Let’s assume 1960 (JFK election) was the last “good year” in the USA. What has actually happened with inflation since?

Photo above - The good old days. Was 1960 the last "normal" year in America? You could get a newspaper for 10 cents.

I get 100 spam pieces a day ranting about inflation in America. This is a lot, but I couldn't say how much the spam rate has increased.

So I did the next best thing: I used the official US government dollar inflation website (link below) to calculate what happened to the US dollar since 1960. It’s big number, and a round one: 999% inflation. Something that cost $1 in 1960 theoretically costs $11 today. According to the US government. They wouldn't lie to us, would they?

I decided to check the online inflation calculator against some real-world purchases. If you want to have a cheerful and happy day, please don’t read any further.

1 – F150 pickup. America’s best-selling vehicle. According to several websites, this stickered for $4,000 in 1960. The average sale price in 2025 was $60,100. You could pay more – a lot more – for the nice ones, but let’s stick to average. The F150 price increased by 1,500%. Way more than the official 999% inflation rate. In Ford's defense, let me concede that the 2025 models can tow more and have bigger tires. But still . . .

2 – College Tuition. No, I am NOT going to cite “Harvard” because nobody you know actually went there. Let’s use Arizona State University instead. America’s largest public university. In 1960, tuition was $186. Not a misprint - $186 a semester for in-state students. In 2025 a semester (full 6 course hours) would be $5,416. Without dorm, meal plan, or parking. Still, that doesn’t look bad next to Harvard. However the ASU single semester price increase is THREE THOUSAND PERCENT. For a government run education. I don’t think this kind of stuff ever makes it into the official CPI data.

3 – Appendectomy – This one is especially tricky. Hospital costs are all over the map, as are hospitals. Best I could come up with: $418 in 1960 (before insurance), including a week’s stay in a hospital room for recovery. Today’s cost seems to average $20,000. How long you get to stay in that room varies too, but 1-2 days if there are no complications is the norm. Price increase: 5,000 percent – 5 times the official CPI inflation rate. I warned you to stop reading, didn’t I? I doubt putting the government in charge of hospitals will rein in medical inflation, after seeing what they did to college tuition.

4 – Grab bag – local costs may vary: Big Mac, up 1,400%. Converse sneakers – 2,000%. Washington post single copy – up from 10 cents to $3 (3000%)

Median US income for 1960 was $3,000. Today it’s 1,800% higher: $53,010. But we all feel poor, unless our last name is Musk, Bezos, or Swift.

As I said at the beginning – the official government data could be completely made up BS. How would we even know? And what did we expect from a bunch of guys who borrowed $38 trillion in our name which they never intend to repay?

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Inflation Calculator | Find US Dollar's Value From 1913-2026

Easily calculate how the buying power of the U.S. dollar has changed from 1913 to 2026. Get inflation rates and U.S. inflation news.

 www.usinflationcalculator.com

AMA with Jeffrey Ladish. Wednesday 2/4 at 2:00 PM CT

Executive director of Palisade Research; studying AI loss of control risks.

Amazing hack to assess accuracy of your writing. As I’ve been building this project I’m calling Better Political Conversations, I’ve stumbled across an AMAZING virus detector for my writing. When I think a section of my content is complete and fully edited, I copy-paste it into NotebookLM and have it generate a podcast of the content. The way the podcast AIs talk about the content makes the flaws in my explanations very obvious, and I go back and edit. It also gives me a sense of how and where people will be likely to fold pre-existing knowledge and assumptions into their interpretations of my words, and I’m challenged to find a less-interpretable-but-still-accessible version. When it finally gives me a good podcast, I feel way more confident in what I’ve got.

casre. The article here on Relatefulness vs Circling, and numerous instances of listening to people try to nuance intriguing distinctions between various tweaks of intersubjective practice, turns my mind back to the shamanic.  What I mean is that these modalities which emphasize conscious access to self-content which is recognisable and verballly communicable, needs to be supplemented by modalities in which we are nonlinear mysteries to ourselves and each other, reaching for the shares we don't understand, the languaging that doesn't make sense, the gibberish, the coded speech of subconscious and nonhuman wisdom.  This emerges to some degree in all the different styles but from my point of view it needs to be more explicitly highlighted in order to invite the strangeness of deeper levels of the self.

What are your secret internal moves, your cues? I'm eternally curious about how we navigate our worlds, and the tricks, jumps, hops, and skips we use.

Sports coaches have cues for all kinds of things. "Follow through" in golf, tennis, and throwing generally. "Chest up, hips back, knees out" for a back squat. "Light feet" or "quick feet" for agility training. 

These cues aren't attempting to be accurate descriptions of the world from a physics point of view. They're an attitude/orientation that helps a human do a thing a little better.

My contention: we each are an entire compendium of little skill orientations that we use all the time. But because they're second nature and interior, they're funcionally invisible and don't often get shared or talked about.

Wouldn't it be neat if we talked about them?

Some examples from me:

• "Can I do this with less effort?" Physically, this applies to anything. Sitting, pooping, walking, standing, reading. It's an immediate invitation into my body and more relaxation. There is often habitual extraneous muscular/mental/emotional tension in the system.
• If I'm feeling small, stuck, contracted, tense – it can often help to "get as big as the room". It's not something to really think about or analyze too much. Just… become as big as the room. When I do so, there's often more space for the knotted stuff to just be and/or move. This also works great even when things are good.
• I don't have a convenient handle for this one, but it's something like: "fall into wonder as you observe (from within) your body just doing simple things". Doing the dishes or making coffee could be a chore – or I can switch into looking through this lens and just be astonished at how intricate and skillful the dance of it all is. There's no way I could thinkmanage it all, and yet somehow it all happens anyway.

So what are your cues? Nothing is too simple, silly, or obvious.

A Thing I Want: More Playful Imaginal Experiments. I'm almost shaking-quivering with excitement here, and I have to try to say something, but there's no really good way to say it. So here's the bad/incomplete/short version:

Play more with your imagination, it's fun!

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Let's start small. 

Imagine you have a box in your hands. How big is it? What is it made of? What does it smell like?

Open your box and notice that there's a key inside? What kind of key is it? A modern key, an old-timey key, a futuristic keycard? 

Now that you have your key in your hands, go find the door it opens. Where is the door? What does it look like? What textures does it have? 

Use the key to open the door. 

What's on the other side?

If you'd like, walk through the door and explore. Have fun! The real world will be here waiting for you.

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If you ran that experiment what happened? 

Isn't it strange and delightful that somehow, out of somewhere, there was a box and a key and a door and whatever the mystery decided to put on the other side of the door?

Or maybe it didn't – what did you find, or what happened when you tried?

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These kind of imaginal playgrounds are used by various groups for all kind of things: healing, self-development, magic, self-discovery, divination, etc.

My favorite group and use combination is kids for play. 

Let's make imagination fun again!

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I have so much to say about this that I feel overstuffed and confused. Where even to begin? So I'll just leave this here and ignore its incompleteness.

Maybe I'll try to say more later. Or maybe I'll just run more imagination experiments and tell you what happened.

When you take one path. When you take one path, all other paths die and are left behind.

Such is the weight of all our choices.

But I'm not good at letting things die. I keep going back and dragging half-alive corpses around. Abomination!

You stink of the dead. Mark your endings and grieve them, foul beast!

I don’t know if I am doing this right. . I had the urge in my car to start singing an improvised song (inspired by my relateful camp experience at Annabeth’s Vocal Flow and Kedar’s bonfire jam) and it was in that exploration that I had the epiphany that I am allowed to write bad poems! This really excites me and now I’ve started to write a bunch of things that I feel poetic about. The permission to be bad has been crucial in my permission to try, and now I am wanting to maintain my permission to be bad and try in front of others. 

I haven’t posted on UpTrust because I question whether or not I am really “trustable” on any topic. I don’t feel qualified, or justified, or certifiably “trustable”, apart from maybe my honest attempts at honesty. But my honesty =/= truth. I could speak honestly about what I think a Beef Wellington is and still be wrong.  

But I can write bad poems, and I can be wrong, AND I can do that publicly. And in doing it publicly, maybe my poems become better and my honesty becomes truer. 

We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative; we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up.  

OK I’ve tried talking about this before and it always feels impossible, but it also feels super important, so here goes, relatively uncensored (meaning super philosophical, my apologies and hope some of you enjoy!):

“We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative”

1. The nature of the universe is co-constructed / nondual: I think “experience” and “reality” are fundamentally intertwined; you can’t talk about a world out-there without a subjectivity talking about it (experiencing) and you can’t have an experiencing without a world out there (reality). In other words, subject and object (consciousness and matter) are one interpenetrated thingy. When I say “reality” I really mean “reality-experience” and when I say “experience” I really mean  “experience-reality.” Sometimes I just say “Life.”
   
   I mean this in a very extreme way.
   
   Not collapsing to the outer (materialism): This is not “there’s a pre-existing world out there, and many different pre-existing subjective views on it” which is the common way of understanding pluralism. That framing still fundamentally separates the outer world from the inner, and presumes a kind of self-existence of the outer without consciousness, which I think is basically epistemologically untenable. We simply can’t know if that’s possible, ever, because every thought- or real- experiment we do will always be known, by us, inside of a conscious experience.
   
   Not collapsing to the inner (idealism): This is also not “there’s no world out there, just constructs,” which I see as incoherently self-defeating: where do the constructs exist? We’re just hiding the fact that we presume constructs are objectively existing prior to that statement, and then declaring nothing inherently exists. It also doesn’t jive with out lived experience that there seem to be “things” like the laws of physics that are outside of our ability to simply construct a new meaning around. Perhaps the laws of physics are mutable, but we’d still be left with a meta-physics claim, like the one I’m making:
   
   The inner and outer, the consciousness and matter, fundamentally coexist as one occurrence. This is what I’m referring to as “life” in the title of this post.
   
   

1. From this claim I think another follows that there’s a (possibly) inviolable metaphysics of correspondence between the interpretation and world-out-there, a “mirror” to the (obvious to almost all adults) correspondence between the world-out-there and interpretation: eg I can reinterpret the experience of stubbing my toe, but I can’t reinterpret the existence of the table leg I stubbed it on. The most obvious inverse correspondence is that I can use my reinterpretation to change the outer world: let’s say I consider stubbing my toe a lesson, and what I learn from that lesson is that I want to move the location of my table. Now I move my table.
   
   You can probably see where I’m going with this.
   
   If I don’t have access to the interpretation that toe-stubbing is a lesson-opportunity, maybe I’m less likely to move the table, or change my walking patterns, or whatever. (Yes there’s another failure mode in thinking the lessons are always only internal lessons, but that’s recapping the “collapsing to the inner” mentioned above, so already covered I think). Having the lesson-frame changes the way we encounter and react to adversity, even as small as toe-stubbing. Any given frame changes the way we encounter and react to all that we experience, because they’re interpenetratingly one thing.
   
   

2. “Everything in my life is collaborative” is one of the interpretation-choices we all have; and it is causative in the same way “stubbing my toe is a lesson” is causative. I think this is a pragmatic statement of fact; here’s the value-laden one:
   
   Seeing everything that happens as collaborative is very good way to live, and results in greater well-being.
   
   It puts us in flow with what’s happening rather than resistance; it has us take self-responsibility for “what now” and keeps us close to where our actual power is (meaning making, as Frank said yesterday); all of this leads to a better experience regardless of your values and regardless of your life circumstances.
   

“we are scared to say this because we don't want to victim-blame”

This feels very un-politically-correct to talk about because people immediately try to apply it to others. They misinterpret it to mean, “If someone has a shitty experience it’s their fault.” 

This is a mistake!

(1) I’m not using it to talk about others.
(2) The capacity to do something now doesn’t imply the capacity to have done something in the past.
(3) I’m definitely not saying it’s fair.

The statement is about everything in your life, not everyone’s life. The mistake at a philosophical level is trying to make it an “out there” proposition, instead of remembering the entanglement of inner-and-outer.

This clarification is super important because to the extent what I’m saying is true, it’s a huge, underutilized technology in well-being improvement available to you in your life, but it remains unavailable to you if you think that using it means you have to blame other people for their circumstances. Don’t do that! Not necessary! For personal use only! (Even when I apply these ideas in coaching sessions, and we teach them in The Relateful Coaching School, it’s always first from a place of asking questions, finding attunement.)

“but we're also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up”

The other most common block to trying on this perspective is that we’re terrified of being this powerful: 

• What if we don’t use it responsibly? (Then you’d have the chance to see that as collaborative, taking the results as feedback)

• What if we can’t use it well? (There’s no standard—that’s an unnecessary imposition we make up in our heads; and I don’t know if there’s an end either, so we’re always growing in capacity, if we want to) 

• Does this mean it’s our fault if we don’t have a good experience? (no, remember that would be collapsing the outer to the inner)

And we’re terrified at facing the reality of how deeply interconnected we are. 

This means the “I” that I think I am really is indistinguishable from the entire world, which calls into the question the nature of that I. This is a scary thing to face, in my experience. Luckily, as far as I can tell the nature of reality-experience is holonic—transcendence always comes with including. So yes, I am much much bigger than whatever concept I make of myself, but that bigness doesn’t erase the concept or the me, it simply contextualizes it in something much grander. Which ironically, gives us a lot more room for self-expression, play, and surrendering into embracing the whole human experience with all of it’s complexity, suffering, and joy.

#DeepTakes 

Erotic energy is often not about sex.
I think it is mostly an impulse to create something together. I don’t have a good model for the causal mechanism of how it works, but I think that attraction essentially hints at a specific potential between the two parties. Sex and “baby” is the creation-potential only a tiny fraction of the time.

Here are some of the many alternative creation-potentials, in no particular order. Would love to hear what else y’all notice, as this is not an attempt at an exhaustive list:

• A project for you to create together

  • as small as a party and as big as an organization

• An emotional gift one of you has for the other

  • eg: a piece of advice, sharing of life experience, an introduction to someone important

  • Similarly, information share—eg: a mutual friend needs to be taken care of 

• A quality or characteristic for you to integrate/embody more: The classic projection of a “golden shadow”

  •  Eg: “She’s so strong” because I’m not claiming my strength, or “he’s so smart” because I’m not comfortable admitting my own intelligence 

• A psychodynamic transformation (aka "healing")

  • Eg: you projecting your mom/dad stuff onto each other can be seen as a beautiful chance to make it conscious so you can be more present and available in all your relationships

• A different kind of relationship: Ongoing friendship, mentorship, employment, or some other awesome/potent relationship

• A chance to see what you’re avoiding in other relationships. This is the classic where someone cheats rather than deal with stuff at home.

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You meet someone new and feel that sudden frisson of erotic excitement. That’s a crush—must be romantic love, right? We’ve watched it happen so many times in ourselves, our community, our movies and books, that it’s almost taken for granted. But I think as soon as I point out the alternatives, they seem obvious too. I wonder if there are other media and cultural narratives to help support more awareness of the alternative? I feel like this would help people be more open to different kinds of love, different kinds of relationships, and suffer a lot less. I feel like this awareness has done so for me, at least.

Hat Tip to Ken Wilber, where I first heard of using the word “eros” as the creative impulse of the universe driving to more novelty.

Creative thinking vs winning an argument. Creative thinking needs to be taught and valued as highly as smart thinking, right thinking, and ethical thinking.  

I wonder if we've been trained - consciously and unconsciously - to converse in formats that can be intimidating and arguable ... inviting responses that are judging, which can then be judged back and forth:  smart or stupid, right or wrong, ethical or corrupt ... that binary thing we do.  I propose that this creates anxiety and intimidates creative brainstorming, mutually respectful musing, generous listening, genuine questioning, seeking connection and curious questions?  

I can be as guilty as the next person - fishing for affirmation by winning a point in conversation ...   

#DeepTakes

American aristocracy could learn some things from the old world. A big American founding myth is that we eliminated the aristocracy from our government, but the real American innovation is making it much easier to join the aristocracy starting as an outsider. 

Sure, great. A little closer to meritocracy, one hopes. 

But governance is complex enough that you’d ideally want to be trained from birth to do it. Programs of similar intensity to olympic training, for example. 

That was a potential upside of the previous method. You had a limited set of preselected kids who were almost certainly going to rule one day, so you could put them through the training to do so. It often worked pretty well.

Now anyone who is good at twitter can ostensibly rule without knowing anything about how to do it. 

Remember Boaty McBoatface? Our current timeline is the spiritual equivalent of running an internet poll to determine who is in charge of a nuclear reactor. Except orders of magnitudes more reckless and dangerous than that. 

 We need a better synthesis. 

#DeepTakes

Indian Marriages. I was at a family wedding yesterday and so much happens which at times is not necessary that we forget the austerity of the sacred ceremony like marriage.In Hindu marriages a fire is lit up around which the bride and the groom take circles,while the holy man receives sacred hymes which ties them together in Holy matrimony.During my growing up years I was a super inquisitive girl wanting to know the why’s.During once such wedding I had attended as a small child I saw my entire family returning back to the same spot where the Pheras(Holy matrimonial rounds) had taken place just sometime back.Now with my Aunt gone to her husband’s house it was empty.I asked my mom-mumma why have we come back here,to which she replace ed that we need to sit here for sometime as I should not be left empty.This logic stayed with me,and I would impart this knowledge.Today during the wee hours of the morning I again was about to give the same logic but as I opened my mouth to give the answer which has come from Mumma My Masters spoke through me-to make a wedding to be culminated successfully -THE FIVE ELMENTS OF NATURE COME TOGETHER AND BLESS THE ENTIRE CEREMONY THAT IS HOW IT IS CULMINATED SMOOTHLY AND NOW WE MUST THANK ALL THESE ENERGIES AND ASK THEM TO TAKE THEIR RIGHTFUL PLACE BEFORE LEAVING THE MANDAP.This explanation was well received by all who had to receive this knowledge and it has brought unimaginable kind of peace to the inquisitiveness in me.

benefits of not valuing paying more for quality services? . Was thinking about AI contributing to lower service rates by humans. I feel tension around this inevitable happening and had an insight that since we are moving toward lower costs, this could help usher in Universal Basic Income, a world where we don’t need to worry about how much we are making anyways. Does this make sense? It’s longterm though and there’s still a current today ouch to it all.