The Joy of Persisting
When do you finally quit?
The number of people who start a project, relationship, or journey is always more than the number of people who persist to see the end. Because quitting projects, relationships, and journeys is easier now than at any other time in human history. And because the sacrifice to persist to the end is a higher emotional, psychological, and spiritual price than many are willing to pay.
But many of the people you’ve heard of persisted in spite of a low percentage of success. Consider the stats below:
Frank Sinatra: 1,200 songs, 209 hits, 17 percent success rate. Elvis Presley: 710 songs, 40 hits, 5.6 percent success rate. Babe Ruth: 8,399 at-bats, 714 home runs, 8.5 percent success rate. Pablo Picasso: 147,800 pieces, 30 masterpieces, 0.02 percent success rate.
Quitting is the default setting for many people when the process involved in mastering the project, the journey, or the relationship gets hard; when the first attempt doesn’t work, and even when the 500th attempt isn’t what the crowd claps for and declares a “hit.”
The comic book artist and dyspeptic entrepreneur, Dave Sim, once opined in his comic book Cerebus that, “Every artist has 200 bad pages of comic book art in him. Draw those 200 pages. Get them out of your system. But remember that by the time you get to drawing that 200th page, you won’t care what other people think about those pages. And more importantly, you won’t care about what YOU think of those pages either.”
Not quitting means not caring about the opinions of others about what you’re doing. Persisting means not caring about the critiques you have of what you are doing as well.
Thinking About William Gibson
One of the most obvious facts about the entire science-fiction genre is that its ideas, presuppositions, assumptions, and more rest on an analysis, not of the future, but of the present conditions projected forward into a fantastic future.
Which is why both dystopian science fiction (Blade Runner, most notably) and utopian science fiction (anything written by Isaac Asimov) miss the mark in describing the future we all now live in, from their perspective in the mid-20th century.
The unremarked upon challenge for science fiction writers in our time is that we need stories about the future of our present era, with its cell phones, social media, surveillance and data tracking, rising large-language models, and skepticism and mistrust of institutions and authority figures. Oh, and rockets from Elon, Bezos, and Lockheed Martin.
But we can’t get those stories–just as we can’t get tragic stories, just more reporting on tragic circumstances–because writers and artists today lack the creative vision to imagine the future and project forward, from this point today into an unknown future, in the way that Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson did.
And those guys had typewriters, railroads, rocket missions to the Moon, and computers that still ran on reel-to-reel tape.
We don’t need more narrative rehashes of classic science fiction describing the world we live in now. We need narrative imagination describing and providing a narrative structure for the “gee-whiz” world to come.
Fever Dreams
When the human body is sick and fighting a foreign disease element or injury, and body temperature increases as the fight for survival commences, the likelihood of a person experiencing fever dreams increases. In the past, fever dreams were tied to hallucinations, bizarre or surreal experiences, and, of course, divine visions. All of this is easy for us ontological materialists to dismiss in our time as the meaningless speculations of the uneducated and the backward, particularly because post-modern science attaches no more meaning to the occurrence of fever dreams than it does to the presence of gravity.
Which is to say, “Sure, you’ll dream when you’re ill, and those dreams will seem weird and crazy, but they possess no deeper meaning.”
And yet.
At the individual level, humans insist not only on getting fevers, but also on dreaming. And at scale in society and culture, systems get fevers and systems dream.
Such as it were.
There is meaning to these phenomena and connections to be explained and explored, particularly as we are currently in a several-trillion-dollar fever dream with new tools–a new disease element against which we have not been inoculated–being introduced by the wizards and soothsayers of Silicon Valley into our cultural, technological, economic, and even psychological systems.
Our current societal fever dreams possess significance up and down the meaning hierarchy that goes beyond the banal or the easily dismissed. It’s up to leaders to have the wisdom of the sages and the ages, to explain the significance of our societal fever dreams to us. And when they can’t, we all wake up collectively confused and mistrusting the next time another disease element is introduced into the larger body politic.
Leading in the Post-Literate West
Much of my career, such as it has been, has consisted of teaching, writing, training, researching, and thinking about what makes people leaders, why we follow people in the first place, and once we become leaders, how we can become better. It’s not exactly the sexiest career, but it pays (some) of the bills.
For me, thinking, reading, and writing sit at the bottom of every act a person who leads commits to. Decisions can’t be made, and choices can’t move from idea to practicality without those three acts. Followers can’t be ethically guided, and enemies can’t be accurately identified, confronted, and, in some cases, defeated. Without a robust practice of thinking, reading, and writing, leadership becomes a buzzword and a marketing term rather than an act that changes people and can change the world.
However, in America, and the West overall, I suspect, we have either entered, or are entering, a post-literate world, as defined by Rose Horowitz of_ The Atlantic_ in the long excerpt below:
“For the August issue of The Atlantic, I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a ‘niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.’ And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.
“Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.
“This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.”
Here’s my harsh prediction: In a post-literate America, both leaders and followers will struggle not only with comprehension of hard ideas, but also with being unable even to ask the types of questions that lead to formulating the initial hard ideas in the first place. Combine this fact with evidence of the Iron Triangle of Arrogance–where people not only genuinely believe wrong information and facts, but also shout them at louder and louder decibels via every channel they can broadcast them, because correction would require a change in identity, rather than just a change of mind–and a post-literate, American electorate will be fooled often and taken for a ride frequently.
Future leaders will not only be literate–they will be able to read the words on the page of those hoary old relics called books–but they will also know what the words mean, what the author meant, and what those words mean for their post-literate followers. Followers who will have a lot of text in their brains, but very little comprehension or wisdom in their hearts.
Behold, what a brave new world we are entering, folks, and behold all the people in it.
When The Hurly-Burly's Done, When The Battle's Lost and Won
One of the more interesting facts of our age is the lack of tragic stories being told via books and film.
Now, don’t get me wrong, plenty of tragic circumstances are constantly splashed across our collective social media feeds; from people we know, people we don’t, people experiencing tragic circumstances across the globe, and much more. Circumstances imposed upon them by fate, identity, chance (both random and purposeful), and nature. And we observers of this stream of tragedies are tacitly rewarded by the algorithm for engaging through clicks, scrolls, and eye movements, for “engaging” with the stories of these circumstances.
While it may initially appear as though there are more tragedies in the world, the actual fact of the matter is that there aren’t more tragedies now than there ever were before in human history. From the burning of a random village in the Amazon in 1500 B.C. to a person soliciting funds for cancer treatments on a GoFundMe page in 2026 A.D., tragic circumstances are a regrettable and pervasive human constant.
What is missing in our tragic circumstances-soaked social media feeds is fictionalized stories of real people overcoming those tragedies to become heroic and succeed in the end. It’s almost as if we have wound up in a place in our social media feeds that is a full realization of the frustrated, nihilistic fictional lament of the Hollywood writer and director, Charlie Kaufman, in the film Adaptation (2002): “What if the writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens? Where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies, they struggle and are frustrated, and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world.”
This is where the tragic plays of William Shakespeare can help us sophisticated, nihilistic, deconstructionist, and social media addicted post-moderns navigate how to put tragic circumstances into a narrative form to extract meaning, significance, and even closure from them. It turns out that the tragedies of Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello aren’t just “…tales told by an idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing (Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5). They remain the best method humans have of coping with the brute facts of the natural world and both random–and purposeful–circumstances that happen to us.
And the ones we love.
Let’s bring back the telling of tragic tales, for the hurly-burly will never be done, and the never-ending tragic battles are ever to be lost or won.
The Sandlot Problem
There is a moment in the 1993 film, The Sandlot, where one of the characters declares a pause in the shenanigans the young men are embarking upon in order to retrieve a baseball that has landed in the yard opposite the sandlot where they play pickup baseball every day.
He declares, with all the weight of an exasperated grown-up, “I think we’ve gone off the rails here. I really blame myself.”
And of course, the reason the line works as a joke is that no adult ever says that, much less thinks it about themselves when a project “goes off the rails.” The other reason it works is that every adult thinks this about another adult and blames them when a project “goes off the rails.”
It takes the innocence of a child to call a pause, take on some accountability, and return to the drawing board.
In every project you’ve ever been on, there have been opportunities to engage in the way that Tommy Timmons did in that iconic film, and there will be more in the future.
All you have to be is brave enough to say the words out loud.
Pursuing Happiness
We used to understand that the pursuit of happiness entailed the possibility that you very well might not get happiness.
You might be disappointed, frustrated, discouraged, defeated, or wind up rejected by the very system in which you were attempting to pursue happiness. And that system could be a family, a church, a neighborhood, or any community.
Most of the systems were known to be flawed. This was accepted. The people inside the systems were known to be flawed. This was also accepted. We used to call this the “tragedy of human existence.”
In our time, though, abundant material prosperity has fooled us into believing that we have defeated the fallen nature of the world, the systems in it, and the people operating in those systems. This belief leads to frustration, disappointment, discouragement, and feelings of defeat because material prosperity doesn’t equate to psychological and spiritual happiness.
That’s still something we will most likely not achieve perfectly, on this side of reality.
By all means, continue to pursue happiness. But acknowledge the ceiling.
The CEO and the Fentanyl Addict
Human beings like winning in the short term.
The biological dopamine rush, the external status acknowledgement, and the internal ego boost can’t be beat as motivators to continue to refine the processes that bring a short-term win. And with every new technology, the ability to shorten the distance between idea and outcomes that produce all those good feelings gets faster and faster.
We are observing this phenomenon in real time right now with top-down LLM adoption in organizations across the board. Thus, to gain a short-term win with shareholders, the market, and his board, a public-company CEO fires 21,000 people and then sails off on his yacht. As it turns out, even the highest-ranking CEO is still a human being pursuing the same short-term wins that even the lowliest fentanyl addict on the street is pursuing. And with the same motivators.
The ever-present challenge of being human is repressing, redirecting, reexamining, and rejecting (very often) the temptation to pursue processes that result in short-term wins that have long-term consequences and repercussions. They weren’t much, but society used to have robust institutions such as families, communities, churches, and civic organizations that kept people (everyone from CEOs to drug addicts) bound and focused on mid and long-range goals.
Did they work “perfectly” 100% of the time? No. But we decided about 80 years ago to start trading, pursuing long-term reality for the pursuit of short-term utopia. And that desire for the short-term win produced long-term consequences.
One of the “knock-on” effects of people losing trust and confidence in institutions is not that they stopped pursuing short-term goals; it’s that people doubled down on pursuing those short-term wins even harder. But now, without a brake on their behaviors. And as we have seen time and again, in ways large and small, people will continue to race to the bottom, without some combination of external and internal brakes.
And eventually, without those brakes, people will win their race to the bottom.
Smart people, paying attention, and tracking human behavior are correct to be worried about the long-term effects of LLM adoption. As they are correct to be worried about the increase in fentanyl use, the decline of institutional trust, and the erosion of the American family core. Smart people, however, need to understand that all these short-term wins that people, communities, and institutions are pursuing are not occurring in a vacuum, nor are they disconnected from each other.
Let us have the same opprobrium and criticism for a CEO as we do for the hard drug addict. And let us rebuild the external and internal brakes that will mitigate the temptation to pursue short-term wins, for the temptation is the same for both of them, and equally damaging to themselves and others around them.
Post-Industrial Heroism
The average person in our post-industrial society in the West searches in vain for opportunities to act heroically. Not because those opportunities don’t exist; they do, but because those opportunities come disguised as work.
Putting in the work that other people won’t. Doing the work to recognize that which is valuable and distinguish it from that which is not valuable. Determining how much effort to apply to solving a problem, providing value, or helping others. All of these and more are forms of work. They are also all opportunities to find the heroic and to be a hero.
Never before in human history have there been more opportunities to embrace work. And never before in human history have there been more opportunities to complain, critique, and avoid work. In a post-industrial society like the one we inhabit, the problem isn’t grinding poverty, cultural biases, or even social institutions aligning against us. The problem lies mostly in ourselves lining up against ourselves. Our personal, never-resting, internal resistance searches for excuses to avoid accurately identifying and faithfully doing the hard work that creates the situation, for the opportunity for heroism to arise.
Even with all that, there are still more opportunities than ever before to accomplish heroic acts, despite the nature of an individual’s circumstances. Overcoming has never been more possible than now.
Writing About Podcasts in Restaurants
And I quote from Seth Goding @sethgodin.com, the following observation: “There are more than a million podcasts. The good news is that it’s easy to start one. The top 1% of all podcasts account for 99% of all downloads. That means that if your goal is reach, the long tail isn’t going to help much. The short head, even in a medium as wide open as this, dominates consumption. Lots of podcasts to choose from, but most people don’t choose."(https://seths.blog/2026/06/the-relentless-math-of-the-long-tail/)
He makes a much longer point about fat heads and long tails, but there is another point Seth doesn’t emphasize, which is worth pursuing. The actions, behaviors, understanding, and thinking that make the algorithm that controls reach, give, or take away from a podcast creator optimizing for reach on the fat head are not the same actions, behaviors, beliefs, understanding, and thinking that reward podcast creators who optimize for depth on the long-tail.
In principle, what this means is that podcast creators have to be willing to think, write, create, and distribute using the mechanics of platforms like Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and others, without succumbing to the seductive pull of those platforms' reductive logic. What has really brought this idea home has been my reading a collection of essays by the great playwright and Hollywood director, David Mamet, and his 1987 collection of essays, Writing in Restaurants.
Mamet deeply understood, even in 1987, that the theater building, the production company, the stage itself, could not be confused with the acting, writing, directing, or even the marketing of the play, the movie, or the television show. And even at a deeper level, he understands that creators must get comfortable with the philosophy of the thing they are doing, rather than confusing that thing with all the infrastructure surrounding that thing. He even parses these distinctions concerning critics and their critical writing about theater productions. In other words, Mamet understood at a level deeper than most modern “content creators” exactly what he was creating, for whom he was creating it, and what the trade-offs were going to result in, in terms of opportunities, freedom, and, of course, money.
In our time, podcasts are probably the last pure Internet-based medium that, through its various rises and falls over the last twenty-five years, can support the kind of thinking and philosophizing that theater itself grew to support in the 1960s and 1970s in this country and globally. The kind of thinking and philosophizing that Mamet sharpened to a point in the 1980s. This means it’s probably time for podcast creators to start writing, talking, and publishing about not the mechanics of podcasting, the vagaries of YouTube, or even the flood of commercial shows in the market sucking up audience attention, but, instead, about what it means to podcast. And what it requires of a creator at a real level.
Maybe these conversations are happening in places this author and podcaster are unaware of. After all, other than talking to my guests, I don’t have interaction with other podcast creators or producers. So maybe that’s on me. There is a way to do podcasting, after all, where the host/producer/creator is, for all intents and purposes, a man +1 show. But if these conversations are happening, among the more than a million podcast creators in the world, they are happening in such a muted fashion that they aren’t breaking through the zeitgeist of podcasting itself in any meaningful fashion.
Maybe this is all “inside baseball.” But I think the best way to become more impactful in podcasting is to go out further and further on the long tail, reveal the inside mechanics to the outside audience, and stop chasing the seductive idea of optimizing more and more for the platforms–or the stages and the production companies, if you will–and really getting down to brass tacks.
I think guys like David Mamet would appreciate that.
Sports Metaphors With a High Batting Average
Sports and military metaphors dominate in both the business and start-up worlds. Such metaphors, stories, and anecdotes are an easy heuristic for explaining concepts that are hard for people who aren’t “in the game,” as it were. Of course, the plethora and misuse of such metaphors, stories, analogies, and parallels have diluted their impact over time. But that hasn’t stopped their use.
Because humans are inherently lazy and we like mental shortcuts.
The sport of baseball used to be the most popular team sport in the United States, until it was eclipsed in popularity by American football. Not to be confused with soccer, American football is a team game where one player can have a terrible day, and the team can still pull out a win. There’s a leader/manager in the quarterback position, and then there’s plenty of support staff who go unrecognized, unheralded, and unacknowledged. The game of American football is a wonderful metaphor for 20th and 21st-century corporate culture.
But baseball is fundamentally different. Not just in the fact that it is a different game that requires the mastery of a different set of skills, but also in the fact that baseball, as a game, celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the team. In baseball, an individual player can have a great game, and the team loses. But the team can still win a big game, even if an individual hitter can’t get on base to save his life. The game of baseball is a wonderful metaphor for the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century small business community culture that we have forgotten, or abandoned in our current corporatized and “financialized to the nth degree” era.
Which is why baseball has been fading in this country in popularity since the 1960s, and the lights may go out entirely within the next 100 years on that sport.
One of the greatest hitters of the 20th century was a player named Tony Gwynn. He was a right fielder who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn drove pitchers like the notorious Greg Maddux to absolute distraction by being able to “read” the stitches on the baseball as it was coming into the plate at 99 miles per hour and still hit the ball. He would regularly get on base and was a reliable .300 hitter for his entire career. This means, for every 10 at-bats, he would get on base at least 3 times, which is almost superhuman. The Major League Baseball average is .250, and the great Ted Williams is the only player to ever hit .400.
However, Tony Gwynn would have never gotten on base at all if he had never gotten into the batter’s box, set his feet, and swung the bat. And every time he did it, he memorized the patterns, not only of the ball and its movement toward the plate, but also of the pitchers and how they moved, pitched, and behaved. He was a student of the thing he was doing. He was a student of baseball. And he loved being a student of baseball.
A lot of us stop being students after we leave school. Our love of learning is ground out of us. And our desire to have the sure and the right answer at all times is built up in us. But the world we are building of the future is not a world of reliable football players, led by a spectacularly talented and spectacularly compensated quarterback. Instead, the world of the baseball player, the world of Tony Gwynn, is the world we are preparing to enter. A world where the passion for learning, deeply, the thing you are most interested in doing, is going to be the thing that pays the most money, because in a world of LLMs, it will be the thing that will be the most scarce.
In order to become those scarce players, we need to be guiding, mentoring, coaching, and teaching the people we are leading to love learning. To love the hard parts of becoming better at a skill set every day that may take a long time to be financially rewarded. And to build a habit of curiosity and learning that no LLM can outstrip.
Seeking an Authentic Original
Before the advent of the Internet, culture was driven by derivations. Derivations of ideas, concepts, and thoughts that were once original, but then, through the impact of other people, those ideas were watered down. This was a phenomenon most nakedly seen in the creative fields, and more carefully hidden in the more materially oriented fields. But derivation from an original idea is something that human beings have been doing for a long, long time.
With the coming of the Internet, though, this process of derivation increased in speed. Because the volume of people who had the ability to publish their ideas–original or not–increased by an exponential factor. With such an increase in speed from hard-won original thought to cheaply bought derivation, the work of being an “authentic” individual, with a unique perspective, shifted from being hard, to being difficult.
And in the future, with our LLM toys and tools, this shift will move from being difficult to seeming to be impossible. As a matter of fact, this shift is already beginning to occur. This is not because we don’t have original ideas. And it isn’t because we have an avalanche of slop derivations. And it isn’t because humans are lazy and would rather play the easy, short-term game of just copying slop rather than doing the hard work of coming up with an original idea.
The shift is happening because when humans with access to mass-scale communication technology get together, it takes a while for the humans to determine what the hard work is that is scarce, and thus creates outcomes that are valuable and worth paying for. Of course, humans tend to align to the belief–stated and unstated–that what is scarce and valuable is only what is materially beneficial. But that’s not true. Nor is that particularly an original alignment.
It’s going to take a long time to figure out scarcity in a world of seeming idea abundance. And we’re going to, all the while, be searching for an original idea.
Stepping Into the Path of Pain
Some acts are easy to commit to, and others are hard. Most of how we categorize the “hardness” or “easiness” of a particular act comes down to our own individual temperaments.
We rarely address the factors involved in structuring temperament, except in a psychological sense. And even then, we do it rarely and poorly. This is because temperament is highly individualized and particularized to how identity is structured, from our biology all the way to cultural influences. The structure of individual temperament also involves examining inputs that exist down deep inside of people that we don’t like to talk about at polite cocktail parties.
Determining that which is hard and differentiating from that which is easy is a category problem in and of itself. One that requires returning to individual first principles and questioning personal bedrock assumptions in ways that emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually cause mental pain. Unfortunately, we are deep into an era of individuals avoiding, mitigating, and side-stepping all kinds of pain, from emotional pain to mental pain, in favor of doing more of that which is perceived as easy.
Figuring out, as an individual in this era, how to step directly into the path of such pain, in order to categorize and differentiate “hard” tasks from “easy” tasks, is probably the primary challenge of our denatured times.
Weight to Carry
One of the more damaging features of the cultural, social and political chaos we’ve experienced in the past twenty-five years, has been the placing of psychological, emotional, and spiritual weight onto institutional structures not designed to carry the load. Family, tradition, neighborhoods, used to be the places that carried the psychological, emotional, and spiritual loads for individuals when they could no longer carry the weight for themselves. But over the course of the last few decades–at least two generations and maybe even three–those places have eroded. Eroded in power. Eroded in prestige. Eroded in importance.
The problem, of course, is that individuals don’t just stop needing help in carrying the loads they bear, and so, the carrying has shifted to institutions that were meant to be the last resort to carry such loads: the workplace, the government, or even the society at large. But the workplace isn’t a substitute for the support of family and friends. The government can take from one person (or group of people) through redistribution and give to another person (or group of people), but it can’t do so fairly and equitably. The society can’t take up an individual’s personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems while at the same time adjudicating everyone else’s unique issues.
This is the deep reason that all the interventions we’ve tried as a culture and a society, from the Great Society programs of the 1970s to the therapeutic language and social identity policing we do today, have not worked to produce outcomes of unity, stability, and social peace. They have instead produced chaos, disunity, and a fractured moral order.
Here’s a great irony: The people who were always emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically relegated to the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhoods, the people who always felt suffocated and “put upon” by social strictures and structures, don’t believe they’re doing great now. They moved their personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems from the edges of family, traditions, and neighborhoods, and successfully “centered” those problems in institutional spaces like the workplace, adjudicated them through government power, and talked about them endlessly in societal discourse. And the outcomes haven’t been what they long desired. Weirdly enough, there’s more social suffocation, the more open every privately held problem has become.
The solution to this is a trade-off. And a brutal one at that. Social pressure to reprivatize the personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems that people experience at the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhood is gradually and imperceptibly increasing. Over the next twenty-five years, the pressure to societally swing back towards what folks on the edges call “suffocation and compliance” and what the rest of us call “the center” will be enormous.
But such a swing will allow the institutions to heal from the damage of attempting to carry weight they were never structured to carry.
Searching for a Use Case
Thirty years ago, very few businesses and services built atop Industrial Revolution assumptions inherent in mass employment, mass housing, mass media, and mass markets could pivot to the Internet. A place built on oppositional assumptions clustered around long-tails, niche tastes, small audiences, and rabid tribes.
Now, we have transitioned as many businesses and services as possible to the current Internet-driven paradigm. There are still remnants of businesses and services built on the old Industrial Revolution model, and there is still rampant emotional and cultural nostalgia for the safety and seeming solidity of “the good old days.” But by and large, the assumptions of the Internet continue their relentless march across our markets, our behaviors, our psyches, and our assumptions.
The current hype cycle around large-language models and machine learning is largely similar in tone, emotional content, and perspective to the previous Internet hype cycle that existed back when Pets.com was advertising opposite the Super Bowl around 1999 or so. Just as then, we currently are so early with our large-language models that we don’t have a “use case” for productivity, service, entertainment, or markets that seems to justify the current LLM hype cycle. Just as we didn’t have use cases at the arrival of the Internet.
But the use cases will arrive.
The hype cycle will collapse.
And out of the trillion dollars of hype cycle rubble left behind (it was billions after the dot-com crash in 2000-2002), businesses and services that were built on the assumptions of niche, long-tails, and tribalism will either adapt or expire. Even as new assumptions–LLM-driven assumptions–will begin their thirty-year-long takeover of our markets, our behaviors, our psyches, and our assumptions. Rest assured, it will take about thirty years for the takeover to even be 85% complete. No matter how hot the current friction is right now around LLMs.
When humans figure out how to make a technology work, when they stumble on an appropriate use case, they move like lightning, and all of us wonder how we lived without it. The fascinating element in all of this is who, exactly, will see the future use case and have the courage to go first.
Every Man Did What Was Right In His Own Eyes
The Bible is full of wild stories.
Some of the wildest are in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament.
The book is a story of the transformation of Old Testament Israel from being a people and a country of promise under the rule of Yahweh through their ignominious decline as a nation-state as they chased–and were chased by–other gods. The struggle, ignominy, and decline are framed as a loss of cultural faith, a loss of national perspective, and a loss of focused tribal obedience in terms of worshipping Yahweh in the way that Yahweh commanded He be worshipped.
We moderns, in our own era, read the Book of Judges and are perplexed as to its relevance to our sophisticated, materialistic, technologically driven era, where Yahweh doesn’t even get a seat at the table of our epistemological assumptions. The relevance is there, though.
Read in purely naturalistic terms, the highs and lows in the Book of Judges map neatly to the period of cultural unraveling that took place in the United States, starting from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and culminating in the horror of September 11, 2001. The people of the United States during that interregnum period had no earthly idea why the “center” was failing to hold, solipsism was taking hold, and “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The seeds of the cultural chaos of that era, the unraveling, bore fruit in the chaotic cultural period following September 11th.
The period that just ended, in the United States, with the attempted assassination of our current President in July 2024.
The Book of Judges is currently closed as a salient reference point to our particular historical and cultural moment. But have no fear. It will be opened back up again in about 2060 or so.
Right around the time of the next secular unraveling.
What is Valuable?
For most of human history, the value of labor was so inexpensive that it was below cheap. This is one of the mainly unstated reasons why human slavery of all kinds flourished all over the world for as long as it did. There were a lot of extra humans, and it was too expensive to just allow them to exist. And besides, work needed to be done.
Farm work.
Building work.
Hauling work.
House work.
Fighting work.
But when the Industrial Revolution began, human labor started to become more expensive, and the value of that labor began to increase. Sure, factory labor was hard, but it was less likely to be devalued if the person running the machine knew more about how to turn out a product on a repeat basis than the guy running the business. Even if that guy had started the business by turning the product out himself.
Then, computers came along, and knowledge became specialized. And with specialization, labor tottered precariously between being expensive (after all, there are still a lot of humans around) and being cheap (after all, there is still a lot of work to be done). Add to this the fact that monetizing knowledge is hard because it tends to develop on a long timeline (20-25+ years), and you’ve got a situation where labor and knowledge have been in a weird truce for some time.
But now, since the advent of the Internet, knowledge is perceived as being cheap. And since knowledge is cheap, human labor must return to the forefront in value. Except that the LLMs combined with robotics will render both labor and knowledge increasingly inexpensive, but also unevenly.
So, how can humans differentiate themselves from both knowledge and labor in order to create value for other humans and to accomplish all the work that (still) needs to be done in the world?
I don’t have the answer to that question, nor does anyone else.
I know what the answers aren’t. And Universal Basic Income–or money for just hanging around and existing–is not one of them. I also know that human creativity, unbound from both knowledge and labor, is a petri dish in which all the old spiritual and psychological diseases that still beset us as a species will grow and flourish in unprecedented ways. I also know that the smartest people in the world don’t have any other answers to the question either.
We are all in this together now.
Selling Someone Out
Betraying a person’s confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you are doing it and what end it serves, is where the erosion of trust begins.
And once trust in a high-trust society, bound by traditions, family bonds, and the surety of community, is riven by such erosion, the beginning of social chaos is not far behind.
But a society that is eroding in trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether by individuals refusing to play the game of selling out their principles, their values, or their relationships. It’s a lot of psychological, moral, and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is fraying, tearing, and breaking.
But it’s only the act of buying in that works to preserve, not what was in the past, but the circumstances–fragile though they may be–for a different, and potentially better, future. Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of “all against all” breaks out and then nothing worth preserving remains.
And it’s monstrously difficult to cobble together a high-trust society again out of nothing.
The Limits of Witness and Understanding
When we observe an event, whether the observation occurs in real life or online, we cannot truly be sure of what we have seen. Over the last quarter-century, we have built a genuine, skeptical panopticon online, where everyone knows that everyone is seeking to market to everyone else. Thus, we live–with increasing comfort–the conclusion that there cannot be truth from the systems in the box in our hands and on our desks.
There are people who will claim that both the panopticon construction and comfort with a lack of belief in reality have always been with us and are nothing new and nothing to be alarmed at. These same people blithely declare that “Technologies don’t change people. Technologies just reveal who people always were.” I believe the marketer and social media hustler, Gary Vaynerchuk, once loudly declared that in some video I saw of him on YouTube.
What is missed in such superficial analysis is the erosion of witness and the erosion of understanding. If we cannot understand what we are seeing, how are we to make any critical decisions, engage in critical analysis, or make an impact if our internal ability to discern the external discourse is constantly in question? The answer is, of course, we can make those decisions, and we then outsource the decision-making and the hard parts of witnessing events in the world to people with titles, positions, and authority. Many of whom aren’t any better at observing and analyzing than you or I are.
Sure, there are experts. But collectively, we have built a social panopticon that may have started with the best intentions of opening up all of our eyes to see more. And has wound up closing our eyes to the things of value that needed to be observed to be maintained by everybody, and not just “experts” with titles, degrees, positions, and fancy PR firms.
We live in a time where everyone has more data points about everyone else than ever before, and yet, we know much less than people who came before us about each other than ever before.
That’s not just a problem of technology.
The Word 'Secular' Means Now
The word secular comes from a root that means “age,” “generation,” or “lifetime.” When it is put in front of another word, it indicates the power of the present and the immediacy of now.
For instance, the terms “secular traditions,” “secular morality,” or “secular thinking” are all indicative of traditions, morality, or thinking that is focused on the present time, without reference to the past.
If we are doyens of progress, and most of us, even the most religious of us, are, then usage of the word “secular” shouldn’t give us that much pause. But if we are doyens of tradition, family, community, or of ideas, themes, or myths that are from the past–and that have proved to be useful regardless of which time they come from–then perhaps our language should shift away from secular terminology and toward language that is more eternal.