What We Gave Up
and What It Cost Us
We didn't lose it in a war, and we didn't misplace it by accident. We surrendered it in exchange for ease. That's the part no one wants carved into stone.
We gave up friction first. Friction is what slows bad ideas down. It's what forces justification, explanation, proof. It's the pause before action, the drag on momentum. Friction used to be built into systems—paperwork, deliberation, debate, process. We stripped it out because it was inefficient. Because it annoyed us. Because it asked too much. Once friction was gone, everything moved faster—including the wrong things.
We gave up patience. We stopped waiting for understanding and started rewarding immediacy. Whoever spoke first mattered more than whoever was right. Whoever shouted loudest mattered more than whoever knew. Speed replaced judgment. Reaction replaced thought. We taught ourselves to confuse urgency with importance.
We gave up trust, then pretended trust was naïve. We built systems assuming bad faith and then acted surprised when bad faith flourished. We replaced trust with monitoring, monitoring with metrics, metrics with algorithms. We stopped believing people could be accountable and started treating them as variables.
