If you went back 45 years, the built world would be eerily similar–the clothes, the cars, even the haircuts.
Except you’d quickly notice that there were no personal computers and no smart phones. That for seven or ten hours a day, every day, people were interacting in real life, not with their screens. Many of us can’t remember what we did all day.
The same thing probably occurred after the adoption of electricity. We acclimate to the new normal.
What happens a year from now, when most of those ten hours have been transformed by AI? We probably won’t remember what it was like today.
If you buy an Ikea table, you’ll need 8 bolts to put it together. 7 is not enough.
This is a functional sort of ‘enough.’ It can be critical to our survival. “I have enough medication to last through this illness.” “We have enough food to feed our family.”
But this isn’t the stress that we often feel in social or financial settings. That’s the bottomless, n+1 habit of never having enough.
Our needs got hijacked and turned into endless wants. Marketers and adjudicators of cultural standing turned ‘enough’ from a functional requirement to a never-ending tactic.
The not-enough of the driven hedge fund bro in the Hamptons, or the not-enough of the person hoarding resources, or the not-enough of the generous but nervous host who finds a sort of fuel in worrying about being hospitable. The not-enough chronicled in magazines and social media accounts. It’s the not-enough of someone counting online metrics, and the not-enough of the athlete who doesn’t simply want to win, they want to break a record.
This is a choice, and it is simply about the story we tell ourselves. There’s no absolute measure, no certain number of nuts and bolts needed in the optional search for solace and status.
On the other hand, when we find the insight to choose what our enough is, the people around us often respond warmly and in kind.
Insufficiency isn’t a tool or an advantage. It’s a hack, a distraction and a place to hide. This is a choice, a simple one, one we can remake each day.
Perhaps this has happened to you: You’re at the reference desk of the library, with the answer to any question available–and you can’t think of anything to ask.
And there’s the vegetable blindness that occurs at a really good farmer’s market. After a few stalls, it’s hard to imagine what to cook.
Shortly after high-speed internet arrived, this mind-blanking set in for many people… you could look up anything on Wikipedia, listen to any song, read any recipe–and in that moment, our curiosity seemed to fade.
And of course, with Claude and other AI tools here, it’s now a worldwide epidemic. We can find information, get tutored, create code, build illustrations, narrate projects… a team of free interns, ready to give it a go.
We have the keys to the car, and it’s got a full charge… where are we going to go now?
On poison and high voltage wires, the label clearly informs us that this can kill us, right away. For obvious reasons, these are important labels, and generally quite effective.
On cigarettes, it’s clear that if you smoke long enough, you’re going to die, and probably not pleasantly. The warning labels haven’t been nearly as effective as taxes in curbing smoking, but they made the issue clear.
New York State just passed a law requiring labels on social media. Many of the tactics of online networks make people, especially children, unhappy, perhaps for the long term.
Perhaps by highlighting the addictive, manipulative features that cause the most harm, informed consent (or avoidance) will follow.
We probably want to avoid signs like this:
But I’m wondering if a simple, universal symbol could get the job done:
Not just similar. Cavendish bananas (the usual kind here in the US) are all clones, each from a tree grafted from a tree grafted, all the way back, from the first tree of the species in the UK.
There are problems with this.
Sure, the banana is the most reliable fruit. The banana marketing folks don’t have to worry about uniformity.
But the monoculture is fragile. When the virus that kills this species spreads, they’ll all disappear.
And there’s little room for innovation, for positioning or to be anything more than a commodity provider. It’s hard to tell a story about a better banana when bananas are all so obviously the same.
They seem like they’ll spread to everyone and stick around forever.
This almost never happens.
In order to spread to everyone, they need to move beyond the people who are looking for a new idea. And that happens when existing users have a powerful reason to tell their friends.
Not only that, but the idea has to solve a real problem for people who weren’t sure that there even was a solution to that problem.
And in order to stick around forever, there needs to be a generous lock-in, a reason to not only keep using it, but to not switch to the next thing.
The network effect plus stickiness almost never happens after the idea is launched. It’s about marketing (in the powerful, design sense) not promotion.
Under each post on my blog there’s a button that says RANDOM.
I’ll confess that reading posts I wrote ten or twenty years ago is often a surprise. I wrote each one, but I have no recollection of doing so.
We can no longer expect that others will experience an introduction to us and our work in the order we would like. Instead, we present a mosaic to the world, persistent tiles that add up to a whole.
The first difficult task is to consistently and persistently create one tile after another. Showing up to earn trust, attention and a voice.
And the second is to make sure it all rhymes.
December 23, 2025
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