Every CEO is giving a pep talk to middle management about how AI is going to change their company for the better. And that everyone must get smart with AI.

AI is the future.

Yes, AI is great.

But lately I’ve been scratching my head over the net benefit it’s bringing to us. This isn’t an anti-AI rant. It’s a question about what gets lost when machines handle more of our expression. If output goes up, does human worth go down, or just get harder to see?

As more and more people use AI, more and more content and output will be AI generated.

For example, everyone says, I save so much time now that I don’t have to draft these emails. I have AI write them for me.

Well now most emails are produced from an AI assistant of some sort, which in a weird way makes them less scary. Once I accepted that most of my inbox was produced by some bot or LLM, the angst around sending and receiving professional emails dissipated. Gen Z might not remember a time when you spent an hour writing an email that ended up being three sentences long because you wanted it to be perfect, but those days existed.

It needed to carry the right tone, but get the message across strongly. Be warm, yet professional. Informative but not dry.

And when I received an email, I knew someone put time and energy into crafting it. When the notification hit that your manager just sent you an email, a butterfly emerged in your stomach wondering how you might have screwed something up or what extra work you just got nominated to do. And you read it in their voice.

Side note: I also have the thought often about how ridiculous email really is. Sure it’s a way to communicate. But humanity has become enslaved to the technology in a way that practically doesn’t make any sense. No one wants to read emails. No one wants to write emails. No one wants to receive an email. Why the fuck do we still use email then?

This phenomenon isn’t just for emails.

Job applications. College essays. Brainstorming ideas. Data analysis. They are all being outsourced to some AI platform or tool.

I get it. Life is finite and time is precious. Not many of us think that editing a Word document for the tenth job application is a great use of that time. I agree.

But as we outsource our lives to AI, we slowly lose our individuality.

Without getting too technical, these AI systems are trained on overlapping data at massive scale. The essence of the technology requires access to a lot of information in order to work as intended.

A data scientist on a podcast I listened to recently pointed out that many large language models draw from broadly similar corpora. Whether you use Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini, the data are highly overlapping. The paradox is this. The better an AI system is, the more data it needs. But the world’s high-quality data is finite. As AI systems grow, their training sets inevitably overlap more and more.

So the output of these models tends to converge.

If every college applicant uses them to write their essays, how are they going to stand out? Sure, each person has a unique story and inputs. But the expression starts to blur together. Polished. Competent. Interchangeable.

The individuality that used to come from the writer’s mind now gets routed through near-identical black boxes.

When someone uses AI, it doesn’t impress you. You don’t think less of them, but there’s a subtle disappointment that they didn’t really do it.

A few months ago I read a newsletter by Oliver Burkeman that named a hidden truth I only felt before.

“The point of a good novel produced by a human isn’t that only a human could have produced it. It’s that a human did. There really was another thinking, emoting consciousness at the other end of the line. When you consume the work, you enter into a kind of relationship with them.”

That is why we appreciate content, work, art, and writing. We connect with the author. We acknowledge the work they did to produce it, the talent on display, and the distinct insights they bring to light.

The perfect sentence structure or grammar isn’t what moves us forward as a species. It’s the effort to reach it. The trying. That often matters more than the output itself.

Let’s say you hear a song on the radio. You’re jamming out. It directly captures the emotions you’re feeling in that moment.

Now, what if you found out it was generated by AI from a journal entry you wrote that morning. It took your thoughts and feelings, plugged them into its musical model, and curated a song for you to listen to three seconds later.

For me, that brings an air of disappointment. You are underwhelmed precisely because it was artificially generated. The technical competence is there. The connection is not.

This is not to say all AI content is bad, unnecessary, or redundant. It is to shed light on our true desires as humans. We want to connect, not just consume.

Don’t believe me? Public speaking is often cited as a top fear. We don’t want to be ostracized from the group. We want to fit in. We want to belong to other people.

Because of that desire for connectedness, I now find myself second-guessing whether the content, email, video, music, or artwork in front of me is human made or AI generated. It’s sad, but these days my initial inclination is that something creative in nature is AI produced. Or at least refined by AI.

And it’s bittersweet. You want to appreciate the thought or message that inspired the piece of content. But without the human effort and touch, it falls below expectations.

The irony is that while AI tools have raised the standard of output, they have diminished the impact it has.

As a result, AI is shifting what the market values. Diligence and first-draft polish get automated. Scarcer now are taste, judgment, curation, courage, lived experience, and trust.

We used to have copywriters who were experts of language at work. They could massage words and communications better than most people, and that was their profession. Now much of that quality is a prompt away and the cost is saved.

This concept is nothing new. AI is replacing a multitude of tasks because it can perform them better, quicker, and cheaper.

But there is another impact we don’t often name. It changes the comparative advantage of distinct qualities within professions.

Here is a fictitious scenario.

Say you have Lawyer A. Hard working, studious, attentive. Not particularly charismatic, but they never leave a page unread and come to meetings prepared.

Compare them with Lawyer B. Political, great with words. They tell a wonderful story and have that charm that swings a jury. They are not particularly studious, but they shine at big moments.

Who benefits more from the introduction of AI?

If AI can review documents and spit out key findings, Lawyer A loses their edge. Preparation is leveled. Performance is amplified. Maybe that’s fair. But a lot of us still feel like Lawyer A got the short end of the stick.

I am not here to say good or bad. I am saying the introduction of AI has dramatic impacts across industries and professions, even when workers are not directly replaced. It reshuffles which human traits carry weight.

One last thing I am still wrestling with. AI does not improve pure human productivity. It increases total output.

AI multiplies artifacts. It does not multiply attention. So we flood the zone with more emails, more decks, more videos, more everything, while the human capacity to notice and care stays fixed.

Is that good or bad?

Have we just cluttered the world even more at a time when we are already drowning in abundance?

What does humanity gain from the explosion of AI output?

I fear it is not as great as we expect. And I worry about unseen externalities and trade offs if we keep inflating the AI bubble before we slow down and understand our relationship to it as a species.

This is not me claiming that Terminator is coming to town instead of Santa this Christmas. I am asking what truly matters to us.

What do we gain from saving a few minutes typing an email if we lose the connection to the individual on the other end. A name. A voice. A person.

I can see an AI inflation landscape brewing where there is a continuous injection of AI produced content that distracts us, distorts truth, and distances us from one another.

Maybe the real danger isn’t AI becoming more human. It’s us becoming less.

For my whole adult life, I prided myself on being a morning person. In college, I signed up for early morning classes when everyone else wanted to sleep in. I was getting in miles at the track and reps in at the gym before the sun came up.

Routine was my best friend.

And for better or worse, that was my identity as well.

I liked that people were impressed by the fact that I could be productive in the earliest hours of the day. There’s a pride you take in being outside the norm—going against the grain of society, forging your own path where there always seems to be resistance.

And when you see success from this pattern of behavior, you naturally believe it’s the cause of that success.

It’s strikingly similar to Chris Williamson’s concept of the insecure overachiever:

“When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip tightly. Because worrying is so common in every pursuit you attempt, your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer, and your failures are proof that you should have worried all along.”

You intrinsically tie your routine and habits to the outcomes you achieve.

I had straight A’s. Great numbers in the gym. Ran like the wind.

So of course, I assumed it must be the routine.

When Lyme disease hit, I lost my routine.

I lost my identity.

I no longer could rely on a clear mind by 8 a.m. to do deep theoretical or philosophical work. I wasn’t sure if a morning walk would wake me up or put me back in bed.

Life was unpredictable—not my cup of tea.

It forced me to sit still for the first time in years—and in that stillness, I stumbled upon a new idea about what it means to happen to life rather than let life happen to me.

As timing had it, I was listening to a podcast with entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant. He’s a unique thinker and paradoxically doesn’t structure his life in a manner one tends to associate with multimillionaire business owners.

Naval claimed he doesn’t have a schedule, and he doesn’t make commitments. If he never has to be at a specific place at a specific time, he’s embracing his full freedom—the freedom that was the natural order we were born into until the rigidity of the schooling system set in.

More importantly, Naval said on the podcast:

“Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately. The moment that curiosity arrives, lean into it.”

That struck me as profound, because for so much of my life I blocked out time to do certain work. Two hours for X, an afternoon window for Y.

I had embraced the notion that motivation is weak, and discipline is king—that you should never rely on motivation because it’s fleeting. It comes and goes with no rhyme or reason.

It was engrained in me that simply doing the work when you intended to would yield the results I had grown accustomed to.

But as I listened to Naval, I began to realize he wasn’t glorifying laziness or chaos—he was describing a kind of attunement. A trust in the signal of curiosity when it strikes.

Naval counters that approach by explaining that your best learning and work come when they’re derived from a place of curiosity. He asks the podcast host, “How much do you remember from school—when you were forced to learn on a timeline and rigid structure?”

I reflected on that. Sure, I’ve retained core pieces of my education over the years. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. But so much of the interaction with material was lost because it didn’t flow from a place of curiosity.

On the flip side, think of a hobby or passion you have. Think of the wealth of knowledge you’ve accumulated and retained on that subject. You most likely weren’t beating your head against the wall to learn or master the craft. Simply exploring and being willing to make mistakes left your brain ripe for neuroplasticity.

Andrew Huberman highlights that science directly backs this up. The growth-mindset approach—embracing errors, detaching your identity from performance, and treating learning as a process—is by far the superior way of learning.

He explains that curiosity engages the brain’s learning centers; it literally prepares the mind for neuroplasticity. A curious state isn’t passive—it’s an active readiness to absorb, connect, and integrate.

That inspiration and curiosity are synonymous with fun—and thus the spontaneity of those moments should be cherished and pursued. Your best work and productivity are downstream of freedom, not discipline.

At this point, I started to see that discipline and spontaneity aren’t opposites—they’re partners. Discipline creates the container, and curiosity fills it.

I’m not abandoning discipline—I’m redefining it. Discipline isn’t rigidity; it’s the commitment to show up when curiosity calls.

While battling Lyme disease, I noticed pockets of the day that felt normal—moments of clarity and energy that had been previously vacant.

My past self would’ve complained that these bursts weren’t coming in predictable waves or on a schedule I could optimize.

But the revelation Naval brought me shifted my perspective. Instead of seeing those unpredictable bursts as frustrating, I began to exploit them for as long as they lasted.

Some moments were only thirty minutes. Others lasted a few hours. During those times, I launched a whole new section of my website (“Thoughts I’m Wrestling With”), formed a detailed outline of the first fiction novel I want to write, designed a faith-based kids’ cartoon series, and created a self-ethos adventure guide called The Conscientious Cowboy.

None of these were crafted in a designated window of the day. Some sat idle for weeks—and then suddenly captivated my attention again.

I took away the pressure of having to execute and instead saw them as living, evolving journeys. I asked myself, “How can I enjoy this 10% more?” (Ode to Joe Hudson.) And by disassociating the stress of perfection or achievement from these projects, I naturally kept engaging.

Being on medical disability from my day job, I was obviously blessed with the freedom of time to engage in this lifestyle experiment. There weren’t many obligations or restrictions pulling me away from my flow. I could tackle whatever felt pressing or enticing that day.

That freedom made me more productive because I didn’t have a schedule constantly pulling me away from the work itself.

As much as I’d love to say I’ve fully adopted this radical spontaneity, I haven’t—because I’m still wrestling with it.

Part of me sees the world as a sphere of distractions constantly competing for our attention. That little device in your pocket is the prime example. We’re being slowly wired to confuse inspiration with impulse. Curiosity with compulsion.

How many times have you been lured by what appeared to be a shiny object—a new hobby, a new job, a new relationship—only to be left feeling hollow afterward?

You were inspired (falsely), you acted on it, but it didn’t yield the happiness that Naval references.

I also have this gut sense that fully embracing spontaneity can slowly coalesce into a path of least resistance—that I’ll fall into complacency.

Humans are lazy by nature. Catering to that disposition doesn’t seem like the avenue to producing something extraordinary.

And yet, I know God wants me to enjoy my life. Endless commitments and structure might signal that I’m idolizing something more than I idolize Him. He wants to see me in my humble form—completely outside of myself, living for others.

That’s where faith reenters the frame for me. God’s design for discipline isn’t about control—it’s about communion. The structure He gives isn’t meant to suffocate spontaneity but to protect it, to make room for the moments when curiosity becomes calling.

We also know scientifically that dopamine is released during the pursuit of a goal. If we sit around waiting for inspiration, it may never come. It’s in the commencement of a task that our brains release the chemicals that keep us engaged.

There’s also a wealth of research showing that depending on how you’re wired—morning lark or night owl—there are pockets in your circadian cycle where you’re physiologically primed for divergent, creative thinking, and others where you can take advantage of neuromodulators that enhance focus.

It seems foolish not to design your day with that information in mind.

You don’t have to color-code your Microsoft calendar to the nth degree, but having a general framework can yield its own kind of freedom.

So I’m torn.

Part of me sees the value in spontaneous exploration and learning, but another part fears the dangers that emerge when inspiration isn’t discerned—when we confuse curiosity with compulsion.

I know there is never a perfect time to start something. The world is inherently chaotic, and wishing it would settle just for me is like asking the Powerball to reveal the winning numbers. Inspiration can’t be my saving grace.

But I can’t brainwash myself into thinking structure is synonymous with success either. Improvement can’t be forced. Breakthroughs aren’t linear.

Maybe that’s the balance: structure reminds me I’m not God — that I need boundaries and rhythm to stay grounded — while spontaneity reminds me I’m alive.

Maybe the art of living isn’t choosing between structure or spontaneity—it’s learning when to surrender and when to steer.

As someone not extremely literate on the issue, I’ve never had strong feelings one way or another.

On one hand, I would see a cartel gang overtake a Colorado apartment complex at gunpoint on social media and think, “We need much tighter border security.”

But then I would drive down the road to the grocery store and see other immigrants (some probably illegal) peacefully living their American dream right alongside me, and I would say to myself, “America truly is the melting pot.”

If anything, I’ve held the belief that if an immigrant could travel from the depths and despairs of various parts within South America, and make it to the United States alive, they are one heck of an individual, and we should welcome them with open arms. They have gone through more adversity than many Americans will ever face in their entire lifetime.

Under that theory, we would assume everyone at the border perseveres through trials and tribulations to make it to our ‘free' soil, and thus has earned their entry into our country.

But we know that’s not the case. And we know that shouldn’t be the case either.

Which is where I started to intellectually spar with my friend a bit more. Not because I had a point to prove, but rather was trying to explore where my own beliefs truly lay.

To my surprise, my friend listed off various statistics that contradicted my prior immigration assumptions.

For starters, immigrants commit fewer crimes and face lower incarceration rates than U.S.-born individuals. And from a community standpoint, higher immigration levels tend to coincide with lower overall crime rates. Many fear deportation and thus are on their best behavior to not give authority a reason to question them.

There is also something known as the Immigrant Paradox: a pattern where first-generation immigrants often outperform both U.S.-born individuals and later immigrant generations in education, health, and behavior—even though they may face significant socio-economic challenges.

Despite those challenges, immigrants are also less likely than native-born citizens to be crime victims—and more likely to report crimes when they occur.

I’m sure many of you reading this now just learned something new.

We often falsely attribute the one-off anecdotal news story as the norm. Or watch a video on YouTube and feel enriched with knowledge that inflates our actual understanding of an issue. Or we rely on our own experience (and biases) to conjecture our opinion of truth on matters at hand—and wonder how others could possibly disagree with us (scratches head).

This is the broader tension I keep circling: stories versus statistics.

When our own story is attached—or we read a story—we are psychologically wired to feel that more than simply seeing numbers on a page. Stories make us feel something data never will.

Joseph Stalin is often quoted as saying: “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”

There’s a reason charities like Save the Children pair you up with a specific child to sponsor. When you relate, you care more. That’s not cynicism—it’s human wiring.

But at what point do we need to put our heart in check?

Every human walking this earth has experienced the great war between the heart and the mind. Emotion and reason.

Stoics like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius leaned into the logical end of the spectrum. They disciplined emotions under rational control, seeing unchecked feeling as a source of suffering. Aristotle and Plato also placed reason above passion, though without suppressing emotion entirely.

On the contrary, Romantics like Rousseau, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron rebelled against rationalism. They believed intuition, imagination, and emotional authenticity revealed truth more deeply than cold logic ever could. Nietzsche distrusted pure rationalism altogether, celebrating passion, will, and instinct as life-affirming.

So where does that leave us?

The problem is, humans are irrational. Our instincts aren’t always optimal or right. Sure, we have the saying “trust your gut,” but what exactly is that gut feeling giving us? Is it wisdom—or just old wiring reacting to fear, hunger, or habit?

On one hand, instincts can mislead us—they’re colored by bias and outdated evolutionary shortcuts. On the other hand, neuroscience shows that the gut-brain axis is a legitimate source of information: a way the body flags patterns and risks before the conscious mind can.

Which means we even face the added challenge of knowing when not to trust our gut. When is the body picking up on something real—and when is it deceiving us?

This same tension between gut and data shows up outside politics and philosophy—even in sports.

I love investigating the famous/infamous (depending on who you were rooting for) decision of the Seattle Seahawks to attempt a pass play on second down, one yard from the end zone, instead of running with the best running back at the time, Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch.

For those who remember, the New England Patriots executed a perfect jam at the line, allowing Malcolm Butler to jump the route and make the game-winning interception on Russell Wilson.

Richard Sherman’s face after seeing the outcome said what we were all thinking:
“Why didn’t you just run it with Marshawn Lynch?”

But when you strip away hindsight bias, the numbers actually favored Seattle’s infamous call. Lynch had only converted about 45 percent of his carries from the one-yard line over the previous five seasons—well below league average. By contrast, passing from the one was both common and remarkably safe: that entire season, quarterbacks had attempted 109 passes from the one-yard line without a single interception, and across a decade only five had ever been picked off in that spot.

On top of that, the clock and timeout situation made a pass on second down strategically cleaner, leaving room for two potential rushes if it failed. In other words, Seattle’s choice wasn’t reckless—it was a data-driven, situationally sound decision that just happened to collide with one of the most improbable defensive plays in Super Bowl history.

Authors David Henderson and Charley Hooper, in their book Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, investigate this exact play. Their reflection is where we can all take away some insight.

Here’s the bigger point I want to make and it applies whether the decision is by a football coach in a big game or you in your big game called life.

The point is this: it’s important to distinguish between decisions and outcomes. We all know why there is so much criticism of Pete Carroll: because his play decision for that second down led to a bad outcome—that doesn’t mean it was a bad decision.

A good decision is one you would choose again, even if it occasionally produces a bad outcome. A bad decision can also lead to a lucky outcome. That distinction matters.

But life isn’t always as forgiving as sports. The Super Bowl title only gets crowned once. A single bad outcome can shape the rest of your life.

So part of me thinks not all decisions are created equal. In principle, Pete Carroll has a defensible case, and had the pass worked, we’d probably never have this debate. But something in my gut still tells me the better option was to run with Marshawn Lynch. I can’t explain it in words—and neither can most football fans. It’s just the (biased) fact.

The decision/outcome matrix is useful for limiting regret. When bad outcomes strike, if we can say we’d make the same choice again given the circumstances, then we don’t cannibalize our own confidence. But that doesn’t erase the reality that a single play, or a single choice, can define everything.

TLDR:

Humans have consciousness. That’s why we can recognize our friend by the way they walk faster than any AI could. It separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom—and from our soon-to-be computer companions. That consciousness is an asset in decision-making.

But it’s also fundamentally biased and limited. Ignoring data that tells a fuller story is just as dangerous as ignoring the gut instincts honed by a lifetime of embodied experience.

The art of decision-making isn’t in choosing one over the other. It’s in learning when to trust each—and living with the tension that you may never get it perfectly right.

Maybe the better question isn’t whether to go with your gut or double down on data—but how to keep making decisions you’d stand by, even when the outcome isn’t what you hoped for.

Still Wrestling.

Admittedly, I get more articles sent to my email than I care to read. I’ve been trying to employ Oliver Burkeman’s tip from a recent newsletter: read in the moment or delete the article. I have a tendency to see an enticing title and tell myself I’ll read it when I have time to “really” engage with it — but that’s just another form of avoidance. Or, as Steven Pressfield would put it, letting resistance win.

Anyway, the title that recently came through my Outlook inbox was:
“Social Media Shortens Your Life. Here’s How to Get Time Back.”

Immediately, I was drawn to the premise. Like anyone else, I struggle to find balance in my use of social media. I wasn’t looking for a silver bullet or some hack to forge unwavering discipline against temptation — I was just curious where the author was going to take the article.

The writer, Gurwinder Bhogal, outlined how apps like TikTok and Instagram warp our perception of time. Ironically, he touched on many of the same scientific principles about memory formation and the passage of time that I explored in Is Life Short or Long?

Bhogal says the sinister thing about social media is that it speeds up your sense of time — both in the moment and in retrospect — by simultaneously impairing your awareness of the present and your memory of the past.

Try to remember the last few posts you scrolled past.
You don’t.
I don’t either.
We got bamboozled.
Yet we keep going back for more.

The Lethe Effect

Theoretically, a social media feed should dilate time. It selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, or scary — content that, by all logic, should heighten awareness and memory. But that’s not what happens.

Why?

Because when every post is alarming, your brain desensitizes. It starts to interpret outrage and novelty as routine. And routine — being passive and unmemorable — speeds up time.

Bhogal quoted Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, who once admitted:

“The thought process that went into building these applications was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”

Read that again.

In the digital economy, attention is the most valuable currency. I don’t care how convincing the bitcoiners are — the human nervous system trumps its value.

It struck me while reading this: maybe we’ve given too much freedom to tech companies — or, as some now call them, “attention engineers.”

When Clever Turns Predatory

This is a touchy subject. At face value, I’m advocating for regulation, which to some ears sounds like a slippery slope toward communism.

But here’s the real question:
What is the cost of letting ingenuity go too far?

Bhogal referenced the work of Bill Friedman, a casino manager who meticulously studied human behavior in order to design disorienting casino layouts. It’s called the Gruen effect — the moment a shopper forgets what they originally came for and starts aimlessly wandering and impulse-buying.

Grocery stores do this too. That’s why the essentials — milk, bread, eggs — are in the back. You’re forced to walk the full distance and pass distractions along the way.

The optimization of the Gruen effect happens when space is designed to disorient. Minimal sharp turns (which jolt awareness). No clear corners, no defined start or end.

Sound familiar?

Social media sites are designed in a very similar way.

Links are placed where your thumbs already go. Notifications pull you into a feed before you ever reach the message you opened the app to read. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions — so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.

As Bhogal writes:

“What makes social media even more disorienting than a casino is that our feeds are not just mazes in space, but also in time.”

Social platforms exploit a dozen other tricks. They leverage our own behavior against us — and to their benefit. Our attention, time perception, and even our offline awareness are under siege.

And it’s not without consequence.

Sleep performance is trending down. Depression and anxiety are on the rise. Some researchers have even linked disrupted time-perception — potentially exacerbated by constant screen use — to earlier puberty onset in children.

Screen time also correlates with accelerated aging. Muscle loss. Bone density decline. Other metabolic issues.

Social Media Shortens Life — Literally

Which is the ultimate point of Bhogal’s piece:
Social media doesn’t just waste time — it compresses and degrades it.

So I return to my original question:

At what point do we admit the costs of these technologies outweigh the benefits?

In A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying introduce a term I think about often: Sucker’s Folly — the mistaken belief that just because something works immediately, it must be good overall.

But the “folly” is this:
The hidden costs show up later.
Sometimes in ways we couldn’t predict, and never imagined.

They use the automobile as an example. Cars solved transportation brilliantly. But decades later, we started seeing the real cost — greenhouse emissions, climate impacts, auto fatalities.

We’re evolutionarily wired to trust short-term payoffs because, in the ancestral world, long-term harms were rare. But modern technologies have long-tail risks — and we keep falling for them.

That’s why Bret and Heather argue that we need caution in our principles, and humility in our innovations.

The Folly of Social Media

Maybe now we’re finally seeing the folly.

Social media solved the problem of information flow. But it ruined authentic connection.
And now we’re seeing it degrade the very fabric of our lives.

Worse still — I’d argue that the “attention engineers” continue exploiting their capabilities, even with growing public awareness of the consequences.

So I ask, out of genuine curiosity:

Where is the line between clever behavioral design and outright manipulative harm?

Why do we continue giving innovators a pardon from the chaos they create?

A New Hippocratic Oath?

It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but I can’t help thinking of the Hippocratic Oath — the ancient physician’s pledge to prioritize patient care and do no harm.

Should we institute something similar across the tech sector?

This isn’t about punishing ingenuity — it’s about governing practices that systematically exploit cognitive vulnerabilities.

We already regulate nicotine, gambling, and alcohol — products that hijack human biology. Why should attention-harvesting design be exempt just because it’s clever?

As Uncle Ben told Peter Parker:

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

So should we hold “attention engineers” accountable for their abuse of power?

What constitutes abuse?
What’s fair?
What’s legal?
What’s ethical?

I don’t have a final answer.

But I do believe this:

We scroll, we age, we forget — and the architects keep building the maze.

Guardrails must be built before the system spins too far out of control.

Then again… who’s to say we aren’t already there?

Sofia’s character takes a gap year, after finishing her finance degree at Cornell, to study her lifelong passion — Victorian poetry — at Oxford University. Of course, the crux of the film is the growing romantic tension between the two leads. Hollywood has endless ways of creating clever hooks and friction that make you think every great love should start that way.

Early on, she attends her first poetry class, and I caught myself thinking, One’s life must be more than adequately sustainable to have the time and money to study poetry. Not with snobby disdain, but as a reflection on how far society has evolved.

Economics teaches that farming allowed early civilizations to produce surpluses, freeing people to do more than hunt and gather. That shift made specialization — and eventually the study of the leisure creations of past generations — possible.

Sofia’s character is the daughter of U.S. immigrants who worked tirelessly for her to have this chance. So when she clashes with a young grad-student professor radiating privilege, she correctly guesses his wealthy upbringing smoothed his path — as if to say, You know nothing about the realities of life, and your interpretation of poetry is shaped by that.

I’ll admit — that confirmed my earlier thought: It must be nice to have the luxury of teaching your interpretations of poems for a living.

Then comes the plot twist: he’s undergoing treatments for a rare, incurable cancer.

On a dime, past resentments shift into empathy.

This reminded me of a thought experiment I’ve heard on podcasts:

If given the choice to be 80 years old and a billionaire, or 20 years old and broke, almost everyone picks the latter.

We instinctively value time over money, and health over materialism.

Bill Perkins, author of Die with Zero, recapped the impact the book Your Money or Your Time had on his understanding of the utility of money over time. One of the tools it preaches is to calculate your hourly wage after tax and began analyzing costs of the world not in terms of money, but in terms of your time. Bill said this really helped him get in touch with his values. Money was no longer this arbitrary medium of exchange, it was a direct connection to the person he was.

When you align with your values, you clarify the life you want — how you spend your days, the goals you pursue, the masterpiece you’re building.

(Full disclosure: there are flaws to viewing the world purely in hours-for-money, but it’s a useful lens for understanding the trade-offs you’re making.)

Most people drift into working for money on autopilot, assuming freedom will come later. Perkins — and others — warn that’s a dangerous gamble: you’re exchanging youth and health for wealth. It’s like running a marathon on a treadmill. You cover the distance, but the experience is miserable.

Run that marathon outside instead, and you’ll still hit 26.2 miles — but with fresh air, unexpected conversations, and maybe a new way of seeing the world.

Too many of us treat life like the treadmill version — heads down in our youth, expecting a grand payout later — only to find the equation of health, time, and wealth has shifted when we get to ‘later’.

Naval Ravikant puts it succinctly:

“When you're young, you have time. You have health, but you have no money. When you're middle‑aged, you have money and you have health, but you have no time. When you're old, you have money and you have time, but you have no health… By the time people realize they have enough money, they’ve lost their time and their health.”

Time is a finite commodity, and bartering it is a high-risk game.

My Oxford Year leans into the idea that life should be lived now — to “eat cake every chance you get.”

The first poem the professor assigns is by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.”

A well-lived life might come at a cost, but nothing is permanent. Our passions, loves, and lives are fleeting — which may be exactly why we should embrace them fully.

It’s easy to get caught up in longevity-optimization culture: avoid cigarettes, track sleep, guard against dementia. This advice isn’t wrong — but Millay would argue that sometimes the richest moments come when you throw caution to the wind. Always preparing for tomorrow means you never live in today.

Maybe you’re a soldier in a foxhole under artillery fire. Your buddy offers you a cigarette — not to take the edge off, but in acknowledgment of the absurdity of life. Do you calculate the seven days it might shave off your life, or think, The hell with it — this is a story I’ll carry for whatever life I have left?

The professor tells his students, “Life has a way of derailing the best-laid plans,” and “The best bits of life are often the messiest.” A cancer diagnosis sharpens that lens of course, but the film invites the viewer to consider it without waiting for tragedy.

But here is where I see another side to the coin.: scientifically speaking, life is the longest thing you’ll ever experience. We’ve absorbed the idea that we must make every year count — which creates a subtle pressure to always be doing something worthwhile.

I know, because I’ve believed it. I trace it partly to my college reading habits. I devoured military autobiographies that condensed decades of someone’s life into a few hundred pages. Highs and lows came rapid-fire: training, missions, achievements. You finish thinking, They lived more lives than I ever will.

What those books don’t show are the slow months: six-month rehabs, mundane work, and the quiet in-between. Those moments don’t sell. So we compare our balanced mix of action and rest to their highlight reel and conclude we’re behind.

George Leonard, in writing about mastery, reframed this for me. Progress, he said, is mostly plateaus — long stretches with no visible improvement, punctuated by brief surges. Eventually, he learned to welcome plateaus as the surest sign another breakthrough was coming.

Life is like that. The “boring” stretches can be the most fertile.

Author Oliver Burkeman helped me shift my mindset from serial productivity to something with more grace — and, frankly, more oxygen. Not because I was burning out, but because science and experience both show that rest isn’t the opposite of productivity; it’s the catalyst.

Efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness. You can be hyper-efficient and simply make room to cram in more work — which leaves you with less of the life you actually want. True productivity is producing the life you’d be proud to live.

This is where “doing nothing” comes in. It’s not wasted time — it’s the mental equivalent of recovery days in training. In downtime, your brain’s default mode network quietly stitches together ideas, makes unexpected connections, and solves problems in ways you can’t force. That’s why the best ideas come in the shower, walking the dog, or staring out the window.

Burkeman warns that if you only rest when “everything is done,” you’ll never rest — because the “everything” list is infinite. Rest has to be scheduled, guarded, and defended — not as indulgence, but as infrastructure. The irony is, respecting that space makes you far more effective.

Dr. Peter Attia takes a similar stance on the physical side of life. He champions lifestyle choices that maximize healthspan — not just lifespan. Healthspan is the stretch of life where you remain physically capable, mentally sharp, and free from chronic disease, so you can keep doing what you love late into life. It’s living in a way that lets you extract what you want from the world for as long as possible — without the world dictating what you can and can’t do.

This is all to say, life is both long and short. Long enough to spend years refining your craft, resting on plateaus, and savoring unhurried days. Short enough that tomorrow isn’t promised. The challenge — and the privilege — is to live in the overlap: to protect your healthspan so you can keep doing what you love, to defend your downtime so you can keep loving what you do, and to seize the small, messy, cake-filled moments that give the whole thing meaning.

This shows up in friendships, family ties, and romantic relationships alike. So often, we have this desire to prove to people how unbalanced the scoreboard is, and why we’re choosing a different path forward — tallying how many more points we have than the other person.

Say you want to break ties from a family member. It’s very enticing to list off A through Z all the reasons why you’re ‘in the right’ for deciding that course of action. Or a friendship seems to be growing apart, despite your consistent attempts to rekindle and nurture a connection that once was. Or a love you once cherished feels like a burden that continuously wears you down, instead of building you up.

We want to unroll the cartoon scroll of reasons we’re justified for the big decision we are making. There’s a rush of adrenaline and dopamine to being right.

But Mark points out that the validation we are seeking by highlighting a skewed scoreboard, should really be our realization that things have been unhealthy for a long time—that the foundation may have been off from the very beginning

I think it’s important to note here, unhealthy doesn’t have to be such a negative connotation. We are naturally loss-averse, we hate losing more than we like winning. To see something go away hurts us humans more than gaining that same thing. Losing friends, family, lovers is never easy—but there is a misperception that loss is always bad.

Loss is a part of life. It’s a part of maturity. It’s a constant reminder that our time is finite in this world.

Just remember: loss can leave a void — but it can also create space for something unexpected to grow.

Wildfires may look like devastation, but they often clear the way for stronger, more resilient life to emerge.

As Mark was talking about the concept of the scoreboard, I began investigating a statement I have routinely made— “I will forgive, but I won’t forget.”

My justification has always been that our brains are data collecting machines. It’s foolish of us to discard data that has important information on it. We must remember who has hurt us in order to avoid being hurt in the future. We’re biologically wired to be threat-conscious—to protect ourselves from future harm.

But the dilemma my brain is now facing is such—part of me feels that by refusing to forget a past offense, I may be keeping a relational scoreboard with that individual. In which case I’m tempted to ask myself is there something deeper that remains unaddressed that I’m neglecting.

Yet the other part of me feels that becoming a pacifist to the harm and injustices done against you will lead to others taking advantage of you, or exploiting your naturally good demeanor toward mankind for malevolent purposes.

Lewis Smedes in his book Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve, teaches that the act of forgiving is not first about the other person — it’s about liberating yourself from the corrosive power of bitterness, resentment, and vengeance.

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

Smedes makes it clear though that forgiveness doesn’t mean wiping your memory clean—it’s not amnesia. Forgiveness is a moral choice to release someone from your personal condemnation, even if the memory remains. In other words, we can still store the data of the injustice on our hard drive, but we alter the impact it has on our coding.

“You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.”

Forgiveness is NOT saying what happened was okay. Forgiveness is NOT a full reconciliation. Forgiveness is NOT trusting that person again. It’s a way to release your anger without reentering vulnerability.

“Forgiveness is God’s invention for coming to terms with a world in which people are unfair to each other and hurt each other deeply.”

So if I was at dinner with Smedes tonight and I asked him “Am I really forgiving someone if I say I forgive, but keep the memory?” I think his answer would be yes, as long as that memory isn’t activating resentment or fueling personal revenge of some sort. You don’t want that data hijacking your direction — quietly rewriting your story while you think you’re in control.

Remembering serves you—for safety, wisdom, and boundaries. Forgiveness serves you too—by bringing peace, healing, and personal freedom.

Is there a way to keep the data but not keep the resentment?

As I was researching Smedes’ work some more, it dawned on me that Viktor Frankl’s powerful story, Man’s Search for Meaning would be another wonderful layer of insights to pull into this thought entanglement.

For context, Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy—a school of psychological thought rooted in the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power, but meaning. In 1942, Frankl, his pregnant wife, parents, and brother were all deported to concentration camps. Only Frankl would survive the atrocities. Upon liberation he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in nine short days.

The core beliefs of his message can be summed up in these three quotes:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Though Frankl never explicitly talked about forgiving the Nazis or having compassion for the German people, he modeled how to find dignity, agency, and moral clarity in the face of dehumanization.

For Frankl, forgiveness was not so much about letting someone off the hook, but refusing to let your identity be anchored to the harms and injustices done against you. This very much echoes Smedes take on forgiveness as a way to set the prisoner free— the prisoner being you.

Throughout all his work, Frankl’s lack of bitterness towards those that took his whole world away from him proves that past pain doesn’t need to dictate your default programming. Don’t dwell in the identity of a victim. Instead, step into that space between stimulus and response and explore how you really want that event to define you.

C.S. Lewis in multiple pieces of his work highlights the difficulty in forgiveness. He openly admits that forgiveness was one of the hardest commands Jesus gave because it asks so much of the heart.

Lewis draws a line in the sand though between excusing and forgiving. Excusing is turning a blind eye or convincing yourself that whatever happened wasn’t really that bad. Forgiveness is looking at the harm squarely, acknowledging it for its impact on you, but choosing to not hold it over the perpetrator’s head forever.

Lewis also believes forgiveness and justice can coexist. You can forgive someone in your heart, but still carry out a punishment for their action. The distinction being that the punishment is not retaliatory in nature or done in spite, but to oppose the action in question.

He makes an important note that forgiveness is not a feeling, but a discipline that has to be practiced constantly. One day we may feel no resentment towards a past wrongdoing, and the next totally infuriated. Lewis says that doesn’t mean you haven’t forgiven the initial harm, but rather you are still in the process of healing.

So maybe I shouldn’t view the past wrongdoings, or my rightdoings as a scoreboard comparison, but as saline drip in an I.V. bag that is helping to heal some part of my soul. If I haven’t ‘forgotten’ it yet, it just means I have more space to interpret and learn from it. Some I.V. bags will be bigger than others.

What does the King of Kings have to say?

As I read the bible for the first time last year, the battleground of nuance seemed to erupt and complicate so many of the core Christian life lessons—forgiveness being one of them.

On one hand Jesus explains that it’s the sin that must be named, not the sinner. In John 8:3-11 Jesus says:

“Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.”
And then to the woman:
“Neither do I condemn you. Go, and sin no more.”

In Proverbs 21:3 it says:

“To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”

The takeaway being forgiveness doesn’t mean enabling evil—it means releasing the desire to retaliate. That’s God’s job.

And in Luke 23:34, when Jesus is being crucified, Jesus says:

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

He shows that there is a separation between their value as people and the wrongdoing they commit.

And in Matthew 5:44 Jesus says:

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Jesus consistently called His followers to a radical standard of forgiveness. Not by denying sin — but by refusing to let sin define the person. Whether it was a crucifixion squad, an adulterous woman, or a corrupt tax collector, Jesus always saw the soul beneath the stain. He never excused sin — but He never weaponized it either.

But Jesus wasn’t a pacifist.

Jesus Himself flipped tables. He publicly called out the religious manipulators for their hypocrisy, legalism, and abuse of spiritual power.

In Matthew 10:34 Jesus says:

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

The word sword here is a metaphor for ‘truth’. Truth would divide families, cultures and hearts. It wasn’t a utopian glue to bring about universal happiness.

As you can see, it’s a tough subject to navigate. All the individuals I referenced above (maybe not Jesus) really struggled with forgiveness. Not because they didn’t understand it — but because, like a muscle, it needs to be flexed regularly or it starts to atrophy.

Maybe the presence of a scoreboard is my psyche’s metaphor for vengeance — or at least retribution. And when that voice in my head reminds me of the score, maybe it’s just an invitation to revisit forgiveness.

Maybe the scoreboard isn’t there to measure others — but to reveal the kind of person I want to be, regardless of how the numbers add up.

Does the world even care about my scoreboard? Or is it just me?

Either way, I hope the path I take leads to peace. And if it doesn’t… well, I’ll have to forgive myself too.

Almost a decade ago, I watched a video clip on YouTube with Katrin Davidsdottir, a two-time CrossFit world champion. The interviewer asked what her perfect day looked like. Her response?

"A day where I’m not rushed."

I didn’t write it down or bookmark the clip, but I can still hear her saying it like it was yesterday. Probably because I resonated with it so deeply.

But why? No one really enjoys the feeling of being rushed (even procrastinators), but I’d never heard it framed as something to avoid—not just an inconvenience, but a root cause of other negative emotions and experiences.

Yesterday, I was reading a Modern Wisdom newsletter where Chris Williamson wrote about time: how some days feel like years, and some years feel like days. It captured a subtle reality of adulthood—the novelty of our youth gives way to routine, structure, and repetition. Our brains prefer it that way. It conserves energy.

Imagine if every day were completely different. Your route to work changed constantly. Your breakfast varied dramatically. New faces greeted you at the gym every class.

That probably triggers anxiety in a few readers—and understandably so. Humans are creatures of habit. We need some novelty, but not too much. Chaos is no way to live, no matter how thrilling it might seem.

Chris pointed out that routines compress time in our minds. When our days follow familiar patterns, the brain essentially goes on autopilot to conserve RAM. There’s nothing novel to encode, so we don’t remember much.

As we get older, days seem to fly by not because they’re short, but because they’re forgettable.

On the flip side, we all remember our youth vividly. Vacations. New classrooms. Amusement parks. The novelty triggered more cortical activity, which formed distinct memories.

This ties into the Holiday Paradox: time flies when you're having fun, but it feels long in retrospect. And the inverse is true—boredom crawls in the moment but disappears from memory.

Which leads to this insight: the more memories you generate, the longer time feels in hindsight. Our remembered time expands in proportion to novelty.

So what does memory have to do with being rushed?

At 2 a.m. last night, I scribbled this thought in a notebook: "Being rushed = being outcome-oriented."

When you’re focused on outcomes, you become a passenger in the present. You only "arrive" when you hit the milestone—or when you fail. The process itself becomes forgettable. Your brain has no reason to record it.

(Quick note: I’m not talking about emergency situations. I’m talking about the cultural pace we’ve normalized. The always-on, go-go-go mode that tells us we’ll be left behind if we slow down.)

Whenever I feel rushed, it’s usually because I’m trying to please someone else—or accomplish something I’ve deemed critical. But that urgency is self-created.

If I had $1 billion in my bank account, would that last-minute assignment from my boss feel as critical? Probably not.

If I’m late to coffee, the coffee won’t taste worse. I’m just worried about what the other person will think.

I even feel rushed typing prompts into ChatGPT. I’m so eager for an answer that I barely think through the question. As if sending it 10 seconds sooner will save the world. How ridiculous, Mitch.

In doing that, I skip the very activity where the value lies. Reading and writing are where insight happens—not when you click "send."

Rushing cheats us out of reflection. It’s a scarcity mindset. It puts more value on others' expectations than on your own presence.

When I look back, almost nothing I rushed actually needed to be rushed. The urgency was usually a fallacy—an illusion I mistook for reality.

Have you ever looked back and thought, “Good thing I rushed that decision”? Probably not. If anything, those are the memories we don’t have—because the brain didn’t deem the process meaningful enough to store.

(Some might argue: "I have to rush. I have bills to pay and a boss to please." And yes, I get that. But we all chose the jobs we’re in. I’m not saying it’s easy to change, but the first step is ownership. You chose your current path. That means you can choose differently.)

Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard, has a formula for satisfaction:

So here’s a question: can you really feel rushed for something you already have?

Maybe there’s an exception, but I can’t think of one.

What we have is often more abundant than we realize. What we want, on the other hand, is adjustable. We can shrink that denominator through self-reflection and alignment. I’m not saying zero wants—but endless wanting guarantees dissatisfaction.

So next time you feel rushed, pause and ask: “What am I chasing? What do I already have?”

Sometimes the rush is subtle. Like when I fold laundry fast just to "earn" my relaxation. Or when I try to clear my to-do list so I can finally enjoy the day. But if I treat life like a series of hurdles to get past, I never arrive anywhere worth being.

Joe Hudson has a beautiful reframe: “Enjoyment isn’t what you’re doing—it’s how you’re doing it.” His go-to question is, “How can I enjoy this moment 10% more?”

That mindset anchors me in the present. It pulls me out of performance mode and into participation.

So that’s my goal: to catch myself when I feel rushed, name the driver, and ask—do I keep going, or do I slow down?

I don’t want to eliminate urgency. But I want the kind that creates stories worth remembering.

Till next time.

“God is well aware of what a wretched machine you are trying to drive, and asks only that you keep on doing the best you can. Christianity…is humane, but not easy. It asks us to recognize that the great religious struggle is not fought on a spectacular battleground, but within the ordinary human heart, when every morning we wake up and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be.” – C.S. Lewis

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis, is one of my all-time favorite books. It’s a great encapsulation of human reflection, questioning, and longing that I’ve struggled to find in other literature. I may be biased because I agree with many of Lewis’s arguments in favor of a Christian worldview, but anyone with curiosity will appreciate the tussle that is human existence throughout the book.

As a foundational claim, Lewis outlines his views on “The Laws of Human Nature and the Moral Law”—the phenomena of morals and righteous behavior among mankind. He recognizes that civilizations around the world have various guardrails and standards for right and wrong, but by and large, humans tend to have this innate understanding of what one ‘ought to do’ and an eye for fairness.

These ‘Laws’ govern our behavior and interpretation of others’ actions as we navigate life.

Yet, even while agreeing with Lewis, I've started to wonder: do we truly share one universal moral compass, or are there deeper variations than we acknowledge?

Jordan Peterson explains in one of his lectures that the most compelling evidence for God isn’t external miracles or cosmological arguments—but the “argument by conscience.” He sees our conscience—our inner voice asking, “Is this right?” or “Am I doing the right thing?”—as God speaking to us directly, aligning us with the deeper structure of reality.

Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, having the humility to sit with your thoughts and question where you can be a better person activates the inner voice of God—your conscience. And we all invariably know the parts of our lives that could use improvement.

In another lecture, Peterson posits that there is no true success without moral success. If you excel in business, school, or sports, but employ nefarious methods, your conscience keeps the real score—a score you'll never outrun, no matter how outwardly successful you appear.

Matthew McConaughey, in his recent Lyrics of Living newsletter, had wonderful insights on selfishness. Society typically attaches a negative connotation to selfishness, but McConaughey argues that true selfishness—as it pertains to self-service—means serving ourselves without neglecting our neighbors. Such behavior provides long-term ROI to both neighbors and the individual performing the ‘selfish’ act.

“If I lie, cheat, and steal to get what I want or avoid inconvenience today, am I truly being selfish? It may look like it in the short run, but in the long run? I don’t think so. Think of the stress I’d cause myself for the rest of my life every time I walk out the door, go to a function, or hear my doorbell ring—all the burned bridges, all the people I screwed over, the anxiety I’d endure would make my life feel like a prison. Fundamentally, there’s NOTHING selfish about that.” – Matthew McConaughey

For many years, I believed my conscience kept score. If I did something selfish that hurt others or felt morally inferior, I’d regret it deeply. Naturally, when I read Lewis, listened to Peterson, and reflected on McConaughey’s insights, they all reinforced this perspective.

However, I've grown curious about individuals who seemingly don't possess a conscience in the way we typically assume humans do. Could it be these individuals, intellects, and philosophers make assumptions due to their own conscientiousness—their discipline, responsibility, and reliability—that lead them to assume everyone naturally shares their sense of conscience? Perhaps this introduces a subtle bias.

Conscientiousness—the trait associated with orderliness, responsibility, and discipline—can easily be confused with moral conscience, though they aren’t identical. Someone can be highly conscientious but still have a distorted or unconventional moral framework.

Consider this morally ambiguous scenario:

You've been working two jobs, desperately saving money so your child can attend college and live a better life. Unexpectedly, you receive an insider trading tip linked to your work that would enable you to pay your child's tuition within a year.

You rationalize: “It’s a capitalist economy. Chances of the IRS or SEC catching me are slim. And if high-powered figures in politics and finance routinely skirt the system, why shouldn’t an average joe like me capitalize on this opportunity?”

If you adopt Peterson’s perspective, every dime earned would become a thorn of torment, reminding you of your moral deviation. Each joyful college call from your child would stir guilt, knowing their opportunity arose from an illegal act.

Yet, I can also envision someone genuinely proud of their decision, joyfully FaceTiming their child each weekend without guilt. Their conscience doesn’t perceive that insider trading as burdensome at all.

An even more extreme and troubling example—one I’ve struggled to understand—is terrorism. Some terrorists use their own families as human shields or celebrate mass violence. These actions aren't mere deviations—they’re inversions of universally human instincts to protect family and community. Are these individuals genuinely devoid of conscience, or do they operate within a radically different moral framework, one we struggle even to comprehend?

Douglas Murray, in a conversation with Lex Fridman, shared how a friend who grew up in pre-revolutionary Iran once explained that it’s especially hard for Westerners—particularly Americans—to truly grasp ideological or religious fanaticism. The ‘death cult’ mindset that some of these individuals have, and the lasting ramifications that unfold when such individuals come to power

I’m probably a victim of that negligence mindset/lack of awareness since I’ve never truly studied or visited the middle east.

Thousands of such individuals walk the earth with these starkly different moral compasses. While they may or may not fit a psychological diagnosis like psychopathy or narcissism, they certainly don't align with the moral codes most of humanity accepts. At least according to the moral framework many of us in the West subscribe to.

As someone fascinated by human behavior and incentive structures, this moral dilemma leaves me scratching my head. It would be comforting to claim that since the majority do X, behavior Y must be wrong. But perhaps I simply lack the innate conscience these individuals possess, which perceives Y as perfectly acceptable or even preferable.

I don't pretend to have easy answers. Perhaps that’s the point of wrestling—it’s an ongoing dialogue rather than a solved puzzle. I'm genuinely curious about your perspective: Do you think morality is truly universal, or is it shaped more deeply by personal conscience than we commonly admit? Since humans are irrational, what are the outward bounds of irrationalities that are tolerable?

The saddest part, I know I’m not the only one dealing with this issue. In fact, insurance companies have ‘earned’ the reputation of being devious and exploitive.

Recent headlines of State Farm changing policies while the California forest fires were taking place speak to the sinister practices c-suite individuals will employ to protect profits. Cases of people being denied coverage or services by UnitedHealthCare surfaced in the wake of the CEO’s assassination, illustrating the hoax insurance companies employ. Advertise and promise blanket protection, then quickly renege when the customer actually needs to cash in on the deal.

This phenomenon extends past insurance companies. There are a multitude of systems that function more as self-preservation machines than human-serving institutions. Here’s a list of industries and sectors that are notoriously difficult to navigate or have developed reputations for sinister, exploitative, or self-serving practices:

• Big Pharma

• Health Care and Hospital Systems

• Government Bureaucracies

• Student Loan Servicers and For-Profit Colleges

• Telecom and Internet Providers

• Tech Giants and Social Media Companies

• Airline and Travel Companies

• Subscription-Based Software and SaaS

• I’m sure there’s many more but these are what came to mind.

Just reading this list probably stirs resentment or angst in you. Apologies for digging up an old wound.

But it begs the question: where does the evil come from? Are these industries all run by villains twirling their mustaches? Or is it something more ordinary—incentives, apathy, culture, silence? Let’s look at the facts at hand.

Incentives shape behavior. As much as we would wish a utopian, selfless society existed, reality will never conform. Charlie Munger’s famous quote is, “Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.”

The economic foundations which these companies and industries were built on are inherently contradictory to the product/service they provide.

For example, YouTube’s algorithm is specifically designed to slowly pull you to the extremes of content. Not give you a 5 min relaxation break to then go about your day.

Have you ever clicked on a video, then notice an hour has gone by and you’re now chasing a conspiracy theory of whether rabbits were scientifically altered at a point in time to produce kangaroos?

That’s extreme, but there’s a mountain of research showing how social apps are designed in ways that actively undermine the outcomes they claim to serve.

Take Hinge. “The dating app that is meant to be deleted.” Well if you delete it too quickly Hinge would lose its customers. Dating algorithms aren’t easy, and this doesn’t even touch on the science of compatibility vs. similarity when it comes to relationships. But I would be hard-pressed to bet against the odds that Hinge/Bumble/Tinder/etc could perform backend changes to more successfully deliver their ‘proposed’ mission statement to customers.

But they are not interested in helping you find a relationship. They are interested in your wallet, and stringing a dopamine carrot in front of your face to get you to pay. If you happen to find your relationship, you’re probably the outlier, not the norm. That customer churn rate is factored into their business model, yet I’m sure a part of them wishes you return for business in the future.

When talking about these industries I listed out above, there is this general theme of referring to them as an individual conscious being. Evil being, but nonetheless an individual with set of characteristics you diabolically oppose. When you talk to your friends, you say “I just hate these travel companies.” As if Delta, American, Spirit, and SouthWest are siblings of the same household, raised under parents with perverse ethics and morals.

But my recent experience with this insurance company has offered me a perspective or reality I never really considered. Human beings, just like you and me, work at these places. This is a subjective take, but I believe most humans have a general conscience to them that leans more favorably towards the goodness vs. the evil end of the spectrum.

C.S. Lewis writes about this in Mere Christianity when talking about the Moral Law and the Law of Human Behavior.

If something happens you might have two impulses. One to help others and one to seek safety for yourself. But then a third thing appears which says you ought to suppress the impulse to run away and follow the impulse to help. The thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot self be either of them.

The law of human nature is not simply a statement about how we should like mankind to behave for our own convenience, for the behavior we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behavior we find inconvenient and may even be the opposite. (An enemy traitor may be someone who helps us, but we don’t necessarily see them as a good person. Vice versa)

These are just excerpts that shed light on a very real human phenomenon many of us have felt, but probably were never able to fully articulate. We have hearts. We have conscience. The display of their calibration is not always ideal, but we know they are there.

So, with that in mind, I sit here and think. “Does every employee at this insurance company wake up in the morning with the sole goal of making my life a living hell?” The answer is most likely no. They are humans, that should I meet them in any other circumstance, I might even be friends with. I might have a laugh at the bar with them. I might pick their kids up from practice on a carpool schedule.

Which then brings me back to the underlying issue. If humans are empathetic, how do corporations become these Machiavellian institutions—brilliantly engineered to frustrate users into submission. Because on the outside, we would think most of humanity would have a true sense of disgust when hearing/reading/onboarding to the insidious business model the company has. Or if their manager says, “Hey Niki, if we deny every claim that comes in today, regardless of its merit, I’ll give you a $5k bonus.” Sure it’s enticing, but the conscience in Niki would most likely have a hard time digesting that method of business. (I get economic incentives are a touchy and tricky subject. These are generalizations—maybe to a fault. Humans will go to extreme ends to survive, I get that).

It's tempting to imagine a smoky boardroom where executives hatch villainous plans. To paint every employee as some evil conformist that never speaks up against authority. As a Nazi regime reborn in disguise.

But I think the truth is scarier: there’s no one person orchestrating this. No puppet master. Just a thousand small compromises that calcify into corporate norms.

Eliyahu Goldratt says, “The goal of business is to make money.”

In the strategy marketing world, we were always presented with an initial brief that listed ‘Business Goal’, then right below it, ‘Consumer Goal,’ for the next year. Why, because as strategist we needed to find the thread that connected the two. Fundamentally they have to be different or it’s not a business. Someone needs to produce value, and the other party has to want that value.

Problems erupt when the thread between the two becomes increasingly distorted, resembling nothing but a black box. And it’s so tempting to blame that on c-suite leadership, high level managers, or boardroom stakeholders. Though they have a weighted say at the table, I don’t think they are the sole perpetuators of shady practices.

In large corporations, it’s easy for an individual employee to feel removed from the final delivery, or worse, inconsequential to it. But the truth is that they are still a part of the sausage making. Their individual choices and incentive structures compound and directly contribute to the overall functionality of the institution.

The greatest trick these institutions probably pull is divorcing moral accountability from their outcomes. Not through overt cruelty — but through a slow erosion of responsibility, distributed across a thousand rationalizations.

So while you don’t think the decisions you make at a grassroots level impact the bottom line they do. In a similar manner, just think of our voting practice. Individually our votes hardly matter, but it takes the collective nation to reach an outcome.

(Though, I must throw this quote in for additional head scratching. Mark Twain famously said, “If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it.”)

My dad always says, “People vote with their wallets.” As much as they want to support what’s noble, their individual bottom line is always top of mind.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe it really is just individual incentives, trying to take care of themselves and their family, that shape the reality of these big corporations. What initially seemed like a reasonable business model gets pressure tested to the limits and out emerges a beast that was never a part of our wildest imaginations.

But I could also see a hesitancy in humans to not be confrontational. A somewhat devious manager could devise a strategy that is beneficial to the company, and since no one wants to speak out against a group, they hold their hesitations to themselves.

This is known as Pluralistic Ignorance/Abilene Paradox: when a group collectively decides on a course of action that none of the individuals actually want, simply because they believe everyone else wants it. Or a situation where individuals privately reject a norm or idea, but assume others accept it, so they go along with it — reinforcing the very thing they disagree with.

Take this example: A marketing firm is brainstorming ideas for an upcoming campaign. Someone proposes a transgender awareness initiative tied to the product. While no one in the room is transphobic, one analyst believes — based on data and market trends — that the campaign may be a statistically risky business move. However, fearing they'll be labeled a bigot for voicing that concern, they stay silent. Unbeknownst to them, many others in the room share the same hesitation — but they, too, keep quiet for the same reason. The result? The campaign moves forward, despite widespread private doubt, all because no one was willing to speak up first.

The way this shows up in the managerial example is, the plan might very well help each person on that team make more money. Knowing that people are incentivized by their own wallet, then leads people to believe they are also in favor of the plan since it promises increased profits. Thus, no one speaks up to confront the shadiness or the strategy or the harmful human element they are imposing on the customer.

Maybe it’s a combination of all the above. Maybe I’m missing critical human behavior elements that a sociologist could fill the gaps in with.

All I know is that in our current capitalist society has produced torment weapons that masquerade as human-serving institutions. We clearly see emergent evil – systems that produce harm without individual malice. You, me, and our neighbors all suffer the consequences of it, yet never seem to be able to correct their behavior. Why is that?

Maybe there really is an incredibly intelligent select group at the top, pulling the strings of the world as we know it, and we are victims of their cynical concoctions.

Maybe the Illuminati is real.

Maybe Epstein really did kill himself.

Maybe we are just too dumb to connect the dots.

"An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backward. So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it means it’s going to launch you into something great. So just focus and keep aiming." — Anonymous

I often refer to this quote when people ask how I’m doing and I happen to be going through a rough patch. Most people don’t want to hear a Negative Nancy or a victimized take on life. We like positivity. Optimism. Strength through adversity.

So when life seems to be getting the better of me, I’ll say, “An arrow needs to be pulled back before it’s shot, right?”

But lately, I’ve become more curious about this frame of mind as I stumbled onto a thought theme that seems to be living rent-free in my head.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to fully articulate it in words, but it’s something like this:

I journey through life with the primary mindset of being a learner — constantly being a sponge of knowledge, information, experience, and feedback to course-correct the direction I’m going. You never know when something will be useful. When a past failure will reemerge and you’ll get a shot at redemption.

Humans weren’t designed for utopia. They were designed for this world — one that fights back at them, that plays no favorites. A world that’s a battleground of unrelenting adversity. One that no one has ever survived.

So it only makes sense to be on edge. Alert. Wary of the next obstacle that’s going to be thrown your way.

The great distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is our intellectual capacity for mental time travel. While a dog remembers where it buried a bone, only a human can imagine what might happen if it doesn’t find that bone tomorrow — or what others might think of its failure. This capacity for mental time travel is what allows us to regret, hope, plan, and worry.

Add in the brain’s default mode network — the system responsible for internal simulation and metacognitive reflection — and it becomes clear how deeply embedded the learner’s mindset is in our biology.

But where I find myself missing the mark is in believing there will be this ultimate moment where the lessons I’ve learned finally pay off. Where the culmination of hardships transforms me into the successful savant and the script flips. As if God has written the story of my life so that all the learning from the rising action reaches a climactic moment — and I’m able to live the remainder of my days in blissful resolution.

Let me break that down a little more.

I have this overwhelming tendency to analyze a current situation in a way that’s intended to bring about some benefit to me in the future.

“How can I navigate a social interaction next time to limit the negative emotions that accompanied it?”
“What can I learn from this setback at work so I’m successful the next time?”
“How can I package these latest life hardships into a lesson that I share with others to produce value for society at large? I would hate for history to repeat itself.”

I honestly have this belief that I must turn every point of adversity in my life into a form of compensation down the road — whether that’s financial, spiritual, emotional, or otherwise. I feel like I’m failing if I don’t incorporate every piece of current living into my mental algorithm of analysis in order to extract its full value.

If my arrow is being pulled back, I must glean an insight from it before I’m allowed to release it forward.

As if I’m living sub-optimally by neglecting certain experiences I’ve encountered along the way.

I was recently listening to a podcast with Andrew Huberman and author Michael Easter, where they explored resilience, grit, dopamine, and motivation. They examined the root of many modern-day struggles — and exposed the truth behind some of our so-called “first world problems.”

Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of delayed gratification, made famous by the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment in the 1970s. The core principle is this: short-term discomfort is necessary for long-term flourishing.

Pursuing a life of hedonism — where you choose the most pleasurable option at every moment — is bound to end in pain and regret. It’s one of life’s unavoidable trade-offs: you suffer now, or you suffer later. There’s no escaping it. The key is to suffer in a way that produces meaning.

Aristotle argued that true fulfillment comes not from chasing fleeting pleasures, but from living a life of virtue — which often means tolerating hardship in the service of something greater.

This theme runs through the Bible, too.
Luke 9:23 — Jesus says, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily.”
Romans 5:3–4 — Paul writes, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character...”

Jordan Peterson puts it simply: “Don’t do what is expedient — do what is meaningful.”

Huberman and Easter point out that our modern lives are flooded with stimuli that deplete dopamine by tapping into our pleasure circuitry without offering any real reward in return.

Paradoxically, depriving yourself of pleasure — by taking a cold shower, exercising, or doing something difficult — is more challenging in the moment, but more rewarding after. Once the task is complete, your dopamine reserves are replenished — with interest — and pleasure is genuinely felt.

Huberman refers to this as investing dopamine versus spending or leaking it through instant gratification.

This got me thinking about how even noble self-denial can go too far — something I first encountered not in a psychology book, but in a finance one.

A few years ago, I read Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. In it, Perkins breaks down the fallacy we often fall into: believing we must always save for a rainy day. Save for retirement. Save for emergencies.

But in sticking to that framework too rigidly, we often die with unused wealth. Money that could have bought us experiences, memories, and enjoyment of our time while we were here.

Even if you say, “Well, I’ve left it for my children, and that’s what makes me happy,” the reality is: you’ll be dead when they receive it. You’ll never experience the joy of seeing them benefit from it. Perkins argues that delayed gratification — in the extreme — leads to no gratification.

“If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives, we may forget altogether to live them.” — Alan Watts

Huberman and Easter both agreed that while investing dopamine is the superior approach, never spending it isn’t living either.

Chris Williamson makes a similar point: if you permanently “win” the marshmallow test, you never arrive at a moment where you actually cash in your effort for reward.

And so, back to my original mental quandary.

If I’m so fixated on reaping meaning from the present in order to utilize it in the future, does that paradoxically mean I’m living in the future at the expense of the present?

Do I need to release every arrow that gets drawn back? Do I need to attach meaning to all my struggles?

By this article’s logic, am I just paying into a knowledge bank account that I’ll never withdraw from?

Maybe just living is the compensation for the struggle.
Maybe Sisyphus was onto something when it comes to meaningless effort.

Or is life really just a biological test of survival of the fittest — and I need to be vigilant and sharp at a moment’s notice to pass it? Maybe each encounter with adversity should be met with war paint and a fight song.

Or maybe the point isn’t to optimize every arrow shot or suffer for the sake of strategy.
Maybe the mere act of being — of staying in the tension — is enough.

I’m not really sure. It’s something I’m still wrestling with.

But I’ll leave you with this quote from Naval Ravikant:

If anyone asks why I love country music, I always tell them it’s the storytelling. The music teleports me into a new world where I get to live out different life experiences — ones I haven’t had, and maybe never will. One can be so profoundly moved in a matter of minutes. That’s why I love it.

Ironically, I rarely start with lyrics. I listen for melody and vibe — an unnamed, intuitive standard my sister teases me about. But this one passed the test.

One evening I went over to Genius lyrics, fired up the song, and read along as it played:

“…Live a life, so when I die there’s standing room only, standing room only.”

Goosebumps.

One of the first articles I wrote on TCM was titled Eulogy Qualities — an ode to the idea that success isn’t measured by money, status, or achievements. I wrote it as a reminder to myself not to lose sight of what really matters. Not to have a funeral where people simply list the accolades on your life’s résumé — but one where they celebrate the ways you made their lives richer.

That’s why the lyrics hit me so hard. McGraw paints the picture of a man living a life so large that, at his funeral, there aren’t enough seats for everyone. The service is so well attended, all that’s left is standing room.

“Standing Room Only” is about a man looking in the mirror after covering some ground in life — knowing he still has more to go — and being honest with himself about what he truly wants, and the actions that will grant him peace when it’s all said and done.

There’s a line in the second verse that stopped me in my tracks:

“I wanna learn how to say a lot more yes and a lot less no.”

Reading those words on a screen doesn’t do justice to the emotion and tone in which McGraw delivers them. I encourage you to take three minutes to hear it for yourself.

Because when you do, there’s this air of resonance. Your conscience nods along quietly, knowing how true it is. An inner voice admits that the way you’re currently living might just lead to more regrets than you’re prepared to carry.

So what exactly am I wrestling with?

Tim McGraw — and my gut — are begging me to say yes more. But nearly every piece of wisdom I’ve absorbed about boundaries, fulfillment, and long-term health tells me the opposite.

There’s a strong coalition in the self-help space arguing for the value of saying no.

Greg McKeown’s Essentialism makes a compelling case for minimizing nonessential commitments in favor of living with clarity and intention. It’s about focus, not frenzy.

Warren Buffett is famous for his “25–5 Rule”: list your top 25 goals, circle the five most important — and avoid the remaining 20 at all costs. Not because they don’t matter, but because they distract you from what does. They are, as he puts it, seductive diversions.

Oliver Burkeman, in Four Thousand Weeks and Meditation for Mortals, argues that a meaningful life is built not on more, but on less. Saying no, he says, is what makes room for depth — and protects us from wasting our one wild and precious life.

Even I have preached the wisdom of adopting an Eastern mindset — of stripping away the unnecessary to uncover the essential. Removing layers, not collecting trophies.

So why, then, do I still feel swayed by Tim McGraw’s words? Why does my gut say the default setting for a good life should be yes?

Because the data paints a sobering picture. We’re more disconnected than ever. More time on screens. More loneliness. More isolation.

Does saying no help solve any of that?

If a friend asks you to grab a drink mid-week, what should you say?

If your boss asks you to help onboard a teammate during an already busy week, what elevates your leadership?

Are we really so swamped and stretched that saying yes will break the camel’s back?

We spend nearly 9 hours a day on screens. I look at that and wonder: maybe I’ve been delusional to think that saying no, in the context of this lifestyle, somehow leads to a healthier, more fulfilled life.

George Mack describes his “Luck Razor”: if stuck between two equal options, pick the one that feels more likely to generate luck. He once chose drinks with a stranger over staying in with Netflix — and later called it “the highest ROI decision I’ve ever made.”

Sure — essentialism, boundaries, and protected time help prevent burnout. But do they get you to a Standing Room Only life?

Will people remember you for saying no — or for showing up when you had every reason not to?

An old friend once told me, “You’ll never look back on your deathbed and say, ‘Damn, I wish I got more sleep.’” I was notorious for prioritizing my 8 hours, always defending it with: “I’ll get more done. I’ll feel better. I’ll be happier.”

But part of me knew he was right. He wasn’t telling me not to sleep. He was telling me: don’t fixate so much on the future that you forget the present is all you ever have.

I don’t think I’ll ever perfect the dichotomy of yes and no.

But I do know this — Standing Room Only will be my final arbiter when I’m confronted with a choice.

So maybe the question isn’t Should I say yes or no?

Maybe it’s: Which choice adds more people to the room when it’s all said and done?

Because a Standing Room Only life is built by showing up when it matters most.

What are your thoughts?

Finally, some comfort in the midst of a hectic week.

Thirty minutes later, your order shows up. Your endorphins start jumping at the mere thought of enjoying this meal in the next few minutes.

You pick up the order at your front door. Walk back to the kitchen. Open the bag.

Wrong order.

Like any normal human, I think it’s safe to say we’d all get frustrated here. Maybe even regardless of the setup I just laid out. You could be having the best day of your life—someone still messes up your order and all hell breaks loose.

It’s totally reasonable to react that way. Hell, I do. You spent your hard-earned money on a transaction you wanted executed to your specifications. A certain level of competence is expected—hence why you ordered from them in the first place.

But the conflict I keep running into—and keep wrestling with—is this: I’m getting mad at a human for not being perfect.
As if I’ve never made a mistake.
As if I’m some finished product with my shit together, just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

That’s a bit hypocritical. I’m as imperfect as the person walking next to me. All 8 billion of us are.

And yet—even with that understanding—I still catch myself slipping into this mindset where I assume other people are just more off their shit than I am. So I get frustrated at their incompetence. Then I get mad at myself for thinking like that. It’s egotistical. I know it. And so begins the spiral.

What’s helped lately is running a mental exercise: when I’m about to get irritated, I try putting myself in the other person’s shoes. I invent a plausible reason why they might’ve messed up. Just to play devil’s advocate against my own frustration.

And you know what? It actually helps. As I start rehearsing these little fictitious defenses in my head, the tension naturally starts to diffuse. I’m reminding myself: I’m not dealing with a machine. I’m dealing with a human.

That person might not be incompetent. The restaurant might not be a bad restaurant.
A mistake happened. That’s all. Because a human was involved—and humans always make mistakes.

And if you interpret every mistake as the new norm, I fear you’ll live a much worse life than if you simply chalk it up as what it is: an occasional human error. Because lord knows you make them too.

Which brings me to a bigger question I’ve been sitting with:
Where do we draw the line between a forgivable error and a justifiable frustration?
When am I actually allowed to be upset that someone let me down?

Here’s one thought:
Anytime you willingly hand over your money to another human, you’re taking a risk. And that’s on you. If you’re unwilling to accept the risk of human imperfection, then your only option is to do it all yourself—or micromanage until it’s done. But that’s completely impractical.

That would mean personally driving to the restaurant, placing the order yourself, standing next to the chef to make sure they get it right, then overseeing the hand-off to the Uber driver to ensure safe delivery.

You’re paying for the convenience of not having to do all that.

And as I mentioned in a recent post, we’ve specialized as a society to the point where we can rely on others to get things done. Most of the time.

But money isn’t a guarantee of competence. You’d like it to be—but it isn’t.

So now I use something I’ve started calling The Envy Question.

If I don’t admire something about the person I’m frustrated with—if I don’t aspire to be more like them in some way—what gives me the right to hold them to a higher standard?

“Envy” might not be the perfect word, but it gets at something. If I wouldn’t trade lives with them, why am I demanding perfection from them?

Now—this isn’t to belittle anyone. Especially those in service roles. But let’s be honest: when you pull up to McDonald's for a double mac, are you expecting Michelin-star execution from someone who’s probably overworked, underpaid, and managing 12 orders at once?

You kind of know what you’re signing up for. And if you choose to walk into that transaction anyway, then that decision—and all its risks—is on you.

But there are people I hold to a higher standard. People I respect. People I want to be more like.

Let’s say it’s a friend or mentor you admire—their character, their integrity, the way they move through the world. You’ve modeled parts of yourself off of them. So when they drop the ball—when they ghost you, snap at you, or act out of line with who they usually are—it stings.

That frustration is different.
It’s not about superiority.
It’s about shared standards. It’s about disappointment rooted in respect.

That, to me, is the only kind of frustration that feels truly valid—when it’s pointed at someone I genuinely look up to, and it comes from believing they can be better.

Because I want them to be.

I just think in life, it’s hypocritical to expect everyone else to have their shit together—when we most certainly don’t.

So don’t just get frustrated next time.

Pause. Breathe. And remember: if you’re trusting another human to do something for you—especially someone you wouldn’t switch places with—you’re rolling the dice.

And that’s okay. We all are.

That’s the cost of convenience.
The cost of community.
The cost of being human together.

“A specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing.”— Konrad Lorenz

It’s a general understanding that human civilization has thrived through economic specialization. Allowing individuals to pursue work that aligns with their unique skills, interests, or comparative advantages has led to enormous gains for society.

We no longer need to be jacks of all trades to meet our needs. Humanity has evolved to the point where, with a few taps on a glass screen, we can send a signal to a satellite orbiting the earth — and five minutes later, Taco Bell shows up on our doorstep.

We’ve come a long way from sharpening stones to tie onto sticks, crafting makeshift bows, and setting out on foot to hunt our dinner.

And for the most part, that’s a good thing. Our lives are longer, easier, and arguably more comfortable than at any other point in human history. You could make a case that happiness tells a different story — but still, it’s hard to argue there’s been a better time to be alive.

But lately I’ve been wondering: Have we evolved so far, we’ve disconnected from what made progress possible in the first place?

Take a young adult who studies computer science. They go to college, land a job as a coder, and maybe build an app that gets Taco Bell to your house in three minutes instead of five.

But could they set up electrical wiring in a home? Could they build an electrical grid from scratch — the very foundation that makes their specialty even possible?

We tend to build on top of systems without ever asking what those systems are built on. And the deeper our expertise gets, the further we drift from the basics. Not because we’re lazy, but because it’s easy to assume someone else already figured it out.

But what happens if those systems collapse?

Comedian Nate Bargatze has a great bit where he imagines time traveling into the past. The catch? He couldn’t actually convince anyone he was from the future — because he doesn’t understand how any of the technology works. He knows it exists, but not how to rebuild it. And honestly? Neither do I. Neither do most of us.

If the power grid failed tomorrow, if a meteorite hit, or if we lost access to the technologies and infrastructures we now take for granted — how long would it take us to rebuild?

If all the physical records disappeared, if AI went offline, and all the knowledge we outsource to search engines and cloud servers was erased — would we even remember how to begin?

It’s not a doomsday question. It’s a curiosity about how fragile our knowledge really is.

Do we need to rethink our educational paradigms to make sure we’re not just training specialists, but grounding people in first principles?

I love having the world at my fingertips when I’m connected to WiFi.

But where am I vulnerable when I’m not?

Thought I’m wrestling with.

I don’t farm. I don’t hunt. I don’t build shelter or haul clean water. I sit at a screen—sometimes to solve problems, sometimes to stare into the abyss of my own search bar—and I get paid for it. Paid more than the people doing work that literally keeps me alive.

We’ve become so surplus-rich that people earn full-time incomes from playing video games, selling digital pictures, or analyzing data tied to arbitrary financial derivatives. And I’m not judging that—it’s just… weird. Astonishing, in a way. But weird.

Think about it: entire industries exist to serve micro-needs that only emerged because we had time, money, and convenience to spare. Entertainment—sports, movies, music—makes billions not because it feeds or shelters us, but because we no longer need those things. I doubt a group of nomads in 2000 B.C. would’ve bartered their invaluable supplies to watch little kids review toys on YouTube.

And yet, it’s the knowledge workers, managers, and abstract thinkers who are often valued most by our modern society. People like me. We get paid handsomely for organizing, strategizing, optimizing—often with no physical output you can hold in your hands. Just digital files and messages flying around in cyberspace.

Don’t get me wrong—I understand how having basic needs accounted for allows for the leisure time that produces ideas and innovation. But I wonder: if that same “abstract thinker” were born in 1245, would their social status be equivalent to their modern-day value?

It’s just fascinating that the human race has evolved to the point where being able to manage people or think abstractly is the skill society rewards. Often exponentially more than the laborer or master craftsman.

It makes me wonder: how much of what we do is actually valuable… and how much is just self-reinforcing theater?
We produce abstractions to sell to people who, in turn, produce their own.

I’m not sure if this line of thinking is useful or nihilistic. Paradoxically, it’s these very modern advancements that have afforded me the ability to write this article—and feel a sense of value in doing so.

So on one hand, it humbles me. On the other, it pressures me to do something “real”—as if growing sweet potatoes is more noble than running strategy meetings.

And maybe it is. Maybe part of our modern mental health crisis stems from being ungrounded—disconnected from work that ties us to the earth. We’re floating in the metaverse while reality is right beneath our feet.

Or maybe the better question isn’t “Am I doing something essential?”
Maybe it’s: “Is the life I’m creating feeding something essential in me?”

Still wrestling.

“As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to more Eastern thinking, this is backwards. As we age we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves but rather strip things away to find our true selves.” Arthur Brooks in his book From Strength to Strength

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on this quote. Part of me resonates with the Western sentiment, as I’ve always aspired to acquire more knowledge, more experiences, and more stimulus out of life in the hopes of becoming a vast source of wisdom. I’ve always said that my dream is to be that grandparent one day that always has an enlightened story/lesson to share when a grandchild has stumbled upon a roadblock in their life that they need help with. I’ve also always been curious about how other humans live their lives around the globe, and constantly wonder “if I could live such a life”…whether it be a farmer in rural Russia, a CEO in Shanghai, or an entrepreneur operating in a public market of Istanbul. I really try to put myself in their shoes, which I believe allows me to develop great empathy for others and a willingness to entertain their points of views.

But the Eastern way of thinking, stripping things away, has increasingly resonated with me. Our time is finite. There will never be enough time, money, or energy for me to experience all that life has to offer. There isn’t enough time to experience 1% of what life has to offer. But I’m beginning to be comfortable with that and enjoying the “sacrifices” I choose to make. The relationships I invest in, the books I read, and the trips I take. Instead of constantly feeling as though I need to rush from one thing to the next in order to be as productive and efficient as possible on a fixed timeline, I prioritize what I value and what I want to give energy/attention to and I commit with full presence to that path. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to be cautious of the hedonic treadmill trap many can find themselves in if they don’t maintain perspective of their individual core values and internal motivators as they pursue growth and challenges in the world.

From Strength to Strength

Podcast with Arthur Brooks