Hey guys, it's Non here.
Coffee in hand. Have you ever asked someone at work why something is done a particular way, and watched them go completely blank? Not defensive — blank. They do not know.
Nobody knows. It has just always been like that. And everyone keeps doing it anyway, every single day, at real cost. What exactly is holding that in place?
You are standing in a checkout line, the only one open, and the machine is asking you to swipe your card. You do it, you hear the beep, the machine tells you to sign here. You sign. You take your bag of groceries and walk out.
You don't think about the transaction. It just happens. You do not think, "I am exercising my fundamental right to exchange currency for goods." What exactly is holding that in place? Now imagine a different line.
You are in an open-plan office, and your manager walks by your desk. She points to a report on your screen. "This looks a bit light," she says. "Can you add a bit more analysis here?
Maybe a SWOT analysis? And a Gantt chart? And some KPIs, just to be safe?" You look at your screen. You look at the report.
It is three pages long. It answers the question it was asked. It is finished. But the manager says it needs more.
She says it needs those specific things, even though they were never asked for. She is not asking you to do better work. She is asking you to do something that looks like work. You sit there and you start typing.
You start generating the words. You are not thinking about the job. You are not thinking about the quality of the ideas. You are thinking about the manager.
You are thinking about the next meeting. You are thinking about what she will say if you don't do it. You are shrinking yourself to fit into the space she has cleared. This is the most expensive shrug in any organisation.
It is the silence you give to a demand you cannot argue against, but you also know is useless. You shrug, and you do the thing anyway. You pay for it with your time, and you pay for it with the loss of your own ability to judge what is good and what is unnecessary. In the next few beats, we are going to look at what happens when a demand has no owner and no reason.
We are going to look at the cost of doing the thing just to make the noise stop.
You might be right at this point. It feels like work to figure out what is real and what is just background noise. But this is where the price tag comes in. You are paying for permission to exist.
The most expensive thing in an organisation is not the software or the office space. It is the habit of nodding along to things that don't make sense because a boss said them. I believe thoughts are like these objects. There are thoughts and ideas that the privileges and elites are trying to make us believe that unless we know them we don't belong to the society.
Most of these thoughts are obfuscating, hyper-complex, deeply abstract, and far from being useful. Jean-Paul Sartre sat in a café in Paris and watched a waiter who was doing his job too perfectly, and it bothered him for the rest of his life. He worried that the waiter was acting like a character in a play, pretending to be a waiter instead of just being one. He called this bad faith, which sounds fancy, but it just means lying to yourself about who you are so you can feel comfortable.
When you agree to a rule because you think it is the "right way" without asking why, you are doing the same thing. You are adopting a role you didn't choose just to be accepted. Fair enough. But why do we do it?
It is easier than asking questions. So, the first challenge is to identify which thoughts are helpful to be sceptic about, and which thoughts are not. This is not just about philosophy class. This is about the expensive shrug.
You see a task on your desk that has no owner and no reason. You do it anyway. You say, "Okay, I will just do it." That is not work; that is a reflex. It is a habit wearing a claim's clothes.
A real claim has a reason. "I am doing this because it connects to the goal." A habit shrug has no reason. It is just breathing. To sum up, I think we shall take everything that we believe we truly need both seriously and with intensity because by doing so we are directly exercising our innate ability to respect, comprehend, and process practical lessons learned through the experience and wisdom of other people.
But we have to be careful. Just because we stop nodding doesn't mean we start digging for treasure. We should allow our ability to dig deeper beyond the surface of things to help us see through the superficial facade that others have put up to protect themselves from having to reveal the undesirable inauthenticity to the world -- but this doesn't have to be done on purpose, as the purpose of life should simply be to appreciate the existence of things around us as they are without an absolute goal of trying to change it. You are allowed to look at a problem and simply see it.
You do not need to solve it. You do not need to change it. You just need to understand what it is costing you to pretend it is something else. That is enough.
Fair enough. You might be right. Perhaps the world is not just a pile of cheap tricks, and sometimes the elites are actually trying to give us a gift. Maybe some of those complicated ideas, like the rule of law or the idea of rights, are not just noise meant to confuse us.
Maybe we should pay attention to them because they help us live better, not just because they sound smart. I get that. I don’t want to be the guy who thinks everything is a scam, either. But here is the thing.
If you have a heavy box to carry, and your neighbour is already walking it past your house, you don’t need to drop your own box and walk the same path just to see if it is heavy. You just watch them. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. You do not need to fall flat on your face to know what pain looks like.
That is the point. We are not talking about math or science, where you have to run the experiment yourself to know if the math is right. We are talking about ideas—ideas of individuals who have tried to discover the most elementary form of our being. My take here is: why stumble and fall on your own when you can learn from other people's experience?
True. Not everyone will have the same experience of a certain thing. I don’t consider thinking about these thoughts a helpful exercise, and therefore worth exercising my scepticism to get to the bottom of it. That said, as many colleagues of mine have pointed out lately, there is always a glimpse of both existentialism and romanticism in just about everything I have said and written about lately.
Existentialism is the idea that we are free to choose our lives, and romanticism is the idea that we should cherish the beauty of the world just as it is. I am trying to do both. I am saying we should be free enough to choose our own path, and romantic enough to enjoy the walk.
You are talking about a requirement that nobody checked, a rule that exists only because it was written down last Tuesday. You might be right. It feels like a burden, doesn't it? A document on a shelf gathering dust while you try to fix a broken machine.
But that document is not the machine. It is the habit wearing a claim's clothes. I once watched a manager hold a meeting about a new logo. The team sat in a room for four hours, arguing about the shade of blue.
They spent weeks on it. The blue did not matter to the customers. The blue mattered only because the manager was afraid to admit he had no reason for the logo to exist. He was using the complexity to hide the fact that he was shrugging.
Just to be clear, we are not talking about mathematics or geometry, which are fields based on specific laws governing the world. We are talking about ideas of individuals who tried to discover the most elementary form of our being. True. But why invent a problem that someone else already solved?
The reason why we tend to think that we need much more than we do need is simply because someone else in the position of power tells us so. If you see a standard that no one can explain, and no one can break, you are looking at a habit wearing a claim's clothes. This may sound as though I am contradicting myself here as I just wrote earlier that I only want to be sceptical about things that are useful and appropriate to me. This is exactly the point.
Why can't we make the enjoyment of things around us something of practical purposes that also make life worth living and exploring? However, we shouldn't just take it at face value, we shall allow our ability to dig deeper beyond the surface of things to help us see through the superficial facade that others have put up to protect themselves from having to reveal the undesirable inauthenticity to the world -- but this doesn't have to be done on purpose, as the purpose of life should simply be to appreciate the existence of things around us as they are without an absolute goal of trying to change it. Ask the owner of the requirement why they wrote it down. If they cannot answer, you are not wasting time.
You are just observing a shrug.
But wait. If we stop asking why, where does the noise stop? A requirement arrives with an owner and a reason, or it arrives as inherited noise. That is the question: which is the cheapest work available?
A claim that cannot survive being asked why is not a claim, it is a habit wearing a claim's clothes. I think we shall take everything that we believe we truly need both seriously and with intensity because by doing so we are directly exercising our innate ability to respect, comprehend, and process practical lessons learned through the experience and wisdom of other people.