Johan Rheeder

Ubiquitous, streaming cameras will bring the end of privacy, petty crime, police brutality, and eventually, shame.

I’ve often cited this as one of the benefits of being deeply well-read and broadly being prepared. There will be situations in life when a snap judgement call is the inflection point where life branches off on one of two diametrically opposed paths. For those moments, you want to make sure your subconscious is properly primed, your knowledge base is wide enough and well-integrated enough to be trustworthy, and your body and mind can sustain you on the chosen road. Many of these inflection points come once and never again, allowing no do-overs or retries. The life you want to live is often built in years of darkness, desert, and preparation. The poetic beauty and cruelty is that, in the process, none of this preparation seems to matter all that much — until the exact moment when it matters more than you could possibly know.

Here a controversial take: most meetings are rituals where people try to discover whether anyone has enough status to make the decision without being punished.

Remember the Roman army rule: action removes fear.

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

A huge part of human behavior is not driven by fresh intention. It is driven by emotional memory. People do not wake up every day and deliberately choose the same fear, the same avoidance, the same shutdown, or the same self-sabotage. They simply find themselves inside the same patterns again, and mistake repetition for identity. The illusion is that they are choosing freely. The reality is that they are often responding automatically to what once felt necessary to survive. That is the real power of the subconscious mind. It does not mainly care about what is most true, most useful, or most aligned with the life you consciously want. It cares about what is familiar. If vulnerability once led to pain, it learns to pull away from openness. If expression once led to punishment, it learns to silence you before you even think. If shrinking kept you safe in one season of life, it can keep replaying that same strategy long after the danger is gone. This is why someone can consciously want love and still panic when intimacy gets close. Why someone can want visibility and still hesitate every time it is time to speak. Why someone can want freedom and still keep falling back into the same limiting patterns. None of that means the person is broken. It means an outdated emotional code is still running beneath the surface. Daniel Kahneman explained part of this through two systems: one fast, emotional, and automatic (closely related to what most people call the subconscious mind), and another slower, more logical, and deliberate (closely related to what we think of as the conscious mind). The problem is that the slower system usually arrives late. By the time logic begins trying to explain what is happening, the nervous system has often already reacted. The chest is already tight. The mind is already spiraling. The body is already preparing for a threat that may not even exist in the present moment. That is why knowledge alone rarely changes a person. You can understand a wound intellectually and still keep living from it emotionally. You can reject a belief in your conscious mind and still behave as if it were true, because the subconscious does not update through insight alone. It updates through repetition, experience, and safety. Awareness matters, but awareness alone is not enough. It’s awareness plus consistent action that creates real change. When you show your nervous system, again and again, that a new response is possible. The brain builds around what is repeated. The nervous system learns from what is practiced. And the subconscious starts updating when your life begins giving it new evidence. That is how neural patterning changes, not through pressure, but through consistent proof. So the work is not to conquer the subconscious, but to partner with it. Not to shame yourself into change, but to create enough internal safety for a different pattern to become believable. This is why healing is often quieter than people expect. It is usually not one giant breakthrough. It is a series of small moments where you meet an old trigger differently. You pause when you would have panicked. You speak when you would have shrunk. You stay when you would have run. And every time that happens, even in a small way, the subconscious receives a new message: maybe this is not dangerous anymore. That is how identity begins to shift. Not by deleting the past, but by refusing to keep repeating it. And this is bigger than one person. The world is not collapsing because people are weak. It is collapsing because too many people have been conditioned to survive in systems that were never built for emotional clarity, mental health, or inner freedom. If minds stay trapped in fear-based patterns, behavior stays trapped too. If behavior stays trapped, systems do not evolve. That is why this work matters beyond self-help. If we change minds, we change behavior. If we change behavior, we change systems. If we change systems, we change the future.

A psychologist recently explained something interesting why 90s kids developed different thinking patterns than Gen Z, largely because of games. Back then, no autosaves, no hints, just three lives. Games like Super Mario Bros. and Prince of Persia taught: fail, restart, keep going you had to earn progress. Games like Tetris and The Legend of Zelda trained maps and patterns, building memory, navigation, and patience. Finish a level turn off the console. No infinite dopamine. Play was social: one couch, one screen, real conflict and cooperation. Today, games like Fortnite and Roblox are endless, with autosaves and reward systems that keep you playing. They hold attention but don’t train completion the same way. The difference is simple: 90s kids built focus and tolerance for failure, while today’s players are shaped by constant stimulation. What do you think about this?

-Victor Hugo

The father determines the sex of the offspring because he can contribute either a X or Y chromosome (mothers always contribute X). Studies have found that men who work in high-stress environments tend to produce more X-chromosome-carrying sperm. It's believed this is an evolutionary adaptation. During prehistoric times, when a tribe was faced with hardship or disaster, it was beneficial to have more daughters since they would grow up to become mothers and ensure a stable population in the future. When it comes to reproduction, a single male could do the job of a hundred, at least in principle. So it makes the most sense to have more daughters than sons. This property carried over to modern times. High stress (as one might experience in combat or while working a physically demanding or dangerous job) triggers the hormonal changes in a man that favor daughter-producing sperm.

@SARugbymag 😂 This was too obviously a joke

Rassie Erasmus has signed a multi-year deal to replace Steve Borthwick as England head coach. sarugbymag.co.za/rassie-quits-b…

David Lynch: "You're operating with a limited mind and don't realize it" "If you have a golf ball-size consciousness, when you read a book, you'll have a golf ball-size understanding. When you look out, a golf ball-size awareness. When you wake up in the morning, a golf ball-size wakefulness. But if you could expand that consciousness, you read the book with more understanding. You look out with more awareness. You wake up with more wakefulness." Lynch explains what lies beneath: "There's an ocean of pure vibrant consciousness inside each one of us. It's right at the source and base of mind, right at the source of thought. It's also at the source of all matter. Modern physics calls it the unified field. All matter, everything that is a thing emerges from this field." He describes what the field contains: "This field has qualities like bliss, intelligence, creativity, universal love, energy, peace. It's not the intellectual understanding of this field, but the experiencing of it that does everything. You dive within, transcend, experience this field of pure consciousness, and you unfold it. It grows. The final outcome of this growth of consciousness is called enlightenment. And a side effect of enlivening this consciousness is that negativity starts to recede." Lynch shares what happened when he started meditating: "When I started, I was filled with anxieties. Filled with fears. Kind of a depression. And anger. I took this anger out on my first wife. After two weeks of meditation, she comes to me and says, 'What's going on?' I was quiet for a moment because it could have been any number of things she might have been referring to. I said, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'This anger, where did it go?' I didn't even realize it had lifted." He explains why negativity kills creativity: "Anger, depression, sorrow, these are beautiful things in a story. But they're like poison to the filmmaker. Poison to the painter. Poison to creativity. They're like a vice grip. If you're super depressed, you can hardly get out of bed, let alone think of ideas or have creativity flowing." Lynch describes what grows when you expand consciousness: "It's money in the bank to get that beautiful consciousness growing. Creativity flows. The ability to catch ideas at a deeper level. Intuition grows. This field is a field of pure knowing. You dive in there, and you just know how to go. You know how to solve problems. It's like an ocean of solutions." He shares the ultimate benefit: "The ultimate thing for me is the enjoyment of the doing. The enjoyment of life grows huge. I love making films now more than ever before. Ideas flow more. Everybody has more fun on the set. People look like friends, not like enemies. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing." Lynch addresses the myth that you need anger to create: "People say, 'You gotta have anger. You gotta have an edge to create.' No, you gotta have energy. You gotta have clarity to create. You gotta be able to catch ideas. You gotta be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress. And this gives you more and more ability. It just looks beautiful. It's way, way, way better." On the nature of true happiness: "They say true happiness isn't out there. True happiness lies within. I always wondered, where is this 'within'? And they don't say where it is. They don't even say how to get to it. But it's there. And when you're in it, you know you're in it. It's familiar. It's you. Right away, a happiness, but it's not a goofball happiness. It's a thick beauty. A thick beauty to appreciate life and living. And suffering starts to go."

Neuroscientists discovered that having even the smallest amount of power reduces our ability to empathize with others

“In at most a few decades, we'll have transformed man [through anti-religious humanism] into a repugnant little pleasure-machine, forever liberated from pain and even from death, which is to say from everything that, paradoxically, encourages us to pursue any sort of noble human aim, and not only religious transcendence.” — René Girard

“The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air,
Love for another being,
Freedom from ambition,
Creation.” — Albert Camus

If you can figure out how to configure your default state to be slightly amused rather than slightly annoyed you pretty much enter God Mode

Enjoy ordinary things.

“It is very important to go out alone, to sit under a tree—not with a book, not with a companion, but by yourself—and observe the falling of a leaf, hear the lapping of the water, the fishermen’s song, watch the flight of a bird, and of your own thoughts as they chase each other across the space of your mind. If you are able to be alone and watch these things, then you will discover extraordinary riches which no government can tax, no human agency can corrupt, and which can never be destroyed.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

“A genuinely funny person is constantly removing tension from the environment. Laughter clears accumulation. Most people carry residue everywhere. Work stress. Social slights. Small humiliations. Unspoken resentment. It piles up. Most people can't even clear their own cognitive load. People with strong humor operate continuous clearance around them. Someone who clears it for others does something closer to medicine than entertainment.” Best explanation of laughter ever seen. Many modalities - but boy does laughing seem to do something against stress. Perhaps why Patch Adams resonated with so many.