Duration is the final filter. People chasing rewards leave when rewards dry up. Sustained obsession can’t be faked. If you do fake it long enough to become indistinguishable from someone who has it, you’re not faking anymore.
If effort is now diminished, if it can be hidden, and proof can or soon will be gamed too, if transparency itself can be performed — what’s left?
The only thing left that can’t be gamed is wanting something badly enough that it shows. Desire is the closest thing to proof of authenticity we have left.
But what I began to notice, through all of it, was that something felt increasingly off. Not just in my own experience, but in the culture surrounding it. What once felt full of possibility had started to feel constricted. The language of freedom was still there, but beneath it was a kind of pressure that didn’t feel creative at all.
Cantillon argued that the origin of entrepreneurship lies in the lack of perfect foresight individuals have about the future. Rather than consider this lack of foresight a defect of the market system, Cantillon accepted it as part of the human condition. Uncertainty is a pervasive fact of everyday life, and those who must deal with it continually... See more