Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to go before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a like like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currently of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
Billions in private investment have created room for growth, but suppliers need predictable demand, says the head of Northrop Grumman’s solid rocket motor business
Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.
The quote has a clean, precise quality that most observations about fear do not. Reid Wiseman posted it to Twitter in October 2014, a few days after completing the first spacewalk of Expedition 41 aboard the International Space Station: “While #spacewalking I realized something: I used to think I was scared of heights but now I know I was just scared of gravity.”
He was floating outside the station at roughly 400 kilometres above Earth, working with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst for six hours and thirteen minutes on cooling pump relocation and external robotics work. The spacewalk was conducted on 7 October 2014. At that altitude, with nothing below and the planet curving away at the edge of peripheral vision, Wiseman noticed the absence of something he had expected to find: the fear he thought he had.
The quote has resurfaced in the months around the Artemis II mission, for which Wiseman serves as commander. On 1 April 2026, he launched as part of the first crewed mission to the Moon since Gene Cernan commanded Apollo 17 in December 1972. The insight is more than a decade old. It reads differently now, from a trajectory that takes Wiseman and his crew past the Moon and back.
The distinction itself
The difference between fearing heights and fearing gravity sounds like wordplay until you hold it carefully. Both terms are commonly used to describe the same cluster of behaviour: the discomfort on balconies, the reluctance to stand near the edge of a cliff, the particular unease of a glass floor above a long drop. The behaviours are consistent. What Wiseman is questioning is the diagnosis.
A fear of heights, understood as a response to elevation and exposure, locates the problem in the altitude. But what most people are responding to in those situations is not the height in any abstract sense. It is the fall. It is gravity’s action on the body in the event of a slip. It is the trajectory the body would follow if the ledge gave way, and the irreversibility of what that trajectory leads to. The height is the setup. Gravity is the mechanism.
In microgravity, the mechanism has been removed. There is no directional pull toward a surface that recedes infinitely. There is no trajectory the body would follow if it lost contact with the station. An astronaut outside the ISS is not high in the sense that a person on a balcony is high, because the relationship between position and consequence that produces the fear of heights has been cancelled. Wiseman was in the most extreme version of elevation a human can occupy, and the thing he expected to feel was not there.
He worked backward from that absence to what it meant. The fear he had carried was not of heights. It was of gravity.
What reclassification does
This kind of revision is harder than it sounds. Most people who believe they fear heights have arranged something around that belief: the avoidance patterns, the decisions about which windows to stand near, the self-description offered when explaining a refusal. The label has become load-bearing. It organises behaviour.
What Wiseman found was that the label was describing a proxy rather than the cause. The altitude was consistently present when the fear appeared, so the altitude got named. But the consistent presence of altitude was itself a consistent presence of gravity’s consequences. The two variables had never been separated. Spacewalking separated them.
The implication is not that people who fear heights are wrong about their fear. The fear is real and the behaviour it produces is real. What shifts is the precision of the account. Someone who understands their discomfort as being about gravity’s consequences, rather than about altitude per se, has a different description of where the sensitivity lives. That description may or may not change anything practical about what they avoid. But it is more accurate, and accuracy in these matters has a certain value even when it is not immediately actionable.
Wiseman did not overcome a fear. He reclassified one. The distinction matters because overcoming implies confronting the same situation repeatedly until the response diminishes. Reclassification involves recognising that the situation you have been avoiding is not quite the thing you thought it was.
Twelve years and a lunar trajectory
Wiseman is 50 years old, a retired United States Navy captain and test pilot. As of April 2026, he is the commander of a mission carrying him further from Earth than any human since the Apollo programme. His crew includes NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Victor Glover and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Artemis II is a circumlunar flyby, not a landing. The crew will loop around the Moon and return. The distances involved, the communication delays, the duration, make any analogy between this and an ISS spacewalk look quite small. The environment Wiseman occupied in 2014 was far more controlled than the one he entered in April 2026.
The 2014 insight does not become more or less true in this context. It is not predictive of how Wiseman or anyone else experiences the Artemis II mission specifically. But the Artemis II frame does something to the quote: it makes the scale of what he has learned to not be afraid of more visible. The man who discovered in 2014 that his fear was of gravity, not altitude, is now travelling to a distance at which Earth’s gravity is a much smaller presence.
There is a version of this story that treats it as an arc of overcoming, each mission more extreme than the last, the fear perpetually shrinking. That is not what Wiseman is describing. He is describing a single clarification, arrived at empirically, during six hours of work outside a space station. The rest followed from that, or did not.
The question the observation leaves open
Wiseman’s observation raises a question that has no clean answer: when we say we fear something, how often are we naming the right thing?
The fear of heights is a durable shorthand, but it collapses a set of variables that could in principle be separated. The height. The exposure. The lack of handholds. The awareness of what would happen if the body fell. The mental simulation of the fall itself. These are not identical. They would, if separated, suggest different things about where the sensitivity lives. Most people never encounter the conditions that would separate them. Wiseman did.
There is no general lesson here that applies predictably from person to person. What seems clear is that the precision of Wiseman’s account is a function of the specificity of the test. An environment that removed gravity as a variable allowed him to see that gravity was the variable that mattered. Ordinary environments, which almost always include gravity as a background constant, do not offer the same diagnostic clarity.
He has not said whether the reclassification changed anything else. He has said that he now knows which word to use.
A few months ago, I found myself deep in a conversation about Mars colonization timelines. The other person — a software engineer, genuinely enthusiastic, not naive about the engineering — was walking me through radiation shielding approaches, the habitability of lava tubes, the logistical case for SpaceX’s Starship architecture. It was fascinating. He clearly knew far more than I did about the technical specifics. But somewhere in the middle of it, a question started forming that I couldn’t quite place, until eventually I did: we hadn’t once asked whether any of this was a good idea.
We had been talking about how for an hour, and neither of us had said the word why.
That conversation has been sitting with me since. Not because the technical questions aren’t important — they’re genuinely hard, and the people working on them are doing serious work. But there is a gap between “this is technically possible” and “this is what we should do,” and that gap tends to close faster in the Mars discourse than it does almost anywhere else. The survival problem gets all the oxygen. The ethical one gets treated as settled — as if the answer to “should we go?” is obviously yes, and the only thing left to figure out is the radiation shielding.
I’m not a space scientist and I don’t have a strong stake in any particular answer here. What I do have is a persistent discomfort with how questions get framed — with the way the tractable problem has a tendency to absorb all the attention that the harder one deserves.
The question we’re not asking
The survival discourse is, in its way, extraordinary. Cosmic radiation at the Martian surface running at roughly six to seven chest X-rays per day under normal conditions — and significantly higher during transit and solar storm events. An atmosphere that amounts to about one percent of Earth’s. Temperatures swinging 70 degrees Celsius or more between day and night. The progressive bone density loss from low gravity that compounds across months into something that isn’t easily reversed. These are real problems, and the engineers working on them deserve the coverage they get. None of that is what I’m questioning.
What I’m questioning is the habit of treating “can we survive there?” as a proxy for “should we go?” — as though answering the first settles the second. It doesn’t. They are different questions that require different kinds of thinking, and we have, for the better part of a decade, let the excitement and tractability of the first crowd out serious engagement with the second.
The life question nobody wants to stop for
One of the more uncomfortable things I’ve come across in reading about this is the planetary protection question — specifically, the possibility that Mars might not be as empty as the colonization narrative tends to assume. The debate about whether Mars currently harbors microbial life, perhaps in briny subsurface water or in the recurring slope lineae that have been periodically interpreted as evidence of seasonal liquid water, remains genuinely open. No confirmed biology has been found. But “not yet confirmed” is not “not there,” and the question of what we would do if we found it — before or after we arrived — seems to get less serious treatment than it warrants.
NASA’s planetary protection guidelines exist precisely because this uncertainty is real. They were built around the concern that Earth microbes carried on spacecraft could contaminate Mars and compromise any future ability to find or study native life there — or vice versa. The protocols apply most strictly to robotic missions, which can be sterilized. They apply far less cleanly to humans, who exhale, shed skin cells, and carry an internal ecosystem of trillions of organisms that are not optional passengers. A crewed mission, by design, cannot be managed the same way a probe can.
What this means, if taken seriously, is that any crewed mission to Mars before we have higher confidence about the biological status of the planet carries a non-trivial risk of introducing an extinction event for whatever might be living there. Carl Sagan, who spent his career both advocating for space exploration and urging caution about it, made this point repeatedly — that introducing Earth organisms into a low-diversity Martian ecosystem, if one exists, could eliminate it entirely before we ever knew it was there. The argument has not aged out. If anything, growing scientific interest in Martian subsurface habitability has made it more pressing, not less.
We have spent years asking whether humans can survive on Mars. We have spent much less time asking what Mars might be surviving from, if we arrived.
The backup civilization argument and its hidden premises
The most common justification offered for Mars colonization at the level of civilizational stakes is the backup argument: a multi-planetary species is an insurance policy, and the cost of not going is existential risk to the entire human project. Stephen Hawking made this argument in his final years. Elon Musk has built it into the explicit ideological foundation of SpaceX’s long-term mission — a self-sustaining city on Mars as a hedge against collapse on Earth.
I find this argument more worth taking seriously than most critics give it credit for. The underlying concern about existential risk is real. The logic that a species concentrated on one planet is more vulnerable than one distributed across two is coherent. But the argument is doing more work than it usually admits, and some of its hidden premises deserve more scrutiny.
The most obvious one is timing. The existential threats most likely to end civilization on Earth in the foreseeable future — climate change, engineered pandemics, nuclear conflict, biodiversity collapse — are immediate relative to any realistic projection of a self-sustaining Martian colony. A genuinely self-sustaining Mars city, by most serious estimates, is generations away. The threats we are failing to address are not. If the backup civilization argument is meant to be taken literally as a response to existential risk, it would seem to require securing the primary civilization first — not as an alternative to Mars ambitions, but the sequencing matters considerably more than the discourse tends to acknowledge.
The governance question matters here too. The Mars colonization effort as it currently stands is being driven largely by the decisions of a very small number of extraordinarily wealthy individuals and their companies, operating mostly outside democratic institutions, international treaty frameworks, or any serious mechanism of public deliberation. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits national sovereignty claims over celestial bodies, but it was not designed to address private colonization by corporations operating under whatever regulatory minimums they can find. The choices being made now — when to go, at what pace, under what protocols — will shape the terms of Mars activity for a very long time. The fact that those choices are being made by a small group of people with specific and concentrated interests seems like something a more serious public conversation would address.
What an honest accounting would require
I want to resist the easy conclusion here — the “we should never go” position that treats any Mars ambition as inherently reckless or hubristic. There are real arguments for human Mars exploration. The science alone — the geology of ancient riverbeds, the evidence of a once-warmer world, the complex chemistry of the regolith — has produced discoveries with no parallel in the history of planetary science, and there are legitimate cases that humans on the surface could accelerate that science in ways robots fundamentally cannot. I find the impulse to go, the sheer ambition of it, genuinely compelling on some level I can’t entirely defend rationally.
But I think we owe it to the question — and possibly to whatever might be living on that planet — to stop treating the survival problem as a substitute for the ethical one. An honest accounting would start with the life question: invest seriously in determining whether Mars is biologically empty before a crewed mission departs, and treat a positive finding as a real constraint on what comes next rather than a footnote to manage. It would include meaningful international deliberation about who gets to make these decisions, and why the current answer to that question is “the people with the most rockets.” It would take the backup civilization argument seriously enough to notice what it actually implies about sequencing and urgency on Earth.
The conversation I had a few months ago was a good one. The engineer was genuinely thoughtful, and I learned things I didn’t know. But I’ve been bothered, in the time since, by how naturally we both moved through the technical questions and how completely we both skipped the other kind. The “can we?” problem is captivating in a way the “should we?” problem never quite is. It has cleaner edges. It has milestones. It announces itself as progress.
The harder question doesn’t do any of that. It just sits there, waiting for the conversation to slow down enough to make room for it.
The face you walked into the room with this morning was being read, by every person who looked at you, in approximately one hundred milliseconds — about a tenth of a second, faster than any conscious thought. The reading was not primarily about the features that took your DNA twenty years to assemble. The bones of your face, the colour of your eyes, the shape of your jaw, the symmetry of your features — these all contributed to the judgement, but they were not, on the available evidence, the only ingredients of it. A substantial part of how attractive any individual stranger perceived you to be, in the brief moment before they had any other information about you, was almost certainly whether you appeared to be having a good time. A genuine smile, animated expression, and the visible signs of a person enjoying being where they are produce, in the moment of first impression, attractiveness boosts that can rival what carefully selected clothing, makeup, or grooming can plausibly achieve.
According to a 2014 paper by Jessika Golle, Fred Mast, and Janek Lobmaier published in Cognition and Emotion titled “Something to smile about: The interrelationship between attractiveness and emotional expression”, the social effect of smiling on stranger-rated attractiveness has been replicated across enough independent studies and across enough cultural contexts to be considered one of the more robust findings in social psychology. Smiling faces are rated more attractive than neutral faces of the same person, across both sexes, across multiple age ranges, and across essentially every population that has been examined. The neuroimaging literature has identified the underlying mechanism: when human observers see a smiling face, the medial orbitofrontal cortex — a region of the brain involved in reward processing and the assignment of positive value to stimuli — shows a substantially stronger response than when the same observer sees a neutral face. The smiling face is, in a literal sense, registering in the observer’s brain as more rewarding to look at.
What kind of smile actually works
The specific type of smile matters substantially. As reported by a peer-reviewed PMC review of smile research and the broader perception literature, the most extensively studied distinction in the smile literature is between what researchers call Duchenne smiles and non-Duchenne smiles. The Duchenne smile, named after the 19th-century French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne who first characterised it, activates two distinct sets of facial muscles: the zygomatic major, which pulls up the corners of the mouth, and the orbicularis oculi, which creates the small crinkles around the outer corners of the eyes. Both muscle activations occur involuntarily when a person is genuinely amused or pleased. The non-Duchenne smile activates only the mouth corners and is the kind of polite, social smile produced on demand for photographs or to acknowledge a casual greeting.
The two types of smile are perceived very differently by observers, even though most people cannot articulate exactly what the difference is when they see one. Duchenne smiles register as genuine, warm, trustworthy, and substantially more attractive. Non-Duchenne smiles register as polite at best, performative or insincere at worst, and produce far smaller boosts to attractiveness ratings. The discrimination is automatic and is operating in the observer’s brain at the level of unconscious pattern recognition rather than conscious analysis. This is the underlying reason why the standard advice to “smile more in photos” often produces mediocre results in practice: the smiles are non-Duchenne. The viewer’s brain registers the difference even when the viewer cannot consciously identify what is wrong with the expression.
Why the effect is so large
Per a 2023 study in Evolutionary Human Sciences examining how smiling expressions interact with facial features in attractiveness judgements, the magnitude of the smiling-on-attractiveness effect is large enough to substantially affect outcomes in real-world social contexts. Across studies, happy facial expressions consistently produce the highest attractiveness ratings of any expression tested; angry expressions produce the lowest. The effect appears in both sexes but is particularly pronounced for ratings of female faces, where smiling can shift attractiveness ratings by amounts comparable to the difference between an averagely-rated face and a substantially above-average face. Even male facial masculinity — which interacts in complex ways with attractiveness preferences — is moderated by smiling: smiling reduces the avoidance response some women show toward strongly masculinised male faces.
The evolutionary and social explanation for this effect is, in the relevant literature, fairly direct. A smile is one of the few human expressions that is broadly cross-cultural — recognised across nearly every population that has been tested — and that consistently signals friendliness, low threat, willingness to engage, and positive emotional state. For an observer making rapid social judgements about whether to approach a stranger, the smile is a substantial piece of information: it indicates that the encounter is likely to go well, that the person on the other side is in a positive frame of mind, and that initial overtures will probably be reciprocated. The attractiveness boost is, in this account, the observer’s brain doing what brains do — bundling the information about the smile into a single quick-summary judgement about whether this stranger is worth engaging with. The summary judgement, in shorthand, comes back as “attractive.”
What the framework does not claim
Intellectual honesty requires noting the limits of the smiling-as-attractiveness effect. The research does not show that smiling can substitute for every other physical or social factor in attractiveness ratings. As covered by a 2025 review at All About Psychology on the broader smile-attractiveness literature, static physical features — facial structure, body shape, height, age, grooming — still contribute substantially to first-impression attractiveness ratings, and the smile effect is best understood as a substantial modifier of these underlying factors rather than as a replacement for them. A smiling face is more attractive than the same face not smiling. A smiling person is generally more approachable than a neutral one. Whether the smiling person is, in absolute terms, more attractive than a non-smiling person with substantially different underlying physical features is a question the research does not consistently answer.
What the research does support is a more specific and more practically useful claim. For any given person, in any given moment, the version of that person who appears to be genuinely enjoying themselves is going to be perceived as more attractive than the same person looking flat, distracted, or unhappy. The variable that each individual has the most direct control over, in the seconds before a first impression forms, is not their face or their body — those are mostly fixed at the moment of the encounter. The variable that is actually within their control is their expression, their visible emotional state, the degree to which they appear genuinely engaged with what is happening around them. The research consistently suggests that this variable, despite being the one most readily modifiable, is one of the larger factors that the observer’s brain weights when assigning the first-impression attractiveness rating. Looking like a person who is glad to be where they are turns out to be, by every available measure, a substantial part of what other people are responding to when they form their first impression of you.
The face you saw in the mirror this morning was not the face anyone else saw when they looked at you over breakfast. The two are related but not identical. Most human faces are slightly asymmetric — the eyes are at slightly different heights, the smile pulls more strongly on one side than the other, the hair parts on one side, freckles sit in specific positions that do not perfectly mirror across the vertical axis. When you look in a mirror, you see one version of your face, with left and right reversed relative to what other people see. When other people look at you, they see the opposite. You have, over the course of your life, become deeply familiar with one of these two versions. They have become familiar with the other. Neither version is wrong. Both are, however, surprisingly different from each other in ways that affect how each party perceives the same underlying face.
According to a 1977 paper by Theodore Mita, Marshall Dermer, and Jeffrey Knight published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the experimental setup that established this phenomenon was straightforward. The researchers took a frontal photograph of each of 37 women — undergraduate psychology students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee — and printed each photograph twice: once as a true image (showing the face as a camera or another person would see it), and once as a mirror-flipped image (showing the face as the subject herself would see it in a bathroom mirror). The subjects were then shown the two versions side by side and asked which they preferred. The same pairs were shown to the subjects’ friends and lovers, who were asked the same question. The results, in both Study 1 and a subsequent Study 2, were striking and consistent. The subjects themselves preferred the mirror-flipped version of their own face. Their friends and lovers preferred the true version.
Why this happens
The mechanism underlying the effect is one of the better-established findings in social psychology: the mere-exposure effect, first proposed by the University of Michigan psychologist Robert Zajonc in 1968. As described in Gizmodo’s coverage of the mere-exposure mechanism behind the mirror preference, the mere-exposure effect is the phenomenon by which repeated exposure to a stimulus increases a person’s preference for that stimulus. The more often you encounter something, the more comfortable you become with it, and the more positively you evaluate it on subsequent encounters. The effect operates across an enormous range of contexts. People develop preferences for songs they have heard repeatedly, for faces they have seen frequently in public, for words that appear often in their reading, for foods they have eaten before. It does not require any explicit reasoning or evaluation; it works at the level of automatic familiarity processing.
The mirror-image preference is a particularly clean demonstration of the effect because the two stimuli being compared — the true image and the mirror image of the same person’s face — are objectively almost identical. The asymmetries are small. The lighting is the same. The expression is the same. The only difference is which side of the face is on which side of the photograph. The subject has, over the course of her life, spent many thousands of hours looking at one specific version. Her friends and lovers have spent many thousands of hours looking at the opposite version. When the two parties are then asked which version “looks more like” the person in question, or which version is more attractive, each party prefers the version they have been seeing all along. Neither is wrong. Each is simply applying the mere-exposure effect to the version of the face they have the most experience with.
What this implies about self-perception
Per the Mita et al. paper’s broader theoretical discussion, the finding has implications that extend well beyond the specific experimental setup. The general principle is that the version of yourself that you have internalised as canonical — the face you recognise as belonging to you, the face you adjust before going out, the face whose minor blemishes and asymmetries you have catalogued in detail — is a version that essentially nobody else has ever seen. Every photograph anyone else has ever taken of you. Every memory anyone else has formed of your face. Every impression you have made on a stranger across a room. All of these have been based on the opposite version of the face from the one you have been carrying around in your own head.
This is the underlying psychological mechanism behind the common experience of looking at a photograph of yourself and finding it subtly wrong. The face in the photograph is the true image — the version other people have been seeing all along — but it does not match the mirror image you have spent your life looking at. The mismatch produces the small but real sense of discomfort that most people experience when seeing themselves in photographs, particularly photographs they did not pose for and in which they had no opportunity to adjust their expression before the shutter clicked. The photographs are not unflattering. The photographs are accurate. Your face is mirroring back at you, several centimetres off from where you expected it to be.
The selfie problem
The modern environment has complicated the picture in ways that the Mita team could not have anticipated in 1977. As covered by Goody Feed’s analysis of how mirror-image preferences apply to selfie photography, most smartphone cameras now display selfies in the front-facing camera as a mirror image of the user — because that is what the user is accustomed to seeing — and then save the resulting photograph in one of two ways, depending on the phone model and the specific app being used. Some phones save the mirror-flipped version (the version the user saw in the viewfinder). Others save the true version (the version other people would see). The user is, accordingly, receiving inconsistent feedback about which version of their face is “really” them. A selfie that looked fine in the camera viewfinder may appear subtly wrong when reviewed afterwards, because the photo has been flipped to the true orientation. The same selfie viewed by a friend may look slightly strange to the user but entirely normal to the friend, who has been seeing that orientation of the face all along.
The broader implication, beyond the specific case of selfies, is that nearly every modern human is now navigating a world in which both versions of their own face are routinely available — the mirror version every morning in the bathroom, the true version in every photograph, video, and reflective non-mirror surface. The two versions are different enough that the brain registers the discrepancy. The version each person has learned to recognise as their own is, by all available evidence, the one that other people have not seen, except in the rare case of looking at the person directly while standing on the opposite side of a mirror. Everyone else has been seeing the other one. Your face, the one in your head, is essentially the reverse of the one the world has been looking at for as long as you have had it.
Casey Harrell can now talk for twelve hours at a stretch. Two years ago, he could not talk at all. The ALS he was diagnosed with several years earlier had progressively destroyed the motor neurons controlling the muscles of his face and throat, leaving him with the symptoms doctors call dysarthria and, eventually, anarthria — the inability to speak intelligibly even with substantial effort. Harrell still knew what he wanted to say. The neural commands his brain was sending toward the muscles of his lips, tongue, jaw, and larynx were intact. The muscles themselves no longer responded. What the BrainGate clinical trial team at UC Davis did, in a July 2023 surgery that took several hours, was implant four small arrays of microelectrodes into the left precentral gyrus of Harrell’s brain — the region of the speech motor cortex that ordinarily sends those commands to those muscles. The arrays contain 256 electrodes between them. The electrodes record the firing patterns of individual neurons in real time. Machine-learning software running on a nearby computer translates the patterns into the words that Harrell, despite no longer being able to produce them with his mouth, is still trying to say.
According to UC Davis Health’s June 2026 announcement of the latest results, the system now operates at approximately 99 percent accuracy across a working vocabulary of 125,000 words — essentially every word an English-speaking adult would ordinarily need. Harrell’s average speaking rate via the device is approximately 56 words per minute, comparable to slow natural conversation. He has used the system at home, without researchers present, for more than 3,800 hours over a 400-day continuous-use period — averaging roughly five hours of daily use, with maximum single sessions of approximately twelve hours. He has produced more than 183,000 sentences and approximately two million words. His synthesised voice is modelled on recordings of his own pre-ALS voice. When he first heard it during the early trial phase, his own comment was: “It feels a lot like me.”
What changed between 2024 and 2026
The BrainGate team’s first publication on Harrell’s case, in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2024, established that the basic approach worked — that brain activity recorded from the speech motor cortex could be decoded into fluent speech with high accuracy, in a setting with researchers present and a constrained working session. The June 2026 paper documents something fundamentally different: the same patient continuing to use the same system, but now in an independent home setting, operated by his own care team rather than by researchers, for thousands of hours over multiple years. As reported by ScienceAlert’s coverage of the latest results, this transition — from a proof-of-concept demonstration in a research lab to a sustained, independent communication tool used as part of daily life — is the genuinely novel achievement that the BrainGate team is reporting.
David Brandman, the UC Davis neurosurgeon who implanted the device and co-led the research, framed the shift directly: “For years, BCIs have been proof-of-concept devices that lived in highly controlled research labs. This work shows that we may have crossed a threshold, by empowering a person with paralysis to speak on his own terms.” The practical difference is substantial. A device that requires researchers to be physically present every time it is used can demonstrate scientific feasibility but cannot become part of a person’s actual life. A device that the patient’s regular home care team can connect every morning and disconnect every evening, with no specialist intervention required, can. Harrell has been doing the latter for two years.
What the system actually does
The fundamental insight underlying the BrainGate speech BCI is that the brain continues to send speech commands even after the muscles can no longer execute them. When Harrell attempts to speak, the neurons in his speech motor cortex fire in patterns that are essentially identical to the patterns they would have produced if he could still move his speech muscles normally. The implanted microelectrodes record those firing patterns from approximately 256 individual neurons. The decoding software, trained on Harrell’s specific neural signatures during initial calibration sessions, identifies which phonemes he is trying to produce and assembles them into words. Per The Next Web’s analysis of the BRAND platform that powers the decoding, the system uses a custom machine-learning architecture optimised for real-time speech reconstruction, with continuous adaptation to changes in the neural signal over time.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the system is its inclusion of a deliberate “privacy mode,” in which Harrell can disable data recording when he does not want his neural activity captured or used to train future versions of the decoder. The feature exists because the technology raises real concerns about the boundary between intended speech and unspoken thought. Brain-computer interfaces, by their nature, record neural activity that the user may not have chosen to externalise. The BrainGate team has been careful to design the system so that the user controls what gets recorded and what does not.
What this means for the broader field
The Harrell case is part of a broader convergence in the BCI field that has been gathering pace over the past several years. As covered by a Clinical Trials Arena analysis of the BCI clinical trial landscape, the BrainGate consortium — which has been running clinical trials of brain-computer interfaces since the early 2000s, and now spans Brown University, Massachusetts General Hospital, the VA, and UC Davis — is one of several parallel efforts working on the same general problem. Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Synchron, Paradromics, and the UCSF and Stanford BCI groups have all produced demonstrations of varying scope and ambition. The BrainGate Harrell case is, at present, the most extensively documented sustained-use BCI result in the published literature, but it sits within a broader trajectory in which the basic technology is moving from research curiosity to clinical reality.
For the approximately 30,000 Americans currently living with ALS, the practical implications of the Harrell case are limited in the short term. The technology remains experimental, requires invasive surgery, and is not yet commercially available outside the clinical trial setting. Scaling the approach to a second patient, a tenth patient, a hundredth patient will require substantial work on hardware durability, surgical standardisation, software adaptation across individual neural signatures, regulatory approval, and the long list of practical and economic questions that any new medical device must answer before becoming generally available. None of these are insurmountable. None of them are immediate. Harrell himself is now able to communicate, work, and participate in family and social life in ways that were not available to him two years ago. The question of how soon the same becomes true for other ALS patients, for stroke survivors with severe communication impairment, for people with locked-in syndrome, and for the broader population of patients with severe paralysis is now a question of engineering, manufacturing, and policy rather than of fundamental scientific possibility. The threshold the BrainGate team is now claiming to have crossed, in Brandman’s framing, is the one between proof-of-concept and tool. Whether the rest of the field follows, and how quickly, will define the next decade of BCI research.
Red Granite Pictures, a small Los Angeles production company co-founded by Riza Aziz, the stepson of then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, wrote the checks that put Leonardo DiCaprio on a yacht in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The film, released in December 2013, cost roughly $100 million to make and grossed almost $400 million worldwide. U.S. Department of Justice civil forfeiture filings later alleged that a large share of that production budget came from money looted out of 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB.
A movie about a stockbroker who defrauds investors was paid for, prosecutors say, with the proceeds of one of the largest financial frauds in history.
The irony is the kind screenwriters usually have to invent.
The fund that was supposed to build Malaysia
1MDB was set up in 2009, the year Najib Razak became prime minister. The pitch was straightforward: a state investment vehicle that would borrow on the strength of Malaysia’s sovereign credit and pour the money into power plants, real estate, and infrastructure that would lift the country into the upper tier of developed economies.
Within a few years, the fund had raised billions through bond issues arranged by Goldman Sachs. Where the money actually went became the subject of investigations on four continents.
U.S. prosecutors allege that at least $4.5 billion was siphoned out of 1MDB between 2009 and 2015, routed through shell companies and offshore accounts, then spent on penthouses in Manhattan, a Bombardier jet, a 300-foot superyacht called the Equanimity, Van Gogh and Monet paintings, jewelry for Australian model Miranda Kerr, and a slate of Hollywood films.
Red Granite and the Scorsese pitch
Riza Aziz founded Red Granite Pictures in 2010 with an American partner, Joey McFarland, a former event promoter from Kentucky. Neither had produced a major studio film. Within two years they had outbid Warner Bros. for the rights to The Wolf of Wall Street, the memoir by convicted penny-stock fraudster Jordan Belfort that Scorsese and DiCaprio had been trying to get made for years.
Red Granite covered the entire production budget. They threw a launch party in Cannes in 2011 with Kanye West performing. The young executives told the trade press they had backing from wealthy Middle Eastern investors.
The real source, according to the Justice Department’s 2016 and 2017 civil forfeiture complaints, was Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, a Malaysian financier in his early thirties who had become close to the Najib family and who allegedly orchestrated the looting of 1MDB from the inside.
How the money moved
The U.S. complaints trace a specific path. In 2012, prosecutors alleged, hundreds of millions of dollars traceable to diverted 1MDB bond proceeds moved into accounts linked to Red Granite and were used to fund film production.
From there, prosecutors say, money tied to the diverted bond proceeds helped finance The Wolf of Wall Street specifically. DOJ remarks at the time put the figure at more than $100 million involved in the theft from 1MDB used to finance the film.
The film opened on Christmas Day 2013. DiCaprio was nominated for an Academy Award. He thanked Riza Aziz and Joey McFarland at the Golden Globes when he won Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.
The yacht, the paintings, the Oscar statuette
The asset list U.S. authorities tried to recover reads like a parody of what a 1990s screenwriter would imagine a corrupt billionaire owns. The Equanimity, valued at around $250 million, was seized off Bali in 2018 and later sold to a Malaysian gaming company for $126 million.
Malaysian authorities have since recovered and displayed Picasso and Joan Miró works that prosecutors say were bought with stolen funds, unveiling the paintings publicly as part of the asset-recovery effort.
Jho Low also allegedly bought Marlon Brando’s Oscar statuette for On the Waterfront as a birthday gift for DiCaprio. DiCaprio handed it back to investigators in 2017, along with a Picasso he had been given and a Basquiat collage.
Settlements, pleas, and a fugitive
Red Granite Pictures settled with the U.S. Department of Justice in March 2018, agreeing to pay $60 million without admitting wrongdoing. The settlement covered claims that production money for The Wolf of Wall Street, Dumb and Dumber To, and Daddy’s Home had come from tainted sources.
Najib Razak lost the 2018 Malaysian general election to a coalition led by his former mentor Mahathir Mohamad. He was arrested weeks later. In July 2020 he was convicted on seven charges of abuse of power, criminal breach of trust, and money laundering tied to a smaller 1MDB-linked entity called SRC International, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. His sentence was later halved to six years. His path from prime minister to prison inmate took barely two years.
Riza Aziz was charged in Malaysia in 2019 with laundering $248 million of 1MDB funds. Those charges were dropped in 2020 under a settlement requiring him to return assets, a decision that prompted public anger in Kuala Lumpur.
Goldman Sachs paid more than $2.9 billion in penalties to U.S., Malaysian, and other regulators in 2020 for its role in arranging the 1MDB bond issues. Its Malaysian subsidiary pleaded guilty.
Jho Low remains at large. Interpol has issued a red notice. He is believed to be in China.
The Switzerland trial
The case keeps generating new courtrooms. In April 2024, two men accused of embezzling $1.8 billion from the fund went on trial in Switzerland, another set of hearings stemming from the multibillion-dollar scandal that has touched banks, royals, and Hollywood studios across half a dozen jurisdictions.
Swiss prosecutors have been pursuing the case since 2015, when the country’s attorney general announced criminal proceedings over what he described as serious indications that funds had been misappropriated from Malaysian state companies.
What the film became
The Wolf of Wall Street made Scorsese’s longest theatrical cut, at three hours and two minutes, and the film’s reputation has only grown. It is taught in business ethics courses. Belfort himself tours the world giving motivational speeches.
Whether films about financial crime glamorize the behavior they depict, or warn against it, is a live question in academic research on media representation and public perception of crime. Outlets shape understanding by selecting which incidents to report and how to frame them, and the 1MDB case is a near-perfect study in that framing problem.
The film about Belfort’s quaaludes and stolen millions was paid for, prosecutors allege, with quaaludes-and-stolen-millions money. The closing scene shows Belfort, freshly out of prison, running a sales seminar in Auckland. The audience leans forward. They want to learn how he did it.
Why people do this
The psychology of large-scale financial fraud is its own field. One useful clue is the gap between how people see their own ethics and how they judge everyone else’s. A Psychology Today discussion of researchers’ self-ratings points to bounded ethicality and motivated reasoning, the ordinary mental machinery that can let people preserve a moral self-image while making decisions they might condemn from the outside.
Jho Low, in the few public statements his lawyers have made, has consistently denied wrongdoing. Najib has maintained that he believed the funds in his personal accounts, a now-famous transfer of roughly $681 million, were a gift from the Saudi royal family.
Malaysian voters did not buy that explanation. According to reports, Najib defended distributing money to win votes, a practice that critics said epitomized his administration’s approach to governance.
A footnote in the credits
The opening credits of The Wolf of Wall Street still carry the Red Granite Pictures logo. Streaming services have not edited it out. The film plays on Paramount+, on airline seatback screens, on television at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday.
The closing scene with Belfort in Auckland was shot in late 2012. By then, according to U.S. prosecutors, the wire transfers into Red Granite-linked accounts had already cleared. The film was, in a sense, already inside the crime it was about to depict.
Of the roughly $4.5 billion U.S. authorities allege was stolen from 1MDB, the Malaysian government has so far recovered a little over half. Jho Low’s whereabouts are unknown. The Equanimity sails under a new name. And somewhere in a federal evidence locker, a Picasso and an Oscar statuette wait to be sent home.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
Bernie Sanders has unveiled an aggressive plan to transfer trillions from leading AI firms to the public, and, to the likely horror of AI firms, it goes even further than expected to give Americans more control over the AI industry.
Sanders shared a summary of his legislation with AP News. If passed, the law would create a sovereign wealth fund “financed through a one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the largest AI companies,” AP News reported. Any AI firm that does $200 million in annual AI sales would be subject to the tax, as would any new firm once it reaches that revenue level.
In total, Sanders estimated the fund could be worth $7 trillion, generating “hundreds of billions of dollars annually in direct payments to Americans and programs such as health care, education and housing,” AP News reported. Each American would likely receive more than $1,000 annually in 5 percent annual dividends, Sanders estimated.
The Guardrails Alliance, which has raised $5 million, is positioning itself as a populist effort that will take on the pro-A.I. interests trying to influence this year’s elections.
The American population pyramid is changing shape in real time, and the rate of change is accelerating. The country has always been, demographically, a relatively young society — substantially younger than most of Europe, dramatically younger than Japan, and shaped throughout its history by waves of younger immigrants and high birth rates that kept the population pyramid wide at the bottom. That configuration is now ending. The 78 million baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are aging through the older brackets of the population in a single demographic wave that will not be replaced by an equivalent generation of children behind them. The youngest boomers will reach 65 in 2029. By 2030, every member of the boomer generation will be 65 or older. By 2034, on the most recent Census Bureau projections, the population of Americans aged 65 and older will, for the first time in the nation’s history, exceed the population of Americans under 18.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s official announcement of the 2017 National Population Projections, Jonathan Vespa, the Census Bureau demographer who led the projection work, characterised the milestone directly: “The aging of baby boomers means that within just a couple decades, older people are projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. By 2034, there will be 77.0 million people 65 years and older compared to 76.5 million under the age of 18.” The Bureau’s updated estimates have refined the crossover year slightly — earlier projections had placed it in 2035, while the current best estimate places it in 2034 — but the basic milestone is the same. Within approximately the next decade, the United States will become, in a measurable demographic sense, an old country.
The arithmetic of the crossover
Per the Census Bureau’s June 2025 release of the Vintage 2024 Population Estimates, the gap between the two populations is now closing faster than at any previous point in American demographic history. In 2020, the 65-and-older population numbered approximately 55.8 million, while the under-18 population was approximately 73.1 million — a gap of just over 20 million favouring children. By 2024, the gap had narrowed to under 12 million. The 65-and-older population had risen to 61.2 million, growing at 3.1 percent in a single year, while the under-18 population had declined by 0.2 percent to 73.1 million. The pattern is now well-established: over the four-year period from 2020 to 2024, the 65-and-older population grew by 13.0 percent, while the under-18 population declined by 1.7 percent. Working-age adults grew by just 1.4 percent over the same period.
The two trends are not symmetric. The 65-and-older population is being driven upward by two compounding forces: the boomer cohort moving sequentially into older age brackets, and the continued slow extension of life expectancy at older ages. Both forces are likely to continue operating through at least the early 2040s, with the 85-and-older population projected to grow approximately 200 percent by 2060 — from approximately 6 million today to approximately 19 million. The under-18 population is being held down by sustained sub-replacement fertility rates (currently 1.6 children per woman in the U.S., below the 2.1 needed for population replacement), combined with declining birth cohorts year over year. Without a substantial increase in either fertility or immigration, the gap between the two populations will continue closing through 2034 and then reverse.
What “older country” actually looks like
The United States is not the first developed country to experience this transition. Japan crossed the equivalent demographic threshold in the 1990s and now has approximately 28 percent of its population aged 65 or older — substantially older than the U.S. at 18 percent. Italy is at 23 percent. Germany is at 22 percent. The U.S. is now beginning the same transition that these countries have been navigating for the past two to three decades, with the corresponding challenges to social security systems, healthcare infrastructure, labour markets, and intergenerational political dynamics. The current median age of an American is approximately 39 years; the current median age of a Japanese resident is approximately 49.5 years — the oldest of any major country. The U.S. is unlikely to reach Japan’s current median age within the next two decades, but the trajectory is in that direction. Under the Census Bureau’s projections, the U.S. median age will reach approximately 44 by 2060 — older than the U.S. has ever been, though still substantially younger than Japan is today.
As documented in the Census Bureau’s 2020 Demographic Turning Points for the United States publication, the structural implications of the transition are substantial. The ratio of working-age adults to those aged 65 and older will shift from approximately 3.5 working-age adults per retiree in 2020 to approximately 2.5 by 2060. The implications for Social Security and Medicare funding, which depend on payroll taxes from current workers to fund benefits for current retirees, are direct. The U.S. will also become, beginning approximately in 2030, a country in which net international migration overtakes natural increase (births minus deaths) as the primary driver of population growth — another demographic first for the United States, and one that will substantially shape the politics of immigration policy for the rest of the century.
What has already happened
Per Population Education’s analysis of the 2020 Census results, the largest single demographic change in the United States between 2010 and 2020 was the 27 percent expansion of the population aged 55 and older — a rate of growth dramatically faster than any other age group. The under-18 population, by contrast, actually declined by 1.4 percent over the same decade. This is the configuration that produces an old country: not a single dramatic event, but a slow, accumulating divergence between the growth rates of the older and younger populations that, over decades, produces a population pyramid radically different from the one the country has always had. As of 2024, eleven U.S. states — Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Florida, West Virginia, and several others — already have more adults over 65 than children under 18. Nearly half of all U.S. counties (approximately 1,500 of 3,100) have already crossed the same threshold. The national milestone in 2034 will be, in effect, the moment when the rest of the country catches up to where these states and counties already are.
The transition itself is not bad or good. It is a structural fact that will reshape essentially every institution designed for a younger demographic configuration — schools, family policy, pension systems, healthcare infrastructure, the housing market, the political coalitions that have organised around generational interests, the labour markets that depend on younger workers, and the cultural assumptions of a country that has, until now, always thought of itself as relatively young. The crossover year of 2034 is not the destination but the marker. The destination is a configuration of American life in which the median citizen is substantially older than the median citizen has ever been, in a country whose institutional design was built around a demographic configuration that, by every available indication, is now ending.
Viktor Frankl returned to Vienna after liberation from the Nazi camps, having lost his wife, mother, father, and brother, and he dictated the manuscript that would become Man’s Search for Meaning in a compressed period of intense work. He had been a prisoner at concentration camps including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. The book has sold millions of copies in dozens of languages, and its central claim — that meaning is found in serving something beyond yourself, not in pursuing your own happiness — has outlasted nearly every popular psychology trend of the last eighty years.
Frankl initially considered publishing the book anonymously. His friends convinced him to add his name to the cover. He later said he was certain the book would fail.
A manuscript carried in memory
The writing pace was not literary affectation. Frankl had been carrying the manuscript in his head for years. An earlier manuscript had been confiscated when he arrived at Auschwitz. He spent the rest of his imprisonment reconstructing it mentally and on scraps of paper, rehearsing the arguments during forced labor.
When he got back to Vienna, the words came out fast because they had been written, erased, and rewritten in his memory for nearly three years. According to accounts of the manuscript’s creation, he worked through intense sessions of dictation to produce the book rapidly.
The first edition came out in German in the mid-1940s. The English translation arrived under the title From Death-Camp to Existentialism, then was later retitled Man’s Search for Meaning. The Library of Congress named it one of the most influential books in America.
The thing he saw in the camps
Frankl was a trained neurologist and psychiatrist before the war. He had developed an approach he called logotherapy — after Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology. Drawing from the Greek word for meaning, he believed that the deepest human drive was not pleasure or power but the search for significance.
The camps gave him a laboratory he never wanted. He watched, clinically, who survived and who did not. Physical strength was not the predictor. Education was not the predictor. The prisoners who endured, he observed, were those who had something outside themselves to live for — a manuscript to finish, a child waiting in another country, a piece of work only they could do. The ones who lost that thread tended to die quickly. He described prisoners who simply lay down in their bunks one morning and refused to get up.
From this he built his core argument: meaning is not something you find by looking inward. It is something you find by looking outward — at a task, a person, a cause, a piece of suffering you have been asked to bear with dignity.
Why happiness can’t be the goal
Frankl was sharp on this point. He thought the pursuit of happiness as an end in itself was self-defeating. The more you chase it, he argued, the more it recedes. Happiness has to ensue from something else — from devotion to a cause, love for another person, or the way you carry an unavoidable burden. Chase it directly and you end up empty.
His logotherapy framework identified three routes to meaning: creating a work or doing a deed, experiencing something or encountering someone (love being the highest form), and the attitude one takes toward unavoidable suffering. The third was the one the camps had taught him. You cannot always choose what happens to you. You can always choose your response.
He often quoted Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” In the camp barracks at night, he said, that sentence had kept men alive.
What the research has done with the idea
Decades on, the empirical literature has caught up with Frankl in ways that would have surprised him. Building on concepts of eudaimonic well-being — the deep satisfaction of living for something larger than yourself — versus hedonic well-being focused on pleasure, research on well-being suggests that purpose and meaning are not luxuries layered on top of survival but central to it.
Work from the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley has documented that people who orient their lives toward service report higher meaning scores and lower rates of depression than those who orient toward self-improvement or pleasure.
The medical field has begun to fold this in. A 2026 paper covered by EurekAlert called on lifestyle medicine practitioners to treat meaning, purpose, and spirituality as foundational components of patient care rather than optional extras, citing their measurable effect on adherence to treatment and long-term health outcomes.
The statue of responsibility
Frankl had a proposal he repeated for the rest of his life. He thought the Statue of Liberty on the east coast of the United States should be matched by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast. Freedom, he argued, was only half of the human story. Freedom without responsibility for something or someone else was just license, and license was not the same as meaning.
He lived this out. After the war he returned to clinical practice and lecturing. He remained active into old age.
What the intensive writing period produced
The book itself is short, with the camp memoir occupying roughly the first half and a primer on logotherapy filling the second. The prose is plain. There is almost no rhetorical flourish. Frankl describes the smell of the barracks, the way frozen feet feel inside cardboard-stuffed boots, the small economies of bread, the moment a guard’s casual cruelty could decide whether a man ate that day. And then, without warning, a sentence like: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
That sentence has been quoted on graduation programs, in twelve-step rooms, in hospice wards, in military training manuals, and on the walls of palliative-care clinics. It came out of a man who had watched his family murdered and had days to put what he learned into words before the grief swallowed him.
The argument that refuses to age
Self-help publishing has cycled through optimism training, mindfulness, manifestation, dopamine fasting, hustle culture, and a dozen variants of personal-happiness engineering since Frankl’s death. None of them have displaced the book. It continues to sell widely. College syllabi still assign it. Hospice workers still hand it to dying patients.
Part of the durability is the credential. Frankl was not theorizing from a comfortable office. He had run the experiment on himself in the worst laboratory ever built, and he came out the other side with a finding he was willing to stake his career on: the people who survive — and the people who live well after surviving — are the ones who have something or someone to live for outside themselves.
The book ends with Frankl’s conclusion that nothing would so effectively help one survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is meaning in one’s life — a conclusion he drew from observing who survived the camps and who did not. He wrote it down in a Vienna apartment in the late summer of 1945, with the windows open and the city still in ruins, and it has not gone out of print since.
In the early 1970s, a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sat in a Chicago studio watching painters work. They had been at it for hours. Lunch came and went. The painters did not notice. One artist, asked later why he had skipped meals and let his coffee go cold, could not really explain it — he had simply been inside the canvas. Csikszentmihalyi wrote down the phrase his subjects kept reaching for: it felt like being carried by a current. In his book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, he gave the state a name. He called it flow.
Half a century later, the finding has been diluted into a productivity slogan. That dilution obscures what Csikszentmihalyi actually discovered, and why it matters now more than ever: flow is not a kind of focus you can summon. It is what happens when attention points so completely outward that the self goes quiet — and the device in your pocket is engineered to make exactly that impossible.
The argument of this piece is narrow. The neuroscience that has emerged in the last decade does not extend Csikszentmihalyi’s theory so much as confirm its strangest claim: that the vanishing of self-monitoring is not a feeling, but a measurable redistribution of brain activity. And the conditions that produce that redistribution are precisely the ones the modern attention economy is built to prevent.
The man with the rock
Csikszentmihalyi’s interest in absorbed states began long before the Chicago studios. As a child in wartime Europe, he watched adults around him struggle to find meaning after catastrophe, and noticed that the ones who coped best tended to lose themselves in something — chess, music, mountain climbing. He carried that observation into his graduate work at the University of Chicago.
One of his early subjects was a rock climber. Another was a chess master. Another was his own older brother, a mineralogist who could spend an entire afternoon studying a single stone. As Psychology Today recounted, the brother’s quiet absorption in a piece of quartz was one of the seeds of the entire theory.
The common thread across climbers, chess players, surgeons and painters was not the activity. It was the structure of attention.
What the painters told him
Csikszentmihalyi’s method was unglamorous. He handed people pagers, later replaced by digital devices, and beeped them at random moments during the day. When the pager went off, the subject filled out a short form: What are you doing? How hard is it? How skilled do you feel? How absorbed are you?
The data, gathered across thousands of subjects over decades, kept producing the same shape. Flow appeared when three conditions lined up at once: a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge that sat right at the edge of the person’s skill — hard enough to demand full attention, not so hard that it tipped into panic. Below that edge, people reported boredom. Above it, anxiety. Inside the narrow band, the self went quiet.
The surgeons he interviewed said they forgot they had bodies. The composers said the music seemed to write itself. The climbers said the mountain seemed to move them rather than the other way around. None of them could enter the state on command. They could only set up the conditions and let it arrive.
Why the brain seems to cooperate
The behavioural finding sat unexplained for decades. Csikszentmihalyi could describe what subjects reported, but he could not say what was actually happening inside their skulls. The neuroscience of the last fifteen years has begun to fill that gap, and the pattern it has found maps closely onto what the painters told him.
The default mode network — a set of midline brain regions associated with self-referential thinking, mind-wandering and autobiographical rehearsal — was first characterised by Raichle and colleagues in 2001. It is the circuitry that hums when you are worrying about a conversation or imagining yourself from outside. A growing body of imaging work, reviewed in Frontiers in Psychology, finds that this network quiets down during tasks meeting Csikszentmihalyi’s flow conditions, while sensorimotor regions become tightly coupled to the work at hand.
The mechanics of how blood flow tracks neural activity, captured by techniques described in neurovascular coupling research, allow researchers to watch this redistribution happen in real time. In jazz pianists improvising, in expert climbers visualising routes, in writers composing fluently, the self-monitoring circuits dim and the task-relevant circuits dominate. The behavioural strangeness — the vanishing self — has a neural signature.
Recent work has gone further. A 2024 study from Washington University traced a mechanical link between body motion and fluid movement in the brain through a network of veins, suggesting that the physical engagement characteristic of flow states — climbing, playing, surgery — may shape neural conditions in ways that pure cognition cannot.
The conditions the phone destroys
One of the most-cited findings from Csikszentmihalyi’s pager studies was that flow is not tied to any particular kind of work. Factory workers entered it on assembly lines. Mothers entered it reading to children. Accountants entered it in spreadsheets. The activity did not matter. The structure did.
What separated people who experienced flow often from those who rarely did was not their job description. It was whether they had organised their attention so that something — anything — could demand all of it.
This is where the modern problem comes into focus. People who spent their evenings flicking between apps reported the lowest flow frequencies. People who played an instrument, gardened, climbed, cooked complex meals, or wrote in journals reported the highest. The phone, with its endless drip of low-stakes novelty, sits exactly in the wrong zone: enough stimulation to keep attention from settling, not enough challenge to absorb it. It is, in effect, an anti-flow device — engineered to keep the default mode network humming, to keep the self always slightly aware of itself.
As National Geographic reported, climbers like Steph Davis describe entering a state on big walls where fear, plans, and self-talk drop away and only the next handhold exists. Free soloists in particular — climbers without ropes — describe the state as not optional but necessary. Any intrusion of self-consciousness at 600 metres above the ground is dangerous. They are, in a sense, the last group for whom the conditions are non-negotiable.
Why it cannot be forced
The paradox at the centre of the theory is that flow rewards attention pointed away from itself. The harder a person tries to be in flow, the further it retreats. Trying to be in flow is, by definition, attention pointed at the self.
Csikszentmihalyi’s advice, repeated across his books and lectures, was indirect. Set up the conditions. Choose a task with a clear goal. Match the difficulty to your current skill. Remove interruptions. Then forget about the state and do the work.
What the painters were really doing
Looking back at the studio interviews that started everything, the detail that still stands out is how mundane the painters’ answers were. They were not chasing transcendence. They were trying to solve a problem on the canvas. The colour was wrong. The composition needed something in the lower left. The hand had to move in a particular way.
The state Csikszentmihalyi named arose as a byproduct of that ordinary attention — attention so completely committed to the object in front of them that there was no spare capacity left to think about themselves. That is the part of the finding that has resisted fifty years of dilution into self-help. Flow is not a productivity hack. It is not a brand of focus that can be summoned with the right playlist. It is what happens to a mind when something outside it becomes, briefly, more interesting than the mind itself.
Csikszentmihalyi died in 2021. The painters he interviewed in Chicago are mostly gone too. The pagers have been replaced by phones, and the phones, on the whole, have made the state harder to reach. But the structure he identified has not changed, and the neuroscience has only sharpened it. A clear goal. Immediate feedback. A task at the edge of one’s skill. And then the quiet, when the self steps out of the way and the work fills the room.
The objection Darwin knew would be hardest to answer was not about bones or fossils. It was about conscience. As long as the moral sense could be held apart from animal life, the distance between human beings and other creatures remained intact. Rev. Leonard Jenyns made exactly this argument in a letter to Darwin in January 1860, writing that he could not bring himself to accept that “man’s reasoning faculties and above all his moral sense could ever have been obtained from irrational progenitors, by mere natural selection.” Take the moral sense out of nature and you preserve, as Jenyns put it, “the Divine Image that forms the insurmountable distinction between man and brutes.”
Darwin’s response, worked out across Chapters 3 and 5 of The Descent of Man (1871), was not to deny that the moral sense was special. It was to explain where it came from without appealing to anything outside the natural world. The argument is more specific, and stranger, than it is usually remembered.
The hypothesis Darwin actually made
Darwin’s central claim was a conjecture he stated plainly near the opening of Chapter 4: “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.”
This is worth reading carefully. Darwin was not saying that morality evolved because it was useful to individuals. He was not saying that conscience is simply clever self-interest. He was saying that if you take social instincts, which already exist in many species, and combine them with sufficient intelligence, memory, and language, something like a conscience is the outcome. Not a chosen outcome. An inevitable one.
The social instincts Darwin had in mind were real biological tendencies: propensities to take pleasure in the company of others, to feel something like sympathy with them, and to perform services for them. These tendencies, he argued, are persistent. They do not disappear when they are overridden. Other impulses, hunger, desire, self-preservation, can suppress social instincts in a given moment, but the social instincts persist as a background disposition, always present, always able to reassert themselves once the pressing impulse has passed.
Where memory enters the argument
The mechanism Darwin proposed for the emergence of conscience depends on memory. An animal with strong social instincts but no memory of its past actions cannot experience the conflict between what it did and what its social nature would have preferred. It acts, it satisfies an appetite, and it moves on. The social instinct, frustrated but not forgotten, leaves no trace.
Add memory, and the calculation changes entirely. After an act that violated social instinct, that persistent social feeling reasserts itself in memory and produces a disagreeable feeling that Darwin described with precision: “He will then feel remorse, repentance, regret, or shame.” This is conscience, in his account. Not a divine faculty. Not a special human endowment. It is the collision, remembered, between what was done and what the social nature would have preferred. “Conscience looks backwards,” he wrote, “and serves as a guide for the future.”
Memory alone is not enough. Darwin added language as the mechanism by which communities build explicit shared norms, what he called “public opinion” as to how members should act for the common benefit. These norms are conventional, not instinctive. Their content varies across cultures and times. But their binding force, Darwin argued, depends on something that is instinctive: sympathy. “Our regard for the approbation and disapprobation of our fellows depends on sympathy, which forms an essential part of the social instinct, and is indeed its foundation-stone.”
The consequence of how we understand civilisation
If this argument is substantially right, a particular way of thinking about manners, conscience, and moral restraint becomes harder to hold. The traditional view treats these things as the victory of something higher over something lower: reason over appetite, culture over nature, the civilised over the animal. Darwin’s account does not work that way. Manners are not the suppression of instinct. They are one set of instincts, the social ones, as they have been elaborated and made explicit through memory, language, and the accumulated judgments of people living together.
Restraint is not the opposite of instinct. It is what instinct looks like after it has been complicated by the awareness that others are watching and will remember.
This is unsettling in a specific way. It means that the moral progress of a society cannot be understood as a movement away from biology toward something purely rational or conventional. It means that the social instincts, those old biological tendencies toward sympathy and mutual regard, are doing continuous work underneath the surface of any functioning moral culture. When those instincts weaken, when the conditions that maintain sympathy erode, there is no backup system of pure reason to fill the gap.
What Darwin acknowledged the argument could not do
Darwin was a careful enough thinker to register the difficulty his own account ran into. He wanted to say that the social instincts, including sympathy, were themselves products of natural selection. But natural selection works on individuals, and sympathy is a propensity that benefits others, sometimes at the individual’s expense. He gestures toward what would later be called group selection, the idea that tribes with more cooperative members outcompete those without, and toward something close to kin selection. He did not resolve it. The mechanisms that actually account for the evolution of altruistic behaviour were worked out in the twentieth century by W. D. Hamilton and Robert Trivers, building on foundations Darwin laid.
There is a further limitation worth naming. Darwin’s account of conscience as social-instinct-plus-memory is a psychological and evolutionary account. It describes how the moral sense likely arose and what it is composed of. It does not, by itself, tell us what we ought to do. Darwin was explicit about this. He was more cautious than Herbert Spencer and others who tried to derive ethical prescriptions directly from evolutionary facts. What evolution explains is the origin of our moral faculties, including their biases, their reach, their limitations. It is not a replacement for moral reasoning.
The reading that travels farthest
What we keep coming back to in Darwin’s account is how little of it requires the human animal to be exceptional in the ways that traditional moral philosophy assumed. The components he identifies, social instinct, memory, language, the sensitivity to others’ approval and disapproval, are not inventions unique to our species. They are elaborations, remarkable ones, of tendencies that appear in recognisable forms across many social animals.
This does not diminish the moral achievements of human cultures. It relocates them. What seems to belong to a separate, higher domain turns out to be built from materials that were already present, already working, long before anything we would call civilisation. The notebooks Darwin kept in 1838, more than thirty years before The Descent of Man was published, already contain the essential idea, written in his characteristic shorthand: “Society could not go on except for the moral sense, any more as a hive of Bees without their instincts.”
The comparison to bees was not meant as a reduction. It was meant as an observation about what holds any social life together. The moral sense, in Darwin’s reading, is not a ceiling above our animal nature. It is something that grew from within it, shaped by the fact that we live together, remember our actions, care what others think of us, and inherit the social tendencies of creatures far older than ourselves.
Login
