Others

Most of the work of becoming a master is internal — fix the body, fix the diet, fix the mindset, forgive the past, walk out of the harness. All true. All necessary. None of it sufficient.

The other half of the work is figuring out who you spend your life with. Not just in the marriage sense — that one is obvious, and mine is settled. In the broader sense: who gets your attention, who gets your energy, who gets to be in the rooms where your real thinking happens, and who gets, politely, none of it. The wrong inner circle will undo the body work, undo the mindset work, drag you back into the slave OS by sheer social gravity. The right inner circle will challenge your bullshit, push your ceiling, and make every other system in your life run hotter and cleaner.

This essay is about the second one. It’s also about the much larger population of other people who aren’t going to be in that ring, and why I’ve stopped feeling guilty about that.

The first question is the smallest. Who, in your actual life, are you willing to fight for? Not “support emotionally.” Not “send a card to.” Fight for. Move money for. Drop everything for. Tell the hard truth to, even at the cost of the relationship. The list is shorter than most people pretend. For most adults the honest answer is between two and six humans. For some people the honest answer is zero, which is a separate problem.

Those two-to-six people are the inner ring. They are the ones whose call you take at 2 a.m. They are the ones who get to challenge your bullshit and have the challenge land, because they have earned the right by being in the trench with you long enough to know what your bullshit actually looks like.

You cannot manufacture this ring. You can only recognize it, prune it, and protect it. Most people protect it badly — they let acquaintances drift into intimacy positions, let in-laws have inner-ring access purely on bloodline, let coworkers into psychological territory those coworkers never earned. The result is an inner ring full of people who do not actually challenge anything, because they have nothing at stake. The challenge does not land. The bullshit accumulates. The master mindset corrodes inside a social system that flatters it.

The maintenance work is asking, periodically and honestly: who would I actually fight for, and who is currently in my life as if I would, but I would not. The second category gets moved out. Not theatrically. Just out. The replacement is the empty chair, which is far healthier than a chair holding the wrong person.

The rings around the ring

Outside the inner ring, life radiates outward in progressively weaker rings with progressively different norms. The second ring is the people who are not in the trench with you but are in the same camp — friends who get real time but not the 2 a.m. call. The third ring is the camp you collaborate with — work people, training partners, people whose project happens to overlap with yours. Beyond that, acquaintances, then strangers, then the general public.

Each ring has its own social norm. The inner ring talks straight, because that is the entire reason it exists. The second ring talks honestly, with edits. The third ring talks professionally. By the time you reach acquaintances, the talking is mostly pleasantry, which is fine — pleasantries are the lubricant of a functioning society. The mistake is letting inner-ring expectations leak outward (then you are exhausted by your acquaintances) or letting outer-ring norms leak inward (then your inner ring is full of people who never tell you anything true).

Knowing which ring a person is in saves enormous amounts of energy. The acquaintance does not need your real opinion on his life. The colleague does not need your therapy. The cousin does not need your full medical philosophy unless the cousin is asking. Most people leak inward and outward constantly, get hurt or confused when the ring does not respond the way they expected, and burn months trying to fix the wrong relationship at the wrong intensity. The discipline is to place each person at the right radius and treat them according to the norm of that ring.

For most of my life I’ve been a misanthrope. People tire me. I see how limited most of them are by a combination of poor inputs, poor habits, poor cognition, and poor incentives, and the limitation is so consistent and so resistant to outside influence that being around it for long is exhausting in a way I find difficult to recover from.

Animals do not tire me. Animals are doing exactly what their species has done for thousands or millions of years. The cow behaves like a cow. The dog behaves like a dog. There is no claim about higher-order self-determination, no pretense of agency that the animal then refuses to deploy. The animal is consistent with itself. You can love the animal without expecting it to be other than it is.

Humans tire me because humans have enormous brains and then refuse to use them. They have the hardware to compound, to learn, to revise, to face hard data, to choose the harder door — and most of them, day after day, decline. They keep walking the loop, keep eating the food that is killing them, keep telling themselves the story that explains away yesterday’s failure, keep waiting for the cavalry that is not coming. The waste is the part I cannot stop seeing. The brain is the most expensive organ a body operates, metabolically, and most of the brains in any room are running well below idle.

Frank Herbert had a name for the distinction. In Dune, the Reverend Mother holds a poisoned needle — the Gom Jabbar — to the neck of young Paul Atreides and forces him to keep his hand inside a box that simulates unbearable pain. If he pulls his hand out, he dies. The test is whether he can override the animal reflex with conscious will. An animal in a trap chews off its own leg; a human sits inside the pain and uses the higher faculty to handle the problem differently. That is the line. By that standard most of what calls itself human, in any given room, is failing the Gom Jabbar every day — declining, over and over, to use the apparatus that makes the species what the species is. The hardware is present. The choice is not being made.

The recent shift, which I credit to actually getting healthy and getting older and getting honest, is that I’ve become more forgiving of these people, not less. Not because I have lowered my standards. Because I have come to see them more clearly.

They are animals too. Animals operating outside any environment their species evolved for, with hardware they did not choose, in a culture engineered to suppress whatever agency the hardware might have produced. Their abilities limit them to the slave mindset, and their cognition is, in many cases, the limiting factor. They are doing the best they can with the substrate they have. The substrate is often not good enough. That is the actual situation.

Life is not fair. I spent a long time inside the policy version of the argument, in which education was the answer, in which the right combination of programs and incentives could lift everyone, in which empathy could and should dictate policy. I no longer believe that. Empathy can dictate how I treat the next person I meet. Empathy is a catastrophic foundation for policy at scale, because at scale the question is not “can we be kind to this individual” but “can the floor of human cognition handle the demands the modern world places on it,” and the honest answer is that for a large fraction of the population, no.

This isn’t a popular thing to say. I’m saying it anyway. The manifesto on this site says I am not going to soften, and I am not.

The dumb sign in the math classroom — Attitude determines altitude — is, embarrassingly, mostly true. Mindset is the lever. I have written several essays arguing this from several angles and I am not retreating from it.

But mindset rides on a substrate. The substrate has to be there. You have to be able to reason. You have to be able to do basic math to balance trade-offs. You have to be able to speak, to write, to read at a level that exposes you to ideas more sophisticated than the ones currently running you. Without that substrate, mindset has nothing to push on. You can have all the will in the world; if the cognitive apparatus cannot model trade-offs across time, the will is going to be deployed against the wrong targets.

This is the half of the master-mindset argument the optimistic version skips. Anyone can do it is half true. Anyone with the substrate can do it. The substrate is real, the substrate is unequally distributed, and the substrate is the reason there has always been a reason the elites sent their children to college — not because the college creates the substrate, but because the college environment, applied to an already-good substrate, compounds it. Take the same college and apply it to a substrate that is not there, and almost nothing compounds. We have run that experiment for fifty years now. It has not scaled the way the policy people promised.

The above can sound colder than it is. I want other people to win at life. I want my friends to win. I want my neighbors to win. I want the readers of this site to win — that is, in fact, the entire reason the site exists. If I did not want strangers to flourish I would not have spent the hours writing any of this.

But wanting it is not the same as being able to deliver it on someone else’s behalf. The work is the person’s own work. The substrate is the person’s own substrate. The mindset is the person’s own. I cannot transfer mine into another body, and pretending I can is the same condescension that drives a hundred failed development programs and ten thousand failed self-help relationships.

What I can do is publish what worked. What I can do is be the example. What I can do is keep my own house in order. What I cannot do is carry another person’s stack on top of mine. I have a wife with MS, a body to maintain, a mind to push, a finite calendar, and my own real limits to contend with. I am not unlimited. Treating my hours as if they were is a slow form of suicide.

Here’s the line. I’m not joining anyone’s pity party. I am not going to be the supporting cast in a victim narrative. I am not going to spend an evening listening to someone explain why their life is the way it is, when the explanation is the same story they told last year, and the year before. I have heard the explanation. I am not going to hear it again. I am not being cruel; I am being precise. I cannot help the person who will not act on the help, and the time I spend listening to the un-actioned story is time I am not spending on the people who would.

I do not want to be around people who play victim. I do not want to be around people who cannot own their shit. I do not want to be around them because I cannot help them, and being around them does not help them either — it just consumes my hours and provides them with another audience for a performance that is not going to end.

This isn’t contempt. It’s triage. Triage looks like contempt only to people who have never had to do it. Anyone who has run a hospital, a fire line, or a startup understands instantly. You spend resources where resources produce results. You do not spend resources where resources produce theater.

The revolution that is not coming

I used to think the obvious unfairness of the situation would eventually produce a revolution. I was wrong. America’s design quietly kills the revolution at the source. In other systems, revolutions happen because the most capable people are trapped under an immutable hierarchy — they cannot rise, so they have to break the system to live. In America, the hierarchy is mutable in a hundred ways. The capable person can rise inside it, leverage it, and then exit it. The capable person does not need to break the system. The capable person needs only to use the system on the way out.

So the people who could have led a revolution — the smart, the disciplined, the substrate-plus-will minority — instead work hard, accumulate capital, walk out of the harness in their forties or fifties, and spend the rest of their lives doing what they want on land they own. This is the American story, and it is, on the whole, fantastic. It is the cheat code no other country has figured out. The pressure that elsewhere would build into revolution here vents through the exit door of early retirement.

What this means for the people left behind is that no one is coming to fix the system on their behalf. The people who could have fixed it have, sensibly, opted out instead. The mediocre middle is left to manage itself, and it does so badly. The political theater on top of this is, at this point, a sideshow. The capable have left the building. The losers are running the loudspeaker.

And the loudspeaker is loud

To which I will say, bluntly and at the risk of being cancelled by every polite person reading this: we may, eventually, need to bring back insane asylums for the fucking animal losers, because the alternative is that they continue to occupy public space, public attention, and increasing fractions of the public dollar while producing nothing, contributing nothing, and being humored by a culture that has decided every behavior must be respected. Not every behavior should be respected. Some behavior is the output of an animal that should be kept somewhere supervised — for its own sake and ours — and treated, not platformed.

I do not say this with relish. I say it because the polite version of the argument has produced visible results in every American city, and the results are not good for the people the policy was supposed to protect. The kindest thing for many of these people would have been to keep them somewhere supervised. The current arrangement is not kind. It is cowardice dressed up as compassion.

What I do instead

Inside my own life, the policy is simple. Inner ring: the small group I would fight for. Second ring: the larger group I respect and collaborate with. Outer rings: the polite world I move through without granting it psychological territory. Anyone behaving like an animal — playing victim, refusing to own their part, demanding the audience perform sympathy on cue — gets a polite distance and no real time. I am not in orbit around them. They are not in orbit around me. We pass.

I focus on the people who are striving. I want to see how far the human ceiling actually goes when a substrate-capable adult is paired with a master mindset and a long enough timeline. I want to be in the room when those experiments are run. I want my friends to push themselves and report back. I am willing to be uncomfortable, challenged, and corrected by anyone in my inner ring, because that is what the ring is for. I am unwilling to be the supporting cast in anyone else’s stuck story.

I notice, more and more, that the dominant feeling inside the system I’ve built is gratitude. Gratitude for a mind that works, for the desire to push it, for the determination to keep playing whatever game I’m currently playing, all the way to the end. That’s not a small thing. That’s most of what a good life is.

Most people manage the body badly, manage the calendar worse, and never look at the ring map at all. Look at it. Edit it. Defend it. The life you can build is downstream of the people you let into the rooms where your real thinking happens. Choose them on purpose. Everyone else gets pleasantries, the door, and my sincere good wishes from a distance.