Word of the day: “Senescence is a formal and technical word that refers to the state of being old or the process of becoming old.”

Emily and I have been thinking a lot about senescence as it turns out. Not that either of us even knew that word existed. But as for “getting old” it’s fair to say that neither of us is relatively old. However, it is clear to me and her both that we’re seeing generational shifts all across the board, and a lot of them aren’t for the better. It seems many high school “graduates” and college “products” are less prepared for the real world than ever. I think about what Allan Bloom said about matriculated freshmen essentially being blank slates, and it was a big reason I tossed that book in the trash (literally). No one is a blank slate, and yet, this is how our “higher education” operates.

High school is really just a more advanced version of elementary school with SAT prep and raging hormones. It doesn’t prepare you for jack shit. College is just high school again but with more alcohol and drugs – and there were plenty of those in high school already – plus putting yourself in crippling debt that forces you into wage slavery. Fun times.

So for me, senescence is a rapidly growing state of being, even for those of us who aren’t considered advanced in age. People’s mentalities are regressing to a point that is unfathomable to me. People are so stuck on these “social norms” that don’t align with reality; this idea that debt is an “investment” in your future when people miss the fact that corporate debt is always paid with outside money and profits, not with your weekly (or bi-weekly or monthly) paycheck. Or paychecks for those of us who like not panhandling all weekend…

Yeah, I’m pretty pessimistic about the present, and only cautiously hopeful for the future. It makes me feel like an asshole that I have nothing to worry about financially anymore. Sure, we got “lucky” but Emily and I made our own luck through making decisions with safe but reasonable upside.

Anyway, we need to stop viewing senescence as a bad thing, and more like a fermenting process. But like wine or any other liquor, the ingredients and how you store the product is just as important as how long it sits. Wine being old doesn’t make it good, after all. This is a bit of a clumsy metaphor, but basically, if people just view getting old as progressively becoming useless, then they are already making themselves useless in the present. People that clamor for the “good old days” in their late TWENTIES AND EARLY THIRTIES? Come on now!

At 38 I should be getting interested in what nursing home I’ll be shelved away in to rot. These days, so many people are experiencing a sort of premature senescence and it’s pathetic. I hear people YOUNGER THAN ME talking like they’re on the verge of retirement, when the great irony is they’ll likely never retire. … Life is hard, yes, but you can make it easier on yourself by knowing when to walk away and find something better, because you may be surprised just how many opportunities exist. 

Still, money alone does not a winner make. It’s being in a sustainable, healthy position that matters most. Money just makes things easier. It would be really nice if people learned from our example, because we struggled our entire lives until last year. We lived off of Emily’s savings, not New York City.  And yes we made some good stock picks and financial decisions along the way; I did make a couple bad calls with beyond meat and bought AMD a bit too early, but those were nothing compared to the ETF and Nvidia picks! And AMD came back. Big time.

Everyone is so suspicious of wealth now. Yet so many worship the uber wealthy. Even those who claim to hate the uber wealthy, they are making the uber wealthy more so by bitching about it on social media! And yes, there is a middle ground between capitalism and communism where wealth creation is focused on actual capital investment and not “line go up.” The capitalism we have now is rooted in fascist consumerism. True economies of scale can’t operate in that fashion. And we’re seeing physics take over and watching the house of cards toppling in slow motion. People need to understand that the outward flow of money is important.

Multimillionaires and billionaires don’t sit on piles of money like Scrooge McDuck. That’s not how money works. The problem we have is we keep creating debt on paper with money that doesn’t actually exist. Debt is meant for capital improvements and future investment. Not going ot an old brick building and being told that they need to sit down and learn how to write properly when they already write like a PHD. Debt is meant to be a shared societal obligation managed by the government. Not individuals. Personal credit used to be about purchases that were urgent without cash on hand. They were essentially cash advances and had super high interest premiums. But consumer credit created this inversion where most people just created bigger deficits for themselves. So if their house value didn’t go up, and they couldn’t access their equity, their lifestyle of living beyond their means that our wonderful world of consumerism sold to them becomes untenable and they have to move in with their 80 year old parents.

The great tragedy is that the vast majority of people, the lower middle and working class were still being responsible but got fucked by the irresponsibility of the upper classes. So they had to take on debt just to eat! What do you think trickle down economics really is? Who pays for the debt? The people who did nothing wrong and have to absorb the costs of irresponsible idiots. I learned from personal experience that you can’t make it as a working class person if the work just doesn’t line up. It shouldn’t take dumb luck to make it. And even when you do, if you don’t “live up to expectations” on a surface level, you’re immediately suspect. You just can’t win.

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Quote exploration time.

Albert Einstein on Reading Too Much: “Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” 

Yes, there is such a thing as too much reading. That’s why I keep my reading to a relative minimum, jot down any interesting phrases or ideas, then apply them to real life situations. It’s all about active reading and not staying inside your own head too much.

I didn’t bother putting this one on Sublime, but this is a concept I do want to return to in the future after I’ve compiled all my reading notes properly.

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Aldous Huxley on Hypocrites “There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.”

I’d love to agree with my boy Huxley on this, but I do think conscious hypocrisy is more common than would seem possible.

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Alvin Toffler on the Future: “When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right.”

This is worth putting in my Forward Thinking collection on the Sublime app. It is funny to me, though, how much futurists get right in the long run… the technology actually develops but some ends up not having the impact on society and culture whereas other tech does. AI, for example, certainly isn’t quite as wondrous as futurists thought it would be by now, but they weren’t wrong about its use cases and potential overall. Especially many of the negative potentialities…

Speaking of AI, the Sublime insights for this quote brought up the phrase “Imaginative agility,” and I love that! And yes, paradigms are more important than particulars.

Also from Sublime: “Contrarian take: Being reliably accurate matters more than flashy imagination, because steady, correct predictions build trust and practical progress; imagination without grounding can mislead when it counts.”

This is an interesting take that dovetails well into my above statement about paradigms. And the more grounded you are in the construction of said paradigms, the more practical world you can build.

Another one of the Sublime insights: “Hot Take: In a world addicted to exact forecasts, imagination is the real superpower that actually reshapes the map.”

There’s increasing literature that points out just how flawed forecasting models truly are. Because they are built on some wild assumptions. And always fixated too much on the past.

That’s a damn good quote. These three insights seem to draw out the key points I want to make, rather than having to write entire essays based on them… I can always do that later. The trick is to work with these ideas in an effective, but concise manner, not so much about efficiency, but really engaging with the idea and applying it to future studies.

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Amelia Boone on Suffering: “I’m not the strongest. I’m not the fastest. But I’m really good at suffering.”

This is a really interesting quote, and after reading Kyla’s book, I really think this is a sad take. Yes, suffering IS part of human existence. But our work should be to OVERCOME that suffering, not wallow in it. Well, unfortunately, we live in this masochistic, self-destructive society, and it’s not going to change fast enough to prevent me from becoming physically ill watching it happen over the next few years.

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Anne McCaffrey on Good Stories: “A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.”

I agree with the gist of this. The author isn’t as important as the story itself. That’s a given. The whole cult of personality around authors, honestly, is pretty stupid. That isn’t to say I don’t respect great authors – I most certainly do – but all of them have written total crap too. And yet people still buy it. This whole “branding” nonsense just sucks. I wish I’d never bought into that idea… and I only did that to try and get work. It got me street. So I said fuck it, I’m gonna go be this instead, and here I am.

Sublime says…

The Gist: This note distills a core literary principle: the value of a story transcends authorship—quality is not bound to the author’s identity, but to the story’s own merit and impact. It invites openness to diverse voices and the universality of storytelling.

And all great stories have this quality of being developed into a canon over time. Now we have these corporate entities stretching these stories so thin that they become thin shadows of what they once represented.

Contrarian take: Quality storytelling can’t be judged purely on the story itself; the author’s intention, craft, and context matter because they shape how the story is told and received.

I do think context definitely matters. But ultimately, the stories that live on do so independent of their original intent. Funny as that is.

Hot Take: Good stories are perfectly color-blind about authors; the real win is when a great tale breaks through gatekeepers regardless of who wrote it.

I like this take. Historically, though, not enough diverse voices break through. Which is a crying shame. And many stories we take for granted come from anonymous sources, just whoever popularizes it and makes it marketable ends up with the credit.

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Archilochus on Expectations: “We do not rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our training.”

I agree with the ancient Greek guy on this. The problem is that today we conflate ‘training’ with expensive schooling and certification and degrees. I’d argue that the ‘training’ most people get is entirely inadequate for real-world situations. 

Let’s see what Sublime has to say…

The Gist: This line reframes success not as reaching higher goals, but as the habit of disciplined practice: our outcomes reflect what we consistently train for, more than what we consciously imagine. It highlights that consistency and conditioning are the real determinants of performance.

Right, and all of this training that Sublime infers is HOW we choose to condition ourselves and the quality of our consistency. Yes, degree programs can be useful – I’m not discounting them wholesale – but that piece of paper is not a stand-in for true hard work and disciplined, intentional actions. 

Contrarian Take: Loud goals and bright plans can still push you to start; the problem is not the expectation but the lack of steady follow-through—training alone without aspiration can become mindless routine.

I feel like this is the problem with how universities often operate… education is often treated as mindless routine and not a living, breathing exercise as it should be.

Hot Take: Great plans are for show; solid routines are for growth.

Not sure if this is that “hot” of a take, but yeah, a lot of credentialism is surface-level and skin-deep. And it’s incredibly sad once you realize that so much of what we take for granted is a lie that eventually caves in and you see the stage collapse and the background fall away to reveal the wage slaves forced to keep the illusion alive for long as possible…

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Arnold Schwarzenegger on Learning: “I’ve always treated the world as my classroom, soaking up lessons and stories to fuel my path forward. I hope you do the same.” & “Never stop learning. Ever.” (From the Foreword of Tools of Titans)

As much as I respect and admire Ahnold, I think it’s funny that someone else popularized this idea previously in 2014 with the line “Life is just a classroom.” The song was “New Romantics.” I don’t have to say who it is, other than the singer is now a billionaire and has classes taught about her catalogue and career at places like Harvard. LOL. I’m sure that’s a coincidence, but it’s still funny to me. [Yes, I of course mean Taylor Swift!]

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Last one for today. An oldie but goodie as I like to say.

Ben Franklin on Knowledge: “An investment in knowledge pays best interest.”

The issue we have today is conflating ‘knowledge’ with ‘information.’ We live in an ‘information age’ not a ‘knowledge age.’ We need to quickly transition into the latter and rediscover productive, practical wisdom before we blow our brains up with minutiae about every outfit Sabrina Carpenter has ever worn… uhh… oops.

The Gist: This succinct line reframes learning as a guaranteed contributor to future returns, suggesting knowledge compounds like interest, yielding long-term personal and societal dividends beyond immediate costs.

I completely agree with that gist. But most people don’t treat knowledge like that and discount their own knowledge far too much. Then we overrate the opinions of experts when they are just riffing off on things just like anyone else. An ‘expert opinion’ is still an opinion and it’s up to your own judgment whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘based’ or ‘goated’ or whatever.

Contrarian take: Knowledge alone isn’t enough without actually applying it; learning without practical use or opportunity to earn from it can waste time and resources.

Ben Franklin believed this as well. And sadly enough, most public school learning is entirely worthless in the long run. We started thinking the humanities weren’t worth keeping around, when in fact understanding culture and the works of great artists is in fact more valuable than arbitrary theorems and opinions of whoever the current department head thinks is correct.

Hot Take: Knowledge is the only truly tax-free return on investment—everything else pays out in a monopsony of time and effort.

Monopsony is a great word! That is, “a market situation with only one buyer for a particular good, service, or labor,” And if we’re all bettering ourselves, we raise the floor for everyone else.

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I’m considering putting the big blocks of quotes I have from certain books or figures on Obscure Curiosities. I may be taking a lot of the scraps I have for different series I was writing and trying to suss out what I was really getting at. Deconstructing my journals and my commonplace notes could prove to be very rewarding. Then other people get to benefit from this work long-term. The results of these deep dives is what will inevitably become posts on OC. They won’t be plentiful but they will be very in-depth. [I have done this quite a bit in 2026, as you are likely aware!]

I want to understand WHY I like the content that I do. Sublime app is a nice start but its insights, while useful, and the related ideas are good too, it’s just a tool I’m using for my old continuing education. I need to better understand the workings of my own intellect; how do I come to these wild conclusions that prove to be 80-90 percent accurate in the long run?

The real challenge is curating all of the various topics from my writing. You know how editors built out these collections, like with EB white, that are concerned with certain broad subjects? 

I should chill and sort of just let these notebook journeys happen organically. I don’t want to plan anything too much.