I present the following thought exercise to you: if some overeager, industrious journalist were to write an obituary for Canada, how would it read?
Today, the world marked the passing of Canada, younger than most, older than some. Canada, on her best days was a beacon in the world for freedom, justice, inclusion, poutine and hockey. Canada gave the world the telephone, the lightbulb, the pacemaker, insulin and was the first nation to successfully complete a double lung transplant.
For the better part of her history, Canada was a trusted ally, a safe harbour for those fleeing persecution, a voice for the voiceless and an example for other nations. People from around the world flocked to her shores to bring the best of where they came from together with others contribute to building a nation that was unlike any other in the world.
But the last few years of her life did seem to be defined by a nearly psychopathic desire to get in her own way. Anointed by God with a natural bounty that, if mined and managed responsibly could have made her one the fairest and wealthiest nations in the history of the world. And yet that natural bounty remained largely locked away.
Canadians had built one of the fairest and most equal societies on the planet, and yet they seemed hell-bent on focussing on the minutia and sometimes the mirages that appeared to divide them.
The 21st century was poised to be the Canadian century, but through much fault of their own, Canadians squandered that opportunity, and today we bid farewell to a nation that had greatness within its grasp, but decided instead to become smaller, to become lesser, to marginalize itself and by extension, made the world a less wonderful place.
Canada: for many on the outside looking in, gone far too soon. Ironically, the assessment of the Canadian legacy by so many who, through the happy accident of birthright, or another privileged pathway to citizenship is markedly different: she overstayed her welcome.
Ben Mulroney, “Canada’s chance to find itself again”, National Post, 2025-11-10.
July 1, 2026
QotD: An imaginary obituary for a nation
June 26, 2026
To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm
If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.
Slide from cyberghostvpn.com
Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.
A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.
The replies tore him apart.
Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.
Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.
“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”
Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.
Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.
“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”
Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.
Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.
The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.
Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.
One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.
That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.
If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.
June 23, 2026
Modern children as human hothouse plants, needing constant care and protection
At Becoming Noble, Johann Kurtz discusses how parents today treat their children in ways they largely never experienced, failing to provide them with enough freedom to allow them to develop personal autonomy as most western children have done for generations:
Giving children the freedom they need to develop agency is now a luxury good. The number of neighborhoods in which it is normal for children to leave the house and roam all day has collapsed. This collapse has come for a variety of reasons relating to security, trust, law, norms, and infrastructure.
Allowing children the privilege of freedom depends on conditions that most families no longer have access to: safe streets — yes — but also neighbors who are known and trusted, and a settled local agreement about what children are and what they are for. These conditions have not vanished, but they have concentrated, and are now a guarded secret, found only in private, privileged, and intentional communities.
This is a curious inversion of an older pattern. For most of history the peasant’s son had the run of the village while the noble’s son was kept under tutors. Now it is the wealthy child who is sent out to enjoy the freedom and adventure of camps and screenless schools, while working and underclass children are kept indoors and screened up.
Photo from Becoming Noble
It is worth being clear about the factors which underlie this transition. Otherwise, parents seeking the nostalgic “free roaming” experience are directed to explanations which are emphasized because they are unproblematic and suggest that a broad solution is available if we just move policy in a sensible direction. This includes discussions of “walkable development” and a rejection of “helicopter parenting”.
This polite framing avoids the reality that the prudent decisions available to parents are mostly made for them by the place they can afford to live, the people they live among, and how radical they are willing to be.
Children develop “agency” — the self-belief that they can independently and effectively manipulate and shape the world in creative ways — through constant experimentation and positive reinforcement.
The “independent” aspect of this formula involves developing internal psychological permission to break from prosaic norms and routines. Developing this is helped by play outside the control of authorities and interacting with the real world in settings unmediated by parents.
The closed systems that now fill children’s hours provide some feeling of agency (open world games, sprawling social media platforms, private chat rooms) without its substance. A child scrolling or playing through the programmatic logic of games is making choices, but they are only the choices that limited systems can accommodate.
Closed-system childhoods teach that there are inviolable hidden structures underneath reality and that the smoothest and most rewarding experiences are to be found when you conform with them. Experiences from boxes teach you to think within boxes. And the vice available online can be as controlling as any parent.
A few years ago, I linked to an article that graphically illustrated how the generations of an English family near Sheffield had experienced continuously diminished “range” for the children to explore:
Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.
June 21, 2026
QotD: Wishful thinking
There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.
June 20, 2026
“Get off your high horse”
Devon Eriksen responds to a post from a Japanese man who claims not to understand American racism:
“United States, Canadian and Japanese Flags on Seventh Avenue” by Jim, the Photographer is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga
Honestly, racism is one of those things many Japanese people struggle to understand.
If we see a white person, we think, “Oh, they’re white.”
If we see a black person, we think, “Oh, they’re black.”
If there were blue people, we’d probably think, “Oh, they’re blue.”
And that’s about as far as it goes.
If someone is nice, we think they’re nice.
If someone is an asshole, we think they’re an asshole.
If we like them, we like them.
If we don’t, we don’t.
We grow up being told not to cause trouble, not to fight, and to get along with the people around us.
Maybe that’s why judging someone by their race feels so foreign to a lot of Japanese people.
We’re usually too busy judging people by whether they’re good people or not.
This is what we, in America, call a “Luxury Belief System”.
That means something you can believe, and advertise your belief in, precisely because your privileges shelter you from the negative consequences of believing it.
You, @japan_nobunaga, live in a nation that is 99% Japanese, just like you.
You have plenty of time to evaluate gaikokujin as individuals. There are only a few of them around, and they probably aren’t going to stab you while you are trying to figure out the content of their character.
So you have the luxury of telling everyone “look at me, I am not a racist, I am an enlightened being who makes no judgments about wolves” … because you do not live near any wolves, and run no risk of being bitten.
In America, we have another saying … “Get off your high horse”.
This does not mean a literal horse.
But it is meant to make you think about how the daimyo‘s son, on his expensive thoroughbred stallion, does not understand why the peasants have muddy boots.
If you get down off the horse, and walk, you will understand why the farmer’s boots are muddy.
There were some dissenting comments to the original post:
I’ve heard similar stories of Japanese racism toward other East Asian peoples, never mind what they said (and probably still do say) about American black servicemen.
June 13, 2026
Hating on Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire
It shouldn’t be surprising that so many people are doing what they can to raise resentment against the very rich in general, and Elon Musk in particular. Stoking resentment of the better off has always been a viable short-term political play, and it’s not every day we see wealth of this scale:
Reddit meme
For all these dumbasses claiming if they had Elon’s money they’d end world hunger, cause world peace, educate everyone, or whatever, blah blah blah … No you wouldn’t. You’re full of shit and everyone knows it, because that’s not how the world works.
Throwing money at a problem doesn’t fix it. The entire history of government demonstrates that. Saying vapid nonsense just makes weak, unimaginative people with a childlike grasp on reality feel better about themselves for caring harder, while accomplishing nothing.
Meanwhile, the guy you hate revolutionized EVs and self driving cars, brought affordable reliable internet to every corner of the Earth, and is making the dream of colonizing space real. And the process of doing all that has given hundreds of thousands of people jobs.
While you posture about how you’d give everybody an imaginary unicorn, he’s done stuff that’s actually changed the world for the better.
And you don’t get it. You can’t get it. Because you’re just too fucking small.
And even the Globe and Mail, which used to consider itself the most respectable and influential newspaper in Canada goes for the “hate the rich” market:
But some people just can’t help themselves and ginning up the hate and envy is all they can do:
For the left, it’s important that you do more than view billionaires with skepticism. You have to actually hate them. You have to blame them for every ill that befalls you, and you must actively resent their wealth.
One way that the left accomplishes this is by framing their gains as somehow your losses.
Congressman Greg Cesar (D-TX) decided to try that on X Tuesday with this banger.
Now, it’s interesting that he talks about their wealth being three times what it was 15 years ago, but doesn’t account for what the rest of us are dealing with. Instead, he engages in an apples-and-oranges comparison.
For starters, the increase in net worth for billionaires has nothing at all to do with whether your life is three times better than it was back then. There are too many variables. Someone who was unemployed and homeless and got a job, built a life back up, and then started a successful business is a lot more than three times better off, right?
Plus, it doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living or anything else.
Instead, a better metric is whether the median household net worth in America has increased a similar amount. So, I went to Google, then got its AI to generate a graph for me showing what’s happened over that timeframe.
While that’s not three times, it is 2.5 times the median net worth 15 years ago, and since this caps at 2022, it may well have increased even more.
In other words, the net worth of ordinary Americans seems to be mostly keeping up with that of the billionaires.
Cesar’s question, though, is disengenuous because the cost of living has gone up about 53 percent over that timeframe. So while net worth has increased, so has the cost of living. Not enough to completely drain away the gains in net worth, but enough that people aren’t living three times better than they were.
But that’s the point, isn’t it?
It’s not enough that, on average, Americans are much richer than they were 15 years ago, and by about the same amount as the billionaires, because that won’t foster the necessary resentment the left needs to push through their policies. You have to resent their wealth, and that’s less likely if you realize you’ve gained as much as they have by percentages. You have to feel like their wealth has been taken from yours, otherwise you’re less likely to look at wealth redistribution as a good thing.
And wealth redistribution is what it’s always about.
Sing, Muse, of A Complicated Man: Why the Narrative Structure of The Odyssey is VITAL
MoAn Inc.
Published 2 Jan 2026
(more…)
June 12, 2026
QotD: George Bernard Shaw
On the other hand, he was one of the few playwrights in English whose plays can still be performed for the pleasure of an audience a century later. One or two of them might even, without absurdity, be called great. He was undoubtedly very witty, and if he was unbearably opinionated, his prose was always vigorous and quite often elegant. I learned to write from him. Many of his bons mots are still nearly as funny as those of Oscar Wilde.
It was as a playwright — one whose fame stretched around the world — not as a thinker or guide to policy that he is commemorated in the name of the theatre [at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. His plays have been in print ever since they were written. His achievements in the theatre can hardly be denied. He is virtually the founder of the modern drama in English. I can extract at least 20 of his plays from the vaults of my mind.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Man and Underman at RADA”, City Journal, 2020-09-17.
June 7, 2026
Morality and humour
Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):
There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.
Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.
The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.
Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.
This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.
And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”
Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way.
But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms.
They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.
This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat.
The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.
June 5, 2026
The Lord of the Flies was just a novel
We often use The Lord of the Flies as a shorthand way to illustrate the darkness in the hearts of men, and that, absent civilizations, men descend into a hellscape of violence, hatred, and all-against-all destructive competition. Yet the real-life case of a group of boys isolated for an extended time didn’t go at all the way the novel did:
More and more I’m learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.
Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn’t turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.
In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 “borrowed” a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.
Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.
They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan’s Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.
They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.
It wasn’t just William Golding manufacturing dark stories, of course:
QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces
Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.
Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.
Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.
Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.
And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.
Women are … a certain way.
This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.
Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.
I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.
A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.
It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.
It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.
This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.
Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.
May 30, 2026
“Bullying”
I was bullied as a kid. I hated it. Most kids experience it, and either hate it or embrace it as “how things are done” (most likely both). This is basic human nature across all cultures. It’s how we learn how to conform, or appear to conform, to cultural expectations. In a pre-urban environment, the community could only handle so many non-conformists — that is: close to zero — so nipping it in the bud with the children was a pro-survival/pro-communitarian mechanism. In modern urban environments, bullying still happens because it’s part of human nature rather than being how children learn how to cope with social situations.
We’ve even migrated the notion of suppressing “bullying” to the military, as InfantryDort explains:
Any man who thinks bullying is ubiquitously inappropriate has the survival instincts of a deer gazing longingly at headlights.
For most of human history, communities had weak formal institutions. Public ridicule, shaming, and ostracism were used to enforce norms.
Examples:
> Villages mocking chronic thieves.
> Military units humiliating cowards.
> Tradesmen ridiculing apprentices who refused to learn.The positive effect was often:
> Greater conformity to community standards.
> Faster correction of disruptive behavior.
> Stronger group cohesion.It hardens individuals to harsh environments when properly applied. And enforces societal norms we want and dissuades the ones we don’t.
The lack of bullying is how people grow up to adulthood and say things like “I’m gonna kill you and your whole family” at some political protest. And have it come out of their mouth as normal as breathing.
Because nobody ever stood them down in their formative years.
You’re a JAG. You think every problem has a legal solution. It doesn’t. You don’t understand the way the world works outside of the one the law has carefully curated for you. Made possible by people who’ve been using strength to coerce others for all of human history.
Let me spank the kids while you do the dishes.
May 27, 2026
The boomers don’t hate you, they just prioritize feeling good about themselves
This is something I see very clearly in Canadian baby boomers — most of whom support Mark Carney and the Liberals because they feel that’s what nice people do, and boomers want to think of themselves as nice people above all else. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a meme expressing later generations’ view of the boomers:
On the surface, it sounds like Boomers hate you. Or like they have the attention span and logical thinking skills of a goldfish.
Neither one of these is true.
Their complete dismissal of any of your concerns, and their total refusal to understand your situation or worldview, is actually quite sensible in light of one key fact about them.
They’re not hateful. They’re not dumb. They just have an incredibly low emotional pain threshold.
They cannot stand to feel bad about themselves for any reason, even for a moment.
When you create a meme like this, or you tell the story of how you are forty years old and can’t afford a house because you trained for three different careers and got rugpulled by work visas and offshoring every time …
… then they don’t even think about it as a worldview or a perspective or an experience that you have. They don’t think about you at all.
They think only about the effect on their own self-esteem, which must be parried.
You have, you see, told a tale of playing life on hard mode, which implies that they were playing life on easy mode, which implies that they are not wizards of insight and paragons of virtue.
That’s why they will immediately respond with these incoherent lines about whining and bootstraps and firm handshakes and avocado toast. Of course they don’t make sense. They don’t have to make sense. The goal isn’t to persuade you of anything or engage with you at all.
The goal is simply to have an excuse to avoid thinking about something which might make them feel bad.
These Boomerisms are magic talismans used to ward off emotional discomfort, in much the same fashion as all the species of plants they smoked their way through when they were your age.
I don’t see a solution to this.
I don’t know any way to tell Boomers that Hart-Cellar, CRA1964, DEI, open borders, social welfare programs, anti-racism, gay marriage, gun control, the sexual revolution, etc, were massive mistakes and need to be stopped, while hiding the obvious implication they were the ones who made those mistakes.
If we wish to save Western civilization, to make things good enough again that actual Americans can manage to have homes and marriages and children, then we’re going to have to find a way to work around the Boomers, because they’re never going to get on board.
QotD: “Bring your whole self to work”
Organisations and institutions are formalised teams. Due to past ruthless selection — see the Neolithic y-chromosome bottleneck — the male expression of Homo sapien genes is much better at teams than is the female expression of the same. This does turn out to matter.
We have spent centuries, millennia, dealing with the bad traits of men in power. We better start wrestling seriously and quickly with the bad traits of women in power, or we could end up with a cascading collapse of complex systems (see the LA fires for an example). We are already seeing some serious institutional degradation.
But if we remain stuck in “if you criticise men, it’s feminism; if you criticise women, it’s misogyny”, we have a potentially terminal problem.
Lorenzo Warby, Substack Notes, 2026-02-21.
May 26, 2026
Canadian parents are increasingly adopting the “helicopter” or “bulldozer” model
Eva Chipiuk on concerning trends in Canadian parenting styles and the long-term impact on children:
Not many people have really turned their minds to the psychology of Canadians. Most are too busy reacting to the latest outrage, headline, or political controversy.
However, David Redman has cautioned about what he has identified as a trend in Canada: “helicopter” and “bulldozer” parenting, where children are either constantly hovered over or where every obstacle is removed before they ever have to face it themselves.
Over time, that kind of environment can produce people who become uncomfortable with uncertainty, overly dependent on authority, fearful of risk, and hesitant to think independently or challenge difficult ideas. As this article put it:
Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone — young boys most of all — learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground”. The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance …
Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place. It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.
Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.
That mindset does not just affect childhood. It shapes entire societies. It affects how citizens respond to disagreement, political debate, uncertainty, criticism, and even new ideas.
Somewhere along the way, many Canadians lost their sense of adventure, resilience, curiosity, and willingness to engage with uncomfortable conversations or difficult questions.
Where did that spirit go? What happened to the mindset that encouraged people to explore, question authority, take risks, debate ideas openly, and build something better even when the outcome was uncertain? Somewhere along the way, discomfort itself seems to have become something to avoid rather than something people grow through.
Because if we stop exploring, questioning, debating, and taking risks, we lose something essential about what it means to live freely and think independently. A society that becomes afraid of uncertainty eventually becomes dependent on being told what is safe, acceptable, and permitted.
If we are going to move forward in any meaningful way, we need to rediscover the spirit of curiosity, resilience, and adventure that pushes people to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and engage with the unknown instead of fearing it.
Perhaps one of the most important conversations we should be having is this: what does it actually mean to be Canadian today?
Because for many, it increasingly feels like the answer is becoming less about courage, resilience, curiosity, and self-determination, and more about compliance, comfort, and avoiding difficult conversations.
