A few years ago, I quit the only job I’d ever had. Shortly after, I wrote this:
“I close my work laptop for the last time. It’s 5:01 PM, and that means I am no longer an employee at Facebook. I wake up the next morning confused, without any items on my to-do list—what is it that people do?
In therapy the next day, I tell my therapist life feels strange. Without the emails, the messages, the Outlook calendar, I have to learn to be a person again. My therapist corrects me: ‘Alex, you started at Facebook six weeks after you finished college. You’re not learning again. You’re learning to be a person for the first time.’”
There’s a scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which road she should take.
“That depends,” the Cat replies, “on where you want to go.”
Alice says she doesn’t much care.
“Then it doesn’t matter which road you take.”
I think about that exchange often. In a world where you’re fortunate enough to choose what your life might become, what do you do? Who do you want to be?
Because the uncomfortable truth is this: we have more freedom than we know how to use.
Every choice you can imagine making, you can make. You can quit your job with an email. You can tell that girl you love her with a text. You can create an app by asking a chatbot. You can order a hundred dollars of Taco Bell with a tap.
These may not be good choices. But they are choices available to you.
The paradox of our era is that it has never been easier to act—yet we have never felt more uncertain about what we should do.
For most of history, the shape of a day arrived pre-formed—by culture, by labor, by obligation. The modern era changed that. We gained freedom—and built tools to manage it. Clocks and calendars. Schedules and reminders. Systems to help us coordinate and keep up.
For a while, that worked.
And then something shifted.
The tools we shaped to manage complexity began to shape us instead. We traded the discomfort of choosing our priorities for the ease of living reactively, moving from one notification to the next.
This is where I’m supposed to tell you this is all the fault of technological progress, or late capitalism, or a handful of powerful, nefarious people. That story is tempting and comforting. It gives us someone to blame—and a clear prescription.
But the problem is: it’s not true.
When you open your laptop on a Saturday morning with a few free hours, you could work on the project that’s been nagging at you. You could finally book that trip. You could call your mom. You could do any of a dozen meaningful things.
Instead, you check your email. You reply to a few messages that don’t really matter. You open TikTok to take a break. You look up, and the morning is gone.
Email did its job—it helped you respond to someone who wanted your attention. TikTok did its job—it kept you entertained and engaged. By the metrics those products use, that was a successful morning.
But if a system optimizes for any metric long enough, the measure drifts from the meaning. It stops measuring the system’s value to us and starts measuring our value to the system.
And so, gradually, we became very good at executing other people’s priorities—and less practiced in the quiet work of choosing our own. Not because anyone forced us to. But because reacting is easier than deciding what matters when everything is possible.
For a while I thought the answer to this challenge was to opt out, unplug—to resist the technium and its siren song. To vibe with the Stoics rather than the shitposters.
But I was wrong.
We built this world for ourselves, and it’s on us to build the tools that help us live inside it.
Whenever humans unlock a new kind of power, we expose a new kind of vulnerability. We create abundance, speed, leverage—and then discover that our bodies, instincts, and institutions aren’t yet equipped to live comfortably inside what we’ve made.
We learned to engineer food that was cheap, abundant, and irresistible, and our biology—shaped by scarcity—struggled to keep up. So we built nutrition science, insulin, and now drugs like Ozempic.
We built machines that could move faster than human reaction time. Cars didn’t make us immoral; they made us fragile. So we built seatbelts, airbags, traffic laws, and entire safety disciplines.
There will always be voices calling for retreat—for less, for slower, for a return to some imagined equilibrium. But history suggests a different ethic. We don’t become more human by abandoning our inventions. We become more human by refining them—by building the next layer that lets ordinary people live well inside the world as it is.
Building the next layer isn’t blind techno-optimism. It’s literally just what humans do.
When coordination pressure became constant, we built calendars and messaging apps. When information went from scarce to infinite, we built search engines and feeds. Now that execution has become effortless, we need tools that help us decide what’s worth executing.
Where past systems trained us to react, future tools must help us to choose for ourselves so that we can make deliberate use of our most limited resources: time, attention, and energy.
Building that is harder than what came before. There is no single objective function for us to optimize. Our goals are not universal—they are personal. And that demands tools that can adapt to serve our values, not override them.
The Cheshire Cat once told Alice that if her path was unclear, it didn’t matter which road she took. But the Cat was wrong. That choice is the only thing that matters.
And our work, in our strange new wonderland, is to help her make it. Not by choosing for her. By helping her see clearly enough to choose for herself.