In the pursuit of growth—more money, more fans, more consumption—we become the dog chasing its tail. We start chasing the wrong signals.

With more data available than ever, we've become obsessed with false proxies. What looks like an objective measure ends up being an inaccurate reflection of the truth, drifting our efforts in the wrong direction.

These false proxies are a mirror, reflecting our biases and prejudices of how we see the world.

"Growth is good" is the obvious one. Take GDP. It's a cold, calculated formula that doesn't factor in human or environmental costs. In fact, those often bring GDP down. When communities switch to public transit, start a community garden, or fix a broken appliance instead of buying a new one, GDP goes down. When there's a war, a school shooting, or the cost of surgery rises, GDP goes up. GDP doesn't measure what's better. It measures more and calls it the same thing.

But it isn't just GDP.

Call it the N+1 theory: there is always one more of anything.

The fifth marshmallow doesn't taste as good as the first. The infinite scroll keeps us hooked on media junk food, around and around. Another series on Netflix becomes decision fatigue, so we let the algorithm decide for us.

More doesn't mean better. Better means better.

As economist Charles Goodhart put it, when a metric becomes the goal, we lose sight of what we were trying to do in the first place.

The dog keeps chasing its tail.

It’s hard to stay motivated for something you can’t feel day to day.

The gap between action and visible result is where motivation goes to die. When nothing seems to change, motivation has nothing to feed on.

Humans need feedback. Instant feedback scales, for better or worse. Slow or invisible change is feedback‑starved.

You go to the gym for two weeks, and your body looks the same. You start saving, and your account barely moves. You cut your carbon footprint, and the planet still feels like it’s burning.

Same pattern: effort now, no payoff yet. Present‑you does all the work. Future‑you gets the benefit.

So what keeps us showing up when we can’t feel the impact?

Three levers.

1. Make the invisible visible

If we can’t feel the change, we need to see it. That’s why step counters, streaks, and dashboards work. They turn invisible progress into something tangible to look at: miles run, dollars saved, days in a row.

Social media proved that gamification works. We chase stats. But the risk is always the same: the metric becomes the goal, and the goal drifts from what it was meant to measure. That should make us uncomfortable, but carefully designed feedback is still better than none.

2. Remove the need to feel motivated

Most investors don’t monitor their 401(k)s. They set it up once and let it run. Money comes out of each paycheck and quietly compounds.

That’s automation. Defaults. Structure.

The same logic applies to habits: prepping meals once a week, biking to work because that’s just how you get there.

You don’t have to wake up inspired if the decision was made upstream.

3. Elevate the status of showing up

When feedback is slow and structure is weak, status takes over.

The Prius didn’t win on emissions data. It won once it became the car that signaled you cared. Solar panels became visible signals before they were affordable.

Status shows up in personal change too. The identity of being “a runner” keeps you running. Being “good with money” keeps you saving. The reputation of being “reliable” keeps you shipping.

We can’t control whether we get to see the future we’re building toward. But we can design better feedback, better defaults, and better status games today—and let those do the work long after motivation fades.

At some point, every long bet starts to blur: the startup in year seven, the acting career still waiting on a break, the novel on its fifth broken draft, the rocky relationship deep into its second decade.

When is it time to call it quits?

Outcomes won’t tell you—at least not from where you’re standing. The entrepreneur whose company fails at year ten and the one who builds something great tell nearly identical stories at year seven. Same grit, same doubt, same "everyone thought I was crazy." We only know which one was "right" after.

For most of us, quitting feels like giving up. The culture punishes that. But giving up usually happens long before we actually quit.

Giving up is what happens when we feel entitled to the outcome. The work becomes a transaction, and when it doesn’t pay out, it sours into resentment.

There’s an alternative.

Letting go releases the outcome and keeps the work clean. From the outside, it can look the same—you stop, you walk away—but inside, it’s a completely different move.

The question isn’t should I quit? The better questions are:

• If you imagine it working out, does it pull you forward, or just promise relief?
• If you knew you would fail, would you do it anyway?
• Is the work still alive, or are you just repeating the motions?
• Are you still learning, or just enduring?

We’re not entitled to outcomes—only to the work. And we get to decide what the work is, and for how long.

Letting go isn’t giving up. It’s noticing the work has already ended, and being honest about it.

Everyone who has sat in the doctor’s office has had the patellar reflex test (also called the knee-jerk reflex). The doctor taps just below your kneecap with a small rubber hammer called a reflex hammer, which stretches the patellar tendon. Your leg kicks. You didn’t decide to kick—your nervous system fired before your mind got involved.

That’s the whole point of the reflex test. It shows you that part of you is operating below thought.

Most of what we call having “a hot take” online now is the same kind of kick: an involuntary reaction. We’re just mislabeling it.

There’s a progression worth naming: Reaction becomes habit. Habit becomes reflex.

Reaction is the first encounter.

Something happens and you respond to it—genuine, considered, even if it’s quick. It’s not about good or bad necessarily. It’s about appropriate. Your dog meets you at the door. A call comes in that someone you love has passed. Your body and mind responding to a real thing.

Habit is what reaction becomes through repetition.

You’ve responded the same way to the same kind of thing enough times that trenches of thought patterns have formed. You’re still doing it more or less consciously—if someone pointed it out, you’d recognize it. You could decide to break it, the way people decide to stop checking their phone the second they wake up or to stop smoking. It takes work, but the steering wheel is still in your hands.

Reflex, on the other hand, is what habit becomes once you’ve outsourced the seeing itself—when something else decides what you notice in the first place.

That’s the move worth slowing down on. The algorithm decides what you encounter, in what order, with what framing. You’re not really reacting to the thing anymore. You’re reacting to a curated presentation of the thing, designed to provoke a specific response from you.

Your reaction can be as authentic as you want and still be playing out a script someone else wrote.

The handover wasn’t of our reactions. It was of our perception.

When you step away from the rat race for a while, you notice it. You’re not the first to get the news, so you watch other people kick before you do. You see the reflex from the outside. In that gap—between the hammer and the kick—actual thought becomes possible again.

Stepping away isn’t about overriding a reflex in the moment. By the time the hammer hits, it’s too late. Stepping away is about reclaiming the way we see the world as it is—the thing we lost first.

Once we can see again, we might find ourselves back to habits, which we can actually work on. The work isn't fighting the kick. It's getting back the ability to choose what gets near our knee.

In the race to be first, and viral, and to have an opinion about everything, it’s worth saying plainly: an instant reaction isn’t an opinion. It’s a reflex disguised as one.

The Singer wasn’t just about manufacturing sewing machines with interchangeable parts (though they certainly did). More importantly, Singer transformed domestic work.

The sewing machine took something that was handcrafted—clothing, mending—and made it mechanical. Then came the mass production of ready-made clothing.

Singer is a story about technology eating craft from both ends: the machines themselves were standardized, and they standardized the work they did.

When Henry Ford pioneered the Model T and the assembly line, a new promise of abundance transformed how people thought about work again. Jobs were automated and broken into smaller, repeatable steps, with interchangeable parts—and interchangeable people.

Singer mechanized the work. Ford mechanized the worker.

And so we learned the lesson that stuck: technology begins when we make old work easier.

And it did, at first. Ford ushered in the five-day workweek and the $5 wage. Over time, we learned how to do work faster and cheaper at the expense of labor—creating, in the end, an abundance of the things we don't care about: average stuff for average people.

What isn’t getting talked about enough is that AI is both a standardized tool and a tool that standardizes the work it touches—much like the Singer sewing machine. It’s the same pattern, arriving in a new place: not on the factory floor this time, but in the work we thought was ours alone—writing, thinking, deciding.

The new work isn’t more automation of the kind we saw with Singer or Ford.

The new work is human work.

Craft...again.

The real lesson is the part we tend to miss: technology starts by making old work easier, but then it demands that new work be better.

We get to define what better means.

The trillion-dollar question right now is: How much will AI replace the work you do?

A simple test: "Hey Claude, tell me a funny joke.”

[Claude’s response for me: “Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything.”]

Womp womp.

This is something I’ll keep coming back to with every new model that comes out.

The best comics are always searching for the line. They’re willing to cross it from time to time. They put words to something we’re all feeling. Most importantly, they’re willing to bomb.

AI, however, optimizes for the opposite: the safe, the proven, the reliable.

Technology has never made it easier to make average stuff for average people. It’s a race to the bottom; you might even win.

The funniest people are funny because they’re willing to fail in ways that don’t average well.

So the honest version of the trillion-dollar question isn’t, “Can AI do what you do?” It’s, “Which parts of what you do are average?”

Which is to say: automated. A summary of yesterday’s news, a competent product description, a how-to article, a meeting summary—those are already getting squeezed.

What resists displacement is the human work of telling a good joke. And if you have to explain it, it’s probably not that good to begin with.

If what you do can be written down into a simple set of instructions, chances are AI will replace it.

Here's the thing about the gold rush. The gold was always present. It was just finally discovered. Then the word spread, and then the panic.

The extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds still exist today—we just now call it FOMO. The emphasis lands on the rush, and it changes how we approach the work. Shortcuts become normal. Slop becomes the default. Speed becomes the point. Quality stops mattering.

But the rush always ends. Much like the lottery: someone will win some gold. Most go home right back where they started. Empty-handed.

Rushing without intention is a race to the bottom. The work is to choose the intention and then choose the rush.

(Of course, you could just sell shovels instead.)

"I know so many painters who title their works after they've done them, which is a real giveaway, you know." — David Bowie, Inspirations (1997)

Bowie's not entirely right.

Today, it's easy to open a chat window with an LLM, describe the blog post you want to write, and have it spit out slop. Autocomplete. Send. Repeat.

The step toward better is to come up with a concept, write a draft, read through it, make some edits, and then take it to the LLM for suggestions. And perhaps the best work, like most pieces of writing, emerges through the editing process, which means you have to kill your darlings.

What I publish is often the tenth iteration of what I started. I know what I'm going to say at first, but not where it will end. I leave the door open. The piece evolves.

Which begs the question: If, after using the LLM, you keep only 10% or less, is the piece yours? You could retype the whole thing, and then what?

The reason the LLM's version might have felt usable to you isn't the prose. It's the structure—the order of beats, the placement of the pivot, the choice of where to end. That structure was worked out together through the back-and-forth.

And this hits on something important: Who does the art belong to?

The NYT bestseller certainly had an agent, a researcher, an editor, a publisher, plus technology—an army to help produce the work. Yet we have no problem putting the author's name on it, because they had the vision of what the book was supposed to be.

Because structure and prose are not the same thing.

The artist, like any designer, is about making choices—what goes in, what goes out. There are 26 letters in the alphabet and unlimited combinations of these symbols to create words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books.

Bowie believed artists are generally happier discussing the process of creating rather than trying to define what the artwork means. That's why painters title their works after they've done them—Bowie sees it as evidence of evasion. We're obsessed with how the work is made because, deep down, we're afraid. We're insecure as artists—and writers, designers, and coders are feeling it especially hard at the beginning of the AI era.

But this insecurity isn't new. Every artist can feel the fraud police right behind them, checking their work. Even the surgeon who moves from working on cadavers to live patients will feel like a fraud the first time.

Here's the thing: the invention of the internet vastly changed how research was done—no more encyclopedias or mandatory trips to the library. The laptop changed how fast we can type—no more jammed typewriters or yellow legal pads. Spell-check didn't stop people from being bashful about putting their name on a piece. And now we have LLMs, and the temptation is to fall back into that same insecurity.

The LLM is just scaffolding. The structure is what was co-created.

In the end, the art doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the piece.

Bowie is right that we name the process to cover our insecurity. But he's wrong to call the late title a giveaway. You need something to say. The blank page won't fill itself with meaning just because you showed up. But the meaning often arrives in the work, not before it.

The art is in the showing up and in having something to bring. The practice and the thread, together. That’s what gets named.

People don't sit around in a burning building. They act. Some run away. Others grab a hose. A few run in. What we don't do is have a meeting about it—time is short, and decisions must be made now, not later. That's how we move during a crisis.

And that's the problem with change: when we have the luxury of time, we use it. It becomes the crutch we lean on until a decision has to be made.

We don't move because we want to; we move because we have to.

That says a lot about human behavior. It suggests we don't want change unless it is necessary—even if the change is for the better. The hard truth is we are complicit in creating the conditions we say we don't want, because we don't act when the waters are calm—only when the storm is on our doorstep.

In chess, there are two players and six types of pieces. After each player's first turn, there are 400 possible positions. By the time each side has moved five times, there are over 69 trillion possible games. In fact, the total number of possible chess games exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe.

All of that chaos on a fixed 8x8 board. Fixed pieces. Fixed rules. Perfect information—both players can see everything. And still: incomprehensible.

And yet...chess is the easy case. It has a board.

Creative work doesn't have a board.

No fixed squares. No agreed-upon rules. No turns. No win condition. You don't even know who you're playing against, or whether there's a game at all. At least the chess player knows what a bishop does. The writer, the founder, the person trying to build something—they're making up the pieces as they go.

Steven Pressfield writes, "The birth of anything—stars and galaxies as well as people and animals—takes place amid disorder, confusion, and chaos. That's our novel, our non-profit, our Korean vegan restaurant. You and I must teach ourselves to be comfortable working in darkness and in crooked lines."

Working in darkness. Crooked lines. Not as a failure of planning but as the actual shape of the work.

People change. Constantly. And we like to think it's a linear path of getting 1% better each day.

Interestingly, we really can't help but talk about ourselves in this way:

"I've changed."

"I used to care about that."

"I'm not that person anymore."

The grammar alone smuggles in this assumption that there's an I doing the work of change, a stable observer watching and measuring the shifts over time.

But if we step out for a moment to see what's actually moving, it isn't one self accumulating experience—it's priorities. What mattered at 25 doesn't matter at 40. The wanting has quietly shifted hands to someone else inside you, someone the earlier version didn't plan for.

You didn't evolve. You were replaced, slowly, by someone your younger self wouldn't fully recognize.

The challenge of living a good life, then, is figuring out how to measure it—what matters, what counts, what adds up. But the harder problem is that the yardstick keeps moving too.

The thing is, your past self, who chose the metric, isn't around to be accountable to it. By the time you could evaluate the life you planned, you're not the one who planned it.

If the self isn't continuous, the whole-life project was never really coherent. There was never going to be a final you who could look back and say it added up. That you doesn't exist and never did.

Which is why it's better to break life into chapters. Chapters aren't a mental model or a productivity frame; they're how long one version of you lasts before it becomes someone else.

Trying to write the whole book of your life isn't a long view—it's a quiet grandiosity about identity, a belief that the author would still be the author at the end.

Instead, we can decide to just live this chapter well and trust that whoever shows up to write the next one will know what they're doing.

Sometimes, despite all the planning and preparation, the conversation goes sideways. Plans fall through. People back out of commitments. Things fall apart.

Almost without thinking, we reach for the lesson. Some clean sentence we can extract from the wreckage so the discomfort at least counts for something.

That's a habit. A belief we forgot to notice.

The world isn't actually handing out lessons. We're the ones installing the framework. Over and over, we take whatever just happened and ask it what it was trying to teach us—as if experience came pre-loaded with meaning, as if every hard thing was placed in our path by a patient tutor.

Perhaps. Perhaps it did. Perhaps the pattern is real and worth naming.

Or...

Perhaps the conversation just went sideways. Perhaps the plan just fell through. Perhaps we just exist, and the thing that happened doesn't owe us a takeaway.

That's harder to sit with than it sounds. If nothing is being taught, nothing is being authored on our behalf.

The question stops being, “What is this trying to teach me?” and becomes something quieter, “How do I want to be here?”

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is taught as a parable about the consequences of lying. But the part that stays with me is what happens after. Not the punishment—the village. The way a false alarm doesn't just cost the boy his credibility. It costs the village its ability to listen.

Right now, we have noise, not signal. Some are crying slop, bias, theft, and collapse. What they're doing isn't lying. It's reacting.

Every headline is a wolf. Every model release is a wolf. Every announcement, every leaked memo, every new screenshot.

The damage isn't that we'll stop trusting any particular alarmist. It's that the signal collapses into noise, and when something actually needs attention, no one will be listening.

What I keep circling back to is what the alarm reveals about us. We have watched automation replace people for my entire life. The pump replaced the attendant. The kiosk replaced the cashier. The spreadsheet replaced the bookkeeper. There was no alarm. Those people disappeared into a story about progress and efficiency, and most of us nodded and moved on.

Now it's reaching toward work we thought was safe because it was ours. Writers, designers, coders, doctors, lawyers—and suddenly everything is a wolf.

Most of us didn't feel the alarm when the travel agent went away. We feel it now.

That asymmetry is uncomfortable to sit with. The alarm we feel now is the alarm we didn't feel then, and the difference is us.

The question underneath the alarm is about dignity. You train for something. You work at it for years. You get paid for it. You are told—maybe you tell yourself—that you are part of something bigger than the paycheck. Then a machine can do a version of it, and the whole arrangement looks different.

That loss is real. But we might be misnaming it.

We say we're mourning the job. I'm not sure we are. I think we're mourning the story the job let us tell about ourselves. The dignity wasn't inside the work—it was inside the arrangement, the sense that showing up and being good at something meant something larger. The machine isn't taking the dignity. It's exposing that dignity was always contingent on a structure never built to last.

Which is maybe why the alarm sounds the way it does. It's not really about AI. It's about the story we're losing, and the quiet fear of who we are without it.

I, like many, worry about the seismic shift happening with AI. It isn't the technology itself—it's the velocity coming at us.

You can read all the horror stories of what can go wrong. And there are plenty of reasons:

• We’ve lost faith in institutions.
• The alignment problem.
• The incentive structure.
• Bad actors.

Those are real. But they're not why we're stuck. We stay stuck because we've trained ourselves to be pessimists.

The last six years gave us plenty of reps. At some point, the feeling becomes automatic, and automatic feelings aren’t observations anymore—they’re reflexes.

Pessimism isn’t wrong. It’s just the default. Defaults are what you stop thinking about and eventually stop noticing. They feel like clear-eyed realism from the inside, which is exactly what makes them hard to see past.

If pessimism is the default, then imagining things can go right isn’t naive. It’s the harder path to follow. It’s the realistic response to a moment when the old default is miscalibrated.

It feels like a massive door is opening and collapsing at the same time. That’s the training talking.

The door is real.

The cost of staying in default is that the world doesn’t wait. It moves on with or without us.

For most of human history, change was slow enough that a person could die in roughly the same world they were born into. Stone tools, fire, clothing. Followed by a long, quiet stretch.

Then came wedges and pulleys and wheels. Farming. Animals pulling what people used to pull.

Until...

Ships. The printing press. Steam. Factories. The internet. Smartphones. AI.

The list compresses as you read it, which is the point. It took a long time to get here. It won’t take a long time to get to whatever’s next.

We assumed (or were sold on the idea) that technology was supposed to give us time. It did the opposite. Not because it failed, but because it doesn’t just speed up tasks—it reshapes what we organize our lives around. Each new technology is a new template for what a life is supposed to look like.

Industrialism taught us to build our lives to resemble the factory—and we got it. Now we're building our lives to resemble something else, and we'll likely succeed there too.

It’s tempting to treat the new model of work as an autocomplete multiplier. But they're wrong. They're actually just compressing the old model: More output, faster. Same job, more of it.

That's a faster horse in the most literal sense. But a real reimagining of work is on the opposite end of the spectrum: using AI to do things we couldn't do before, especially things that aren't about volume or speed. The question isn't "How do I produce 10x more of what I already produce?" It's, "What becomes possible that wasn't possible before?"

Today, the pitch is 10x, and soon we'll see spam emails saying, "I can 100x!" What then? 1,000x? How about 1,000,000x? At some point, more of the same stops being meaningful. Production becomes effectively free. We've already seen it with the internet and smartphones. (What can be faster than instant?) The entire game of competing on output ends. So we need to reexamine how work is done before we get there.

The thing I would bet on is that the reimagining might actually look slower and more deliberate, not faster. If AI can handle the bulk production work, maybe the human move isn't to ride that wave and ship more of the same junk. Maybe it's to do less, but better.

If you are waiting for the shift, you will find the ground has already moved.

Isaac Asimov wrote over 500 books and 90,000 letters in his lifetime. He’s considered one of the three most influential science fiction writers of all time. Of everything he wrote, his favorite was a short story called The Last Question.

The premise is simple: humanity keeps returning to a supercomputer to ask the same question—can it solve the problem of entropy, the inevitable increase in disorder that will eventually cause the universe to run down?

(I won't spoil the ending.)

What stays with me is the returning. Civilization after civilization, across billions of years, humanity keeps coming back to the same computer with the same question. The computer never has an answer. They come back anyway.

I used to think the story (perhaps our story) was about survival and persistence. But as I get older, I think it’s about something smaller: we get to try. Of everything in the universe we can see, we might be the only thing that gets to try. That’s not nothing.

And somehow, it all feels less deterministic—even when the odds are almost zero.

In farming, monoculture is the industrial practice of planting a single crop to increase efficiency and yield. In the short term, you increase profits. When the long term shows up, you destroy biodiversity and degrade the soil, making it nutrient deficient and more susceptible to pests and disease. That, in turn, requires more chemicals that need to be sprayed, which degrade the soil even further.

Monoculture is a death spiral and will inevitably destroy the ecosystem.

The culture of the internet over the last two decades has incentivized us to produce instant, fast content for attention and clicks — producing more and more mediocre work that has continued to accelerate. Now, in less than two years of AI, we’ve seen that acceleration go into warp speed, producing an unprecedented amount of slop. Slop on top of slop.

The monoculture of fast, lousy work depleted the soil. Now the slop has arrived, and there’s nothing left to resist it. As I pointed out the other day (Day 3653), 22 years after the launch of Facebook, the long-term effects are now here, and we have to deal with them.

Instagram influencers don’t even need to be in front of the camera anymore when Nano Banana can produce the video. You don’t need to use your voice when CapCut that will read the script ChatGPT produced. Why even read and review the transcript? Ship it—if it’s bad and no one notices, you can send the next thing right away. Aim to go viral!

This is the race to the bottom—a noisy, crowded ecosystem, algorithm-driven with no one behind the wheel, eroding the internet a little more every day.

The alternative is to race to the top.

Ship work that matters. Produce the content you would want to read. Spend time with it. Be proud to have your name on it.

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of this blog.

I couldn’t have done it without developing a practice. Of course, when I started, I didn’t have one. The practice emerged over time by showing up daily to do creative work without obsessing over outcomes or waiting for inspiration to arrive. The habits came after doing the work (not before). The decision to write every day was made once, 10 years ago—and everything since has been about honoring that commitment over and over again.

Most importantly, a practice means showing up when no one is watching. It’s learning to trust the process and embracing the constraints (it’s Saturday Night Live, not Sunday Morning Recorded). It’s what Chinese philosopher Layman P’ang pointed to over 1,200 years ago: “Chop wood, carry water.”

(In fact, this is my second draft of this post. I somehow deleted the first one. I felt deflated, gave myself two minutes to grieve, and then opened a new document and began typing again.)

As Seth Godin has written, “The ocean is made of drops. And our practice turns those drops into something of significance.” Over time, the practice gives something back. It creates a body of work you can point to and say, “This is me. This is what I do.”

Most of the early posts aren’t very good. But I wanted to write. And over time, I got better. The practice of writing something every day—of shipping something, of making something—despite all the turbulence in the world has taught me to be resilient in the face of adversity. After all, ten years of writing every day isn’t given. It’s earned.

I don’t have many subscribers. Many, many times, I could have quit. (Who would I be disappointing?) There was no monetary reason to show up—it’s not my job. And yet, this has been one of the most important decisions of my life. It has taught me that despite all the excuses and drama, I can still sit down and write to you. Because, in the end, that’s what a practice is for. Showing up, over and over, is how resilience is, well, earned.

To everyone who reads this: Thank you.

And you’ll know where to find me for another decade—or two, or five, for that matter.

I wrote yesterday about how we don’t need more technology to create—we just need to make the choice. And that choice can change our posture in how we approach the world.

The artist’s process, despite what you might read, isn’t about the mystical power of inspiration. There is no muse that chooses us. There is no such thing as writer’s block—it’s just the gap between wanting to have written and wanting to write. And it certainly has nothing to do with talent.

Art is about the work.

And the work in the creative sphere is messy. It’s chaotic. Rarely do you understand at first what it is you’re doing.

Lisen to any professional comedian and they’ll tell you how many years it took to get a good five minutes. Just five minutes. Andy Kaufman remained misunderstood by many throughout his career because he was following a thread that looked stupid from the outside—and it turned out to be the whole bit. Early on, few people understood why Steve Martin was combining juggling, banjo playing, and a magician’s persona, and so he struggled for a long time before he broke through.

I have never met or read about an artist who walked a straight line.

In fact, it is their ability to follow the winding roads—even when they lead to dead ends, forcing them to turn around and start again—that helps them find their own way.

It’s usually not romantic. It’s deciding to stick with a draft after three weeks. It’s showing up and contributing to a project every day for six months. It’s nonprofit leaders doing the parts no one else wants to do. It’s a professional chef showing up to make the customers’ favorites again—even when they don’t feel like it.

The winding road isn’t something artists have—it’s something you walk. The choice from yesterday’s post is the choice to keep walking when the road bends.

When you first read Harold and the Purple Crayon, it’s hard not to feel the wonder and magic of a world where anything is possible. You could do what Harold did: draw your own moon and sidewalk, fight dragons, jump on a boat, taste nine different flavors of pie, fly in a hot air balloon, fall out of that hot air balloon, save yourself from the fall—all before heading off to bed.

For a child, it sparks so much imagination, curiosity, wonder, problem-solving, creativity, artistry, and power.

As an adult, though, there’s a twinge of jealousy. Look how much freedom, autonomy, and agency Harold has! It’s tempting to think, If I just had a purple crayon, my life would be so much easier. But we know magical purple crayons don’t exist. And honestly, many adults, if handed a magic purple crayon, would probably just draw a big pile of money.

What a boring way to use your imagination.

Magical purple crayons may not exist, but we can’t pretend there isn’t a kind of magic in our world that simply didn’t exist 200 years ago. The laptop I’m typing on, the internet, the smartphone, clean water from the tap, the humble level, standardized measurements, penicillin, a refrigerator—the list goes on and on. These are everyday miracles we barely notice anymore because the technology is everywhere.

And now we have AI, as close as we’ve ever come to a real-life purple crayon. Yet again, so many of us rush to figure out how to monetize it, convincing ourselves, Once I make money with this, then I’ll finally be creative. But it doesn’t work that way. We choose to be creative first. Maybe the money comes later. Maybe. But the money isn’t the point.

Harold doesn’t actually teach us that we need a magical purple crayon to feel what he felt. The tools are everywhere now. What we really need is to become curious again. To use our imaginations. To be brave enough to make art. That’s when we tap into the same sense of power Harold had.

We like to believe—or at least tell ourselves—that the choices we make shape our circumstances. If you make enough good choices over a long period of time, the story goes, you stack the odds in your favor for better outcomes.

But when the winds shift, we often look for someone or something to blame. We put ourselves in the role of judge—of other people and of the world around us. Over time, this can become a habit. And pretty soon, we turn that same criticism toward ourselves, too. We start thinking we don’t belong either.

The question becomes: who does, then?

The world is unfair. It is full of injustice. Whether it’s a decision we made—or a decision someone else made for us—no matter how quickly we want to attach our stories of effort or luck, we do ourselves a disservice when we stop being curious about the world and the people who occupy it.

Instead of pointing fingers and finding someone to blame, we could ask ourselves:

• What’s possible?
• What are my choices today?
• Knowing what I know now, how can I respond?
• Where can I contribute?

The world is more complicated than the simple story that our choices create our circumstances. Curiosity cuts through that story and opens doors of possibility. When curiosity becomes a habit, it pulls us toward solutions—not just choices, not just circumstances, but the attitude we bring to the table.

A habit of judgment does the opposite. It keeps us stuck inside the very circumstances we wish would change.

There is an instinct in our culture today to pull back when someone isn’t “one of us.” We’ve segmented ourselves to the point that it’s easier to isolate than to come together despite our differences.

Hot-button issues are too many to count now. I don’t even have to name them. I recently talked to someone who would not associate with anyone who eats at Chick-fil-A. Unfortunately, these are all side effects of eroding communities, and we are stuck bowling alone.

Which makes it really difficult to find ways to get along.

There are a couple of things worth noting:

First, there’s always been a loop of purity in our culture. It isn’t enough to be vegetarian; now you must be vegan. And yet, the chef who works at Outback Steakhouse doesn’t get to decide what is on the menu. That one-upmanship has a cost: the virtue signal becomes more important than the work itself. And that distraction often impedes the work. Work will always be messy, and that messiness too often gets in the way of even getting started.

Second, snap judgments in humans will never go away. But now, filters are everywhere on the web, amplifying what we don’t like about each other. If you don’t like what someone says, you can mute, swipe left, unfollow, or unsubscribe—creating an echo chamber in the process.

Third, we haven’t built a culture that values work over opinions. Knee-jerk reactions often get applause. And when you ask why someone holds such a strong opinion, the answer is usually thin—more about identity than experience or effort. It often boils down to this: I’m not sure, other than that they are not like us.

It turns out there is always something we will find to disagree about. What matters, then, is what we are building toward.

Times do change. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, slavery seemed like it could never have been abolished 200 years ago. And then one day it was.

It was unheard of for Republican representatives to debate climate policy 20 years ago, and now they do.

My first job out of college was as a park ranger. I remember when the National Park Service took the controversial stance of acknowledging climate change as a problem, and we were required to educate visitors about it. That doesn’t seem so controversial anymore.

The Great Salt Lake is currently drying up. I don’t see a political divide in the masses; most are terrified of what they are breathing every windy day.

A flexible, work-from-home schedule was uncommon six years ago, and now it isn’t.

The reactions we feel today rarely show up in the long run. And when we are busy tossing aside the people around us so quickly, we often find ourselves alone in regret down the road, after the strong feelings have passed.

When we start rowing in the same direction, we tend to overlook what is different about us and instead focus on the rowing.

Legendary comedian Paula Poundstone has a bit where she talks about how, early in her career, she would complain that no one ever showed up to her shows. Of course, she was saying this to the audience that had actually shown up.

Gabe Anderson, the bass player, writes that you only get to release your music—you don’t get to control how your audience listens to it.

The same is true here. I can’t tell you how to consume this blog. You might read it in the bathroom, on a walk, in a quiet library with no distractions, or not at all.

The work is the work. That’s all we really get.

That isn’t to say outcomes don’t matter. They do. But they’re not what we control.

What we can control is the process:

• our attitude
• our posture
• the choice to show up
• the decision to create work that matters, regardless of who is watching

Everything else is just noise.

And so much of our culture—especially in behavioral economics and psychology—is focused on gaming people into certain behaviors: to spend more, scroll more, watch more, consume more.

The alternative is to simply leave the door open.

Make the space feel inviting. Ask for permission if people want to be part of the journey.

As Seth Godin has pointed out, permission marketing and long-term relationships are built on communication that is anticipated, personal, and relevant. That is vastly different from spamming people.

The world doesn’t need another used car salesman. And just because you wrote a joke doesn’t mean it’s funny to the rest of us.

We need more people who will contribute. You don’t earn trust and attention without continually showing up to feed the community. But if you do it long enough, with enough care, eventually the community will feed you back.

Drip by drip, the ocean is filled.

1. This is water: In 2005, David Foster Wallace opened his Kenyon College address with a parable: two young fish are swimming along when an older fish passes and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” After a while, one young fish turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

2. Muddy waters: Social media continues to erode the fabric of our culture and communities. It’s a dark, muddy water we’ve grown used to navigating—reshaping how we think, how we feel, how we believe we should live, while stealing and monetizing our attention. But this isn’t normal. And it keeps getting weirder, pushing us in directions none of us truly want to go. Over time (and now, 22 years after Facebook’s emergence), it is making us more divided than ever. The long-term effects are starting to show.

3. Triggers as signals: What’s triggering you? And why that, specifically? What sets you off may not bother someone else at all. That gap matters: our triggers often point to old wounds, unmet needs, or stories we’ve told ourselves for a long time—stories we then act out on the wrong people online, further eroding our communities and widening the divide between us.

There is simply no substitute for the real world. No work “family” can replace a real family. No online community can replace relationships with your neighbors. In the real world, you can’t easily hit a mute button or swipe away when adversity shows up. And it turns out there are real consequences when we start treating offline relationships the way we treat online ones.

Wallace’s point is that the real trap isn’t in obviously “bad” beliefs, but in the unconscious ways we worship things. (Remember, he said this only one year after the emergence of Facebook.) The world rewards this default mode, which keeps us self-centered and restless. True freedom is learning to notice the “water” we swim in—to choose awareness, to care about others, and to sacrifice for them in small, unglamorous ways, instead of drifting along in polluted waters.

Physics is not emotional. Neither is mathematics, nor talking to an LLM. The weather doesn’t care about your vacation, and mountains certainly don’t care if you have a 2 o’clock with the board of directors.

Humans are the emotional ones. We bring feelings into almost every decision. Much of what we choose isn’t driven by logic, but by how it makes us feel. We don’t feel like cooking, so we grab fast food—even though we know it’s unhealthy in the long run. Every smoker knows it’s bad for their health, but chooses to do it anyway because of the comfort or status it provides.

In that light, maybe not everything is meant to be logical. We constantly weigh trade-offs and decide that certain negative consequences are worth it. Maybe the real tension is between the long run and the short run. We rarely see what two decades of a bad habit can do, compounded over time, so we let it slide. It stops being about what’s truly optimal and becomes about what feels acceptable—especially when we know that, in the very long run, something will get us anyway.

But thinking this way is a lousy strategy for living. It gives our short-term feelings all the power and leaves our long-term selves to deal with the bill.

Google’s reputation for killing beloved products really hardened in 2013 when it shut down Google Reader—its much-loved RSS feed tool. People still remember.

Since then, Google has continued to swing the axe: Inbox by Gmail, Google+, Google Glass (way ahead of its time), and then the 2019 massacre—Daydream, Clips, Chromecast Audio, Spotlight Stories, goo.gl, and so on. There’s even a dedicated graveyard for Google’s products and services—299 and counting.

RSS feeds are still the best way to organize the internet. The problem is, there aren’t many great RSS tools out there.

Feedly has been my go-to for years. It’s good, but it isn’t perfect. And I find it hard to pay for a service that doesn’t really do the one basic thing I want: organize and collate the internet. I don’t need an AI assistant. I don’t need another layer that promises to mute the noise. That’s what an RSS reader is supposed to do.

At this point, I’m actually considering building my own. But I digress...

Blogs are still very much alive. I have mine, of course, which you can subscribe to. But here are a few others I read regularly — and that you should too:

• Seth Godin
• Gapingvoid
• Gabe The Bass Player
• xkcd
• Our World In Data
• Boing Boing
• Steven Pressfield
• Lefsetz Letter

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins noted that our ancestors worked two to three hours a day to survive. Juxtapose that with today, and we’re arguably working four times as hard. Why is that?

The washing machine promised to end the dreadfulness of scrubbing a shirt. The microwave championed convenience. The refrigerator works once we plug it in—I don’t have to sit there and baby it. The same goes for a range or a thermostat: I just need to set the temperature and walk away. And that’s just advances in home technology. We can say the same for travel, for the internet and online shopping, for Amazon’s delivery network, and on and on and on.

If our lives are supposedly getting so much more efficient, then why are we working so hard?

There are a bunch of reasons:

1. Humans always find a way to fill their time. We just don’t always get to pick what we fill it with. While we could use discretionary time for something else, culturally we’ve decided to fill it with a 40-hour workweek. (Even when we don’t need 40 hours to complete the actual work.) We don’t own our time. We’re on the boss’s time.

2. Our incentive structures don’t lead to more freedom, possibility, discretionary time, or leisure and recreation—they lead to profits. We maximize and optimize for something that pulls us away from our communities and toward the interests of central institutions.

3. We’ve been told, over and over, that to create meaning in our lives, we must consume. And when we inhale this story, we clamor for more status symbols and artifacts to show others that our lives are worth envying.

4. We use false proxies. We measure the wrong things. Money is, indeed, a story. But it also sends a signal—if the digital bits go up at the end of the quarter, we feel better about our situation.

None of these things are as definitive as gravity. They’re choices. Unfortunately, we’ve built a culture (or a cage, for that matter) in which no one is directly accountable for the system or the way things are. That makes it even harder to change anything—we’re fighting an invisible force that controls the operating system: how we should think, how we should feel, how we should live.

Once we can put our finger on it—once we can see the world as it really is—we can make a second choice: to push back.

Philosophers and poets have written about this throughout human history. As far back as when we told legends and stories of Pandora opening the box and accidentally unleashing all the dreadful things of this world. According to the legend, the only thing left in Pandora’s box was hope.

But the Greek language has two meanings for hope:

1. The hope of a better tomorrow—the belief that things can improve, that our efforts matter, that light can break into even the darkest places.

2. A false sense of hope—the sense that nothing really changes, that we are simply enduring for the sake of enduring, fighting to survive and be remembered, even though, in the long run, we are star dust.

The human condition often seems suspended between these two definitions. We strive. We build. We love. We ache to leave a legacy. And yet, zoom out far enough—across centuries, galaxies, lifetimes—and we are impossibly small.

So why do we keep hoping?

I think that edge where the two sides meet is precisely why we tell the story. Again and again. Because perhaps this time we’ll tell the story differently. Maybe this time we’ll hear it differently. Maybe this time we’ll live it differently.

Hope and false hope—two sides of the same coin.

It’s clear, with the popularity of tools like OpenClaw, that people are yearning for a digital assistant. Even with the risks—prompt injection, accidental deletion of important documents, or potential data leaks—many are still willing to roll the dice if it helps them navigate the digital clutter we’ve created. In some ways, it feels like the wild west of the early internet all over again.

Back then, the promise was that digital would make everything better. I’m not convinced it has. Yes, there have been real breakthroughs—like having GPS in your pocket. Life is certainly more convenient. But I’m not sure it’s better because of the internet.

Other innovations, like email, didn’t simplify communication; they turned it into something instant, 24/7, with no real off switch.

The incoming is constant now.

So we skim. We scan quickly through the next item on the agenda and sort it into piles: here’s something I should pay attention to, here’s something I can delete, here’s a stack of things for “later,” and so on.

Over time, though, that kind of sorting can wear on our psyches. We start filing information in ways that only reinforce how we already see the world. Anything that contradicts our beliefs gets filtered out or quietly ignored. Social media amplifies this, building echo chambers around our preferences. Spotify algorithm preferences. Netflix suggestions. Google reviews. You get the picture.

There is another option: we can try new information on for size.

Instead of instantly rejecting ideas that conflict with our worldview, we can sit with them for a moment. We can ask, “What if this were true? What would that make possible?” Sometimes that posture opens doors we didn’t even know existed.

And if it doesn’t work—if the new idea proves unhelpful or wrong—you can always go back. The point isn’t to abandon what you know; it’s to stay open to what you don’t know yet.

If you opened your calendar and task list today, how much of it is real work—and how much is just managing the system?

That gap between (real) work and "work-about-work" is where our systems quietly take over.

Over time, systems left alone will always become more complicated. Without real intent to cut the cruft, digital debt compounds until systems become unusable. Many of the tools that were supposed to 10x your work ten years ago are now practically worthless.

"Work-about-work" has become a full-time job.

As a friend recently put it, “Salesforce is an 800-pound gorilla you just have to deal with.”

When a system is layered with abstractions, it stops being a place for productive work and becomes a place to hide. Take sales: the real job is to talk to people. But if you spend all your time in a system tracking and measuring those interactions, you forget what you were actually hired to do. College Professors feel the same way. If all you do is report what you’re going to teach, teaching itself becomes secondary.

Systems were built to support workflows. Over time, they became the very thing we manage and hide behind—the disease—instead of the thing that helps us do the actual work of talking to humans—the cure.

Tomorrow morning, spend your first hour talking to humans before you open any system. See how different the day feels.

It is clear that AI will take some jobs, just like the invention of the printing press wiped out scribes. Many jobs will evolve much like Excel changed the way accounting was done. And new jobs will emerge, just like the invention of flight created a need for air traffic controllers and pilots.

So the question shouldn't be if AI will take your job. The better question is, how can I use this technology to level up the work I do? The temptation in any revolution is to lean away, hold tight to what is ours, and to hope you skip the chopping block. The alternative is to lean in, let go, be fluid to change, and see what happens.

So many doors are closing while opening at the same time. And I truly believe more will open for those who are curious. As always, becoming a linchpin and indispensable is the best way to insulate yourself in an uncertain job market.

Accountability is the practice of owning our commitments and outcomes. This allows us to look forward into the future. It's a promise of who we could be, with a witness to see it.

Accountability is an easy step to miss when trying to change things. Especially when the change is a private one behind the scenes.

One useful tool for AI is to create an accountability buddy. Create a project in Claude, for instance, that you can come back to. Set a goal, and be honest about what you are working through. Write down (even better, speak into the microphone) when the Resistance shows up. While I do not think there is a substitute for having a real accountability partner in your life that you check in with, having a chatbox in your life to check in every hour of every day, that has unlimited patience, is something that is difficult to achieve in our fast-paced lives.

For instance, I think it is wonderful to set up a Fitness project that I check in each day. I write down what the scale says, how I slept, how I am feeling, what the schedule is for today, what I am worried about regarding snacking, and my meal ideas, to remind me of my fitness goals, and so on.

I could give you a prompt, but I think it's better to start and see what happens. Showing up every day is so hard to do. It is a practice. And having someone with more tools in our corner to help us stick to our commitments turns accountability into results.

Telling our version of the truth is easy when we don't have anyone to be accountable to.

Happiness is a wonderful feeling. But it's also a fleeting moment. Much like riding a roller coaster or eating ice cream at the park. It comes and goes like a change in the wind. And more often than not, so many things have to be in alignment to feel happy. You need to be well-rested, free from stress, have the absence of negative emotions, comfortable, stress free, etc., etc. It's the positive feelings we have while in the moment that's heavily tied to our circumstances and our mood.

Satisfaction, on the other hand, you don't need near the same conditions as happiness to feel. Climbing a mountain, for instance, can feel like suffering but feel just as satisfying. Parenting is a difficult job. Most parents I talk to are not very happy day to day. But they are satisfied with a job well done as they watch their kid grow. Satisfaction embraces all the parts of life, taking in to account the ups and the downs. It's the feeling we get when we step back from our life and see the good we are doing. It isn't necessarily tied to pleasure which makes it much different from happiness.

The pursuit of happiness has been engrained in us from an early age. What we need is the pursuit of satisfaction.

A friend of mine recently reminded me that there is always a cost to quitting something. And he is right. When we quit social media, we also quit staying in the loop, the feeling of being part of what everyone is doing, etc. I missed the Artemis launch because my feed wasn't reminding me that today was the day.

There's a cost to quitting a relationship, a job, even a bad habit. Smoking, after all, is a great icebreaker. "Hey, you smoke Marlboro Reds? Me too!"

While we focus on what we lose, we don't take into account what we gain.

The obvious benefit is improved mental or physical health, as demonstrated by the two examples above.

But I think the thing we gain the most is the psychic benefit of exercising agency. We get to choose what we allow into our lives. Further, increasing our locus of control in a world that feels constantly out of control. With enough belief that you can quit anything, you'll find it incredibly frustrating when things don't let go. (Try cancelling a Disney subscription and see what I am talking about.)

As always, there is a flip side to the cost. The benefit is: If you say no to this thing, what do you get to say yes to?

Decades of social media use won't have much benefit beyond some dopamine and entertainment along the way. It's because of the nature of consumption. When we are busy consuming junk food media, we get what we sign up for.

By contrast, when we are shipping something, we are making something, and when we are creating art, we are opening a new door of possibilities with our interaction with the world.

Humans, by nature, need to consume resources to survive — to a point. But to experience what it fully means to be human, we have to share something to feel the connection we so desperately crave. The world can already feel isolating. We have made so many decisions along the way to amplify this feeling.

We are social creatures. And without first contributing to a tribe, how could you ever really feel part of the tribe? Why should the tribe feed you if you never feed them back?

We can develop a posture of what does the world owe me, or we can say what do I have to give?

When our ancestors decided to walk the long way home cause they heard a roar in the distance, they survived. At least, they survived better than those who didn't listen to the warnings in a dangerous world. This is what our biology has taught us — look for the patterns to make an unpredictable world more predictable and be afraid of the warning signs.

Today, we don't have to run from sabertooth tigers. The world is a much safer place in many respects than it was for our Homo Erectus friends. But our brains don't understand that they're no longer a risk — we can't help but look for what's wrong with this picture.

Social media amplifies this. It does it by changing the story we tell ourselves and the world around us. Since the machine isn't a source of clarity but is used to extract data, attention, and money, we tend to look for what can end us. Further amplifying the story of what is wrong with the world.

These are not positive spaces to live in. And when we choose to embed our lives in the digital space of social media or create doppelgangers, we become an extension of the story it tells us about the world. We can't help but point out all the problems we see because that is what is socially acceptable to do online.

I mention this because I have had three interactions recently in which the person felt the need to complain about everything wrong around them. The lights are too bright, the line is too long, the food is too cold, and so on.

This is what is acceptable now — complain about everything that is wrong with the picture we are seeing. Pointing out what is perceived as danger when it isn't. It is no surprise to me, at least, that all three have a social media problem. Garbage in, garbage out. If all we are exposed to is slop, then our lives and our interactions will become the same.

You can't game the system. The house always wins. And yet, so many who are hooked on social media think that they have a handle on their addiction. The internet sucks in most ways now. I love the good parts of it. AI and this blog have enriched my life in so many ways. But make no mistake: we are watching its enshitification at the same time.

Dirtbag climber, James Lucas, talks about how climbers should give 80% of their effort on most days out. Which isn’t something you hear in today’s culture — to leave something in the tank rather than give 110%. But climbing, especially on lead, is as much a mental game as it is physical. And if you always give it your all on the scariest climb, you will burn out quickly.

There is something to be said when you feel confident and climbing well below your hardest grade, where you can focus on the climbing and not worry about falling at all. In other words, building a "coast feature" into our lives can be widely frowned upon. Yet, those who learn to stay productive and engaged while finding incremental success tend not to burn out as easily. They survive to be there in the long run.

Life is indeed a marathon for a reason. Someone showing up day after day, putting in max effort, might be an incredible Olympic gymnast. And then they are done by 16.

Excellence comes in many forms. Sometimes in accolades and achievements. Other times, most of the time, it is showing up when no one is watching. I don’t climb because I get paid to do it. I do it cause its a great way to spend my time. There is a poetry/graceful element in the movement itself — like doing yoga with a rope. Just moving like this has meaning despite the grade.

And maybe that is excellence too.

Yes, you should try hard in things you love. Rewards and accolades are nice to pursue, but they aren't the "why."

Living in the space of the "long run" isn't something we arrive at without showing up for many days of "I don't really want to be here right now." Pushing through today to get somewhere way down the road of "someday" can't be done by optimization alone.

The first week of baseball is underway. And with the new ABS (Automatic Ball-Strike) system, balls and strikes have never been more accurate. Except, I am not so sure we should have them. Just because we can doesn't mean we should.

Robots have been replacing humans for quite some time. The printing press wiped out the scribing industry. The steam engine replaced human labor. I don't think we can even remember when we started using self-checkouts, but they are everywhere these days. Anyone under 30 won't even know what the world was like without smartphones and GPS.

We just don't realize how much we like to automate the work we do.

The reason I suspect it stresses us out is that we fill our time with more stuff to do. When something is crossed off the list, we add two more things. Not necessarily more productive things. Just more of it.

In many aspects, we have more, not fewer, choices in how we use discretionary time now. We don't have to go back far in time to a world without a microwave, a range, a fridge, a washer, or a dryer.

Today, we just spend our leisure time differently. Many will be scrolling and worrying about whether the world is going to fall apart. We tune in to watch something on Netflix, only to spend the time picking something to watch.

When you think about it, records killed live music in many ways. So did radio and television for the local theater. And yet, there is still value in going out of our way to see a live show. Technology isn't the threat to human flourishing. As always, it is in the eye of the beholder and how you use it.

In climbing, people will complain about whether a bolt should be placed on a route. And one way to think about it is that nobody is forcing you to use it. Using tech is a choice. How you spend your time is another matter. Automation might be great. And sometimes it isn't. Sometimes we want a human touch. Others, we want a robot to get it more precisely than we can.

If it's crunching numbers, grab a calculator/spreadsheet/AI to assist. But if you are here reading this, I know you didn't click to read a generated AI post. And if we can't call pitches accurately anymore, what are we doing? Further, who even cares?

You can always choose to use the self-checkout — or not. Perhaps with all this technology, we don't need umpires in baseball either. And yet, I think having the chaos of being human and making mistakes is what makes sports so fun to begin with.

I am happy to announce that I built SaveTheCommons.org. A love letter/passion project I've had in me for a while. Those who know me personally know that I've been on Great Salt Lake, studying water issues for quite some time, including identifying problems with canals, alfalfa fields, water usage, state legislation, and so on.

I hope the website is informative, helping visitors go from a 1-4/10 understanding of the issues to a 6+/10. The idea is to make boring public data tables more digestible, to make data beautiful, and to turn it into a story we can understand. This is just version 1.0. The website isn't finished, it'll be an ongoing pursuit, but with all things of this nature, it's better to ship early and get feedback along the way to make tweaks and adjustments needed before more eyes see it.

In addition, the work was partially inspired by watching The Lake at the final Sundance Film Festival this year in Park City (RIP). It was very dystopian to say the least watching as the lake was drying up while the snowpack was going through a dry spell. Honestly, the film made me want to pack up and leave. But the reality is this is an issue across the entire west in how we use our water. Not only that, everywhere you go will be facing a climate change issue. At some point, we have to draw a line in the sand. This is our home. And it is worth fighting for. I've been asked why I would do this, as in where is the monetary pursuit in this. There is none. This is my contribution to the fight to protect our home, our children, our communities.

Flow is when abilities meet challenge. When we are fully engaged in this way, we can lose the sense of time and even the self.

The other end of the spectrum is shitty flow: doomscrolling for 90 minutes without looking up, or scrolling Netflix for 30 minutes without choosing a show. Same effect — fully engaged in the same way as climbing a mountain — much different results.

Our attention continues to be sucked out of us in every turn to the point it has fundamentally altered our behavior. Worse, we amplify the story we tell about the "pursuit of happiness" because of what we are fed by the machine.

Happiness, while nice, isn't long lasting. In fact, the times in our life when we feel most satisfied is often when we are not happy. Grinding through hours of Claude Code, for instance or being terrified on lead while climbing. The day in and day our pursuit of excellence, which in the end, will ironically make us most happy.

10 years of daily writing, 10 years of projects, 10 years of talks, and 10 years of experience and expertise, I have wanted to house them under one roof. And in five days, I took a concept that had been in my mind and coded my way through. Two years ago, a project like this could have cost tens of thousands of dollars, from coding to design to even the logo. I am so proud to present joshall.red, where all my blogs will be published going forward.

AI is going to continue to divide people based on how much it will change things around here. The skeptics had real arguments two years ago when LLMs were hallucinating, agentic work wasn't really happening, and so on. Models were just not good enough back then. But today, most of those issues are solved.

What I've also seen from skeptics isn't so much that they think AI will fail to live up to its promise as that they hope it will fail so they don't have to change.

Until you have an "aha" moment with AI, you will remain skeptical about the tech, while the gap between power users and everyone else continues to grow.

We need to be clear: human work is still needed. A human behind the machine making good judgment, having good taste, using creativity, seeing a problem that needs to be solved, hasn't gone away, and won't anytime soon. We still need comedians writing funny jokes. We still need impresarios in the nonprofit making connections. We need activists to solve interesting problems.

This tech will 10x your work if you are willing to learn.

The problem? Like most things, there is a learning curve. It isn't something you can vibe your way through. You won't do it overnight. And you have to be patient at the beginning. Until you're willing to put in 100 hours in and willingly go from a state of competence to incompetence, much like learning how to ski or swinging a golf club, you won't see the magic it can produce.

My advice: leap first. Don't wait, because the window may close in a year or two for early adoption. There is so much open space right now for those who want to do work that matters.

Backpacking the John Muir Tail is a reminder that every journey with great length starts with one step. And then another. And then another. Until one day there are no more steps to take. Learning a new language or finishing med school or using AI for the first time can feel like a similar journey. Doing it all at once can feel so overwhelming. But taking it one step at a time, pretty soon you can find a rhythm.

Systems tend to have a bias to where they will point to. Usually it is towards stock prices or efficiency. Rarely, do they point towards better. To make things better, you must go against the grain of what is normal or easy to do.

Hollywood screenwriter, William Goldman, said this. I think about this a lot in the age of uncertainty. But the age of uncertainty didn’t start with AI or COVID. Humans have always been concerned about their future. And have always had to live with uncertainty. This isn’t new. When talks of jobs going away, in the age of uncertainty about jobs (to be more specific) we could also embrace the technology. I’ve found that the people excited by AI haven’t had the magic moment yet. When they make something they couldn’t have possibly done just six months ago. It’s indeed scary if you are running from the tech that is going to fundamentally change the world. It’s still scary when we run towards it too but far less so when you have more clarity what it’s capable of today.

Being at the right place, at the right time, with the right tools, with the right pieces in place is nothing without the right attitude.

Try deleting social media from your phone. Not your account. Just the app itself. Temporarily deactivate your accounts and sign off. See what happens in just two weeks.

Next, you need to fill your time with something. Pay $25 per month (or if you are really bold, pay $125) and start coding. Make the page you have always dreamed of. It doesn’t have to be good; it just needs to be yours.

See what happens when you commit to 8 hours of sleep.

There is always a cost to quitting something. But also, there is a benefit too.

Jhey Tompkins spent a decade showing how to turn code into magic. Over time earning more trust and attention. And now people notice. A lot of people notice. It goes to show: when you feed the community, the community turns around and feeds you.

We can spend a lot of time fighting for the last little bit. Nasty divorces can fight for every inch. We see it in wars too. The question we should be asking is if this is with even fighting for? Does the last 10% matter? What about the last 2%? It turns out we are so much happier when we focus on what we gained not what we maximize.

Some of us start ahead. Others way behind. But gravity pulls us to average. That’s where most of us live. It can be difficult to accept that in most ways we are average. But what’s remarkable is the little slices of us that are exceptional. That makes you you.

This is often an acceptable thing to say when feeling criticized for our actions.

But doing our best isn’t same as someone saying, “I’ve done everything I can.”

Life is hard. And I am not dismissing our efforts. It’s also a place to comfortably hide and to let us off the hook for responsibility. After all, two things can be true at the same time.

There’s always something else to be done. We make choices. And with those choices come trade offs too.

There’s a fine line between the two. We often confuse what it is we are trying to accomplish.

In these emotionally charged conversations it can be easy to think an apology will fix what’s wrong. But when the thing that hurts is rooted deeper, it is often so messy it can’t be fixed. The person is really searching for a way to accept the circumstances they are in.

This is difficult to do because the relationships that this affects the most, one party may not see it.

Reconciliation is the better path. But it isn’t always an option. And that’s where we get stuck.

Not everyone wants the same thing or can even put the words to it.

Coincidence are true but hard to believe because of the story we tell ourselves. We don’t say we are that lucky all the time. Once again, our vision doesn’t match the data of what’s possible.

Everyone acts rational. According to their rational, which isn’t your rational. That’s what makes relationships with spouses, friends, and coworkers so difficult to cultivate. We all operate at different spaces.

Act accordingly.

Then when?

Tomorrow turns into the next day.

And the next.

Until one day life is behind us.

Yesterday is always the best day to act.

Today is the next.

Tomorrow could happen.

Maybe.

But why chance it?

The beauty of Saturday Night Live isn’t that it’s perfect. It’s that its Saturday and the show must go on. Despite any mishaps or mistakes along the way. For some reason, we have forgotten this is sports. Mistakes happen. People see things differently. As a result, it introduces a level of chaos that makes it unpredictable and fun.

Watching the NBA my whole life, one of the worst changes we see now is the five minute long coaches challenges. It’s awful from an entertainment standpoint. And it changes how the game is played. For instance, all games we call the ball are not off the last touch (unless it’s obvious) but who hit it which direction when two players get a hand on the ball at the same time. We don’t get a replay each time. Instead, the referees make a judgement call and check ball. They are not always right. That’s the point.

It’s a feature not a bug to be human. Close enough indeed works.

The difficult layer of parenting is how easy it is to judge ourselves based on the performance of our child. We compare. We worry that one behavior may lead to a string of things down the road. It’s natural. But that guilt and shame rarely makes us better. Outcomes are separate from decisions and effort. We can make all the right decisions and put in the max amount of effort and still not reach the desired results. That’s how life works most of the time. Not like we plan.

There is so much noise in the world today. Perhaps, it has never been noisier. It’s fair to want to listen and stay informed of what is going on. I wrote many years ago about the idea of allowing yourself 15 minutes per day to read the news. Today, that is perhaps more true now more than ever. Otherwise, it’s just gossip we are glued to.

(Recently, I started giving NPR’s Up First. Other publications have been doing this for a while like Apple News or New York Times but this is by far my favorite I have listened to. Highly recommended.)

Recently, I’ve made the switch from Apple to Android. And I cannot tell you how frustrating a process it has been to detach from Apple products. I’m 10 days in and still not finished. Grant it, there is 10 years of cleanup/digital debt I am paying the price for. But it makes me think about what kind of company one really embodies when you try to leave. While it’s difficult to leave any system that locks us in, we also remember and it’s the reason why we don’t go back. It’s a reminder to any corporation out there to simply let go of your customers.

At the moment, AI can write stellar code. And it is only getting better. But as the sourcors apprentice knows, having the wand and the incantations isn’t enough to do a spell. With having so much opportunity at are finger tips, it is tempting to sit back and wait to be told what to do next. But the better move is to cease the opportunity right before us. There has never been a better time than to learn to code than today. But just cause the bar has been lowered, it doesn’t mean it has been removed.

Curious folks will ask what’s wrong and not get mad at the other person’s response. Defensive people brace for impact.

Nothing is inherently wrong with either approach. Sometimes you do need to defend yourself. Over time, however, it is easy to turn our insecurities into other people’s insecurities. Mudding up the waters of what is actually happening.

Fear. Failure. Fall.

On assignment with SLUG.

Enjoy.

Once the printing press helped millions to gain access to information, domain knowledge became less valuable if it was something that could be looked up. As long as you knew how to read, a blacksmith could search how to optimize building swords. The Internet and Google have sunk this even further. “Just Google it.” wasn’t a saying when I was born.

We are seeing the same trend now with doing a task. After all, an ATM, a self checkout at the grocery store, and an automated driving car, much like the printing press, took someones job. And with Agentic AI, doing digital tasks are getting easier (and the tools are only going to get better).

So what’s valuable?

It isn’t the knowledge (although some will help) but really who has the guts to try to solve something, the person who can organize, and the person who can communicate. Those who initiate and lead. All the soft skills, that have been preached for 50 years, are even more valuable today. If you have been a generalist, this is a huge moment to get to work.

Debt compounds and compounds making it more difficult to ever pay off.

The problem with digital debt, companies are not incentivized to help you declutter. The more clutter you have, the more you will pay in the long run.

For instance, think about switching from an Apple ecosystem to Google–fron password managers, hidden emails, apps, etc. Another example, is cleaning up Google photos. Google isn’t incentivized to create a tool to quickly scan which photos to keep and which to delete. Have you tried to unsubscribe from Disney lately? They make it hard to let go.

The point here is that there is a cost to change systems. The later we wait to pay for it, the more expensive it gets.

The default is to think about what we can add to it. We don’t think what we can take away to make it better.

Some examples:

The John Muir Tail doesn’t have Internet access most of the time. That’s a feature not a bug.

Not setting expectations based on reel you saw on social media, changes how you feel when you walk along the sunset at Big Sur.

Instagram makes it easy to be seduced you are missing out on something. And it’s right. You are missing out on being present to what the experience can offer right now, not what it could be.

Unsubscribing today can feel like you’re doing something wrong. Companies bury the button under a plethora of pages. Buttons are misdirecting, making it easy to click the back button. Warnings asking if you’re sure. Threats that you’ll do something (even if they don’t know what that something is themselves).

Recently, I went through and compiled a list of everything I subscribe to (AI was wonderful at helping me create it). And the list was longer than I had suspected. So, I started slashing. Taking note of which companies were treating humans as dignified beings with autonomy and which ones were screaming, “Don’t leave!”

It’s liberating. And I think it’s worth taking some time to see which services you actually use and which are just gimmicks.

There are good political reasons to do this too.

Companies must earn our trust and attention. And it’s worth thinking about why we have five different television apps, Amazon Prime when you have a store on every corner, unnecessary auto-completes in the age of AI, and so on.

The amount of blame people place on each other when we are the ones hurting inside never ceases to amaze me.

Often, the thing we are most upset about is the thing we fear the most.

When we are lonely, we reject the people around us.

When we are scared, we take our anger out on those closest to us.

Philosopher Barbara Herman points out that the goal and purpose are two separate things. For instance, professional baseball might seem like a sport where the goal and purpose is to win. But that isn’t true. To be clear, the goal is win the game. But the purpose is to entertain. And as fans, we can watch our favorite teams’ strategies in a way that follows the metrics, to the point where the game is optimized (which, in most ways, it is now), but that isn’t entertaining to watch. It turns out that, in an age of analytics, we think we want everything optimized to create more convenience. But the reality is, this isn’t a world we want to occupy if it becomes so.

How people think LLMs are used:

And what happens when we take a break:

The reality is, there is still a learning curve to these tools. And if you’re not going to put the time and effort into it, it’s going to go haywire quickly.

However, the bar to learning has never been lower, and it has dropped significantly in just two years. Now is the time to get fluent with these tools.

If coding is solved, which anyone who has played with an LLM knows it has, then what’s next?

It seems to me, at least in this moment, what matters now is imagination, great taste, great products that solve interesting problems…not autocomplete tasks. Not bullshit jobs. Not middle managers or TPS reports.

I have talked to many nonprofit leaders over the last year who have it all wrong and are thinking about how they’re going to use AI.

The mindset at the top is: how do I replace my poor performers by implementing AI as quickly as possible?

The problem is the technology, which, while good, isn’t quite good at implementing what you have going just yet. Obviously, there are exceptions, like in the software tech industry.

The better mindset is, how do I use these tools to 10x my top performers? How do I give them the right tools and the time to learn so they can do their job better than they ever could imagine? And when they learn how to do this, the profits follow. Not by cutting costs and employees. But by investing in your best people to do their best work.

If you give a milkshake in a big cup to an eight-year-old that’s half full, someone with a fixed mindset would say, “It’s only halfway full.”

Give them the same amount of milkshake in a smaller cup, and all of a sudden, you have sparked joy.

It’s easy to chalk everything up to growth or to fixed mindsets and to assume everyone needs to adopt a growth mindset. But life is hard. And what I keep getting pulled into is the choice architecture used to deliver the information to change the interaction we are having.

Problems are everywhere.

They are endless. And we need people to solve them.

That didn’t change when humans invented the printing press, electricity, the internet, or AI.

There is always a cost to quitting something.

But the price isn’t so high that you can’t pay it.

The internet makes us think global.

Social media makes us think about status.

The job makes us think in bottom lines.

All these systems floating around to optimize one thing or another.

We don’t think enough about why optimization is the goal for more GDP, more clicks, more money.

Optimizing isn’t where we need to land. It isn’t the destination. And it probably isn’t part of the journey either. At least not as important as we make it out to be.

In the age of AI, it can feel like humans are becoming obsolete. I don’t see it that way. People are miserable with the work that code and LLMs can now handle for us so that we can be free to exercise good judgment, craft a better story, show we have good taste, connect people, change the emotion in the room, be creative, and so on.

What I think this tech does is allow us to have an honest conversation about what work we do matters and what is just bullshit. Unfortunately, for many of us, it’s more than we like to admit.

But not everyone is productive.

The way we use our time is a signal of what we value.

The universe doesn’t conspire against us. It doesn’t try to make us lonely or feel pain. That’s the human condition. We all experience it. The unequal distribution of it can make it feel so much worse. If only we had that one thing…Keeping account of what we are missing in our lives only highlights it and closes our eyes to what we do have.

Is the phenomenon where we hear ideas that contradict our worldview, reject the data and evidence, only to return to what is familiar.

Change is scary. And when the world feels under existential threat, the easy answer is to resist. To hunker down. And wait for a return of what is familiar.

It’s difficult to grow up thinking the world is one way and then find out it’s another. It’s also difficult to see the end of the road. But no matter how much we try to fight gravity, we just can’t.

When we anchor ourselves to our lens in how we see the world, to find clarity, watch it stand still, we can’t be shocked when it moves again. Life is a moving target. Which means if it is insufficient, it can get better too.

Coming up with a solution isn’t the hard part anymore.

Little Cottonwood skiing suffers on powder days, let’s create public transportation that works.

The Great Salt Lake is collapsing, let’s examine how alfalfa farms are using too much water.

Time to draw new district lines, have it done by committee.

We have the solutions. We have the technology. And yet these problems persist. Why?

Coordination is the problem. Incentive structures. Allowing bad behavior. Not evolving with the times.

The blueprints are easy. The step-by-step instructions can be completed in a day. What we find, though, is that what the masses want isn’t what someone with some pull wants to.

The climbing gym I use recently hiked its rates. The problem isn’t the rate itself, but how the rates were justified. Now, a feature that has existed for 2 decades, allowing you to use any gym in their network, has gone away. To retain that privilege, you must now pay an extra $10 per month.

The issue isn’t the money (it’s already expensive). The issue is how your best customers are being treated, not to mention the litany of problems this creates. What if one partner only goes to one gym closer to their home? What if the location you choose doesn’t offer yoga on Wednesdays? What do you do when you’ve climbed all the routes in your grade?

The easiest thing to do is to raise prices. The hard work would be to create and understand the user experience that makes you special. (I’ll also add that the email announcement was clearly not written by a human.) The bottom line: A few will leave, some will upgrade, but everyone is unhappy about the situation. And they are not the only player in town. It’s just so tempting to raise prices and call it a strategy. But when you are not making real decisions and rely on the default/textbook answers, that isn’t real design or leadership.

Good design doesn’t distract us. It creates or changes the emotion in the room. It’s describing a feeling without words.

DammyJay93 breaks it down for us. The results show that a human is still behind the code.

It’s easy to turn the machine on and vibe a product. Garbage in, garbage out. The real work is spending time with the code. Learn it. Test it. Ultimately, it’s about deciding what kind of experience you’re creating for someone.

If you’re not making decisions, you’re not designing.

Yesterday. And it isn’t getting any better.

It hasn’t worked in a long time. And it’s difficult because there is a cost to quit—psychological costs, the feeling of being left out, missing some events, and so on.

But when only 7% of the content you signed up for appears on your feed, it’s time to go.

You will also gain something too. You just don’t know how much you needed peace in your life.

Perhaps, you’re still on the hook. The better question is: When does social media become untenable for you?

Framing problems in a way that invites people to the table is a difficult skill to master. It’s easy to frame problems on two ends of the spectrum. Cresting a divide that won’t ever be crossed. Resolution, however, is best achieved once we quit framing it in two directions but instead look closer to home.

It’s quite interesting that someone with a laptop and Claude Code can now be in the same seat as a veteran coder.

So what stands out now?

It seems to me it’s the person with the guts. The vision. The creativity. The grit. The one willing to jump off the high dive.

The narrative around AI is complicated. And some of it falls into a justified category. Tech billionaires who make big promises to change the world that will ultimately lead to more ads to sell. That’s one fair criticism of why someone should be skeptical. Another is the history. It took 50 years to get electricity to become more accessible after it was invented. Technology takes time to adopt. And of course, everyone is wondering whether this is a bubble.

All of these are fair criticisms. What I fear, though, is that the criticism I’m seeing comes from a place of fear and tired. Tired from coming off a pandemic to see more change coming. Fear that this change may lead to losing my job or changing my industry forever. Tired of having to learn a new technology or a new job, for that matter. What does this mean for my kids down the road? And so on.

Again. All these criticisms are valid. But let’s call them what they are: the fear of more change in a world that feels too broken to fix. Another Tuesday and another existential threat to face. After a while, it can be deflating. To the point, we don’t care much anymore.

While I’m skeptical of the big promises AI is making, it certainly does more than the first version did.

If you haven’t played with AI in a while, you should try it again. In a matter of months, hallucinations are down. You can turn speech into good code. And have projects going off the ground.

Imagine, for a moment, that someone told you the internet was going to be the next big thing, and you did nothing. Actually, that was most of us. If only we knew what we now. The same was said about electricity, the smartphone, and email.

Hear this: we are being told that new technologies that have revolutionized the world, like the internet, are coming before they arrive. I would start listening and start learning how to get good at it.

Social media, political ideology, COVID, the erosion of institutions, and the degradation of communities have all led us to distress each other. Artificial intelligence pushes us further apart—if we allow it. It’s easy to assume a well-written piece must have been AI-generated. The same goes for any piece of art, a well-crafted email, or a presentation that knocks your socks off. The thing is, we don’t ask the CFO if their work is authentic when they show up with great results:

Did you do this work?

Did you really?

What do you mean you used Excel?

What do you mean you didn’t do the formulas by hand?

Wait, you used a calculator?

It’s a slippery slope to assume that because the artist used the tools available, they didn’t do great work. And when the world is one giant sandbox, don’t be upset how someone uses it.

AI is great at auto completing tasks. And can produce a lot of junk too. Soon it’ll be just mediocre. Exceptional work, however, still needs a curator and good taste.

We can choose a different path. And start by assuming people want to do good work.

Every baker has a favorite recipe. And while we need to be passionate about what we are trying to make, we can’t ignore the infrastructure needed for great things to happen.

The difference between what content we consume today and just two years ago—we have to stop and ask, “Is this authentic? Is it real?” We have to use discernment now more than ever, which is difficult when everything is coming at us from everywhere.

The alternative is to slow the flow. Of course, you can’t control who is going to put out more content. But you can control what you choose to read, when, where, how, and so forth. That’s the discipline.

Staying informed is easy. Finding the truth is hard.

We often think it’s the features we don’t want. But what’s more interesting is the features we need to add to our lives—the guardrails in particular. Minimalism is difficult to achieve. Not because we don’t know how. It’s because the incentives in our culture drive us toward more, more, more!

Originally coined by Corey Doctorow. It’s the downward spiral of the lock-in phenomenon: users simultaneously hate the product they can’t seem to quit. Meanwhile, the platform is incentivized to make money by any means necessary. Hate speech. Violence. Seeking the attention of kids. Manipulation. A race to the bottom for your attention.

Lock-in makes switching costly—in time, money, and emotional capacity. It’s hard to say goodbye.

We have ti accept, the internet is not what it used to be. We think we don’t pay for products like Instagram or Facebook. But we pay with our lives as our communities collapse.

With the rise of AI, when will these platforms become untenable? The answer is actually yesterday. Perhaps, you can’t just quit it yet. But at the very least, try de-shitting your phone if you haven’t yet. Turn off notifications. Delete the apps that mine your attention. Take back your life.

HT Ezra Klein, Cory Doctorow, and Tim Wu.

There’s so much time spent on maintaining ourselves that we get so little to just be.

We have to sleep for 8 hours. Shower and shave. Eat every day. Drink water every few hours. Use the bathroom. Brush our teeth. Work out. Don’t forget the cooking and the cleaning. And so on. Then we spend more time commuting with no one to talk to. Work 8+ hours. And then we are, understandably, tired.

And what is left isn’t very much after achieving what’s optimal for a human to thrive?

This is why we can’t measure living by existing. We exist, but sticking ourselves in a cryo chamber isn’t much of a life.

We measure life by how we live.

Physical bruises are a reminder that we could get hurt. A bruise can teach us something about our limits. What we can and what we cannot do. Rarely do we consider the value of these lessons. It turns out our ego can get bruised too. And there is certainly value in getting a bruise early in life. The consequences down the road can be so much more catastrophic.

Sometimes we lack the energy or the will. Regardless, we can become complacent in our reasons. Saying we already know how this story will end. In fact, we like to skip to the end. Assuming nothing new will happen.

But that is precisely the problem with our culture today. We don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t let fortune cookies guide us. Because we don’t know what will happen. Only when we say yes to what could happen do we open the door to new possibilities.

I am not a flexible person. It has been difficult for me for as long as I can remember. Recently, I was finally convinced to try yoga. After a couple of months, with some consistency, I’m proud to say, I am doing so much better. And now I am at least below average in flexibility (which is way better than feeling like the worst in the Wasatch).

We get so used to these labels we stick on ourselves. We forget that we are an unfinished story. One that can be changed.

As long as the future can’t be written, it remains uncertain.

The hammer hasn’t changed much in quite some time. It has looked more and less the same as it was first invented.

Think of also plumbing or electrical in a house. A toaster, socks, or your local park.

Technology can feel exponential in the age of AI. But most tech is linear. It gets better with more use. Until it feels good enough.

There’s comfort in how things work. When things change too quickly, when the world feels out of control, we look for something to hold on to.

Usually, it is a story we like to tell. To help us sleep better at night. Unlike a hammer, stories are often fiction—at least the ones we like to tell.

Most people don’t realize that the corporation is an institution. The fact is we have allowed corporations to gain so much rights and protections that they are easier to view as people.

But because corporations live on paper, they are not subjected to the same struggles as humans. They don’t feel like we do. Which again makes them less human, and yet, not treated as such.

We work so hard to create in the either, that over time, we forget that the system we built isn’t the only system we need to be locked in to.

It exists because we say it exists. And the moment we stop saying it exists (or at least recognize it doesn’t have the seat at the table with fellow humans), we can change how we move forward.

Assuming a new set of truths lead to a new set of assumptions. Which ultimately leads to new possibilities.

At the last Sundance Film Festival in Utah, I had the opportunity to go see the documentary The Lake about how the Great Salt Lake is drying up.

The film was excellent. But I couldn’t help but feel how dystopian it was to watch a film about a lake 30 miles away that was killing us.

Try explaining this to an alien (or a 7 year old for that matter).

“So why can’t you fix the lake? It seems like all you need is more of this green paper you call money and that way you can save yourselves.”

“Well, it’s a bit more complicated. You see people fight over these resource like cash or water. And it is difficult to get everyone on the same page.”

“But if you don’t then everyone loses right and your economy would crash anyway?”

“Correct.”

It’s just very dystopian. And it continues to get weirder. While part of me, who has children, want to run. The other part knows we cannot escape the problem of climate change. Anywhere you go, you will find a new set of problems.

And perhaps, this needs to be the mentality going forward…

The buck stops here. The line is drawn. And we must fight to protect our home.

Perhaps the most frustrating trend I have noticed in outdoor user experience is how complicated it is to go outside now.

As someone who has worked in the outdoor sphere for a good chunk of my life, I do understand the challenges of working in that space. However, over time, with so many rules, it is difficult for anyone to follow. And now we have created a space not to escape the troubles of the modern world, but to have created the feeling of “Am I doing this wrong?”

Parking in the Cottonwoods, for instance, is a nightmare. White Pine has zones where you can park on the road and others where you can’t. They also made changes to the trailhead fees. (Which is fine, but a lot of changes are fast for people who don’t know.) The permit system was flawed from the start of the ski season. And there isn’t a formal apology—parking Enforcers to check in with, constantly scanning cars. Different parts of the road are now open to residents. This is just parking. And it’s a mess. I can go on.

Recently, I was told that Catherine’s Pass was closed. (Alta can’t close a pass that they don’t own.) In fact, you had to travel uphill outside their stakes. Of course, this is unofficial, as to where their area ends, and public land begins. Because no surveyor is going up there any time soon, meanwhile, it makes it impossible to travel up Catherine’s safely. (By the way, make sure you don’t bring a brown-bag lunch on ski days.)

And on, and on, and on.

No one wants to feel like they’re doing it wrong for recreation and leisure. If we don’t turn things around, we’ll eventually get to a place where people won’t care anymore.

Further, I might add that no one is entitled to anything. Purchasing a ski pass doesn’t guarantee a great ski season. Nor does being paid as ski patrol give us the authority over law enforcement. Police are in the same boat. When we lost the medium where the public meets the rule of law, we now have officers reduced to speed traps and parking violations.

We can all do better.

It’s worth noting that each of us has a limited capacity for action. This isn’t the same as the capacity to care. Caring and action can indeed go hand in hand. But we can’t assume that people who don’t take action also don’t care too.

If you have the ability, focus the frustration on those with the power to change things, not on those who also suffer.

The funny thing about the weather is that it gives us something to complain about constantly. It’s too hot. Too cold. No snow! Too much snow (now I have to shovel). And of course, when it’s perfect, we know it will end.

It tells us something about human nature—life will never be good enough until we accept what it truly offers. The good. And the bad. And the banal.

What’s interesting about owning a car is that you have the right to prevent anyone from entering it or using it. And yet, you can’t drive it anywhere you want.

You are told where you can or can’t park. The speed is regulated. You can’t drink and drive (obviously).

Ownership is treated with a sacredness in our culture. But there is nothing absolute about it. Making us very possessive in our culture. I suspect it’s because deep down we like to kid ourselves about our rights.

When it’s profitable (and cheap) to trash the environment, we push the costs to someone else. Sometimes that person isn’t even born yet.

The problem with capitalism is that we have decided to measure it using numbers like GDP, which doesn’t reflect the well-being of the people who make up the economy, just the money spent. GDP goes up when there are wars, when everyone has a car, when healthcare is expensive, and so on.

Part of the challenge we face is fixing the incentive structures so that bad behavior isn’t rewarded. But it’s easier said than done.

The state can ban a major corporation from buying housing. But it doesn’t stop someone from opening up 20 different LLCs to purchase 20 houses and build a mini real estate empire.

We meet a second problem once we recognize the first. We run into the system of obscurity, rules, regulations, studies, and so on. We lose momentum, get lost in paperwork, or get lost in red tape or laws.

In the long run, the incentive structures will shape how we behave. The short run is difficult to endure because we are not on the same timeline as when we see this change finally take effect.

We inherit the world we build.

Awkwardness may be a sign of how we behave that doesn’t rhyme with the world around us.

But it might mean the story we have told about that person. Perhaps there is nothing awkward about them, you just couldn’t let go the one version you saw of them.

Each of us are many versions of ourselves. At the same time. Through the eye of the beholder.

“I don’t care” is a confusing thing to say in our culture today. Perhaps, misunderstood. What we probably mean to say is “I don’t have the capacity to do much about this.”

It’s impossible to fix all the wrongs in the world. When you study history, one thing that repeats over and over again is injustice. There is lots of injustice in our world.

I’m not so sure this is even the right approach. What I see today is a recipe for burnout. Fueled by the algorithm to enrage each of us. To click like and subscribe. Share and thumbs up. All to keep us on the hook. A warped piece of entertainment. Sex and violence has always sold.

To clarify, when we witness injustice, we can begin to develop empathy. But empathy is an action word. When we actually do something about it. Otherwise, we are being sympathetic. Nothing wrong with sitting on the sidelines and cheering others on who are doing the work to fix a problem.

For example, nonprofit leaders work to alleviate the suffering of someone experiencing homelessness. Impossible, however, to also fight climate change too. And eliminating the debt of third world nations while building wells for clean water. You get to focus on one thing when you’re a nonprofit.

And the choice is the same for us: we get to do care about many things. Not everything. Not everyone. You probably can do something about a couple of those things after that. But it doesn’t mean you don’t have a heart just because you didn’t act on one of the things you care about.

Perhaps a better approach is to not scream after every injustice but to actually do something if you’re feeling that passionate about it. And I’m talking more than hitting a share button. Pick up the phone and call a senator. Write an email explaining your concerns. Vote. Submit public comments during opportunities. Stay informed during legislative sessions. Understand the local news. Speak to someone. Not anonymously. Donate your time and money. Start a nonprofit. Join a club. Serve.

The world has always been broken. And humans struggle to get out of their own way. But it is possible to live a full life despite the challenges we face. We can do both. And I think we need to give ourselves permission to do so too.

So much of our history is misunderstood (since conquerors wrote it). And if it wasn’t written down, it is often lost at this point. As a result, we lack an incomplete picture of who we are as a species. And the story we love to tell is a linear, complete story of how humans evolved. The truth is, we don’t know. And the truth is often messier than we realize. Far from linear. And far from complete. I think it’s a good thing. We are not so simple. We are full of surprises. And yes, it makes the future that much more exciting when we realize that humans during prehistory were just as interesting as we are.

The hits are something anyone can sing along to because they hear them on the radio. The algorithm pushes them to get everyone to like the same thing. But albums represent where the band is at that moment. There’s nothing wrong with being a fan of the song, but it’s vastly different from being a fan of the band. If it’s been a while since you listened to an album straight through, I recommend giving it a try.

(I’ll speak toward men on this post. But it certainly can apply to anyone.)

As you get older, you will see relationships fail. One of the problems I have observed is that men haven’t decided what kind of man they want to be.

For instance, if you are someone who makes a mistake and has a relationship outside of marriage; it could be a slip up. It could of been a series of bad decisions. It could be one bad moment. But often its because they haven’t decided who it is they want to be. To go further, if you know who you want to be, you will avoid certain types of situations in the first place. This goes beyond relationships, of course. Someone with the need to conquer will look for conflict.

So either it is:

A) You are either undecided.

B) You are decided but can’t admit it to yourself—which is even a worse type of self deception.

Pleasure is a strong pull for any person. And we need to decide what kind of person we will be when we interact with it or when the opportunity arises. When the pull for pleasure conflicts with your relationship, there is an out-of-alignment that will bear a high cost. The two are not mutually exclusive, regardless of how you treat them.

One last note: It is indeed interesting how far we as humans will go to avoid confronting our truths about ourselves. And the people around us suffer until we do. This is the danger of ego working.

This is the hallmark of our world today. We have so much stress that we are constantly trying to eliminate it. But the better path is learning how to deal with it. And here’s the thing about stress we don’t acknowledge enough: if you have a lot of stress, it is a testament of how much you can endure. Not a weakness.

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she admitted she wished she understood what was happening in politics better. But every time she tries to dive in, it feels overwhelming with what is happening in the world. This person has a master’s degree in finance and is very bright. And if she can’t understand what’s going on, I explained, that’s precisely the point of politics today. The Big Beautiful Bill is close to 1,000 pages. The 2022 Ommibus Spending Bill was 4,000 pages long. No one can read this. This is just one example.

We often think of bugs as bugs. Rarely do we think of them as features. The length, the ambiguity, the complexity…these are features for someone. Not everyone. We don’t need a complex tax code, yet we do. Bills in Washington don’t need to be thousands of pages long, but they are. Budgets are the same story.

I, too, spent many years feeling that the landscape was too complicated ever to understand. Until I realized that the feeling of shame is purposely manufactured to keep the masses disengaged. This isn’t a failure on the individual, but for the system that thrives on keeping the public uninformed.

If you feel deep inside that something is wrong with the world, it’s because there are things wrong. Even if you lack the language or feel you can’t put your arms around it, understand that you have moral clarity.

The moon landing is one of the outstanding achievements in human history. Often, people forget why it is so important, though. And the reason is that when we come together and put our minds to something, we can break boundaries about what is possible. We need reminders of what humans can accomplish. So much of our media is about the awful things that we do to each other. And when something spectacular is done, we are often left unimpressed because, deep down, we’ve seen something similar on the internet for clicks before.

So much of what we do is about perspective. And we tend to put a ton of weight on other people’s perspective of us. For instance, in a job interview, it’ll come off that you have a great perspective of yourself and the world when you can talk about the great work you are doing. That doesn’t guarantee the job, of course. Because in the end, you are talking to strangers. Those who have a unique perspective on how you’ll fit in their lives. That’s vastly different than not being qualified. Chances are, if you’re in the room, it means you are at least competent enough. Really the question is, will they like me?

With a constant stream of media, we have been trained to overreact to everything in the digital sphere. What’s different in the real world is that we get a moment to calm the amygdala before we react. In fact, more discussion and more information were needed pre-social media to decide how to respond. It’s clear to me that social media feeds into loud, out-of-the-ballpark takes way more than the quiet, calculated form. Frankly, it takes time to describe how something makes us feel.

Power has a bit of a negative connotation in our day and age. Power is often associated with bullies, geopolitics, and social media. But power isn’t just the strength to dominate another being. Power is a quiet confidence in your ability to do hard things. Everywhere we walk, everywhere we turn, our culture has a way to drain it.

These power drainages come when we move our attention away from the task at hand. We lose power when we wish we are somewhere else rather than in the state attention. We lose more power when we are avoiding the hard thing that we know that needs to be done.

Inversely, we gain power when we tackle these things rather than avoid them. One thing I think we could use more of in our culture is power for workers, or power for children, or power for parents, and so on.

It’s worth thinking about: will this gain or drain my power? Will this conversation or use of my time or this thought help or hurt it?

I took a sip of a cup of coffee from McDonald’s the other day. And to my surprise, it was hot. Really hot. And I even mentioned to my wife, “This coffee is hot!” Of course, it was on the label. Too often, we skip the instructions, ignore the warning signs, and fall into heuristic traps because of what? We are in a rush. Sometimes we need to believe better what people are trying to tell us. Slow down. And be patient. Not everything is on your timetable.

Johnathan Haidt has written an essential book on the subject, highlighting the difference between kids growing up in the real world versus the digital one. And the differences of how we interact with each other, how we solve conflicts, sit with tension, and so on—it is different from previous generations. It’s an essential book for any generation to read. While Gen Z may have borne the brunt of this, I see it across every age group, stuck on their phones.

So much more important than your credentials is the work you have actually done. Having a Master’s may help you stand out, but it doesn’t replace your portfolio. Sure, we need your dentist to meet the minimum training requirements, but outside these professional spheres, what shows your abilities is your list of projects you have completed. You should be able to point to something you have done.

According to Anthony Bourdain, the fish on Mondays is leftovers from the order on Thursday in preparation for the Friday and Saturday rush. And that’s why you’ll see “Chef’s Special!” as they try to offload on Monday.

And there are lots of other tidbits in his seminal book, Kitchen Confidential.

I highly recommend the audio—something about Bourdain’s voice that is so inspiring.

Just an observation: I think we have figured out how to lower the temperature in the culture. Not by much. By degrees. And slowly.

It may not seem like it, especially if you live on social media. By no means has that cesspool of social media cooled any. But people are slowly starting to see this isn’t any way to live—in constant fear that is. I’ve seen it in parents, with liberals and conservatives. I’ve seen it with the young and the old—all walks of life.

After ten years of skiing, it feels like I learn something new every year. I think the reason is that I am still open to learning. Mostly because I am self-taught and learned in a very unorthodox way (walking up hill to ski downhill). I’m patient and don’t feel a need to rush the process. I’m not doing it for money. I do it cause I love it. And as a result, I still find joy in the process. The process doesn’t have an endpoint, much like this blog.

It isn’t easy to reconcile what it means to have meaning in a capitalist society. Because what brings about so much status —how we spend our time on the factory line, all the training leading up to becoming a worker bee—can make it seem, from all the external feedback, that this is what life is for. But life isn’t about production. It’s about living. And what you can’t quantify, you can’t grow. Precisely the opposite of what the growth imperative capital stands for. Humans are the meaning-making machines. Not corporations or marketing or whatever social media tells us n

The strength of a relationship isn’t the absence of conflict but in how you resolve conflict.

While lead climbing, if you feel scared, you tend to clip the quickdraws high when you are below. But as you do that, you get even more tired. You are working extra moves to be the rope to your mouth, then clipping.

Over the course of say 14 clips, you might do 7 extra moves just to teach the top. It adds up.

There’s a metaphor here with fear and performance.

The more afraid we are the more likely we are to fail.

Skiing is therapeutic. And so is exercise, sunshine, journaling, eating a healthy diet, sleeping well, being kind to yourself (and others), cutting down on social media, quitting a stressful job, working on a relationship, letting go of the past, forgiveness, and so on. It might not replace capital T Therapy. But it sure helps to do the basics. Sometimes we fall into the trap of the big/quick fixes in our lives when we should be focused on the little things we can control—our choices and our attitude — that can go a long way.

I’ve been a strong proponent of understanding the decisions one makes under stress. During those times, we have to make choices that we wouldn’t make otherwise. And when the emergency is over, there is no announcement that it is over. So the body keeps reacting as if the emergency hasn’t ended. Over time, this can have massive compounding effects. To the point, it can be as simple as changing the thermostat temperature to trigger a strong response. These things don’t make sense on paper. But they are genuine in our lives. It’s worth doing the work to figure out why we do the things we do. And so often it is because we made a decision long ago that made sense at the time, that doesn’t make sense anymore to keep making today.

It takes tremendous courage to choose to be happy in this day and age. Part of the problem is that people don’t believe they deserve happiness. We don’t honestly believe good things can happen, so some of us struggle not to sabotage our lives in ways that create the next emergency. The next emergency will come, but how we treat it is a choice.

I’m not sure if you have to forgive someone or something for the past. To be clear, we have a bad habit of being quick to anger and slow to forgive. At the same time, I do believe there are some things so egregious that you don’t have to forgive. In fact, the pressure to forgive often shifts the responsibility off the one who committed the misdeeds in the first place.

In other words, I think it’s horrible to tell someone, “You’ve got to find a way to forgive.” If you can—please do. If you can’t, however, I think the better step is to learn to accept it and be at peace. Don’t let them hurt you anymore.

What’s more important is learning how to let go of your anger (or grief, or loss, or whatever) before ever finding forgiveness.

As the saying goes, “If you want forgiveness, find a priest.”

What’s interesting to me is how we express someone’s ownership of their body. Along with their time or choices. If you are to sell your time, then you must own your time in the first place. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t own these things. But why, under the flag of property, to begin with? What if it were a sacredness instead?

One of the things no one tells you is that your time is no longer yours. Think about the time used to engage at work, to make a meal, or to do a chore. And if you’re not careful, that slippery slope can be taxing on our psyche. Perhaps the better way to frame it is:

1) the commitments you have made and

2) the time you need to see them through.

My prediction with AI, jobs, income inequality, debt systems, climate change, social media, geopolitics, and so on—things continue to get weirder.

That the conversations will get weirder, the numbers we crunch will be more bizarre. The stock market will do strange things. Policies will be odd. The public’s reaction will be bizarre, too.

But that doesn’t mean we have to be weird too.

You can choose to stay off social media (actually, when you think about it, that’s a weird choice). You can choose to be happy (another).

Scratch that. Be weird too. But not in the usual kind of way.

Nostalgia is a powerful feeling.

Recently, one of the city council members wanted to put a recreation center in the middle of an open-space park. Once the word got out, that person lost their re-election campaign.

A miscalculation. Not because building a recreation center is necessarily a bad idea. It has its pros and cons. It’s because that park hasn’t changed since the 1950s.

And that feeling for those who have been here a long time is a reminder of a time that was. Not every improvement is an improvement. Sometimes the right improvement is not to keep changing things. But to leave things precisely as they are to remind us where we came from.

If you’re struggling with social media, I have found it helpful to delete the app from your phone.

But not everyone is willing to do so.

So, another choice to create friction.

Log out.

Move the app off the home screen.

Require face identification.

Put it in the hidden folder so the temptation isn’t there.

Creating more steps and adding more friction can short-circuit the auto-response to pick up the phone and scroll.

It seems to me the adventure doesn’t begin when you decide to go. It always seems to start when everything begins to go wrong. We live a life of such comfort and security. And we think our trips should go down the same way. This is never the case.

Climbing isn’t just about strength. It certainly is a huge component, but it isn’t the only one that matters. So does your technique and your technical know-how. There’s a head game too. You can be very strong and have the know-how, but if you don’t have the head game, well, you won’t get very far. You can’t ignore all the facets of climbing, and that’s why it is so interesting to do. Life is similar. You can be powerful in a couple of areas, but when you ignore one, it will cap your ceiling of what is possible.

“I don’t know how to code.”

“I struggle seeing the use of Claude.”

“They don’t pay me enough to deal with this.”

Seems like all the same categories when frame them as insecurities or inefficiencies.

Emotions change from moment to moment. A lifetime of emotions can be felt in one day. Joy, awe, inspiration, anger, sadness—it’s all right there with us every day.

I’ve been thinking more about this, and one thing that has helped is better sleep. I know it isn’t a sexy option. But the better my sleep, the better the next day is for wrestling with these emotions. Somehow, I feel more of the positive ones too, and less of the petty ones.

Nothing good starts from a place of anger. Anger is a manifestation of entitlement. And we often believe we deserve something that isn’t present in the moment. Be honest with the anger.

Holidays are a happy time of year for some. And for others? It is the hardest time of year. It’s surprising to me how scared we get to reach out to someone—even just a text. Have the courage to say, “I was just thinking of you. Merry Christmas.” The worst that can happen is to spread cheer. The best-case scenario is that you can reunite with something that was once.

Distance is a matter of perspective. Great distances feel greater when we haven’t done it before. Ancient Mariners crossing the sea. Albert the Monkey is going into space. Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon. MER on Mars. And once it’s done, it seems reasonable to do it again. In fact, it seems shorter.

Much like when Roger Banister ran the sub-four-minute mile, or Phillip Petite walked a high line between the twin towers, the mental hurdles are often just as challenging to overcome as the logistics.

Perhaps then, quiet confidence that you can do something that has never been done before is the greatest asset anyone can have. In the age of AI, I see a lot of fear. And maybe it’s time to see the quiet confidence of these new tools at our disposal again.

“I think most artists feel a lot happier discussing the process of what they do rather than what the hell it means…I know so many painters who title their works after they’ve done them, which is a real giveaway, you know.”

This David Bowie quote is a fascinating perspective. That an artist without an endpoint didn’t have an intention to start. Bowie is obviously a genius—one of one. I also slightly disagree that you sometimes don’t know what you want to say, but you have something in you that must be worked out. I think we get so wrapped up in the process that we forget the most essential thing: start. And see what happens. Not every piece of work is a masterpiece. And plenty will be disregarded, put in the trash, or stuffed in a drawer. And in chopping wood and carrying water, however, sometimes inspiration hits us like a freight train.

Wile E. Coyote sometimes thinks he can fly. Until someone (usually The Road Runner) points out he can’t. Then disaster strikes.

Confidence often works the same way. There’s magic in that moment before people burst our bubble. It turns out our culture is full of bubble poppers.

From medical to auto, symptoms help indicate what’s wrong. Intuitively, we look inward for answers. It’s sometimes worth looking externally for answers, too. What’s coming in? From food to stress to social media. We may not be able to control what’s going in the inside but we can shut down our phones, choose what we eat, and decide which battles to fight.

It is so difficult to create things in this world. You have to see a need, have imagination, build intuition, and build it so that someone will use it.

What’s easier? It isn’t to destroy or tear down but to criticize. Critique. And yes, give a suggestion.

Feedback isn’t a problem, of course. From those who care, show up, and understand the intent, by all means, tell the creator what you think. But for everyone else, criticism is just another form of gossip.

Humans are storytelling creatures. Someone who strongly believes in mythology, legends, and mysticism can see coincidences as miracles. Someone else who anchors in statistics and empirical data might see it as chance, luck, or something as statistically unlikely but not impossible.

But either way, we see a story. Because while the search for capital T Truth may not be obtainable, we do a good job of finding and defining our own truth.

What’s important to remember is that humans don’t always hold the same truths. We do, however, a better job sharing our ideals. Perhaps then, we can reframe our search for truth as our search for ideals. Once ideals are established, maybe then we can search for truth.

It’s easy to type something online and post it. And it’s even easier to stay in the shadows and not have a name next to what it is you say. I do not doubt that, after nearly a decade of blogging, there are things I have said that are dated and inconsistent with today’s standards. But my name is still there to stand by what I said, or more importantly, I have an opportunity to address it and yes, change it if it needs to be. As a result, there is an opportunity to grow my ideas. Not hide from them.

One of my favorite websites, Mountain Projects, lets you post a comment without a name, but they are very clear about marking you as “Anonymous Coward.” Creating a standard if you are not going to stand by what you post. More importantly, sending the signal to the rest that you don’t need to treat this comment as if it came from someone who matters as much.

What if it is possible to create that same sorta feedback loop on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X? How would it change if whatever you posted was also featured on your LinkedIn? Would you act differently? Would you share something else?

Anonymously posting kills the public discord in the long run. Because what is being rewarded isn’t facts or truth, but what is viral.

Seth Godin had a post yesterday that got me thinking about the filtered self. I completely agree that, over time, the incentive structure of our digital lives has flipped from a filtered self to an unfiltered one. To the point now, many will say something online (even anonymously) that they would never have the guts to say in person to a neighbor, co-worker, boss, spouse, child, friend, etc. What’s interesting is how this has evolved into being “authentic.” And what continues to fascinate me is how humans create a moral framework to justify violence. Not all violence is led with a fist.

The iPhone changed the world. But was it a positive change? It made life very efficient when you can have talk and text in your pocket. Add in email, calendar, weather, GPS—what a tool! But now, we have data. We are always online. So much so, many of us are staring at a screen longer than seeing what is actually happening in the world. The person who invented the ship also accidentally invented the ship wreck. And now we are experiencing a shipwreck in our mental health.

Most of us set out to change the world for the better. But rarely do we stop to ask if this is something humanity wants? Are we ready for it? And with AI being supercharged with the help of the market—no one stopped to ask if this is something we wanted. It’s showing up. Time will tell if it will be the last great invention or if it will be a glorified chat box.

AI can replicate a script. And can give directors notes. And even set the schedule. But it can’t go on stage. It can’t do everything, no matter what people say is possible. There is no substitute for play.

Seems like a reasonable option when something will never work. That’s what makes relationships so difficult to end when there has been such an investment. Not only is there the investment piece, but when you squint, you can see a path where it could work. So, we need to be clear—when is it a good time to throw in the towel with a job, a relationship, a project, or whatever?

Be clear if it is possible or not. It is possible to lose weight with a high-protein diet, exercise (lifting weights), 10,000 steps per day, and 8 hours of sleep consistently for an extended period. It’s impossible to defy gravity and fly. You can’t break the laws of physics. Juxtapose that with the fact that it probably isn’t possible to start a nonprofit that will change the entire world or to develop a vaccine that’ll cure cancer. Someone may do that. But it probably won’t be you either.

Hope is necessary. But a Hail Mary isn’t a good strategy either.

One explanation for erratic behavior is framing. Why would someone do something that seems, from the outside, so erratic? Because it is easier to do than the thing they most fear. In other words, it might be easier to have an affair than it is to break up with your spouse. It seems easier to have another treat and convince yourself to start dieting next week. It seems reasonable to stick an iPad in front of the kid who won’t stop yelling at a restaurant. And on and on. It’s all about a point-of-view problem. When we live within the struggle, the best option can seem the most daunting. And we can trick ourselves into believing we need to wait for a miracle, which isn’t much of a strategy, since you’ll be waiting a long time for nothing to change. The power is in us. Always has been.

In sports such as hockey, basketball, and football, the tendency is to think about moving forward. When you get better, side-to-side opens new doors. Elite athletes, however, know how to change pace and step back to go forward.

It’s counterintuitive to think this way. But it’s useful when navigating the field/court.

The culture has trained us to move forward constantly. Sometimes stepping back allows us to step forward. Because it is drilled into us to always move forward, it can feel like we are being left behind. This isn’t true. In fact, it’s just a lie we are telling ourselves when we feel uncomfortable with slowing down.

It seems that the more we have, the more we fear losing, which makes sense why the wealthiest 1% might find ways to hide their money from the government or bend the rules of ethics to get more. Not only does our narrative drive our decisions, but our fear too.

Grief is love with no path to go. We don’t know where to put the love anymore. Making it difficult to cope with the moment.

Being unprepared for the test because you didn’t study is an easy fix.

Feeling unprepared after preparing is performance anxiety.

Usually, it’s because there are no redos.

Climbing has a term for this, “the onsight.” It’s your first go, with no beta, and you have to climb it without falling, which isn’t bad if the climbing is below your grade. But as you progress to climb at your hardest, the onsight gets very difficult.

The point is, preparing for an onsight is a different skill versus getting to try again and again. And we don’t often practice to perform the first go, which in the end is a different skill set.

Life resembles way more like an onsight.

“I hope the bureaucracy of this organization changes things around here.”

Said no one. No one seems to like it, yet we surround ourselves with it. Why? I think (and I don’t think it’s the only reason) is that rules and processes insulate us to justify our jobs. So that when change comes, we don’t get fired. The interesting thing about the work we do is how much we can’t admit that our job is what David Graeber would call “bull shit.” If we really were honest with ourselves, how many productive hours per week do you actually do? The answer is probably more than zero but certainly less than 40. Even the open heart surgeon has to fill out paperwork that they find useless to feed the machine of bureaucracy.

Change doesn’t happen with systems. Systems enable behavior. They can enhance it. But in the end, its action. More accurately, the courage to take action that changes the way things are done.

Strings, however, keep us coming back. Precisely when we don’t want to. And that can be a good or bad thing. Depending on how you look at it.

Feelings can have so much energy, be so strong that they can make us feel isolated. And when we talk to other humans, we realize they feel those feelings too. It helps to acknowledge, “Other people feel this too” to open a path of understanding.

Lock-in isn’t just a problem with how we organize people. After all, we could sell computers with a more efficient way to manage the keys, but we just don’t for several reasons. Costs are the biggest for Apple and Microsoft. But it’s the emotional toll that users don’t want to learn a new way. It’s easier to follow “the standard” that has been set. But, over time, that cost rises. Not in inefficiency. But in locking ourselves into a path. The path becomes a trench. The trench becomes a hole that feels too big to escape. Of course, I’m not talking about keyboards. When we think about education, politics, economics, and the climate crisis, how powerful is the lock-in? It truly says something about humans when friction to change is present and how much time/energy/resources we have to spare.

“Every passing moment is a chance to turn it all around.”

It has stuck with me for nearly 20 years. And it is still true today as it was then.

Every piece of data suggests that kids learn through play. And yet, despite knowing all the evidence and facing an obesity crisis (as well as a mental health crisis), we continually attack physical education and time on the playground. It’s not that we don’t value these things; it’s that they are perceived as unproductive. Systems evolve over years, decades, and even centuries. Once the track we walk is set, it is hard to change. Bureaucracy builds to protect the status quo, not to change it.

Stare straight at the sun long enough, and you’d probably go blind.

You only need to try it once (I wouldn’t recommend it) to realize that what everyone told you about the dangers of doing such an activity is true.

But the world seems to grow more complicated the farther we move from physical danger. (Other examples: driving without a seatbelt, staying away from heroin, and so forth.)

Yet, when we culturally accept drinking Monster energy drinks or allowing kids to use social media, the culture can be relatively quiet.

We hear about hard skills (tangible skills) and soft skills (interpersonal skills), and perhaps warnings can follow a similar arc.

So if we say, social media isn’t inherently bad for you, it’s only when you overuse it. But the problem is that almost everyone overuses it. We can think of this as a “soft” problem (we still need a better term). And when we juxtapose with, say, operating a vehicle while being distracted as a “hard” problem.

In other words, are consequences obvious and immediate, or are they long-term and ambiguous?

Many assume humanity began in some form of egalitarian state and has since fallen. That story teaches us to keep a narrow lens on the world and how to view its problems. When we choose to keep the narrative simple, we will have a simple way to look at the world. As a result, we develop the moral compass of a child. “Good guys” and “bad guys” type of story arcs.

Implementing a new system can be tricky, not because of the change. Change is inevitable. But the change going forward in any organization is difficult for those who have been there. Everyone who is new coming in doesn’t know any different. Take the extra time with the people who have been there the longest. Not because they are not capable. It’s because they are the most capable. And will be able to help set the culture in the future.

Getting from zero pullups to one is a significant accomplishment. Pretty soon you’ll be to two, then three, and then five. And so on. But the most challenging part is the first one. Starting a business is the same as making the first dollar: it takes a foundation of work to get there. It’s much easier to make money with money than it is to get the first pile. Debt works the opposite.

Compounding our problems makes problems worse. However, compounding our good decisions can also scale.

Black Friday is a term Philadelphia police used to describe the mayhem on the day after Thanksgiving in the 1950s, caused by the influx of shoppers. Perhaps racial tension played a role in the naming of the day. Either way, somebody (a retailer or marketer) decided to take the original story and put a spin on it to make a buck. Using the term “in the black” in the profit column. Either way, the idea stuck. Changing the culture in a primarily negative way and creating status through consumption.

These ideas are so powerful that they change human behavior about when to shop—embracing the chaos. And yes, even get violent to get what you want. It’s capitalism’s finest day. And one of humanity’s ugliest.

I can’t help but think about these things like money, time, status, assimilation, story, etc.—the lengths people will go to fit in, even when the behavior isn’t good for us.

What’s remarkable is thinking about all the rules and laws we subscribe to without a single course on what they are. The tax code is the same. This idea that we need an expert to navigate these minefields is a bit boggling when you think about it. Humans have survived for most of history without such rules and regulations. Perhaps some is needed. But maybe we have lost something in the translation of complex systems into what they do to our everyday lives. Humans first. Not systems. While systems are essential, complexity is no substitute for community and culture. In fact, complexity becomes the perfect excuse to hide.

Everything feels risky. A risk manager will always find something unsafe. Even bubble wrap can be a choking hazard. So the key then is to identify it. Talk about it. Verbalize with someone. See if they see what you see. Next, we need to mitigate it. The temptation is to wait until the risk is gone. But that just isn’t possible. So we must decide how much risk I am willing to tolerate.

In climbing, we all need the reminder that if you relax, you won’t fall. The more tense we get, the quicker we are to pump out.

The only reassurance we need is the quiet kind. The one we whisper to ourselves.

Culture is what enables everything we do.

We also need infrastructure to organize.

Infrastructure without culture, however, turns into the bureaucracy.

And for most of the time, it is. How we treat ourselves each day makes that number more daunting. Part of the anxiety we feel comes from nostalgia. We yearn for a time that is gone—a time with less responsibility, where we could live. I will say the biggest hack to feeling younger is treating your body as such. Stay active. Eat well. Invest in your mental health.

Defeat isn’t a moment. It sometimes looms for years—even decades. And to rebuild after a defeat can be daunting.

Defeat is a process that we should better recognizea a long road. But the good news is, the holes are not so deep that you can’t get out of them.

I’ve been drawn to this idea lately and have been thinking about whether we are a defeated people who don’t recognize it.

The funny thing about security, happiness, joy, comfort, safety, and so on is that they may require a certain amount of money to achieve. But it doesn’t need millions of dollars either. The best times of my life were when I was most broke. And that certainly isn’t the case with children in the mix. However, the best memories didn’t require spending money either.

It’s worth taking note: why do I need more money at the moment? Is it to save for a house or new wardrobe or a vacation? All fine pursuits. But is it to make you happier? That’s really the million dollar question.

Important decisions can be a good thing. Maybe a new job that takes you to a new city. Starting a relationship or moving in with someone. And when “weighing” options, we tend to think in terms of pros and cons. Which has more weight? Perhaps we should ask instead, ‘How will one make me feel?’ Will this bring me dignity? Is it the responsible decision? Is this part of the arc you are building?

Analysis will help us do things better.

But better may not be the goal.

Enjoying the process might be precisely what the doctor ordered.

Our narrative can become so biased that hearing an outside perspective shifts our outlook. Because it is so contradictory to what we constantly say to ourselves (”I’m not good enough”).

For instance, someone applying for jobs can feel like a reject after receiving rejection letter after rejection letter. That doesn’t mean you are the reject. They are rejecting your process or your pitch.

We often conflate the two: the narrative and the reality.

Every streak comes to an end. The streak isn’t the point unless you’re trying to get into the Guinness World Records. The fact is that streaks create another layer of showing up today. They enforce our behavior. Once we decide to do something, the streak reinforces it. Results follow process.

“Getting by” is awful. Humans are unique because we want more than to survive. We want to thrive. We want to grow. And we want to live (by experiencing life).

Sometimes we need to put our head down to “get by” the day. But we miss all the lessons that awful stretch can teach us.

You will always find opposition anytime you push an agenda through. Even building a park has its critics. How much will it cost? Who is paying for this? Where? Will this attract vagrants? Will someone get hurt? And on and on.

And we spend a lot of time trying to make the citizens happy when they never will. It doesn’t mean we don’t consider the critic’s perspective. But we don’t need to cater to someone who refuses to be happy, either.

Building something always has a cost. And rarely do we consider the emotional toll.

Comfort comes with practice. When we are afraid, dancing with that fear can make us more comfortable in these vulnerable positions.

Comfort can also make us complacent. In many ways, we get used to where we live, the jobs we have, the wrath of a bad boss, and so on.

Comfort is indeed a double-edged sword in what we choose to endure. Comfort that leads to complacency kills the human spirit.

The temperature is surprisingly cooler…

The noise is much quieter…

When we put our phones down.

Because politics are a human invention. And so is debt.

Nature didn’t create these things, we did.

It seems that nature doesn’t really care about what we think.

At least not on their own.

People do.

Act accordingly.

Being incessantly inundated with images and messages over time can change our wants, desires, and dreams. The shift is evident as a millennial. You didn’t grow up wanting to be a sellout. To become a millionaire. And over time, when we glamorize this, it becomes the next generation’s desires. Not everyone, of course. But enough to see the impact of a world of constant marketing. Feeling sad? Here’s a pill and a Louis Vuitton purse to get you through. After all, you deserve it. What I’m trying to point out here is that when we are free from this kind of disruption and distraction, we can actually think freely with our own thoughts and explore who it is we really are. Between smartphones, constant internet access, WiFi, billboards, and advertisements, there is no quiet. And quiet is how we turn down the noise. The culture—collectively—could use some quiet time to figure out who we are and what it is we want to become.

They are very similar but with key differences.

Rules are shared. They are agreed on how we will play the game (in a relationship).

Boundaries guide our own behavior.

Expectations are how we wish others would treat us.

We often conflate these terms. The biggest problem is that we play by different rules than the person we are in conflict with, and then expect others to play by our rules to protect invisible boundaries that we haven’t announced to the world.

No matter how many times we are knocked down, we have to get up at least once more.

If we are knocked down seven times, we need to get up eight.

Competition is one way to organize. And it is encoded in the culture’s DNA. The bias of money, debt, corporations, government…It’s all survival of the fittest, as they like to say. And we see how far competition has taken us. Some would argue quite far and point to numbers like GDP as evidence. But these are false proxies for measuring a species’s well-being. Since the advent of capitalism, a million plant and animal species have gone extinct.

Perhaps we can ask ourselves then, is this the best way to organize ourselves? What would happen if competition became co-operation? What if we picked a different number to measure progress?

When we think we are due for a miracle, we will keep persisting for a sign. And so, we wait and wait. And you could be waiting for a very long time for something that may never come. I say damn the lotto winners. What can be done today is action. That doesn’t need permission to go do the thing that must be done.

Each bee has a role. They perform the role they are supposed to be when they are born. The lifespan of a bee is short. There is no time or luxury to hem or ha. What is clear is that we have way more choices than bees. And that kind of power is scary for most. While we can be envious that the path is defined for worker bees, we can also feel like worker bees when we don’t exercise the thing that separates us from the other animals—agency.

No one grows up thinking they will be a sellout. You grow up wanting to become an astronaut cause space exploration seems like a cool thing to do. And then one day, you are something completely different from what we imagined. And while circumstances will dictate what kind of endeavor you think you deserve, you are also worth more than you think.

Circumstances determine so much of our behavior.

And behavior determines so much of our circumstances.

It’s tempting to draw a line and decide how much responsibility one should take.

But a better approach is to recognize that they are coupled.

Better circumstances lead to better decisions, which lead to better circumstances, and so on—an upward spiral.

The same is true for a downward spiral.

Understanding something is easy. I can understand basic arithmetic, but once you live a life where you apply it, then another level of knowledge opens up.

Knowing something comes with experience. It may take 10 years before a lesson learned in the past actually begins to take effect.

We tend to dismiss how far someone is willing to go to endure a toxic relationship. That fear of worthiness or the fear of being alone can keep us frozen. Over time, that wall of endurance fails and can manifest in addiction or depression.

And what I’m trying to get out here is the pain that one feels is a known quantity. The pain someone could think is another. That unknown is enough to keep us where we’re at.

Halloween is done. You had to be there. Much of how we organize (concerts, live shows, in-person classes, the Super Bowl, etc.) is about being present in the moment to share with your friends. And while we can’t be everywhere all at once, it’s a reminder that getting candy isn’t the point. It’s that we are in this together.

Because of the amount of people that are willing to participate is exactly why it works.

This is how democracy works too. And traffic laws. There are so many games we willing participate in together. Way more than we realize.

Because we have become so conditioned to accept our place in the world.

It’s a really uncomfortable question to wrestle with. Conquered people, after all, have their agency taken away. They are hauled off in chains, put in debt peonage, and even slavery. While the Hollywood images are drummed up, it isn’t a stretch either when you read history and understand that taxes, for instance, were put on those who were conquered. Of course, we have more agency than someone in a medieval village who was put into bondage. But, this isn’t freedom either.

What we can’t anticipate far outweighs what we can guess will happen.

And the fear that plagues us today is the exposure to what we might never have imagined.

It’s not about the speed at which you move, but rather the amount you are willing to accomplish. Today’s world expects us to perform our checklist like a factory. But we shouldn’t approach our lives in such a productive manner. Life is meant to be loved.

When the outlook appears bleak, perhaps the best course of action is to step back and refrain from trying to solve everything. Just solve something. And when we create that momentum, one step at a time doesn’t seem so bad. We need to make the conditions for more change to happen.

Corruption? Racism? Sexism? Patriarchy? Big business? Money out of politics? Inequality? Climate change?

And you could ask a thousand people and get completely valid answers that are all different.

What it highlights, however, is that, despite the incredible modern-day comforts, we still face a multitude of problems with no clear answers on how to address them.

There is no single solution that can address all these problems.

When you work out Pi, quickly, you can guess it keeps going on and on. But we can’t prove that goes forever cause we can’t play it out. And so, we assume and make an assumption that allows us to do other work. However, we can be stuck in the weeds with data. Sufficient data is sufficient to make our work great. Not perfect. And indeed, if you need your work to be perfect before you present it to the world, well, you’ll never actually ship it then.