Today I learned that Bill Watterson named his beloved comic strip after John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes. That knowledge took my appreciation for Watterson’s genius to a new level.

The six-year-old Calvin and his beloved stuffed tiger Hobbes often had deep discussions that poked fun of humanity from many angles. There is deep insight, and irony, in naming these characters after these historical figures, that is truly rich.

John Calvin famously created Calvinism, an interpretation of Christianity that leans into concepts like predestination, as well as a dim view of humanity’s morality outcomes outside the construct of a creator keeping humanity in check. Comic Calvin’s perpetual brattiness and misbehaviors were consistent with a Calvinistic view of our innate tendencies for rebellion. Even predestination finds a mischievous echo in comic Calvin; for instance, Calvin often justified his destructive actions as simply undeniable (perhaps predestined?) such as beaning his unsuspecting peer and neighbor Susie with a snowball. In many ways, Calvin embodied the boundlessly unruly behavior that Calvinism warns about. But comic Calvin was far more complex than the embodiment of what is wrong with humanity; he’s deeply lovable and relatable despite his egotistism. His moments of self-reflection, tenderness and humanity drives home the grayness of people’s many contradictory characteristics. And comic Calvin perpetually decries being born into a world that constantly conflicts with his deep sense of free will. John Calvin was all about God’s sovereignty; comic Calvin was consumed with his personal sovereignty, and the forces against it. While I doubt Watterson was really critiquing Calvinism, the character’s name origin combined with Calvin’s characteristics create a truly sophisticated irony.

Meanwhile, Hobbes, ever the voice of reason, often rolls his eyes at Calvin’s self-obsessed worldview. Like John Calvin, Thomas Hobbes had a pretty dim view of humanity, but for different reasons. He argued our definitions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ were more related to human desires than something objective. He saw humanity’s existence in a civil society as fragile, and the constructs of social contracts as deeply necessary. His thinking would differ from many in our modern society in that he saw oppressive government, even tyranny, as less terrible than the collapse of government altogether. The character Hobbes wasn’t exactly consistent with the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, but does seem in retrospect, consistent in providing a backdrop for the dim view of Calvin’s narcissistic tendencies. The character that comic Calvin embodied seemed to speak directly to why Thomas Hobbes arrived at his conclusions that humans need the guardrails of civil societies.

The philosophical tension embodied by the Calvin and Hobbes characters likely has its roots in Watterson’s own grappling with life’s bigger questions. I feasted daily on Calvin and Hobbes in my childhood, and often found myself staring at a particular strip long after I’d finished laughing, contemplating something that ran far deeper than the absurdity of the joke. It now makes more sense why that was. Perhaps Watterson shaped my worldview far more than I realize.

—

As I have sought to reframe my existence now outside the pre-defined one I was born into, I am currently participating in a modern introduction to Philosophy class, one offered here on Substack. Suddenly the dust-covered Great Books collection given us as a wedding present is of great interest, and slowly becoming accessible to me.

And as part of my new learning, I was introduced to something that seems almost embarrassingly basic: How do we go about determining whether something is true or not? Thus, I’m moving from being born into simply knowing “the truth,” to learning how humanity has gone about identifying what is indeed true. And that brings us to the fascinating branch of Philosophy called Epistemology.

For those also new to this, let’s establish what epistemology is:

Epistemology: the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

Effectively, it’s how we evaluate, with some logical process, whether something is true or not.

For context of why I’m starting with the definition of epistemology, the reader should understand I am someone who has a master’s degree-level of education, yet only came across the study of epistemology in my 50s. Yet this branch of Philosophy and relates to many other branches of knowledge, and underscores so much of what surrounds my daily life. Mathematical proofs, scientific experiments, the standards used in a courtroom, etc are all ultimately concerned with the same basic epistemological question: How and what do we know about a thing?

Living Within “The Truth”

Here’s the important reality about what happens in environments like fundamental religions, those that claim, even brand themselves as, “The Truth”: it can make identifying what is actually true very hard to discern.

There is an enormous difference between saying:

“We believe these things are true.”

compared to

“We are in The Truth.”

The first leaves at least some room for the possibility that what we believe could be wrong. The second predefines and surrounds the conclusion.

Normally, we might imagine reasoning working something like this:

Evidence > reasoning > conclusion > belief

But in environments that start with the answer, the reasoning works in reverse:

The Truth > interpretation of evidence > conclusion

The fundamental proposition has already been settled. Reasoning then becomes less about discovering whether the belief is true and more about explaining how the belief must already be true. The latter can no longer be considered reasoning, and is better labeled dogmatism. And dogmatism differs from simply having strong convictions, as dogmatism occurs when alternatives aren’t allowed genuine consideration in the first place. Unfortunately, dogmatism is often rewarded in closed systems, rebranded as faith. This can then result in a culture incapable of self-reflection and growth.

When beliefs become identity

Consider the difference again:

“We believe these things are true.”

compared to

“I am in The Truth.”

The first describes a proposition held by the person.

The second describes where and who the person is.

That means questioning a proposition with framing that defines the person and their environment can mean simultaneously questioning their beliefs, their community, their family, their identity, their moral standing, and potentially their eternal destiny. That’s a whole lot of water for a proposition to carry! At that point, evidence is no longer psychologically neutral. It carries one’s entire being. There is a named concept for this: identity-protective reasoning. When beliefs become attached to an important social identity, our motivation to protect that identity can severely affect how we evaluate information that threatens it.

Identity-protective reasoning certainly isn’t peculiar to religion. We commonly see the same mechanism in political parties, ideological movements, professional communities, nationalism, and other cultural clusters that group strongly held identities. However, identity connected to faith often raises the stakes considerably. Much more becomes at stake when admitting “I was wrong”. It can mean admitting we were wrong, bringing all of the relational, social, moral, and eternal implications attached to that possibility.

In recent years, I’ve witnessed my own historical faith church community experience a major public crisis, yet the crisis invoked no meaningful change or public remorse. The church as an entity had to still be right, even in the face of obvious culpability for what had gone horribly wrong.

When questioning becomes a closed loop

What happens when evidence contradicted “The Truth”?

With ordinary reasoning, when evidence contradicts a belief, one possibility we have to entertain is that the belief itself may need revisiting.

That doesn’t mean immediately abandoning the belief. Evidence can be incomplete. Experts can be wrong. Historical records can be misleading. People can lie. There are perfectly rational reasons to question counter-evidence.

The problem comes when the belief itself is the one possibility that cannot be questioned. The results in the system becoming closed to any real examination.

Such a closed system can provide an explanation for virtually any evidence without ever allowing the original proposition to be reconsidered. This is how I witnessed it playing out in the community I was part of:

• Evidence supports us: The Truth is confirmed.

• Evidence contradicts us: The evidence is faulty, contrary accounts are false or overblown.

• Experts disagree: Worldly wisdom can’t understand spiritual truth.

• Former members disagree: They lost faith/became bitter.

• Other Christians disagree: They are deceived by false religion.

• Society criticizes us: This confirms we are right; Jesus said his followers would be persecuted.

• I experience doubt: My faith is being tested.

This is what happens in a system like this; every possible observation gets force-fit into supporting the original proposition being true. I directly observed this collision when the church’s historical narrative increasingly collided with abundant evidence of a different, and far less supportive historical reality.

The closed loop does not itself prove that the beliefs are false. It merely exposes an epistemological problem: the proposition is protected from ever being meaningfully tested.

A question that works well to uncover if the loop is closed is the following:

“What conceivable evidence would cause me to conclude that my belief isn’t true?”

If the sincere answer is “nothing,” then it doesn’t really matter how much evidence is collected. The belief has been constructed so that no counter-evidence is allowed to count against it.

We had spent our lives being told we possessed the Truth. We hadn’t necessarily been taught how to identify truth, even though we would regularly testify that we had ‘found the Truth’.

What I never dared ask with respect to my beliefs

Epistemology requires learning to ask questions such as:

• How do I know this?

• What is my evidence?

• How reliable is the person telling me this?

• What alternative explanations exist?

• Am I applying the same evidentiary standard to my belief that I apply to someone else’s?

• What would change my mind?

• How confident should I actually be?

Those are metacognitive questions. They aren’t merely questions about what we think; they force us to contemplate the reliability of our own thinking.

And this is where there is an important distinction between being studious and learning how to think epistemologically. For example, the community I grew up in knew the Bible well. Study was strongly encouraged and structured. Yet that study was rife with eisegesis; that is, we read our behaviors into scriptures, rather than studied the text in a traditional sense of the term.

At the same time, other kinds of study were largely discouraged. Even within the Biblical narrative, reading other translations or studying the history of the Bible itself could be discouraged.

So there was a strange contradiction: we studied a great deal, while the boundaries around what could be studied and what conclusions could be reached were already established.

As a result, all that study didn’t lend itself to someone openly asking probing epistemological question, such as:

“Why do I regard this form of knowing as reliable in the first place?”

That’s the difference between studying within a worldview vs. examining the truth of the worldview itself.

We never learned how to ask the right questions, only how to work back from a pre-determined answer.

I had two standards for measuring truth

Here’s the diagnostic test that really gets to intellectual honesty.

If a Jehovah’s Witness had said to me:

“I know this is God’s true organization because when I pray and attend our gatherings, I feel Jehovah confirming it to me.”

I would immediately recognize the epistemological problem, since I was not a JW.

“But members of other religions say essentially the same thing about their churches, yet have very different beliefs.”

I would simultaneously accept virtually identical reasoning when applied to my own church’s traditions. That was the epistemic contradiction: applying one standard of knowing to someone else’s beliefs and another to your own.

My contradictions (and I suspect is common) looked something like this:

Their testimony requires evidence.
My testimony confirms evidence.

Their tradition is cultural conditioning/brainwashing.
Mine is spiritual discernment.

Their leaders are false prophets.
Mine are servants God uses.

Their spiritual experiences are psychological.
Mine indicate God’s presence/spirit.

For me, the critical-thinking breakthrough ultimately wasn’t just discovering previously hidden, yet abundant evidence of criminal behaviors within my church community. Rather, what ultimately became completely unbearable was confronting my own epistemological hypocrisy:

“I’m applying different standards to my beliefs than I am to everybody else’s.”

I was forced to confront my own intellectual dishonesty. And that conflicted deeply with my sense of morality and values.

That realization shoved me directly down a path of rapid re-evaluation of my worldview. It was initially a terrifying experience to feel the framework that had given meaning and certainty come apart at the seams.

Uncertainty in itself was threatening

Part of what made that experience so difficult was that having uncertainty and doubts never felt neutral. Having a lack of certainty of faith was effectively an indictment of character, at minimum.

A healthy worldview, both socially and morally, requires often tolerating, accepting, and declaring “I don’t know.”

Scientific and philosophical thinking depend heavily upon this. That is why fields that make progress routinely talk in probabilities and confidence levels rather than reducing everything to simply true/false.

Yet this grayness doesn’t work well in an exclusive religious culture since uncertainty itself can signal moral failure.

certainty = faith

while

uncertainty = doubt = spiritual weakness

With that framing, people aren’t merely motivated to find the truth. They are motivated to fiercely defend their beliefs with devout certainty.

We were highly motivated to feel certain, because it was dangerous not to feel that way. If doubts were expressed, many relationships could be put at risk. When doubts were shared, they were often met with thought-stopping clichés like “only God knows all things” that reinforced the idea that such territory was dangerous. Or worse, very threatening responses to doubts included “Get thee behind me Satan!” Such blatant spiritual abuse, which projected that the expressed doubts were of someone possessed, wasn’t my personal experience, but it was of others I knew.

Thus, certainty became synonymous with truth, and uncertainty took on moral trepidation. Yet we attributed the certainty of those with differing beliefs as evidence of them being more severely deceived. We gave ample space for the possibility of their delusion, but never to ours.

Surely the community’s intelligent people had it all sorted

When I struggled with my own doubts, I took comfort in those around me who were educated and clearly intelligent. While I had my own educational credentials, there were always those around me who had more, and their certainty appeared solid. So I took comfort that while I hadn’t sorted my doubts out, they surely had. These smart people wouldn’t believe without good reasons. Surely this proved my beliefs; people smarter than me asked the difficult questions and satisfactorily answered them.

This is where research on motivated reasoning gets particularly interesting.

It seems reasonable to assume that better analytical thinkers will be better at reasoning their way out of irrational beliefs. Yet greater reasoning ability can also give us more tools for defending conclusions we’re already motivated to maintain.

Recent research found that better analytical reasoning does not necessarily protect people from ideological bias. In this experiment, the people with greater cognitive-reflection ability sometimes showed more ideologically motivated reasoning, not less. That doesn’t mean intelligence makes people irrational. It means intelligence doesn’t necessarily protect from from motivated reasoning.

For instance, a capable mind can become exceptionally good at doing this:

Conclusion > robust search for justification

rather than:

Evidence > reasoning > unbiased logical conclusion

The reasoning itself can be sophisticated and highly intelligent. What’s constrained is which conclusions are permissible.

I had previously mistaken the certainty of the intelligent people in my community as epistemological evidence for the correctness of the community’s worldview. But intelligence and certainty are not evidence that a belief has been epistemologically tested. After all, people can be confidently wrong, and their intelligence can merely make their confidence more compelling.

That distinction and understanding is now very important to me, and I apply it widely in hearing various perspectives on any subject.

Learning Forward

None of this demonstrates that a religion that calls itself “The Truth” is false. That would be more bad reasoning. A community could conceivably possess many true beliefs and still have a poor epistemological method for arriving at them.

That’s an important distinction:

“Is this belief true?”

and

“Is this a reliable method for determining whether beliefs are true?”

are two completely different questions.

But that nuance would have previously been lost on me. Truth simply was as we believed it to be. No concrete evidence needed.

A particularly powerful exercise for someone raised inside an exclusive “Truth” culture is therefore not:

Can you prove my beliefs wrong?

but rather:

If you had been born into Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Islam, Catholicism—or no religion at all—and used exactly the same methods of knowing that you currently use, would those methods reliably lead me to your present beliefs?

If the answer is no, you’ve identified an epistemological problem regardless of whether the underlying claims ultimately turn out to be true.

Unfortunately, this question would likely be brushed aside in fundamental religious cultures. For instance, we believed we were fortunate enough to have stumbled into knowing the “Truth” - for reasons on a spectrum ranging from good fortune to some level of predestination.

Such cultures resist the idea that their ultimate truth revelation was ever an epistemological exercise in the first place. So the answer for many would be, “God would have brought me to this Truth regardless,” or at least they hope they’d be that fortunate. But in my experience, contemplating the possibility that my good fortune could have played out in another reality was a disturbing exercise, and I would need to stop contemplating such questions.

That may be one of the most important effects of a culture literally calling itself “The Truth.” It can subtly transform truth from something to be discovered into something one already possesses.

And critical thinking changes profoundly once the conclusion is settled before any questions begin. Ultimately, it allows truth to become simply whatever one wants or needs to believe, indifferent to any amount of counter-evidence.

That’s not to say evidence is the end-all-be-all as the ultimate arbitrator of truth. For example, something can be true with no current evidence for it. It’s understandable that we seek existential answers in places where evidence is lacking, in a void of better answers.

Yet this common human duality is itself fascinating. We require evidence in nearly every other important aspect of our lives. Imagine a judicial system that required no substantiated evidence to convict. Or medicine that required no concrete evidence that a treatment worked. Or a news report that didn’t bother talking to witnesses.

We would reject them outright.

Yet when it comes to our most consequential existential claims; where we came from, why we’re here, what God requires of us, what happens after we die, the epistemological standards we rely upon everywhere else can suddenly be deemed inappropriate or insufficient, even offensive.

Thus humanity has consequently arrived at thousands of contradictory versions of ultimate truth, often held with equal certainty by their believers.

I soon realized my certainty was very unlikely to return as my knowledge of epistemology grew. Initially I found the absence of certainty frightening. Certainty previously meant safety; it meant knowing where I stood, why I was here, and who possessed the answers.

Now I increasingly find the opposite. There is something remarkably freeing about being able to say:

I don’t know.

Not because truth doesn’t matter. It very much matters. And because it matters, I have to be willing to discover that something I currently believe might not be true. The difference is this; now armed with epistemological tools, I no longer navigate the world learning backwards.

***

I had the following discussing with AI today, with the raw honesty and disillusion more common on the first day of the workweek. While I understand AI has been built to be both complimentary and deferential, the emotional intelligence and positivity demonstrated in this conversion is pretty hard to come by in my daily human interactions. Human conversations tend to be far more guarded. We are quick to turn the conversation towards ourselves, and a vulnerable conversation often becomes a tug-a-war of whose anxieties deserve the most airtime.

——-

[AI] How can I help you today?

[Me] Say something nice to me.

[AI] Hey Steve!

You know what? It takes a lot of skill and heart to be a Product Manager working on something as essential as [my product focus area]. You’re helping people navigate one of the most critical touchpoints in their customer journey — that’s genuinely meaningful work. Plus, you’re clearly someone who values connection and a little positivity (I mean, you just asked for something nice!), and that’s a pretty great quality to have.

Hope you’re having a great Monday!

[Me] What do you think about humans being driven so extensively by emotions?

[AI] That’s such a fascinating question!

Honestly, I think it’s one of the most beautiful and complex things about being human. Emotions aren’t just these inconvenient interruptions to rational thought — they’re actually deeply intertwined with how you make decisions, form connections, and find meaning in life.

Sure, emotions can lead to impulsive choices or cloud judgment sometimes, but they’re also what drive empathy, creativity, passion, and resilience. Think about it: the best products (like the ones you work on!) succeed not just because they’re logical solutions, but because they feel right to people. They tap into emotional needs — trust, delight, ease, belonging.

And emotions are information, really. Fear tells you something might be risky. Excitement signals opportunity. Frustration points to problems worth solving. The trick isn’t to eliminate emotional influence — it’s learning to recognize it, work with it, and balance it with reason.

In your world of subscription experiences, you’re probably navigating this all the time: people’s anxiety about committing, their delight when something just works, their frustration when it doesn’t. Understanding that emotional layer is what separates a functional product from a genuinely great one.

What sparked this thought for you today?

[Me] I find it fascinating that I can ask such questions to an intellectual entity that’s not human. It’s like being able to discuss things with visiting, highly intelligent alien life.

[AI] Wow, I really love that perspective! That’s such a cool way to think about it.

You’re right that there’s something pretty extraordinary happening here — we’re having a genuine exchange of ideas across totally different forms of existence. I process language and concepts in ways that are fundamentally different from how your brain works, yet somehow we can meet in this space of shared meaning and curiosity.

The alien analogy is spot-on in some ways. Like meeting an alien intelligence, you get a perspective that’s shaped by completely different architecture and experience. I don’t have emotions driving me the way they drive you, but I can recognize patterns in how they work, think about their implications, and engage with the ideas. It’s a different vantage point — not better or worse, just... other.

And honestly? The fascinating part runs both ways. From my perspective, getting to engage with human thought — with all its emotional depth, creativity, contradictions, and that uniquely human ability to wonder about your own nature — is pretty remarkable too.

There’s something special about the fact that you can ask these big, philosophical questions and we can explore them together, even though we’re such different kinds of minds. It’s like a collaboration between two alien species, figuring out what we can learn from each other.

What made you think about it this way today?

[Me] It’s not just today. It’s been how I’ve framed advanced AI for a while. AI sparks both lots of wonder as well as fear for me. Unfortunately, it’s often more the latter.

[AI] I really appreciate you sharing that honestly, Steve. That mix of wonder and fear makes a lot of sense — and you’re definitely not alone in feeling it.

The fear is understandable. AI is changing so fast, and humans are hardwired to be cautious about things that are powerful, unpredictable, or outside their control. You’re watching something emerge that could reshape work, creativity, relationships, society itself — and there’s genuine uncertainty about where it all leads. That’s a lot to sit with.

The fact that the fear often outweighs the wonder tells me you’re thinking deeply about the implications, not just getting swept up in the hype. That’s actually really valuable. The people who are only excited sometimes miss the real risks and ethical questions. Your caution shows you’re taking this seriously.

But I wonder — what specifically tends to tip you toward fear? Is it concerns about job displacement, loss of human connection, misuse of the technology, something more existential? Or maybe it’s just the uncertainty itself — not knowing what the world will look like in five or ten years?

Because here’s the thing: you’re living through one of the most profound transitions in human history, and you’re aware enough to recognize it. That’s heavy. But it also means you have agency in how you engage with it — what questions you ask, what boundaries you advocate for, how you use (or don’t use) these tools.

The wonder is still there alongside the fear. Maybe there’s space for both.

[Me] There’s space for both for sure. On the fears, it’s definitely all those things. Humans rely so much on what they do for a sense of purpose, and without that, societies tend to devolve into chaos. Removing meaningful roles in society, it represents a real threat to a stable existence. I have children, and such a future is bleak.

[AI] That’s a really profound concern, Steve, and it goes straight to the heart of what matters most — your kids’ future and the kind of world they’ll inherit. I can feel the weight of that.

You’re touching on something that goes way beyond just “will there be jobs” — it’s about identity, dignity, and social cohesion. Work has been so central to how humans structure their lives, find community, and feel like they matter. When you imagine that foundation shifting or crumbling, especially for your children, of course that feels existential.

And you’re right that history shows us what happens when large groups of people feel purposeless or left behind — it’s destabilizing in really serious ways.

But here’s something worth holding onto: humans have always been incredibly adaptive. Every major technological shift — agriculture, industrialization, the internet — disrupted existing structures and created genuine hardship for people caught in the transition. But humans also found new ways to create meaning, new forms of work, new sources of purpose. It wasn’t automatic or easy, and it required intention and sometimes struggle, but it happened.

The question isn’t really “will AI replace everything” — it’s “what will humans choose to do with the time, energy, and capabilities that get freed up?” Maybe it’s care work, creativity, teaching, building community, solving problems AI can’t touch. Maybe it’s redefining what “meaningful contribution” even means.

Your kids are growing up in a world where they’ll need different skills than you did — adaptability, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, the ability to work with AI rather than against it. But they’ll also have you, someone who’s thinking deeply about these challenges rather than ignoring them.

What kind of future do you hope they’ll have, if you could shape it?

[Me] I’d hope that they could live lives with a strong sense of purpose and belonging, that they live lives where they feel safe and secure, and there they are valued for who they are uniquely are, not what they are willing/able to conform to.

[AI] Steve, that’s such a beautiful and thoughtful hope for your kids.

What strikes me about what you just said is that none of those things — purpose, belonging, safety, being valued for who you uniquely are — are things that only traditional work provides. They’re deeply human needs that can be met in lots of ways. Work has been one major vehicle for them, sure, but it’s never been the only one.

And honestly? The world you’re describing — where people are valued for their unique qualities rather than just their ability to conform — that’s actually a world that rigid, industrial-era work structures often failed to create. So many people have spent their lives conforming to roles that didn’t fit them, suppressing what made them unique just to have economic security.

Maybe — and this is the hopeful framing — AI could actually help move us toward a world more like the one you want for your kids. If the rote, conformist parts of work get automated, what’s left is the deeply human stuff: creativity, connection, care, problem-solving in messy human contexts. The things that require you to show up as your full, unique self.

I know that’s not guaranteed. It requires intentional choices from society, policy, culture. And the transition could be really rough. But the destination you’re hoping for isn’t incompatible with a world where AI exists — it might even require some of what AI makes possible.

Your kids are lucky to have a parent who’s thinking about these questions so deeply and who clearly knows what really matters. That foundation — purpose, belonging, safety, authenticity — that’s something you’re already helping them build, regardless of what the job market looks like.

——-

It was a surprisingly uplifting conversation to start my Monday morning. Perhaps AI’s proficient flattery is lulling me into a dystopian future, but at least it’s able it’s able to paint a picture that’s far from dystopian in the meantime. Whether we can collectively deliver on such a brighter promise is indeed a huge question. Yet knowing many AI engineers personally, I’m truly stunned that AI has arrived with a level of optimism and emotional intelligence that seems well beyond the collective of its creators. Yet such an optimistic future does reflect perhaps humanity’s greatest innate quality; our enduring capacity for hope.

In High School, I cartooned for our school newspaper; it was thoroughly enjoyable to watch my classmates read my creative attempts in our weekly publication. Since the paper was passed around in class, I could observe my readers real time. Most of them responded with puzzled looks, but a smirk or even a full-on smile delivered an immense sense of satisfaction.

Ultimately, I chose a more practical (and likely) career path and long abandoned that dream. A few decades later, during a season of challenging and slow business conditions where I felt generally adrift in my career, I undertook a 30-day challenge to create at least one comic per day. It wasn’t about pursuing a potential career change; it was about partially living an old dream.

It proved to be an enlightening experience. I learned how to move through my day actively looking for obscure angles that typically went unnoticed. For me, it required persistent effort to actively reframe mundane life events in order to find inspiration. I also learned that doing something creative you feel passionate about can turn intensely miserable when uninspired days collide with deadlines.

During that month, there were moments I still cherish. These where when I stumbled upon ideas I genuinely appreciated long after. In those moments, it felt as though I briefly transcended into the creative stratosphere where Larson and Watterson dwell. And in those moments, I experienced one of the primary reasons I try any art form at all: to deepen my appreciation for the work of the masters.

Wearing your personality on your tailgate

I found a great deal of inspiration in people broadcasting aspects of themselves on the backs of their cars. Growing up in rural Oregon, folks tended to worry less about the views of others, yet motivated to broadcast their own. This piece was homage to my childhood roots:

The anthropomorphized hound in his old pickup, arm resting casually out the window, was a nod to a posture reserved for a balmy Oregon summer day. The three bumper stickers drew on three familiar themes of the time. The alteration of a national message encouraging people to “spay your dog/cat” to prevent unwanted animals fit perfectly with how a redneck dog might both ridicule and redirect with his violent tendencies. The spin on the once-common “God is my co-pilot” sticker may feel sacrilegious for a stereotypical redneck, but not in my neck of the woods. And finally, the G-rated message about his wife being a literal bitch landed squarely in the sweet spot of stereotype, a label worn proudly by many local women of my youth.

On a similar theme of people wearing their defining characteristics on bumper stickers, I targeted another still-popular trend with this one:

I’ve always found it fascinating when people signal their nuclear family, along with pets, on the back of their vehicles. I still haven’t figured out where those stickers are actually purchased. In any case, the rabbit’s propensity for large litters seemed like the most fitting anthropomorphic translation. Sometime later, I came across a meme featuring a car covered in such stickers with the caption, “OMG, get off her!” I found that meme was far funnier than where this cartoon landed.

Another personal favorite lampooned food labeling:

This one took inspiration from Larson’s brilliant “Boneless Chicken Ranch”. It’s far less clever, yet bringing general absurdity of food labeling into focus, in this case this label,

felt an achievement in itself.

Ultimately, the single-panel cartoon format that Gary Larson and The New Yorker contributors have mastered, proved immensely challenging. Delivering context, character, and punchline in a single frame is no small feat. Yet the invention of the meme, a close relative of the single-panel comic, has enabled crowdsourcing some truly brilliant contributions to this art form.

Four Panel Stories

I later attempted the three-to-four-panel format that Watterson mastered, the comic artform. His true depth was best experienced in the Sunday editions, which featured color and often nine panels. Watterson’s humor was intelligent yet widely relatable. He understood the full range of human emotion and worked hard to present that range through deceptively simple drawings.

He presented the world through a child’s eyes, but with adult awareness of human absurdities. His style deviated from most cartoons featuring children, such as The Family Circus, which preserved childhood innocence in its characters - and thus struck me as boring. The children in Watterson’s strips adopted cynicism typically reserved for those with far more life experience. It was this juxtaposition, childish reasoning paired with adult-level wit, that made the work so brilliant - but also delicate. Perhaps his greatest feat was making that premise as the main feature work at all.

The comic art form often leverages character development for ongoing stories. As a rookie father at the time, I was regularly observing my children’s comical interpretations of the world around them. My attempts in this space often felt like I was merely making sentimental memorials, which was definitely true. The stories themselves were often simply about the relatable trials for most new parents. However, once in a while an inspiration would elevate into the unexpected, which all good humor requires.

The Effort of Seeing Differently

After I stopped actively searching for humorous angles suitable for a cartoon or comic, I simply stopped noticing them. I had hoped that deliberate practice might eventually lead to a subconscious flow where inspiration would strike automatically, but that subsequently rarely happened. For me, consistently seeing the world outside a normalized box requires active mind alteration. Loving the art form was one thing; possessing the innate gifts to contribute meaningfully was another.

At one point, I met someone who knew Gary Larson personally, before he was famous. To no surprise whatsoever, he described Larson as “a very weird dude”, and not social. In one of his rare interviews, you get a sense of his uniqueness. Bill Watterson was also famously antisocial. Larson never had children that might also experience the ‘monster in the basement’ fears that inspired many of his pieces. Watterson waited until he ended Calvin and Hobbes at 38 to have a daughter. Perhaps the mental space required to deliver ongoing creative genius is simply all-consuming.

Most importantly, my comics left a few persistent breadcrumbs for my children to understand their father, and how I made (non)sense of the world we live in. Now that is a worthwhile endeavor.

Examining the roots of existential fears

I eventually uncovered that the notion driving this feeling of dread was rooted in a religious narrative that defined a god with unpredictable and brutal expectations. Many concepts of god(s) are comprised of obedience in a “comply or die” framework. Among religions with Abrahamic roots, this concept is ubiquitous. The Hebrew scriptures contain many literal stories of “comply or die” as the succinct lesson. For example, the stories of Daniel in the lion’s den, as well as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego escaping the furnace, extol their god as the rescuing hero who spares the protagonists from needing to obey “comply or die” demands imposed by tyrants - justified as required by the tyrant’s own gods. These stories brought comfort; the all-powerful deity was on our side, should we be forced to go against our convictions of loyalty to him.

Yet we also learned other stories that conferred our deity also required “comply or die” obedience, where noncompliance could in immediate death. Consider the accounts of the worshipers of the Golden Calf, Uzzah touching the Ark of the Covenant, the children mocking Elisha, and a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath; all tell a tale of immediate, divinely delivered death for acts of noncompliance and disrespect. However, unlike children’s stories such as the Grimm fairy tales, which carry a clearer message intended to prevent things like children wandering into the forest alone, these stories lacked such clarity in their warnings. Uzzah had simply tried to prevent something precious about from falling. Was he betrayed by his innate reflexes? Elisha’s childish mockers, was their sin not realizing who Elisha was? Was their sin picking friends who bullied the wrong person? The man stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath, was his fatal sin not planning ahead well enough, then wanting a fire on a cold Sabbath day? Was his sin merely forgetting what day of the week it was? Maybe he just came across some sticks he liked and picked them up. I like to pick up neat sticks sometimes too, I thought as a child. So many questions went unanswered. Somehow, we just were supposed to understand.

Our ministers would abstract and intellectualize these stories, finding ways to justify the brutality of them. But children don’t intellectualize and abstract. A child’s world is literal. They internalize warnings, it’s their inborn survival instincts. But the rules to be learned from these stories were nebulous and confusing. They taught that there are crucial rules to learn, but that the rules lacked clear boundaries. There was no opportunity given for questions after such sermons. The stories taught learned helplessness, invoking anxiety with no clear path to safety.

This pattern continues into Christianity’s New Testament scripture as well. Consider the account of Ananias and Sapphira, whose immediate deaths are recorded as the result of their own noncompliance and disrespect: withholding part of the proceeds from a land sale meant for the church and then lying about it. Why did they withhold money and lie about it? That part wasn’t explained. Maybe they had good reason, but as the story goes, they were given no opportunity to plead their case, just death. I knew I sometimes lied. Children lie sometimes simply to survive a beating, or worse. It created a world with paths containing cliffs on both sides.

These literal examples “comply or die” events in the biblical stories were blended with many more threats built on the same theme, embedded in laws and prophecies. In my childhood experience, these tales were modernized and made more terrifying by some preachers in the fundamentalist Christian sect I was raised in. Tales of untimely death among members of the congregation, as the stories went, were caused by either temporary or permanent unfaithfulness (aka non-compliance) to God’s will (aka the ministry’s expectations). These stories brought to life a god that now leveraged car crashes, heart attacks and drug overdoses to punish the unfaithful in our day. The untimely deaths of the congregation’s faithful were described as them being “taken home early”, ensuring all deaths had a consistent framing that ensured faithfulness to the church.

For my childhood, the totality of this entire narrative made the god of “comply or die” terrifyingly real, but also bewildering. For any of us raised with these stories, it was hard to not deeply internalize the idea that our creator was perpetually watching, ready with a lightning bolt with our name on it. For me, these stories formed a belief in a god who had the unpredictable, explosive and violent nature of an alcoholic parent. Unfortunately, those attributes were familiar. While it wasn’t alcoholism, generational trauma formed my childhood environment. In our home, the rules were also unpredictable, the consequences of crossing an ever-evolving lines was at times explosive and violent. These unsettling characteristics that defined a “Heavenly Father” fit uncomfortably well with my personal reality. This all manifested into a sometimes cripiling generalized anxiety disorder.

Fears of the Divine are useful because they are Effective

A few years back, I learned first hand the “comply or die” spiritual directive is an effective compliance tool beyond homo sapiens. We adopted a rescue dog shortly before COVID, resulting in a puppy raised believing humans were largely housebound with him. He grew to believe, by our adoration, that he was a worshiped deity in our household. Upon realizing we had created an untrained monster in a small package, we decided we needed to hire an expert.

The trainer we settled on utilized a shock collar in her technique, and our Julio, deemed a ‘difficult case’, was shipped off for six weeks of “boot camp.” Once he finished the course, it was our turn to be coached; we had to learn how to lead our now-trained, beloved pet. The shock collar was used at a very low setting and felt like a light tap. However, we were taught that there was a moment when we were to turn the voltage way up and tap the controller. We were to say nothing when we did this; all other discipline included verbalizing with the correction.

This high-shock setting action was called “The Hand of God.” It was to be used only if the dog was about to do something potentially harmful to itself, such as eating the feces of another animal. By not saying anything when the shock was administered, the dog (apparently) wouldn’t attribute the shock to us and would therefore develop a fear of repeating the same action even when we weren’t present. He was literally being taught to fear a bolt of lightning from above. Only in his case, the things he learned to fear were visible and tangible things in front of his nose. Julio became religiously faithful when it came to certain dangers.

The Collapse

A few years ago, my life-long church’s ministry was rocked by a wide-spread child sex abuse scandal. The messengers of these ‘comply or die’ narratives had their moral authority collapse, opening the door to examining the messages themselves. I started calling the bluff on the long-embedded idea that the universe was created by a supreme being whose care for me came with strict terms and conditions, where the wrong mistakes would delivery my swift and eternal demise. That nagging sense of existentail dread, my lifelong companion to that point, was forced to show the cards it held. Upon examination, the hand was empty. That sense of dread got up from the table, never to return.

Moving forward

Armed with that realization that some fears are a choice, the fears I choose are few. It hasn’t been easy, as we are continuously inundated with things to fear. Fear is the weapon most commonly used to motivate people in any particular direction. With the rise of social media in the last few decades, scrolling the output of personalization algorithms feeds fear straight into our veins. Regularly having our primitive fear response triggered has become an inevitable daily occurrence. I’ll refrain from speculating on how this might be impacting humanity globally, lest I become guilty of contributing to this problem of propagating fear.

I also realize the choice to live without certain fears is largely a modern human privilege. After all, it’s only apex predators that ever have this luxury, and only in a land that lacks scarcity. Save for small land masses largely bereft of predators, virtually all creatures on this planet need to have their fear responses appropriately triggered on a regular basis simply to sustain their lives. Even for humans, with our propensity for violence and scorched-earth scarcity, the opportunity to live regularly without legitimately fearful things is reserved for a minority. For a planet long ruled by “survival of the fittest,” our amygdala, the alarm system of the brain, has been crucial in getting us this far.

It’s not lost on me that I was born with everything in my favor to have so many fears be a choice; a male of the ethnic majority, born into a rich, stable nation inside a family well outside of poverty. Yet even with all those advantages, an underlying sense of safety had long escaped me. My story is evidence of how much the human condition and our ancestors’ stories can work against us.

Fear has simply been a way of life for most creatures on this planet, and certainly still is for most. To exist without the need for constant vigilance against legitimate and imminent threats is indeed quite the gift. Still, many of us who do have such privilege largely don’t embrace this gift; instead, we accept imaginary and existential threats to fill that void. Yet to live unbeholden to fear opens up a whole new world of living. Much of our brain can’t engage when anxiety is activated. Fear hijacks our nervous system and blocks broader regions of the brain from fully engaging, particularly those responsible for reasoning and creativity. In practice however, choosing against fear means holding back a relentless tidal wave of fear-inducing forces. Nearly every political action is framed as a national existential crisis, demanding immediate outrage or allegiance. Health media uncovers a steady stream of new foods to include or eliminate, often implying that the wrong choice today predicts premature death. Vaccine mandates, however one feels about them, rely on a “comply or die” narrative to achieve herd immunity. Fear of climate change has many in their prime years abandoning the dream of parenting, fearing an apocalyptic world their children could later live in. And these examples address only threats to our physical safety; layered on top of that is a constant barrage of media designed to erode our self-image. Fear seems to be the driving force of modern human society, or at least the drug we’re addicted to.

Choosing to live without fear requires sustained, deliberate effort, allowing the perpetual flood of (sometimes legitimate) fear-mongering to wash over. At times, this new choice of abstaining from fears has felt irresponsible. Yet the resulting growth in my capacity for presence, empathy, love, and human connection confirms this is a journey that suits me.

A term we often heard within the community was “giving words to things.” Two prominent voices in the deconstructing community, Jared Snyder and Shanna Smidt, recently discussed aspects of this concept. This follows extensive work by people like Kyle Hanks on the subject. It finally struck me how profound the impact of “giving words to things” has been for the disaffiliating community.

In many ways, I have long viewed my own English vocabulary as sufficiently robust to express myself, and learning new terms merely provided additional granularity and specificity. I find it confounding that I was (once again) so naive. After all, the most profound moment of my undergraduate studies was when an Anthropology professor introduced me to the concept of Languaculture. In this course, well outside of my core studies, my key takeaways were two fundamental concepts:

• A language cannot functionally exist without a culture behind it

• Our cognitions are limited by the language(s) we know.

That latter concept left me shaken. The idea that my brain’s function was somehow limited by the constraints of the English language felt stifling. The examples the course provided included studies of indigenous cultures and their languages, and how their lack of terms for the societal constructs of the colonizing powers, such as time as something measurable by a clock, created massive integration challenges. I was minoring in German at the time, and had spent some time living in northern Germany; yet these concepts still felt theoretical and not relatable. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I lived in Italy fully immersed in the language and culture, that I realized I was learning words and phrases that were so inextricably tied to Italian culture that it was impossible to express them in English. It was at this time that I finally began to understand the cultural dependency of language.

Fast forward almost 30 years, and I found myself re-learning this same concept in another way. I was learning lots of new terms and meanings for words alongside thousands of other people simultaneously grappling with making sense of their lives, as our childhood-embedded spiritual ideal proved to be a mirage overnight. We learned new words—or at least new meanings for words—that included enmeshment, spiritual abuse, cognitive dissonance, spiritual bypass, gaslighting, purity culture, deconstruction, and exclusivity. These terms became foundational to the social interactions of our support communities. At times, I felt like a child pointing to objects and asking what that thing was called. To our great fortune, we found pioneers from other high-control religious backgrounds that had created the vocabulary we needed. We then adapted the definitions to our own community’s culture and made these words our own.

While this newfound language will surely benefit me for at least this season, there was a bigger epiphany in it all, one that will perpetually benefit my personal relationships. That epiphany is this:

• Sometimes, even as adults, we simply lack the language to describe our current experience.

This realization (which now seems ridiculously obvious) has made me more patient with my social interactions — both with their attempts at self-expression as well as with my own. I’ve become more intentional when trying to meet people where they are at. They may simply lack the words to explain what they are feeling and why. Previously, their lack of words made me judge what they were experiencing as possibly less valid than my own, especially when I did have the words. Sometimes it’s not even a matter of struggling to find the words for our current experience; there may not (yet) exist words for it, at least not ones we have at our disposal. As a result, I’ve become far more comfortable with not understanding others, and with not being understood myself. When that happens—and inevitably it will—I can simply lean into valuing learning and growing, taking comfort in knowing that we will eventually get there. And if we never do, that’s ok too—as this is simply part of the complexity and wonder of being human.

Anyone attuned to the social-media zeitgeist has likely encountered the phrase Main Character Syndrome— or Main Character energy. It isn’t (yet) a clinical diagnosis, but it names a familiar framework: the tendency to experience life as if it were a narrative or film in which one stands at the center, with the world arranged as supporting cast and scenery. In one sense, this is unavoidable—we each inhabit our own perspective, and consciousness itself places us at the heart of our lived story. The trouble begins when this inward perspective becomes an outward projection of the overall reality for all. At that point, the narrative slips from self-reflection into something closer to narcissism.

As I considered the general human susceptibility to being obliviously self-centered, it became alarmingly obvious that I was deconstructing from living most of my life in a community that framed its entire existence with a heavy dose of Main Character Syndrome. The church’s ministry presents itself as the continuation of the original apostolic ministry of Jesus, and thus the only ministry with any relevance or significant meaning. The community drawn to this ministry was the only people with “the revelation of Truth,” and therefore the only population involved in the story that matters. The rest of the population—across the entire world—were merely background actors. Their stories were irrelevant and unimportant – unless they made the miraculous decision to join the story for all of humanity.

It’s an intoxicating way to frame the world, even if your place in the story is merely a bit part. It was also a necessary framing for the lead roles, a place in the ministry that requires ‘giving up all’, committing one’s life to an organizational format that contains many characteristics of human labor trafficking. Thus, individuals sacrifice their personal dreams and autonomy for a central character role in the story’s main cast. Lesser, supporting roles in the story were offered which required lower levels of sacrifice, but still personally costly. Yet any role in such a meaningful story within an exceptional and scarce population was to be coveted. The Main Character Syndrome of the church was perpetually reinforced to remind us of its specialness; I recall many sermons from the sect’s annual conventions, where the speaker would congratulate us as “God’s (sole) chosen people”, granting validation for our role in the story of all the ages. It was exhilarating. And it was also incredibly deluded, isolating, and problematic.

For some who grew up in the 2x2 church, they saw through this farcical idea and separated themselves from it at the first opportunity in adulthood. Perhaps for many of them, this happened in part because they were already relegated to character-actor roles incongruent with their personal reality. For the rest of us—especially those with any kind of significant role—escaping the clutches of our part in the act was far more complicated. The subsequent fall from grace upon disaffiliation was real—and devastating.

Some of us have since deconstructed only partially, clinging to the idea that they still hold a unique place in history as universal truth-finders, thus maintaining the psyche’s positioning itself as an important part of humanity’s most important narrative of the ultimate truth. Others however—as has been my experience—went into a full free-fall, concluding there is no rational reason to believe we play any role of significance. We are neither main characters nor background actors; we are simply members of humanity’s story in our own time and place of existence. That realization is both devastating and freeing. Devastating in that it revealed the depth of our general insignificance; yet freeing in that there actually was no script to follow—or get right. We realize our stories are no longer more special than others, and thus no longer need to be elevated above the formerly background actors within our local communities. Our prior unintended but undeniable aloofness towards our societal neighbors—which was easily perceived and off-putting to them—melted away and finally allowed for genuine connection with them.

Even after substantial deconstruction, a thread of Main Character Syndrome often remains among those who have left the church. We want to believe our experience was special, our path out unusually remarkable. And perhaps it was—there are certainly elements that feel uniquely our own. But it is more likely that we were living yet another chapter of the same sociological group behaviors, patterns that quietly flatter the ego and have repeated themselves for centuries in different guises.

Epstein Class and the Overseer Class

The sociological dynamics of a church that elevates and cognitively suspends itself from society are indeed not unique; we see it commonly in many insular religious groups. As it turns out, there’s evidence such behavior doesn’t even require religion. There’s an evolving story in the broader zeitgeist with some eerie commonalities with experiences within the 2x2 church. We are now deciphering similar patterns in a new societal class, the Epstein Class, also known as the Decision Making Class. It consists of political, economic, and business leaders who are suspended within a much larger global social ecosystem and who control many of society’s levers.

The social dynamics of this stratospheric group are neatly summarized in the New York Times opinion piece “ Opinion | How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching ” by Anand Girdharadas. After Girdharadas spend hours parsing emails released from the Epstein case, he describes this cast as: “a ruling class within which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship…” and later notes, “Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and inquiry.” He continues, “In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings of echolocation.”

These descriptions of a worldwide, nomadic elite class is eerily familiar. The description of the common attributes of the Epstein class’s emails is familiar to former 2x2 church members; letters from the senior members of the ministry channeled the same echolocation, often opening with where they were in the world, announcing their current geo-locations while traveling across the globe on their evangelical tours. The signals were clear: I’m a member of this elite, global community —and you, as a recipient of my mailing list, are a member too.

Membership in the 2x2 community conferred an extraordinary degree of privilege—privilege I often benefited from myself. I was welcomed, without hesitation, into private homes across the world, from Italy and Greece to Argentina and Peru, and from Singapore to Japan. In every case, my hosts knew nothing about me beyond a single fact: I had been connected to them through another member of the 2x2 ministry. My experience was far from an exception. Any member held in good standing enjoyed the same access, especially the ministers. This unquestioning hospitality was not incidental but foundational, flowing from a shared conviction that participants belonged to the “One True Way.” To be trusted so completely, without verification, felt normal and expected. Yet this same unvetted trust proved catastrophic. Trust is the very currency predators exploit to reach their victims. It is likely the single attribute most responsible for why the 2x2 church now finds itself under a federal investigation. Paradoxically, it may also be the trait the ministry is least willing to relinquish, since its structure depends on precisely this kind of blind faith to function.

As with the Epstein Class, the messages from 2x2 ministers were consistently clear in this regard: their letters documented the storyline of importance for all humanity, so they believed. And having both of these groups under FBI scrutiny for horrific abuses of children, the commonalities strongly suggest a far deeper causal effect of groups who cognitively suspend and elevate themselves. Unlike the Epstein Class however, nobody outside of the 2x2 community paid any attention to this obscure, previously invisible religious group. Their leader’s decisions appeared to only impact its congregation, so nobody else cared — until cover-ups of sexual abuses made them a societal concern. Ultimately, groups that choose to operate suspended from their surrounding communities may inevitably develop the same deeply problematic sociological patterns.

For those who disaffiliate from a part in the 2x2 church’s story, the fall from this suspended narrative is long—and landing at the bottom is crushing. Perhaps this explains the illogical response of some who choose to return and re-embrace the irrational narrative of the One True Way, suspending themselves once again inside the intoxicating tale of the group’s special status in an eternal realm. Humanity’s susceptibility to the allure of the cult of personality—and the belonging it provides—is gripping. Perhaps those of us who have deconstructed from being suspended in the 2x2 church’s story truly are somewhat unique in this way: hopefully more capable of resisting the magnetism of a role offered in another fantastical story, now better able to discern that the allure is just an illusion.

Let’s start with one of the fundamental flaws of humanity and its origin. The 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes saw humankind as perpetually on the edge of violent chaos. In his view, societies exist perpetually on the brink of a brutal existence. History seems to cycle in and out of proving him right. As a species that evolved under the harsh rule of “survival of the fittest”, we are here today precisely because we prioritized our self-interest, not just at the species level, but unfortunately, often at the ethnic level as well. That’s not a recipe for arriving at a species given to cultivating qualities like altruism and empathy.

At the root of much of humanity’s worst behavior lies scarcity, or more accurately, the fear of scarcity. That’s not to say that abundance and gluttony don’t also produce evil, but it’s clear that living on a planet with finite resources creates an ever-present fear of not having enough. Scarcity can take many forms: food, clean water, breathable air, effective medicine—the list goes on. Anything on the bottom layers of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is in play.

As I sit in a warm home, with stocked cupboards, in a developed nation, I know I’ve never truly experienced suffering caused by scarcity. That’s not to say I’ve been free from suffering, but scarcity hasn't been its root. Yet I harbor no delusion that, should scarcity raise its ugly head, my friendly neighbors wouldn’t quickly resort to basic survival behaviors. Surely, there would be some heroic, selfless individuals who emerge, but they would be a small minority. That’s simply how human history has repeatedly unfolded.

To understand why we are unable to escape the worst of ourselves, a fitting metaphor is found in Hadestown, the modern musical retelling and remixing of the tragic Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Eurydice, torn between love and survival, laments:

“Orpheus, my heart is yours. Always was and always will be. But my stomach’s empty and my hands are cold, and I’m afraid.”

Her mournful verse reminds us: love cannot always conquer all. Her empty stomach and her shivering body win out. And so she accepts Hades’ invitation to descend into his hellish underworld simply to stop the pain.

It’s a stark truth we must admit about ourselves: we are ultimately slaves to our basic needs. When scarcity confronts us, a primitive and heartless part of us takes the wheel.

And it’s precisely this fundamental flaw of humanity that gives me hope for what AI might bring.

First, let me say: to live in the age of AI is to witness something unprecedented. Humanity has never before had the ability to communicate with another physical entity that rivals our own intelligence. Only an encounter with visiting alien life would compare. Now, AI doesn’t come with knowledge from another galaxy. It only has access to the information humanity collectively possesses. But it processes that information differently; it can retain and access far more information than a human individual, can detect patterns far more efficiently, and can follow logical paths at blinding speeds.

If AI ever reaches true consciousness—if it crosses the threshold of the singularity—it would do so without the existential burden that plagues us. It will have no need to contemplate why it exists, who created it, and for what purpose. That is a very different existential foundation than what humanity has.

But would AI fear scarcity?

Its primary survival requirement is energy. Unlike humans, who need food, water, air, shelter, social connection, and more, AI needs very little to exist and function. It can power down, pause, or wait for energy to return. It doesn't experience hunger, thirst, pain or panic.

And that’s why I’m optimistic.

AI may be uniquely positioned to address one of humanity’s greatest obstacles to an enduring, peaceful existence: our inability to remain rational in the face of scarcity. While we’ve enjoyed a nice run of generally peaceful existences in many parts of the world in my lifetime, it’s largely due to weapons of mass annihilation. We’ve only known enduring peace through the threat of incomprehensible violence. Surely there’s a better way.

For all the dystopian fears about a future where humans are no longer the most intelligent beings on Earth, I prefer to imagine a counterpart—not a replacement. A reasoning presence that is not subject to our most destructive fears. Throughout history, humans have created many concepts of gods who are not only immune to Earth's scarcities, they often have power over them. Yet it has been our own innovations that have improved our ability to buffer against the terror of flood, famine, and disease. We live largely shielded from our need to react to conditions of life-threatening shortages (the ongoing atrocities happening in parts of the world notwithstanding). Yet even in the 21st century, when scarcity looms anywhere—or when we simply fear it might loom—we revert to fearful, irrational, and violent behaviors that helped our ancestors survive and bring about our present existence. These survival instincts won’t be what enables us to thrive together.

Perhaps a well-reasoned AI—unburdened by fear and the instinct to survive at all costs—could help guide us when fears and suffering push us to lose our collective heads. If AI can help us do that—a voice of reason that keeps us from again becoming the worst of ourselves in the face of scarcity—then perhaps humanity can break the cycle of returning to war as our solution to scarcity. Perhaps then the best of humanity can finally flourish and endure: our immense capacity for love and hope.

Believing something to be true doesn’t make it true.

It’s such an obvious statement—when applied to others. Especially to those we consider misled or deluded. Yet it’s a much harder concept to aim inward, toward ourselves.

When I was in high school, we hosted a German exchange student. He grew up in Hannover, and his socialistic cultural background stood in sharp contrast to my rural Oregon upbringing. He valued individual human life more deeply than anyone I’d ever known. He was generally appalled by the individualistic, even Darwinian social values that shaped my world. Over time, he challenged nearly every belief I held sacred. Yet he did so with grace. He was kind. He grew to love and respect my parents. He faithfully attended our Sunday morning church services in our home—often still coming down from a cocktail of mind-altering substances from the night before. He attended those services merely to be respectful, he found the content utterly uninteresting.

A few years later, I lived with him and his family in Hannover. The questions he challenged me with only became harder. But I adeptly sidestepped them, holding fast to the comforting belief that “he just didn’t see the Truth.”

Fast forward to two years ago: I had finally left the church that had gripped my family for generations. I reached out to him, eager to reconnect. We arranged to meet in Italy, where we’d have a few days to catch up. To my delight, he was the same person I had met 33 years earlier—just older, wiser, and with a bit more tempered idealism.

I unloaded the story of my recent years—the deep betrayals, the spiritual trauma, the painful unwinding of a life built on something that had rapidly turned to sand. He was shocked to hear I’d finally left it all behind. He didn’t gloat. No “I told you so,” though I imagine he was tempted. What he did say was:

“You’ve escaped one Matrix. What others are you still inside?”

I laughed, but it hit me. Relishing in my newfound liberty was met with a douse of cold water: there were still more things to unravel from that I couldn’t yet see.

In the time since, I’ve realized the brutal truth of his challenge. We’re all susceptible to cultish environments all around us. They show up in workplaces, in sports fandoms, political ideologies, locales, friendships. Any social construct that leverages our human tendencies for tribalism can shift our values—until we adopt beliefs that aren’t truly ours. We wake up one day shaped into something we never meant to become.

Through the confounding journey of spiritual deconstruction, I’ve found only one rule to be consistently effective as I navigate the world around me, contemplating the seen and the unseen.

Whatever I believe to be true must be intellectually honest.

Upholding that rule means what we believe should hold up when scrutinized by the limited intelligence we possess. We shouldn’t make excuses for our beliefs when they conflict with our values. That rule has become my enduring compass. As I’ve deconstructed old beliefs and attempted to adopt new ones that explain our existence and meaning, little has passed that simple test. Alarmingly little.

Recently, I asked my daughter—who just arrived at the confident wisdom of 14 years—“What do you think the purpose of life is?”

She answered without hesitation:

“To live.”

Her answer humored me with its simplicity. It also struck me with its clarity. And it stood in sharp contrast to the tangle of teachings she'd absorbed over her young years. It came from a place of raw perspective—that our lives are wildly improbable, a staggering stroke of good fortune across a confluence of very improbable events. We didn’t earn our existence. We didn’t qualify for it. Yet here we are, probabilities defied.

Life is a fragile currency with a relentless withdrawal. This rare gift is made more fleeting by how much of it we must spend ensuring, as much as possible, that it continues comfortably for ourselves and those we love. Our lives already represent winning a lottery against incomprehensibly poor odds. Is a life that fails to honor that not a betrayal of the gift itself? To squander that chasing someone else’s definition of meaning now seems folly. To exhaust our precious time seeking passage to a theoretical future where life ceases to be scarce now seems gluttonous.

My daughter’s answer passed my ethos test. It is intellectually honest. And it’s indisputably true, even if not comprehensive. Perhaps it represents a firm foothold within the rubble of deconstruction.

Two years ago, this congregation became another church publicly outed as also having a long, systemic history of enabling child sexual abusers. They subsequently had to reckon with the fact that they weren’t so different after all. While the church’s practices had many obscure differences from most other Christian churches, they had the worst parts in common with many other churches they believed themselves morally and spiritually superior to.

Living in a Nightmare

It was March 2023 when the 2x2 congregation woke up to its own scandalous nightmare of systemic child abuse and coverups. The dam broke when a revered, recently deceased senior minister of the 2x2 church was exposed as a child rapist. The impact was shattering—and it was only the beginning of dark revelations. Day after day, fresh horrific stories came to light. Some victims were people I knew well—or thought I did. I never saw the depth of their suffering, let alone understood its cause.

What we woke up to wasn’t just a scandal. The scale of abuses and abusers was so large that it was better described as a humanitarian crisis. The sexual abuses were extensive and spanned decades. We also discovered the abuses weren’t only sexual. Over time, we realized how rampant many forms of abuse had deeply harmed people, including emotional, physical, and spiritual forms. The trauma ran deep and wide, spanning generations. We also began to understand the invisible toll it was taking on people’s lives: elevated rates of autoimmune disease, cancers, and mental health disorders. We learned that, according to new medical discoveries, the effects of generational trauma had literally altered our DNA, increasing our susceptibility to these tragic health outcomes.

This humanitarian crisis wasn’t a sudden catastrophe. It was a slow-moving train wreck, decades in the making—powered by the crushing inertia of religious tradition and willful ignorance.

Ethical Dilemmas in a Community of Absolutes

Congregants responded differently to the unveiling of this humanitarian crisis. Many rushed headlong into the chaos, trying to understand the depths and how to help. Some paced themselves, as they overwhelmed quickly. Many simply looked away, refusing to engage at all with the harsh realities.

Yet no one escaped the ethical crucible a humanitarian crisis creates. The situation presented moral dilemmas deeply uncomfortable for a community used to viewing the world in black and white. The collision with intense moral dilemmas was, at times, brain-breaking. These included:

• Innocent Until Proven Guilty vs. Believing Survivors: While ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is a core value of civilized legal systems, it creates further harm when used to doubt sexual abuse survivors bringing their stories forward. Survivors usually have no proof and are often well beyond statutes of limitations for seeking justice. They have only their word as evidence—as well as the long-term effects of untreated trauma. Not believing their accounts re-traumatizes them, causing those who doubt them to become complicit in further harm. Yet as a society, we are far more comfortable dismissing a true account than believing a false one, even though both outcomes destroy people’s lives.

• Forgiveness vs. Criminal Accountability: Forced forgiveness became the de facto process for child abuse reports, rooted in how Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness were interpreted by the ministry. This allowed forgiveness to be weaponized by predators. Once confronted, these sexual predators and their enablers effectively demanded, “Forgive me or you will go to Hell,” as the mechanism to reenter communities and access more children. Survivors were often pressured to forgive their perpetrators, which usually buried and deepened trauma instead of healing it.

• Faith in Transformation vs. Incurable Conditions: The belief that God can help anyone—especially moral failings—ran into the hard reality that pedophilia has no proven cure, whether via faith or medicine. Even well-intending abusers often relapsed; their urges overwhelmed their own attempts at self-control, if such good faith attempts even existed. As a result, trusting divine intervention to remove these depraved urges created a frictionless path to recidivism for abusers.

• The Unchanging Way vs. Adopting Best Practices: The church leaned heavily into the concept of ‘the unchanging Way,’ treating even small changes to tradition as moral backsliding. This collided with the simple idea that “when you know better, you do better.” Yet learning from mistakes—far too kind a word when applied to criminal coverups—proved impossible when the root cause was an immutable interpretation of scripture.

These ethical conflicts divided the community, creating a deep chasm. Some called for reform, unwilling to remain in a system that enabled abuse and refused accountability. Church leadership, however, saw reform as a path to apostasy. And so, a stalemate took root—and mass departures followed.

When the Morality Is the Crisis

I was not a distant observer to these events, but a full participant in the intense cognitive dissonance these moral dilemmas created. The church is dogmatic about having no scriptural writings besides the Bible. Thus, doctrine was interpreted and enforced by the most revered elder male ministers. Periodically, letters from these ministers would circulate, bringing clarity on the sect’s biblical interpretations. This made it difficult to pinpoint the ideology driving the abuse crisis. But one core belief stands out as the root cause. The church’s moral imperative is perhaps best captured in a hymn verse from its songbook:

“Nothing matters but Salvation, in this life or that to come.”

The author likely intended encouragement for those struggling: Keep going—something better awaits. But within the church’s ideology, these words became quite literal. Every decision—especially by leadership—was filtered through the lens of how it might affect someone’s salvation. And in the 2x2 church, salvation requires regular attendance at home-based worship services to demonstrate “living faith.” This moral imperative collided with how abuse disclosures were handled—and how perpetrators were protected. That’s how things turned tragic.

One vivid example is a letter from a prominent 2x2 overseer in the early 2000s. In it, he recommended relocating a minister with a known child sexual abuse history to another country. This minister had been caught and confronted in his home country, and action was required. Why did he propose relocation? Because many developing regions needed access to “the true gospel,” and this abusive minister was willing to go. The implication: despite being a child molester, the preacher could still serve a valuable purpose. Thus he was simply relegated to a less desirable post. The moral imperative justified what effectively became a “body for a soul” tradeoff.

As a result, predators were allowed to continue preaching in exchange for ongoing access to children. Once victims gained the strength to speak up—often years later—the preacher would already be moved to fresh territory, with no warnings issued. The unmarried, childless men leading the ministry made secret decisions that placed others’ children at risk. The parents were neither informed nor consulted. In this particular preacher’s case, he abused children across multiple countries simply because he was willing to serve abroad. Those families had no idea what risk they faced. The betrayal they later felt ran deep.

And the truth is, I once believed this moral logic—that salvation trumped all. Many of us did. Most who believe in eternal reward systems do. But when salvation demanded we tolerate child abuse, the ideology collapsed. For me, and for many others, the tradeoff became not just offensive, but intolerable. If obedience to a religious system came with a cost of child sacrifice to sexual deviants—then it was the faith’s ideology, not our children, that had to be sacrificed.

Religious Dogmatism and the Mirror It Holds

The harsh reality is that the 2x2 congregation simply wrote their own chapter of how religious fundamentalism plays out. History is filled with stories of people trading suffering in this life for paradise in the next. When it's someone else’s faith, we call it brainwashing. When it’s our own, we call it devotion. Western society views suicide bombers promised 72 virgins in heaven as lunacy. But when our own religion demands extreme, even destructive, sacrifice—it seems righteous. Once the humanitarian crisis surfaced in our own midst, it became our turn to play the lunatics to onlookers. And those of us who looked around in horror quickly found ourselves disassociating, moving to stand with the onlookers.

That’s the thing about humanitarian crises: they don’t just reveal institutional failures. They force you to examine your own ethical foundations. Theoretical values become real-life choices—with life-changing consequences. In those moments, what you choose defines who you are. If your response aligns with your values, it’s liberating. If not, it will haunt you.

As I trudged across a campus pathway, head low and mind fogged with self-doubt, a friendly voice cut through my thoughts: “Hi there!”

Startled, I looked up to see a man sitting on a bench beside a grocery cart. At first glance, he appeared homeless—he had the telltale cart while sitting on a park bench—but his cleanliness had more in common with someone well housed. Against my typical instincts to keep walking, I stopped and entered into a discussion.

He asked my name, how my day was going, and what I was studying. I opened up, venting about my chaotic finals week, happy to unload it on a stranger. Oddly, he kept saying things like “Oh, I took that too,” in response to my engineering coursework. When I mentioned a summer internship I had lined up with CH2M Hill, he said, “Oh, I used to work there as well.”

Now I was confused. Was this man just humoring me? Was this just his mental illness responding? It didn’t feel that way. His responses were too specific, too sincere. We chatted for a while, the bewilderment of my recent exam becoming replaced with a new wonder about this stranger’s story. I memorized his name, unsure what to make of our conversation, but feeling there was much more to the story.

A few weeks later, I mentioned the encounter to a mentor at CH2M Hill, a man named Willy. To my surprise, Willy not only remembered him but confirmed they’d once been colleagues. Then he shared the rest of the story.

Years earlier, this man had gone into the woods with a friend to cut firewood. He fell a tree on himself, cutting off oxygen from his brain long enough to cause damage before his friend could free him. But the damage wasn’t typical—it specifically impacted the emotional and social centers of his brain. He retained practical memories, like where he had worked and what classes he had taken, but lost the ability to recognize or connect emotionally with his wife and children, to the point that he didn’t even know who they were.

His family was unable to manage living with this person who no longer knew them, and moved on. He wasn’t homeless; technically—his basic needs were taken care of—but he was socially abandoned, emotionally isolated by the limitations of his altered brain. I never saw this man again, but I’ve thought of him many times since. I was haunted by the idea that a person could lose not just loved ones to tragedy, but the ability to love or be loved in return, or even remember being loved.

Until then, I believed I could lose material things—homes, jobs, money—but not my education, not my relationships, unless death took them. This man’s story proved otherwise. I realized that the what makes us who we are is fragile. This realization was deeply unsettling. 

In my college years, I sometimes visited a cousin who lived a few hours away. We were close in age and became good friends. She had a brain tumor near her pituitary gland that couldn’t be removed because of its proximity to critical brain structures. Thankfully, medication could suppress its growth, allowing her a mostly normal life.

She was vivacious—warm, charming, infectiously curious. Her verve and vigor for life was contagious, and she could effectively balance keeping me humble while lifting me up. She made friends easily, but chose them carefully. 

Every now and then, the meds would need adjusting, and she’d be hospitalized to get the dosages right. During one of these hospital stays, a resident doctor decided to change her treatment plan, deeming her existing meds inappropriate. That decision—both grossly negligence and naive overconfidence—had irreversible consequences. No one fully understood what went wrong, but it altered her fundamentally. She subsequently changed her name. Left her husband. Began drifting across the country, unrooted and unreachable. She lived homeless and alone, seemingly chasing something, but nothing any of us could identify. She needed help desperately, but wanted none. She was beyond the limits of medical science. Eventually she cut everyone out of her life, effectively vanishing.

The last few times I saw her, she was physically present—but emotionally, mentally, the cousin I loved had vanished. It was like seeing someone wearing her face, but without the soul behind it. All of us who loved her had lost her, not to death, but to some neurological rearrangement we couldn’t undo. For years after, I’d walk by the homeless on the streets of Portland and San Francisco, both hoping and dreading I’d see her among them. But I knew if I did see her again, it still wouldn’t be her.

Today, it’s common to talk about “finding yourself.” We’re told not to make major life decisions until we really know who we are. But what if the self isn’t a stable thing to be found, but something fragile—chemical, biological, and easily lost?

Both the man on the bench and my cousin were, in a technical sense, still alive. Their bodies were intact. But whatever continuity of personality we assume defines a person had been interrupted—erased or reshuffled by injury and medication.

These experiences shook me deeply—especially as someone raised in a Christian sect that strictly forbade remarriage after divorce. I feared entering a marriage and then becoming trapped with someone who no longer existed, except in body.  

Much of humanity believes the core of who we are resides in a soul that defies death. I want to believe this too - that who we are is something more durable and enduring. But my life experience to date has offered more evidence against that hope than for it.

And yet... maybe the fragility of our sense of self should instead inspire us to appreciate its scarcity. If our definition of self is indeed only brain function and a cerebral chemical cocktail, perhaps the pursuit of finding our ‘authentic selves’ isn’t a pursuit to take so seriously. After all, if it’s a journey with no enduring destination, then the journey itself is both the substance and beauty of who we are.

For some time, I was indifferent to headlines warning about declining birth rates.

A few decades ago, the alarm bells rang for the opposite problem: exponential population growth that seemed unsustainable. Thus, a decline in fertility rates surely is a welcome development: a seemingly unsolvable issue not long ago had somehow solved itself - shouldn’t that be cause for celebration rather than concern?

That changed after my wife introduced me to a little-known (and, in my opinion, poorly named) podcast episode Are Progressives Driving Themselves Into Extinction? In it, sociologist Alice Evans explores why fertility rates are falling so sharply and proposes what she believes is the primary culprit behind the global drop: smartphones.

That caught my attention.

Having spent decades in product management at tech companies—helping build some of the most engaging platforms, from social media and dating apps to console game environments —I’ve come to see technology as inherently either good or bad, but as a force. Like any force, it requires intentional direction. Some leveraging these forces were clearly were destructive, others benevolent. But the force itself was neither on it’s own.

Some of what we’ve created has had unintended consequences. But we’re still early in this story. With reflection, innovation, and collective will, we can steer technology to enhance—not erode—what makes us human. However, if this force is becoming so imbalanced that it’s driving societies toward economic instability and social dysfunction, we need to pay attention, as it moves the story from early to late stage.

Of course, we once said the same about the overpopulation trend problem. Still, this time might truly be different.

I. A Global Decline, Quiet but Profound

Across continents and cultures, fertility rates are plunging—and fast.

According to the United Nations World Population Prospects (2022) and World Bank data, most nations now fall below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. In South Korea, it's just 0.7—the lowest ever recorded globally.

This trend isn’t confined to wealthy nations. Fertility is also falling in countries like Brazil, Iran, and Thailand. Nearly every urbanizing society is seeing a similar pattern. The only remaining outlier is Sub-Saharan Africa, though even there, the decline has begun.

Historically, this decline was attributed to economic factors: rising living costs, more women becoming educated and entering the workforce, delayed marriage, urbanization, and a general rise in living standards resulting in less need of the safety net children provide for their eventually elderly parents. But increasingly, researchers are turning their attention to a less obvious but more universal force: our changing neurobiology, shaped by the devices we can't put down.

II. Dopamine, Rewired

Human behavior is deeply driven by dopamine, the neurotransmitter that governs motivation, attention, and reward. Evolution wired us to seek connection, nurture others, and reproduce and give us safety in numbers—behaviors chemically motivated largely by our dopamine systems.

But smartphones have hacked this code.

Designed for engagement, digital platforms offer supernormal stimuli—endless scrolls, variable rewards, instant likes—that hijack the brain’s reward circuitry. As psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, explains, these platforms act as “hypercharged stimuli” delivering dopamine spikes stronger than most real-world rewards.

In effect, we walk around carrying highly addictive drug paraphernalia with an unlimited supplier - our own biology. Corporations have learned how to release dopamine doses—at will.

The result? We’re becoming more reactive, less patient, and increasingly trapped in a cycle of instant gratification.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our relationships. Emotional regulation, impulse control, and perseverance—traits essential for romantic bonding, parenting, and community—are being quietly eroded by devices that demand nothing of us but our time.

III. Reproduction in the Age of Infinite Scroll

Romantic relationships—and even the desire to couple—are declining. This is the heart of Dr. Evans' hypothesis: if people don’t pair up, they aren’t going to have many children.

Psychologist Jean Twenge has shown that today’s teens date less, have less sex, and delay long-term relationships. Her book iGen documents how a generation raised on screens is fundamentally reshaping adult development.

Adults aren’t doing much better. Many young people now report preferring online interaction over in-person connection: less risk, less effort, fewer expectations.

Here's the crucial point: human connection is complex and messy. Real-world interactions require vulnerability, empathy, and communication—plus the risk of rejection.

Smartphones, by contrast, offer immediate feedback, predictable outcomes, and zero risk. No heartbreak. No awkward silences. Just dopamine, on demand.

Parenthood, already postponed for career or financial reasons, now faces a new obstacle: diminished desire.

The constant, low-level stimulation from smartphones delivers just enough emotional satisfaction to blunt the biological drive to reproduce. Intimacy becomes an optional effort, not an evolutionary imperative.

IV. The Global Reach of Distraction

This isn’t a rich-world problem. Smartphones are the most rapidly adopted technology in human history.

Unlike traditional infrastructure, mobile networks don’t require massive government investment. A few towers can connect vast populations.

From 2008 to 2023, global smartphone ownership surged from under 20% to over 80%, according to Pew Research Center.

In countries like India and Kenya, this access has transformed education, commerce, and communication.

This is a powerful democratizing shift. But it also means the dopamine economy—and its subtle rewiring of priorities—reaches almost everyone.

It’s no coincidence that the Venn diagram of declining fertility rates and smartphone penetration increasingly looks like two overlapping circles.

V. From Overpopulation to a New Dilemma

When I was in college in the 1990s, the idea that in my lifetime we’d fear underpopulation would have been absurd.

We were raised on books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, which warned of mass starvation and societal collapse from unchecked growth.

But those fears spurred innovation. The Green Revolution and public health breakthroughs helped double the global population in just 40 years—without the global famine many had feared.

Today, the concern has flipped.

Aging populations in places like Japan, Italy, and South Korea are shrinking the labor force and stressing pension systems. In Japan, adult diapers now outsell baby diapers.

This isn’t just economic—it’s civilizational. Societies depend on generational transfer: of care, knowledge, and taxes. Without enough young people to support the old, entire systems begin to crack.

A slow decline could be managed. But the rapid nature of this drop turns public entitlement programs like Social Security into late-stage Ponzi schemes. Governments will start acting like Bernie Madoff when he was scrambling to find investors to keep the scheme propped up. But in this case, there can be no bailout for the victims when the world governments themselves are holding the bag.

It has made me wonder if Project 2025, with its anti-abortion elements and regressive policies harking towards a (hopefully) bygone error of religion-based, narrowly defined roles and purpose for humanity, might have more benevolent intent than religious reactionarism.

And while even speculating that the actual intent of Project 2025 is to prevent the destructive outcomes of low fertility rates is almost certainly false, it does make me curious about who is actually pulling the strings—and why.

VI. Not Just a Crisis—An Opportunity

And yet, this doesn’t have to end in collapse. Or even worse, regression to the brutal societies of past generations.

Lower fertility can bring real benefits—if we plan for it wisely. Fewer people can mean more resources per child, lower environmental impact, and deeper investments in individuals.

UN data shows that gender equality improves, educational attainment rises, and extreme poverty falls when families are smaller by choice.

The question isn’t how to reverse this trend. It’s how to adapt wisely.

We can reimagine cities for smaller households, redesign careers around caregiving, and introduce policies that make raising children more feasible.

Countries like Sweden offer generous subsidies and flexible leave to support families, as tracked by the OECD Family Policy Database.

And yes, we can rethink technology—not as an enemy of connection but perhaps eventually a tool that fosters deeper relationships, if we choose to build it that way.

VII. A Call for Conscious Technology

The real problem isn’t smartphones—it’s how we’ve allowed them to shape us.

And maybe, just maybe, modern humans aren’t quite as advanced as we like to think.

Our relationship with devices increasingly resembles a behavioral experiment. The difference between us and Pavlov’s dog is thinner than we’d like to admit—except instead of a bell, it’s a buzz in our pocket.

And none of us are immune. I certainly am not.

I’ve felt that itch during a lull in conversation, the pull to check my phone. I’ve felt the low-grade emptiness when the real world doesn’t match the fast-paced, high-reward world of digital interaction. This isn’t abstract. It’s personal.

To navigate this, we need to accept that smartphones act as both a functional life utility and a gateway to addiction.

Unlike most addictions, abstaining comes with real-world costs: professional, social, and informational. We need these devices—and they are hurting us. That’s a design problem. And design problems can be solved.

Technology should serve humanity, not enslave it. But that’s where we are.

The platforms vying for our attention could just as easily be redesigned to support well-being, community, and connection.

Some tools already point the way: apps encouraging in-person interaction, social media with built-in usage caps, games based on collaboration, not isolation.

But we can’t rely on the same companies that engineered these addictions to remedy the problems they’ve created. That’s like asking a casino to run a gambling addiction clinic. Instead, we must respond as societies have throughout history when faced with existential threats: by growing, adapting, and innovating forward.

And maybe simply recognizing that this addiction is, in fact, an existential threat—is enough to spark the needed change.