Aeoli Pera

This was my practice race and my first official event with other people and a timing chip. My ‘A’ race for this year is an Olympic one 10 weeks later, but I’m also planning to do a 70.3 next year and hopefully a full Ironman the year after. That’s just to get the T-shirt though. Long-term, I’m going to do the shorter courses because they’re more fun and fit my physiological profile as a “diesel” better.

Major lessons

I significantly underestimated my ability to hold a high heart rate for a long time, and therefore significantly underestimated my potential performance in a short-course race. I averaged a HR of 165 for the first 1.25 hours and had enough in the tank to do a linear ramp in the last mile of the run, increasing gradually from 165 to 183 at the very end. As a result, my final time of 1:26:53 was >9 minutes faster than my estimated time of 1:36:00, and 8 minutes faster than my goal time.

Logistics really is the fourth discipline. That’s fine in my book because a large part of the reason I do these is to improve my character in general. We overprepared and overpacked (the latter by quite a bit). This is preferable to underpreparing or underpacking, so most of our improvements will come from streamlining this part by incorporating many small improvements. A meta-skill here is to separate concerns into major failure modes (e.g. dehydration), known absolute necessities (e.g. triathlon gear), and lifehacks that enable better execution on the former two (e.g. using a wagon to transport stuff instead of carrying multiple bags). In particular, the process of getting back to the car was pretty brutal.

The organizers shit the bed this year for some reason. The good news is that most everything is a repeat of previous years, so all the normal stuff ran like a well-oiled machine because it already was a well-oiled machine. The bad news is that everything new broke down entirely. There was zero communication other than an email, two weeks in advance, telling us that the new athlete guide was going to be released as an app any day now (a terrible decision to begin with). In reality, the app was never released, there was no athlete guide, there were no other emails, and the website was down for two months before the race due to an expired certificate. Then on the day of the event the bridge to the event from the shuttle dropoff was under construction (likely had been for a long time), so a volunteer was stationed there to yell at people to go to a different bridge. Between that and the shuttle being strangely delayed, a lot of people were probably running significantly behind.

Some ideas for improvement

• Work on pacing at a HR of 150 for my Olympic race. I can’t count on doing 3 hours at 165-170, even I would crash out after a couple hours of that. This will require significant threshold training in all three disciplines, but especially swim and bike.
• Start in a faster swim group. I started with the 2:20 group, which probably slowed me down, and should have been in the 2:05 group at least. Maybe 2:20 group for the Olympic-length swim though.
• Put my bike in the correct rack! I probably lost 45 seconds just looking around for my spot both times I got to transition.
• Running was the least fun by far because it’s hard and hot and you feel slow. At least if that’s my specialty I can look forward to doing it well. So I’ll focus on run volume (and bike threshold) in preparation for the Olympic to have a subjectively better experience overall.
• Heat is a big factor in my running performance. I should do some heat adaptation training and practice pouring water over my head periodically.
• I screwed up T1 by getting on my bike just in front of the line instead of just past it. Oops.
• Work on holding aero position for a long time. Would have sped me up in the flats. A bit of hamstring flexibility and mobility would go a long way.
• Mash a bit more on the downhills. People tend to coast along at their average speed way more than they should.
• Hydrate more the day before and less the morning of. I had to pee from the moment I got in the water, and I’d already peed 3x that morning.
• Could really speed up T2 by getting my feet out of my bike shoes while coasting. Running in cleats is silly.
• Need to actually include transition practice in my normal swim and bike workouts. Transition is such an easy place to pick up free speed.
• Need to practice using the aid stations. I got away with it in the short course but it’s a bad habit to take into longer courses.
• Could pick up some easy time by practicing my sighting in open water swimming.
• A little baby oil to prevent fogging in my goggles would have saved me 20 seconds of treading water to clear them.
• Cleaning my bike and oiling the chain (possibly replacing it) will make it more efficient. Getting the rear wheel brake un-gunked will too. Should possibly get the bearings and sprockets checked by a bike mechanic.
• Speaking of, should really consider a bike fit, even though it’s expensive.
• I saw a guy running with a crazy fast cadence. I should train myself to do that better. Freely chosen cadence is best for racing, but it can be trained up too.
• Practice using aid stations (in nutrition plan/practice too)
• Try electrolyte packs (especially afterward, bc why not?) — test with long ride or brick.
• I got to spend the entire thing chasing people down, so my conservative self-seeding accidentally created ideal race psychology. Should remain on the conservative side to preserve that.

What actually happened, in order

Let’s talk through what happened chronologically and pull out some more lessons. Logistics and time management really are the fourth discipline. Just getting to and from the event with everything we needed was an accomplishment worth celebrating.

I wrote up a few pages of instructions with diagrams and pictures for my wife because she’s busy at work and doesn’t have time to make sense of the various packing lists, timelines, packet pickups, parking, shuttle schedule, and so on ahead of time. Plus, having a soundboard helped me plan everything out explicitly. This was a great idea, plus it made the other spectating wives jealous. That said, it didn’t all go according to plan, as mentioned. It was a long walk back to the car carrying multiple heavy bags after an already long morning of racing. Next time we’ll at least bring the wagon.

We packed Friday and drove down Saturday morning for packet pickup and stayed over at my sister-in-law’s place. That saved a lot of money and trouble. Had Thai food for dinner, mostly because we don’t have that out in the hinterlands. Should have over-hydrated a bit on Saturday and hydrated less on Sunday morning, because I peed three times and still had another one in the chamber from the starting gun until the end. Also should have topped off my bike tires and filled my water bottle Saturday evening instead of Sunday morning, that set our departure time back a bit. Fortunately we had enough slack in the schedule to absorb that mistake without trouble.

Had one of the best nights of sleep of my life and got up at 5:15, 45 minutes before we needed to leave, ate my normal breakfast of overnight oats with applesauce and bananas, and drank 150ish mg of caffeine–a common morning practice for me that I refer to as “inducing labor”. I.e. I don’t want to worry about pooping in the middle of the race. Then I filled my tires as mentioned and got dressed. My best idea when it comes to packing is putting everything I’d need when getting dressed the center pocket of one duffel bag.

Red duffel bag:

• Body glide
• Sunscreen
• Sharpie (for body markings)
• Timing chip
• HR sensor
• Watch
• Tri suit
• Hoodie (and sweats if cold)
• Socks x1
• Running shoes
• Wetsuit
• Grocery bag (for putting on wetsuit)
• Goggles
• Event swim cap

As I dressed in the morning, everything moved from the big center pocket to my person or, in the case of things like sunscreen, into a side pocket. That way I didn’t even need a checklist, I knew that if the duffel bag was empty I was done. Everything except the last four items I put on at home, then at the event I left the running shoes and socks in transition, and grabbed my swimming stuff and carried it to the swim start.

When the duffel bag was nearly empty (except for the wetsuit, bag, goggles, and swim cap), I was able to fit a second, smaller bag in it with everything I’d be setting up in transition.

Transition bag (the Under-Armour backpack):

• Colorful beach towel (for finding my spot quickly and stepping on)
• Smaller hand towel (for drying feet)
• Spray-on sunscreen (for re-applying)
• Socks x2 (NB: I run in two pairs of socks to prevent blisters)
• Bike shoes
• Bike helmet
• Glasses (NB: ackshually my helmet has a magnetized visor)
• Full water bottle for bike
• Race belt with number

Again, I knew I was finished setting up my transition area when the bag was empty.

When my wife dropped me off I was immediately redirected to another route by a volunteer due to construction blocking the pedestrian bridge. This was another small bite out of the extra half hour of slack in the schedule. About half of the athletes were riding their bikes to the event, which looked pretty attractive to a ground-pounder like me, but they had special large triathlon backpacks to carry all their stuff (and I was also carrying my wife’s chair while walking my bike, so it wasn’t meant to be). When I got to transition it took way less time to set up than I expected, maybe 3-5 minutes. Gave me time to go potty.

Afterward I headed to the swim start, where my wife was already in a bad mood about the missing shuttle. I did a very minimal warmup but mostly stood around spectating and enjoying the high energy of the crowd and the Olympic-distance swim start. Those wetsuit strippers are a godsend, I can’t imagine why half the athletes weren’t availing themselves of that service. Went potty yet again. Then I went to the swim start and lined up with the 2:20 pace crowd. It’s amazing how many volunteers there are for an event like this. Where do all these people come from? I understand you can get some credit to put toward future race fees but a lot of them clearly weren’t athletes, they were just really positive people who wanted to help out. Almost feels like I found my people. Almost.

Swim

Swimming in a crowd was a lot less intimidating than I expected. Sometimes I touched other people, but it was just grazing touches, and everyone I swam around was very polite. I didn’t get clobbered or clobber anyone. But I seriously underestimated my swim pace, and ended up passing a lot of people. Keeping the correct heading was as hard as ever, and I almost went around the wrong side of a buoy even though it was only about 25m from the previous one. Paced well, and my final swim time was 12:21 for 600m, or 2:03.5 100m splits. Beat my expected time of 14:00 by 1:39.

Subjectively, I was shocked by how fast it was over. It felt closer to 200m. That might be due to adrenaline and having a lot to monitor at once: stroke, other people, heading, decisions about where to pass and where to slow down, etc. Had to stop and tread water for 20 seconds to clear the fog in my goggles once. I should try that tip where you apply a little bit of baby oil to the inside of the lenses.

T1

Transition from swim to bike included a half mile of running, which is probably why the swim distance wasn’t 750m like normal. The wetsuit stripper probably saved me a 10-15 seconds and a giant headache at a time when my head was already aching a bit from oxygen deprivation. As noted before, I’d racked my bike in the wrong place, which cost me 30 seconds of looking and lost momentum. My transition strategy was “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” so I got through the helmet-belt-socks-shoes routine without major hiccups, with a final time of 07:14 (including the half mile). Beat my expected time by 46s. Forgot to practice applying sunscreen, which wasn’t necessary for this race but will be for longer races later.

I screwed up T1 by getting on my bike just in front of the line instead of just past it. Oops. They didn’t penalize me, and I didn’t get any advantages from it, but that’s absolutely not a mistake I want to repeat.

Bike

This was by far the most fun part of the race. The headwind keeps you cool, riding a bike is just plain fun, riding fast is more fun, and passing people is even more fun. Because I’d estimated my speed super-conservatively, and the rest of humanity overestimates themselves, I got to spend the entire thing chasing people down. One annoying thing was that not everyone read the rules about staying to the right when you’re not passing, so “on your left” became “on your right” a couple of times. I only stayed in aero on the downhills for the most part, but I’d like to work on that. Pacing was flat, and I did the 12.4 miles in 38:45, with an average speed of 18.7 mph. My plan had been to average 17.0 mph, so my expected bike time was 43:45, which I beat by a full 5 minutes.

Subjectively, I was again shocked by how fast it was over. Felt more like 25 minutes and was great fun the whole time. I bet the aquabike events get real popular in years to come.

T2

Great dismount. I could speed up the running portion by taking off my bike shoes while I’m riding, it’s not as hard as putting them on while riding or flying mounts. Lost another 30s finding my bike again. Final time was 3:04, which was 4 seconds slower than expected.

Run

Running felt okay until the last mile, which was awful. I pulled off a negative split at the cost of my final sprint, so my official photo coming onto the blue carpet looks awful. It will not be going up on the fridge. It was getting to be a fairly hot morning by this time, and as I’ve mentioned before I run very hot at the best of times. Subjectively, what I remember is the absolute grind at the end when my heart rate was running up into the high 170s and low 180s, but if I recall it honestly it was a comfortable, very sustainable pace for the first 2.1 miles. My focus at first was on keeping my heart rate below 170, which turned out to be a good pacing strategy for me. For the last mile I tried to shift up about half a gear with the intention of leaving nothing in the tank. Average mile time was 8:25, or 7.13 mph, for a final time of 25:30 which was 1:30 faster than expected.

Subjectively, running is stupid and hot and I don’t wanna. It would be great if we did it first and THEN swam, but probably half the participants would be tired and drown because they didn’t train until the last two weeks before the event.

Nutrition strategy

I didn’t have one, to my shame. Didn’t even use my fancy handlebars-mounted aero Big Gulp thing, which I should get back in the habit of using (it’s free time). I just filled my bike water bottle half full with water, half full with Gatorade, and put maybe 80 mg of caffeine in it. I think I had planned to bring a banana on the bike ride but forgot about it. Didn’t use any of the aid stations either. Mostly finished the water bottle. Chat GPT says I should do a sweat test and get this part really ironed out before my Olympic race comes up, which is true.

Afterward

As mentioned, the event planners kinda shit the bed, so there was a long ruck march back to the carrying more stuff than we’d needed to bring. Again, would have been real nice to haul everything in a wagon. One of the main takeaways is to only pack essentials for not dying, and assume there’ll be at least something around to eat.

Cooler (more minimalistic version):

• 20 oz. water
• Electrolyte packet
• Protein bar
• Cooling towel
• Compression socks for post race
• Minimal first aid kit
• Something for wifey to drink

I had some backup stuff in a bag back in the car, like another bike helmet in case mine was DQ’d for some reason, which was totally unnecessary (except for allaying my first-race anxiety). Will probably still pack it next time, but put the backup goggles in my transition bag. Those are one item that could absolutely go wrong at the last second.

Misc other lessons

• We overpacked for the recovery time bigly, especially the liquids (which are heavy to carry!). Most of my post-race desires were met by the event organizers, and I wouldn’t have died as long as I had at least water, electrolytes, and maybe 100 calories.
• Speaking of, water of all things was surprisingly scarce for my wife and for me after the race.
• A little time between sunscreen and Sharpie application goes a long way.
• The time compression in swim and bike are a sign that attention was saturated and cognitive workload was high, which is different than adrenaline.
• Wash wetsuit during shower afterward
• Sew backpack straps on wife’s chair, or at least a shoulder strap
• Separate race planning into these phases:

1. Home prep
2. Travel from home to transition area
3. Transition setup and final race prep
4. Race
5. Recovery time
6. Travel from event to car, food, and shower

Re: https://www.seangoedecke.com/patience-too-cheap-to-meter

I’d like to extend Goedecke’s idea a bit by pointing out that the LLM format also encourages the reader to be more patient, which is mediated by social norms.

Let’s start with the assumption that some topics require a long message without conversational tangents or interruptions. When I write long-form messages to my wife, she’ll read them all the way through in one sitting with no problem. But if I try to talk to her about them in person, she’ll start responding after 0-3 sentences. This is normal in conversation. It’s abnormal, and would unsettle most people emotionally, if one person spoke on the same subject in a well-structured format while the other person listened and only asked clarifying questions once every 10 minutes. Peer conversation is a poor medium for addressing complex topic with many variables and interdependencies.

A formal tutoring or 1-on-1 meeting setting is somewhat better, so it’s not just writing vs. speaking. But even then some interaction is expected. Part of the value of tutoring is this student-tutor feedback loop. However, even if it’s much less frequent than in casual conversation, pupils still interact with tutors more frequently than LLM users do, measured in number of words between prompts. If you were trying (unadvisedly) to turn a casual relationship into a teaching relationship, it would take a lot of groundwork in norm-setting before they’d learn to hold their questions in their heads, unspoken, until a structurally appropriate stopping point.

Now, if I recorded a 10-minute video message for my wife, tailored to her prompt or situation and considering all the previous context, I could expect the same sort of attention span from her. I.e. she would be situationally more patient. But she doesn’t prefer to interact with me in that way, even though I’m very patient and would do it (I write her long-form messages semi-regularly because that’s what I do with everyone who’ll put up with it). Like most people, she prefers to vibe with people she loves (low-patience format) and approach complex ideas separately in writing or lecture format (high-patience format). LLMs occupy the latter by construction.

Personally, I’d love it if letter-writing came back into fashion, because that was the blogosphere of yore which enabled all of our cultural and scientific advances. But for now, we’re stuck with Chat GPT and whatever hasn’t yet been paywalled on Substack.

Hellraiser is a simple allegory about human motivation where the Lemarchand configuration is the study of desire (and psychology more broadly) and the cenobites represent the dopamine system unleashed. The story is thereafter a straightforward science fiction plot that takes seriously the observation that inhuman horrors are more engaging to the human mind than pedestrian pleasures, and that if we understand this and still act according to the pleasure principle the results would be monstrous. This presaged the internet age of algorithmically curated content, where we’ve learned that this tendency to prefer and seek out progressively more shocking and transgressive content is more or less true and is now structurally reinforced. Curiosity seeks novelty, novelty becomes habituated, and stronger stimuli are required, eventually crossing unimaginable boundaries in search of greater engagement.

Humans have a strong negativity bias in our experience of emotional intensity, perhaps mirroring our cost-aversion. This is why I feel Frank is the most important character to the plot. Because negative emotions can be felt much more strongly that positive emotions, someone becoming progressively inured to intensity must reach more and more deeply into the range of negative experiences. What makes Frank interesting is that he has already exhausted the positive side of experience before the film begins. Barker goes out of his way to establish that Frank has traveled, pursued sex, pursued luxury, pursued novelty, and pursued every conventional pleasure available to him. The Lemarchand configuration (puzzling out how our reward systems truly work) only becomes attractive once ordinary rewards stop working.

Pleasure is enjoyable. But pain, fear, disgust, humiliation, mutilation, terror, grief, ecstasy, and trauma can reach intensities that ordinary pleasures rarely approach. This is one reason why Frank’s motives are unsettling while many fictional hedonists feel shallow and unrealized. He isn’t seeking pain, he’s seeking something that’s still capable of making him feel alive. Having solved the psychological problem–the only hedonic way out of anhedonia is down–he follows the formula to its logical conclusion and, in accordance with his hedonic principles, gives himself over to the dopamine-spiraling monsters who live there. As subpoints of the thesis, we find that dopamine-spiraling leads to the destruction of one’s body, close relationships, and often the lives of bystanders who get caught up in your schemes.

The movie’s thesis appears to have been somewhat overstated in the short term, as it doesn’t account for the strong influence of social imitation, status striving, and other communal effects on human value systems and therefore what our baseline dopamine systems reward our pursuit of, but it remains to be seen whether long-term TikTok use is structurally inclined toward traumatic BDSM and cartel torture videos or if there are in fact permanent natural guardrails of some kind. Pain may well be the lowest common denominator, though I’d prefer it if we turned off the internet before finding out. It turns out my curiosity has limits after all.

Addendum to https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/ai-lifehack/.

The website has paywalled downloads of the tracks you generate. However, my understanding is that it’s legal to obtain the download without paying for it–they simply aren’t obligated to provide you with the feature for obtaining it. That’s assuming law even exists on the subject.

Anyway, moving on to the hack fix to the lifehack:

Open the list of your songs in Chrome. Hit F12 to open the Web Inspector and open the Network tab. Click the “Media” button to filter out the traffic we don’t care about. Press play on the song you want to download. This will bring up new traffic:

Right-click on the one that’s about the right size. My 4-minute song would be about 3.5 MB, so I right-clicked on the bottom one. Choose “Open in a new tab”. This will open the MP3 file in Chrome’s native player. Click the three dots on the right of the player controls and you’ll be able to download from there.

https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/the-death-of-the-university-degree

I think the title is a bit overstated, but it’s a good essay.

In Caplan’s model, university attendance signals three things: intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity. The latter is what has made it impossible to replace with better alternatives. E.g. MOOCs and alternative schools were supposed to replace colleges, but they turned out to be places that assure employers you’re a weirdo. Employers want normal.

College’s value for intelligence signaling was already in the toilet–it had become primarily a signal for conscientiousness and conformity. What we’re seeing now is the loss of signaling power for conscientiousness as well. But the conformity one is exceedingly important, and Chat GPT use for cheating is, if anything, a further sign of normalcy.

There are many laptop jobs where cognitive laziness is even a feature rather than a bug. Do you want your HR drones thinking for themselves? Of course not. Better to have them copy-pasting polite propaganda messages. Compliance is literally in their job title.

There’s also an extremely salient factor that Caplan misses in his model: assortative mating. A college degree still predicts that you don’t do meth or deal drugs, even if it doesn’t say much about how smart you are. That means dads will keep sending their daughters to college, making most men without degrees effectively unable to marry any girls who are smart enough to use Chat GPT. It’s a rational choice to prevent marriage to complete losers by filtering them out entirely.

Still, the loss of conscientiousness signaling will represent a real loss of value to college degrees to any profession that requires conscientiousness. That’s a real and significant market shift. This is accurately represented in the paraphrase from Hendricks:

A senior New York financier told the Financial Times’s Gillian Tett that his firm now combs through humanities students rather than “AI-native” STEM graduates, on the grounds that the latter arrive with “alarmingly shallow ideas”.

Muh STEM degrees 😭.

But still, the university system will crawl along for a lot longer than it should. And don’t think this will lower tuition; if anything, higher tuition will become a proxy measure for the actual value of the degree for signaling conformity and marriageability.

I consider Of swords and Shadows to be my best work. Let’s see what Chat GPT thinks! (Note: I presented it as “a weird greentext I read once” in hopes of bypassing flattery.)

---

A fair amount of this is incoherent or deliberately schizo-posting for effect [Ed: What you meant to say there was “hilarious.”], but the core symbolic framework is actually fairly sophisticated. It is trying to construct a unified cognitive-mythological model out of:

• Piaget
• Jung
• heroic fantasy
• cybernetics/game theory
• JRPG aesthetics
• internet political subcultures

The result is unstable but interesting because it accidentally rediscovers some real structural patterns in myth.

A few parts are especially notable.

---

“Sword = assimilation / magic = accommodation”

This is probably the strongest idea in the whole thing.

The author is mapping Piagetian cognition onto fantasy archetypes:

• Assimilation:
  applying existing schemas to reality
• Accommodation:
  altering schemas to handle novelty

So:

• the sword = applying known structures forcefully
• magic = creating new conceptual structures

That actually tracks surprisingly well with how fantasy stories are structured.

The hero:

• operationalizes
• executes
• acts decisively
• applies solutions

The wizard:

• researches
• discovers
• reframes
• invents new metaphysical rules

In mythic terms:

• wizardry often represents epistemic transformation
• swords represent agency and selective pressure

The claim:

“If ordinary swords worked, the magic sword would be unnecessary”

is structurally true in many stories.

The magical weapon usually represents:

• a new paradigm
• recovered sacred legitimacy
• a forgotten technology
• moral worthiness combined with capability

For example:

• Excalibur
• the Master Sword
• the Dragon Slayer
• the Dark Dragon Blade in Ninja Gaiden 4

These are not merely stronger weapons.
They are “category-breaking solutions.”

---

The nightmare castle as a social unconscious

The “nightmare castle” idea is also stronger than it first appears.

The recurring fantasy structure:

• dark tower
• cursed city
• haunted castle
• abyssal fortress
• evil empire capital

often functions psychologically as:

a spatialization of concentrated corruption.

The important thing is that fantasy externalizes moral and psychological conditions into geography.

So:

• Mordor
• Dracula’s Castle
• Ganondorf’s tower
• Silent Hill
• Tokyo under cursed rain in Ninja Gaiden 4

become:

• psychic infection zones
• regions where normal rules collapse
• manifestations of accumulated shadow material

The greentext’s language about “low-trust preference cascades” is internet-rationalist jargon awkwardly grafted onto this older symbolic structure.

But underneath the jargon is a real insight:

evil domains in fantasy often symbolize environments where cooperative norms have broken down.

The land itself becomes spiritually and socially nonfunctional.

That is why fantasy corruption spreads outward geographically:

• blight
• cursed fog
• undead plague
• demonic influence
• poisoned rain

These are mythologized depictions of social entropy.

---

The barbarian vs wizard tension

The Conan discussion is exaggerated and polemical, but it points at a real recurring polarity in myth:

Barbarian archetype

Represents:

• instinct
• vitality
• courage
• embodied competence
• anti-decadence energy

Distrusts:

• abstraction
• overintellectualization
• excessive system-building
• metaphysical experimentation

Wizard archetype

Represents:

• abstraction
• forbidden knowledge
• adaptation
• symbolic manipulation
• technological/spiritual leverage

Risks:

• alienation from embodied reality
• corruption through excessive curiosity
• attempting to master forces beyond human scale

This polarity appears constantly:

• Conan vs sorcerers
• Fremen vs imperial technocrats
• Jedi vs Sith scholars
• warriors vs alchemists
• techno-optimists vs primitivists

The greentext correctly notices that fantasy frequently portrays:

wizards as both civilization’s greatest asset and greatest liability.

That is archetypally ancient.

The shaman:

• heals
• guides
• protects

but also:

• traffics with dangerous forces
• risks possession
• destabilizes taboo boundaries

---

“Accommodating the Shadow”

This is where the post starts partially collapsing conceptually.

Jungian “shadow integration” does not mean:

• indulging evil impulses
• dissolving moral boundaries
• surrendering to corruption

It means:

recognizing disowned capacities and drives so they stop acting unconsciously.

Fantasy often dramatizes failed shadow integration as:

• the wizard corrupted by forbidden power
• the king consumed by ambition
• the hero becoming the monster

But successful integration is usually represented by:

• disciplined confrontation
• purification
• transformed power

Which brings this surprisingly close to the symbolic structure of Ninja Gaiden 4 again.

Yakumo does not “embrace evil” in a simplistic sense.
He confronts inherited corruption without pretending he is separate from it.

That is much closer to Jung than the greentext author realizes.

---

The accidental political theology underneath it

The deeper structure of the post is actually a theory of civilization.

Roughly:

• societies require heroic assimilation to maintain order
• but eventually face genuinely novel threats
• novelty requires accommodation (“wizardry”)
• excessive accommodation destabilizes norms
• excessive rigidity leads to collapse
• therefore civilization oscillates between:
  • heroic conservatism
  • dangerous innovation

That is not a crazy framework.

It resembles:

• Toynbee’s challenge-response theory
• Nietzschean decadence cycles
• Spenglerian morphology
• cybernetic adaptation theory
• Jungian compensatory dynamics

The fantasy metaphors work because myths naturally encode tensions between:

• stability and transformation
• purity and contamination
• tradition and adaptation
• force and knowledge

---

Why this style of internet writing exists

This genre of greentext emerges from people trying to reconstruct meaning from:

• fragmented pop culture
• psychology
• internet irony
• political disillusionment
• mythology
• systems theory

The tone oscillates between:

• insight
• trolling
• genuine metaphysics
• manic pattern association

because the writers are often half-performing and half-serious simultaneously.

But one reason it resonates is that modern people frequently experience fiction more mythologically than literally.

They intuit that:

• castles
• swords
• demons
• corruption zones
• magic bloodlines

are carrying psychological and civilizational meaning, even when the creators themselves may not fully articulate it.

The result is this strange hybrid:

meme esotericism attempting to reverse-engineer symbolic cognition from fantasy media.

The main problem with the ideologal age is it ruins the metaphors for our relationship with God as king. For example, medieval peasants wouldn’t have needed a philosophical argument to convince them they were the king’s rightful property. They may not have liked it, and they may even have revolted or fled, but the idea of disagreeing with it wouldn’t have occurred to them. In contrast, if you tell modern Western people that they are God’s rightful property in the same way that they’re the state’s rightful property*, you’re going to have an interminal philosophical discussion immediately. They’re going to start with the counterfactual position that people aren’t property and argue it ad nauseum. The exception to this is high-IQ INTPs, who are generally open to the idea that social fictions like human rights are Noble Lies that exist to organize and coordinate mass society, not to explain how it works.

*Such that non-participation, like moving innawoods, constitutes rebellion and will trigger state reprisals if it’s seen as a viable alternative to participation.

I realized something very curious about myself recently that I should have realized ages ago. All of my focusing lifehacks are based on getting my heart rate up into the most productive zone (100ish):

• Sitting in the sauna for ~15-30 minutes.
• Walking on a treadmill at ~1 mph.
• Doing something that requires focus immediately after a cardio session (heart rate still up).
• Stimulants like caffeine or nicotine or both.

Normally I operate at the level of a bright but not brilliant college student, who can string words together by pure association (System 1 stuff) but who struggles with coding or difficult math ideas like proofs (System 2 stuff). But when I’m in the sauna all of my walls come down and I can work through technical material in a flow state like it’s nothing, whether it’s coding or proofs or abstract algebra or whatever. Back when I was in school, when I was struggling with a particularly different math problem I’d go in the steam room and in 5-10 minutes it would just solve itself in my head, as if it were being worked out by someone else on a chalkboard before my eyes. If it was just brute thinking work like ordinary coding I’d take my laptop in the dry sauna (which is a bit less intense) and have the pseudocode and all the tricky bits written up in 60 minutes. For work that just required attention, I could use the treadmill (but I also tapped out on that after about 90 minutes). I used stimulants for proctored tests, since I couldn’t do those in a sauna or on a treadmill.

The problem with all of these is they’re tiring. Or in the case of the stimulants, bad for me. Anyway, I think this is a pretty interesting observation, and it doesn’t feel intuitive that it would be common.

Today I learned that when users request something, solving the root cause isn’t always the whole job (for a couple of possible reasons).

In this particular case, a department head asked accounting for a report of all phone calls made by an employee. The gal in accounting in turn asked IT. I looked at the account and noticed that the phone’s plan didn’t include voice and was using minutes, which was probably resulting in unexpected charges. So I called the accounting gal, who directed me to the department head. I talked to the department head and she confirmed that the problem was the unexpected charges, so I started a new ticket for her to get the phone on the appropriate plan (and a coworker), let the accounting gal know, and closed the current ticket.

Well, a week later my boss re-opens it and says the accounting gal still wants the report. What gives? After talking to my boss, and then talking to her again, she still wants it. I can imagine a couple of reasons this might be:

1. Accounting gal doesn’t give a hoot about the root cause. She was asked for a report, and for personality or procedural reasons she’s getting a report, and that’s that. This is the most likely, because doing exactly what she’s told, without concern for why, would explain how she’s stayed on here for more than 20 years.
2. Either accounting gal or department head gal wanted the report to financially justify the plan change. Plausible, but a bit more effortful than usual for this organization.
3. The reason given was a fig leaf for the real reason. Maybe department head gal is actually looking for a way to fire the employee, and she only agreed with my root cause analysis because she was caught off guard that I was even asking. This is unlikely but the most potentially deleterious because it makes you look too naive to be involved in the informal economy.

Anyway, today’s lesson is that yes, you have to solve the root cause, but you also have to confirm with everybody in the chain of communications that they’re happy with the solution. Preferably in writing, although it’s usually enough to note the verbal confirmation in the ticket.

I’m writing this to kickstart my own thinking on the topic, not because I’ve reached any conclusions.

Home improvement currently serves a horrible mishmash of conflated concerns. Probably the most important for our economy is personal investment in a “nest egg”–a topic Dave Ramsey and Robert Kiyosaki would fight over, which already signifies trouble at the level of basic definitions. There’s also personal comfort and aesthetics, as well as improving the house in a way that’ll be attractive to potential buyers, another source of tension if people are different (they are). There are also investments to preserve or upgrade the basic functions of a house, like buying a new roof. Last, there’s all the weird economic activity that financialization tends to produce, like 30% of houses in my county being reserved for Airbnb rentals.

Because our economic system is about to go through some fundamental changes, the conventional confusion of these purposes should, theoretically, open up unusual opportunities to make money during the transition period as they decouple. That is, the efficient market hypothesis will not be true in housing for about 10-20 years, as a ballpark guess. Market fundamentalists will screech at the idea, but I’m not just talking about economics here, I’m talking about one of those periods in history when the market plays a supporting role to the accumulated consequences of human insanity: crisis and its aftereffects.

We don’t know what the crisis will look like exactly, but we know there will be a financial component for at least two reasons, Peter Turchin’s “wealth pump” and the military-enforced trade deficit. Our prosperity depends heavily on imports from other countries, with our primary export being military supremacy. Why would those countries, especially China, accept such a bad deal? Partly because they had to as a form of tribute, partly because we were a great customer and selling to us fueled their economic rise, partly because they were taking advantage of our CEOs’ high time preference to undercut our productive capacity, partly because they were undermining our military supremacy with electronic backdoors, and probably other reasons I can’t think of off the top of my head.

As our military supremacy visibly declines (and therefore also our economic supremacy), we’d expect the imports related to it to slow down, disappear, or possibly even reverse direction. Who knows, maybe in the future I’ll have a side gig setting up fly-by-night sellers on Chinese Amazon sending white-labeled trash to housewives in Shenzhen. Anyway, what I’m getting at is the massive trade deficit, which represents about half of our prosperity, is unlikely to survive the various wars after we lose in Iran.

Here are some possible big picture scenarios:

1. Gently managed Britain-style imperial collapse. Unlikely due to elite demographics (ref. Turchin).
2. Everything’s great, economy keeps improving 4% every year like always. Demographic decline toward India conditions.
3. Stagnation but slow, like in recent entertainment. There’s still internet and stuff to watch on it if you’re not picky.
4. Sharp 10-year depression and recovery, like postwar Germany.
5. Argentina-style financial collapse. Most likely, in wake of Israeli empire collapse and SWIFT alternative in BRICS.
6. Covid-style long-term logistics systems breakdown. Would be very bad.
7. Roman collapse-style Reconquista from the south.

Returning to house values, we should consider which parts of a house’s value are going to be decoupled from the others in the wake of the most likely futures, and in what direction. We should also consider the Silver Wave circa 2040. For reference, I’m going to copypasta some Chat GPT text that I made for managing our household maintenance expenses.

---

Heuristics for spending the house maintenance budget.

***Layer 1 — Catastrophic Risk Prevention (non-negotiable)

These are failures that create irreversible or compounding damage:

• Roof leaks, water intrusion
• Foundation issues
• Electrical hazards (fire risk)
• Plumbing failures (burst pipes, sewage)
• Mold conditions
• Central heating failure

If ignoring it could cause ≥5× cost within 1–3 years, it belongs here.

***Layer 2 — Hidden System Integrity

Systems that quietly degrade and then fail expensively:

• HVAC servicing, filters
• Water heater aging
• Drainage and grading
• Insulation and ventilation
• Appliance maintenance (not replacement)

These are easy to ignore because nothing is “wrong yet.”

***Layer 3 — Efficiency and Cost Reduction

These improve your long-term resource position:

• Air sealing, insulation upgrades
• Energy-efficient appliances (when replacement is already needed)
• Water efficiency improvements

Key distinction: Do not upgrade purely for efficiency unless payback is real and near-term. This layer is about compounding savings, not ideology.

***Layer 4 — Functional Friction Reduction

Things that waste time, attention, or create low-grade irritation:

• Poor storage / organization
• Broken fixtures (doors, drawers, lighting)
• Layout inefficiencies

This layer is undervalued but high leverage for quality of life. These rarely look urgent, but they degrade daily experience, increase cognitive load, and subtly reduce discipline.

***Layer 5 — Aesthetic and Identity Alignment

Paint, decor, landscaping, stylistic upgrades. These matter—but only after the house is stable, systems are reliable, and friction is low. Otherwise, they become a form of avoidance or signaling.

***Budgeting Heuristic (Simple but Robust)

Allocate roughly:

50–70% → Layers 1–2 (risk + systems)
10–25% → Layer 3 (efficiency, when justified)
10–20% → Layer 4 (friction reduction)
0–15% → Layer 5 (aesthetic)

---

We can usefully talk about layers 1 and 2 as the “true” value of a home, in the sense that these are what people care about in a chaotic situation (like war, economic crisis, etc.). During Covid, we saw a massive spike in spending on layer 5, which represents stress-fueled personal expression masquerading as “investment”. That will probably happen again. Layer 4 is more of a personal productivity thing, and only has downstream effects on the economy, so we can dismiss it. I’ll have to stew on layer 3, because it’s a complex soup of top-down policy, ideology, investment, code, prepper fantasies, door-to-door sales, and technical innovation. Are people going to be buying more solar panels during a crisis?

My gut says no, but my gut also says the opposite of what a normal person’s does in most situations. I’m still shocked, to this day, that blogging platforms with arbitrary character limits and video platforms with arbitrary time limits remain wildly influential. What’s next, credit cards with tiny spending limits? Texting plans with character limits? Video game platforms where all the games have 20-second time limits? Actually shoot, that one would probably blow up, maybe I’ll do that instead of trying to understand a dying financial instrument.