I haven't tweeted much about it, but I am running a part-time, 6 week program this summer at Fractal to help professionals master AI agents. It's based on everything I learned from training ~100 engineers over the last 2 years. Check to see if your employer will pay for it :)

i'm designing a custom keyboard for when i become a dad

kids only need two things: 1. love 2. The Way Things Work by David Macaulay

she was self-taught via khan academy, homeschooled, and had finished calculus at age 11. wow the internet creates the opportunity for such miracles. Thanks to Sal Khan, and the continued work of others who are democratizing knowledge

I kinda love the self-own of "as an adult" Correct, you have successfully lost one of the greatest virtues of children. Congrats!

my friend literally parted the matrix

this also amazed me as a kid from public school in the suburbs. sure, i was "gifted" and a "top scholar", but I had no idea what to do with myself. In high school, I planned to be an electrical engineer (?) at Intel (?) because I knew that Intel made the chips in my gaming computer, lol. anyway, the answer, it turns out, is friends and culture. You need a supportive context. Blogs can help. The internet can help. But mentors were very big for me. I still remember the first piece of real, opinionated career advice I ever got from a successful man. I basically just took it at face value and then my entire career was set from that point on. I still owe him a huge debt.

I have determined that it does not "take a village" to raise a child, but rather it takes a Grandma. There's a bunch of parts for which you need more than a grandma, but the main "hard" thing (eg. 24/7 nonstop responsibility) is 90% alleviated because grandma is responsible.

it's okay to ask dumb questions, even if you have a prestigious job, even if you are good at some things, even if you have a college degree, even if you write software or do math or studied physics. Niels Bohr was stupid and asked dumb questions, even about movies

"just grab the dude you like and convince him" is generically good dating advice imho

men are delaying fatherhood to boyboss imo, (biased because I'm a man, I guess) men intentionally postponing family formation is a much larger effect than women postponing family formation. it's anecdotal, but the women I know want kids; the men I know "want them in 10 years"

OpenAI is hiring junior engineers. I called this. Junior engineers use AI in ways that surprise more senior engineers: "During my visit, I met with Sulman Choudhry, who heads up ChatGPT’s Engineering and Applied Research functions. He had a few interesting things to say: OpenAI now hires junior engineers, not just seniors. The company is finding success with a “super senior + super junior” mix. Super juniors are early-career software engineers, who are AI-native, entrepreneurial, and several of whom were at the startup accelerator Y Combinator, which is also headquartered in San Francisco. Super juniors use AI tools in ways that surprise more experienced colleagues, Sulman said."

welcome to the world, little one.

it still boggles my mind that I can just ask a text-bot to produce art like this. i live in an age of miracles.

I read a lot of bullshit sentences like "how can we create social change in a system that seeks to atomize and isolate us." Uh... just host dinner parties? Like literally just go knock on your neighbors door. Nobody is seeking to atomize you, you just moved away from home...

my friend likes to say "the next big religion will come about to help humans overcome superstimulus." Superstimulus is an Apex Predator in our era, but overcoming this predator will give us a super-powered ability to coordinate, focus, and play games of our own choosing

wow this is art. It's like "The McKinsey Consultant's Guide to Self-Actualization for Men", but unironic. I've not really seen many slides that makes me appreciate the art of the slide as much as this one

TIL: during the golden age of Athens, the city was about 0.7 sq miles, and held 75,000 people. For perspective (pop/sq mile): - (Ancient) Athens: 107,000 - Manhattan: 69,468 - LA: 8,499 - SF: 6,266 If we want a golden age, we should consider raising the density. A lot.

ban devices that have little LEDs on them everywhere that I can't turn off. I know if looks cool in the store, but *please* i'm trying to go to sleep and I just can't stand how my monitor has a blinking LED that I can't turn off! why!?

Being on Twitter creates a weird pain for me because it's very obvious that the wise people aren't rich and the rich people aren't wise and this fucks with me on like every level

you are not owed my labor. you are not owed my daughter's labor. you are not owed my friend's labor. you are not owed poor people's labor or rich people's labor. you are not owed anyone's labor. I will give my labor as a gift, or I will not give it at all. You do not own me.

i am still wildly progressive on infrastructure, UBI, human rights, futurism, art, and expression... but i find myself increasingly morally conservative. I have a family now, and many more responsibilities. I want to be surrounded by responsible, upstanding, happy citizens.

lmfaooo

i am (very likely) starting a small montessori homeschooling co-op for toddlers (~16mo -> 3y). finally!! i've been dreaming of this for years. joke about the outcomes you want!

Also highly confusing and mysterious to me, and increasingly so. I just don't get it... But I also don't judge anyone for it. I see it as a true tragedy, and a true agony, to all involved or affected. But I just want to say some things randomly to perhaps start a conversation. When I was in high school, I feel like everyone good kind of loved everyone else good. It was like "oh well, we'll all marry each other, so you get Alice, and I'll get Sarah, you get Tom..." Everyone just seemed... okay with that? I certainly was. It felt normal. In a way, I had a crush on EVERY smart, pretty girl. And some, I had crushes on most of all. And some liked me, too, how wonderful. But I wanted monogamous marriage, so once I started dating one, I was fiercely loyal. Obviously, in another way, I believe in soul mates, and in God, and in having found the other half of myself... But sometimes when I talk to my friends it's like they just aren't that enamored by smart, happy men, or smart, pretty women. It's like they are not enamored by people enough, as a base rate. As if they are filtering their ability to feel feelings before they feel them. Are people scared to have crushes? Or do people have plenty of crushes, and it's like they keep getting rejected after the first date? So many first dates. I can't imagine. Again, I've been on like 8 first dates in my life. I just... trust my intuition, I guess? If I had a good feeling while flirting with this person, then I just figure we will make it work and I keep trying to make it work. Seems like maybe some people are searching for reasons why it might not work? For instance, I've never considered red or yellow flags. I've only considered "the big green flag", the one that makes me know if I want this. Are people quibbling? If you want to make it work, just do it. If you are making a mistake, this will be clear very soon. Have faith. Always do your absolute best. Another theory: I had two healthy parents in a happy marriage who somewhat begrudgingly but also very supportively allowed me to date and to explore romance in my early teenage years. Did I just learn subtle mental models of how to make relationships work this way? Another theory: I would listen to relationship talk shows with my mom on the radio on the way to school. Not sure if this was intentional from her?? I don't think so, I think she was just interested in it. Anyway, did I pick up a bunch of really mature mental models for relationships at age 7 and then have over a decade of peak wisdom and happiness to refine them?? I don't think I was perfect by any means in my romantic life. I guess I just found the whole thing like... Obvious? I feel the feeling in my heart that says I want to be around person X, so therefore I just do everything in my power to be around X all the time, both in body and in spirit. To draw spiritually close. I want her to think of me when I'm not there. I want to be with her when I am there. Oh, looks like we are boyfriend girlfriend now. Oh no, we're breaking up because we're bad for each other. Terror. Grief. Pain. [delay as I build natural courage] Oh now I have the feeling in my heart that I want to be around Y all the time... I repeated this like... 4 times total? I almost had it in 2, or so I thought (although I thought that every time, lol), but the relationship unexpectedly and catastrophically blew up in a way that would later come to be obvious. Fourth time is the charm, I suppose. I was set up on a blind date with a smart girl. Didn't know what she looked like, and I asked not to be told. When I met her, I was instantly in love. She was so beautiful. She was so funny. She was so smart. She told me she didn't think we were compatible, that we should just be friends. I told her "I'm not so sure about that. We should wait and see." We are now married. I love her. I have always loved her. What does it mean that I didn't know what she was going to look like, but I was so excited to meet her anyway? You can look at as many selfies as you would like, but you will never know what someone looks like (the way they really look, in their spirit) until you spend 5 years with them, and even then, they will change, and you will come to meet more of them. If I am doing my job right, every day is a blind date with my wife, even now. I am still meeting her. I am still getting to know her. I am still falling in love with her. Dating doesn't stop, I've just chosen to date the same person, the same soul, over and over and over again, for the rest of my life. Every day. I don't know if anything in here was helpful, but I hope you all find monogamous love. I hope you choose to commit yourself to another soul forever, and to inextricably and impossibly entangle your lives in a way that could only be called reckless and absurd. I hope you find this fun and daring and wild. I hope you trust your intuition much more, and make many more costly mistakes. I do not think there is any eternal love without life-shattering risk.

what the hell is attention. explain attention to me right now. what is attention.

what is the 2022 equivalent of spending $300MM to build 1689 beautiful public libraries "dedicated to the diffusion of knowledge." in 1900 (1681 of which are still around) how could billionaires be as civically ambitious as Carnegie?

I am married to the hot, smart woman of my dreams and have a happy 7mo daughter. I said I would wow her on the second date, and I did. (she said "we should just be friends" after date 1). We talked. We kissed. We fell in love. Just love people and stop micro managing this stuff

i love that my friend makes his midjourney art in our shared discord, so I get to see all the beautiful things he is daydreaming about...

also coming out on team "billionaires existing is fine???" here. what are we afraid of exactly? It's like saying "no sane society would have special forces" or "no sane society would have political leaders" or "no sane society would have a popular religion"

okay but imagine if you wrote down: 1) everything you want in life 2) how other people can help you get it 3) why they want to help you get it some crazy stuff might happen, idk 🤷‍♂️

Helping your friends exit poverty is probably the number one thing you could do to unblock them, above and beyond any "residency" or "inner work" Like it's great to help people with their inner work, but have you tried helping them with their outer work? It's very helpful!!

do people have immediate A/B preferences on this screen? It's from my friend's deck building card game

It's crazy how much of the attraction here is just lighting and plants. What people want: - automation - plants - sunlight - family This is a solvable problem, where is the startup that fills my house with self-managing plants?

top of my mind is always "why don't all the best people coordinate to build the best stuff??" why aren't we already in a golden age? why isn't everyone flourishing already? why aren't we already living meaningfully, wonderfully, virtuously? why isn't the culture valorizing this?

The need to use willpower to get work done is an anti-signal. The fact you have it is great, but if you need to lean on it all the time for the basics of your work is indicative that you do not have a good, supportive context. Fractal is designed to fix this.

I’m excited to announce a new community experiment: "Fractal University". An in-person school community dedicated to completing (and teaching!) the best online courses in the world and publishing our notes. Our first semester starts on September 5, and you can apply now. (1/7)

Specifically, (with respect to family help) I'd rather have a grandma and no village than have a village with no grandma.

engaged to the most beautiful, ambitious, true-hearted, curious, and wonderfully weird woman in the world 💍 Here's to forever! ❤️ @Prigoose

oh my god, this is so typical. imagine if college was just the real ("harsh") feedback every single day, and then the emotional support, encouragement, and training you need to recover from that feedback and persist without crashing out. could be interesting.

My experience at a Montessori school was the opposite: the child's impulse to seek meaning and purpose is so strong our understanding of the reason behind Netflix addiction in adults is in the stone age. It's certainly not caused by an impulse to do nothing

guys, i've been hosting dinner parties every sunday for over 1 year now 🎉

you can just fuck off and live in a monastery and love yourself and be free. You don't need to start a company or a family or a network or write a book or have an account on the internet or do literally fucking anything. You can be free. You are free.

look fellas, i proposed to my wife in 2" inseams during summer. You can do this.

my very smart friend says she doesn't know what she wants to do, but then I asked her what she *does* do she said "i just read, write to myself, and talk to people all day" anyone out there who knows a job for someone who just wants to read, write, and talk to people a LOT?

please stop ducking away from greatness. if you know you were meant to be great, just fucking own it. SAY IT. if you know your friend was meant to be great, tell them to drop everything! we live in the safest era of all time, what the hell are you scared of?

I can systematically teach a love of software engineering. My students say they are "addicted to coding" and that the 60-hour per week school is their "home away from home". This is worthy of serious scientifc study.

"BAD HABITS" DON'T EXIST. YOU ARE NOT "LAZY". BEHAVIORISM IS MADE UP. YOUR BODY IS TRYING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS THAT YOU AREN'T RECOGNIZING. WHAT ARE THEY? ASK YOURSELF ABOUT YOUR OWN BEHAVIOR FROM SCRATCH, STOP LETTING POP SCIENCE ARTICLES TELL YOU WHAT YOU ARE. WAKE UP

imo, poly people have trouble with marriage bc marriage is a fundamentally scarce thing. You are committing all of your scarce resources to one person for the rest of your life. That's what marriage is. You can't split that in any fraction and then have it be the same marriage

watch out, world.

Leaves out where the money comes from. The money came from a customer who wanted to pay to use a software tool. Caring more about writing good code than building good tools that people want to pay for is not really virtuous by any means.

lol, the industry actively stopped training juniors for 2 years and basically flatly stated "we only need seniors now" Then the industry complains that it's hard to hire and engineers can all demand really good comp. Yes, because you stopped training juniors. Hire juniors!

I love this photo of Priya like (15?) hours after her birth. She is so beautiful and strong

you changed the world, man. you changed the trajectory of my life. i owe you a great debt, one too large to repay, i think. i'm really really happy for you, and so happy for your family and for your son. thank you, thank you, thank you.

Some simple lessons I've learned from teaching Fractal Bootcamp so far: 1. The children crave rigor. 2. Lectures are a waste of time 3. Humans learn via Culture, not Curriculum. 4. There's a virtuous cycle between creating and demoing; do both. 5. fear is, in fact, the mindkiller 6. Students want real-world experiences & real-world impact 7. internships good 8. executive coaching good 9. talking feels much better than coding for many juniors. your job as an educator is to encourage them until coding genuinely feels better than talking. 10. AI is insane. Absolutely insane. It changes everything. No one knows, anyone who tries to tell you they understand does not understand. We're so, so, so early in this new medium.

my advice to new parents: Get 24/7 live-in help for the first 6 weeks. Ideally this is one of the grandmothers, but anyone responsible, conscientious, and deeply experienced/calm/wise with newborns will do, if you plan right. Completely game changing

many lovely people feel depressed, lonely, and uninspired because they are in a depressing, lonely, and uninspired environment, and it has nothing to do with them. There are actually pretty easy fixes (like moving and quitting your job), but it's upsetting and hard to admit that

i have always been the type of guy who has a multi-tool on me (has been useful in countless situations), but it's been stolen by TSA 3 times now due to forgetting it in my backpack, and I haven't bought another in defeat.

good flirting is giving the other person the option to escalate or back away with plausible deniability and paying attention to which they do nice, succinct summary h/t @nardposterino

You can earn (EARN!!) money by doing something people love and want to see more of in the world... But you have to pick a socially acceptable way to ask for the money, which I think is kind of a funny bit about it.

what's more entertaining than netflix? more fun than video games? more romantic than tinder? more attention-grabbing than vertical video? imo, it's a functional, healthy tribe. when i am in a good tribe, it feels like my senses are being used to their fullest extent

Scenius' are also obsessed with unblocking each other's work! There are so many examples of this from my research. (unblocking as in: removing roadblocks to progress, and pushing each other's work forward)

Alan Kay (1987) on science pedagogy: “The sad part of Hadamard’s diagram is that every child is taught math and physics through the [purely symbolic] channel that almost no adult mathematician or physicist uses. They use this channel to communicate, but not to [work].”

there are no rules, you can literally just ask for what you want. consider doing it in a series of blog posts over the next several years, or in a tweet consider writing a 5 year master plan for everything you want and exactly how people can help you get it and why they want to

men want to start their families in their late 30s after a successful career; they want to be basically retired, they want to have finished all their adventures. Obviously this is going to lower TFR. Want more kids in the world? Perhaps start by being the man who has them.

update on my first ever bootcamp cohort -- one of my students just raised $400k for their startup!!! holy crap i'm so proud

you have been visited by the good luck baby reply with "thank you, baby 🙏" for 1 week good luck beware: if you do not thank baby you will receive one (1) grumpy curse 😵

Just watched the movie. Holy. Shit. How did they capture THE THING I think about all the time. Are we all like this? How many people meditate on this same conflict all the time??

wow this went megaviral one important part of the story: as soon as I stepped in the flood water, before I had even composed myself, I called the group chat -- "I need 3-5 people for 3-4 hours. Please help!" If you want a community, you need to learn how to ask for help.

im a dad now

True, but an interesting flip side: Friends who have abandoned the notion of career trajectory entirely have had some of the most exploratory/adventurous careers I've seen Making space for interesting can look like dropping the ball.

*me, literally sobbing*: you can't just turn "hanging out with your friends" into a career! only rick rubin can do that!! it's because he pushes them to produce their best work and helps them distribute it!! your friends aren't just going to donate to keep you alive!!

i'm in my basic bitch era and i love it. Here is my basic bitch advice: - learn to code & make good money in tech - read self-help books - invest 30%+ of income, max your 401k/Roth, become wealthy - start a family - live near your friends - do politics - play, sing & be merry

sorry, I'm bringing my daughter with me to things I do every time unless she is explicitly banned, in which case I'm often going to ask why families aren't welcome. Families come as a unit. You can either be a society that supports families, or one that marginalizes them.

Alright today is the day where it's official for me: The "new right" is now the most annoying group of people on the internet by far. I don't know how they managed to be more annoying than people who used your identity as a "gotcha" in arguments, but we're there now.

- Free to study for 20 years - Free to do God's work for 40 years (genuinely I feel this way. I know not everyone does, but I have advice if you dont) - Free to retire with all my expenses paid, and a secure society for 10-30 years Am I the only one who feels free? I feel free.

tech bro is a dumb slur. techne is a virtue, literally referring to "art, craft, and skill". brotherhood is a virtue - the bonds between brothers are beautiful and worthy of reverence. you are making fun of technical skill and brotherhood. a brotherhood of technical mastery.

Last weekend I was married to the love of my life and the light of my soul 10/09/22 marks the birth of The House of Rose 🌹 I revere @Prigoose and always will. There could be no better woman with which to work, play, and scheme for the rest of my life. I love you, Priya.

An update on Fractal Tech Bootcamp, and a request for help 🙏🏼 I started an AI engineering accelerator (a “bootcamp”) about 1 year ago, because my friends and I could not find enough good AI talent to hire, and I’m obsessed with educational reform. The bootcamp was an experiment- an attempt to see how much better adult education can be when we apply principles from my education research into Montessori, Xerox PARC, ARPA, The Manhattan Project, Black Mountain College, YCombinator, The Royal Society, The Jesuits, and other great cultures. It might sound grandiose, but what if I treated culture and education as an engineering project? What if I leveraged everything I knew about tech, culture, and education to help students learn effectively? We've run 3 cohorts so far, and the results are very good. Even in a tough tech market, we have a 100% placement rate into SWE jobs. One of my students raised $500k for his startup. And the thing is, this is barely a prototype- I’ve only built out a fraction of the educational program I intend to build. I'm just getting started. Montessori describes a process called “normalization” by which the student adapts to the culture of focused work in the classroom. After a child has normalized, they work just for the sake of it, because they want to, because they enjoy it, because they love the work of learning, because everyone around them loves the work of learning. We have built a space and a culture where everyone loves to work on software engineering, all the time. At Fractal Tech, students are immersed in this rigorous, high-achieving environment where shipping 3-5 PRs per day is a baseline expectation of the culture, because we enjoy being prolific. Students learn how to work on professional engineering teams before they graduate, because every student gets an internship with a local startup. Students learn what real code review looks like, because every instructor has led engineering teams, and we deliver brutally honest (and invaluable) feedback on code quality. Also, we built an entire tech coworking space to create a feeling of immersion. If you want to teach someone French, don't give them a dictionary, just drop them in France. Students work side-by-side with over 50 other professional founders and engineers, who naturally mentor the students and show them what real work looks like. Students work in-person, they make friends, they network casually, just by being in the space. I’m proud of what we've built so far, and now my goal is to share it with the world. I’m reaching out to Twitter for referrals because you know what I’m about, and I could use your help finding ideal students. Maybe you, reading this, are my ideal student :0 If you have a friend who could use our program, and our network, to level up as a software engineer, please refer them to me. Our ideal student knows how to code, but wants help becoming great: Think recently unemployed devs ready to bounce back, self-taught devs or CS students looking to break into the industry, coders and PMs stuck in boring jobs, or entrepreneurs who need technical skills & a network to make their startup happen. They will be in good hands. Sincerely, Andrew P.S. website in next tweet to appease the Twitter gods

apparently, off-season cruises can be very cheap i found a 16-day transatlantic on Norwegian's Breakaway for $1250 per person (or $78/day). to be clear, that includes: dining, drinks, broadway, spa/sauna, aqua park, cleaning... this is probably great if you're a writer!

she is my best friend

1. Soothing is a basic human need, you can't get rid of it. You can only meet the need. 2. Most of us are self-soothing, because we don't engage in any social soothing after moving away from home. 3. Self-soothing can be so distressing that it is often mislabeled "addiction"

baby

I just want to raise my kids and study with my friends in a dense, walkable community of friendly, ambitious, nerds who are constantly trading expertise with each other while embarking on many independent, interwoven grand adventures. Is this too much to ask? (no.)

Have you ever met someone who is in permanent "the stakes are always high" mode? It's really hard to make things better if you're too serious. There's something magical about play and humor and their ability to help you think about problems in depth. To relax so you can improve

are you freaking the fuck out? try God, like literally just try praying to a very kind and forgiving and loving God who loves you like his child and will protect you for a couple minutes anyway, carry on.

LessWrong deserves more credit for its role in the online intellectual scene we inherited -- especially the kind, good-faith, nerdy essay style. LessWrong is an intellectual ancestor -- like Grandpa, or Dad. Idiosyncratic, sure. I might disagree, sure. But still family

Yea, we live in Brooklyn, what about it?

my business has officially leveled up from the "you can just do things" stage to the "you really ought to be paying for a lot of nice things" stage. this is a scary transition because it's kind of a one-way door. now i pay for lawyers and accountants and coaches and teachers!

guys the demand for coliving houses in nyc is like 10,000; i have infinity people. the supply is 0; every house is full and overwhelming with demand. if you start a coliving house here (and you are responsible, kind, and charming), you will have infinity demand

ok, but you have to admit i have an objectively cute baby. baby influencer

One interesting thing from Fractal is that 99% of people never actually learned the lesson. The lesson is that you can live in Utopia of your own making if you live walking distance from many friends. But ppl keep moving away lol. Even I forgot the lesson at one point!!

My wife says I have a talent for unblocking ambitious people and should record a coaching session so others can see how. So I'm offering 30 minutes of free coaching to 5 people who feel stuck (especially in your career or business). DM me if you want to be publicly unstuck!

as someone who basically structured a successful sabbatical for myself, I have a lot of advice here. hard to deliver it all at once, it's worthy of an essay perhaps

We started giving our daughter large chunks of steak to gnaw around 7 months. It became her favorite food. She's 8 months now and has gotten so good at eating steak, she just ate a quarter of a filet without any choking, and with almost no intervention 😲

man... if i could just leave people with one lasting impression it's like... if there's only one damn thing to do on this Earth before you die it is to make a Home for your friends. we have all this fucking wealth and most of us are totally without Home. im gonna cry.

this is off-brand for me, but: stripping children of their sovereignty turns them into weak, shallow husks. my generation has been systematically stripped of sovereignty at the expense of our development how do we become strong if our decisions are made for us at every step?

i talked to harrison, a fractal bootcamp student who tripled his income in 7 weeks. we talk about how he broke out of the adhd gifted kid burnout cycle, learned to feel emotionally safe working hard again, and rehabilitated his relationship to ambition

We did it!! Fractal University: Spring '24 is official. Cheap, abundant education could be commonplace in society. We're addressing that by teaching everything we wish we knew, in-person, in NYC. Our second semester starts on Jan 27 w/ 20+ classes, and you can apply now! (...)

This cohort hasn't even graduated yet, and 4 of my students have jobs 😁 1. H graduated 5 weeks early with a $184k offer 2. B graduated 3 weeks early with a $150k offer 3. A graduated 3 weeks early with a $150k offer 4. K graduated 2 weeks early with a $138k offer

so i did @visakanv's annual Lord of the Rings tradition this year. A couple new things I picked up: 1. endings matter so much. Lord of the Rings has one of the best and most heartfelt endings of any adventure movie ever made. Ending an epic 13 hour journey is not easy, and the ending was actually so good that it made me appreciate the journey more. The ending made me appreciate how long the movies were, it made me appreciate how many different hardships we witnessed, it made me appreciate all the antics and all the drama... I think with a weaker ending, I would have felt retrospectively felt like the movies were too long. "Sure, the movies are good, but did they really need to be so long? Did we really need so many scenes that essentially show us the same emotional struggles?" Instead, the ending was so strong that it made me retrospectively wish the movies were longer!! I wish I had even more time with Sam and Frodo and the Fellowship so I could feel their parting as much as I see they do. 2. It now feels obvious to me that Hobbits represent children and The Shire represents the childhood home. Just look at how earnest they are, how silly, how purely emotional. Look at how they hug and kiss and play with each other. Look at how they love. They are the only creatures who can bear the weight of the one ring (and the burden of saving humanity) without corruption. The children are asked to do an impossible task, to face an unspeakable evil, because only they can face it with enough love and friendship to survive. 3. There are some other archetypes I caught; I was especially interested in Denethor, son of Ecthelion's suicidal, decadent, delusional nihilism. He was such a failure of a leader, such a phony king, that he would rather give up than face the consequences of his failure. And more so, he would rather not even have to see the consequences at all -- so he hides away in his fortress, he tells all his men to give up the fight, and then he tries to kill himself and his son. It's like he's so much of a failure that he has now become delusional about when success is possible for anyone else! He won't let his son live, because surely it isn't possible for his son to be alive given how bad things are. He won't let his soldiers fight, because surely there is no point fighting given how bad things are. At every step, he tries to quit playing the game (and to get everyone else to quit, too!) so he doesn't need to face his own failure. Despite all this, of course, Minas Tirith stands, and Gondor wins the day with the help of Rohan and Aragorn. Denethor could have been there to see it, and he could have enjoyed victory with his son, but instead he commit suicide. Pathetic, sad, delusional. It's such a curious archetype to me. But I see it in people in real life. It comes up as a desire to crush other people's dreams. "That is impossible, you can't do that." or "I tried, but it's just not possible."... then when you point out that it is clearly possible, because someone else in the past did it, they say things like "those people had special circumstances. It's not possible any more. Only special people can succeed. There's no point trying." etc... You might respond "Well, we can do all the special things so that we create the special circumstances and become the special people." and eventually they either change the topic, continue to bring up incoherent objections, or eventually just get angry, as if you are against them. Denethor is the same. He wants to be right more than he wants to win. Victory is right there for him to take!! But no, he needs to throw it away so he can prove that everything is lost. It's worse than suicidal, it's destructive. It's worse than nihilism, because he cares enough to dissuade other people from trying. It's narcissistic pessimism. In Denethor's eyes, anyone who believes there is hope for Gondor is an enemy (despite Gondor being his kingdom to lead). They are an enemy because they threaten Denethor's fragile worldview -- which is humiliating. And there is nothing worse to a narcissist like Denethor than being publicly wrong and humiliated. This archetype would rather lose at every one of their goals than face humiliation, or humble themselves by admitting their wrongdoing. Though, of course, we know that these admittances are the very actions that would redeem them. Sad. Thank you @visakanv for the tradition.