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Nature vs. Nurture & Luxury Beliefs Mental Model: Executive Summary

The concept in three sentences: Biology sets the base-rate distribution of possibilities for any trait; culture, development and incentives steer the expression thereof, in a way which can incorporate feedback (i.e. the environment can influence the expression of our genes.)  Agency is the driver within those lanes. Ideology can often steer us one way or the other, resulting in “luxury beliefs” that violate basic fundamentals of nature and nurture, providing an inaccurate and harmful schema that affects how we view reality.

Three brief examples:

Dogs’ hypersociality during the critical period: early social exposure (weeks, not years) shifts adult bonding and trainability; even shelter labeling and handling norms change adoption outcomes. (See Dog Is Love by Clive Wynne).

Rough-and-tumble play: A cross-cultural, biological preference in boys, driven by testosterone, that serves as critical training for social dominance; this biological drive is often mislabeled as a disorder (ADHD) when not given a proper outlet. (See T by Carole Hooven and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari).

Luxury beliefs: Status-enhancing ideas held by elites (e.g., “monogamy is outdated” or dismissing real trauma in favor of theoretical harms like “cultural appropriation”) who are insulated from the negative consequences, which are externalized onto vulnerable populations. (See Troubled by Rob Henderson).

Nature vs Nurture: A Deeper Look

Prefer to listen?  This mental model is available as a podcast on YouTube (below) – or just look for “Poor Ash’s Almanack” on your favorite podcast platform!

Nature vs. nurture is an age-old debate, but one that’s rarely covered holistically and with the required nuance; as we’ll explore later, it’s often oversimplified and used inappropriately to justify pre-determined ideology. It can be thought of as the intersection between trait adaptivity, culture, and agency.

Nature sets hard bounds that cannot be exceeded; for example, humans cannot fly (without external propulsion). As an example more useful in the everyday sense, the need for sleep is well-conserved across all animals. In Why We Sleep, Dr. Matthew Walker cites a sleep researcher, Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen, as stating:

“If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.”

As we explore in more depth in the sleep mental model, research demonstrates that our sleep needs are largely deterministic; no amount of nurture or “training” can erase the biological consequences of sleeping too little. The same largely applies to “chronotype,” or our circadian rhythm (i.e. being a morning person vs. a night owl), as explained by Till Roenneberg in Internal Time.  Yet many cultural forces, and productivity books, unscientifically promote the idea that a single schedule (such as waking up at 5 AM) is the right approach for everyone.

Of course, most bounds are not so easily determinable, although some are. We can think of these as a base rate, with hard variable bounds both at the individual level, which is a subset of variability the population level. For example, there is some upper limit to how fast any human can run; there is also an upper limit to how fast I can run (which is significantly lower than the population-level limit- I’m not a runner.)

Within these bounds, however, there is often a lot of room.  Or, as Sam Kean’s puts it in “The Violinist’s Thumb,” genes:

“deal in probabilities, not certainties.”  

Kean explains that if one identical twin develops schizophrenia, the other one only has a 30 – 50% chance (probability) of getting it – still a very high probability relative to the 1% base rate, but far lower than we’d intuitively imagine. Similarly, Clive Wynne notes in Dog Is Love, people who cloned their pets (like Barbra Streisand) reported the clones had wildly different personalities from the original, summarizing it as “you can’t clone the soul.”

That’s where nurture comes in; here, we define “nurture” as coming from both parents, peers, and the broader society and culture at large, as well as individual choices (agency). (Even though I hate running, I could certainly become a better runner, if I really wanted to.) Whenever we’re thinking of our own capabilities, or those of our loved ones, it’s important to understand where these bounds are – and how much variability is reasonable to expect.

We’ll spend a lot of time on sexual dimorphism, both because it’s a fascinating view into the topic, and because of its everyday, practical applicability in our own lives. Understanding the differences between men and women in a nuanced way allows us to be more empathetic – but also to not tolerate gendered excuses for behavior. Indeed, empathy is a great case study: across all cultures and even species other than humans, males are less empathetic than females. But unlike the sleep example discussed above, this is far less deterministic; empathy is learnable.

Thus, our training and agency – as well as the broader culture – can help males overcome these natural limitations. Unfortunately, with broader discourse today often demonizing males’ immalleable, nature-driven tendencies, an unintended consequence is teens and young men increasingly consuming misogynistic content online. As discussed in more detail in the focus and attention mental model, such content steers all of us (not just males) away from the empathy that can be built through sustained attention and long-form reading; instead optimizing for engagement. By understanding this complex interplay of forces, we can try to raise a generation of young men with healthier attitudes (on both our part, and theirs).

Testosterone Makes Boys’… Brains (And Everything Else)

When one thinks about the differences between boys and girls, certain organs come to mind. I’m referring to the brain, of course. (There’s plenty in Hooven’s book about other body parts, too, but I’ll keep the mental model mostly PG.)

“Although humans are not held captive by evolutionary forces, genes, or hormones, we still experience their profound influences.  But we are unique… in some important respects, including our ability to carefully consider the consequences of our actions and inhibit our baser instincts.  The more we understand the forces that shape us, the more control we have over how we behave.  As I have stressed… behaviors that show sex differences are often heavily influenced by culture… but one can’t solve a problem if one misunderstands its causes. Frank talk about T[estosterone] will help us appreciate how changes in the environment can rein in problematic male behavior. It is within our power to close or widen sex differences in aggression – but the underlying tendencies producing those differences precede culture, and they exist because of testosterone. No good can come from denying that.”

Carole Hooven, in “T: The Story of Testosterone“

Hooven’s point about how “changes in the environment can rein in problematic male behavior“ is a central theme of Rob Henderson’s memoir, Troubled. Henderson describes how, for many young men from chaotic backgrounds, the military functions as a coordinate exercise in structural problem solving – taking young men, often from troubled backgrounds, and imposing an external, structured environment that is “designed to keep us too busy and too exhausted to get into trouble.”

The military effectively serves as an environmental brake on the very impulses Hooven discusses, at the “time in their lives when they’re most likely to” go off the rails. Rob managed to escape his childhood of foster care and broken homes, but many of his peers didn’t. To create such systems – whether at an individual or societal level – we need to deeply understand nature, nurture, and the complicated ways in which they interact.

There’s a lot of oversimplistic discourse about the extent to which men and women are different (or the same); we’ll get into some of this in the subsequent luxury beliefs section. In T The Story of Testosterone, Hooven presents evidence on what can (and can’t) be explained by testosterone in numerous animals, from lizards to rats to deer; meanwhile, human evidence from those with rare genetic anomalies that affect the expression of sex hormones acts as a scalpel, separating the effects of culture from the effects of prenatal or pubertal hormone exposure.

Nature vs. Nurture in Play Preferences: Bullets from Barbies

Let’s start with play preferences; the differences are so stark that Hooven calls it the “biggest difference in the behavior of boys and girls.”  The single biggest difference between boys and girls, found across all cultures, is the love for “rough-and-tumble” play. Hooven’s description of her own son Griffin’s “intense and complex” fantasy world of “mortal combat and violent destruction” – which she juxtaposes against his generally sweet, thoughtful, and creative nature – will be familiar to any parent of boys. “Boys, it seems, are resistant to efforts to condition them away from battle and weaponry,” as shown by a preschooler who picked up a Barbie doll and began to “shoot bullets out of its head.”

This isn’t a cultural artifact; it’s a biological tendency. The parallel in animal models is comically identical. Hooven notes that the scientific description of juvenile rat play is so similar to her son’s that “minus the ‘rat’ and ‘paws’ parts, [it] seems very much like the way my own son plays”. Or, as Hooven puts it: “overall; where boys used their bodies, girls used their words.s  Boys pushed, pulled, or hit their partners about six times more than girls did[…] boys laughed and smiled even as they hit and shoved each other while fighting over rights to the viewer.”

As we’ll explore more in a later section, boys’ rough play style and innate drive for physical dominance (nature) is then powerfully shaped by the environment (nurture). In Troubled, Rob Henderson provides a stark illustration of this from a different social context. He notes that for foster kids who are “constantly moving to new schools,” fighting is not just play but a social necessity. It “increases the odds of fights breaking out because boys constantly feel the need to reestablish the pecking order.” Henderson describes how he had to get into fights specifically to avoid being “perceived as weak.“  This is a clear example of “trait adaptivity“ : a behavior that, while adaptive for survival in a chaotic environment, can persist as a “bricklike effect” of its own long after the environment has changed (being closed off emotionally hurt Rob for a long time).

This extends to toy preferences; girls will spend about 60% of their time with girls’ toys, while boys spend only 6% of their time with girls’ toys.  So is this due to society/culture, or innate biology?  Hooven presents data on Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (CAH), a disorder where a female (XX) fetus is exposed to unusually high levels of androgens in the womb. If the pure-nurture, culture theory of the world (“it’s all socialization”) were true, these girls, raised as girls, should behave just like their unaffected peers. But they don’t. Girls with CAH spent only 21% of their time with girls’ toys, spending 44% of their time with boys’ toys. Their preferences were, unequivocally, “much more masculinized“.

This is a clear demonstration of path dependency.  Prenatal exposure to testosterone “organizes” the brain, creating “bricklike effects” that permanently alter the pathways which will be activated by hormones and social cues later in life. As Hooven states, these experiences “made clear that boys’ and girls’ brains are not gender-neutral blank slates.”

Nature Isn’t Static: The Nurture Feedback Loop

This interplay between organization and activation is a universal biological principle, not just a human one. Clive Wynne’s Dog is Love provides a perfect parallel. He argues that what makes dogs special isn’t some innate cognitive genius, but rather a genetic potential for ‘hypersociability’ (likely linked to Williams syndrome in humans) that must be activated by life experience. For example, back to the “bricklike effects” discussed above – puppies isolated from humans for their first 14 weeks become “like wild animals” and are “essentially untamable”. The genetic potential for love is there, but according to Wynne, it is “lost forever because it was not activated by experience at the right time.”

This explores how nature vs. nurture are often not separate, but linked in a feedback loop. The environment and social context dynamically regulate testosterone levels. Mother rats lick and groom their sons more if they have higher T; this differential grooming itself affects later adult behavior. “The vital lesson here is that hormones can sometimes affect behavior indirectly; by affecting social interactions, which can change behavior in turn.”

More broadly, Hooven cites the “Challenge Hypothesis.” Testosterone levels aren’t static; they “rise in response to threats to status or resources”. This is true in sparrows, whose testosterone levels “shoot up to maximum” when their territory is challenged, and it’s true in humans.

This mechanism produces the “Winner-Loser Effect“. After the 1994 World Cup final, the T levels of the winning Brazilian fans “stayed the same or increased,” while the T levels of the losing Italian fans “dropped”. This isn’t a curiosity; it’s a powerful adaptive response. In hamsters, a loss in a fight causes a drop in testosterone that makes the animal “cower in fear” and shy away from future fights. This is smart. As Hooven puts it, for a loser, “overconfidence is generally a bad idea”. The hormonal change enforces a behavioral change (caution) that increases the probability of survival.

But this feedback loop also provides an off switch; nature isn’t static. Just as testosterone rises to meet a challenge, it falls in response to pro-social, nurturing behavior. This is a critical finding for humans. Male T levels “drop when they are in a romantic pair bond and involved in caring for their offspring.” This is brilliant evolutionary design: the “decline in T helps direct attention away from rivals and new sexual prospects and toward one’s mate and children.” This isn’t just a passive effect; it’s an active feedback loop. Studies of Hadza fathers show that “highly involved fathers” have about 50 percent lower T levels than childless men, and direct “physical interaction with children… consistently lowers T.” This is a biological mechanism underpinning family stability.

Cultural Epigenetics

This interplay between biology and environment extends beyond individual feedback loops. Cultural enforcement, or lack thereof, can also act as a powerful environmental force, as demonstrated by Rob Henderson’s concept of ‘luxury beliefs.’  Henderson describes how affluent classmates at Yale would promote ideas like “monogamy is kind of outdated” or that marriage is “just a piece of paper” – all while privately intending to have stable, monogamous marriages themselves.

The devastating consequence of these beliefs, as Henderson’s data shows, is the collapse of the two-parent family structure precisely for the classes that lack the social and financial capital to withstand it. Between 1960 and 2005, the two-parent family “plummeted to 30 percent” for the working class but “remained largely intact” (at 85%) for the affluent. The promotion of these “luxury beliefs” by a protected elite, who benefit from the very stability Hooven describes, actively undermines the social enforcement of the biological and familial norms that are essential for societal well-being, especially for children.

The nuance here (covered on pages 174-176 of Hooven’s book) gets even deeper, right down to gene transcription. T doesn’t just flip an “anger switch”. It tunes the brain, making aggression more probable by decreasing empathy, reducing the perception of fear and pain, and increasing reward sensitivity. This empathy gap has significant real-world consequences. Hooven notes (on page 159) that while outcomes of intimate-partner violence differ significantly by sex, it is due not only to mens’ far greater strength, but also lower levels of empathy: “men are less able to [understand how others are feeling] than women, across cultures.” This pattern is not uniquely human; it’s mirrored in other male animals, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, elephants, dogs, and wolves.

This directly mirrors the “mother rat” feedback loop, but in reverse. Henderson’s memoir is a case study in what happens when that nurturing, grooming, and pro-social feedback is absent. He describes a childhood so devoid of care that he had a painful breakthrough in therapy, realizing not only had nobody ever loved him… but he had also not loved anyone else. This adult indifference had predictable consequences; he intentionally gave wrong answers on tests, thinking, “Adults didn’t seem to take my needs seriously. So why… should I take their tests and questions seriously?”

His story was not unusual in his peer group; the small California town he grew up in was defined by a “widespread absence of fathers.” Without that critical moderating influence on unchecked male impulses, the result is a life lived in a “relentless ‘fight-or-flight’ state” and the grim statistical outcome that for every male foster kid like Henderson who graduates college, “20 go to jail.”

Hormonal effects are also mediated by personality. Giving men testosterone gel only increases aggression in those who are already “dominance-oriented” and “impulsive“ – and given the feedback loops to gene transcription, it stands to reason that boys raised in stable families end up expressing different genes.

Furthermore, it’s not just the level of T that matters; “the effectiveness of the receptor matters, too.” The androgen receptor gene has “CAG repeats”; fewer repeats mean a more efficient receptor. A man with fewer repeats (a more “sensitive” receiver) gets a bigger aggressive response from the same amount of T and even “got more pleasure from being aggressive”. This is a great example of multicausality where genes, hormones, and personality interact.

This environmental feedback isn’t just a fast-acting hormonal loop; it also operates over the long term at the genetic level. Marlene Zuk’s work in Paleofantasy is so crucial here. She dismantles the idea that human evolution stopped 10,000 years ago. In reality, evolution has accelerated, and culture is one of the primary drivers. This is the Gene-Culture Coevolution mental model. The cultural practice of dairy farming, for instance, created a massive selective pressure that favored the “lactase persistence” mutation, allowing adults to digest milk. Similarly, the cultural shift to grain-based agriculture favored individuals with more copies of the salivary amylase gene (AMY1), making them better at digesting starch. This is a critical insight: our biology is not “stuck” in the past; it is constantly adapting to the cultural and environmental niches we create.

Nature vs. Nurture in Addiction and Depression

Rob Henderson’s journey with alcoholism and mental health provides a powerful, first-person illustration of the dynamic between the “cage” of one’s improper nurture, and one’s intrinsic “nature.” His story is a near-perfect case study for the central theses of Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, and some bits of Stolen Focus.

In Chasing the Scream, Hari’s discussion of the “Rat Park” experiment is the single best metaphor for understanding this link. The prevailing theory of addiction is chemical “hooks.”  A rat in an isolated cage will compulsively self-administer morphine until it dies. But the “Rat Park” experiment challenged this, finding that rats placed in a socially rich, engaging “park” with other rats, toys, and food would not use the same drugs, even though they were freely available. (It is worth noting that the Rat Park experiment is debated and others have had trouble replicating it; treat it as one data point in context, like anything else.) The conclusion is that addiction is not simply a chemical hijacking but an adaptation to a ‘cage’ of isolation, trauma, and powerlessness.

Henderson’s childhood was that cage. He describes his youth as a “relentless state of fight-or-flight.” This connects powerfully to Hari’s “zoo animal” analogy in Stolen Focus. A horse in a stall develops “cribbing,” a compulsive behavior that “doesn’t happen in the wild.” A polar bear in a zoo begins “endlessly pacing.” As the vet Nicholas Dodman concedes, these animals are suffering from “‘frustrated biological objectives.‘” They are expressing distress because “they can’t express their innate nature.” Henderson’s own compulsive, self-destructive behaviors – his “addiction” to thrill-seeking, from drinking tequila at age nine to playing the “choking game” – were his form of “cribbing.” They were the rational, adaptive distress signals of a human “stuck in a zoo” of chaos, neglect, and constant threat.

Our modern approach to these signals, as Hari notes, is often to medicate the symptom. We give Prozac to polar bears and Xanax to parrots. We indulge the “fantasy… that you could take a creature, ignore its nature, and make it live a life that fits the owner’s needs… without any cost.” Henderson’s life shows the cost. His addictions weren’t a problem with his brain in a vacuum; they were his solution to the pain of his cage. He explicitly sought “every kind of buzz” as a way to “feel anything but pain or to feel nothing at all.”

This pain is what Hari, in Lost Connections, argues our society misdiagnoses. Depression, in this view, is not a “chemical imbalance” but a “rational response to profound pain.“ Hari points to the “grief exception” in the DSM, which pathologizes normal human suffering. The DSM created a loophole, eventually just two weeks, after which normal grieving can be classified as a mental illness. Hari asks, if grief is a reasonable response to a death, why isn’t depression “a reasonable response to… a life you’ve lost?”

Through this lens, Henderson’s depression can be viewed a form of profound, unresolved grief: grief for a stable, loving family he never had. The lesson his childhood taught him – never get too attached… everyone is replaceable – is a rational, if tragic, adaptation to that loss. His painful breakthrough in therapy, the realization that not only had nobody ever loved him… but he had also not loved anyone else, is the ultimate expression of this disconnection. When graduating, he realizes the entire point of his pursuit of success was to build a stable future for a family, to become the reliable parent he never had. He acknowledges he would trade all his academic achievements for a stable, loving childhood.

This profound grief connects directly to another of Hari’s core themes: the disconnection from a secure future. Lost Connections describes depression as a feeling of being “radically shortsighted,” where the future vanishes. Suicidally depressed kids, one study found, were “uniquely unable to imagine their… future”. This explains why Henderson’s “residual anxiety and rage” persisted even after he found success and structure in the military. His environment had changed, but the “cage” was now internal. His drinking binge that led to the ICU was the culmination of this hopelessness. It was only in rehab, after hitting a “high bottom”, that he confronted this. While his environment and trauma (Nurture) were the cause, his solution was a powerful act of agency (Nature). His realization that he had “failed himself” and that, ultimately, “only I could fix it” (agency), was the turning point that allowed him to finally dismantle the cage.

Henderson also reflects directly on the nature vs. nurture aspect of his own addiction, given his biological mother was a drug addict. He acknowledges a potential genetic propensity (nature) but concludes, in a way that perfectly aligns with Hari’s “Rat Park” thesis, that this propensity is far more likely to manifest within the “cage” of a harsh, unstable, or unloving environment (nurture). The genetic loading may exist, but it is the trauma and disconnection of the environment that pulls the trigger.

The Childhood Attention “Crisis”: A Problem of “Cage” or “Brain”?

The diagnosis curves for ADHD are eye-popping: in the U.S., the share of adolescents diagnosed has climbed into the low teens, with boys nearly twice as likely as girls to get the label; in some areas, it’s as high as 30%.

Hari argues that the same logic underlies ADHD diagnoses as the depressed animals. As Hari explains in Stolen Focus, the story often goes like this: a doctor tells a boy’s mother there’s a “problem with his brain“ and that genetics (nature) are “75 to 80 percent” of the cause³. This diagnosis offers “relief”.  It’s not the parent’s fault—and the solution is Ritalin⁴. But this medicating is just a “management tool“ that “puts us a little more at ease,” “muffling their signals with drugs“ while ignoring the root cause, just like the root cause of the pacing polar bear or cribbing horse was being locked up all day. Hari notes that one child told him he felt like his brain was “turned off“ when he took the drug.

Hari cites critics like Dr. Sami Timimi, who argues that “ADHD is not a diagnosis… It’s just a description of certain behaviors”⁷. Timimi compares it to diagnosing a cough by simply saying, “yes, the child has a cough,” without looking for the cause⁸. The label, he argues, should be the start of the investigation, not the end⁹. When clinicians do investigate the context, Hari notes, the “ADHD” often vanishes: a new school or a better parental relationship resolves the “symptoms”¹⁰.

The Focus/Attention Mental Model: A Vicious Feedback Loop

In the Focus/Attention Mental Model, I explore how our modern environment is a giant feedback loop that is pushing us toward the low end of our natural attention span. It does this by creating a state of chronic, low-grade, “fight-or-flight” activation, which fragments our ability to think deeply. This constant, vigilant state, fed by multiple, interacting forces, keeps us perpetually distracted.

The Internal Environment: Diet, Sleep, and Stress

The feedback loop starts inside our own bodies. Poor sleep, chronic stress, and a processed diet create an internal state of emergency. Hari, in Stolen Focus, highlights a Dutch study where children with focus issues were put on an “eliminationist’ diet” without synthetic additives or dyes. The results were “remarkable”: “more than 70 percent” of the kids improved their ability to pay attention, with an “average improvement” of “50 percent“. This supports the idea that “when you consume the foods that we evolved to eat, your brain will function better”. When our internal environment is in a state of distress from poor food or lack of sleep, our attention is the first casualty.

Back to Testosterone: Biology and Free Play

When you think about it through the lens of evolution and trait adaptivity, young animals’ preference for play initially seems a strange thing.  In T: The Story of Testosterone, Carole Hooven poses the following question:

“rats, and mammals in general, spend a surprising amount of time engaged in what looks like a frivolous activity – playing. All that tumbling and running around seems to waste valuable energy that could be directed towards other, more sensible activities like finding food… and small, inexperienced animals frolicking, oblivious to their surroundings, are the perfect targets for stalking predators.”

This is where Hooven’s research on testosterone ties back to ADHD.  Hooven uses the concept of “proximate vs ultimate” explanations. The “proximate” explanation for “rough-and-tumble” play is that “it’s fun” – the same proximate explanation applies for “sex.”  But this isn’t the ultimate explanation; the ultimate explanation for sex is the survival of the species. Similarly, the “ultimate” evolutionary why for play is that this is “critical training” for “the ‘dominance arena'”.

This “frivolous” play is a crucial developmental window. Male rats “experimentally prevented from playing” in this way grew up to be “evolutionary losers” who “readily submit to intruders” and fail in the “mating arena”. This behavior isn’t pathology; it’s practice for negotiation and regulating force.

We have now placed boys, biologically wired to be rambunctious, into an elementary school schema that equates “learning” with sitting still for hours, where putting hands on anyone else is highly discouraged, if not banned entirely. We have, as Hari documents in Stolen Focus, engineered the “collapse of free play.” Even after school, boys have no time to explore; home ranges have declined for decades. This is not necessarily a bad thing (due to safety… Rob Henderson certainly got up to a lot of stuff without adequate supervision, and ended up in some dangerous situations), but without providing boys another structured outlet, is it so surprising that they can’t pay attention?

Henderson’s own story provides a perfect example of this. The boxing gym became a critical, alternative outlet for him. The gym provided a structured, physical “park” for the very male energy Hooven discusses. While the emotional vulnerability of therapy felt “scarier” , the gym offered tangible, “visible progress” and a sense of “earned belonging”. Most importantly, it provided what his life lacked: a positive mentor. A coach named Old Joe gave him “crucial, earned praise” , which instilled a rare feeling of “pride”. The gym succeeded because it didn’t suppress that energy; it channeled it, providing a stable environment where, for the first time, his effort was directly connected to a positive outcome and validated by a reliable adult.

The “Harvesting” Machine: Hijacking Our Fight-or-Flight

Our anxious, poorly-fed, under-played attention doesn’t just “wander off”; it is harvested. Hari notes “the average child between the ages of thirteen and seventeen in the U.S. was sending one text message every six minutes they were awake”. This system is “compulsion by design,” not accident. Snapchat streaks, for example, “weaponize adolescents’ high need for social connection” to manipulate them into checking every day, often for hours.

This rewires us, creating “internal, habitual interruptions”. Even with external distractions removed, Hari found he “will start to interrupt” himself, constantly “imagining how I would describe [things] in a tweet”. This hijacks our need for social connection. Hari notes “no stranger is going to flood you with hearts and tell you you’re great.”

The Antidote: Reading as an “Empathy Gym”

How do we break this loop? We must rebuild our capacity for focus. Long-form reading is weight-training for focus. It is the primary antidote to the “fragments” of social media.

Johann Hari, in Stolen Focus, calls fiction an “empathy gym”. He cites research finding that reading fiction builds empathy by acting as a “social simulation,” training your ability to understand others by “immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head”. This is not limited to print, but requires a “complex narrative that simulates the world” ; if you see the world through fragments, “empathy doesn’t kick in”.

This critical skill is in freefall. Hari notes that the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure is at its “lowest level ever recorded,” with the share of men reading for pleasure falling “by 40 percent” between 2004 and 2017. The average American now spends “seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone”. The problem is not just time; the medium itself is retraining our brains. Professor Anne Mangen’s research shows that reading from books trains us to read “in a linear fashion,” while screens train us to “‘scan and skim’” in a “manic slip and jump”. Mangen warns that this scanning “‘also becomes our default’” behavior, even when reading on paper. (Of course, for work purposes, reading on paper is a really dumb idea (particularly in the age of AI) – but particularly for kids, long-form reading clearly has its benefits.)

Rob Henderson would likely agree; he notes that reading helped him construct “makeshift role models” from reliable, distant sources like books and television, as they, unlike the adults in his life, “wouldn’t disappear on him”. Reading stories of “hardship and resilience” became a source of private comfort. It was a “social simulation” that gave him a lens into other worlds and other minds, providing the very “practice” in understanding humanity that his chaotic environment denied him.

But this activity was kept private. Henderson actively hid his reading habit, not out of shame, but to keep expectations low. He wrote, “I didn’t want anyone to accuse me of being smart, because that would mean I would have to acknowledge that I wasn’t living up to my potential”. This fear of potential is a direct consequence of his “cage.” With no stable parental involvement, “potential” isn’t a gift; it’s a burden. One of his foster mothers only punished him if he irritated her—she “could care less how he did in school”. Data indicates that reading to your kids (or encouraging them to read) is one of the things you can do as a parent with the largest compounding benefits; less TikTok and more books is a recipe for better attention spans (and everything else in life.)

Ideology vs. Reality: The “Luxury Belief” Mental Model

This failure of empathy—or, more accurately, the misapplication of it—is at the heart of one of the most useful concepts I’ve come across in years: “luxury beliefs”. Rob Henderson, in Troubled, coined this term to describe “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class while inflicting real-world harm on the vulnerable”.

It’s a devastatingly precise mental model. A luxury belief is a form of virtue signaling, but with a toxic twist: the believer reaps the social reward (status) while remaining completely insulated from the belief’s negative N-order impacts, which are externalized onto others. Henderson’s “schema“ gap upon arriving at Yale was profound. He discovered that the abstract theories of his classmates were built on a foundation of unacknowledged stability; in one seminar, he learned that “over 90% of his peers were raised by their two biological parents”. This stood in stark contrast to his own life, where “most of the kids he grew up with barely had one”. His classmates could afford to have “fashionable ideologies” because they were, in essence, playing a game with house money, backed by a lifetime of stability they took for granted.

The Anatomy of a Luxury Belief

Henderson provides several perfect examples of this mechanism in action:

• • The Family: This is the big one. He describes a classmate who told him “monogamy is kind of outdated” and not good for society… while also admitting she was raised by both parents and “personally intended to have a monogamous marriage”. This is the luxury belief in its purest form. The affluent can signal their open-mindedness by critiquing traditional norms, all while benefiting from those very norms in their private lives.
  • The Cost: The “real-world harm” is staggering. Henderson presents data showing that in 1960, 95% of both affluent and working-class children lived with both biological parents. By 2005, 85% of affluent families were still intact, but for working-class families, the figure had “plummeted to 30 percent”. The elites promoted the dissolution of the family, and the working class paid the price.

• “Defund the Police”: This is perhaps the most glaring example. The call to “defund the police” makes perfect sense “if you live in a safe, sheltered bubble”. Henderson notes that a 2020 survey showed the “richest Americans” were the strongest supporters of defunding, while the “poorest, who are most often the victims of crime, were least supportive”. As someone who grew up with real crime, Henderson understood that the world would “descend into chaos if unpoliced”. The elite get to feel virtuous; the poor get to be victims.
• “Harm”: Henderson’s “schema” for “pain” was radically different from his peers’. He was shocked when classmates claimed an email about Halloween costumes could inflict “pain”. In one instance, a classmate told him he was “too privileged to understand” the harm of cultural appropriation, assuming that because he was Asian, he’d never faced hardship in his life (of course, he grew up in foster care and then a broken adoptive home). This perfectly contrasts the fluffy, theoretical harms of a costume with the real, visceral trauma Henderson experienced growing up – while he was walking past neighborhoods suffering from “real poverty, addiction, and homelessness.” The redefinition of words like “harm,” “violence,” and “safety” to include emotional discomfort is a luxury belief that cheapens the meaning of the real thing.

This intellectual rot isn’t just a social phenomenon; it’s a scientific one. The academic tendency to deny biological reality is a luxury belief of the intellectual class. In T: The Story of Testosterone, Carole Hooven describes this firsthand. After Larry Summers’ comments, she saw a powerful pushback against “dangerous ideas”, with professors insisting “It’s socialization” and that even discussing biology could harm “achieving gender equality”.

This is the exact same mechanism Henderson describes. As Hooven warns, “if you find a hypothesis distasteful, a red flag should immediately go up: there is a clear and present danger that you will discount the evidence”.

The debate over biological males playing in female sports is a perfect case study. The “luxury belief” is that biology is irrelevant – that suggesting there is a meaningful biological difference in athletic performance between males and females is inherently transphobic.

The cost of this belief is paid exclusively by female athletes, who face unfair competition as well as higher injury risk. This belief willfully ignores the permanent, “bricklike effects” of male puberty. As Hooven details, a year of T-suppression “doesn’t budge” bone size and density, and “muscle and strength are not completely lost”. These advantages are “difficult to eliminate”. Denying this isn’t “inclusive” – it’s unscientific, and it undermines the entire purpose of women’s sports, which exist precisely because of these biological base rates like the “10 percent” gap in world records. It is entirely possible to treat transgender individuals with kindness and respect, while also recognizing the immutable scientific reality of the permanent effects of male puberty; Hooven explores this issue with dispassionate, scientific depth and nuance.

This extends to the broader demonization of masculinity. Hooven critiques a Washington Post piece titled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?”, calling out the “vilification of half the human population”. This, too, is a luxury belief. It’s easy to write about “toxic masculinity” from a safe, civilized society. But Hooven contrasts this narrative with her real-world experience, noting the book wouldn’t exist without the Ugandan men who protected her. She argues we forget “the virtues that nature seems to have preferentially handed out to men,” including the willingness to “put their lives on the line for others,” noting that men are disproportionately represented in almost all dangerous professions. These very virtues are the flip side of the same trait coin, creating the safe bubble from which such ingratitude is launched.

Ideology Is a Two-Way Street

But this failure mode isn’t exclusive to the left. Ideology is a “schema” that distorts reality for everyone, and the right has its own set of “luxury beliefs” that ignore the data. If the left’s failure is denying nature, the right’s failure is often a rigid, “paleofantasy” (to borrow Marlene Zuk’s term) that ignores nurture and variation.

• Ignoring Variation & Dose-Dependency: The right often falls into this “paleofantasy” trap, promoting a single, rigid script for “manliness” that is just as unscientific as the left’s “blank slate” view. This “more T = better” thinking is rampant, from the testosterone clinics popping up on every street corner to the online worship of a single “alpha” ideal. This is objectively dumb. It completely ignores basic biology, specifically the Dose-Dependency mental model. More is not better; it’s just different, and often, it’s far worse.Hooven provides a brilliant experiment that guts this narrative. Scientists gave lizards T implants, creating hyper-aggressive “jacked-up lizards”. These lizards acted just like the “alpha” ideal: they “more than doubled the amount time… patrolling their territories, and attacking other” lizards. The result? They “failed miserably”. This is a perfect example of N-Order Impacts. The first-order effect was “more aggression” (victory!), but the second-order effect was ruin. They “spent their precious energy early and unwisely,” and half of them died before mating season even began.Meanwhile, the “Goldilocks” control lizards—the “betas,” if you will—were “rested, fattened up, and prepared”. This is a crucial biological trade-off. Belief in a monolithic “alpha” script ignores that T’s effects are mediated by personality (only increasing aggression in men who are already “dominance-oriented” and “impulsive”) and biology (receptor efficiency, or “CAG repeats,” determines the response). Pushing a “jacked-up” ideal on everyone isn’t a great idea.
• Amplifying Maladaptive Traits: The “culture of honor” Hooven describes in the “American South” is a perfect example of a right-leaning luxury belief. This is a cultural script that encourages men to respond to perceived insults with “savage violence”, resulting in “higher rates of violent crime”. This is trait adaptivity gone wrong. It’s a cultural overlay that amplifies the most problematic parts of male biology (T-fueled aggression) in a modern environment where it is wildly counter-productive.
• The Rejection of Internal Nurture (Mental Health): Extreme right-wing ideology can posit that mental health struggles are merely a lack of personal will or moral fiber, rejecting the need for professional help like therapy or rehab. This can be especially true for men, where seeking help is often viewed as a feminizing weakness that violates the “alpha” script. By insisting on a purely individual, agency-driven solution to problems like addiction or trauma, this ideology ignores the profound, deep-seated effects of poor nurture, such as the “cage” of chaos, abuse, or neglect described by Henderson and Hari. This rejection of professional, structural intervention for the internal environment stands in stark contrast to Rob Henderson’s story, whose ultimate turning point (overcoming alcoholism and trauma) was only achieved through the accepting that he needed help (and therapy). For him, agency was expressed not in rejecting help, but in the courage to seek and accept it, proving that addressing a broken internal environment is not a failure of will, but an adaptive, life-saving act of self-correction.