Ajinkya Wadhwa

Fighting well. Fighting is inevitable. But there are good and bad ways to fight. When a couple is good at fighting, they defuse tension, approach things with humor, and genuinely listen to the other side, while avoiding getting nasty, personal or defensive. They also fight less often than a bad couple.

The Asymmetry Is Everywhere

Your Great2,000 Grandfather’s Social Survival Mammoth was central to his ability to endure and thrive. It was simple—keep the mammoth well fed with social approval and pay close attention to its overwhelming fears of nonacceptance, and you’ll be fine.

If you want to have dozens of eyes on you and endless pictures taken of you for an entire day for doing nothing but existing, the best way to accomplish that is by having a wedding. In fact, being the central character of a wedding is one of the best ways to receive constant attention while putting in the least amount of effort on the day of.

For the rest of this post, we’ll zoom in on one specific type of culture: intellectual culture. There are all kinds of intellectual cultures out there, but we can slot them into two broad categories:

In other words, on the ancient landscape—the one we were designed for—the human being wasn’t really the independent life form of the human race. The tribe was.

This is the power of human beliefs. Not only do they produce an endless array of behavioral varieties—a million little evolutionary experiments—they allow for the complete behavioral mutation of any one of them within a single generation. Sometimes within a single day.

To make sense of all this, we need to discuss the critical, invisible force that ties all of the loaf’s slices together: culture.

The psych equilibrium of a culture exerts a vertical pull on the individuals within it—filling each culture with a kind of electrical current.