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A bunch of alarming shit www.derekthompson.org/p/the-26-most-important-ideas-for-2026

2787 sats \ 29 comments \ @elvismercury 15h BooksAndArticles

(Actual article title: The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026)

Lots of interesting things in this, too many to linger on. Here's just one:

A systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory. In the chart below, you can see a consistently negative, if also heterogeneous, relationship between heavy short-form video use and problems with attention, memory, and control.

...

But taken together, [the studies] suggest a plausible mechanism: a daily diet of hyper-rewarding, rapid-fire stimuli may gradually reshape attention and regulatory systems in ways that weaken our attentional control.

This hypothesis is, neuroscientifically speaking, extremely plausible. One can (and ought to) look as the routines of daily life as a kind of training. The natural question that arises is: what are you training yourself for? The idea that most of the industrialized world is training themselves in the manner described above is consistent with my experience and also horrifying.

Anyway, lots of thought-provoking things. Relevant to this recent post about reading, too.

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367 sats \ 10 replies \ @grayruby 14h

This is very depressing. I definitely agree with the casinoification of the economy. All these apps that were designed to democratize and gamify both finance and sports betting paired with young minds that are addicted to dopamine is probably a very dangerous cocktail.

Young men becoming degenerate gamblers is a very nihilistic and insecure way to live. "what's the point, I am never going to rich or have a beautiful house or find a great mate so let me yolo into memecoins and try to turn thousands into millions". In some ways I don't fault them for this attitude, this is the behaviour the fiat system incentivizes but I think we really need to push back against it. Young men spending all their time gambling on sports and memecoins would be better suited learning a skill, plying it, living below their means and reinvesting in themselves, finding a tribe (like minded people) and meeting in the real world. And for the love of god go talk to women in the real world, not online.

And that's all I have to say about that. I will go back to degen gambling on sports now and ignoring my wife. Haha

220 sats \ 7 replies \ @SimpleStacker 13h

Statistics (which i'm too lazy to look up and link to right now) show that young men are actually trending more conservative in terms of desiring a more trad lifestyle: getting married, having kids, etc. But I think the stats also show that there's a growing despair that they'll ever be able to achieve that. At the same time, women are trending less trad than ever. The gap between young mens and womens' outlook on life has never been wider, afaict. It's very concerning to see. Every generation worries about the next, but the statistics seem to look worse than ever before.

94 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 13h

I think this is right. Older generations have been saying "those darn kids" "this is going to fry your brain" etc. But it does feel the sexes are rowing in two different directions in a lot of ways.

67 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 13h

I'm sympathetic to both of your points:

every generation thinks the next is utterly ruined
right now feels (to me) acutely bad

... but then I think that maybe, wrt #2, I am exquisitely sensitive to certain flavors of ruin, and see it clearly, and see that it's worse than ever. But then I think that every generation may have had their own particularly fine-tuned feature detectors.

For instance, there are people alive now for whom the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times; that worry seems absurd to me, but I have an entirely different mental ecology as a function of my path and era.

It's a foreignness that's hard to simulate, I think.

20 sats \ 4 replies \ @fourrules 10h

the prospect of men marrying each other and paying money to impregnate someone for a sperm cocktail baby surely predicted the end-times

Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism. It's not like renting their labour. So yeah, end-times is on point.

40 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury OP 9h

Bryan Caplan occasionally does posts where he makes a big list of things that seemed abhorrent and hideously unnatural over the years, that now we don't think twice about. This seems like that, to me.

The bigger class of concerning things, imo, are things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous in the same way we're stunned that our ancestors thought slavery was fine.

141 sats \ 1 reply \ @billytheked 5h

things we don't think twice about now that our successors will one day look as monstrous

Hm. Wrt slavers, I think we can either excuse them because of moral relativism, or not, and say they should have known better.

Do you think we ought not to be excused for our follies on this principle?

Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 4h

Or maybe we should know better about certain things, making our behaviors inexcusable. Then I would wonder what these are as well.

The only possible audience for such an audit is yourself; and therefore you're the only one who can say what's on that list.

I do wonder if most people go around, as I do, knowing they're doing terrible things, and do them anyway, because they can, because it's normal and nobody's stopping them, and they get by through a willful act of looking-away.

Or whether the wrongness doesn't even occur to them, and so there's nothing to look away from.

And I don't know which I think is worse.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 10h

Renting people's reproductive capacity is abhorrent in the same sense as cannibalism

Why?

80 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 13h

Agreed with all of this. I would only add: young women seem to have their own flavor, it's just pointed in a slightly different direction. Freya India writes persuasively on this topic.

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @krispy_donkey 10h

Interesting thoughts, thank you. But actually my small zap is for the Forrest Gump reference, wish such things were more common.

53 sats \ 6 replies \ @Undisciplined 12h

I recently unsubscribed from most of the political pods I’ve been listening to for years.

Something like this “what are you training for?” question was part of that.

69 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury OP 11h

Interesting! Do you have an answer to that question (e.g., an aspirational answer) that was inconsistent w/ the listening habit, or did you unsubscribe bc the implicit answer was one you didn't like?

101 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 9h

Yeah, I edited out a couple of inarticulate attempts at explaining it from my original reply.

Basically, I don't think being so obsessed with things I have no control over and that evoke overwhelmingly negative feelings is very additive to my life. That those things are "important", I realized, is not particularly relevant to whether I should spend my time on them.

I can spend my time focusing on things I enjoy or on things within my control that impact my wellbeing. That path seems more likely to go someplace good.

69 sats \ 2 replies \ @SimpleStacker 9h

I basically agree with you, but I'm also seeing the danger of being totally checked out of politics. So many people in California are so oblivious of politics that they're letting bad policies and bad politicians run rampant. Then, if you want to talk politics with them they're like "oh I hate talking politics"

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 8h

I think it's about the amount I was letting it consume me. I already know what my positions are on any normal political topic and I'm happy to discuss politics when people bring it up. I just don't need to go out of my way to soak in it.

69 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 8h

Yeah, I think it's best to at least have thought about it carefully at some point in your life and be willing to discuss it. Agree with not letting it consume your time or mental energy. It's kinda like a natural disaster. For the most part, there isn't much you can do about it

69 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 8h

Basically, I don't think being so obsessed with things I have no control over and that evoke overwhelmingly negative feelings is very additive to my life.

Can relate. It's the curse of the curious person, to have to resist the temptation to indulge in things that are undeniably important but unproductive in any good sense.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 14h

You get sats for the post title - article title contrast.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 14h

Thank you for appreciating my craft.

74 sats \ 1 reply \ @nym 13h

I've definitely experienced this and noticed a recovery when I stopped, and started reading books again. It felt like my thoughts flowed smoothly again instead of jumping around.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 13h

Same. Since I've been on "sabbatical" for 7 weeks I've started reading fiction (in book form) voraciously again, and it's like waking up to myself. Oh yeah, I remember when the inside of my head felt like this, it's nice.

I never want to go back. In fact, I want to keep pushing forward, whatever that means.

53 sats \ 1 reply \ @winteryeti 14h

Interesting. I always thought it was me, but I never learned well from video. I always needed to read concepts from books or written material, preferably printed out. I still use books extensively for learning new concepts and video only for entertainment or white noise.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 14h

IME video is good for an orthogonal set of things, and is clearly superior for those things. For most of the things I care about, books / text are a big win, though.

29 sats \ 1 reply \ @plebpoet 14h

like rats in a lab

20 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury OP 14h

Rats that built their own lab.

27 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 15h

Training themselves to respond in predictable ways to manipulable stimuli. Soon, if not already, people skilled at creating short-term videos will become highly prized consultants for anyone that wants to exert social control.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SHA256man 13h

"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6 KJV

Linnér A, Almgren M (2020). "Epigenetic programming - The important first 1000 days". Acta Paediatrica. 109 (3): 443–452. abstract

i am really behind on my posts... maybe that's the appropriate strategy, so that conscious stackers can catch up;

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 13h

All very interesting but zero mention of China and how it has won the trade war and without Chinas rare earths the USA cannot fight a war of any scale.