broadened women’s social networks to include more non-kin or that it increases the support women received from non-relatives.

Our findings suggest that religion plays an important role in cultivating stronger relationships between relatives, something that sociologists call ‘bonding social capital’, at least for women. Religion may therefore provide a bulwark against fracturing kin networks in societies experiencing economic development and demographic change. In other words, if religion strengthens bonds between family members, it may play an important role in alleviating some of the more disruptive impacts that economic development can have on families as people move further from where they were born in search of jobs. Faith communities are important repositories of social capital and their decline in Western democracies may have played an important role in the breakdown of family-centric social networks in many secular communities. The role that religion seems to play in maintaining close ties between relatives in the face of increasing geographic dispersal may help more religious countries effectively navigate the rapidly changing social relationships in the process of globalization.

Ancient institutions, like many religions, do not result from deliberation or prefabricated plans. They develop organically, in complex ways not envisioned by their founders, and often embody a tacit evolutionary wisdom. Their successful survival, adaptation, and response to human needs across centuries of cultural evolution, has integrated these practices and beliefs into our social and cultural institutions in extraordinarily complex ways that we will likely never fully understand. Religious institutions and practices are so deeply woven into the fabric of many societies that when the social capital they provide is not replaced by new secular institutions (e.g., political organizations or bowling alleys) the consequences can be dire. Some countries like Finland, where I lived for several years, seem to have successfully made this transition and social networks formerly rooted in religion have been replaced by community organizations and the state. Other countries have not made this transition as effectively. Although conceptualizing a world without religion as John Lennon does in the classic anthem ‘Imagine’, may be appealing to some, it is not without drawbacks. It is a utopian dream that exaggerates both human perfectibility and our ability to reason and ignores the complex co-evolution between religion and human social networks. As the late Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson said “Nice Theory. Wrong species”.

I recently found out from my mother that my extended Mennonite family is changing along with the rest of the world. Not only have I lost touch with them, they have also lost touch with each other. My Opa (‘Grandfather’) imagined that all of his children would one day all have farmland on adjacent lots, but only one of them is still a farmer. My aunts and uncles go to church less often, and my cousins don’t go at all. Social relationships in the Mennonite community are weaker. My cousins never see each other. Some have resorted to drugs and alcohol and others haven’t worked for more than a decade. One cousin hasn’t spoken to anyone in his family in years, and another recently committed suicide. A lot of things have changed since I was young, so it’s hard to pinpoint why all of this has happened. But my family is not unique, and these effects are being seen in rural, formerly religious communities across North America. These trends are all too familiar and their causes are obviously incredibly complex, but it would hardly be surprising if not going to the same place every Sunday has played a role in some of it.

“I see a lot of unfunny comedians, I see unfunny TV shows, I see unfunny awards shows, I see unfunny movies — because everybody’s scared to make a move. And that’s not a place to be … now you got a place where people are scared to talk … especially bizarre in America” — Chris Rock

Laughter evolved as a form of play in mammals. It began as a way to practice predator-prey interactions —a training ground for when the threat stops being make-believe. Humor emerged later, alongside language in humans, and is still, at its core, risky play. A good joke is a high-speed collision between what we know and what we think we know and helps us accept our flaws, imperfections and contradictions. It’s easy to learn to savor the sublime and the orderly, but it takes a certain madness to learn to delight in the ridiculous and the unexpected. Humor takes the messy contradictions and paradoxes that haunt the dreary intelligence of our species and extracts from them pure joy. By giving us space to be what we are—confused primates high on our own delusions—a good joke lets us stop pretending we’ve got it all figured out and take life (and ourselves) a little less seriously. It forces us, often against our will, to confront the stupidity of it all—bursting our bubble of self-importance, puncturing the illusion of control, and letting a little air in the place.

That’s why comedy has always been more than entertainment. It’s a socially sanctioned way of pointing out incongruities that don’t make sense and acknowledging the screws that stay loose without getting exiled for noticing them. Good jokes spoil our simplistic concepts of good and bad, the sacred and the profane, and frustrate the rigid categories devised by reason, emotion and social custom. They’re dirty, inconvenient and irreconcilable. Good people have bad thoughts and supermodels take nasty dumps—the very stuff we suit-wearing apes evolved to laugh at.

In an anxious culture that turns partisan narratives into sacred beliefs and rewards branding over sincerity, comedians used to be among the last people still allowed to say what everyone else was thinking. Their job was to notice everyone marching in lockstep and break the spell. But in a nation where partisan politics consumes everything in its path, tribal orthodoxy has started to affect Americans’ sense of humor. Onstage, you can feel the tension as the audience nervously checks whether a bit is safe, has been pre-approved by the joke police, or whether the comic is on the right team. Norm Macdonald called it a crisis of “clapter”: a humorless age where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. And although the populist right is probably the greater and more immediate danger, the social justice left better captures this era’s zeitgeist—a nation of anxious primates competing for online status relieved only by the empty babble of smug chuckles.

Politics kills comedy by turning jokes into identity tests and loyalty signals. It moralizes and sets certain beliefs apart as inviolable, while humor thrives in the grey areas between the sacred and the profane. When Chappelle mocks untouchable cultural totems, like the etiquette around gender identity, he’s doing something extraordinary that very few people in the world can pull off. When he’s lecturing his audience about racial justice, he’s just another self-righteous scold doing something anyone can do. And when late night collapses into “Trump sucks,” it stops being comedy and turns into propaganda.

Comedians used to be contrarians. They were allergic to tribes, bristled at authority and made fun of mawkish sentimentality. They were Patton Oswalt’s brother, Matt, at the Hollywood Bowl on Christmas eve, screaming “Fuck you!” at the screen in the middle of Jerry Maguire’s “cynical world” speech. The best were equal-opportunity offenders. Their target wasn’t left or right; it was whoever was doing the policing or pretending. When the Moral Majority was telling everyone what to say— that’s who they went after. When the woke scolds did it—they mocked them too. They embodied Groucho Marx’s motto: “Whatever it is, I’m against it” and their goal was to expose the hypocrisies of whoever was in charge.

American humor was always anti-elite. Its mission was to upset hierarchies, not reinforce them, and few things were more offensive to comedians than bootlicking. One of my favorite moments from The Roast of Tom Brady was when the host, Kevin Hart, caught Jeff Ross quietly apologizing to Brady for jokes he’d just told. Hart ripped into him:

“Wow…. Wow…. Stop being a bitch, Jeff. Just sit down. Stop kissing his ass. You okay? You okay, right, Tom? It was just jokes…. Such a bitch. Jeff, you’re so fucking… Bitch. I heard you over there, you bitch….Tom, you all right?”

Hart was reprimanding Ross for doing what is the most offensive thing a comedian can do—suck up to the most important person in the room.

He was enforcing an old ethic in comedy: don’t apologize for your jokes. It was a throwback to an earlier era, when comedy clubs were places where people were allowed to stress-test the culture without being hauled before Human Resources. More and more, however, audiences have stopped asking “Is this funny?” and started asking “Is this allowed?” Tribalism gets the press, but the deeper threat is what it produces—within-group conformity and a shrinking tolerance for dissent. And although both sides celebrate their free-thinking iconoclasm, loyalty is strictly enforced. On the right, it’s “don’t tread on me” policed by a culture where one criticism of Trump can end your career. On the left, nobody’s in charge, but everyone is policing everyone else—so many rules about who can say what about whom that you need to consult a moral spreadsheet before you can make a joke. On both sides, Americans have lost the ability to think beyond their own performance. The whole charade bears the mark of arrested social development—me-centered and self-serious; the nervous conformity of a society stuck in adolescence.

So why does so much “comedy” now feel safe and pandering instead of risky and funny? The old danger was bombing. The new one is being cast as a bad person. When the cost of getting a laugh gets high enough, comedians start optimizing their bits for approval. Never before has every half-drunk joke, every stumble of language, been so on the record; never before has the moral climate been so skittish—so quick to litigate tone, ignore intent and presume motive.

America was once the funniest place on earth. But as our culture turned life into a branding exercise and started treating discomfort as danger, we lost our tolerance for risky play. And as audiences increasingly confused what a comedian thinks, with what he thinks is funny, the incentives shifted from surprise to safety. American humor has always been a tool for questioning orthodoxy, challenging certainty, and keeping tribes from mistaking their sacred stories for reality. When that function collapses and every joke is screened for loyalty, society loses one of its best safeguards against tribal conformity. Clapter is what that loss sounds like. Real laughter belongs to a culture willing to admit it might be wrong. A society that can’t tolerate being offended forfeits one of the clearest ways it has to signal that it hasn’t turned its beliefs into idols. When we can’t laugh at ourselves and comedians are no longer willing to risk offending us, there’s nobody left to break the spell.

AI rhetoric swings between utopia and apocalypse. The likeliest outcome, though, may be far less spectacular: AI will give us exactly what we want, turning us into pampered infants living emptier lives, for whom effort itself becomes a kind of torture—a future less like Star Trek or The Terminator and more like WALL-E.

Laziness is adaptive: when rewards are equal, evolution favors organisms that conserve energy. Biologists call this the theory of least effort. We’re wired to minimize effort because organisms that didn’t waste calories on low-payoff activities had an edge over those who did. At the same time, animals that sat on their ass all day were outcompeted by animals that invested effort when it mattered—finding food, avoiding danger, securing mates, and raising offspring. This tension between saving energy and the struggle to reproduce produced a delicate balance: conserve energy whenever possible, but spend it when it counts.

The link between effort and survival created a simple rule of thumb: if something is hard, it’s probably worthwhile. To make that heuristic stick, evolution had to incentivize work, so it shaped a two-track reward system—immediate pleasure for conserving energy and chilling in the hot tub, and a deeper sense of satisfaction and meaning for doing hard things like earning a degree or training for a marathon. Effort is the wedge that separates pleasure from meaning—evolution’s solution to the problem of getting energy-conserving animals to do hard things when necessary.

At some point in our history, however, many humans—and some of our pets—crossed a threshold where effort became less a condition for staying alive and more a matter of choice. And once it becomes optional, the temptation isn’t just to avoid the tedious shit—it’s to avoid doing anything at all.

I spent the morning copying the responses to a project I created with ChatGPT into another prompt to get “paste-ready” edits. My “job” is Control-A, Control-C, click on another tab, Control-V. Then I do something else—check email, watch a video on how to stop double faulting in tennis—while I wait for the LLM to spit out revisions and new files. Then I paste those back into the project tab. The only trick is keeping the order straight so you don’t have to read any of the crap (i.e. the comments generated by someone else’s LLM) that I’m feeding back into mine. They pay me $65 an hour to do this, and I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before the company decides the obvious: cut out the middleman and let the machines talk to each other directly.

The job might actually be interesting if I bothered to read any of the responses or did any of the thinking myself. I’m supposedly training an LLM to do statistical analyses better, and I might actually learn something if I treated it like work instead of churning out deliverables. But I can log more hours if I just optimize it by never reading any of the comments my “teammates” paste in from their own LLMs.

None of this is entirely new, of course, and there were lots of mindless jobs before AI. The washing machine shrank laundry from a day-long ordeal into a quick chore, freeing millions of women for paid work—or anything besides scrubbing clothes by hand. Calculators and search engines did the same for mental work, supposedly saving us time to do “more important” tasks.

But AI is different. It doesn’t just eliminate drudgery; it increasingly competes with us in the higher-order cognitive tasks it frees us up to do. The danger is that it threatens the ancient bargain between pleasure and meaning by making effort avoidable not only for chores but for the struggles that produce competence and meaning. Generative AI isn’t just another labor-saving device making us more efficient—it’s becoming the thinker. Three years after ChatGPT, generative AI can’t just write a student’s paper, it can complete entire online courses. The problem isn’t that it’s making tasks easier; it’s making them optional—and slowly convincing us that doing them at all is pointless.

The recent occupational history of our species has been one of increasing specialization. I watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie with my kids last week where Pa makes a wagon wheel out of a tree. Before that our ancestors could all make tools from rocks. I have no idea how to do any of that. But neither Pa nor his ancestors could do my job either—clean a dataset and run Bayesian statistical models on hierarchical datasets. That’s the tradeoff of modern life: we give up broad competence in exchange for deep expertise and depend on other people for the rest. But AI isn’t just another step in the specialization of labor. It replaces the part that allows for specialization in the first place: thinking. And by outsourcing thinking, we don’t just lose another skill—we lose the ability to reason and make judgements.

The distinction between whether a technology complements our skills or substitutes for them is critical. Tools that complement our skills still leave the user doing the work, while tools that substitute for them destroy competence. As AI gets better and better at doing intellectual work—drafting emails, writing essays, summarizing vast troves of information—the tendency to label tasks “mindless” to justify skipping them becomes greater. Is reading a book, instead of skimming a summary of bullet points, a waste of your time? Is forcing yourself to wrestle an original sentence into existence mindless?

The more I use generative AI, the more I feel that the important things in life are being stolen from me. We are approaching a world where college essays are written and graded by LLMs with little human involvement. Once accepted, these students ask ChatGPT to write essays that their instructors ask ChatGPT to grade. It is deeply ironic that more and more kids (or their parents) are paying $60,000 a year to cheat their way to a degree, doing everything possible to minimize effort and learn as little as possible.

Immediate gratification and frictionless ease now characterize modern life. Our economy is built around one-click purchases, same-day delivery, and frictionless checkout lines. Consumers have become so twitchy, impulsive and allergic to lag that adding 100 ms for an order on Amazon was seen to reduce sales by approximately 1% (or $6.38 Billion) and the average American checks their phone once every five minutes.

What’s the point of it all? I’ve even heard people bragging about using AI to automate the online part of online dating. Isn’t the whole point of dating the enjoyment of meeting and learning about someone else? I don’t want to streamline my relationships for the same reason I don’t want a laugh track to do my laughing for me. Why are we trying to bypass fundamental elements of the human experience? When machines eliminate friction they strip away the meaning that comes from the struggle. ChatGPT will never teach me the way the real world does—through wrong turns, wasted time, embarrassment, and hard-earned mistakes.

AI didn’t start this, but it looks like it might complete it: the comfort trap, a world where everything is easy but nothing feels earned. I don’t blame people using clever tools to avoid genuinely menial work. The problem isn’t that we like ease; it’s that AI changes the incentives so the meaningful stuff becomes optional too. Effort is what gives our lives meaning; it’s what separates living life from consuming it. Outsourcing effort makes tasks easier, but it turns experience into a checklist—where “seeing” all the paintings in the Winter Palace matters more than the slow pleasure of actually being there. Meaning is downstream of effort. If you want the meaning, you have to pay the effort tax.

The answer isn’t to reject every shortcut. It’s to recognize that there’s more to living a good life than putting as little effort as possible into every task and get back to a place where we aren’t only doing things in order to finish them. Read the book instead of the summary. Stare at the blank page for a few minutes because learning to appreciate that the struggle that AI trains us to avoid is what makes life worthwhile.

The fantasy is that automation will buy us time for the good stuff—tennis, meditation, learning to play an instrument. But these things take time and effort, and more often than not, automating tasks just buys us time for more Candy Crush. The biggest risk of AI may be happening right under our noses: a life optimized for comfort, where anything hard gets outsourced, nothing feels earned and life feels empty.