I remember wondering how odd this was, a noise maker? How do you even define noise? One man’s Beethoven can be another man’s fingers on a chalkboard. That distinction has become even harder to identify and harder to tune out in the modern day. We are bombarded with information 24/7 from every angle. Even fridges have wifi and screens now. At some point, we decided that even the appliance meant to keep food cold and keep bacteria away had to compete for attention.

Information is the new oil. Entire empires have been built, and are still being built, on the trade of it. A meaningful share of Silicon Valley’s value rests on the sale of attention through advertising. On Wall Street, fortunes are shaped by who gets the right information first. And yet, for all its value, much of what circulates as information is little more than noise: endless data, endless signals, endless stimulation, most of it forgettable, manipulative, or useless by nightfall. The more frequently you check, the worse the ratio gets. Frequency only increases exposure to noise and not vice versa.

One of the most essential capacities a modern human can develop is the ability to filter noise. It may sound simple: switch off the devices and platforms producing it. But short of living alone off the grid, some degree of information consumption is now necessary for survival. The real difficulty is knowing what deserves entry and what does not.

Consider how carefully you filter everything else that enters your life. You would not drink unfiltered water from a stranger or let your child eat random food they stumbled upon of unknown origin. We spend billions filtering water, air, and food, yet allow information to pass straight into the system that governs thought with almost no scrutiny at all. And just like bad food from that restaurant or street vendor you know you shouldn’t have gone to, you only feel the effects after it is already consumed and damage is being done.

Information governs life at the most fundamental level. Cells operate by receiving signals, reading instructions, and responding. DNA is information. Hormones are information. Immune systems survive by distinguishing what belongs from what does not. The body is constantly sorting through signals. Is this nourishment or toxin? Human consciousness is not exempt from this logic. The mind also lives by intake and interpretation methodology. What we absorb shapes how we feel, what we fear, desire, and most importantly what we believe. We might feel like information is background noise but it is more like mental instruction. And when the instructions are degraded, the organism falters.

The density, speed, and sheer volume of information we encounter daily is astounding. In the same way that many modern diseases are diseases of excess because our bodies are not designed for instant access to sustenance and processed foods 24/7, the mental pressures of this age increasingly seem to be conditions of cognitive excess: overstimulation, fragmentation, compulsive reaction, false urgency, and a nervous system tasked with metabolizing far more than it evolved for.

Just as a weakened immune system is more vulnerable to invasion, an overstimulated mind full of noise is more susceptible to distortion, manipulation, and disease.

The difficulty, however, is that noise rarely arrives looking trivial. It often appears quick and urgent trying to grab your attention before judgment has time to intervene. Entire industries now depend on this capture, a word that has become so common in boardrooms and strategy decks that its original meaning has been almost entirely forgotten. Backed by billion-dollar budgets, oceans of data, and algorithms refined to predict and exploit human behavior, the modern noise maker inflames, fragments, and distorts at an increasingly more efficient and effective pace.

The memory of the prefect matters because the logic never disappeared. A child was given borrowed authority to identify the “noise makers,” turn disturbance into a list, and hand it over for punishment. It was an early lesson in control: someone decides what counts as noise, someone enforces the label, and order is preserved through selective suppression. The modern version is simply more advanced. Now the prefect is the system itself, quietly sorting, ranking, amplifying, and burying at a scale. The tell has not changed: noise is whatever demands attention while interfering with judgment. A hurricane warning is not noise. Neither is a call telling you someone you love is in labor. In both cases, the urgency is real, proportionate, and clarifies action. Noise mimics that structure without the corresponding stakes. It may provoke and inflame, but it can just as easily distract and crowd out what matters. Either way, it leaves you less capable than before.

We speak often about freedom in terms of speech, markets, movement, and choice. We speak less about freedom of mind. Yet in an age of engineered attention, that may be the more fragile freedom of all. To filter well is not to retreat from reality and become a hermit in the woods. The immune system does not function by refusing all input. It learns over time, what belongs and what does not. The mind develops in similar fashion: through repeated exposure, and the slow discipline of noticing what leaves you clearer and what leaves you depleted. What the mind admits, it serves. Choose your masters carefully.

The conversations among adults would almost always delve into politics, history, the state of the country. Nigeria has never been a stable place, and it’s hard to be when you draw borders around hundreds of distinct cultures and languages, different religions, and millennia old customs, then tell everyone inside the lines to become one united country. You can thank the British for that, specialists in drawing borders that bundled incompatible peoples into one state, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Of the hundreds of conversations I overheard, very few have stayed with me. One did. It was during a period of civil unrest, after the paramilitary police raided the area and killed several people. The aftermath of it turned the talk to coups and civil wars, and in the circle was an older man I later learned had fought in the Nigerian Civil War in the late 1960s, a conflict some estimates place at up to three million deaths. The war was fought over an ethnic group’s attempt to secede from the federation, remember how the British drew those lines? What stuck with me was something he said: there would be no civil war anytime soon, because the living memory of that war had not died out yet. War is horrible, he said, and many of us who fought in it or lived through it are still alive, and so we will do anything not to go down that path again.

When I read a while ago that the last WW2 veterans were dying, I recalled that conversation and thought to myself: does that mean we could drift toward conflict again? And here we are, with constant talk of WW3. But I realized this applies not just to conflict, but to governance in general. There has been a huge wave of right wing resurgence across Europe driven by the cost of living, collapsed trust in mainstream parties, and a cultural backlash that hardened into identity politics, one where migration became the central accelerant. It let them frame insecurity, housing strain, and welfare pressure as a border problem, because as your rent goes up, your wages stagnate, and your government can’t manage a spreadsheet, they tell you the real culprit is a man in a dinghy crossing the Mediterranean or the rio grande to work a job you didn’t want in the first place. I’m not saying immigration policy hasn’t been utterly mismanaged, it has, badly, but it is not the cause of decades of governmental failure.

Curiously, one place that had remained mostly immune to the right wing wave sweeping Europe is Spain, despite being among the countries most exposed to migration and the pressures I’ve described. One reason, I believe, is that Spain still carried living memory of what that path can lead to. Francisco Franco, an authoritarian dictator who ruled from 1939 to 1975, reshaped Spain through repression, censorship, and centralized nationalist rule. The same goes for neighboring Portugal under António de Oliveira Salazar. Franco and Salazar left a recent scar, so hard right politics stayed taboo longer in Spain and Portugal than elsewhere. That historical memory acted like a brake, until economic and political discontent slowly started overpowering it, driven by younger voters with no living memory of those regimes.

Living memory functions like a social immune system in ways that map almost perfectly onto biological immunity. It recognizes a pathogen it has encountered before, mounts a rapid response, and the whole system moves with an urgency that no amount of abstract knowledge can replicate. Think about the first time you got seriously ill after COVID, not COVID itself, but that first real flu or chest infection after years of masking and isolation had kept everything at bay. Your immune system had lost the rhythm of that particular fight, and you were sicker for longer than you expected, not because you were weaker, but because the system had no recent memory of that exact threat. Doctors call it immune debt.

Societies work the same way. Someone who lived through the early stages of authoritarian rule doesn’t need to analyze it. They recognize it in the body before the mind has words for it. The man I was listening to as a boy could tell us what he saw, but he could not give us what it did to him.

So what does a society running on social immune debt actually look like from the inside? It looks and feels like now. A generalized unease that nobody can quite locate, an anxiety that keeps getting misdiagnosed and handed to the wrong doctors. Institutions that feel hollow without anyone being able to articulate exactly when or why they became so. A political class that grew up in the long stable aftermath and so has no felt sense of how fast things can go sideways once they start moving. One that keeps reaching for normal tools in an abnormal moment and expressing genuine surprise when they don’t work, as if yelling “close the border” was supposed to fix housing supply, wages, and a decade of administrative incompetence in three business days.

Rachel Yehuda, a Mount Sinai researcher, studies PTSD and inter generational trauma, including epigenetic changes tied to stress regulation. In Holocaust survivor families, her work links parental exposure to measurable differences in stress biology and DNA markers in survivors and their adult children, suggesting catastrophe can leave traces beyond culture. Still, biology doesn’t hand us a lasting safeguard. Collective memory has a half life and as witnesses disappear, the reflex to hit the brakes weakens. Politics gets rewritten by people for whom the warning label is a Netflix documentary, not instinct. You can see versions of this globally but especially across the West.

The man I was listening to was one of the people who carried the imprint, whatever mix of biology and lived experience you want to call it. He understood something that none of the formal architecture of the post war order ever accounted for, that the memory of catastrophe is a commons. A shared resource that belongs to everyone who lives inside a society, that nobody owns and nobody maintains, that does its work quietly and invisibly in the background. And now those immune cells are quite literally dying out, and what replaces them nobody knows. Another catastrophe that burns new immunity into a new generation at a cost nobody sane would choose, or nothing at all.

This got me thinking. A day earlier I had just flown into Heathrow and used one of the best inventions since sliced bread, e-gates. Scan your passport, talk to no humans, answer no stupid questions and be on your merry way. This particular time my patience was tested because the guy in front of me couldn’t figure out how to scan his passport and it took him maybe 30 seconds longer than normal and I found myself getting frustrated at this 30 second inconvenience. Now putting that in perspective compared to a 22 hour wait, I look absolutely ridiculous for being stressed by that.

One might say oh well, it’s all relative. Your stress responses are based on your lived experiences and just because kids in Sudan are starving doesn’t mean I have to force feed myself what’s left on my plate even though I’m full. That being said, my lived experience involves growing up in a third world country and the list of ridiculousness you experience is enough for a series of books. So how did I, who spent the first two decades of my life dealing with intermittent electricity, regular riots with AK-47s doing what they do and an airport experience that involves people trying to scam you from start to finish, reach a point where an extra 30 seconds in line could bother me?

It goes to show how quickly humans can adapt and reset our norms. So much so that there is a name for it. Hedonic adaptation. They are everywhere. Matter of fact I’m in the middle of one again as I write this. I am 40,000 feet in the air on a trip back to New York and was getting repeatedly frustrated because I needed to log in to my account online to sync my writing and start this piece and the wifi was being choppy. Think about that for a second. Just 120 years ago, which equates to just two people ago, this would sound crazy. My grandparents’ first Atlantic crossing as kids was by boat. It took two weeks and I’m pretty sure they had no wifi. They probably got seasick, tired, ate some weird canned food and here their grandson is complaining because his 7hr trip in this magic tube is not optimal due to his lack of connectivity to all the world’s information. Now the flight is really turbulent and it’s making it hard to type, but I’m pretty sure Atlantic waves and weather for two weeks would be slightly worse.

Hedonic adaptation is fascinating. Psychologists sometimes call it the hedonic treadmill, and the name is apt. No matter where you start on the spectrum of comfort or hardship, you tend to walk yourself back to roughly the same emotional baseline over time. Win the lottery or survive a war, within a surprisingly short window your day to day sense of wellbeing re calibrates to something close to where it was before. It is one of our most impressive survival mechanisms and one of our most humbling flaws. Impressive because it means humans can endure almost anything and keep going. Humbling because it means nothing, not even genuine suffering, earns you a permanent exemption from being annoyed by a 30 second delay at an e-gate or spotty WiFi on a flight.

The research on it is fascinating. A 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman compared lottery winners with people who had suffered paralyzing accidents and found that within a relatively short period both groups had returned to roughly the same level of life satisfaction as before. Which starts to explain how someone who spent their first two decades navigating riots, malaria twice a year and unreliable electricity can end up genuinely irritated by thirty extra seconds at an e-gate. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate who spent his career studying the gap between how we think we make decisions and how we actually make them, adds another dimension to this. His book Thinking Fast and Slow is worth reading in full, but the idea most relevant here is his distinction between the experiencing self, the one living through a moment in real time, and the remembering self, the one that constructs a story about it afterward. The two are often inconsistent. A difficult period can feel endless in the moment and compress into a footnote in hindsight. What this means is that even our reference points are unreliable. We don’t just adapt to circumstances, we adapt to an edited version of our memories of them, which is why intellectually knowing you have been through worse is rarely enough to make the present feel more bearable.

So are we doomed? Schopenhauer, who people love to quote, was a 19th century philosopher who argued that suffering is not an aberration, it is the default state of human existence. That life is essentially a cycle of desire, brief satisfaction and then desire again, the finish line always moving just ahead of us. He was paranoid, quarrelsome, ate alone to avoid conversation and had a famously terrible relationship with his mother, so I take what he says with a grain of salt. He was not wrong, but he was also not totally right. The research suggests we are not condemned to misery, we are condemned to neutrality, which in its own way is both more bearable and more absurd. The Ukrainian woman waiting twenty two hours at passport control will eventually, after a few days back in London, find herself irritated by something trivial. So will you. So will I. The question is not how to escape the treadmill, you cannot. The question is whether you can catch yourself every now and then, mid stride, and recognize it for what it is.

The Stoics have a way to use hedonic adaptation in your favor. Run it in reverse. Since the brain is going to reset your baseline regardless, you can occasionally engineer a deliberate downgrade to remind your nervous system what the floor actually feels like. Not in a performative way, but small and intentional. Take a cold shower, sit in economy when you could upgrade (this is very hard to do once you fly business once), take the stairs instead of the elevator. You get the gist. This gives your brain a new reference point to calibrate against, so that when you return to the comfortable baseline it reads as a genuine upgrade rather than just neutral. The Stoics called it negative visualization, less about pessimism than tricking your own adaptation mechanisms into working for you. The most content people are rarely those with the most, they are the ones most recently reminded of what less feels like.

So why does history feel nostalgic? The question assumes it always does, but obviously that isn’t true. Someone with a traumatic past, or someone living through the bubonic plague, or watching Genghis Khan roll through their village probably wasn’t romanticizing the “good old days.” That said, we’re focusing on nostalgia here, not PTSD.

The word nostalgia itself, like many technical English words, has Greek roots meaning “pain of returning home.” And the term wasn’t originally a single ancient word. That only happened when a Swiss medical student in the 1600s fused the parts together and used nostalgia as a clinical label for severe homesickness. No, you are not medically ill when you feel nostalgic, because over the centuries the meaning evolved into what we know now: a bittersweet longing for the past, not necessarily a place, but a time, an atmosphere, or in more modern language, a certain vibe.

But why do certain parts of your past trigger this feeling so intensely? Why did I suddenly realize I’m listening to millennial classics while writing this? Is it longing for simpler times? A quiet way of mourning who you were before life happened to you? Before taxes, work nonsense, and the hamster wheel of society got you? Longing for what life used to feel like? Or maybe it’s innocent reminiscing, missing a version of yourself who could take more risks because you had less to lose. It can be all of the above and a million other things. These framings are a bit cynical, but nostalgia isn’t always that. Sometimes it’s genuinely sweet. I have songs and moments I remember with affection, and instead of depressing me, they make me want to recreate that feeling in the present. That’s a good thing, right?

Ask a therapist, or a professional listener as some people call them, and you’ll hear something like this: nostalgia is a psychological response to uncertainty. It helps regulate emotion and restore a sense of safety. It strengthens identity by linking past and present into a coherent story, reminding you that you’ve loved, belonged, and survived before. And because it’s often rooted in people and shared moments, it can reduce loneliness and bring connection back into focus.

The thing is, nostalgia isn’t a clean replay of reality. It’s a selective filter that softens the hard parts and intensifies the emotional peaks. At its best, it becomes fuel and meaning. At its worst, it becomes a trance that keeps you living inside what already ended. In simpler English, nostalgia can ground you, but you risk getting stuck in the ground and not moving.

Which brings us to the next thought: the present. Think back to a moment that makes you nostalgic now. When you were living it, it was just another day. It wasn’t “the good old days.” It was simply today. So if that’s true, then the present moment you’re in right now might be nostalgia fuel a few years from now. You might miss the life you’re currently living. You never really know when you’re in the good old days. You only realize it after they’ve already slipped into history.

An odd thing that occurs also is the ability to be nostalgic for moments you never actually experienced. Feeling nostalgic for times, music and vibes that existed before you did. How does that happen? Well one of the best things about being human, and also one of the most painful, is that we can feel emotions across time. We can relive the past, react to the present, and even suffer the future before it happens, which is why you can feel secondhand embarrassment at something you’re watching or anxiety about what next year might bring. Humans can simulate experiences we’ve never even had, and still respond to them as if they’re real. So when you see a 70s photo or hear an old song, your mind runs an internal movie and gives you the emotion anyway.

And as with every human emotion in modern times it is being farmed. History can feel nostalgic because we never encounter it raw, we encounter it curated and polished. The past reaches us through vintage photos, museum lighting, documentaries, remastered films, and aesthetic trends. So it arrives already styled for longing. And now the almighty algorithms amplify that effect, constantly feeding us throwbacks, endless reboots, old songs, and resurfaced memories because nostalgia is a shortcut to emotion, and emotion is a shortcut to attention. Attention becomes clicks, clicks become revenue, and suddenly your longing is feeding a quarterly earnings report.

So answer the call from the past, have a short conversation, but hang up. Don’t stay on the phone so long you forget your actual life.

They were running down the sidewalk, being loud, and then they jumped over something and kept going. Kids being kids. I thought nothing of it.

A moment later I crossed to their side of the street, because risking my life at a New York crosswalk feels like an unnecessary hobby. There I saw what they had casually jumped over.

A homeless man lay completely zonked out on the sidewalk.

I also thought nothing of it. I walked around him and continued on my way as if he were a bench or a pile of bags.

A block later it hit me.

How is that normal. How is that a situation that elicits no reaction from me or from the kids who jumped over him. These kids stepped over a man who, in hindsight, could have been dead. The odds were low, but it’s New York so it’s not zero. He may as well have been a rock.

What struck me more was that I did the same thing. And I think if I had not seen the kids jump first, if I had not been primed by their indifference, I might never have noticed how insane the moment was.

There was a man lying motionless on a sidewalk in the middle of the day and eight year olds were so used to it they did not break stride.

I remember thinking this is what happens when you compress millions of people into a small space long enough. The extraordinary becomes background. People have died on subway trains and ridden for hours before anyone noticed. Screams get ignored and suffering blends into the noise.

My next question to myself was why density does this? Why the more “humans” you pack together the less “humane” they become. That question has no clean answer and depends on who you ask so I defer to your therapist or sociologist friend.

The harder question came next.

What else do people step over that’s not so clear cut?

Not in the city but in life.

The answer is yourself. One of the easiest people to step over is a version of yourself you once promised not to abandon. At first it feels temporary. You tell yourself you will come back for them. You ask them to wait while you keep moving. Then time passes. The person you left behind becomes part of the street. Something you no longer look down at. If you did, you would have to answer why they are still there. After enough times, you stop noticing them at all.

And once something becomes normal, it stops registering. Homelessness. Indifference. Small betrayals of self and others. No one can fight every battle, but surrendering entirely makes you part of the mechanism that keeps the insane feeling ordinary or from going unnoticed.

Nothing teaches faster than repetition. Just ask anyone who has played a sport, learnt a new language or an instrument. Not explanation not rules. What we step over becomes the lesson. And eventually, it becomes the norm. We like to think we are choosing but most of the time we are just practicing. And whatever you practice long enough becomes second nature. True rebellion to this is not overthrowing the world or turning into an ultra marathoner to overthrow yourself, but refusing to lie about it. The only revolt left is awareness of the right things, since hyper awareness of everything usually ends in the psych ward. To step carefully, knowing what lies underfoot and where it leads.

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, I was a record producer. As idyllic as that sounds, it mostly meant late nights working in dark rooms with no windows, trying to pull magic out of thin air. Creation, at least in that world, was always about adding. More strings, another lead line, one more layer to make it feel finished.

It took me years to realize that sometimes less really is more.

When I listen back to records I worked on, I am often shocked by how much I tried to cram in. And when I open old unfinished sessions just to scratch the itch, I usually end up deleting entire sections. What remains suddenly breathes.

There is a particular ritual that happens in studios when you get a bunch of music folk together. You sit around in silence, leaning back in rolling chairs, listening to records you love. No one really talks. You are not dissecting yet, just absorbing and hoping to get some of the magic through some sort of art osmosis. Over time, I noticed something consistent. The records that stayed with me were not the densest or most technically impressive ones. They were the ones that left room. Space between elements. Moments where nothing happened and yet everything was happening.

In those gaps, my mind went to work. I filled them without realizing it. Slowly it became clear that everyone else in the room was doing the same thing, each of us hearing something slightly different, each of us completing the record in our own way. I promise this was also in absence of the Mary Jane although it has its benefits musically but that is a topic for another day.

That realization applies to every form of art. What a song sounds like to me, or what a painting reveals to me, might be entirely different for someone else because the work allows for it. The artist does not disappear in this process. They simply stop over explaining.

This is why Quentin Tarantino never shows what is inside the suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Everyone leaves with their own answer. As he put it, if a million people see my movies, I hope they see a million different movies.

The brain is built for this. There is a theory called Gestalt, developed by a group of slightly eccentric German psychologists in the early twentieth century, which already tells you a lot, as most modern scientific ideas seem to emerge from that exact time and place. It suggests that the human mind does not experience the world as a collection of separate parts, but as unified wholes. We do not hear individual notes, see isolated shapes, or register fragments of information. We assemble them into meaning automatically, often without realizing it. When an artist leaves a gap the brain jumps in to complete the story. The absence becomes participatory. The observer steps in and finishes the work.

This is also why cluttered art feels suffocating while sparse work feels expensive. It comes down to figure ground relationship. When everything insists on being the focal point, nothing can breathe. Remove the excess and the subject finally has context.

Gestalt theory also gives us the Law of Prägnanz, which says that the brain prefers things to make sense with as little effort as possible. Although everyone has an ex or two that would refute that theory. Outliers aside faced with complexity, the mind instinctively looks for the simplest, most stable interpretation of what it is seeing or hearing. It wants clarity, balance, and resolution. When a work is overloaded, the brain has to work harder than it wants to, which eventually feels tiring. When a work is reduced to its essential parts, the experience becomes effortless. Meaning emerges without force.

This is why empty space in art is never empty at all. It is full of the viewer.

Physics arrives at the same conclusion. In modern physics, empty space is not empty. A vacuum (not the one in your house that you use on your dirty floors) is filled with fluctuating energy, particles appearing and disappearing, potential constantly in motion. The void is full of possibility. Art works the same way. The space left in a piece is not missing content. It is stored energy, waiting to be interpreted by the observer.

Space allows time for perception to settle. It creates anticipation. Think of the silence before the iconic drums in Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight.” That sparse soundscape before is doing as much work as the drum sounds that follows.

This logic extends beyond art. Architecture and design follow the same principles. Anyone old enough to remember the pre iPhone era knows how overwhelming interfaces once were. Endless menus, endless decisions. The original iPhone felt revolutionary because it removed friction and created space.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright understood this intuitively. He compressed entryways before opening them into expansive living rooms. A physical buildup and release. An architectural version of a drum roll before a drop.

In the end, the hardest part of making anything is deciding where to leave space.

This is why space is also often misunderstood. Everyone knows someone with an empty house that calls themselves a minimalist. A single chair in a living room does not create minimalism any more than silence creates music. That’s as ridiculous as someone sitting on stage with a guitar in silence claiming to play a song. Space works when it is intentional, directs attention, and gives structure to what is around it.

The placement of space determines whether a work feels unfinished or resolved. When used well, space carries as much weight as any material element. It shapes rhythm, controls focus, and holds everything together.

This applies to humans as well. Michelangelo believed the statue already existed within the stone. A person is no different. Form appears through subtraction, and that is when most people start arguing with the chisel.

Knowing where to place that space is the art. Chisel away.

Walk through any airport or train station and you’ll be harassed by the AI ads with the same five words: optimize, seamless, next-gen, intuitive, tailored. They don’t show new capabilities or real outcomes, just rebranded buzzwords slapped like plastic trim over ancient infrastructure.

This is exactly what’s happening with AI across the corporate world. Companies aren’t building new technology, they’re slapping “AI” over outdated systems the way a landlord paints over water damage and calls it “luxury”.

This is not an anti-AI take. Quite the contrary. The true AI revolution is very real. It will change everything. But what we’re being marketed right now? Landlord specials in digital form.

Steve Jobs once said: “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much.” And at the moment they are running the show but only for so long.

Replacing a call center with a chatbot isn’t innovation, it’s the corporate version of covering a broken tile with a rug. It doesn’t solve the problem. It just hides the human cost and calls it efficiency. Everyone can relate to the to the image of yelling “representative” to the phone.

Real innovation doesn’t require marketing buzz to announce itself. It works, and people adopt it because it actually changes reality. Sure you might need some cool ad campaigns to get it moving but ultimately if it doesn’t work it won’t work at a macro level. The louder the language, the cheaper the renovation. Regardless of what you think of Elon Musk, one thing is undeniable: SpaceX actually executes. They don’t run glossy ads telling you how “seamlessly optimized” their launch architecture is. They don’t fill airports with buzzwords about next-gen synergies. They don’t need to. You’re just driving home one evening, and you look up and boom there it is, a glowing arc streaking across the sky. Not a commercial. Not a 30 second ad interrupting your YouTube video. A rocket leaving Earth. That is what real innovation looks like. It announces itself through reality.

If I believed in shorting stocks, at this point I wouldn’t look at actual earnings or balance sheet health. I’d feed an LLM every earnings transcript and flag every company that uses “next-gen AI integration” more than five times. The more a company markets the illusion of transformation, the less transformation is actually happening.

History always flushes out the landlord specials. Shout out Enron.

We’ve also seen the pattern of fear every time a revolutionary technology emerges. The steam engine, electricity, the internet. Each one triggered panic: It will eliminate jobs! It will ruin livelihoods! And it did eliminate some. But it created far more. Historical data from the early industrial era shows that the steam engine increased textile production by more than 200 times in output while the total number of people employed in the textile industry increased tenfold over the next 50 years. The technology that was feared for killing jobs actually created entire new sectors of employment, wealth, and human advancement. When Apple shifted from being a computer company to building an entirely new ecosystem around the iPhone it rewrote reality. Nvidia is not dominating today because it marketed itself as “AI enabled,” but because it rebuilt its entire architecture to power machine intelligence. Netflix did not hang a streaming logo over its DVD business. It burned the old model and pivoted completely. Amazon went from selling books to constructing the infrastructure of the internet through AWS. And then there is the flip side. Blockbuster tried to add an online tab while clinging to late fees. Kodak invented the digital camera but never adapted its identity, choosing to repackage film instead of replacing it. Yahoo kept redesigning its homepage while search and advertising quietly passed it by. BlackBerry added random enterprise features to old hardware while Apple built an entirely new era and idea of what a phone is. They tried to caulk and paint their way through technological shifts and it worked for a while but eventually the cracks showed.

History rewards the builders. It forgets the landlords.

A new wave of corporate extinction is coming. The companies merely taping AI-shaped vinyl over outdated business models will not make it through. Standard & Poor’s data show that the average lifespan of companies listed in the S&P 500 was 61 years in 1958, 25 years in 1980, and 18 years in 2011 and is closer to 15 years today. Expect AI to keep driving that down faster. Think I am merely inferring the future the way someone who sees seven sunny days assumes the eighth will be sunny too? A 2024 Stanford AI Index study found that mentions of “AI” on S&P 500 earnings calls have increased by more than 500 percent over the past five years, yet only 6 percent of those companies reported any measurable productivity gains from AI deployment. A study by MSCI found that companies that use the most AI buzzwords in earnings calls under perform the market by an average of 5.8% over the following year. The way companies are using “AI” right now is the corporate equivalent of someone saying “trust me bro.” The moment you hear it, you know you shouldn’t.

The Truth About Jobs and Fear

We keep hearing, “AI will eliminate jobs.” Awesome! Why are we fighting to preserve warehouse jobs that destroy your back for minimum wage? Is that the human destiny we’re protecting? AI won’t end human creativity, it will demand more of it. It will strip away the illusion of work and expose where real value comes from. Any job that can be automated should be, because it means humans can return to what we actually do best: invent, create, reason, build, dream.

The real divide won’t be human vs AI. It will be builders vs lazy landlords. One group is building the architecture of the future. The other is busy staging an open house with silly buzzwords like “modern updates” and “rustic touches”.

Sometimes I sit there and watch my cat chase its tail. And I think to myself: What a silly animal. So naive and so unaware, gaining pleasure from running in a circle chasing itself. How primitive a creature.

Then I get up to respond to an email from my CPA telling me how many made up pieces of paper with dead presidents’ photos on them I owe to the government that oversees this made up society where we work until 65 only to retire and supposedly enjoy life when all the tools for enjoying it are on their last legs, literally and figuratively.

Then I think to myself, Oh stop it, go clear your head in the gym to stop these useless thoughts. So I hop in a car and spew some CO2 for a few minutes, helping to pollute the one thing we need to survive, air in case you were wondering. Then I park this huge piece of metal filled with rare earth minerals that someone in Congo earns a dollar a day to mine, and I go into this big room where, along with other humans, I lift heavy things and put them down in order to simulate the hunter gatherer lifestyle and keep my body healthy so I can continue paying made up money to a made up society to support our made up economy.

Ironic, seeing as I took loans to major in economics.

Then I come home to my cat, passed out on the couch from a long session of tail chasing, and I think to myself, Is she the silly one or am I the silly one? Better yet, are we the silly ones? We have gotten so carried away with all these made up things that we treat them as if they are real, tangible elements of nature. We forecast recessions and downturns like hurricanes or earthquakes. Have people forgotten we literally made all this stuff up? There is no geological record of recessions or stock market crashes in the sediment layers of the Grand Canyon.

We take more seriously the stuff we invented and disregard the things that are actually real.

Now before you point out to me that I would not have the luxury to sit here and type this if it were not for the structure and continued innovation afforded to me by society and men long gone, I am well aware. And I am eternally grateful that I do not have to forage for food or kill a woolly mammoth for dinner while hoping I do not run into a saber toothed tiger. I also love my polluting vehicle and tend to buy the most polluting ones because I am a car guy whose inner kid loves the sound of a big German V8.

So where are you going with this then, you hypocrite?

Well, you see, my cat lives in the present. We humans spend thousands of dollars and countless hours listening to and practicing things, be it yoga, meditation, or reading a zillion self help books, to try and live in the present. Eastern philosophies advocate for mindfulness, acceptance, and harmony with the present moment as a path to peace and authenticity, or as a Lehman Brothers investment banker once told me as he was trying to convince me to do a line of imported South American snow, just gotta live bro. I lost touch with him for obvious reasons, but I sure hope he took his own advice in 2008.

Some go as far as to try to become Buddha, giving up everything society has to offer and just sitting and meditating all day. Basically becoming a rock.

We have trapped ourselves in the same tail chasing cyclical motion my cat does, except we have made it infinitely more complicated and forgotten that it is all play.

How can it all be a play if there is so much pain and destruction in the world? One, all the good plays have plot twists and pain. And a good chunk of the pain in this one comes from the fact that we have forgotten what it is.

We are literally the only living beings we know of in light years. Yet here we are, squabbling over land that we think we own, good luck taking it with you when you die, and the basis for conflict is that one group of people has a little more melanin than another or worships a different guy in the sky or has a good amount of dinosaur juice in the ground that we need to power those air polluting machines.

If you zoom out, we look pretty ridiculous.

We have become a cat that genuinely attacks its own tail in all seriousness, with no spirit of play, then freaks out once it starts bleeding.

How silly of us.

Enjoy the chase, fellow humans.