Scaling down individually is very hard. Imagine that if you go to a place where everybody is dressed nicely, and you are the only one who doesn't dress nicely. Everybody goes on vacations to a great place and you go to the Jersey shore. It's very hard to do these things without an organized mechanism, but it looks to me like there might be some organized mechanisms.

When people are in severe pain, there's an expression, you're a "pain person," and what that means is that nothing else matters.

The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.

What reminds you in your environment about saving? Nothing.

We all want explanations for why we behave as we do and for the ways the world around us functions. Even when our feeble explanations have little to do with reality. We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.

There's something about [cyclically] doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating.

that when given the opportunity, many honest people will cheat.