Thought I'm Wrestling With: What Happens if the System Breaks

“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?

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”— Steve Jobs

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.