Death is the default

The power of agency is, in practice, the power to build: to direct our intelligence toward the work of understanding the world and adapting it to our needs. It’s how we impose a purposeful order on nature’s chaos.  

None of this is to say we shouldn’t regard chronic illnesses or pandemics as the scourges that they are, nor that we shouldn’t fight them with everything we’ve got. On the contrary, remembering that “death is the default” should mobilize us to fight them with everything we’ve got—recognizing that the one thing we’ve got, in the fight against entrop... See more

The accumulated fruits of human agency and creative problem-solving are so ubiquitous today—in the form of agriculture and modern medicine, electricity and air conditioning, Uber and Amazon, Google and iPhones, widespread literacy and constitutional government, bank loans and credit cards, Zoom and Facebook—that we tend to assume them as the natura... See more

Most startups don’t die because someone is actively trying to kill them, but simply because the founders stop trying to keep them alive.