Losing big thinking

Fixing shutdowns, slop, band-aids

Last weekend I hiked into a Big Sur trail camp with magnesium pills, a new tent, my favorite sleeping bag, my coziest sweatpants, ear plugs, a thick eye mask, and the highest-rated camping pillow I could find, only to discover that my sleeping mat had a hole. Camping always imparts an important lesson: To achieve what you want (like more than three hours of sleep), you’ve got to start at the foundations.

Lately I’ve been contemplating the “band-aid economy” – how readily we embrace “quick fixes” to deeper problems we’ve created for ourselves. “Work from home” solves for your bad commute caused by poor urban planning decisions, “tiny homes” solves for the high cost of housing caused by poor zoning and land use decisions, and screen time limiters like Brick solve for your social media addiction caused by algorithms that hack the gambling part of your brain.

If you start to pay attention, the success of most start-ups is due to their ability to fix some problem caused by another thing – Uber for public transit gaps, buy-now-pay-later schemes for stagnant wages, GLP-1 drugs for processed food addiction, AI writing tools that promise relief from overflowing inboxes but really just paper over deeper dysfunction of how we work. In a free market, it is enormously profitable to soothe symptoms while allowing the wound to overflow beneath. This has been a larger ambition of the Right since at least the Reagan era: the public sector cuts funding for something until it breaks, creating space for the private sector to step in and privatize the hell out of it.

As I’ve written before on optimization in “how to fix your life,” we only deepen the structural dysfunction of our lives when we lean into structural micro-optimization, buying meal kits to offset long workdays and “quiet quitting” to cope with exploitative workplaces. The band-aids are convenient in theory (and often in practice!), but the very act of buying them reshapes our imagination of what’s possible by normalizing existing dysfunction as permanent. Systemic overhaul looks utopian when another subscription just feels practical.

Another way to think about this cycle of patchwork fixes is through the lens of Austrian social critic and philosopher Ivan Illich, who warned in Tools for Conviviality (1973) that industrial societies create “radical monopolies” when technologies or systems generate problems that they then appear uniquely positioned to solve. Car-centric planning is a classic example: the car makes cities sprawling and un-walkable, which in turn generates demand for more cars, highways, and, later, ride-hailing apps – and then excludes those who don’t own cars from participating in cities at all.

It’s interesting how this intersects with present movements like Abundance, which fundamentally argue a deregulatory regime so as to accomplish more, or at least produce more. More energy, more housing, more computer chips – these are of course contributors to a more resilient society, but does it exacerbate or address our underlying social and economic challenges? The more convincing Abundists I’ve met tell me it’s a “yes, and...” scenario, where an abundance agenda can be paired with deeper democratic thinking and ensuring that the emissions reductions we’ve achieved in the last decade don’t disappear by drilling new oil wells. Still, I worry that we do not think sufficiently large about the increasingly deregulated future we are spiraling towards.

So much of left and right politics is stuck in the most desperate immediate thinking possible – both sides screaming “Lower the price of the Big Mac!” – that you’d find more fleshed out visions of the future in Barnes & Noble’s “romantasy” section. Anemic elections give way to gridlocked policy, which brings us to where we are today, on day 11 (and going!) of the federal government shutdown.

Big thinking is out, just getting through the day is in.

Surely, big ideas to reshape society are never without tradeoffs. Modernizing port infrastructure may not please the union workers there, much like how longstanding workers at California’s declining oil refineries look at the green transition as one that is transitioning them out of their livelihoods. But the issue here is not to prop up industries like coal mining as Trump has chosen to do, as though it were 1825 and workers could pivot to selling pickaxes to goldminers out West. Instead, the solution is sharing the net benefits of innovation with the rest of society such that they lift up those who might otherwise not benefit, through tools like welfare, workforce development, and enforceable community benefits agreements.

In San Francisco, the divide between those standing on corners waiting for Waymos and those crowding onto airless buses couldn’t be starker. Without big thinking, the crumbling infrastructure will continue to be avoided by the few and experienced by many. And for what? Why do I really need that 15 minutes of time a Waymo saves me? I look to the biggest tech optimizers — like Bryan Johnson, the billionaire spending his fortune to live a little bit longer — and wonder if anyone has ever asked him what he’s really living for. What is the purpose of living to 150 years old, veins full of your son’s blood, if you haven’t first figured out how to enjoy a nice merlot and a sunset?

Tech is incapable of offering a larger, more positive vision, not because it isn’t interesting, but because it isn’t profitable. How long did it take OpenAI from promising a “machine god” to its investors to offering a slop machine to its customers? Big thinking won’t come from the the largest structures that surround us anymore.

People will always buy their temporary relief, but its risky to think that’s all there is. What’s the point of dreaming of a medicine cabinet, endlessly refilled?

The last time I camped in Big Sur when I slept over three hours. (Kodak gold on a 1969 Olympus 35-SP)