Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

Most of us have grown up in a world centered around the idea of freedom of speech, and it’s pretty easy to support free speech when you agree with what’s being said.

It’s much harder, however, when the words offend you, or challenge your values.

But a new study suggests that how we handle that internal tension has less to do with politics and more to do with how we think.

Researchers from Belgium recently analyzed over forty years of data from the United States and found a pretty clear pattern: People with higher cognitive ability were consistently more supportive of free speech for all groups, not just the ones they liked.

This included groups most Americans find controversial, from religious extremists to racists. Even when participants disliked a group, higher reasoning ability predicted a lower likelihood of censorship.

The link held true across political lines too. Smarter liberals and smarter conservatives both showed the same tendency: to defend expression more consistently, even when the message was uncomfortable.

In later studies, the researchers also measured intellectual humility, or the ability to recognize that one might be wrong.

This proved to be the bridge between intelligence and tolerance. High-ability individuals were more likely to think, “Even if I hate this idea, I still value the freedom to express it.”

The conclusion: The takeaway is not that intelligent people endorse every form of speech. It’s that they see open debate as essential to growth, truth, and social progress. Their reasoning mind holds space for discomfort, knowing that silencing others weakens collective understanding.

The smarter we are, the more likely we are to protect free speech for everyone, not just ourselves. Higher reasoning ability and humility seem to expand our tolerance, reminding us that defending expression means defending the conditions that allow truth to emerge at all.

Election seasons have become increasingly more emotionally charged in the last decade, and now we are learning more about why this is the case.

A large study analyzing five U.S. presidential elections found that how a candidate makes people feel predicts their vote more strongly than how much they agree with that candidate’s policies.

The researchers compared two main variables in this study:

Rationality - measured how closely a voter’s beliefs aligned with each party

Emotion- measured how much more positive someone felt toward one candidate than another

The emotional factor tripled the predictive power of rationality and logic. Feelings like pride, fear, hope, and disgust drove decisions far more than policy or ideology.

This pattern was especially strong in open elections without incumbents, when the field feels uncertain, emotion fills the gap in voters’ minds. Campaigns that stirred enthusiasm or anxiety performed far better than those built purely on logic.

While people like to think they weigh the facts, the truth is that emotion and identity shape political judgment long before logic and reason enters the room.

Even if we would prefer our elections to be more logic-focused, emotion is not all bad. It reflects values, belonging, and the deep human need to feel seen. The challenge is learning how to let emotion guide us without letting it blind us.

The conclusion: Voting is both emotional and rational, but emotion usually wins. Candidates who make people feel something, hope, anger, pride, tend to win hearts before they win arguments. Understanding this truth doesn’t make voters irrational, it simply makes them human.

Are you too smart for sex?

Ok now that I have your attention, I want to talk about one of the largest studies ever conducted on sexual behavior.

This study revealed a quiet truth about modern life: a small but growing number of adults have never had sex, and the reasons go far beyond choice.

Researchers analyzed genetic and lifestyle data from more than 400,000 people in the United Kingdom and Australia. About one percent of participants, both men and women, reported lifelong sexlessness. What set them apart was not just biology or preference, but a complex mix of social, emotional, and physical factors.

Men who had never had sex were more likely to live in regions with fewer women, higher inequality, and lower physical confidence.

Both men and women reported more loneliness and lower life satisfaction, though many were also more educated, more introverted, and less likely to engage in risky behaviors like drinking or drug use.

Genetically, sexlessness was mildly linked with intelligence, autism-related traits, and perfectionism, patterns that often accompany deep focus, but also social withdrawal.

The researchers emphasize that these findings don’t imply a defect or deficiency in these human beings. Some people are asexual or simply uninterested in sex. Others want intimacy but feel blocked by environment, self-image, or circumstance.

And it’s not just the highly intelligent who are having less sex, everybody is having less sex these days, from long-term and married couples to singles.

For most though, the reality seems to fall somewhere in between: sexlessness as the intersection of modern isolation, ambition, and disconnection.

The conclusion: Sexlessness is not a moral failure or a mystery gene. It reflects the social structures we live in, the inequalities we tolerate, and the emotional habits we build. Understanding it helps us see that intimacy is not guaranteed by biology, but cultivated through connection, trust, and belonging, the same forces that make life itself meaningful.

Thanks for reading the seventeenth edition!

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