- 26 Dec, 2025 *
One of the phenomena that has grinded my gears as long as I remember is being under the control of others – whether directly (authority) or indirectly (systems).
Perhaps this is a function of listening to my grandparents’ stories of a world laid waste by ‘joiners’ to causes and communal endeavors.
But that seems sentimental and incomplete. They, after all, touted conformity to attain conventional measures of success.
Perhaps their hard-earned wisdom should have been heeded.
But I never grew convinced of their story of disciplined conformity.
The innoculation against imbecilic thinking carried through, but it didn’t provide nourishment for an American boy growing up in the 1980s.
It’s nobody’s fault but my own.
The flipside, of course, is a predilection…
- 26 Dec, 2025 *
One of the phenomena that has grinded my gears as long as I remember is being under the control of others – whether directly (authority) or indirectly (systems).
Perhaps this is a function of listening to my grandparents’ stories of a world laid waste by ‘joiners’ to causes and communal endeavors.
But that seems sentimental and incomplete. They, after all, touted conformity to attain conventional measures of success.
Perhaps their hard-earned wisdom should have been heeded.
But I never grew convinced of their story of disciplined conformity.
The innoculation against imbecilic thinking carried through, but it didn’t provide nourishment for an American boy growing up in the 1980s.
It’s nobody’s fault but my own.
The flipside, of course, is a predilection toward being a control freak – an outlook I have relinquished over time through travails and hard-won wisdom.
But in this season of reflection, I am ruminating on how this outlook of seeking to avoid external control has influenced my life, be the mechanisms prosaic or profound.
I won’t run through a litany, but some that come to mind:
- Bain/BCG/McKinsey case interviews - personify a computer and solve a problem as economically as possible; do not seek the (uneconomical) ‘right’ answer
- Bureaucracy - tilting against formal channels and procedures whilst in government and evincing a disdain for ‘tick-box’ thinking and those who employ it
- Bureaucratic politics - performant behavior to attain pecuniary benefits devoid of outcomes
- External validation - the elevation of credentials and conformity over competence and creativity
- Multiple-choice exams - many have clear answers, but some are poorly worded, necessitating judgment and explication
- Procedural capture - the elevation of process over agency (e.g., applying for a UK bank account with a person who possessed not one iota of empowerment to effect a decision)
All in all, society has seemed, in a word, bullshit. A place I’ve never really felt home.
The society I grew up in did not accommodate independent thinking – or even independence. It optimized for standardized tests and conformity with corporate demands.
Ironically, the venture-backed tech bros that enter my mindshare prognosticate about agency whilst exhibiting convention and conformism in spades.
Creating a world that neuters human agency is a devillish thing. It is a path to perdition.
The objective must be to alight upon truth and solve problems.
But neither of those has ever struck me as others’ priorities.
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