My argument is simple: if my happiness makes you hopping mad, the problem is you.

Taste is personal.

It’s shaped by your life, your memories, and your tribe.

It’s a weapon in nobody’s hands, and it’s a crown on nobody’s head.

Rage at the “popular thing” is usually a mask for something else - grief, envy, a lost sense of wonder - and the healthier move is to feed your own mind with the things you actually like, instead of policing everyone else’s fun.

I cover:

* The actual comments Naval made about his schedule and his wife booking his time.

* Why the internet views this as wealthy philosophy instead of real wisdom.

* The “if you need me you’ll find me” problem and how it establishes a strict hierarchy.

* How survivorship bias plays into billionaire lifestyle advice.

* Why modern audiences are totally allergic to guru content right now.

If you enjoyed this video, definitely subscribe and leave a comment below.

Do you think Naval’s approach is pure freedom or a status flex?

While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.

You can buy my book Permissionless here.

In summer 1999, a kid could whisper “I see dead people,” and every person in the room knew exactly what he meant. That is what a movie actually is. It’s not content; it’s never content. It’s actually closer to a coordination technology - a machine for getting millions of nervous systems to fire in sync.

In this video, I take on the “everyone will just prompt their own movies” prediction. The people making it understand the models, the costs, and the timelines. What they miss is a category error: they think culture is a product to be consumed, when it is actually a fire to be gathered around.

I call it the campfire law: the value of culture scales with the number of people who share it, not with how well it fits you.

What I Cover

* Why “I see dead people” was a skeleton key that unlocked every classroom, dinner table, and bus ride in 1999, and why your perfect personalized AI movie in 2035 unlocks nothing

* The campfire law: content is fuel, culture is a fire, and a fire exists to be gathered around

* How TikTok, the most personalized media machine ever built, immediately got repurposed into a folk monoculture of shared sounds, jokes, and dances

* The dream test: your subconscious already produces perfectly personalized entertainment every night, and “let me tell you about my dream” is the most boring sentence in the English language

* Why references are the compression algorithm of human connection, and shared context is the reserve currency of every friendship and group chat

* The software version of the same mistake: your prompted personal app has no tribe, no tutorials, no forum, and no fan club

* Why restaurants, concerts, and sports should all be “dead” by the optimization logic, and why they are not

* What history says happens when the cost of making culture collapses: cheap cameras gave us YouTube, cheap distribution gave us podcasts, cheap publishing gave us newsletters. More fires, not more isolation

* My prediction: everyone will be able to prompt their own movies, and almost nobody will want to most of the time

Key Quotes

* “A movie is not content. A movie is a coordination technology.”

* “The film is the vehicle, the synchronization is the product, and you can’t synchronize with only yourself.”

* “Content is fuel, culture is a fire, and a fire exists to be gathered around.”

* “A reference is only worth something if the other person holds the file.”

* “Being the sole user of a product is solitary confinement.”

* “Humans don’t want infinite content. Humans want common ground.”

* “The maker will change, but the gathering never will.”

The One Question That Survives Every Media Revolution

“Okay, what’s everyone watching?”

That question is not going anywhere. The future of media is not a billion people watching a billion private movies alone in the dark. It is the same thing it has always been: all of us around the same fire, arguing about the ending.

If you liked this one, subscribe and drop a comment: what’s the one movie line that works as a skeleton key for you?

Mine: “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good…”

But you can also take a step away from learning if you aren’t careful.

When you finish a book, podcast, or thread from someone impressive, you feel a sense of fullness. You assume if you just do what they did, you’ll get to where they got. That is almost never true.

In this video, I break down why copying successful people usually fails, how teachers sell you dependency disguised as pedagogy, and how you can extract the real principles that actually transfer to your life.

Key Takeaways:

* The visible parts of success - the habits, the sayings, the aesthetic choices - are just the residue left by a much messier process.

* Don’t take prescriptions unchanged. “Write every morning” is a prescription. The principle is “protect your cognitive best hours.” Extract the principle and re-implement it.

* Gurus sell complete frameworks to create dependency. They optimize for your devotion, not your learning.

* You should scale your deference to the demonstrated domain. A 20-year VC veteran has a great model for company-building. That does not elevate their views on nutrition.

* You do the actual learning by interrogating sources. Everything else is just you admiring them.

I discuss my belief that modern journaling has become a public performance, and share practical steps to adopt the audience-of-zero mindset so you can use writing to figure yourself out rather than to present a polished version of your life…

Key Topics…

* Why Marcus Aurelius wrote with an audience of zero

* The trap of the modern public diary

* How performing for a hypothetical reader ruins your honesty

* Why you should write ugly and use a cheap notebook

* Stopping the factual narration of your day

* Using repetition as a mental gym

* Giving yourself direct commands in the imperative mood

If you found this video helpful, please hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. Let me know in the comments below if you plan to try the zero-audience method in your own life!

Covering:

* The Gilgamesh Complex: Why the oldest story ever written proves that the fear of death is hardwired into human nature.

* The Core of Longevity Maxxing: We break down the extreme world of modern biohacking. What are people actually doing to stop the clock?

* The Modern “Snake”: Gilgamesh lost his plant of rejuvenation to a snake. What are the biological realities, entropy, and genetic limits that will inevitably steal our modern “plant” of immortality?

Are we finally on the verge of beating the clock, or are today’s longevity maxxers just modern-day Gilgameshes destined to look at the walls of their own mortality and accept defeat?

In this video, I look at the Easterlin Paradox, the research on income and life satisfaction, and why more money often fails to make people proportionally happier. The answer is not that money is useless. It’s that most people are shopping in the wrong aisle.

The evidence points to three better ways to spend:

Buy experiences, not things

Spend on other people

Buy back your time

Money matters. But it matters less than people think, and it works better when used to create memories, connection, autonomy, and relief from time pressure.

The wrong things are easy to buy. The right things take more intention.

In this video, I explore the cultural, historical, and psychological roots of our obsession with busyness - from Veblen’s theory of conspicuous leisure to Seneca’s warnings about wasted time, from the Protestant work ethic to Parkinson’s Law. Along the way, I examine how we use email inboxes, overflowing calendars, and delayed replies as props in a theater of pseudo-productivity, and why we seem unable to stop.

Topics Covered:

* The performance of busyness and why exhaustion has become a status symbol

* Thorstein Veblen and the inversion of conspicuous leisure

* Seneca, On the Shortness of Life, and ancient Rome’s relationship to leisure

* Max Weber, the Protestant ethic, and the moral weight of work

* Herman Melville’s Bartleby and the emptiness of bureaucratic labor

* Parkinson’s Law: why work expands to fill the time available

* The psychology behind simulated overload and existential dread

* How we use busyness as a competitive dominance game

* Reclaiming true leisure in a culture that treats rest as a moral failure

References & Further Reading:

* Thorstein Veblen — The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

* Seneca — De Brevitate Vitae (On the Shortness of Life)

* Max Weber — The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)

* Herman Melville — Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)

* C. Northcote Parkinson — Parkinson’s Law (1955)

Key Quote:

“We’ve created a society where we’re actively harming our physical and psychological well-being to maintain an illusion nobody believes. We all know everyone else is faking it too — yet we refuse to break the spell.”

What I cover

* Caesar at the Rubicon: the original burned-boats decision, and why “the die is cast” still resonates

* Why optionality is genuinely correct in markets: asymmetric payoffs, real options theory, and the three principles that govern them (volatility/vega, irreversibility, and time/theta)

* Bezos’s one-way vs. two-way doors: and the opposite mistake we make in our private lives

* Dan Gilbert’s photography experiment: the reversibility paradox, and why the group that could change their mind ended up less happy

* The psychological immune system: synthetic happiness, and why it only switches on behind a closed door

* The four hidden assumptions that make options pricing work for copper mines but fail for a marriage, a career, or a move across the country:

* Exogenous vs. endogenous risk (your commitment creates the value)

* Liquid markets vs. illiquid, compounding human value

* The static observer vs. the self that irreversible choices rewrite

* Capped downside vs. the capped upside of a hedged life

* Why we’re so terrified of commitment: bad affective forecasting, loss aversion, and optionality as an anesthetic against the grief of unlived lives

* Optionality as status signaling: confusing the luxury of having choices with the necessity of making them

* How to do it right: the multi-armed bandit problem, sequencing explore-then-exploit, and Buffett’s 20-punch card

Key ideas & references

* The Rubicon, 49 BC: Caesar, the 13th Legion, and the line borrowed from the playwright Menander

* Real options theory (1970s to 80s): vega, theta, and the copper-mine analogy

* Jeff Bezos, 2015 shareholder letter: one-way doors vs. two-way doors

* Dan Gilbert (Harvard): the psychological immune system and synthetic happiness

* Cheryl Strayed, “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us”: saluting the lives we don’t live

* Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” (1916)

* The multi-armed bandit problem: explore wildly early, exploit ruthlessly later

* Warren Buffett’s punch card: 20 lifetime investments, no reversals

One line to remember

Optionality protects your starting capital. Only irreversibility lets it compound.

Most luxury purchases aren’t about taste at all - they’re about silencing an undercurrent of doubt about whether we’re good enough.

Real taste is idiosyncratic and unbounded by price in both directions - it can be a $1,000 dinner or a Michelin-starred noodle shop. Manufactured taste marches in lockstep with price tags and trends. This isn’t an argument for performing frugality (that’s just another status game) - it’s an argument for figuring out what you actually like, regardless of who’s watching, and learning to enjoy it more.

Because good taste is free, and always has been.

You were enough before you bought the luxury goods, and you’re enough without them.

But Shackleton didn’t treat the death of one objective as the death of every objective.

Rather - he changed the question.

Not “How do I cross Antarctica?”

But “How do I get every single one of these men home alive?”

There is no such thing as fucked.

There is only the position you’re in, the facts you have, the costs in front of you, and the next move.

A bad situation does not need your panic. It does not need your validation. It needs you to get specific, face reality, separate what you control from what you don’t, and take the next useful action.

You don’t need a perfect plan. You don’t need confidence. You don’t need certainty.

You need motion.

If you’re overwhelmed, stuck, ashamed, behind, broke, exhausted, or staring at the wreckage of something that did not go the way you hoped:

The game is still live while there are still moves on the board.

Take the next one.

This is the case for proportion: for caring without becoming unbearable, improving without worshiping optimization, and refusing to let every trend, outrage, or ideology annex your nervous system.

The most radical thing left is to just be normal about things.

The competent rehearse, revise, double-check, and lie awake wondering when they’ll be found out, while the truly underqualified often move through the world with terrifying confidence.

If you feel like an imposter, that feeling may not be evidence that you don’t belong. It may be evidence that you care enough, and see clearly enough, to keep getting better...

Here’s the answer:

Context.

The thing every productivity guru strips out before handing you the advice.

In this video I argue that productivity writing has a structural problem. The circumstances that make these routines work almost never travel. A single mother raising three kids in the 80s knew more about real productivity than any 4am optimizer on YouTube, because her system had to survive contact with the world. The billionaire’s system doesn’t. His scaffolding is invisible and it’s doing most of the work.

I trace the fallacy back through Seneca, Alexander the Great, Ben Franklin, and the long parade of self-help genres that keep promising the same thing. That if you copy your heroes, you’ll become like them. You won’t. You’ll just get tired.

If you’ve ever tried to bolt someone else’s routine onto your life and watched it break, this one’s for you.

He didn’t invent professionalized YouTube. He perfected it. And now every new creator - the kid starting a gaming channel, the consultant pivoting to thought leadership video - feels the gravitational pull of it.

The result is a platform that looks increasingly like a single show with five million hosts.

The top 1% of channels capture roughly 90% of views. The power law is steepening. The channels at the top aren’t weird or authentic. They’re Mr. Beast, Cocomelon, Dude Perfect, and the growing crowd of traditional celebrities who discovered that uploading is easier than auditioning.

For a while, on YouTube, giving a s**t could beat having a budget. That’s less true now. The algorithm rewards the arms race. A video without color grading reads as a student film.

I record my videos with a webcam in a room. No B-roll. No background music. No cutaways to a stock library. They don’t do Mr. Beast numbers. They do the numbers a video essay delivered by one person to the people who care is supposed to do - smaller than a million, larger than zero.

I think a counterculture is coming for the gloss. I’m betting on it.

I don’t need to be Mr. Beast. I don’t want to be Mr. Beast.

The railway needed a common minute. And once we had the common minute, we discovered it could be bought and sold.

This video traces the collapse of the present moment from railway time to push notifications. We cover Frederick Winslow Taylor’s stopwatch studies at the factory floor (1911), how every communication technology from the telegraph to Slack arrived promising free time and delivered higher expectations instead, Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration (2005), Paul Virilio’s argument that when everything happens at once nothing actually happens, and the RescueTime data showing knowledge workers now check communication tools every six minutes.

The constraint was never speed. It was always presence. And presence doesn’t survive compression.

The problem is - you’re not reading any of it.

In 2007, researchers at the University of Minnesota found that shoppers with 24 jam options bought at one-tenth the rate of shoppers with 6. More choices, fewer decisions. That study got cited thousands of times. The real punchline took almost 20 years to arrive, and it landed on everyone’s hard drive at once.

This video breaks down generative overload: what happens when your AI agents produce documents faster than any human can consume them. We cover the collector’s fallacy (Christian Tietze, 2014), Toffler’s information overload from Future Shock (1970), the cognitive penalty of unprocessed information (Glenn Wilson’s 2007 study at the University of London), and why Toyota’s just-in-time production system from the 1950s holds the answer most productivity communities haven’t figured out yet.

The constraint was never generation. It was always attention.

The core mechanic is the dichotomy of control: some things are up to you, some things aren’t, stop caring about the second category. In small doses it’s useful. But the philosophy, taken seriously, asks you to extend that indifference to everything external. Your health, your relationships, the death of your children. Epictetus actually said: “When you kiss your child, say to yourself, ‘Tomorrow you may be dead.’” That’s not a coping strategy. That’s a prescription for emotional amputation.

Nietzsche called the Stoics frauds in Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. He said Stoic indifference was a symptom of exhaustion: numb the capacity for feeling so suffering can’t land, and you also numb the capacity for joy. Modern psychology backs him up. James Gross at Stanford found that people who habitually suppress emotions experience worse outcomes over time, not better. George Bonanno’s grief research flatly contradicts the Stoic model.

I go through what Nietzsche saw, what clinical research says about emotional suppression, why Stoicism converts so neatly into productivity advice, how Aristotle had a better framework 2,000 years ago, and what grows in the space where the parts you cut away used to be.

The people who responded to the fear by building things landed on the moon. The people who responded by predicting doom were forgotten before the decade was out.

Over the last 15 years, a specific intellectual posture has taken hold in educated Western culture. I’ve started calling it competitive pessimism. Whoever can list the most reasons something won’t work gets treated as the smartest person in the room. Optimism gets the tilted-head look, the one people reserve for a belief in astrology.

Philip Tetlock spent 20 years scoring the predictions of 284 political scientists, economists, and government advisors. Most performed about as well as dart-throwing chimpanzees. The very worst forecasters were the ones with one grand theory who bent all incoming data to fit it. Nobody puts the careful, uncertain forecasters on television.

In 1894, the Times of London calculated that the city’s streets would be buried under nine feet of horse manure by the 1940s. Carl Benz had already patented a gasoline-powered vehicle eight years earlier. Malthus said famine was inevitable at the start of the agricultural revolution. Paul Ehrlich said hundreds of millions would starve. Food production tripled instead.

Being wrong about doom costs you almost nothing. Being wrong about hope can cost you your entire career. That asymmetry is pushing smart, careful people toward the darkest forecast even when the evidence is mixed. I refuse to treat that as intelligence.

Marcel Mauss published “The Gift” in 1925 and nearly a century later the tech world still hasn’t caught up with his central insight. Gift giving operates as a complete system with its own logic, its own power dynamics, its own concept of value. Gifts create social bonds and build trust in ways that market transactions can’t. The modern internet runs on tools that people built and gave away: Linux, Apache, Python, the cryptographic libraries that keep your bank details from floating around in plain text.

But the gift economy of software has been absorbed into the entrepreneurial economy. Open source became a go-to-market strategy. Free tools became lead magnets. There’s no conceptual space left for the third option, that you did it because you wanted to.

Covering: The Rule of St. Benedict and monastic labor, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, open source burnout, the long tail of human problems that markets will never solve, and why building something small and giving it away is one of the most valuable things you can do.

That tagline tells you almost everything you need to know about where we are. The pitch for selling manufactured authenticity at scale is that at least the people in the factory are still biological organisms. That’s the floor. That’s what passes for premium.

Open TikTok right now and try to find a video that isn’t selling you something. A political identity, a digital product, a lifestyle, a personal brand. The girl doing a Get Ready With Me has an affiliate link in her bio. The therapist explaining attachment styles is building a course. The couple doing a van life vlog is negotiating a brand deal in the DMs. There is always a funnel, always a CTA.

Baudrillard mapped the process in four stages: the image reflects reality, then masks reality, then masks the absence of reality, and finally has no relation to reality whatsoever. A $3 reaction video spliced into a TikTok ad is operating at that fourth stage. The reaction doesn’t reference a real reaction. There was never a real reaction. The whole thing is a sign pointing at nothing.

AI slop and human slop have now converged to the point where “real humans” is a selling point like “cage free” stamped on a carton of eggs. AI content isn’t poisoning the well. It’s drawing from a well we already puked in years ago.

Then the word “skeptic” got mugged in an alley and had its wallet stolen.

Now it’s attached to people who deny everything from gravity to the moon landing. There’s a distinction that keeps getting lost: genuine skepticism asks how do we know what we know? Denialism asks what if the thing that is obviously happening isn’t happening, and also everyone who says it’s happening is lying? The first gave us the Enlightenment. The second gave us Lysenko rejecting Mendelian genetics while Soviet crop yields collapsed and dissenters got sent to the gulag.

We’re talking about Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments from the 1950s, Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor’s New Clothes (and how everyone misuses it), the contrarians who were actually right (continental drift, germ theory, Barry Marshall drinking from a Petri dish), and why the difference between them and the people insisting it isn’t raining is that they eventually showed their work.

Some things really are that obvious.

Some people really are full of s**t.

Westenberg is built and backed by Studio Self

We make tech legible.

Reach out: hello@thisisstudioself.com

Six years in, I wanted to put down what worked and why. The traditional agency model is a staffing arbitrage play: founders sell, juniors grind, middle managers translate between the two, and most of the taste and judgment that made the pitch compelling gets stripped out somewhere in the middle. I built Studio Self to eliminate that experience entirely.

The thesis was simple. Creative agencies should be small, stay small, and focus entirely on the work. AI changed the math on what “small” can accomplish. I use it for operations, project management, invoicing, scheduling, meeting transcripts, coding, and a thousand small tasks that used to eat 50% of my working week. I don’t use it to write copy or develop strategy. The market is already flooded with AI generated creative work, and the sameness is becoming impossible to ignore.

Ronald Coase argued in 1937 that companies exist because of coordination costs. Every time those costs drop, optimal firm size drops with it. AI is making it possible to run a one person company that would have needed five people in 2020. The structural economics of going solo are only going to improve.

My formulation: AI handles everything that doesn’t require creative judgment. I handle everything that does.

He’s my go-to example of what went wrong with how an entire generation thinks about work and money. Somewhere between 2015 and 2022, “passive income” stopped being a boring financial planning term and became a salvation narrative. The rapture was the day your income exceeded your expenses and you could quit your job forever. The people making actual money were the ones selling courses about making passive income. It was an ouroboros that had incorporated in Delaware.

Between 2019 and 2021, roughly 700,000 new Shopify stores opened. About 90% failed within their first year. We started drowning in drop shipping stores with six week shipping times, affiliate blogs reviewing products the authors had never touched, and courses about courses about courses. An entire layer of the internet that was nothing but confident-sounding garbage produced by people who had optimized for everything except making something worth buying.

I want to talk about how the passive income movement broke Google, wasted the best years of a generation of would-be entrepreneurs, and why the only thing that actually works is the boring thing: find a real problem, solve it for real people, and keep showing up…

In 2016, a botnet called Mirai took down security journalist Brian Krebs’s website through sheer volume. Hundreds of thousands of devices were all demanding something at once until the servers simply gave up. That’s what’s happening to your capacity for thought.

Every day, the infinite scroll serves up a new outrage requiring your immediate opinion: climate change, AI, immigration, whatever the President did. The discourse doesn’t need to trick you into thinking badly. It needs to make sure you never have time to think well.

In this video, I explore how modern public conversation has become a cognitive DDoS attack, exhausting your mental resources until you default to tribal heuristics and pre-packaged takes. I look at why false information spreads faster than truth, why expertise has become impossible to communicate, why we have endless opinions but almost no understanding, and why the same arguments keep happening forever without resolution.

Remember:

The feeling of being overwhelmed is a predictable result of an impossible situation. It’s not a sign of personal failing…

References:

* William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)

* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

* George Eliot, Middlemarch

* Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)

* Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Subscribe for more essays on technology and culture!

But if you couldn’t fix your life before Claude Code existed, Claude Code isn’t going to fix it now.

In this video, I break down why:

* We keep believing a new app or AI will finally organize the chaos

* Tools like Evernote, Roam, Notion, Obsidian, and now Claude Code haven’t solved the real problem

* “Meta-work” (work about work) becomes a sophisticated form of procrastination

* An overflowing note archive is not the same thing as thinking or creating

* Why the bottleneck usually isn’t your toolset - it’s your habits and follow-through

I’m not anti-tool. The right tools absolutely help when you’re already doing the work. If you’re a consistent writer or researcher, AI that can search and organize your archive can be genuinely powerful.

But if you’re perpetually tweaking your system, settling into new apps, and building ever-more-elaborate workflows instead of finishing things, no Second Brain is going to save you.

In the end, the people who actually ship real work usually rely on boring, simple systems:

* A basic text editor

* A simple to-do list

* The discipline to show up and do the work, even when it’s uncomfortable

You already know what you need to do. No AI will do it for you.

🔔 Subscribe for more essays and videos on creativity, technology, and making things that matter.

Read the original essay here: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/claude-code-wont-fix-your-life/

I want to suggest a different approach, and I want to start from the premise that your existing habits are not the enemy.

You’ve spent years building behavioral infrastructure: routines, triggers, comfortable patterns, well-worn neural pathways that carry you through the day without requiring conscious decision-making. This infrastructure is valuable. It represents an enormous investment of biological resources. Trying to demolish it and build something new from scratch is not only exhausting, it’s probably unnecessary. The trick is to redirect the infrastructure you already have rather than fighting against it.

Kurt Lewin, the psychologist who essentially invented social psychology in the 1930s, proposed that behavior is a function of both the person and their environment. Change the environment, change the behavior. But we keep insisting on changing the person, on fixing our defective willpower, on becoming better and more disciplined. We keep failing for predictable reasons. What follows is an attempt to outline what it actually looks like to work with your existing patterns rather than against them.

The Substitution Principle

Your phone is not going away. You can leave it in another room during designated reading hours, and that’s a fine tactic, but at some point you’re going to be lying in bed or sitting on the couch or waiting in line, and you’re going to reach for it. This is a deeply ingrained motor pattern reinforced by thousands of repetitions, not a character flaw. Your thumb knows where Instagram lives.

So change what the thumb finds when it gets there.

Move a reading app to your phone’s dock. Put it exactly where the app you reach for reflexively currently lives. Kindle, Apple Books, Libby, whatever you prefer. The goal is to intercept an existing behavior at the last possible moment and redirect it. You’re accepting that the reaching will happen and arranging for it to land somewhere useful rather than trying to stop it altogether. This works better than you’d expect.

Behavioral psychologists call it “stimulus substitution,” and it’s considerably more effective than pure inhibition. When researchers study addiction recovery, they find that people who replace a problematic behavior with a substitute behavior have better outcomes than people who simply try to stop. Alcoholics Anonymous understood this intuitively when they started serving so much coffee at meetings that the organization became one of the largest purchasers of coffee in America. You’re giving the urge somewhere else to go.

The phone dock is the most direct application, but the principle extends. Do you collapse onto the couch after work and turn on the television out of sheer exhaustion? Put a book on the couch cushion before you leave in the morning. Not next to the couch. On the cushion, so you have to move it to sit down. Your evening decompression ritual doesn’t have to die. It can simply involve a different input.

Habit Stacking Your Reading

BJ Fogg, the Stanford behavioral scientist, popularized the idea of “habit stacking”: attaching a new behavior to an existing one so that the existing behavior becomes the trigger. After I pour my morning coffee, I’ll read one page. After I get into bed, I’ll read until I feel sleepy. After I sit down on the train, I’ll open my book app. The syntax matters. You’re not creating a new habit from nothing. You’re piggybacking on the substantial infrastructure already in place for the anchor behavior.

The crucial insight is that you’re not adding reading time to your day but borrowing time from activities that already exist in your schedule and that already have reliable triggers. The morning coffee is going to happen regardless. The commute is going to happen regardless. Getting into bed is going to happen regardless. These are moments when your brain is already in transition, already shifting from one activity to another, and transition moments are when behavioral intervention is easiest.

This is also why the advice to “find time to read” mostly fails. There is no free-floating time waiting to be found. Time is always already allocated to something, even if that something is mindlessly scrolling or staring at the ceiling. Instead of asking “when can I read?” you’re better off asking what you’re currently doing that reading could replace without requiring additional willpower.

For most people, the highest-value candidates are micro-moments: waiting for food to heat up, sitting in a waiting room, the five minutes before a meeting starts, standing in line at the grocery store. Individually these moments are trivial. Collectively they add up to hours per week, and they’re hours you’re probably spending on your phone anyway. The substitution principle applies. You’re transmuting existing phone time into reading time, not creating something from nothing.

The Content Matching Problem

One reason people struggle to read more is that they’re trying to read the wrong things at the wrong times. Attempting to get through Dostoevsky while exhausted before bed is a recipe for reading three pages, absorbing nothing, and eventually abandoning the project. You can read before bed, but you’re setting yourself up for failure when you mismatch content to context.

Different books are suited to different mental states. Light fiction is perfect for low-energy situations when your brain is basically mush. Narrative nonfiction works well when you’re moderately alert but don’t want to work too hard. Dense philosophy or technical material is best attempted when you’re fresh and can actually concentrate. Audiobooks are ideal for contexts where your hands and eyes are busy but your ears are free.

This sounds obvious, but most people don’t actually implement it. They have one book going, they feel obligated to read that book, and so they either slog through it in suboptimal conditions or they don’t read at all. Having multiple books in progress, each suited to a different context, solves this problem. The tired-before-bed book. The commute audiobook. The weekend deep-reading book. You’re choosing which reading mode fits your current situation rather than choosing whether to read at all.

Katy Milkman, the behavioral economist, writes about “temptation bundling”: pairing something you should do with something you want to do. She found that people exercised more when they could only listen to addictive audiobooks at the gym. The pleasurable thing (the audiobook) became linked to the virtuous thing (the exercise), and both happened more. Reading can work the same way. If you have a book you’re genuinely excited about, reserve it for a context you’d otherwise avoid. The book becomes the reward, and the context becomes tolerable.

Environmental Design For Readers

In 1890, William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology that habits form through the gradual grooving of neural pathways, and that the best way to establish a new habit is to make its execution as seamless and automatic as possible. He was talking about removing friction, about arranging your environment so that the desired behavior is the path of least resistance. This was smart advice in 1890, and it’s still smart advice now.

What does a low-friction reading environment look like? Books are visible and accessible everywhere. The ebook reader is charged and has the cover of an appealing book on its lock screen. The audiobook app is logged in and queued up with something good. Reading glasses are in every room where you might want to read. Lighting is adequate. There’s a comfortable spot without distractions.

But the more important half of environmental design is increasing friction for competing behaviors. Every obstacle you can place between yourself and your phone’s attention-capture apps makes reading relatively more attractive. Moving apps off the home screen. Using app timers that create annoying delays. Keeping the phone in another room during reading-compatible times. Logging out of apps so you have to actively log back in each time.

You’re not trying to make scrolling impossible. You’re trying to make reading slightly easier and scrolling slightly harder, enough to tip the balance in ambiguous moments when you could go either way. Small friction changes compound. An app that’s four taps away gets opened less than an app that’s one tap away, even though the absolute difference in effort is trivial.

The Ulysses Contract

In Homer’s Odyssey, Ulysses knows he’ll be unable to resist the Sirens’ song, so he has his crew tie him to the mast and plug their own ears with beeswax. He doesn’t trust his future self to make good decisions under temptation, so he constrains his future self’s options in advance.

Behavioral economists have borrowed this idea and named it the “Ulysses contract”: a commitment made in a clear-headed moment that binds you during moments of weakness.

Reading offers several opportunities for Ulysses contracts. Joining a book club creates social accountability that makes abandoning the book awkward. Announcing on social media that you’re reading something commits your reputation to finishing it. Using apps that track reading streaks exploits your loss aversion, making you reluctant to break the chain. Paying for a year of Audible in advance makes you more likely to use it because you’ve already spent the money.

The underlying psychology is that we have multiple selves competing for control: the aspirational self who signs up for the book club, the tired self who wants to watch television instead, the social self who doesn’t want to show up without having done the reading. Ulysses contracts let the aspirational self recruit allies (the social self and the loss-averse self) to gang up on the tired self.

Yes, this is manipulating yourself.

But you were going to be manipulated by something.

It might as well be a force pushing you toward what you actually want.

Why This Works When Discipline Doesn’t

The discipline-based approach to reading more treats your current habits as enemies to be conquered. It positions you against yourself. This is exhausting, and exhaustion is anti-correlated with reading. You’re more likely to scroll when you’re tired, and fighting yourself all day makes you tired. The whole enterprise is self-defeating.

Working with your existing patterns treats your current habits as raw material. You already have reliable triggers, comfortable routines, and well-established environmental cues. Instead of demolishing this infrastructure, you’re repurposing it. The energy expenditure is lower. The success rate is higher. And because you’re not framing reading as a chore you must force yourself to do, you’re more likely to actually enjoy it, which means you’re more likely to continue.

The interventions that stick are usually the ones that feel like cheating, the ones that seem too easy to possibly work. Putting a book on the couch cushion is a stupid trick. Moving the Kindle app to where Instagram used to live is a stupid trick. Having three books going at once so you always have something appropriate for your energy level is a stupid trick.

These stupid tricks work because they don’t depend on you being more disciplined or motivated or virtuous.

They work with the person you already are, and that’s the only person you’ve got.

Stop trying to break your habits. Start trying to redirect them.

The infrastructure is already there.