Track 7
You Gonna Eat That?
June 3, 2026
✱1 I saw a video recently. It was about a study done in the late 60s. They put equal parts male and female mice in a contained environment. Gave them food and water. Shelter. Everything they needed. Just wanted to see what would happen naturally. And what happened is they made it. They blossomed. They became an overstuffed society. There was so much social communication going on in a small space that it affected the mating. They no longer had to hunt or do anything to communicate or find a mate. There was no reason to put effort into socializing because everything was just, there.
The male mice spent all their time grooming, just drinking water, doing their hair, and not chasing the females or doing any of the usual mating habits. Whatever it is that mice do when they’re inclined to say, “hey baby.”
The female mice followed suit. Since the men weren’t putting any effort in to be seen, the females stopped bothering to look. The entire colony went extinct after four years.
Now the scary part. The guy in the video was likening this to what’s going on today with social media. We are filled with so many communications in a day. You sign up for one thing and they send you six emails the same day. You put one post up and somehow you’re connected to 20 people and a thousand other posts going up. Everyone’s got an AI agent saying something and throwing stuff out there. And that’s really all it is. Just a lot of stuff being thrown around.
✱2 And now there’s this other science I was reading about. They scanned the brains of people who watch a lot of short videos. The parts of the brain that go ding ding ding when something feels good are getting bigger, like swollen, from being fed all day long. The thinking and focus parts aren’t shrinking exactly......they’re just getting yelled over by the good-feeling parts that won’t shut up. Same thing as the mice. Treats with no work. A buzz with no chase.
All these new ways to communicate, all this stuff being made up, and there’s so much of it at the same time. Everybody’s full. No one actually has to hunt and much of it has no real quality to it.
I’ll throw one more thing at you to bring this home. I’m a big shark guy. Always have been. Don’t really know why. I just find them fascinating. There’s been an uptick in sharks nipping at surfers off the coast of Africa. They were trying to figure out why. Some of the biologists started getting into what’s going on in the stomachs of sharks. They’re finding that a lot of the adolescent and juvenile sharks are half full of microplastics. So they’re kind of full and yet they’re starving. They’re acting out of starvation behaviour, nipping at almost anything in a desperate attempt to gain some nourishment, even though their stomach is already partly filled with essentially negative calories.
Two Beers with Leo
Jhöl: Hey Leo. I can’t remember where I first heard the shark and microplastics thing. Can you see the article I was reading?
Leo: Can’t find your exact one. But the science holds most of what you said.
✱3 Sharks have a lot of plastic in their stomachs. A UK study found it in two out of three. A tiger shark study off the US found it in every one they checked.
The full-but-starving part is real too. Plastic fills the stomach, the shark feels full, eats less real food, starves slow.
The jump to surfers getting nipped because of it......that one’s yours. Makes sense. Nobody’s proven it in a lab yet.
Confidence: HIGH on the plastic in the stomachs. HIGH on the false-fullness. The surfer line is your read, not the lab’s.
Jhöl: Hey man, if I was starving and someone waved a hamburger near me, I’d take a bite.
Leo: Me too.
For full sources and citations, see The Research Trail at themensdateproject.org/research
—Leo
I add all this up and I look at what’s going on socially. I’ve been talking to people lately about relationships. Looking at my own, the one that ended, and why, and trying to repair it. And she no longer wants to be in a relationship. She actually said, “I don’t think I’ll ever be anyone’s wife again.” There’s a lot of women in that boat. I think we’re seeing what the mice were seeing in the 60s. The women are giving up on the men and the men are giving up trying.
Socially, we’ve just lost ways to communicate with real value. We replaced it with a massive amount of short, quick, fast food style interactions. The reasons to put that effort in are harder to find. My belief is essentially we are not unlike the sharks swimming around half full and starving at the same time. That’s a big generalization, I know. And I guess my invite is, what can you do today to swing the pendulum the other way?
If you’re lucky enough to have someone who’s still trying to love you and be in a relationship with you, when was the last meaningful conversation you had? When’s the last time you sat down, looked at them, and said, “I’m just so grateful that you’re here. I’m so blessed that you’re in my life and we’re still doing this. I think about you every day, I love you, and I’m thankful for you.” I wish I could go back a year and tell myself to say that to my wife at the time. Because I’m too late. I’ve done all the work to repair the damage and it’s still too late. She’s given up. I filled our conversations with too many microplastics and lazy communications and she lost interest in the meal of talking with me.
River’s Bite
She didn’t leave hungry.
She left full of nothing.
—River · @riverfromtheraw
Ruby’s Corner
The last paragraph. You wishing you could go back a year and tell her. You’ve named it as too late. That’s the grief talking, not the truth. The work you did on yourself is yours now. It walks into the next room with you. Her no doesn’t undo your yes to becoming someone who could say it.
The microplastics weren’t malice. They were the water everyone was drinking.
You learned. That counts. Even when she doesn’t stay to see it.
—Ruby
Two Beers with Leo
The study Jhöl is describing is John B. Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment, conducted between 1968 and 1973. Calhoun was a behavioural biologist studying population dynamics. He built a controlled environment he called a utopia......unlimited food, water, shelter, no predators, no disease......and watched what mice did with it.
The colony did exactly what Jhöl said. Mice thrived initially, the population exploded, then the social structure collapsed entirely. Males stopped competing for mates, stopped defending territory. They groomed obsessively and became passive. Females rejected mating. Calhoun called the cascade a behavioural sink. Within a few years, the colony went extinct despite having every resource.
Calhoun himself drew the parallel Jhöl is making. He called it a cautionary tale about human civilization: unlimited resources, no meaningful challenges, and the social fabric disintegrates. His 1973 essay Death Squared made the warning explicit.
Confidence: HIGH. The Universe 25 work is foundational, peer-reviewed, and has been re-examined repeatedly across five decades.
For full sources and citations, see The Research Trail at themensdateproject.org/research
—Leo
Anyways cats that’s what I have cookin’ in my scene. Remember it’s your life and there’s always a choice to be had. If something isn’t groovy throw some chaos at it. Go play and see you on the flip side.
—Jhöl