If you had to summarise Seneca’s most uncomfortable observation in a single sentence, it would be this: most of what you are spending your life trying to acquire is not actually going to satisfy you when you get it. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the Roman Stoic philosopher who served as tutor and later adviser to the Emperor Nero, wrote 124 surviving letters to a younger Roman official named Lucilius across the final years of his life — letters that have remained in continuous circulation for nearly 2,000 years and that contain some of the more concentrated observations of human psychology produced in the ancient world. Among the recurring themes in these letters is the curious gap between what people pursue and what actually makes them content. Seneca’s specific claim was that the pursuit of more — more wealth, more possessions, more recognition, more of essentially anything one could accumulate — does not converge on satisfaction. As the supply increases, the demand increases with it, and the gap between the two never closes.

According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s reference on Seneca, his writings repeatedly addressed this question across multiple letters and essays. “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor,” he wrote in his second letter to Lucilius. “Contented poverty,” he added, quoting his philosophical opponent Epicurus approvingly, “is an honourable estate.” In another letter, again quoting Epicurus: “Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the whole world.” Contentment, in Seneca’s account, is not a function of how much one has but of how little one needs. People who have learned to need less can be content with very little. People who have not can fail to be content with essentially anything.

The empirical convergence

For most of the period between Seneca’s death and the late twentieth century, his observations existed as philosophical claims — defensible by argument, supported by example, but unverifiable by anything resembling modern empirical methodology. This changed in 1971, when the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell introduced into the social-science literature the concept of the “hedonic treadmill” — a model in which positive events produce short-term elevations in subjective well-being that fade over time as people adjust their expectations upward to match their new circumstances. The model predicted that lottery winners, despite their substantial good fortune, should not end up much happier than they were before winning, because their reference point would shift upward and their new wealth would come to feel normal rather than exceptional.

Per the Wikipedia reference on the hedonic treadmill and its empirical foundations, Brickman and his colleagues Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman tested this prediction directly in a now-famous 1978 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research team compared 22 major lottery winners with 22 demographically matched controls and 29 individuals who had been paralysed in accidents. The results were striking. Lottery winners were not significantly happier than controls. They reported finding less pleasure in ordinary daily activities than non-winners did, suggesting that the peak experience of winning had contaminated their capacity for mundane satisfaction. The paralysed accident victims, while clearly less happy than controls, were closer to controls than would have been predicted by the magnitude of their loss. The basic Stoic claim — that the relationship between external circumstances and inner contentment is much weaker than ordinary intuition suggests — was, in its broad outlines, empirically confirmed.

Why the mechanism works

The mechanism Brickman and Campbell identified, which Seneca had described in different language, is that humans adjust their internal reference point as their external circumstances improve. The first car you own provides substantial improvement over having no car. By the time you have reached the tenth car in a lifetime of progressively improving vehicles, each new one barely registers, even though every one of them would have seemed luxurious to the person you were before you owned any. The same pattern applies to houses, salaries, food, clothing, professional recognition, and essentially every other category of acquirable good.

The economist Richard Easterlin documented the same pattern at the level of whole societies in 1974, in what has come to be called the Easterlin Paradox. Within any given country at any given moment, richer people report being happier than poorer ones. But as an entire country grows richer over decades — as per-capita income doubles, then triples, then quadruples — average happiness barely moves. The collective acquisition of more does not produce collective contentment. The individual aspiration level rises in parallel with collective wealth, and the gap between aspiration and achievement remains essentially constant.

The hypocrisy charge

The honest account of Seneca’s argument requires noting an awkward complication. Seneca himself was extraordinarily wealthy. He served as a senior adviser to Emperor Nero and accumulated, over the course of his career, a personal fortune estimated by Roman historians at approximately 300 million sesterces — making him one of the richer private citizens in the Roman Empire. He owned multiple villas, substantial estates, and significant financial holdings, including loans to provincial elites that some historians believe may have helped trigger the Boudican revolt in Britain. The contrast between his philosophical writings on the worthlessness of wealth and his actual accumulation of substantial personal fortune has been the subject of debate since his own lifetime, when the Roman senator Publius Suillius Rufus publicly attacked him on this point in 58 CE.

Seneca’s response, articulated in his essay On the Happy Life, was that the wise person does not need wealth but is also not required to refuse it when it comes — that what matters is one’s relationship to one’s possessions, not the bare quantity of them. The defence is contested. Some readers find it self-serving. Others find it consistent with the broader Stoic framework, which emphasised the cultivation of an inner attitude rather than the renunciation of external goods. The biographical inconvenience does not, in any case, invalidate the underlying psychological claim. The clinical observation that the pursuit of more does not produce satisfaction can be empirically true even if the person making the observation happens to be wealthy. The Brickman and Easterlin data confirm Seneca’s claim regardless of how the philosopher himself lived.

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For people who carry two copies of the APOE4 gene, the message from clinical medicine over the past three decades has been blunt: your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease is dramatically elevated, the elevation is genetic, and there is not much you can do about it. About 2 percent of the human population falls into this category. They have inherited one copy of the APOE4 variant from each parent, which combine to produce a 12-fold higher lifetime risk of Alzheimer’s disease compared with people who carry no APOE4 copies. The dogma, until recently, was that this risk was essentially built in. Lifestyle changes might shift the odds at the margins. Nothing was thought to substantially overcome the genetic loading. In August 2025, a research team led by investigators at Mass General Brigham, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the Broad Institute published a paper in Nature Medicine suggesting that the dogma was wrong — or at least incomplete — and that a specific dietary pattern can substantially modulate even the highest-risk genetic profile.

According to the Mass General Brigham press release accompanying the study, the research team analysed data from approximately 5,700 participants in two long-running US cohorts — the Nurses’ Health Study (4,215 women, followed from 1989 to 2023) and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (1,490 men, followed from 1993 to 2023). Combined, the data covered more than three decades of dietary records, genetic information, blood metabolomic profiles, and tracking of dementia outcomes across the participants’ lives. The study population was large enough, and the follow-up long enough, to provide statistically meaningful comparisons across genetic-risk subgroups — including the small but critical APOE4 homozygous subgroup, which most previous dietary studies had been too small to analyse on its own.

What the data showed

The headline finding was specific and striking. Per CNN Health’s coverage of the study, participants who most closely followed a Mediterranean dietary pattern — high in vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, legumes, fish, and olive oil; low in red meat, processed meat, and alcohol — showed reduced dementia risk across all genetic-risk categories. The protective effect was modest in people with no APOE4 copies. It was somewhat larger in people with one APOE4 copy. And it was substantially largest in people with two APOE4 copies, in whom close Mediterranean diet adherence was associated with at least a 35 percent reduction in dementia risk compared with APOE4 homozygotes who did not follow the dietary pattern. The protective effect, in other words, scaled with the genetic risk it was working against — the diet helped most in the people who needed it most.

Yuxi Liu, the study’s lead author and a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, summarised the finding for CNN: “We followed over 5,700 people for 34 years and found those who followed a baseline Mediterranean diet with little alcohol, red and processed meat but full of vegetables, fruits, nuts, whole grains, legumes, fish and olive oil all reduced the risk of dementia. But the benefit was highest for people with the APOE4 gene, especially those with two copies of APOE4.” Richard Isaacson, an Alzheimer’s specialist not involved in the research, framed the implications more directly: “Hopefully this will change the current dogma that having two copies of the APOE4 is a ‘fait accompli’ for developing Alzheimer’s. Genes do not have to be your destiny.”

The metabolomic mechanism

What distinguishes the 2025 study from earlier dietary research on Alzheimer’s is that the team also measured the participants’ blood metabolomes — the full set of small molecules circulating in their plasma — and tracked how the metabolite profiles varied by genotype and by diet. As documented in the original paper by Yuxi Liu and colleagues in Nature Medicine, the integrated analysis identified 57 specific metabolites whose associations with dementia risk varied by APOE4 genotype or by other Alzheimer’s-related genetic variants. Cholesteryl esters and sphingomyelins, for example, were most strongly associated with increased dementia risk specifically in APOE4 homozygotes. Inverse associations with glycerides — meaning higher glyceride levels were associated with lower dementia risk — were also specific to the APOE4 homozygous genotype.

The Mediterranean diet, in the data, was unusually effective at modulating exactly the metabolites that mattered most in APOE4 homozygotes. The diet pushed cholesteryl ester and sphingomyelin levels downward (reducing dementia-associated metabolites) while supporting glyceride profiles associated with protection. The mechanism is not yet fully characterised, but the integrated metabolomic data provide what the authors call “biological plausibility” for the observed dietary effect — meaning the diet appears to be working through measurable biochemical pathways rather than through some unspecified general health benefit. The combination of long-term outcome data and detailed metabolomic profiling makes the 2025 finding substantially more mechanistically grounded than earlier dietary observational studies that established correlation without identifying the underlying biochemistry.

Why the APOE4 finding matters

The clinical significance of the APOE4 result is hard to overstate. Alzheimer’s disease has a substantial genetic component — heritability has been estimated at up to 80 percent — and APOE is by some distance the strongest single genetic risk factor for the common sporadic form of the disease. The 12-fold elevated risk that comes with carrying two APOE4 copies is among the largest known gene-disease effect sizes in medicine. For decades, the consensus framing was that this genetic load was essentially fixed. Patients who learned through genetic testing that they were APOE4 homozygotes typically received the news as a sentence rather than a probability — something to brace against rather than something to act on.

The 2025 finding does not, by itself, eliminate the elevated risk. A 35 percent reduction in dementia risk among APOE4 homozygotes following a Mediterranean diet still leaves these individuals at substantially elevated risk compared with the general population. What the finding does establish is that the risk is modifiable — that a daily food pattern, sustained over decades, can meaningfully shift the trajectory in a population that previous research had largely written off. As reported in Harvard Health Publishing’s coverage of the study, the practical recommendation for APOE4 carriers is not radically different from what cardiologists and neurologists have been telling everyone for decades — eat more vegetables, more fish, more olive oil, less red meat, less processed food — but the new evidence suggests that for the APOE4 homozygous subgroup specifically, the recommendation may carry substantially more weight than it does for the general population.

Limitations and what comes next

The Liu et al. 2025 paper is an observational study rather than a randomised controlled trial, and the authors acknowledged several limitations that warrant honest framing. The cohort consisted of well-educated individuals of European ancestry, which means the generalisability to other populations — different genetic backgrounds, different food cultures, different socioeconomic contexts — is not yet established. The dietary adherence was self-reported through periodic food-frequency questionnaires rather than objectively measured. The participants who closely followed a Mediterranean diet may have differed from non-followers in unmeasured ways that could partly account for the dementia difference. The 2025 finding is not, on its own, proof that Mediterranean diet directly causes reduced dementia risk in APOE4 homozygotes; it is strong observational evidence consistent with that conclusion.

What the paper adds to the existing literature is the genetic-stratified analysis and the metabolomic mechanism, both of which provide convergent support for the broader claim. Earlier work — the 2023 brain-autopsy study showing 40 percent lower odds of Alzheimer’s pathology in Mediterranean and MIND diet adherents, the FINGER multi-domain lifestyle trial in Finland, the long line of MIND diet research at Rush University — had built the case that diet matters for dementia risk in general populations. The 2025 paper extends the case specifically to APOE4 homozygotes, who had been the most pessimistically counselled subgroup and now appear to be the subgroup with the most to gain from dietary intervention. Whether this translates into changed clinical recommendations, changed genetic-counselling practice, and changed daily behaviour in the 2 percent of the population carrying two APOE4 copies will be the central question for the next several years of Alzheimer’s prevention research. The biological case for the diet has now been made. The cultural case for actually following it is, as always, harder.

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Students who believed in finding their one true passion gave up faster when things got hard. That is the finding, stripped to its bone, of a 2018 paper that has quietly rewired how psychologists talk about career advice.

The researchers — Paul O’Keefe at Yale-NUS College, with Carol Dweck and Gregory Walton at Stanford — proved it with a black hole article. They handed undergraduates an essay that started accessible and turned dense with equations halfway through. The students who treated interests as something you discover — fixed, waiting, predestined — lost interest the moment the physics got hard. The ones who treated interests as something you develop kept reading.

That single experimental setup, published in Psychological Science under the title “Implicit Theories of Interest: Finding Your Passion or Developing It?”, became the empirical spine of a now-common critique: the advice to follow your passion may quietly teach people to quit.

The black hole article that broke the theory

The setup was deliberately simple. Students first identified whether their strongest interests were in the arts and humanities or in math and science. Then they were assigned to read an engaging article outside their stated domain — a STEM student got an essay on Pierre Bourdieu, a humanities student got a piece on black holes.

Almost everyone enjoyed it. The hook worked.

Then came the second article: a dense, technical academic paper on the same topic. This is where the two groups split. Students primed with a fixed theory of interest — the belief that passions are found, not built — reported a sharp drop in fascination. Students primed with a growth theory stayed curious through the hard parts.

The researchers ran the experiment five different ways. The pattern held. People who believed passion was a thing you have treated friction as a signal they had picked the wrong thing.

Why the belief itself is the problem

The mechanism O’Keefe’s team identified is almost philosophical. If you believe your real passion is out there, fully formed, waiting to be recognized, then the first moment something gets boring or painful becomes evidence. Evidence that this wasn’t it. Evidence to move on.

Genuine interest, in that framework, should feel effortless. So effort itself becomes suspicious.

The Yale-NUS and Stanford team called this the cost of a fixed theory of interest. The article on the open-access version of the study is summarized in coverage on the cultural fallout of the follow-your-passion narrative, which sits awkwardly alongside graduation speeches that have been recycling the phrase since the 1980s.

What people quit, and how fast

In one of the O’Keefe experiments, students with a fixed-passion belief predicted, before the study began, that finding their true interest would mean motivation would carry them through anything. They believed friction would be absent because interest would be infinite.

It is hard to imagine a belief better designed to produce disappointment.

When the hard text arrived, their reported interest collapsed by a wide margin compared to the growth-mindset group. They also became less open to interests outside their original identified domain — the fixed view narrows people, the researchers wrote, rather than widens them.

The Forbes coverage of related work points out that passion is typically the reward of sustained effort, not the entry ticket. The order in which people expect to feel passion seems to determine whether they ever feel it.

The ghost of Steve Jobs

The modern version of the advice has a clear origin. Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement, June 2005, told graduates the only way to do great work was to love what they did, and if they hadn’t found it yet, to keep looking. The speech has been widely viewed online.

Cal Newport, the Georgetown computer scientist who wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You, was among the first to point out that Jobs himself didn’t follow his own advice. Jobs was interested in Zen Buddhism and calligraphy. He built a personal computer company because a friend asked him to help sell circuit boards.

The passion came later. After the work.

Leadership coach Amina AlTai, in a December 2025 interview, told CNBC the advice “positions us to fizzle out fast” because it sets up an expectation of permanent emotional fuel. Real work doesn’t come with permanent emotional fuel. It comes with mortgages and Tuesday afternoons.

What the study did not say

O’Keefe’s team was careful not to argue against having interests, or against pursuing them. The finding was narrower and more specific: the theory people hold about where interests come from changes how they behave when interests stop being fun.

A person who believes interests develop will sit through a confusing equation. A person who believes interests are discovered will close the tab.

The students reading about black holes were not less smart, less curious, or less ambitious than each other. They had been handed different stories about how curiosity is supposed to feel. That alone changed how long they kept reading.

The slow version of passion

The implication that has stuck, almost a decade after the paper, is that passion is more like a long marriage than a first date. It deepens because you stay. It survives the boring stretches because you treat the boring stretches as part of it, not as evidence against it.

The reverse is also true. People who expect first-date energy at year seven leave at year seven.

This is why the 2018 finding keeps getting cited in career-advice columns, leadership books, and the slow drip of essays pushing back on the Jobs commencement speech. The study didn’t just measure quitting. It identified the sentence in someone’s head — this must not be my real passion — that turns a hard Tuesday into a resignation letter.

The article in the textbook

If you go back to the original 2018 paper, the most quietly devastating detail is in the methods section. The hard article the students were asked to read — the one that made the fixed-passion believers lose interest — wasn’t unusually difficult. It was a standard piece of upper-level academic writing. The kind of thing every person who has ever developed a real expertise has had to push through hundreds of times.

The students who believed passion was something you find treated it as a stop sign. The students who believed passion was something you build treated it as a hill.

Same article. Same equations. Different story about what the difficulty meant.

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Most people who are quietly miserable do not know it. That, in essence, is what a Danish philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard tried to tell the readers of nineteenth-century Copenhagen in 1849, and what the empirical psychology of regret has been confirming, in laboratory studies and museum surveys, for the past three decades. When most people use the word “despair,” they mean acute unhappiness — the kind of low mood that follows a loss, a failure, or a difficult life event. Despair in this ordinary sense is something a person is aware of. They can name it, describe it, and (with luck) move through it. Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, used the word in a substantially different way. The despair he described was not an emotion. It was a structural condition of the self, present in the great majority of human beings, generally unnoticed by the people who carried it, and most acute precisely in those who did not know they had it. Kierkegaard’s book on the subject, The Sickness Unto Death, is one of the founding texts of existentialist philosophy.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Kierkegaard, the framework rests on a specific definition of what the self is. For Kierkegaard, the self is not a thing or a substance. It is “a relation that relates itself to itself” — a dynamic process by which a human being takes up the various contradictory features of being human (finite and infinite, possible and necessary, free and determined) and synthesises them into a coherent personality. The self is not given at birth; it is something a person has to become. And despair, in Kierkegaard’s account, is the misrelation that occurs when this becoming fails — when the synthesis goes wrong, when the person fails to take on the self they were capable of being.

The three forms of despair

Kierkegaard identified three primary configurations the failure can take. The first and most common is the despair of ignorance — being in despair without knowing it. A person in this state has not yet noticed any gap between the life they are living and the life they were capable of living. Their attention is consumed by the routine surfaces of daily existence: work, possessions, social position, the consumption of entertainment. The deeper question of what kind of person they are, in any meaningful sense, has never been seriously posed. Kierkegaard considered this unconscious form to be the dominant pattern in modern society — most people, in his view, were in despair without realising it, because the structures of their lives had insulated them from ever asking the question.

The second form is the despair of weakness — knowing what self one is meant to be and not being willing to be it. The person in this state has had some glimpse of their own possibilities and has, for whatever combination of fear, comfort, social pressure, or fatigue, declined to pursue them. The third form is the despair of defiance — willing to be a self other than the one one is, refusing the actual configuration of one’s life in favour of an imaginary or constructed alternative. The defiant form, Kierkegaard thought, was the most acute but also the rarest. As one frequently-cited line from the book puts it: “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.”

What modern psychology has found

Kierkegaard was writing in 1849, in a theological framework, with no empirical methodology beyond his own observation of the people around him in nineteenth-century Copenhagen. His specific claims about despair as a sickness of the spirit cannot be tested in the same way an empirical hypothesis can be tested. What can be tested is whether the basic phenomenon he described — that the failures most haunting to people across a life are the failures to become the self one was capable of being — shows up in modern psychological data on regret. The answer is that it does. Per a 2023 replication in Royal Society Open Science of the foundational research by Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec at Cornell University, the empirical psychology of regret converges on a striking temporal pattern: in the short term, people’s most acute regrets tend to be about things they did and wish they had not done. In the long term, the pattern reverses. The regrets that haunt people across years and decades, and that dominate when people look back on their lives as a whole, are overwhelmingly about things they did not do — chances not taken, paths not pursued, selves not allowed to emerge.

Gilovich and Medvec’s original 1994 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found this pattern across multiple population groups, including a sample of nursing-home residents reflecting on their entire lives. The 2023 replication, conducted at a Chicago museum of psychological science with a large public sample, reproduced the temporal interaction even though the specific magnitudes differed. The pattern is now considered one of the more robust findings in the empirical literature on regret. Its philosophical implication aligns closely with Kierkegaard’s framework, even though the researchers involved generally do not cite him.

Why the despair is so quiet

The most disconcerting feature of Kierkegaard’s account is his insistence that this despair is, in its most common form, undetectable to the person carrying it. Unlike acute sadness, which announces itself, the unconscious form of despair tends to be hidden by the very busyness of life that produces it. A person fully occupied with work, family obligations, consumption of news and entertainment, social media, the small daily tasks of contemporary existence, is unlikely to encounter the question of whether they are actually becoming the self they were meant to be. The question requires solitude, reflection, and a degree of confrontation with one’s own choices that ordinary life does not generally provide. As reported in D. Anthony Storm’s commentary on The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard described despair as a “misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself” — a sickness that, unlike most diseases, the patient is largely responsible for and from which the patient cannot escape simply by avoiding awareness of it. The avoidance, in Kierkegaard’s framework, is itself part of the despair.

What the framework does not promise

Intellectual honesty requires noting what Kierkegaard’s account does not establish. It is not a recipe for happiness. It does not specify what self any given person was meant to become, or how to identify that self, or how to pursue it once identified. Kierkegaard’s own answer to the question of how despair is overcome was specifically Christian — through a particular relation to God that he called faith — and many modern readers find that the theological framing limits the framework’s applicability. The diagnostic side of his work, however, has had broad influence well beyond the specifically Christian context, including on the existentialist philosophers of the twentieth century, on the founders of existential psychotherapy, on Erik Erikson’s developmental concept of “integrity versus despair” in late life, and on the broader twentieth-century literature on authenticity and self-realisation. What the framework provides is a vocabulary for naming a condition that often goes unnamed — the slow recognition, late in a life, that the person one has been is not quite the person one started out hoping to be. Kierkegaard called this the breaking through of despair into consciousness, and he thought it was, paradoxically, a kind of progress. The unconscious form, in his account, was worse than the conscious form, because it left no opening for change.

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In 2018, one of the largest personal bankruptcies in recent Australian history quietly disappeared. Nathan Tinkler — the former coal magnate who had been Australia’s youngest billionaire before owing creditors more than $540 million — did not simply exit bankruptcy. He had it annulled: a provision of the Bankruptcy Act 1966 that does not just end a bankruptcy. It treats it, in the eyes of the law, as though it never happened.

Most countries let you exit bankruptcy. Australia lets you erase it. And the erasing, it turns out, works best for the debtors with the most to erase.

That is the argument worth making about this provision. The annulment regime is not a quaint legal quirk inherited from Victorian-era insolvency law. It is a working mechanism through which Australian bankruptcy law produces sharply different outcomes for sharply different debtors — and the asymmetry runs in the direction of the people who already have the most resources to deploy.

The provision almost nobody outside insolvency law knows exists

Australia’s Bankruptcy Act 1966 contains a quiet trapdoor. A discharge — the standard exit — ends a bankruptcy, but it leaves a permanent stain on the National Personal Insolvency Index, searchable forever by any lender, landlord or employer who cares to look.

An annulment is different. An annulment retroactively unmakes the bankruptcy. The record is updated to show the bankruptcy was annulled, and in the eyes of the law the debtor is treated as if the sequestration order was never made.

There are three routes to it. Pay every creditor in full, including the trustee’s fees and interest. Convince a court the bankruptcy should never have been declared. Or persuade creditors to accept a formal proposal — a composition or arrangement — that they prefer to the bankruptcy itself.

The $540 million annulment

The headline case came in 2018, when Nathan Tinkler emerged from a bankruptcy whose liabilities had been tallied at more than $540 million. Tinkler had been declared bankrupt by the Federal Court in February 2016 over a comparatively tiny debt — around $2.8 million owed on a corporate jet — but once cross-guarantees, loans and collapsed ventures were counted, the figure ran past half a billion dollars. The one-time billionaire offered creditors roughly $1 million, less than 0.2 cents in the dollar. That offer was rejected. A revised proposal, reported to have been bankrolled in part by retail billionaire Gerry Harvey, was ultimately accepted — and the bankruptcy was annulled.

The mechanics are almost absurdly simple. The bankrupt — through lawyers — drafts a proposal offering creditors some return, often a fraction of a cent on the dollar, sometimes funded by a third party such as a family trust or an outside backer. A meeting of creditors is convened by the trustee. If a special resolution passes, the proposal is accepted. The bankruptcy is annulled. The debtor walks out with their legal slate wiped. Creditors who voted no are bound by the result anyway. That is the trick.

Why creditors say yes to pennies

The behavioural logic running through these meetings is the same logic behavioural economists have been describing since Kahneman and Tversky — loss aversion, and the strong human preference for a small certain return over a large but uncertain one. A trustee chasing a bankrupt’s assets across multiple jurisdictions can burn through years of fees and recover almost nothing. Offshore trusts, asset-protection structures, family arrangements predating the bankruptcy by years — all of it slows recovery to a crawl. A creditor offered two cents on the dollar today, paid in cleared funds within 28 days, is being asked to compare that against a hypothetical four cents in five years, minus litigation costs, minus trustee remuneration, minus the emotional cost of the fight. Most vote yes, exactly as the Nobel-winning work on prospect theory predicts.

What annulment actually means in practice

The legal fiction is remarkably complete. Once annulled, the bankrupt regains control of any property that has not already been sold by the trustee. Future income contributions stop. Travel restrictions evaporate. Directorship disqualifications under the Corporations Act fall away the moment the annulment is recorded.

The National Personal Insolvency Index still shows a record, but it shows an annulled bankruptcy — a category that credit bureaus, regulators and many lenders treat as materially different from a discharged one. Some loan application forms ask whether the applicant has ever been bankrupt. Lawyers acting for annulled debtors have argued, with varying success, that the technically accurate answer is no.

The historical roots

The annulment power was not invented for the wealthy. It traces back through earlier Australian insolvency law to nineteenth-century English insolvency law, where the underlying principle was pragmatic: if creditors and debtor could reach a deal that was better than the rigid liquidation of an estate, the law should not stand in the way.

That principle survived into modern Australian law largely intact. The 1966 Act, which still governs personal insolvency in Australia today, codified proposals as a deliberate alternative to discharge.

The mental ledger nobody writes about

The cases that reach the Federal Court are the loud ones. The quieter reality of Australian personal bankruptcy is a population of thousands of new bankrupts in a typical year, the overwhelming majority of whom owe sums in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions. For them, annulment is theoretically available but practically out of reach — there is no family trust standing by with a settlement offer.

The toll on that quieter population is real, even when it never reaches a courtroom. Serious money trouble tends to arrive with the familiar companions of lost sleep, strained relationships and a particular kind of shame that can linger long after the balance sheet has recovered. There is no outside backer to make the problem disappear and no annulment waiting at the end of it — only the slow, full term of the discharge and the permanent mark it leaves behind.

The skill gap behind the high-stakes cases

What separates the $540 million annulment from the suburban bankruptcy is not just money — it is access to a small professional ecosystem of insolvency barristers, restructuring accountants and asset-protection lawyers who know exactly how the proposal mechanism works.

That advantage rhymes with a broader finding about how people actually make decisions. A 2025 study by the Global Association of Applied Behavioural Scientists, reported through EurekAlert, found that while most experienced professionals rated their own judgement as above average, nearly half lacked any structured decision-making process. Bankrupts who walk in without specialist advice take the default path — years to discharge, a permanent record. Bankrupts who arrive with a strategy already drafted before the sequestration order is even made can sometimes annul within months.

The cases that didn’t work

Not every attempted annulment succeeds. The Federal Court has refused proposals where it found the offer was not in creditors’ interests, where the funding source was opaque, or where the bankrupt had failed to make full disclosure of assets. The court has explicit power to set aside a composition if it was obtained by fraud or if material information was withheld.

In reported cases through the 2010s, debtors who appeared to have successfully annulled were later returned to bankruptcy when undisclosed assets surfaced. The annulment of the annulment carries no special name in the Act. It is simply a fresh sequestration order, this time with a court that has already been deceived once paying close attention to the second filing.

A two-tier exit door

The blunt fact of the Australian annulment regime is that it works best for debtors with the largest debts. A creditor owed $5,000 by a suburban bankrupt has little incentive to negotiate — the recovery costs eat the return. A creditor owed $50 million by a debtor with offshore structures has every incentive to take 1.5 cents on the dollar today rather than fight for years. The percentage return shrinks as the debt grows. The legal mechanism rewards scale.

That is the implication worth sitting with. Australia has built, perhaps unintentionally, a two-tier exit from bankruptcy: a long road back for ordinary debtors and a short, well-lit corridor for those wealthy enough to negotiate their way out. Other common-law jurisdictions — England, New Zealand, Canada — have similar compromise mechanisms, but few combine them with the same retroactive erasure of the bankruptcy record. Whether that is a feature to be exported or a loophole to be closed depends on what the law is for. If insolvency is about returning productive debtors to the economy, annulment works. If it is about applying consistent consequences for financial failure regardless of the debtor’s bank balance, it does not.

Once the annulment order is sealed, the bankrupt walks back into ordinary commercial life — able to take on company directorships, sign loan applications, register for credit, and in the technical language of the Bankruptcy Act, treated as a person against whom no sequestration order was ever made. The half-billion-dollar collapse, on paper, never happened. The court file still exists, of course. Anyone with a subscription to the Federal Court’s electronic registry can pull the orders, read the creditor minutes, and see the numbers. The annulment does not delete the history. It only changes what the law is willing to call it — and who gets to use that privilege.

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Most pig butchering begins with a message that looks like a mistake — a text meant for someone else, landing on a stranger’s phone. The stranger replies to say wrong number. The sender apologizes, makes a small self-deprecating joke, asks where the stranger is from, and a conversation starts. Then come the good-morning texts, every day for weeks. Nothing about money, not yet. Just attention. By the time an investment account finally appears and the balance starts climbing past six figures, the person on the other end, the trading platform, and the balance itself are all fictions, run out of a compound in Southeast Asia.

The Chinese name for this is sha zhu pan — pig butchering plate — and the people who run it coined the term themselves.

The metaphor is literal. The victim is the pig. The months of warmth and patient relationship-building are the fattening. The drained accounts are the slaughter.

A name borrowed from a slaughterhouse

The phrase entered law enforcement vocabulary around 2019, with fraud analysts identifying internal scripts from criminal syndicates referring to targets as zhu — pigs — and the long courtship phase as yang zhu, raising the pig. The final cash-out, where the victim is convinced to send increasingly large sums until the well runs dry, is sha zhu: kill the pig.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation now treats pig butchering as its own category of crime, distinct from older romance scams and investment frauds because it deliberately fuses the two. The numbers are staggering. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more than $5.8 billion in losses tied to crypto-investment fraud in 2024 alone, the bulk of it pig butchering, and analysts believe reported figures capture only a fraction of the real total.

The wrong number that wasn’t

That opening is not improvised. The number is bought in bulk from a data broker, and the text is written to read like an honest mistake: a dinner invitation, a casual check-in, a message clearly meant for someone else. When the target replies to say wrong number, the scammer apologizes, makes a small joke, and asks where the stranger is from.

This opening is so reliable that anti-fraud researchers have a name for it: the wrong-number gambit. It works because it bypasses the suspicion most people feel toward unsolicited contact. The target feels they initiated the friendliness. They were just being polite.

From there the scammer migrates the conversation to WhatsApp, Telegram, or WeChat, where messages are encrypted and harder to trace. The persona is always wealthy, attractive, and successful — a wine importer in Singapore, a Hong Kong-based plastic surgeon, an art dealer in Vancouver. Photos are scraped from real social media accounts belonging to strangers, often fitness influencers or models with no idea their images are in circulation.

The fattening phase

For weeks, sometimes months, nothing about money happens. The scammer texts every morning and every night. They ask about the target’s children, their dog, the renovation on the kitchen. They send photos of restaurant meals, of sunrises, of the gym. The pattern is industrial. Operatives inside scam compounds work twelve-hour shifts juggling six to ten victims at once, with shared scripts and rotating supervisors who review the warmest exchanges and flag underperforming victims, whom scammers reportedly call customers.

The relationship between the daily contact and the eventual fraud is not accidental. Research suggests that oxytocin — the same hormone released during childbirth and breastfeeding — is also central to the formation of ordinary friendships, released during repeated positive social contact and contributing to feelings of attachment and trust. The same UC Berkeley work indicates oxytocin matters most in the early phase of a relationship, when the brain is settling on a preference for one familiar person over a stranger — a preference shaped by repeated contact, not by any verification of who that person actually is.

Scammers do not know the neurochemistry. They know the result. A person who has been texted good morning for sixty consecutive days will believe almost anything the texter says about a crypto trading platform.

The fake exchange

The investment pitch, when it comes, is offhand. The scammer mentions an uncle, or a former mentor, who taught them about a short-term liquidity-mining strategy on a platform most people haven’t heard of. They show screenshots of their own gains. They are reluctant to share details — the target has to ask twice. Eventually they walk the target through downloading an app or visiting a website that mimics a real cryptocurrency exchange, complete with order books, candle charts, customer support chat, and two-factor authentication.

None of it is real. The platform is a front end controlled entirely by the criminal group. The candles tick up. The balance grows. The target deposits a small amount — a few hundred dollars in Bitcoin or USDT — and watches it appear to double in a week.

The withdrawal works the first time. This is critical. The scammers let the target pull out a small profit to confirm the system is real. Then the deposits get larger. Building on loss aversion and prospect theory, once a person sees a paper gain, they become disproportionately willing to risk more to protect it, and disproportionately unwilling to walk away while the line keeps going up.

The slaughter

The kill phase is engineered to extract every last dollar. When the target tries to withdraw a larger sum, customer support says a 20 percent tax must be paid first. Or a verification fee. Or an anti-money-laundering deposit. Each new fee is presented as the final hurdle. The scammer — still texting good morning, still asking about the dog — encourages the target to borrow against their house, cash out their retirement account, ask siblings for help.

By the time the target realizes nothing will ever come back out, the money has been laundered through dozens of crypto wallets and converted into Tether, then into yuan or baht, then withdrawn as cash in Cambodia, Myanmar, or the Philippines. Victims at this stage often refuse to accept what has happened. The same cognitive biases that drew them in can keep them defending the scammer to family members and to police long after the money is gone.

The compounds

The operations are not run by lone hackers. They are run from industrial-scale compounds, many of them in the lawless border zones of Myanmar’s Shan State, in Cambodia’s Sihanoukville, and in special economic zones in Laos. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that hundreds of thousands of people are held inside these compounds as forced labor, many of them trafficked from across Asia with promises of legitimate jobs.

Workers who fail to hit quotas are beaten. Some are sold between compounds. Recent reporting has documented compounds in Myanmar using Starlink terminals to bypass internet crackdowns and keep the scam pipelines running even after government raids.

In October 2025, U.S. prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment charging Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Group and a figure long accused of running one of the largest scam networks in Southeast Asia, with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. The Justice Department seized roughly $15 billion in Bitcoin tied to him, the largest forfeiture action in its history, and the U.S. and U.K. announced coordinated sanctions on 146 people and entities connected to the group, freezing more than £100 million in London property. Chen, also known as Vincent, remains at large.

Why the victims aren’t who you think

The stereotype of the romance-scam victim is a lonely retiree. Pig butchering breaks that stereotype. The average loss reported to the FBI sits well above $100,000, and the demographic skews toward people in their thirties through fifties — software engineers, doctors, lawyers, recent immigrants with savings. Reporting on U.S. victims of these crypto romance schemes describes professionals who lost their entire retirement and, in several cases, their homes.

The reason has to do with money available, not gullibility. The scam is calibrated for people with assets to liquidate. It requires the target to have access to a brokerage account, home equity, or family wealth. Loneliness helps, but the real ingredient is bandwidth — the willingness to text a stranger every day for two months.

What the texts actually feel like

Anti-fraud groups that have recovered scripts from raided compounds describe a remarkable uniformity. The first week is mostly small talk about food and weather. The second week introduces vulnerability: the scammer’s late mother, a difficult childhood, a betrayal by a previous partner. The third week introduces the uncle who trades crypto. By week four the target has been told they are special, perceptive, different from anyone the scammer has met.

Researchers who study emotional manipulation describe this as incremental boundary-crossing — each new request is only slightly larger than the last, so refusing feels disproportionate. By the time the financial ask arrives, refusing would mean betraying a person the target has come to think of as the most attentive presence in their life.

The aftermath

Recovery from pig butchering is brutal in a way conventional fraud is not. Victims have lost not only money but a relationship they believed was real. Many do not tell their spouses for months. Some do not tell anyone at all. Support groups have begun forming in the United States and Singapore for people trying to process the double grief — the savings and the imagined partner, gone in the same week.

The texts usually stop the day the last deposit clears. Sometimes the scammer sends one final message, blaming the target for being cheap, before the number goes dark. Sometimes there is just silence. The good-morning notes simply do not arrive, and the trading platform’s customer support, which had been so responsive about wire instructions, stops answering. The pig, in the slaughterhouse vocabulary of the people who built the system, has been butchered. They move on to the next one before lunch.

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Think for a moment about the person in your life whose presence costs you the most energy. Not someone who has genuinely wronged you in a clear, identifiable way, but someone whose small habits and ordinary behaviour produce, in you, a reaction that is consistently bigger than what those habits or that behaviour would seem to warrant. The colleague whose tone of voice puts you immediately on edge. The relative whose certainty about politics or food or anything else triggers in you an irritation you cannot fully explain to yourself. The friend of a friend you have decided, on insufficient evidence, that you do not particularly like. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, working in the early decades of the twentieth century, paid sustained clinical attention to this kind of disproportionate dislike, and proposed that it has a specific psychological mechanism behind it. The mechanism, he argued, is that the parts of other people that bother us most acutely are very often the parts of ourselves that we have refused to recognise — repressed into a region of the psyche that he eventually came to call “the shadow.”

The shadow, in Jung’s mature formulation, is not the same as “the bad parts of you.” According to the Society of Analytical Psychology’s reference on the Jungian shadow, drawing directly on Volume 9 of Jung’s Collected Works, the shadow consists of “the hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality” — but it also contains “good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses.” Whatever the conscious self has refused to identify with, for whatever reason — whether out of shame, out of social training, out of fear, or simply out of inattention — becomes part of the shadow. The shadow, in Jung’s clinical experience, is then projected outward. The person carrying it tends to see, with unusual intensity, those very same qualities in other people, while not seeing them in themselves at all.

What Jung was actually claiming

The specific clinical mechanism Jung proposed was psychological projection — the unconscious attribution of one’s own disowned traits to someone else. Jung was emphatic that the process is automatic and largely outside conscious awareness. “Everyone carries a shadow,” he wrote in his 1938 essay “Psychology and Religion,” “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” The more vigorously a person represses an unwanted aspect of themselves, in Jung’s view, the more vividly they tend to see that same aspect in other people, and the more strongly they tend to react to it. The reaction, importantly, is not in proportion to anything the other person has actually done. It is in proportion to how much energy the perceiver is spending on keeping the same trait outside their own self-image.

The first clinical implication of this framework is that the people we find most difficult are, in a quiet sense, diagnostic. They are pointing — usually without any intention of doing so — at material in our own psychology that we have not yet acknowledged. A person who finds laziness intolerable in others, Jung suggested, is often someone who has not made peace with their own desire to rest. A person who reacts disproportionately to the arrogance of others has often suppressed their own ambition. A person who is harshly critical of vanity in their colleagues has often disavowed their own desire to be seen. The shadow does not invent these patterns; it inherits them from whatever the conscious self has refused to admit. The disproportionate reaction is the marker that something has been refused.

What modern empirical psychology has found

Jung was a clinician, not an experimentalist, and his framework was developed primarily through case work, dream analysis, and theoretical synthesis rather than through controlled studies. The empirical psychology literature has been mixed on whether his specific claims hold up under laboratory conditions. The general concept of projection — that people attribute their own traits to others — turns out to be well-documented, but in a form somewhat different from what Jung proposed. The form Jung described, where specifically repressed or disowned traits are projected outward, was disputed by mid-20th-century empirical psychologists, who could not consistently demonstrate the effect in laboratory studies.

This changed substantially in 1997. According to a 1997 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Leonard Newman, Kimberley Duff, and Roy Baumeister, defensive projection of the kind Jung described does occur, but through a specific mechanism: when people try to suppress thoughts about the possibility that they have undesirable personality traits, the suppression makes those trait concepts more cognitively accessible, and the accessible concepts then get used disproportionately when interpreting other people’s behaviour. In experimental terms, the Newman team showed that people who both avoided thinking about having threatening personality traits and denied possessing those traits also readily inferred those same traits from ambiguous behaviour by other people. The effect was robust across multiple studies and replicated in subsequent work. The Jungian clinical observation, after seven decades of contested empirical status, turned out to be partially correct, with a mechanism somewhat different from the one Jung had originally proposed but converging on the same basic phenomenon: what we cannot tolerate facing in ourselves, we are unusually quick to perceive in others.

What it means to “meet” the shadow

The clinical work that Jungian analysts have developed around the shadow concept over the past century has focused on a specific therapeutic move: taking back the projection. In practice, this means noticing the people and situations that produce a disproportionately strong reaction, asking what specific quality is triggering the reaction, and then asking honestly whether that same quality exists, in some form, in oneself. According to the International Association of Analytical Psychology’s institutional reference on shadow work, “the integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process” in the Jungian tradition. The IAAP framing notes that complete integration is impossible — the shadow contains material that extends beyond the individual into what Jung called the collective unconscious — but partial integration substantially changes the person’s experience of other people.

What changes, in this account, is the energy spent on rejecting other people for traits they may or may not actually possess. Once a quality is acknowledged as also present in oneself, the unconscious need to police it in others tends to subside. The colleague who used to be intolerable becomes, often, merely a colleague. The relative whose certainty was unbearable becomes someone whose certainty is one feature among many. The friend of a friend, met fresh, turns out to be more interesting than first impressions had suggested. The change is not in the other person. The change is in the perceiver’s relationship to a previously hidden part of themselves.

The limits of the claim

Honest framing requires noting what Jung’s shadow framework does not establish. It is not a comprehensive theory of why all difficult relationships are difficult. Some interpersonal conflict is straightforwardly about real disagreements over real things — values, resources, mistreatment, incompatible needs — and is not reducible to projection. Some dislikes are accurate appraisals of genuinely difficult people. The shadow framework applies most clearly to the specific subset of reactions that are disproportionate to their apparent cause, persistent across multiple instances, and surprisingly resistant to factual correction. Not every dislike is a projection. Some are simply dislikes.

The framework also makes no promise that meeting the shadow eliminates difficulty. Some relationships remain difficult even after substantial inner work, because the difficulty was never about projection in the first place. What the framework does seem to do, both in the clinical literature and in the experimental work that has followed Jung, is reduce the specific kind of disproportionate reaction that comes from disowning parts of oneself. The mechanism is not magical and the change is not total. But the pattern — that the people who bother us most are often pointing at material we have not yet been willing to claim — appears to be real, and the work of meeting it is, by every clinical and empirical account that has examined it, one of the more reliable ways to make the small irritations of ordinary human life take up somewhat less space inside a single person’s head.

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A major international study has revealed a surprising connection between cancer in cats and cancer in humans. Scientists have discovered that many cancers found in pet cats share important genetic features with human cancers. The finding could help researchers better understand how cancer develops and may lead to improved treatments for both animals and people […]

The post Study Finds Surprising Link Between Cats and Cancer in Human appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.

When Scott Jurek won the Western States 100-mile endurance run seven consecutive times, he was eating a fully plant-based diet, and the detail he kept returning to in interviews and in his memoir Eat and Run was not raw power or peak speed. It was the next morning. He could get up and run again. And the morning after that. And the morning after that.

That recovery margin — the ability to train hard on consecutive days without the legs feeling shredded — is the change athletes describe most often when they cut animal products. Before any visible strength gain, before any race-day breakthrough, the first thing that shifts is the soreness curve.

It sounds small. Across a twelve-week training block, it is the difference between 48 quality sessions and 60.

The soreness ceiling that limits every training plan

Every serious training program runs into the same invisible wall: delayed-onset muscle soreness, the dull ache that peaks roughly 24 to 48 hours after a hard session. It is caused by microscopic tears in muscle fibers and the inflammatory cascade that follows — neutrophils, cytokines, C-reactive protein, the whole cleanup crew arriving at the damaged tissue.

That inflammation is necessary. It is also what makes the second day of a back-to-back hard block feel like running in someone else’s legs.

If you can dial down the baseline level of systemic inflammation — without blunting the adaptive signal entirely — the soreness window shrinks. The next session arrives feeling possible instead of punitive.

What the inflammation data actually shows

Plant-based eating may reduce inflammation, with C-reactive protein — the most widely used marker of systemic inflammation in clinical medicine — showing reductions in those who switch to plant-based diets.

CRP is not a perfect proxy for muscle recovery. But it tracks the same underlying machinery — the background hum of inflammatory activity that every training session has to layer new damage on top of.

Lower the hum, and the signal-to-noise ratio of a hard workout improves. The body has less cleanup to do before it can start building.

The protein and microbiome machinery underneath

For two decades the standard objection to plant-based athletic eating was straightforward: plant proteins have lower digestibility scores and incomplete amino acid profiles, and muscle protein synthesis requires leucine in particular at thresholds plant sources struggle to hit in a single meal.

That objection has been weakening. A 2025 review published in Nutrients and summarized by News-Medical found that plant-based protein blends can match whey for muscle recovery and synthesis — provided the dose is adequate and the blend covers the leucine gap. Pea-and-rice combinations get most of the way there. Soy on its own performs comparably to whey in several head-to-head trials. Single-source plant proteins like hemp or pumpkin still lag behind; the athletes who recover well on plants are eating blends, eating more total grams, and timing intake across the day rather than relying on one post-workout shake.

The newer and stranger part of the recovery story lives in the gut. A 2026 study from Edith Cowan University in Western Australia tracked how training intensity reshapes the gut microbiome, finding that harder training measurably changes microbial composition — and that the direction of that change depends heavily on what the athlete is eating. Fiber feeds the bacteria that produce short-chain fatty acids like butyrate, which the gut lining uses as fuel and which appear to modulate systemic inflammation. An earlier Irish study comparing professional rugby players to sedentary controls — covered in Psychology Today‘s gut microbiome and exercise coverage — found the athletes had markedly greater microbial diversity, with fiber and polyphenols giving the gut something to work with that animal-only diets do not provide.

Why the change shows up before strength gains

Strength is slow. Muscle cross-sectional area changes meaningfully over months. Neuromuscular adaptation — the brain learning to recruit motor units more efficiently — takes weeks. None of it happens in a fortnight.

Inflammation markers move in days. Gut microbiome composition begins shifting within a week of dietary change. Subjective soreness ratings drop almost immediately when systemic inflammation drops.

So the first thing the athlete notices is not that they are stronger. It is that the second hard day of the week stopped feeling like a survival exercise.

That perception matters more than it sounds. Edith Cowan researchers, in their work on exercise intensity and gut health, kept coming back to a simple point: athletes who feel recovered train. Athletes who don’t, skip. The cumulative volume difference over a season is what produces the eventual strength and endurance gains.

What the athletes themselves report

The pattern coming out of the inflammation and microbiome data — lower background hum, faster turnaround between sessions — is exactly what the most public plant-based athletes describe in their own words.

Strongman Patrik Baboumian, who has set records including the yoke walk, has been vegan for over a decade. His reported motivation was not ideological at first. It was that he could train more frequently without breaking down.

Tennis players Venus and Serena Williams have credited plant-based dietary shifts with extending their careers into their late thirties and forties — careers built on the ability to recover from one brutal three-set match in time for the next round.

NFL players have been the most public converts in recent years, with quarterbacks and linemen emphasizing the same recovery-window argument. None of them claim plants made them faster or stronger in isolation. They claim plants kept them on the field.

The honest caveats

The recovery advantage is not automatic. Athletes who switch to plant-based eating and replace meat with refined carbohydrates and seed oils do not see the inflammation drop. The benefit tracks with eating whole plant foods — beans, lentils, whole grains, vegetables, nuts, seeds, fruit — not with the presence or absence of meat per se.

Iron, B12, omega-3s, and total calorie intake all need active management. Female athletes in particular need to watch iron status, since plant iron is less bioavailable and menstrual losses compound the deficit. B12 has to be supplemented. There is no plant source that reliably provides it.

Total protein intake usually needs to go up by 10 to 20 percent relative to an omnivorous diet to hit the same effective amino acid delivery. For a 70-kilogram athlete training hard, that is the difference between aiming for 1.6 grams per kilogram and aiming for 1.9 or 2.0.

The psychology of consistent training

There is a quieter dimension to this. Psychology Today‘s coverage of well-being habits people actually stick with keeps returning to the same finding: the interventions that work are the ones that produce a felt sense of improvement quickly enough for the person to keep going.

The recovery-window change does exactly that. It rewards the athlete within two or three weeks. The strength gains come later, but by then the dietary pattern has already locked in because the training itself has become more sustainable.

For coaches building programs around individualized client work, that early-win pattern is what makes the dietary intervention stick where countless others have failed.

The compounding math of one extra session a week

Consider a middle-distance runner doing five hard sessions per week. Add one more genuinely productive session — not a junk-mileage day, an actual quality workout — and over a twelve-week block that is twelve additional high-quality stimuli. Over a year, fifty-two.

Strength coach numbers run similarly. A lifter who can deadlift heavy on Monday and squat heavy on Wednesday without one cannibalizing the other accumulates roughly 20 percent more total tonnage across a year than the lifter who needs four days between heavy lower-body sessions.

None of this requires the plant-based athlete to be stronger on any given day. The advantage is durability, and durability compounds.

That is what Scott Jurek meant, twenty years ago, when he kept talking about the next morning. The race-day result was the part everyone saw. The part that produced it was the quiet accumulation of mornings when the legs cooperated, week after week after week, until the math added up to a course record.

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In the late summer of 2011, Venus Williams won her opening match at the US Open and then, two days later, withdrew before the second round. The reason she gave was not an injury. She had been diagnosed with Sjögren’s syndrome, an autoimmune disease that attacks the body’s moisture-producing glands and leaves many patients too drained to get out of bed. She was 31, a former world number one and seven-time Grand Slam singles champion, and the diagnosis had arrived only after years of mysterious fatigue that no doctor had managed to name.

What kept her on the WTA tour for more than a decade longer was not a new drug. It was a conversation with her younger sister Serena about what she was eating.

The diagnosis that almost ended her career

Sjögren’s syndrome is one of the most prevalent autoimmune diseases in the United States, with the Sjögren’s Foundation estimating that four million Americans live with it, the overwhelming majority of them women. The immune system mistakes the body’s own salivary and tear glands for foreign invaders and slowly destroys them. Dry eyes and a parched mouth are the textbook symptoms, but for many patients the worst part is something harder to photograph.

The fatigue. A weight that settles into the joints and refuses to lift.

Williams has described an exhaustion so heavy that ordinary movement could feel like an enormous effort. There is no single diagnostic test for the condition, which is part of why it had taken her years to get an answer. Patients often cycle through rheumatologists, ophthalmologists and dentists before someone connects the pattern.

By the time she went public in 2011, she had been losing matches she might have won and withdrawing from events she had committed to. She has spoken about mornings when the fatigue made it hard to get out of bed at all.

What the disease actually does

The glands go first. Then the tissue around them inflames. Then the inflammation can spread, to joints, to the digestive tract, sometimes to the lungs and kidneys. Sjögren’s is also highly variable: there is no single course the disease follows, and two people with the same diagnosis can have very different experiences. One patient might have mainly dry eyes. Another might be bedridden.

Williams was the second kind.

For a professional athlete whose career depended on sub-second reaction times and the ability to recover between three-set matches in punishing summer heat, the outlook was bleak. Most players diagnosed mid-career with a systemic autoimmune disease retire. Williams was a seven-time Grand Slam singles champion who had won Wimbledon five times. The conventional wisdom was that she was finished.

The sister who changed the conversation

Serena Williams had been training and traveling alongside her sister since they were teenagers practicing on public courts in Compton. The two had met in nine Grand Slam finals. They shared coaches, hotel rooms and much of the same circle.

After the diagnosis, Serena was the one who pointed Venus toward a change the tour was only beginning to talk about: a raw, plant-based diet. The specifics shifted over time, sometimes described as raw vegan, sometimes as what the sisters jokingly called “chegan,” a cheating-vegan approach that allowed the occasional piece of fish or cooked food. The core idea was cutting out dairy, refined sugar, processed flour and most animal products.

The science linking diet to autoimmune disease was, and remains, contested. But lifestyle and dietary change has become an active area of clinical research as an adjunct to conventional treatment for chronic autoimmune conditions, particularly for managing inflammation and fatigue.

For Williams, the change was dramatic enough to be visible from the stands.

What happened next

She took roughly seven months off and returned to competition in 2012. The comeback started slowly, with early-round losses, and for a while it looked like the gradual fade everyone had predicted.

Then it didn’t.

She worked her way back into the second weeks of major tournaments. In 2017, at 36 and then 37, she reached the final of the Australian Open and the final of Wimbledon. She lost both, one to her sister and one to Garbiñe Muguruza, but she had done something almost no athlete with a serious autoimmune diagnosis had managed. She had returned to the very top of her sport.

She kept playing. She entered tournaments in 2022, 2023 and 2024, including doubles in Miami in early 2024 at the age of 43. After a long break, she returned again in 2025 and carried her comeback into 2026, more than a decade past the diagnosis that was supposed to end her career.

Why the diet mattered, and what it couldn’t fix

Williams has been careful in interviews not to oversell the dietary change as a cure. Sjögren’s has no cure. The disease was still there. She still had flares, and she still pulled out of tournaments. But the daily floor of her energy, the baseline she could count on when she woke up, lifted enough that training became possible again.

She launched a plant-based protein company, Happy Viking, in 2020, partly to make the kind of products she had been improvising in her own kitchen available to other people. She has consistently framed the diet as one part of a broader management strategy that also includes medication, rest and careful scheduling.

Within families, the people closest to a patient often shape how a chronic illness gets managed day to day, sometimes more than any single appointment with a physician. The Williams sisters are an unusually visible example of a pattern that plays out in millions of households: a relative notices something, suggests something, and the patient, exhausted and frightened and ready to try anything, listens.

The sibling effect, scaled up

Psychologists have increasingly come to see the influence siblings have on each other as powerful and long-lasting, shaping identity, behavior and even physical and mental health in ways that long went underappreciated. Siblings share genetics, history and a peer-level trust that doctors rarely match. When Serena suggested the dietary change, she was not a celebrity dispensing health advice. She was a sister who had watched Venus struggle to lift a racket.

That distinction matters. People managing a chronic, life-altering diagnosis often do better when they have a close advocate willing to track symptoms, push back on bad days and notice patterns the patient is too tired to see for themselves.

Venus had Serena.

What her career looks like in retrospect

The numbers, viewed from 2026, are hard to absorb. Williams turned professional in 1994, the year Netscape was founded. She won her first Grand Slam singles title at Wimbledon in 2000. More than three decades later she is still entering tournaments, carrying an autoimmune disease that, in most patients, tends toward progressive decline.

She holds 49 WTA singles titles and four Olympic gold medals, and she spent a combined 11 weeks ranked world number one in singles. Much of that was built before 2011. What the years since have added is rarer still: a top-level career that refused to end on schedule.

And the part that came after 2011 is hard to separate from the conversation with her sister.

The fact that lingers

Sjögren’s syndrome takes its name from Henrik Sjögren, a Swedish ophthalmologist who described the condition in 1933 in his doctoral thesis. For most of the century that followed, it was treated almost as a footnote, a dry-eye complaint, mostly affecting older women, not considered especially serious. The understanding of it as a systemic disease capable of leveling a 31-year-old elite athlete is comparatively recent.

Four million Americans live with it. Most of them are not professional tennis players. Most of them do not have a sister who travels with them and notices what they are eating. But the lesson from Venus Williams’s case is not that a raw diet cures autoimmune disease. It doesn’t, and she has never claimed it did. The lesson is that a disease the medical literature once described as career-ending can sometimes be managed into the background, and that the person who notices first is often not the doctor.

She is still on tour. She is 45 years old. The exhaustion that pulled her out of the US Open in 2011 has not gone away. It has been negotiated with, every morning, for the better part of fifteen years.

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Archaeologists working with the Israeli Antiquities Authority have announced the discovery and excavation of a cave located just outside the town of Fureidis, which has revealed signs of early human presence dating back to between 250,000 and 400,000 years ago.

The team of researchers behind the ongoing excavation said the fortuitous discovery could represent a “time capsule” that has remained sealed for hundreds of thousands of years, offering researchers an unprecedented glimpse into a critical period in human evolution.

Ancient Cave Contains Evidence of Critical Period in Human Evolution

According to a statement emailed to The Debrief, the ancient cave, which lies south of Haifa, near the Zikhron Ya’akov interchange, likely dates back to sometime between 400,000 and 250,000 years before present. The team notes that the range would mean it was sealed since the time of the Acheulo-Yabrudian culture, a period when ancient human ancestors began to display several complex tool-making skills, including various stone blade designs which were in use by hominins until around 300,000 years ago, marking the end of the Lower Paleolithic period.

“The culture we are investigating here was characterized by a variety of advanced methods for producing flint tools, including small sharp handaxes, scrapers, and blades,” explained Dr. Kobi Vardi, head of the Prehistory Branch at the Israel Antiquities Authority and the study’s co-director.

Most archaeologists put the African departure date of the last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals between 700,000 and 500,000 years ago, and the first genetic interbreeding between the two species around 130,000-1,000,000 years ago. Therefore, finding a sealed cave containing relics from the period between these two critical evolutionary junctures offers the research team an unprecedented opportunity.

“We have been fortunate to excavate a unique site of global importance that has been protected from the ravages of time thanks to the exceptional conditions that existed here,” said team member Professor Ron Shimelmitz of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology and the School of Archaeology and Maritime Cultures at the University of Haifa.

Dr. Vardi agreed, noting that “It is very rare to find a site in such a state of preservation.”

“Every prehistorian who visits the site is absolutely thrilled,” he added.

“The Seeds That Led to the Development of Our Complex Culture”

In that same statement, Prof. Shimelmitz noted that the end of the Lower Paleolithic was a “unique time period” before Neanderthals and modern humans became the dominant hominids of the era and spread across “many regions.”

“Only a handful of sites from this important phase have been uncovered in Israel, and the wider Levant, and most of them are inaccessible for research,” the professor explained, adding that marked changes in human physiology, technology, and social organization “foreshadowed the traits and complex behavioral patterns that developed later and characterize both Neanderthals and modern humans.”

One component that helped facilitate the development of complex culture, highlighted by Prof. Shimelmitz, is the transition from ancient humans living in larger groups. He also emphasized the advent of human ancestors “spending longer periods at the same sites.”

Early excavations have already uncovered evidence of what the researcher termed “intensive use of fire.” These early forays have also found signs of prolonged human activity. Prof Shimelmitz said these signs suggest a “complex and rich camp life.”

Dr Vardi said that the ongoing excavation is uncovering animal bones, including ancient specimens of fallow deer, gazelle, and an ancient variety of horse.

Dr. Vardi also noted that these finds were discovered “alongside evidence of the presence of water,” which he suggests may have made the ancient cave an attractive location for hunter-gatherer groups inhabiting the region at the time.

High Resolution Studies of How Ancient Humans Lived

When discussing the implications of their findings, Prof. Shimelmitz first expressed the team’s appreciation for the financial support and enthusiasm shown by the project’s sponsor, the Ayalon Highways Company, “in enabling us to undertake the excavation.”

As for the scientific value of their initial discoveries and the potential for further insights into this period in human history, the professor noted that findings to date are typically associated with “the development of social cooperation and the transmission of knowledge, as part of the processes of human evolution.”

Dr. Vardi echoed those sentiments, while also noting that the ancient cave’s archaeological value “is no less important” than that of the well-known Nahal Me’arot site from the same evolutionarily critical period.

“(This site) will allow us to study in high resolution how humans lived at that time,” the researcher added.

Given the importance the research team put on the site, which included co-leader Amit Gabbay, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of Haifa are already putting forth what they describe as a “large-scale research program that seeks to reconstruct how humans lived, adapted to their environment, and developed new lifestyles and technologies over the course of human evolution.”

Along with heralding the site’s scientific value, the researchers highlighted its cultural importance by declaring their goal to make the site “open and accessible to all: to the residents of Fureidis, students at the nearby school, and anyone interested in the prehistory of the region,” once the formal excavations are completed.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

In the literature related to the powerful entheogen dimethyltriptamine (DMT), it is often reported that individuals claim to have had encounters with what they perceived as non-human entities during their DMT experiences. Descriptions related to these powerful visionary experiences range from what some describe as insect-like forms and machine-like intelligences, to what some describe as conscious entities associated with intricate geometries.

For years, many researchers have regarded these reports purely as hallucinations generated by the human brain while under the influence of the psychedelic compound. However, past studies have never directly tested whether these reported entities could represent something other than internally generated hallucinations.

Now, a recent preprint paper outlines a path toward testing this assumption experimentally.

A collaborative team from the Trace Institute and the nonprofit Noonautics has released a preprint titled Traces of the Other –Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism. The study presents a mathematical framework for understanding the human psychedelic experience and outlines experiments designed to test its primary hypothesis.

The research was led by Professor Emeritus Donald Hoffman, founder of the Trace Institute, and Dr. Andrew Gallimore, a neurobiologist and pharmacologist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and head of Noonautics. The preprint is currently awaiting peer review.

A Problem With a Default Answer

According to some figures, as many as 45% of the individuals who take a sufficient dose of DMT report experiences involving non-human beings. People describe these entities as intelligent and autonomous, and report similar experiences across different cultures and backgrounds.

Typical hallucinations tend to draw on material from memory, such as familiar faces, animals, or places. By contrast, encounters with other humans appear in less than 5% of DMT encounters.

The authors of the new preprint study argue that these reports are difficult to reconcile with conventional accounts of pure hallucination and that the consistency of reports regardless of culture, location, belief systems, and other factors warrants deeper investigation. 

A Framework Built on Conscious Realism

The project draws on Hoffman’s theory of conscious realism, which proposes that interacting conscious agents fundamentally constitute reality. In this framework, the physical world as humans perceive it functions more like a user interface than a direct view of objective reality. According to this theory, conscious agents of varying levels of complexity may exist beyond what humans normally perceive and go unnoticed in everyday life.

The researchers propose that DMT changes the perceptual interface, allowing consciousness to access regions where normal perceptual constraints are absent. In these regions, it may be possible to detect traces of other conscious agents. Hoffman says the project “will provide a new framework for exploring the effects of psychoactive substances such as DMT on the structure and function of spacetime.”

The Protocol That Makes Testing Possible

Testing these ideas has become possible due to past work involving technical development by Gallimore and researcher Rick Strassman. Typically, a DMT experience lasts only three to five minutes, which is not long enough for structured experiments. The extended-state DMT protocol, called DMTx, uses a controlled intravenous infusion to maintain a stable experience for up to an hour, allowing researchers to adjust the dosage as required.

That controllable window makes experimentation possible. “With a theoretical foundation for the highly unusual state of consciousness induced by DMT, we can test these theories experimentally,” Gallimore says.

Experiments Built to Fail

The proposed experiments are designed so that if the external-agent hypothesis is incorrect, the results will be negative. In one protocol, a computer in a sealed room randomly displays either blue or yellow, and a subject under DMTx attempts to learn the hidden color by interacting with an entity. Another experiment involves two isolated subjects under DMTx who try to transmit a random word to each other through a shared entity, a process that would be difficult to explain solely in terms of internal brain mechanisms.

The researchers acknowledge several limitations. Cooperation from entities cannot be guaranteed, results depend on subjective reports, and expectation bias is difficult to rule out. The preprint continues to treat the hallucination model as the default explanation for these entities. What distinguishes this work is that the hypothesis is now formulated in a way that allows for experimental testing.

“This collaboration is a first step to a mathematics of altered states of consciousness and, ultimately, for engineering our perceptual interface to expand our view of reality,” Gallimore says.

Hoffman and Gallimore will discuss the research publicly on Saturday, June 13, 2026, at the Lighthouse Campus at the historic Venice Beach Post Office in Los Angeles, with video to follow on YouTube.

Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.

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