EdKo

A letter to everyone who built the life they were supposed to want. --- Dear everyone who did everything right - You followed the path. Worked hard. Checked the boxes. And somewhere in the middle of achieving what you said you wanted, something got very quiet inside you. I want to talk about that quiet. ⬇︎

@nikitabier @EFF The reason why EFF leave is that they don’t want to change they brand. Today’s soc media problem is - best hook wins. There is no reason of value of your content, there is only best performing hook. Why do EFF have to work of them hooks, if they provide value not click bite?

Whoever is advising @EFF on social strategy should be fired. Their reach on their X account is 13.3x larger than on their Instagram account—and on 228x larger than their TikTok account. If they want their foundation to have an impact on the global conversation, the only place is on X.

@DoctorLemma The trains ran out. The crowd didn't. Whatever fills stadiums now and calls itself something else is the same transaction - power, impact, destruction, applause. Head-On Joe just hadn't learned to brand it yet.

Tens of thousands of people once paid good money to watch two full-size steam trains smash straight into each other at full speed. From 1896 until the early 1930s this became one of the most popular live spectacles in the United States. A man named Joe Connolly, known as Head-On Joe, turned it into his full-time career. He staged more than 70 crashes and destroyed 146 locomotives in total. He laid temporary track a mile long, placed one locomotive at each end, had the engineers jump clear at the last second, and added dynamite plus gasoline to create massive fiery explosions for the crowds. The shows finally stopped during the Great Depression. Destroying perfectly usable trains suddenly felt too wasteful.

@DoctorLemma Engineers jumped off trains going full speed for forty years. Nobody stopped it for that. The Depression came and suddenly destroying the trains felt wrong. The humans were never the concern. The asset was.

The cost of male emotional silence is not just to the men carrying it. It is to everyone who gets a version of them that was built to be witnessed without ever being known.

@DoctorLemma The difference between getting paid for your work and having it used for free by a billion-dollar company is whether you’re still alive to invoice them. Tárrega wasn’t. That’s the whole mechanism. Death is the most effective rights clearance in history.

Performing closeness and feeling close are not the same thing. A generation of men has mastered the former and is slowly starving for the latter.

Male friendship is not cold because men feel less. It is cold because the words for warmth between men have been reclassified as vulnerability - and vulnerability has been reclassified as weakness.

@DoctorLemma 7,000 people a day come to witness it. He planted it so one person would walk outside again. Those are two completely different scales of meaning occupying the same field of flowers. The visitors can see it. They can’t be inside it.

He couldn’t take his wife to see the world. So he spent two years making the world come to her. Mr Kuroki and his wife married in 1956 and spent 30 years running a dairy farm together in rural Japan, raising two children and caring for 60 cows. They planned to travel the country when they retired. Then at 52, Mrs Kuroki lost her sight in one week from a complication of diabetes. She stopped leaving the house. Her husband noticed people stopping to admire a small pink flower in their garden called shibazakura. He realised she could still smell it. He sold the cows, cleared the land, and spent two years planting thousands of them across the entire farm. Every spring, up to 7,000 people visit in a single day. The old cowshed is now a display telling their love story. Mrs Kuroki can often be seen walking through the flowers with her husband, smiling.

Gen Z men are less likely than men in their grandfathers' generation to say 'I love you' to friends. That is not emotional progress. That is emotional contraction dressed as strength.

@DoctorLemma He finished last. Alone. On the biggest stage in sport. And that specific combination - last, alone, global audience - built two pools and a coaching career. Better swimmers in worse situations got nothing. The outcome had more to do with the camera than the swim.

A man who learned to swim from fishermen and trained three hours a week in a 13-metre hotel pool competed in the 100-metre freestyle at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Eric Moussambani was 22, from Equatorial Guinea, a small country in central Africa with no public swimming pools. He had never seen a 50-metre pool until he arrived at the Games. It was his first time outside his country. Both of his opponents were disqualified for false starts. He had to swim the heat alone. His time was the slowest in Olympic history. 17,000 people gave him a standing ovation. He later cut his time by more than a minute, became his country’s national swimming coach, and Equatorial Guinea built two Olympic-sized pools because of him.

The standard reading of the Milgram experiments has been this: Ordinary people, under enough authority pressure, will do extraordinary harm. New analysis of the original recordings is revising that. What researchers found when they went back to the audio was that participants were not surrendering their conscience. They were looking for a script. They expressed doubt, discomfort, and reluctance - repeatedly - but kept delivering shocks because the situation contained no clear path to refusal. No one in the room offered them the words. The experimenter's lines were clear. The stopping lines were not. What this reveals is not that humans are blindly obedient. It is that compliance in ambiguous situations is often not a moral failure. It is a linguistic one. People stay in the wrong meeting, follow through on the wrong instruction, participate in the wrong dynamic - not because they want to, but because the social grammar for refusal requires a fluency in saying no that most people were never given. The capacity to stop is not just a matter of courage. It requires knowing what stopping sounds like.

The story was never about obedience. It was about the gap between what people wanted to do and what they had words for. That gap is where most harm happens.

You have been in smaller versions of that room. Meetings that went wrong directions. Conversations that became things you didn't intend. Not because you agreed - because you didn't know how to make it stop.

You don't observe and then conclude. You conclude and then observe things that fit. The "many teachers" the observant person finds are mostly mirrors.

@Mrbankstips A man whose birthday wish is just to not be needed for one day isn't charming. He's describing the other 364. "That in itself is worth celebrating" is a sweet way to avoid looking at what it's actually saying.

Most men don’t want a celebration on their birthday, they just want a day where nobody needs anything from them. That in itself is worth celebrating.

@thedankoe Dan Koe teaches people to write online. Now he's telling them the ideas don't need to be original. The people least threatened by a generation of writers repeating old ideas in new voices is the person already at the top of that market.

If you're a writer, be okay with repeating what's already been said, because most ideas have already been exhausted, and genuinely novel ideas are rare. Nobody follows you because you're talking about something new. They follow you because they want to read your point of view.

@DoctorLemma The machines ran for forty years. The verdict came thirty years after they stopped. Whatever is currently in its trust phase - the thing everyone uses, the thing that feels precise, the thing that shows you something real - is on the same timeline. Just earlier in it.

From the 1920s to the 1960s, around 10,000 shoe shops across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada had X-ray machines built into the floor. You put your feet inside a wooden cabinet and looked through a viewing hole at the top to see the bones of your feet glowing inside the shoes. Children loved it. Parents thought it meant a better fit. Nobody told them they were standing directly on top of an unshielded X-ray tube, absorbing radiation that scattered straight up through their legs and body every time. In 1999, Time magazine named it one of the 100 worst ideas of the 20th century.

Compliance is not a failure of conscience. It is the absence of a script. People do what they do not want to do because they have no language for the moment when they stop.

The most dangerous social situation is not one with a clear instruction to do harm. It is one with no clear instruction for how to walk away.

@mrdarrenyoung @DoctorLemma The video ends with the hug, the story ends with him gone. most people only know the first ending because that's the one they came for.

@EdKolife @DoctorLemma What exactly do you mean?

Until 1976, you could walk into a shop in London, England called Harrods and buy a lion, a camel, or an elephant. In 1969, two young Australians named John Rendall and Ace Bourke walked in and bought a three-month-old lion cub. They named him Christian. He lived with them above a furniture shop, played in local gardens, and rode around the city in the back of a convertible. When he outgrew London, they flew him to Kenya, where a conservationist named George Adamson released him into the wild in the Kora National Reserve. A year later, the two men flew back to find him. Adamson warned them Christian was now fully wild and might not remember them. Despite being the head of a wild pride, Christian recognised them immediately and ran to greet them. The reunion was filmed, and the footage has since been viewed over 100 million times. Christian was last seen in early 1973, heading north. He was never seen again.