The Polyamorous Misanthrope

But Elmo, after cheerfully surrendering his old toys, sees that the children who swapped toys with him are playing with his toys “wrong”! They’re imagining entirely different make believe scenarios! They’re pretending the football is a dinosaur egg instead of a rocket ship! Aaahhhhh!!!! And this is so distressing to poor Elmo that he does the unthinkable: He does swapsies-backsies and takes all his toys back!

This being Sesame Street, he learns that you can’t control how other people play pretend, but you can join in if you want to! And if you don’t want to, that’s ok, you can just play pretend your own way by yourself or with someone else who wants to play that way too. You can still be friends with people who play pretend differently than you (and aren’t being mean/harmful/etc, do not bad-faith-read this 🤨).

I've seen people online saying we should be pregnancy testing "at the southern border," of course, just in case someone is trying to smuggle a foetus in.

If someone decides to challenge your citizenship? Chances are very good that you'd have a hell of a time proving it.

This is a fairly recent picture of Central Park.

When I was a child, I read a book called Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. In the book, the main character talks about how they live near Central Park and how because of pollution, the leaves on the trees just turn brown and drop off instead of turning colors like he saw once on a family trip.

The book came out in 1972.

So, yes.... Problems that were such background noise in our lives that it was a throwaway line in a children's book can and have been solved.

For once I'm not actually doing a bit; those "any resemblance to real persons living or dead" disclaimers genuinely exist because of Rasputin.

The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons don’t regenerate. They make connections with each other and that’s it. If you don’t use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, you’re gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you won’t notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.

As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.

We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but it’s gonna take decades and it’ll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that it’s a muscle and make it work. People complain about “when am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?” You’re not. You’re teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your week’s schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so it’s clear and you understand what I’m saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.

Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a church’s event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your body’s energy — do you really think it’s going to maintain connexions that aren’t in use?

Most cases of Alzheimer’s are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimer’s starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.

However the drunk guys are also drinking, and eventually she can't afford to buy another pitcher for the table so she can't keep up the ever-full beer glass trick. At this point she has to resort to setting up the pool trick shot that she's never seen anyone but her boyfriend pull off, and says she'll leave with whoever manages the shot first.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Spix's Macaws were extinct in the wild for 70 years, and now captive breeding and conservation groups have reintroduced a small population (with more on the way) and there are babies being successfully raised in the wild again.

And what else is there, but hope? We exist for the grace of hope. Those who have lost all hope don't stay here. If you are here to send an ask like this, it is not because you have given up, it's that you are hoping someone will show you that that hope is worth having.

It is!! It always is!!

The population of an entire island working together to eradicate every last rat and mouse to save the native bird populations. They had to trap a bunch of the birds and keep them in captivity so they wouldn’t be hurt by the rodenticides, and released them after the rodents were gone. Normal residents helped by phoning in tips whenever they saw rodents. And they did it. Lord Howe Island, last I read, remains rodent free, and the native bird populations are rebounding!

Acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer, both of which were terrifying specters of my childhood, have been largely dealt with. Ecosystems devastated by acid rain are also recovering.

In 1991, the first captive-raised condors were re-introduced to Big Sur, Pinnacles, and Bitter Creek.

In 2006, three months before I turned eighteen, the first wild pair of condors was seen nesting in Big Sur in over a hundred years. A hundred years.

We did that. We fixed it.

How about another example.

When my mom was small, in the 1960s, there were many, many days of the year she was not allowed outside. Days and days they had recess indoors, because the air was so poisonous to breathe. Here's an article about it, with some good pictures.

My mom was 13 in the picture on the left. She was 50 in the picture on the right.

In 1987, there were 27 California Condors in the world, all captive.

In 2024, there were 566.

369 of them fly free.

That happened within my lifetime, and I'm not even 40 yet.

When you lose hope, think of our stories we're telling you. Recount them to yourself like a prayer. That's what I do.

There are 369 California Condors flying free in the sky right now.

There is no more acid rain.

There is an ozone.

There are wild tigers.

There are still birds on Lord Howe Island.

By 2013, there were approximately 1,200 living wild, across 18 dens. Their numbers increase regularly, and while the face challenges due to habitat loss, climate change, and their limited genetic diversity, they're in a much better place than they were.

I think it's easy to get lost in the bad things going on in the world, and close to home. But the bad things are often acute. They flash in the pan, which is bright and can be scary, it's easy to be distracted by it. But ultimately, there are always people working to clean up, and prevent it from happening again. There's always people working to improve things overall, and people researching how to do that. It just takes time, and it's not flashy, it's just work.