On Inevitability

The Two Fridas (1939)

1.

A former combat helicopter pilot sits across from me, describing her pitch to venture capitalists. She has raised millions. She speaks of inevitability. What she sells is the conviction that her company’s success cannot be otherwise, that the market will conform to her vision as surely as gravity pulls objects earthward. This is what capital wants to hear: the future as foregone conclusion, risk as illusion, growth as natural law.

I recognize her tenacity. A former varsity soccer captain, like me. The kind of woman who understands that authority comes not from volume but from the refusal to equivocate. We share a vocabulary of command, of making decisions under pressure, of not wasting time on ambiguity when clarity will serve. She was deployed in wars. I’ve been deployed in market disruption.

But I have been helping to care for a body recovering from a double mastectomy. Not my own, but a body I have known all its life and helped care for since it was born. I gently wet, lather, rinse her body, touching her in places that are usually hidden from plain sight. When the job of washing away the day-old ointment is complete, I towel-dry her hair, neck, shoulders, and body. She dries the wounded parts just as she washed them. Before dressing, we carefully remove her drainage bulbs, measure the fluids, and log them in her ledger. Then I milk the connecting tubes to remove the clots. The next and most critical step is applying the antibiotic ointment before dressing her sutures. Each step of friction is intentional, deliberate, and tactile. There is nothing frictionless in preventing my sister from sepsis. I cannot stop thinking about the inevitability of our bodies.

2.

The paradox: a venture thesis of inevitability requires the inevitability of failure. Not only the founder’s failure, but also the systematic inability of existing arrangements. The failure of a system that supports a market. Market disruption occurs when a service is inefficient and ripe for replacement. This is often true. But the business model depends on brokenness as a renewable resource. A permanently solved problem generates no recurring revenue. Durable solutions don’t scale.

What venture capital calls growth, I increasingly understand as controlled demolition followed by temporary occupation. You don’t build to last. You build to flip, to exit, to extract value before the next disruption makes your solution obsolete. The incentive structure optimizes not for making things work but for making things grow, which often means making things worse in new and profitable ways.

My sister’s surgical drain bulbs must be emptied three to four times daily. The fluid is measured and recorded. The color in the early stages of healing is dark, tinged with blood from fresh wounds. As the wounds heal, the color of the fluids lightens. Her medication needs to be recorded and timed. Healing does not scale. It cannot be optimized. Healthcare is still broken because we’ve overfitted for profitability. Her body reknits itself on a timeline that refuses acceleration. The body is willful; it does not keep score. It keeps time.

3.

There is a mode of power I have come to think of as disembodied management. It operates entirely in abstraction. Metrics, projections, and quarterly reports. It makes decisions about human lives while maintaining perfect distance from human consequences. Call it what it is: chosen ignorance, strategic incomprehension.

I think of drone warfare. The pilot sits in Nevada, watching screens, delivering violence to bodies thousands of miles away. The technology creates what military theorists call “moral distance.” It’s the space between action and consequence that makes killing psychologically bearable. Bearability and rightness are different things. The pilot goes home for dinner. The wedding party does not. The pilot never heard a child’s screams for her mother, whose body was shredded by an RX9 Hellfire Missile. Bombing and killing are comfortable in a Herman Miller gaming chair.

Corporate management has achieved something similar. You can optimize a workforce from altitude. Cut costs, automate processes, increase efficiency. You never look anyone in the eye. The spreadsheet tells you everything you believe you need to know. The dashboard shows green. You never watch someone pack their desk or explain to their child why they’re changing schools. You never see the child later alone in their bedroom putting the noose around their neck with the other side tied to the ceiling fan.

This distance is deliberate. To see clearly would be to know too much. To be woke is to understand broken. Better to manage through proxy, through layers of abstraction that protect you from the weight of your own decisions.

But there is something else happening here, something more insidious than simple avoidance. These are people who want to look the part without doing the work of becoming it. They have learned the performance of leadership. The vocabulary, the posture, the confidence, without developing the substance. They mistake the costume for the capacity. These are the henchmen.

Look the part to live it has metastasized into a permanent state of fake it until you make it, with no intention of arriving anywhere real. But who really ever makes it? You can’t. What you’re faking is a way of being present that requires actually being present. The self-delusion hardens into identity. You become what you’re faking, which is to say: you become a veneer, a surface with no depth. Should it be a wonder why body dysmorphia, imposter syndrome, and various forms of anxiety combined affect more than 80% of the population today? There is only the inevitability of your body collapsing from its own adrenal fatigue.

I have been told I am intimidating by people who experience directness as aggression. These people see clarity as a threat. What they mean is: you are not performing the emotional labor of making me comfortable with my own inadequacy. You speak declaratively; therefore, here is what I see, here is what it means, and this unsettles people who have built careers on ambiguity, on never quite saying anything definite enough to be held accountable for. They blame me for their anxiety.

Robin DiAngelo calls it white fragility. The expectation that I will soften my intelligence, cushion my competence, and preemptively apologize for taking up space. That I will manage their comfort instead of stating what I know. When I refuse, when I give clear instructions under pressure, when I command rather than accommodate, it registers as intimidation because they have mistaken deference for collaboration, have confused their comfort with productive discourse. I call it something else.

The people who find me intimidating are often the same ones practicing disembodied management. They want the authority without the accountability. They want to look like leaders without doing the difficult work of actually seeing, of getting their hands dirty, of bearing the weight of their decisions. And when confronted with someone who does that work, who refuses to perform the theater of management, their fragility becomes visible. The gap between what they’re pretending to be and what they actually are becomes undeniable.

So they call it intimidating. It is easier than admitting they are playing dress-up in a domain that requires substance.

4.

My sister cannot lift her arm above her shoulder. Getting dressed requires assistance. Showering is an ordeal of planning and accommodation. Taking care of a disabled body that is not your own is humbling. Taking care of a disabled body that is not your own, but shares 50% of your DNA, and with whom you’ve had tear-down, drag-out arguments—that is healing. It’s the type of therapy that mends wounds. It’s the type of togetherness that is everlasting. She told me I would be squeamish when I saw the fluids. She warned me that it would turn my stomach. When she opened her gown the first night home from the hospital, she was in tears. She was handicapped. All I saw was that she needed me, and it is a privilege to care for a body that needs it.

We have had to build friction into every routine, deliberately, as necessity demands. The cancer is out, and we pray she does not need chemo as we keep sepsis away. We need to keep the pain down so she can rest. We need to make sure she’s not overdosing or underdosing on the meds. There is nothing you can automate. Her skin is the haptic feedback that my skin needs for instruction.

And I find myself thinking: we should be doing this everywhere. Deliberately. Adding friction back into processes we have spent decades optimizing for frictionlessness. There is no free lunch. You cannot buy now and pay later. Presence cannot be outsourced, optimized, or purchased on credit. There is only the work of being present.

I have been characterized as taking the path less traveled. As a child, instead of taking the direct route home, I took a different path every day. Sometimes I got lost. Once, alone in an Indonesian jungle, I came across a man holding a machete. I ended up on his back while he carried me safely across leech-infested waters. There are things you stumble upon that would scare you on paper, but when confronted, they’re momentarily horrifying. If you live to tell the story, those things are more satisfying.

The efficient route would have avoided him entirely. I would have missed the lesson: that the person who looks dangerous might be the one who helps you find your way. That trust is built through dependence, not independence. That getting lost teaches you things about attention and presence that the optimized path systematically eliminates. Recovery will be satisfying.

This has nothing to do with romanticism about difficulty. It is recognition that certain forms of resistance are necessary for consciousness itself. Our brains form new neural pathways through challenge, frustration, and the productive struggle of navigating complexity. When we remove all difficulty, we atrophy. We default to pattern-matching, to heuristics, to the fast, shallow thinking that makes us predictable and controllable.

Consider the design of contemporary digital life: one-click purchasing, buy now, pay later, infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmic recommendations. Every friction point has been identified and eliminated. We glide through interfaces designed to minimize the moment of choice, the pause of consideration. This is called user experience optimization. What it optimizes is our capacity for thoughtless consumption.

The lizard brain, what neuroscientists call the basal ganglia, the ancient structures that govern habit and reflex, craves ease of use. Quick rewards, explicit threats, simple patterns. No ambiguity, no delay, no need for the metabolically expensive work of conscious deliberation.

But our prefrontal cortex, the part of us that can plan, imagine alternatives, reason through complexity, and exercise empathy, these capacities require exercise. They require the friction of difficulty. They require us to slow down and sit with uncertainty instead of reflexively reaching for the easy answer. The trajectory of unregulated technology is not neutral evolution. It is deliberate devolution.

There’s a Chinese proverb: if you don’t listen to the elderly, you are bound to make mistakes.

The current administration understands this. Hyperscale tech companies understand this. They are banking on our exhaustion, our desire not to have to think so hard, and making complexity invisible so you don’t have to listen, let alone ask. They are mechanically isolating us through interfaces and virtual haptics that redact your skin. Authoritarianism always offers this bargain: surrender your agency, and I will give you simplicity. Stop asking hard questions, and I will give you enemies you can understand. They depend on people who have lost their senses.

5.

I watched my sister’s nurses work. The good ones bring something that cannot be automated: attention. They notice the small signs, a wince, a hesitation, a change in the quality of someone’s voice. They adjust. They ask questions that aren’t on the chart. They bring their full presence to bear.

This is true of all care work: teaching, therapy, organizing, parenting. These practices cannot be rushed because the humans at their center cannot be optimized. Bodies heal on their own schedule. Trust develops at its own pace. Understanding unfolds through unscripted conversation.

What we automate, we lose. Not just the task itself but our capacity to do it, to notice what it requires, to develop the judgment that comes only through practice. Every process we hand over to an algorithm or platform is a skill we no longer maintain, a form of attention we no longer practice.

I am not arguing against technology. I am arguing against the religion of efficiency, the conviction that everything can and should be optimized, that friction is waste rather than signal.

Some things should be difficult. Some connections should require effort. Some processes should force us to slow down and think.

6.

When my friend pitches inevitability to investors, she is not lying. Given current structures, given how capital flows, given the rules of the game, her success may well be inevitable. Inevitability and necessity are different things. The game itself is not inevitable. The rules can be rewritten.

What if we pitched something else? What if we built companies around durability instead of disruption? Around care instead of scale? Around solving problems so well that they stay solved instead of engineering perpetual dependency?

The mathematics would not work for venture capital. The returns would not satisfy the growth requirements of institutional investors seeking ten-times returns. But the mathematics might work for everyone else—for workers with stable employment, for communities not in constant disruption, for a future where progress means having more time and capacity for the slow, difficult, essential work of caring for each other.

The real inevitability, the one nobody wants to pitch, is this: systems built on extraction inevitably collapse. The universe is not just, but the contradictions become unsustainable. You cannot maintain social stability when most people have nothing left to lose. You cannot retreat to your compound and call it winning. The bunker is not a life. It is a very expensive coffin.

We are all connected. We all need care. We all depend on the labor and attention of others. No amount of optimization, no quantity of accumulated wealth, no technological sophistication will let us escape our basic condition of mutual dependence.

The question is whether we accept this before or after we have exhausted every alternative, burned through every other option, and optimized ourselves into a corner from which there is no exit strategy.

7.

My sister’s incisions are healing. The body, given time and care, tends toward wholeness. This is a fact, not a metaphor. But wholeness requires patience. It requires attending to small signs. It requires the kind of presence that cannot be delegated, automated, or managed by proxy.

I choose friction over frictionlessness. Presence over proxy. Care over scale. It is not easy, profitable, or inevitable. It is choosing to be human in a system designed to make us something less than requires us to refuse reduction to consumers, to units of productivity, to variables in someone else’s optimization function.

The work of resistance is maintaining complexity in the face of enforced simplification. Of preserving difficulty when everything is designed for ease. Of insisting on care in an economy that treats it as inefficiency.

This is a choice, not inevitability. The choice to build neural pathways through challenge rather than letting them atrophy through convenience. The choice to look directly at consequences rather than managing through a comfortable distance. The choice to believe that how we do things matters as much as what we accomplish.

My friend will succeed. Her pitch is strong, her execution is capable, and her understanding of what capital wants is perfect. I wish her well. And I also wish we lived in a world where her particular form of excellence was directed toward different ends, toward building things that last, toward solving problems that stay solved, toward creating conditions where more people could thrive rather than where a few could exit.

Until that world exists, I will sit with my sister while her body heals, emptying surgical drains and bearing witness to the slow work of care. This, too, is a pitch. Not for inevitability but for necessity. Not for what must be but for what should be.

The lizard brain wants easy answers. The fully human brain knows that the best things require us to stay awake, to bear the friction, to resist thoughtless ease.

Resist the comfortable numbness of unaccountable subsidies. Refuse deployment in disembodied management. Restore what has been optimized away.

This is the work. Not pitching inevitability but accepting it: the inevitability of bodies that need care, that cannot be optimized, that require our full presence. My sister’s incision will heal on its own timeline. This is not inefficiency. This is what it means to be human.