The Mentat blog
Essays on seeing your whole life — branches, odds, and all — before you walk it.
- 5 min read
A Calculator for the Tree
We model whether to buy a $40,000 machine with a three-tab spreadsheet, and which of two decades to live with a gut feeling at 2 a.m. That's backwards — and it's fixable.
Read essay → - 5 min read
Your Life Is a Tree, Not a Track
Most advice hands you a single track. Real life is a branching, probabilistic tree — and the whole point is to see all of it, including the branches you'd rather not.
Read essay → - 4 min read
Compound Interest, but for Happiness
Money compounds — but so do skills, relationships, health, and identity. And happiness decays. The real object isn't a peak moment; it's the area under your wellbeing curve.
Read essay → - 4 min read
The Safe Choice Is a Bet (You Just Aren't Pricing It)
Staying put feels riskless. It isn't. The baseline is a branch with its own downside and its own expected value — and refusing to price it is still a decision.
Read essay → - 4 min read
80,000 Hours, One Unexamined Decision
You'll spend roughly 80,000 hours working and earn millions across a career — yet the decision steering all of it gets less analysis than buying a laptop. That asymmetry is absurd, and a few hours of modeling fixes it.
Read essay →