Month: March 2025

Baseball today is optimized. In 2003, when the Oakland A’s implemented advanced analytics, they had a clear advantage over the rest of the league. Now, everyone uses advanced analytics. So, where is the next advantage going to be found?

The same is true with many technologies and industries. At first, you can create an edge, and then it becomes the standard for optimizing. As we see, every corner becomes optimized, and what will be in less demand is human effort. Someone else has already taken care of it for us.

There comes a point, however, when we must realize that the goal isn’t optimization. The goal should be towards better. Towards dignity. Towards meaning. When all we are focused on is doing things faster/cheaper, this is what the results look like. But are we satisfied? Shouldn’t baseball, you know, be fun?

I don’t think most will complain about an efficient healthcare system. But when we forget that we are treating humans and not just numbers on a spreadsheet, we have lost something. Effecient systems may be really good at producing Model T’s but won’t create significance in our lives. And we have very much missed the mark if we think we can outsource this out.

When are we to simply ask, “At what cost?” Is this really the world we are going to build or can we imagine something better?

If we accept that our actions are ours, we must also accept that other people’s actions are theirs. Rather than spending all this time assigning blame, we can instead blame no one. That things do just happen. Accept it with responsibility and grace if it is in our control. If it is someone else’s, then set it straight. If it isn’t possible, then repair what you can. And if you still can’t repair it, where does blaming someone help the situation? Blaming is an easy lever to pull when our efforts to fix things go unnoticed. But it is a poison that only negatively affects our outlook on people and the world around us.

Lying is easy to do. But after a while, we can understand that when we act “wrongly,” we can damage or harm ourselves. Because once we tell ourselves that lying is okay to get out of poor decision-making, then we can’t possibly get better at decision-making. You just got out of taking responsibility, providing immediate relief of dealing with the tension of consequences. Of course, this isn’t just about lying. There is a hidden cost in any decision we make. We don’t just short-circuit the feedback mechanism for growth but also make those around us question our motives. A more productive question is, why do we feel like we need to lie in the first place? This makes me question whether you feel safe in the environment you are in? Because it isn’t normal to feel the need to lie when safety isn’t in question.

Part of the difficulty of solving climate change is that humans often see themselves as separate from nature because of our ability to master and domesticate it. We built roads to travel across the dirt, boats, and planes to cross the ocean. We are on top of the food chain and fear no animal. The fight to defeat microscopic organisms, such as cancer or other diseases, is underway. Progress indeed happened at the speed of which because we previously believed nature was external and, therefore, could be conquered.

And yet, our fundamental issue with our mindset of building and conquering begins to hit limits when the environment fights back. With sea levels and temperatures rising and carbon emissions growing, it is no wonder the planet is reacting the way it is. Nature doesn’t work to accommodate human plans. As a result, we have created a massive blind spot. We can’t be synchronous until we act in harmony with the environment (and for future generations and animals who occupy it).

It is tempting to simply segregate what happens to us as “good” or “evil,” “right” or “wrong” “pleasure” or “pain.”

Evil is often reserved for the actions of men. No one sees a house burning down caused by an electrical issue as “evil.” We call it an “accident” or a “tragedy.” Only until we find out that the electrician who set up did a lousy job do we say it is “evil.” Rarely do we look at the fact that an electrician hasn’t been hired in 10+ years to look at your old system to update it. In fact, too often, we craft a story that something isn’t our fault. It is the component of human behavior that changes the story we tell.

We fall into this trap, and it is me against the world. We think it must be someone else’s responsibility to fix our problems. We will even go as far as to blame God/fate/the universe to preserve the stories we tell.

The most straightforward story we can tell ourselves about causality and responsibility is that we are responsible for what happens. We have no idea what will ever work out in our favor. We constantly underestimate what time will teach us. Moral simplification will prevent us from growing from our actions. Once we recognize the complexities of life, we can now act accordingly.

The Greeks saw the logos as the intellectual part of our consciousness where we can find the intersection of perception, action, and will. And while it is unclear how much agency or choices anyone has, it is clear that some of us do have more agency than others. Yes, sometimes that is because of title and position. However, many with no such title or position demonstrate an ability to act in their environment better than their peers.

When we feel like we can exercise our ability to shape the world around us, it positively affects our psyche. When we feel good about our choices (despite the outcome), we can develop the kind of posture to tackle things in this world. Even if the options we have in front of us are primarily perceived, we can still have a positive outlook despite the limitations of what one person can do.

The answer isn’t to remove the guardrails to be more powerful but to feel more powerful.

There is immense pressure in our culture to “find ourselves.” This is a fruitless pursuit. Identity isn’t something you just find. You are who you are at all times. It’s whether we can find the words to the story we are trying to tell, which is also different from the story others tell about us.

Creating an identity could be found in the future, where you are trying to go. It can also be resolved by looking into the past and reconciling it. The now is the tension, the intersection of who I was and who I could become. This is where we can find fertile ground to tell the story we want to tell.

It might be productive to ask, “Who am I?” However, perhaps a better place to start is by asking what kind of relationship I have with time. What makes the past, the present, and the future so different from each other? And why do we work so hard to separate them instead of embracing them? What arc are you on?

Planets orbiting around the sun create the solar system. It follows the rules of physics to work. Culture follows rules, too. We must understand that, much like gravity, these rules align things.

What is essential to understand is what we are centered around. What pulls us? What keeps us compliant? What happens when we break the rules? Which can be bent? Who benefits? Who gains status? We can all point to the sun and understand we are rotating around it.

However, it is much more challenging to point to the invisible forces of power at the center of culture. If we can’t see the landscape, we can’t possibly learn to navigate it. More importantly, we must ask, what are we trying to build around?

There is a vicious cycle we have cultivated over the centuries:

Work -> Produce -> Consume

In each step of the process, we have developed cultural status.

One who works over someone who does has more status.

Someone who produces more wealth also gains status.

To show this status, they consume.

And around and around we go.

But our problem is that we construe meaning with work/produce/consume.

We cannot possibly define meaning in our lives by what we consume. Consuming is based on our desires—what we want at the moment. For many, we have far exceeded what we could ever want. And yet, we are left dissatisfied.

The answer isn’t to lean in and consume more. A more expensive car, a more popular college, or a bigger house only creates more desire and an empty feeling of, “Is this all there is?”

Less is more. Not the other way around. The sooner we can correct our expectations of life, the sooner we can begin to live it. Once we live it, then we can find meaning.

Success isn’t a number on a screen.

So often, the reason relationships struggle is that we don’t analyze what fills the space.

Finding the space to forgive is tough when your heart is filled with so much anger or resentment or bitterness.

It has been said in so many great pieces of literature: To forgive is genuinely to be divine. We can’t just get rid of anger, though. We must make friends with it, dance with it, and make peace. However, when we do let go, the space can now be filled with something else.