Ryan Collison is the author of A Theory of Meaning (AToM), a philosophy of coherence. His writing at MoneySexNerd examines how coherence breaks down and reforms under economic, sexual, and social pressure. More at ideasthesia.org
Part 3 of 13 in the Black Sails: A Leadership Masterclass series. Silver doesn't want power. That's what makes him terrifying. He wants comfort. Safety. Maybe love, eventually. A place to settle down where no one's trying to kill him. These are modest goals.
Part 2 of 13 in the Black Sails: A Leadership Masterclass series. Every lie Captain Flint tells is a lie you've told. Or will tell. Or are telling right now. To the crew: "We're chasing the Urca gold. Five million dollars. Everyone gets rich."
Part 1 of 13 in the Black Sails: A Leadership Masterclass series. Succession is about inheriting power. Black Sails is about building it—then watching it eat you alive. I need you to understand something: a show about 18th-century pirates, produced by Michael Bay, airing on Starz between soft-core porn
We've spent this series dismantling the standard story. The standard story says kids are broken—distracted, lazy, anxious, addicted, unprepared. It says parents need to fix them through better discipline, less screen time, more structure, clearer rules. The alternative story says: your model of childhood is fragile, not
Co-Regulation in Chaos: The Only Parenting Skill That Transfers We've established that you can't prepare your kids for a predictable future because there isn't one. That the skills you learned might not transfer. That the rules you want to pass down might be wrong.
Your Kids Are Training for Jobs That Don't Exist Yet When you see your kid spending six hours on content that looks like nothing—streaming, gaming, making TikToks, managing Discord servers—you might think they're wasting time. Consider the alternative: they're training for an
Disorder Is Relative to Environment Here's a line that sounds like a joke but isn't: "Alcoholism is when the drinker becomes unmanageable, not when the drinking becomes unmanageable." The joke works because it points at something true: disorder is defined by dysfunction in context.
The Avocado Toast Math Is Actually Correct "If millennials stopped buying avocado toast and lattes, they could afford a house." You've heard this. It's become a meme, a punchline, a symbol of boomer-millennial culture war. The usual response is to point out that skipping
DoorDash Kids Aren't Lazy—They're Friction-Optimized Your grandparents drove forty-five minutes to a restaurant, waited an hour for a table, and called it a nice evening. Your parents hit the McDonald's drive-through in twelve minutes and felt efficient. Your kid opens an app, taps
Screen Time Panic Is a Category Error "How much screen time is okay?" Wrong question. It's like asking "how much outside time is okay?"—as if playing in a park, walking through a war zone, and hiking in a forest are the same activity
Your Kids Aren't Distracted—They're Running a Higher Frame Rate Attention-deficit disorder diagnoses have increased by 42% in the last decade. The obvious explanation is that something's wrong with kids. The more interesting explanation is that something changed in the environment, and the kids
Authoritative Parenting Worked When the Future Was Predictable Let's steel-man the gold standard. Authoritative parenting—high warmth plus high structure, explaining the reasons behind rules, maintaining boundaries while staying emotionally available—genuinely produces better outcomes across almost every study that's ever looked at it. Kids raised