What I Just Read

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...

A disturbing and sobering book about a hyperinflation in the USA, and the effects it has on an extended family. I consider this book a necessary read right now, especially now, as some of what this book foretells seems increasingly likely to happen--although hopefully to a much lesser degree.   A few themes really stood out to me:  1) On how some people are NGMI and there's nothing you can do to help them, even if you literally tell them exactly what will happen . They will reject it, and worse: they'll reject you for telling them . Hence the awful yet true quote from Thomas Sowell: "People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong." 2) On how people waste enormous amounts of energy arguing about who's right, or trying to "be" right about some unexpected problem,  rather than dealing with the actual problem.  And then, once something unexpected  has ...

A sarcastic approach to self-improvement and calculated indifference in a social media-saturated era. Mouthy, encouraging, but also at times cloying and forced. There are a few different ways to describe this book: "Viktor Frankl with a potty mouth" and "Buddhism lite" both come to mind, but at the same time it's also quite beautiful to watch this young author work out his own morality and his own code for how to live. You get to walk alongside on his journey--albeit at the cost of seeing more of his inner mind than you might want.  And the book's central message is worth reiterating: we all have a limited number of "fucks to give" in this life, so don't waste them : think carefully about where and how you deploy your energy, your effort and your emotional attachment. This book is a competent introduction to domains like Stoicism and Buddhism, and it addresses a number of cognitive blind spots and fallacies, thus it's a useful resource to c...