Our online presence lulls us into believing we are building something productive. While there are cases where this is true, we often use this digital sandbox to make a “presence.” Which isn’t productive at all. The belief is the trap. Distinguishing what is productive and building art and what is pretending is critical to understand. The tangible world is where life and art and connection and beauty happens. Not the intangible world. Who needs a avatar anyway?
It can be a useful skill, but it is also a lousy way to live your life.
Getting through one day can slide into a decade.
The truth is…
There isn’t any rush. There is nothing to get through. This is it.
Instead of getting through, try just staying with the day—as long as you can.
People have a bias. A point of view of how they see the world through their experiences and what they have been taught.
What we don’t realize is that our blind spots are baked into the DNA of ideas and systems. The idea virus also has a bias, built towards a specific outcome that we may not realize.
The reason why we fear aliens is that we worry they can be as violent as humans are. Our ideas can also breed and spread violence too.
One reason we feel so dissatisfied with the status quo is that deep down, we know that violence exists. We push it further down the hierarchy and, as a result, feel the moral consequences of such blindness. We buy our happiness to push away the bad feelings. Now, we are all too busy and have become complacent. The sense that “something is wrong around here” is more widespread than we realize.
Once we label something as a pest we can justify violence. We can say it is even moral when protecting our kids.
That’s the lesson.
When we label something as capital, “it’s just business,” or debt, we open this door for violence to come in.
The most subtle aspect of this debt-morality connection is how it prevents us from questioning the legitimacy of the debt itself. Once we accept the axiom that “good people pay their debts,” we stop asking whether the terms were fair, whether the interest is exploitative, or whether the lender engaged in predatory practices by taking advantage of someone in desperation. Religious traditions that once had strict prohibitions against usury—exploitative lending—now find their adherents defending the moral right of banks to charge whatever interest rates the market will bear. The moral weight of debt becomes yet another tool of systemic oppression, adding psychological burden to financial exploitation. The economic question of whether a debt should be repaid has completely overshadowed the more important question of whether it is moral for the debt to exist at all.
Richard Dawkins first popularized the concept of memetics, which describes how ideas spread and evolve through human cultures, much like genes. It is a valuable framework to understand the history and, more importantly, the story surrounding debt. Malcolm Gladwell further identified what makes specific ideas “sticky”—they contain elements that make them memorable and actionable. Seth Godin also expands this concept, calling exceptionally infectious ideas “idea viruses”—concepts so compelling they spread from person to person, growing stronger as they move through networks of human connection. Bingo. The most successful idea viruses don’t just inform; they transform how people perceive reality. And few ideas have proven more infectious than the belief that “good people pay their debts.”
When political theorist Hannah Arendt walked into Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, she expected to see a monster. Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, had coordinated the logistics for the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps—surely this man would be the embodiment of evil itself. Instead, Arendt found something far more unsettling: Eichmann was “terrifyingly normal,” just an ordinary bureaucrat who had stopped questioning all moral judgment and followed his system’s logic without critical thought. Arendt described this phenomenon as “the banality of evil.”
This “banality of evil” reveals how ordinary people enable systematic violence by accepting institutional frameworks without question, treating what someone designed as if it were simply the way things must be. This happens not through malice, but through moral disengagement and institutional compliance.
This exact psychological mechanism operates in economic systems. When systematic violence requires the participation of millions of ordinary people, it must be wrapped in moral frameworks that make that violence appear not just acceptable, but necessary, even righteous. People don’t mindfully choose to enable horror—they follow institutional logic, complete their assigned tasks, and when the violence happens out of sight, it stays out of mind. As Douglas Rushkoff points out, “it is easier to destroy our world from a distance.”
Recently, I watched this blanket left on a sidewalk I pass every day. For two weeks, no one who works in the building wants to take care of it. The natural response is, “they don’t pay me enough to care.” Of course, this hasn’t absolved me from picking it up either. Do we care about the community? How it looks? How it feels? Are you part of it? None of these things have a price tag.
It doesn’t mean you will get the credit you deserve. The right thing to do is often the hard thing to do, which means you may have made the right decision, but you don’t get to feel good about either.
Josh Allred's Blog 