Removing friction is how rich people end up losing agency and human IQ It starts with Uber-everywhere, grocery delivery, all-inclusive holidays, then private driver, chef, assistant etc… without noticing you’re also removing exposure to reality I see this in London with young ambitious professionals aka HENRYs (High Earners Not Rich Yet) trying to remove every tiny friction from life so they can focus on work + gym + sleep + money, while forgetting that a lot of the “inefficient” shit they’re deleting (cooking, walking somewhere, random talks etc) is also just… being a human in your 20s/30s The thing is you’re not only saving time, you’re removing thousands of tiny reps of dealing with the world. Finding the place, fixing the booking, working out what to do when the train gets cancelled, asking someone for help, improvising because the plan is fucked. None of these makes you smarter on its own, but remove basically all of them for 10 years and I’d be surprised if it has zero effect. You can become incredibly high-agency at work while weirdly low-agency at normal life It’s why so many high-agency rich people are deliberately paying to add friction back into their lives (difficult travel, long treks, sailing, marathons, remote places, silent retreats, climbing mountains, etc). They’ve understood that once comfort is abundant, difficulty becomes scarce. The luxury good eventually becomes optional hardship. The distinction is agency. Being forced to walk 10km because your car broke down sucks. Choosing to hike 20km in Patagonia feels meaningful The way I think about it personally is just aggressively remove boring / repetitive friction, while keeping a decent amount of unpredictable friction. I’ll happily pay more for the direct flight, live centrally to kill a commute, outsource cleaning/admin, take the Uber if it genuinely saves 40 mins. A 15-min annoyance x300 a year is actually expensive. There is absolutely no hidden life lesson in doing your laundry for the 800th time or spending 2h getting somewhere you could reach in 30 mins Think the objective of wealth shouldn’t be zero friction, but simply choosing your friction. Basically removing all the boring shit so you can expose yourself to more of the interesting stuff

I’m kinda convinced my 27k followers on X are just as advantageous as my 500k on Instagram

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the original Woke He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a "noble savage", never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached. 1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755. 2. The "Noble Savage" is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it. 3. The "General Will" is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were "properly enlightened". Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation. 4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every "liberation" movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same. 5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair. 6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda (remember the obłuda of communism?👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word. 7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

Today I’m 49. I started TOMS at 29. Sold it at 43. By 47 I was in the deepest depression of my life. These aren’t 10 hacks. They’re the things I wish I had understood before the résumé started mattering more than the soul.