Nope, I got the name right.

Sam Harris, though it’s not accidental as many of my views comes from him.

Not the kind of boots you’re looking for but just thought I’d share a related user experience:

My Haix Airpower P3 combat boots lasted me 20 years. They possibly could have been re-soled but I replaced them with a new pair recently and I went with Haix again because of my history and positive experience with them. Now I got the Black Eagle Athletic 2.0 in green.

I just got into 1/24 scale mini RC crawlers. They’re relatively cheap and so are the upgrade parts to them. You can get one that’s ready to drive out of the box and it’s quite enjoyable and gives you a good reason to go outside. Then you discover what a difference new tires make as well as better shocks and then you start adding brass parts to increase weight down low but now you’ve got to figure out how to install a stronger steering servo and next you want better crawl control so you start looking for a brushless motor but then the ESC needs to be replaced as well and so on. It truly is a rabbit hole you can go in as deep as you want.

I must say that your post itself does not come across as particularly empathetic. Calling people “negative IQ narcissistic garbage” is rather harsh and dehumanizing way to describe them, even when their behaviour is genuinely harmful or immature.

People do not simply choose to become the way they are. If you had inherited their genetic predispositions, been raised by the same parents, and grown up in the same environment, you would very likely think and act much as they do. Treating individuals as the ultimate, free authors of their character and behaviour is an error in my view. This is not an excuse for harmful actions, but it does call for more compassion and a clearer recognition that most of what separates us from them is luck rather than personal moral achievement.

The fact that some of us managed to develop greater empathy or self-awareness is largely a matter of circumstance. It is not a virtue we can fully claim credit for, any more than others can be fully blamed for failing to escape the patterns they inherited.