🔥🔬 New Year’s Experiments > Resolutions, 🧠 How to Stop AI from Killing Your Critical Thinking, 📚 Red Rising’s Pierce Brown on Life, 😌 a note on being just one thing

#74: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.

Welcome to the 74th edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.

This week we’re talking New Year’s Resolutions…kind of. Mostly dumping on them, actually.

Plus, I continue to harp on the importance of using AI to elevate your thinking vs. thinking for you, Red Rising’s Pierce Brown offers some powerful life lessons, and I note the delightfully indulgent experience of being just one thing at a time.

I will be off next week, so I hope you enjoy this edition. I’ll see you in two weeks.

With love,
Chris

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Here’s this week’s antifragile 4 🔥:

1. 🎉🔬 New Year’s Experiments > Resolutions

2. 🤖 🧠 How to Stop AI from Killing Your Critical Thinking (Video)

3. 📚 Red Rising’s Pierce Brown on Life

4. 😌 a note on being just one thing

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1.) 🎉🔬 New Year’s Experiments > Resolutions

Handsome AI scientist doing life experiments

I love the start of a new year. It’s a wonderful time to step back, take stock, and commit to a bunch of resolutions you’re almost guaranteed not to follow through on.

Nothing like overambitious goals and moral self-flagellation to kick things off strong.
2026, here I come!!

It’s because of this that I’m going resolution-less this year.

Instead, I’m experimenting.

Little, time-boxed tests based on behaviors that have been tickling the back of my mind—things I’m no longer convinced are actually serving me.

To be clear: these aren’t things I feel guilty about. They’re just behaviors whose value feels…dubious.

Take my sports news consumption as an example.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reading sports news. But the way I do it—compulsively opening The Athletic on my phone anytime boredom or discomfort showed up—has started to feel off. I don’t feel good afterward. I don’t feel inspired or energized. I just feel kind of…bleh.

But instead of going full Martin Luther and nailing this moral imperative to the church door as a resolution for all time (Thou shall not read The Athletic, naughty boy!), I’m approaching it as a 45-day experiment.

What does it feel like to not read sports news on portable devices for 45 days?

Because there’s a very real chance at the end of it, I’ll feel like the guy who gave up Diet Pepsi for a month (I know I said no more social media, but this one is too good).

I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that there’s about a 95% chance that turning this into a forever-resolution would end in failure, guilt, and a predictable spiral of shitty self-talk…and likely a deep, compulsive dive back into the warm, comforting arms of The Athletic.

I’m doing this with food as well. Seeing what it feels like to cut some parts of my diet that aren’t creating energy; sweets, Chipotle chips (sorry guys), egregious amounts of cheese. Nothing crazy. And there’s a 45-day limit. No big deal.

At the end, I’ll evaluate (hoping Chipotle chips make the cut) and decide what to test next.

It strikes me as a low-pressure, no-guilt, surprisingly effective way to approach behavior change.

But more tests needed 🔬.

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2.) 🤖 🧠 How to Stop AI from Killing Your Critical Thinking (Video)

This talk expands on my concern about AI-induced societal brain atrophy. He lands where I do: the answer isn’t to avoid AI, but to learn how to use it in ways that elevate our thinking rather than replace it.

Is this the cost of progress? We’ve solved the problem of having to think.

Advait Sarkar

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3.) 📚 Red Rising’s Pierce Brown on Life

I’m re-reading the Red Rising series, and it’s such a gem. Several close friends & family are along for the journey too—which makes it so much more fun.

But what I’m sharing today is an excerpt from the About page on author Pierce Brown’s personal website.

It’s an absolute banger about life & creativity—one that I hope finds a larger audience. It’s long, but I’ve bolded my favorite parts.

May you find it inspiring.

In school, my creativity was almost driven out of me. And that’s just school. It’s not poverty. It’s not systematic oppression. It’s not discrimination. It’s just school. But if something so benign can do that, how unbearably easy it is to have ourselves shaped by others.

I got lucky with Red Rising. I’m lucky to have stumbled onto Darrow and Sevro and Ragnar and Mustang. Luckier still to be able to share this world with you. But I think it a disservice to pretend Red Rising came out fully baked, or that I always knew I’d be an author. It didn’t. I didn’t. I almost wasn’t.

Pretending otherwise would encourage you to believe that this was easy. That’s often the image people want to sell – divine inspiration and all that. It’s sexy, sure. But it discourages those who have yet to reach out for their own dream. Who feel they have to compromise.

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen people talk themselves out of a great personal endeavor, I’d sell my books for free. Sometimes it’s diving into an art form. Sometimes it’s a move to a different city. Sometimes it’s daring to pass up money for their dream. It doesn’t matter. Fear is planted in them by society or someone they trust. They’re told it’s impractical, so they do nothing. They’re told “Oh, no one makes it in publishing” or “Do you know how hard and long medical school is?” So, they soldier on safe and sound and smaller than they want to be.

My grandfather wasn’t a perfect man. But the vastness of his stories and the childish joy that filled his eyes when he told them convinced me that there was magic in the world. It made me set out to try and find it. To catch it. To bottle it and learn to make it mine. Now I get to write about spaceships in my pajamas.

I hope my books help remind you that there is magic in the world. That we are more than integers of flesh, more than gears in someone else’s machine. We can be as big as we make ourselves to be, and the only smallness in your world resides in the hearts of those who seek to tether you to the ground because they don’t know how to leave it.

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4.) 😌 a note on being just one thing

The most stressful periods in my life come from trying to hold more than one identity in the same moment—something the modern world demands almost nonstop.

As Byung-Chul Han has pointed out, modern life quietly trains us to be perpetually available—reachable everywhere, responsible for everything, all at once.

But days—or even just hours—where I can be only a dad, only a worker, only an athlete, or only a friend feel delightfully airy. Spacious. It’s when I force myself to be several of those at once that the walls start creeping in.

I’ve felt this most clearly since Jenna and I started intentionally splitting certain mornings and evenings—one of us has the kids, the other is free to do whatever they want. The mental relief of being able to be just one thing during those windows has been shockingly profound.

To be clear, this tension isn’t something I can fully blame on the modern world. The life I’ve chosen—marriage, fatherhood, entrepreneurship, friendship, curiosity, challenge—doesn’t lend itself to long stretches of single identities. And most days, I love that.

I’m just learning that some moments, it’s really nice to be just one thing.

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Two last things for you this week:

1. Identify a life adjustment tickling the back of your mind. Create a low-stakes experiment to test out your theory.

2. Be fire and wish for the wind 🔥

With love,
Chris

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