1. Canada had the steepest decline in World Happiness Ranking. I don’t really give much value to these subjective rankings. But the steep drop was surprising.

   

2. Canada’s GDP per capita has been trending terrible for the last decade. It’s also embarrassingly lower than the OECD average, per a Bank of Canada study.

3. Bank of Canada study also released the numbers for the brain drain to America. Unsurprising, but also uninspiring for a first world country.
   

   40% of the top 1% earners in Canada leave for the US. About 50% of the next 9 percentile earners also move to the US.
   

4. Canadian Prime Minister tweets Canada is a “proud bilingual” nation. Three days later an Air Canada flight crashes into a fire truck at La Guardia Airport in New York, which ironically exposed a crack in Canadian sovereignty: bilingualism.

   

   

   

   

5. Canada is raining money! And not in a good way. The government is printing money like there’s no tomorrow to finance spending. Excess money supply severely affects a country where housing is absurdly expensive and skilled labor isn’t rewarded competitively. Canadian groceries and merchandise are generally costlier than the US so inflation is.. taxation on top of high taxation.

Is all the printed money spent on roads and healthcare and welfare? You be the judge:

enhance the adoption of gender-responsive and inclusive nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation in the Guinean forests of West Africa

That’s $25 million in taxes. I kid you not, there’s an 18- to 24-month wait for an x-ray or a scan in all provinces. Healthcare in Canada is a nightmare. The wait time for a doctor is 3-5 years. I waited for 4 years, and I was then given a Nurse Practitioner. The nightmarish healthcare stories I know from neighbors, colleagues, and exes are an essay on its own! But the money printing goes on.

6. An immigration audit from Carney administration found out what the previous Trudeau administration already knew: unbelievable amounts of fraud which had led Trudeau administration to scale down immigration, but the numbers weren’t known until now. Of the 400,000 applications approved and audited now, more than 150,000 were in violation. It also found that more than 35,000 people with expired visas are still in the country. Canadians are proud of their melting pot but they are not going to like how they will pay for it1.

   

The flailing Great White North

Canada seemed like the Europe in North America. Everything that was wrong with America, Canada had it right. Right? I had that delusion too.

Then I moved to Canada.

Problem# 1.

What Canada gains in natural resources, it loses in geographic disadvantage

Canada is abundant in minerals and natural resources. It has the largest fresh water reserves. It has more lakes than the rest of the world combined. It has the second largest land area administered by a liberal democracy that values property rights, civil rights, and justice.

Geography

Canada’s biggest geographic disadvantage is not weather, it’s a geographic feature called the Canadian Shield. A geological rock formation underneath the eastern half of Canada that makes the soil non-arable. Every part of the land that is arable has already been settled for agriculture, but most of the land is just economically non-productive vegetation.

While Canada is blessed with lakes, it’s rivers that made its southern neighbor a superpower. Agricultural productivity in the US surpassed every other country 150 years ago because the Mississippi River and its tributaries (see pic below) made transport of harvest easier, cheaper, and profitable for farmers to go sell in other markets in the US. Success begets success. High agricultural productivity led to more industrial innovation, competitive financing (more banks), leading to more innovation and entrepreneurship, and having tax revenue to build railroads and interstate highways2.

Highways

Canada flies out groceries and mail to its northern territories which is subsidized by other tax payers. In contrast most of the US population live close to a Walmart. US government didn’t need to subsidize rural population, economic growth organically included them.

If you try a road trip from Eastern Canada to the Atlantic or Pacific coasts of Canada Google Maps will force you to go through the US highways in both cases, and that’s your best bet. Canada doesn’t have much of a highway system whereas the entire US is crisscrossed with a well-maintained highway network.

Population density

The red patch below is called “Eastern Canada” - more than 50% of Canadians live in this area between Michigan and Vermont. There’s not much in Canada outside of this dense civilization. More than 85% of Canadians live within 100 kilometers of the US border, thanks to the Canadian Shield, lack of rivers, and harsh weather. What does this mean for Canada?

It means absurdly expensive housing, inaccessible healthcare, high taxes, and a first-world nation that doesn’t produce enough babies to sustain welfare for older people.

Healthcare utopia that isn’t

Canadian single payer system is the healthcare utopia for a lot of Americans who have never been a customer of it. The system is helpful when one has a terminal illness or close-fatal accident, and only for that. It works like an insurance policy - as in, a safety net for a grave, one-time healthcare event. But for the reasons you need healthcare 300 times in your lifetime - a fever, infection, broken bones, unknown illness, anxiety, depression - it works far worse than the US healthcare system.

Simply because you don’t have access to services, facilities, or professionals when you need it!

Average physician in the US makes $458,000. In Canada they make $194,000. Market-based pay 10 miles south of a Canadian hospital drive Canadian healthcare professionals away (remember the Bank of Canada study: the top earners flee to the US). My pay precisely halved when I moved from the US to Canada, while my housing expense doubled (or quadrupled based on location).

So how do Canadians access healthcare? They pay for private insurance to avoid several months of wait. This is what the US has been doing without getting government bureaucracy in healthcare, so what’s the point of single payer healthcare? This is an excerpt from Canada’s most popular (wealthsimple) financial newsletter in 2026:

Bonus: America made Breaking Bad out of its expensive healthcare system! On a serious note, ask any Canadian who had to go to a US hospital (this part is important - ask someone who has had firsthand experience!) for a serious injury, illness, or childbirth how they compare the two. You’re lucky to be in America! Isn’t the grass always greener?

Problem# 2.

What Canada gains in melting pot, it loses in lack of national identity

The Hundred Year War is a misnomer. The French and the English never really stopped fighting. As Peter Zeihan pointed out a decade ago, Canada is not a sustainable state due to the deep chasm between Francophones and Anglophones. French Canadians are inculcated from childhood that the land was unfairly taken from them by British. Air Canada’s CEO is under fire, not for any systemic issues that took the life of two pilots at La Gaurdia, but for delivering the condolence in English.

The schism of Canada

Quebec’s language police (yes, that’s a real thing) is peevish and legally harass businesses for things such as the French font size in an ad or display sign being slightly smaller than English. Across Canada road signs and temporary construction signs are to be set up in both English and in French. Every word spoken or written by an elected official must be transcribed in French, or they will be maimed in the next assembly. Products cannot be sold without French labeling. There's a federal immigration policy that’s astoundingly simple to understand and fully online. But Quebec doesn’t want to be part of this. New comers know Canada is practically two countries even before they apply to immigrate - they have to choose, Quebec or Canada?

In Quebec though, all signs are displayed only in French. In fact, Quebec government offices are not permitted by provincial law to serve citizens in English. But Quebecois demand bilingualism elsewhere in Canada!

A citizen of Alberta who doesn’t speak French can’t get a local government job in English-speaking Alberta. Bilingualism is a requirement for employment. But Alberta’s equalization payments are what finances Quebec’s European style welfare and language totalitarianism. Unsurprisingly Alberta wants to secede from Canada. Quebec tried to secede twice in the last 40 years and almost succeeded both times - they do not want to lose their ethno-linguistic lineage to “Canada”3.

These potential secessions are not just identity politics. They would physically split Canadian geography blocking trade and logistics. It’s then a matter of time before provinces are going to knock at America’s door to be the 51st state as that would be the only economically viable option.

Canada’s sovereignty is hanging by a thread.

The French romantic revival

Taking the priggish cultural high road is often a French virtue4. I won’t blame them, western liberal democracy and legal systems are designed by the French after the Revolution. Philosophy and math are heavily influenced by French romanticism. However, the language is dying. The French won’t let go but the only way to resurrect the language might be creating French babies filles du roi style.

Every French-speaking faction on earth is dwindling5. European schools don’t learn French as much as the French want them to as seen in this map.

English has become the lingua franca for a globalized world, and that’s not imposed by Britain or other Anglo Saxon countries. Some call it soft power, and the French have lost it if they ever had it.

Canada’s identity problem

Hockey and maple syrup only goes so much. Canada has no common enemy or war that unifies the nation. Canadian military has 50 reindeers and 100 hockey sticks that they never have to actually use except for silly exercises because Canada cannot be attacked under American hegemony. What’s Canada’s identity?

One highly popular Canadian ritual is pouting about being good-er than the United States. Strangely, watching US news channels for hours is an official retirement activity (mind you, this is an aging country!), and so is flying to Florida often. Americans however seem to have no clue or interest in the daily sundries of Canada.

The urge to be something-er than the US is hard to not notice. A lady in my Montreal office was pissed at me for saying Chicago is colder than Montreal (it was, I swear!). Being better, colder, warmer, or nicer than the US cannot be a national identity. There has to be a deep irreversible undertow that screams we are Canada. What is it?6

Is Canada simply the staid sibling of Uncle Sam? The quiet upstairs of a fiery methlab?

precisely, he has abandoned:

1. spirituality (he’s been christian holding non-theistic hindu philosophy)

2. exertion (not just retire, but also zero pursuits)

3. the first-world (he’s a naturalized canadian citizen like me)

and moving on to:

1. atheism

2. indolence (not even reading!)

3. wayanadu (one of the most beautiful places inside one of the 10 paradises on earth)

turns out his new spiritual awakening transpired after a study of abiogenesis. the other two are personal decisions. but he threw an intriguing idea at me. if you recursively apply the concept of microbial civilization inside our body into the cosmic expanse we might be able to explain god without spiritual alchemy.

each cell in our body is a living organism. even the mitochondria inside each cell is its own life form. what we (want to) eat is greatly determined by the billions of life forms that colonize our gut called the gut microbiome, the effect and scope of which we discovered only very recently. everything from our visible skin to internal organs are teeming with millions billions trillions of micro organisms. each bacterial colony is grinding away like there’s no tomorrow and not knowing about other colonies. they just know their job and do it, get sick, and die.

now what if..

what if us humans are simply a localized colony within an exponentially bigger omniscience, naively grinding away at quantum gravity and artificial neural networks? our colony on earth may have no idea if or when an unknown oncoprotein among us is spreading malignant cells - the cancer might wipe us all out before we realize it!

it’s possible that the secrets of the universe are impenetrable by life-based cognition. is the universe a simulation? could it be a multiplayer simulation with more than one ludic overlord? we don’t know! we don’t know if god is a pre-enlightment era vestige or a numinous truth. or the purpose, the meaning, the beginning, or the end, if there’s any!1

as a result, i only talk to my friend every 1 or 2 years. if that.

the popular mistake

the duration of thought-free moments isn’t the metric. the metric is how many times a rising thought was cut off to bring attention back to breath. eastern wisdom is made popular in the west in a rather well-intentioned guise of positive affirmations and word-salad. the placebo effect this creates might hold us back from pursuing deeper benefits. we quit before trying enough.

immersing oneself in long stretches of thoughtless state is unnatural and unlikely to happen for the average journeyman. the mind has about 30-50 thoughts in any given minute. the very experience of our sentient life is just the brain processing information.

let’s meditate

let’s say you sat down and anchored your focus to the breath. but before the 3rd thought-free breath you’re inadvertently floating in the next thought. worse yet, you only realize it several breaths later. congrats, your brain is working as normal! are you able to relieve and acknowledge that thought, come back to yourself for at least a few more seconds? this is meditating. that’s it! welp, there comes the next thought. you know what to do. yes, we’re still meditating.

this process of relinquishing thoughts and anchoring your attention to breath over time tames the wandering mind.

we learn to detach.

a few hacks for beginners

exteroceptive meditation

pay attention to the sounds around you. switch focus between sounds that are far away (vehicles, birds etc) and sounds that are close (wall cracking, ac etc). then slowly switch to bodily sensations: the sound of breath, sensation of hot or cold air on skin, breathing rhythm etc. this is the point where we bring focus inward.

mantras

a simple humming as you exhale or chanting aum, (as in aaaaaauuumm - instead of the more famous om) can bring the wandering mind under control1. it doesn’t have to be maintained throughout meditation.

exhale - the most powerful tool

sighing - the release of air knots from our chest through a heavy outpour of breath - is the quickest and most effective way to signal the sympathetic nervous system to relax. when we sigh with sound it can have a slightly better effect on calming us.

secondly, several conscious breath control techniques we use in meditation are driven from exhale. for example, slowing down our breath into a long deep relaxed pattern is easier (as in effortless) to do if we begin by trying to exhale every drop of air inside of us to the extend of almost pulling the belly button to the spine. the inhale automatically plays along. this pattern signals the parasympathetic nervous system that we are safe and relaxed.

breath holding

breath holding is a documented benefit of meditation in the early scriptures of yoga. increased lung capacity is a survival mechanism2, but breathless moments in meditation brings us utmost clarity and concentration. important to note, breath holding is a survival mechanism so it will trigger your sympathetic nervous system which controls the flight-or-fight responses in us (increased heart rate, heightened alertness etc. instead of relaxation). pranayama techniques like kapalabhati can help us hold breath for a few minutes with practice.

why’s breath the anchor?

both thought and breath are involuntary. but only one of these (ie thought) hijacks our focus, sometimes to the extent of exacerbating it and producing anxiety. the other (ie breath) simply creates a feedback loop for calm vs storm in our nervous system. regulate the breath, which signals the nervous system, and the storm is sublimated into calm.

a lifestyle, not pill-popping

it’s more than likely that if you practice, you will figure out what works for you and improvise. the one caveat for the western consumer - as with all ancient indian wisdom - is that yoga and meditation are to be seen as practices, not as “tylenol”. ie, on a stressful day you may not be able to sit down and anchor to your inner self. thoughts run wild! your nervous system is giving the appropriate stress response here. rest assured, the very occurrence of a stressful day, either in frequency or intensity, is what a regular practice saves us from.

blue america argues “if you can be anything be nice”, posited by an increasingly nurturing, feminine crowd. red america argues “if you can be anything be just”, posited by an increasingly tribal, hierarchical, masculine crowd. both genders live in a post-scarcity society competing for professional success. we don’t hunt. we don’t cultivate. we have contrived email jobs that solve our first-world comfort-crisis.

and no one has children anymore!

population decline - the crisis of all crises

every developed country on earth now has fewer young people that work, consume, or create, all of which would generate taxes. in contrast, there are more older people that take pensions and healthcare that the taxes pay for. these welfare systems were created in a burgeoning post-war economy but now we don’t have children to pay taxes.

we’re yet to figure out a good policy initiative, if there’s one. direct economic incentives work but hasn’t reversed the decline (eg. hungary1). indirect economic incentives like free childcare doesn’t seem to show any progress either (eg. quebec2, germany). mass immigration isn’t sustainable - it’s mired in fraud and dilutes the very culture that makes immigration attractive in the first place (eg. canada, uk3). japan, a developed country with a highly homogenous population, wouldn’t exist in 2100s4.

american fertility rate, although shrinking, is better than that of italy, japan, or canada currently, but what keeps average american from mating is not just related to economic incentives or hedonism.

the way we form relationships have changed.

hypergamy - the cruel game of evolution

for 3 million years, we hunted, lived under constant tribal warfare and bloodshed, our women got stolen or raped, children barely lived past childhood in the absence of vaccines, and even after inventing agriculture 14,000 years ago we never had enough food. average lifespan up until early 1900s was 40. the industrial revolution upended humanity and made us demigods!

we now have food stocked up in the fridge or delivered to our door. we choose our situationship from an air-conditioned bathroom. this must be what god feels like! so why would more opportunities to find a partner make it more difficult?

hypergamy is why.

women choose the most competent, dominant man they can find using cultural proxies (athleticism, wealth, power, humor etc.). men choose the most sexually healthy, feminine woman using facial beauty, hair, waist-to-hip ratio (which is academic euphemism for body fat), hygiene etc. the crux of human mating comes down to two fundamental principles of courtship:

1. women are far more hypergamous than men due to evolutionary gender roles and physiological differences. this is what drives mating.

2. humans have the most challenging child rearing across all of animal kingdom and women have the highest investment in it. consequently, women act as gatekeepers of sex against men that are looking to spread their seed.

that’s the premise, but both genders want the same thing - xerox their genes for continuity.

the internet put hypergamy on steroids

ignore traditions like arranged marriages. what happens when people freely choose romantic partners from an online, near-infinite pool of profiles? turns out, people set (very) high expectations on their hypergamous selection process.

data from match group that owns most dating apps in the market (bumble being a popular exception) indicates that between 65 - 75% of app users are men. that sounds like 35 - 25% of users that are women have a lot of options to choose from. but 85 - 95% of men on apps are simply ignored5. so women do not get what they want6 because those 5 - 15% of men have all the attention they can handle.

hypergamy isn’t new. only 40% of men ever lived have reproduced (with 80% of women ever lived). desirable men have always had concubines and access to younger women throughout history, and today. this selection bias likely evolved due to females selecting for the best genes. but as we progress into egalitarian societies that no longer have to hunt or protect, hypergamy creates an army of romantically indignant men.

this is the battle of sexes7.

traditions help with social order

in the past religion mitigated this mating disparity despite all the atrocities they have come to unleash. christianity established monogamous relationships bound to a contract. vedic culture had a dating practice called gandharva vivah but hinduism which came after it practiced a more egalitarian version that we now call arranged marriage. even islam known for harems reduced the number of concubines a man was allowed to have.

another deterrent to polygyny in the past was lack of birth control. women spent a lot of time birthing children, so sex was accompanied with commitment. one theory in anthropology suggests that PMS evolved as a mechanism to deter infertile men. if the man was fertile there was no time to be menstruating or PMSing.

anecdotally, a young girl at the peak of her fertility (ages 16 to 22) no longer has the fortuitous yet inevitable experience of holding a random family member’s newborn baby. if you’re old enough, you’ve probably witnessed it at a family event - the girl swoons upon grabbing the tender bundle of life as her maternal instincts kick in. it’s as if tradition’s sleight of hand furtively plants the seed of motherhood.

we’re ditching tradition and bringing ai

we live in a post-scarcity secular society influenced by third-wave feminism. traditions are whatever catches our eye while doomscrolling. we not only have birth control, but also vibrators for mathematical precision of climaxing. so we fuck when we want to, splurge on insta-worthy eurotrips, and anthropomorphize dogs instead of coddling babies.

as a technologist, i’m not sold on the silicon valley utopianism that ai will solve inequality and human suffering. sexual selection via hypergamy will ensure that women will continue to select for the winners or the competent losers. men will continue to engineer status games to play in the selection process. inequality is the foundation of how we choose to reproduce, not something that accidentally or diabolically happens.

we need a plan that doesn’t depend on natural selection to reverse population crisis. a serious policy intervention. something like darpa, but for baby making. please, it can’t be elon musk going around america.

5

the gini coefficient of attention inequality for men on hinge is a whopping 0.73. gini coefficient is a statistical measure ranging from 0 to 1 used to determine income inequality. in the case of dating apps it explains how a very few men get all the attention. if likes, texts, and matches were currency, intrepid men venturing into hinge fare worse off than income inequality in south africa which has very high poverty, a shrunken middle class, and wealth disproportionately held by a few.

7

a study published in 2024 by scandinavian journal of psychology concludes that highly attractive men and highly unattractive men show the most hostility towards women. men that receive overwhelming attention have no incentive to calibrate to women’s preferences. men that are entirely ignored have every incentive to act against women’s preferences. what about the majority that’s neither too attractive nor too unattractive? well..

evolution already solved this at the genetic level through reproduction. why stop at genetics? why not reproduce or extend individual consciousness? remember that consciousness “just” evolved a moment ago in the grand timescale of evolution. so it’s safe to assume we haven’t had enough time to evolve a mechanism in natural selection to extend individual consciousness. while we are at it, do we just optimize for the posited goal of reproduction instead of vague ideas like happiness?

it may sound odd or even corrupt to optimize life for sex. but everything we do from the moment we wake up has been programmed to accomplish just that, even though we aren’t actively aware of it. happiness may not be the objective function1 for life. carnal desires, including romance, form the bane and bliss of our limbic system. whether we like it or not, our behavior, intentions, and mores are naturally selected over 3 million years to ensure just one thing - that we can reproduce.2

all great ideas but we just wanna be happy!

here’s an idea that works for men. do hard things3. men evolved to hunt, protect, and solve problems. men can be happy by “simply” (i know the irony) doing hard things. the inherent randomness in life, or serendipity as i call it, will take care of the rest. if i may be so bold and poetic (both of which i have), i will add that the mother of all virtues is gratitude. now we don’t want a child out of wedlock, do we? so let me reveal, the father is courage.

You will never be lovelier than you are now.

You will never be here again.

-Homer, The Iliad

(more likely, a paraphrased Greek lore)