Subject: “Julián, Your Essays on Money, Meaning and Modern Life.”

Signed Liz Stein, Vice President & Executive Editor at HarperCollins Publishers.

She liked how Huliwood connects money, travel, personal choices and the search for meaning. My background in multilingual editorial work and digital content strategy added “an interesting dimension”.

Then: was I represented by a literary agent, and if so, by whom?

I forwarded it to my dad with the most professional reply I could manage: “Uhhhm… that escalated quickly. Que es esto un catfish?”

Dad called it quite a hook, worth exploring, and told me to look into it with Claude.

So I did.

There is a real Liz Stein. In 2024, Publishers Weekly listed her as an executive editor at William Morrow, one of HarperCollins’ American imprints. She buys commercial novels – a diary about money and the AI transition, written out of a backpack, is not her kind of book.

The email came from “harpercollinsau.com”. HarperCollins Australia writes from harpercollins.com.au. And turns out, the look-alike was registered on 2 October, less than two weeks before it wrote to me.

Plus, HarperCollins Australia only reads manuscripts that come through an agent, so the question sounds like protocol.

My guess was that the next email would introduce a very good agent. Writer Beware, which tracks these scams, says it does: the fake editor recommends “one of our company’s private and reliable literary agents”, who passes you to a “book doctor”, who wants money.

The email praised my themes and my CV. It never named a single essay. Then again, I’d like to call this a milestone – Huliwood, finally worth a forgery.

I made a list: has a newsletter, has a LinkedIn, might want a book… may or may not be desperate for attention.

Moving up in life.

For the record, I’m still not represented.

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Related: True, But Incomplete – true facts arranged into a false impression, which is most of this email.

Sources: Writer Beware, 2026 · HarperCollins Australia, Publishing Fraud Alert · HarperCollins Australia, FAQ · Publishers Weekly, Book Deals, March 2024 · Verisign RDAP, harpercollinsau.com

The essays I can’t remember writing are the ones that started as a clean answer to a clean question.

The ones that began in the wrong alley – chasing a fact that turned out to be false, into a source that disagreed with me – are the only ones whose furniture I still know in the dark.

I’ve been trying to work out what the alley did that the answer couldn’t.

The gap used to run an afternoon, a walk home, sometimes a week – until you found a person who knew or a book that did. How deep does the ocean go? Who won that battle you half-remember? That gap is now closed. The answer arrives before the curiosity has finished forming.

For years the fear ran the other way.

We were drowning in information, the feed was a firehose, and the skill everyone preached was sifting the noise. Fair enough. But then the machines went and solved it. Ask anything, get back one clean, fluent paragraph: no noise, no dead ends, no seventeen open tabs.

Technological progress pushing humanity forward, as ever.

However, the teaching was in the friction. The half hour lost down the wrong alley. The three sources that flatly contradicted each other. The slow build of a picture out of scattered, badly organized parts.

We keep what we generate and lose what we’re handed – a Columbia study back in 2011 caught the handover: the moment people expect a fact to be retrievable later, they remember less of the fact and more of where to find it. Memory, offered a filing clerk, gladly resigns.

The finding comes with a condition attached: the handover only happens once you have reason to trust the clerk.

The learning literature even has a name for the obstacles that make knowledge stick because they slow you down: desirable difficulties.

We sped up the trip. Then we closed the alley. Now what?

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Related: More Information ≠ More Informed – written back when noise was the problem.

Sources: Sparrow, Liu & Wegner, Science, 2011 · Schooler & Storm, Memory, 2021 · Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab

The smartest person I know has been right about almost everything and rich from almost none of it.

The longer I watched it, the less it looked like bad luck and the more it looked like a transcript.

For about two decades, the system that certifies you as smart rewards one reflex above all others: the qualified answer.

Say “it depends.” Show your work. Steelman the other side. Never commit past the evidence. The diploma is a twenty-year record of being applauded for it.

Then you walk into a world that pays for the opposite. Markets, founders, careers – none of them reward the qualified answer. They reward conviction placed early, while the outcome is still unknowable, by someone willing to be wrong out loud. The very move that earned the A, “well, it’s complicated,” is the move that loses the trade, because the money is gone by the time complicated resolves into certain.

The “dumb money” just never sat through the training. It commits while the smart kid is still appending caveats.

Most of that money commits straight into the incinerator, of course (you only ever hear from the tranche that lived).

Unlearning it is the harder problem: not a gap in knowledge but a reflex that twenty years of gold stars installed. I can feel it in this very paragraph: the pull to staple a “but” to everything I’ve just claimed, to hedge, to leave myself an exit.

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Related: If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? – the same bill, itemised.

It turned out to be some orthopedic nerve impingement, and the doctor barely made fun of me for rating my pain an 8, when on his scale 10 meant literally dying. Fun times, aka “fever egg times”!

One Penn State study of people diagnosed with generalized anxiety put the share of false alarms at 91%: the disasters their minds render in such loving detail almost never make it to the world.

The obvious move is to call worry irrational and try to switch it off.

But look at what you’d be switching off. The mind that rehearses the layoff is the same mind that planned the career. The one that runs the breakup in advance is the one that imagined the marriage in the first place.

Foresight, the trick that let a naked ape store grain, build cities, and save for a retirement it cannot see, is just the ability to make an unreal future feel real.

Worry is that exact ability, turned to face the dark.

The false alarms are the running cost of being a creature that can live in tomorrow at all. All you get is self-reflection, mid-catastrophe: the thing mugging you is a rendering.

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Related: How ’Bout Zero Neuroticism? – the case for the prosecution.

Sources: LaFreniere & Newman, Behavior Therapy, 2020

Two years ago, TMT and I spent ten days minding two Bernese Mountain Dogs in a mansion on the Gold Coast. Infinity pool, guest wing, somebody else’s everything. By that pool I wrote that I was dog-sitting a life I hadn’t built yet.

I meant the mansion. Looking back, the line fits my Berlin years better – the flat, the job, the routines – all of it functioning, none of it chosen, me taking someone else’s arrangement for a walk and calling it mine.

You feed the job. You water the houseplants. You keep the routines alive. The maintenance is real work, which makes it so convincing – surely nobody would work this hard on something that wasn’t theirs.

Samuelson and Zeckhauser named the mechanism in 1988: status quo bias, the finding that people disproportionately stick with default options they would not otherwise choose.

The real-world evidence came from pension plans and health insurance, but the finding generalizes viciously.

Nobody picks the dog. The dog is simply there, already named, already fond of you (because of course he is “a good boi”), already needing his walk.

Attending to what’s already there feels like living, right up until you ask the question: if this were offered to me today, empty-handed, would I take it?

I’ve run that question on my own life a few times. Berlin failed it first: in 2024 I quit the job, gave up the flat and sold everything else. I’d love to report the rest came out as clean.

Sike! Some arrangements I audited and kept, and keeping them made them mine. Others I’m fairly sure I’m still just taking on a walk.

The problem is the two states feel identical from the inside; the leash sits the same in the hand either way.

The dog-sitter’s tell, if there is one, is the calendar: he always knows, however vaguely, when the owners come back.

The custodian of a life keeps a version of that date too – the someday when the real thing starts.

I had a date like that for years. But I’ve stopped setting one.

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Related: Escaping Plato’s Cave – where the line comes from.

Sources: Samuelson & Zeckhauser, Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1:7–59, 1988

The pension was a brilliant deal, on one condition: that you died roughly on schedule.

You work, you pay in, and when you’re old and worn out, the next batch of workers carries you through the short stretch you have left.

The short stretch was the whole design. It only balances if “retired” means “nearly done”.

And it isn’t a short stretch anymore. People now retire into two decades and change of grandkids and decent knees, and a formula built for a ten-year goodbye is being asked to fund a twenty-year encore.

When the contract was drawn up, six workers stood behind each pensioner; in Germany it’s now about two, sliding toward one and a half. The sum stopped adding up somewhere in the back half of the last century, and nobody updated it.

Fixing the math means telling the people currently being carried that they’ll be carried a little less. Those people vote. Naturally, they vote in growing numbers, in defense of the one large transfer that flows toward them.

The people on the other side of the ledger, funding a deal they’ll grow too old to want reformed, are fewer at the polls and busy with their lives.

Still, in Germany, pay-as-you-go is the only pension design that survived the twentieth century. Funded schemes were wiped out twice – hyperinflation ate the savers’ capital, war finished the rest – while the unfunded contract kept paying, because its collateral was the next generation, and there was always a next generation.

The design still stands. What expired are the two things it took for granted: that you’d die on time, and that the workers keep arriving.

It never collapses, the way a pyramid scheme is supposed to. It just keeps recruiting.

Today’s payers complain about the arrangement right up until the morning they qualify for it, and then they reach for the same shield the last lot was holding.

Nobody is eating the young. The young are simply waiting their turn to be fed, and they’ll vote exactly like everyone before them once they get there.

The contract has one design requirement: never run out of people too young to stop it.

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The arithmetic, in years of your life. At the full rate, 18.6% of every working hour goes to the pension – 8.4 years of a 45-year working life. Each year at the average wage buys one Entgeltpunkt; each point pays €42.52 a month for life. Divide what goes in by what comes out and the points cancel: you break even 18.9 years after you start drawing, whatever you earn and however long you paid. Retire at 67 and that is 85.9. A man at 67 is expected to live 16.5 more years, a woman 19.5: he dies 2.4 years before he breaks even, she clears it by about seven months. The deal does not improve with pay or with years served – above the ceiling of €101,400 nothing more is insured and nothing more is earned. Two caveats. The life expectancies are the period table, which Destatis itself calls not a forecast; a cohort table gives someone born in the 1980s more years at 67, enough to turn “dies short” into “roughly breaks even”. And the contribution does not only buy a pension: in 2022, 21% of what the system spent went on disability, survivor and rehabilitation benefits.

Related: Boomerlandia – the angrier version, which this one argues with.

Sources: Demografie-Portal, contributors per pensioner · Eurostat EUROPOP2025 · OECD Pensions at a Glance 2025 · SVBezGrV 2026 · SGB VI §§158, 168 · RWBestV 2026 · Destatis Periodensterbetafel 2023/2025

Hakone, Japan 2024. We’d bought the 2-Day Free Pass – buses, trains, cable cars, and (what looked like) an actual pirate ship – and then it rained for 24h without stopping, so we bought dingy umbrellas at 7-Eleven and marched into it anyway, soaked to the bone in Birkenstocks, because we had paid for the pass and the pass was going to get used.

Hours of forcing the issue, then a fallen tree forced us to turn around. So close, yet so far…

Two years on, that tree is the clearest image I own from that whole trip.

The next morning was flawless, by the way. Blue sky, cable car, sulfur chimneys, unhindered view of Fuji sitting there like it was under contract. I have the photos. Yet, I can’t picture it.

Which is a long way of saying the perfect itinerary is a con.

We build them out of FOMO, terrified of wasting a single hour, and the better the engineering, the less survives. A trip with no friction has no edges, and memory only keeps the rough edges.

The reason is almost embarrassing. A plan that works asks nothing of me; I follow it.

A plan that breaks makes me improvise. We retreated, tore up the schedule and booked a ryokan we couldn’t normally afford, because the alternative was another night of being wet.

Best decision of the trip, and it was made by a tree.

That’s the joke buried inside the fear. FOMO builds the flawless itinerary so I’ll miss nothing. It succeeds. I miss nothing and I remember nothing.

I wrote about that rain at the time and got it half right. The argument then was scarcity – the ruined day is what makes the good day count. Tidy. Probably even true. But the good day is the one that dissolved, and the tree stayed.

There’s a duller explanation, too. Maybe the tree is vivid because I spent a day writing about it, in which case the itinerary is innocent and all I’ve proved is that attention fixes a memory.

I still overplan, though. Buffer hours, contingency, no room for a tree – until there is.

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Related: The Antidote to FOMO – the version I’d revise.

For a penny you got a seat, a dish of coffee, and several hours of the sharpest minds alive arguing in one loud room, sober.

The coffeehouses were later dubbed “Penny Universities”, and the name was only half a joke.

Lloyd’s of London began as one. Fellows of the Royal Society adopted another as their annex. Traders, pamphleteers, scientists, and cranks, all for the price of a cup.

We usually hand the Enlightenment to the coffee, the swap from a half-drunk Europe to a caffeinated one. But the harder drug was the room.

What the coffeehouse did that the tavern couldn’t was force an idea to survive other people’s faces. You showed up. You sat down. You said your piece to someone who could see you, push back, and remember tomorrow that you’d been an idiot.

An argument cost you something.

A reputation was a thing you carried in and out the door.

The Penny University priced an idea by whether it held up in a room full of people who’d watched you make it.

That’s the part we demolished.

We kept the stimulant and scaled it to infinity, a coffee on every corner and a feed in every pocket, and we threw out the room.

The comment section is a coffeehouse with the bodies removed: the talk without the table, the take without the tab. Reach went up a millionfold. Accountability went to zero.

The room itself survived, by the way. I’m a paying member – a specialty coffee victim, 5 € a flat white, and the fiver works exactly like the penny did: it’s a filter with a doorway.

Except the penny let in anyone sober enough to argue – traders, cranks, people wrong in interesting ways – and the flat white lets in people exactly like me. Twenty of us, laptops open, silently arguing about oat milk.

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Related: From Buzzed to Wired – the stimulant half of the story.

Sources: Royal Society, founding history · Lloyd’s of London, coffee and commerce

Money is an ice cube.

You half-know this already: leave it sitting in cash and it shrinks, a little smaller every year.

Since 2020 the dollar has shed close to a quarter of its purchasing power while the stock index priced in dollars keeps printing records. That’s the first trick. The cube melts, the number on the wrapper climbs, and you cheer the number.

I catch the melt in small, stupid ways. When I moved to Berlin in 2017, the Döner at my corner shop was 3,50 €. It’s pushing 9 € now – same skewer, same line out the door, and me paying it without a blink.

The Döner barometer never lies; it just climbs. Up, up and away…

Yet the “money is melting” crowd skips the second trick. The water doesn’t evaporate.

Every percent your savings lose, someone else gains: from the people holding cash and fixed wages to the people with debt and hard assets, nobody asked, no line on any statement.

Which tells you exactly who stays relaxed about it: the borrower whose mortgage shrinks in real terms, the government quietly inflating away a $40 trillion tab, the asset-holder watching the ruler bend in his favor.

When the people who set the temperature are the same people standing under the drip with a glass, “a little inflation is healthy” stops sounding like economics and starts sounding like the house explaining why the house always wins.

The cube was never simply melting. Someone was pouring it.

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Related: Nothing Stops This Train – the melt itself, at length.

Sources: BLS Consumer Price Index

Every adult summer since is gone by the time I’ve found the sunscreen.

The calendar swears they’re the same length. Nothing in the body agrees.

A man named Paul Janet proposed the mechanism in 1877: You measure each stretch of time against the whole of the life you’ve already lived. A year is a tenth of everything when you’re ten, and a fortieth of it when you’re forty.

The year didn’t shrink; your ruler grew.

And each summer is a thinner slice of a thicker book, and it reads faster every time.

Novelty does the rest: a child’s July is nothing but firsts, an adult’s is a photocopy of the last one, and memory only files the firsts.

You didn’t lose the time per se – just stopped writing it down.

Under both sits a stranger fact: we run on two clocks that disagree.

One is the body’s, old and elastic, the one that makes a dull meeting sag and a good night vanish.

The other is the machine on the wall, and it is a startlingly recent tyrant.

For most of human history nobody owned the hour: you worked by the sun and the season and the ache in your back.

The mechanical clock came out of medieval monasteries, built to summon monks to prayer, and our word “noon” still wears the fingerprint: it descends from the Latin for the ninth prayer hour, which slid over centuries from mid-afternoon to midday, dragged there by the bell.

We let the bell win.

We decided the wall clock is the real one and the body’s is a glitch to be scheduled around, medicated, overridden, until every hour became the same width as the last.

The watch insists this summer is the same length as all the others.

Maybe. I’m writing this one down anyway.

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Related: Time Is A Feeling – childhood time and what the clock took.

Sources: Janet, Revue philosophique III, 1877 · Wearden, Timing & Time Perception, 2021

You’ve heard it your whole life as a warning: don’t spread yourself thin, pick a lane, go deep or go home.

For its first century the phrase ran bare: “a jack of all trades”, a useful person who could turn a hand to anything. Though never quite an admiring one: Geffray Mynshul’s 1618 printing files him next to the pander, the broker and the hangman.

The “master of none” got stapled on in 1741, in a Dublin pamphlet by Charles Lucas. The line went from a slight to a fence. And the first recorded sneer at a jack-of-all-trades was aimed at Shakespeare.

A pamphlet warned London’s playwrights about an upstart “Johannes factotum” (a do-everything) who fancied himself “the only Shake-scene in a country.” An actor who presumed to write… imagine the audacity.

Funny how the insult’s first recorded target is the best argument it ever got.

Now ask who benefits from the fence…

A specialist is a beautiful thing to an institution: legible, hireable, slottable into a box on an org chart, and replaceable, because the box outlives the person in it. Deep-and-narrow is the shape that fits a system built out of interchangeable parts.

“Find your niche” turns out to be excellent advice, mostly for the people who own the niche.

The generalist is the opposite kind of trouble. He doesn’t fit a box. You can’t write his job description, can’t benchmark him, can’t swap him for the next identical résumé, because the value lives in the wiring between his skills, not in any one of them (and the wiring appears nowhere on the chart).

From inside an institution that illegibility reads as a flaw. From the outside, it’s the entire asset.

Because the thing a system can’t classify is also the thing it can’t fully own.

The specialist rents his usefulness to whoever owns the box. The generalist, messy and unclassifiable, keeps the one thing no org chart can carry: himself.

For the record: I didn’t refuse the lane. I took two – localization first, then copywriting – and drove each to the end of the road. The specialization ran out before the curiosity did. What reads from the org chart as a failure to commit was, from the inside, a series of completed commitments.

With a catch: the wiring between skills pays nothing until you point it at a domain that prices it.

For me that’s markets, where being several things at once is the entire game.

There’s a fine line between unapplied and “polymath”, though. And it’s a two-edged sword – a mind that won’t stop asking “why?” and “why not?” has no natural brake, and somewhere past the 27th open tab, learning stops being fuel and becomes productivity theatre.

Still, I declined to be made legible, and I’m sure that choice has an invoice… opportunities that went, quietly, to people easier to file.

Rebellions this comfortable aren’t usually free.

I just haven’t caught the bill arriving yet.

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Related: The Mosaic Mind – where the generalist argument started, in 2023.

Sources: Lucas, Pharmacomastix, 1741 · Mynshul, 1618 · Folger on Groatsworth

July 1969: 650 million people hold their breath around a single grainy lunar module ladder.

Three years and five months later, Apollo 17 goes to the Moon and it is the last time anyone walks on it. Men were walking on another world, live, and the country had already moved on.

The miracle hadn’t gotten smaller (in fact it had become even more miraculous), but the audience had gotten used to it.

That gap – between the ladder and the shrug – took just 41 months.

By 1986 the shrug was the schedule. Challenger was the 25th shuttle flight, and CNN was the only national network carrying the launch live. The others cut in after it exploded. When miracles stop getting airtime, disasters still do.

We’ve been running the same experiment lately and the half-life is down to about eighteen months. A machine that talks like a person: impossible, then astonishing, then a productivity tip, then “huh,” in barely a year and a half.

Twenty seconds of video conjured from a sentence, a spec that was state of the art in December 2024. The complaint curve is even faster: we went from “it can think” to “it’s a bit slow today” like passengers who boarded a flying miracle and are now upset about the legroom. Louis CK saw this coming from seat 14C, back when the miracle was just Wi-Fi.

Economists would recognize the shape instantly. When you print too much of a currency, each note buys less. We are printing miracles at an industrial rate, and the purchasing power of a miracle (measured in seconds of genuine awe per unit of impossible) is collapsing accordingly.

Amazement inflation. The wonder is being debased, not destroyed.

The standard response is a lecture about gratitude, and I’ll spare you. After all, adaptation is the mechanism, not a character flaw. The brain files the repeated as furniture so it can watch the door. No creature that spent its afternoons marveling at fire made it through winter. The “huh” is survival equipment.

I catch it in myself most on the road. Five months of jumping through Asia and the temples started arriving pre-seen – yet another astonishing thing, said the brain, filing it with the furniture. Nothing was wrong with the temples. I was surviving.

But a currency losing value changes what people reach for, and this one’s no different.

When the impossible costs nothing, attention migrates to the merely scarce – the handmade, the slow, the one-of-one.

The machines conjure worlds from sentences now, the miracles arrive on a subscription, and the whole thing has stopped raising anyone’s pulse.

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Related: Miracle Inflation – the dog that doesn’t exist, at length.

Sources: USIA viewership estimate, July 1969 · Sora launch specifications · Spaceflight Now, Reporters remember Challenger coverage, 2016 · Space Shuttle Challenger disaster (Wikipedia)

In the 1940s, a physicist named Paul Aebersold, later Oak Ridge’s Mr. Radioisotope, supplied the radioactive isotopes fed to people (it was a more relaxed era) and watched where the atoms went.

The answer: everywhere, briefly. His estimate, which he never actually measured, was that about 98% of the atoms in a human body are swapped out within a year. The gut lining goes in days. The skeleton, which feels like the permanent part, cycles on the order of a decade.

Whatever you are, you are not your matter. Your matter barely stays the weekend.

Fine, the bricks change, but the building stands. Except the building doesn’t stand either – it’s being continuously demolished and rebuilt to a drifting blueprint, connections pruned and grown all night, every night.

There is no vault-room where the real you sits untouched while the maintenance crews work around it. It’s maintenance crews all the way down.

So what’s left to be?

Watch a whirlpool below a weir. The water in it is never the same water twice, and the shape holds anyway. The whirlpool is what the water is doing there.

Your atoms are just passing through, at a rate that should terrify you. You’re what they’re doing while they pass.

Which changes the tense of being alive.

A statue exists. You occur.

The person who went to sleep in your bed last night was a slightly different arrangement of matter than the one reading this – close enough to answer to your name, different enough that “same” is a courtesy we extend daily and could, in principle, decline.

I find this either horrifying or consoling depending on the hour.

• Horrifying by night: nothing about me persists.

• Consoling by day: nothing about me is stuck.

The river brings new water whether you asked for it or not.

The whirlpool never holds the water, only the shape.

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Related: You Are Your Thoughts – the same question, at length.

Sources: TIME, The Fleeting Flesh, 1954 · Sender & Milo, Nature Medicine, 2021 · Surgeon General, Bone Health · de Vivo et al., Science, 2017

Aspirin was a brand once. So were escalator, thermos, and cellophane.

Each belonged to one company, until the company won so completely that the law declared the name public property.

The prize for total market victory turned out to be confiscation of the trophy.

Trademark lawyers call it genericide, and it produced some of the strangest ad campaigns in history: corporations begging you to use their name less.

Xerox has spent decades on exactly that – “when you use ‘xerox’ the way you use ‘aspirin,’ we get a headache” – which is a legal department fighting its own marketing department’s greatest triumph.

Google survived its own court challenge in 2017 on a technicality of perception: yes, everyone says “google it,” but they still know Google is a company. The verb had swallowed the noun, and the lawyers held the line at the skin.

The zipper went further still. B.F. Goodrich coined the word in 1923 and registered it for a rubber boot; the public took it off the boot and fastened it to the thing that did the zipping. The word was simply reassigned.

Now listen to any office this year: “just ChatGPT it.”

The same migration aspirin managed a century ago (except aspirin needed a world war, a seized subsidiary and a judge, and this took a couple of years).

A company’s name entering the language is the most valuable thing that can happen to it – and the beginning of its dissolution as property.

Language is the one commons that expropriates upward: it takes from the most successful and gives to absolutely everybody, no vote required, no compensation paid.

The product gets copied, the patent expires, the stock eventually does what stocks do.

The verb is the only part that’s immortal – and immortality’s one condition is that it stops belonging to you.

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Related: Synonym Companies – the 2023 take, from the brand’s side.

Sources: Bayer Co. v. United Drug Co., 272 F. 505 (1921) · Elliott v. Google, 860 F.3d 1151 (9th Cir. 2017) · King-Seeley Thermos v. Aladdin (1963) · WIPO Magazine on the Xerox campaign