Bazzi

The average person isn’t physically active enough to be eating full 3 meals a day

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild. He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed. When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them. Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate. The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions. Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement. The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean. That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

The first week I arrived in Dublin, a woman at a Tesco checkout looked at me like I had asked her to explain the theory of relativity, and I realized I had said "please" the wrong way. Not the wrong word. The wrong volume, the wrong timing, the wrong warmth — the whole social architecture of the sentence was off, and she scanned my tin of sardines with her eyes already somewhere else, and I stood there in my big coat from Kantamanto market holding my Revolut card and thinking, chale, I have arrived in a foreign country and I do not know how to speak anymore. I had been a person in Accra. I want to be clear about this. I had been a whole, functioning, reasonably confident person — the kind who could negotiate a price at Timber Market, talk my way out of a go-slow jam on the Spintex Road, and explain macroeconomics to my mother's trader friends in terms she would accept. I had references. I had a reputation. I had a landlord who respected me, or at least feared my noise. And then I got on a plane and all of it stayed behind, sitting on the tarmac at Kotoka, waving. Here, I had to re-earn everything. The woman at the immigration office who looked at my documents and said, "This address doesn't match," in a tone that had no question in it at all — I had to figure out that I was being given a chance to correct something, not being charged with a crime. The bus driver who closed the door in my face because I had pressed the stop button one second too late — I had to learn that this was not personal, which was somehow worse, because at least in Accra rudeness had the dignity of being directed at you specifically. The pharmacist who asked me to repeat myself three times and then turned to the person behind me — I stood at that counter and made the arithmetic: I could shrink, or I could say it again, slowly, looking directly at her, without apology in my face, which felt so unnatural it made my jaw tight for the rest of the afternoon. The thing nobody tells you is that the confidence does not come back the same shape. You earn it back, yes, but in different currency.... smaller, harder coins. You learn which battles to enter and which rooms will cost you more than they are worth. You develop a patience that is not peace, and a quietness that is not submission, and you start to notice the exact moment someone decides to see you, and you store that moment somewhere careful, because you are going to need it later. By the time I had been in Dublin eight months, the Tesco woman remembered my name. I did not tell her mine.

defending a person & then experiencing why nobody likes them is very humbling.

No one loves women more deeply than the misogynist.