The goal for many people now is simply to live in a superstar city. Not do anything interesting there. Not to save money, not to own a home, or start a family. Being there is the achievement.
The city is not a means to an end.
lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/the-cult-of-…
The truth is, cities are really nice now. The human capital there is top tier. They have morphed into adult playgrounds. They are fun places. NYC is much different than today than it was in the 60s/70s/80s.
Cities are Lindy, they outlast the nations they exist in.
Jun 12 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Why are Americans known as easy to scam? Why do they get overcharged at restaurants, taxis and tourist traps around the world? Even by businesses at home. Or with FIFA and WC ticket prices.
Because being a sucker is less shameful than being a loser
lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/on-getting-s…
French newspapers did an investigation in Paris and found out restaurants were scamming Americans with extra charges. Serving them different food than other french people.
This is somewhat surprising to many, as Paris is supposed to be safe.
Mar 30 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
America was built on the assumption of upward mobility. That expectation has shaped Americans' nature.
Now that downward mobility is becoming more common, the country lacks the cultural tools to absorb it.
Two people meet. They fall in love. They couple up. They buy a home, have children, raise them, and eventually retire side by side. Modern life flows downstream from that sequence. The two-income mortgage. The tax structure. The real estate market. Universities. The suburbs. The school system. The pension system.
If this chain gets broken, things start collapsing.
Mar 13 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Male fashion never existed. There was one uniform they all wore, with slight variations. It made you look good, it didn't require individual expression, or cognitive exertion.
Now that the system of one male uniform has collapsed, most men gravitate to comfort. Rational. But an uglier society
think of the latest male uniform. The suit. The top matches the bottom. It looks good for fat and skinny people, tall or short. women love it. It provides warmth but also light enough to be worn in sunny days.
that's all gone
until a male uniform comes back, society will always favor comfort
Mar 5 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
How do you judge if someone is smart?
IQ? Net worth? Job performance? Reproductive success? Amount of leisure? Sometimes these contradict.
Is it current success? What about someone stuck in a bad country or ahead of his time and is vindicated later?
Every functioning society requires maintainers and scouts. Like a beehive. If you're society has too many scouts lookign for new trails and food sources, and not enough maintainers, it gets destroyed. Same thing if it doesn't have enough maintainers.
intelligence is a group unit, not an individual one
Men haven't changed much. They've been liberated for a long time. There's nothing interesting happening with men.
The real modern change is the complete emancipation and liberation of women. That's what's interesting because now you're seeing behaviors that never existed before with that gender.
The problem with reputation is you don’t own it. It lives in other people’s minds and can be destroyed overnight
Ideally, we’d have integrity. But few people do
Consistency is the practical substitute. If you can’t be good, just be the same everywhere
lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/reputation-a…
The Epstein emails are from the 2010s but sound very modern. His network was a decade ahead of everyone else at the time. These were people who built a great reputation to get his attention.
Jan 21 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
Clearance is how systems stay alive.
From health to relationships to creativity to attention
Anything that enters a system has a window to exit. Miss the window and it starts to become a problem.
Traveling can easily make us sick. Flush out your nasal and throat passages right when you arrive at your destination. Clear those microbes. It works
Take a way after you eat. Walking turns your largest tissue system into a disposal mechanism at the exact moment blood sugar is highest
Dec 19, 2025 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
What people miss isn’t the past. They miss the moment when new things were optional
An inherent property of progress is it turns options into obligations
Life can be objectively better and subjectively heavier. Why the future never feels like the future lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/from-option-…
Most nostalgia centers around life on the sweet spot of this curve
Dec 18, 2025 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Classical parenting resembles modern pet ownership
Modern parenting resembles endangered-species conservation
Force your will on the world, or hold your position until the world shifts in your favor.
Survive in case you get lucky
lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/stay-alive-i…
Americans are experiencing a profound shift in priorities, traditional sources of meaning like patriotism, religion, community, and family have collapsed and have been replaced by a singular focus on money and economic survival.
Nov 21, 2025 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
Why do people dress so badly?
10% of men are fashion obsessed and push for personal style
while 90% of men retreat into comfort because nothing has replaced the suit, which solved male fashion without effort
Until a new male uniform emerges we’re stuck lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/why-do-we-dr…
For centuries, 90 percent of men have always wore some type of uniform. They didn't expand energy on what to wear each morning or attempt to create a personal style
That was already solved by society and tradition
today that's gone.
Leaving 10 percent of fashionable men to pretend they were the normal ones throughout history
Nov 14, 2025 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
Golden ages of art occur when a field briefly offers outsized rewards (money, status, or freedom)
this creates a window that pulls high-ability people into it, but only temporarily
But you could at one point, and this drew people who would normally not be playing rock music.
but those people are gone now.
That doesn't mean the music is bad now, it's just different people playing it
Oct 1, 2025 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
We aren’t living in a culture of literacy anymore, we’re back in oral culture.
From that lens, everything makes sense: short attention spans, virality, popularity, who makes money, even populist politics all follow orality
Lets study the oral rules
lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/the-return-o…
Books are great, they can change your life. But people are not reading books anymore. They are ways for an author to get speaking fees or appear on podcasts to get famous. They are business cards of the intellectual class
Sep 24, 2025 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
It happened already with prohibition. The banning of alcohol led to mass restaurant closures. Especially nice ones.
The restaurants that survived, and the new ones that emerged, focused on cheaper, faster, and blander food to appeal to a wider, more sober audience. These places placed an emphasis on sweets. Sodas, ice creams, sundaes, pies replaced alcohol as the social lubricant.
Permanently altered the American dietary palette.
The American Food Renaissance of the 1990s–2000s brought back good food.
Prescriptions for Ozempic are up nearly 600% over six years. It works. People are losing weight.
But that's not the whole story.
We see unexpected changes with reduced pleasure-seeking and risk-taking behaviors.
It modifies your personality
lindynewsletter.beehiiv.com/p/the-hidden-r…
These drugs are being tested at a massive scale right now. Turns out people have lost interest in their previous interests, like gambling or drinking alcohol or sex drive.
We don't really know what's going on. These were unexpected side effects
