I have not written here in a few weeks. I was in Lake Tahoe, resting. I say that plainly because I have spent most of my life unable to say it at all. The lake did what lakes do. It slowed me down enough that a few things I had been circling for a year finally landed.
Here is the first one.
We are all dug in
I work in government technology. It has been a hostile season. Contracts were cut on spreadsheets. Public servants were dismissed by email. Vendors who had spent years earning trust inside an agency learned that the trust counted for nothing. I am not here to argue about whether any of it was deserved. Some of it was. What interests me is what everyone learned from it, because the lesson was the same on every side.
Collaboration is not protection.
Once that lesson lands, people dig in. Public servants stop taking risks with contractors. Contractors stop investing in relationships they cannot hold. Everyone builds what they can defend. In my corner of the industry, I have watched the open standards efforts that once seemed inevitable quietly go dark, while vendors race to fence off programs with closed systems. I understand the impulse. I have felt it in myself. A fence is faster than a lantern, and when the ground feels unsafe, fast wins.
But step back far enough and something becomes visible. The trench is not a strategy. It is a response. It is a product of fear.
And it is not confined to my industry. Look anywhere. Politics, media, neighborhoods, families. The same retreat, the same fortifications, the same certainty that the people on the other side of the wall are the reason for the wall. We have been at this long enough now that most of what we are living inside was built from within a trench, by people who were afraid, for reasons that made sense at the time.
Assuming sanity returns
I want to make an assumption out loud, because everything after it depends on it.
Sanity will return.
I do not mean that as optimism. I mean it the way spiral dynamics means it: that systems move through stages, that regression is part of the pattern, and that a season of fear is not the end of the story but a contraction before the next expansion. I have written before that some devolution is necessary for evolution. I still believe it. The trench is a stage, not a new permanent reality. Smart people will bear this in mind.
Because, if that is true, then the interesting questions are not about how to win the trench war. They are about what comes after.
What will need to be torn down? We have built a great deal from inside our fear. Procurement rules that assume bad faith. Software that assumes the customer will leave and makes leaving expensive. Management systems that assume people will slack and measure them accordingly. Organizations that call themselves families and then substitute for the real one. Whole industries whose business model is the fence. Not all of it is wrong. But all of it was built under conditions that will not hold, and some of it will have to come down before anything healthier can go up.
What will need healing? This is the harder question, because a trench doesn’t just change what you build. It changes who you become while building it. The public servant who learned that loyalty is a liability. The engineer who learned that openness gets you copied and closedness gets you paid. The neighbor who learned that the other side cannot be talked to. These are wounds, and wounds take time to heal.
I do not have the full answer. But I think the work of the next season, whenever it arrives, will be less about building new things than about un-learning what the trenches taught us. And I think the people who will be useful in that season are the ones who kept a lantern lit through this one.
The book
The second thing that landed at the lake was a manuscript. I finished it there.
Room to Be Human is about time poverty. Not a shortage of hours, but a shortage of hours that are yours and, most importantly, what it costs us individually and collectively with regard to what we become. What we become has lost out to how we survive. And it’s time to fight for growth again.
This book grew out of a decade in Norway, where protected time is a structural requirement rather than a perk, and out of the year after I took a job with an American firm, without leaving Norway, and ended up in an emergency room certain I was having a heart attack. If ten years of unlearning could be undone by a change of employer, the problem was never my discipline. It was the system, and we can rebuild systems only once we leave the old trenches. This book calls you to leave your trench of survival again.
The book also makes a claim I did not expect to make when I started. The deepest cost of time poverty is not exhaustion. It is transcendence. Dr Lisa Miller’s research suggests the capacity to become more than our output is measurable and universal, and that it is the flip side of depression and anxiety. A life with no unclaimed hours starves that capacity. I think this is why the current season feels the way it does: anxious, brittle, unable to wake up. We are not only tired. We can’t rise, or simply look up.
My father studied for thirty years for a ministry calling in the hours a job left him. He was permitted to answer it only after his working life was over. That is the emotional center of the book. It argues that the pace is built, that the beliefs holding it up were installed, and that both can be taken apart. And we need to have this conversation now, because automation takes away the moment.
The book is on pace for launch early next year. I am excited to debut it at SXSW in March. I am proud of it in a way I was not sure I would be. I think it’s the best of what I have to offer, and I pray you will pick it up and feel something real.
Next season, I am going to turn this blog toward the book’s lessons. Time poverty, the transcendence it costs, what Norway does differently and which of it travels, and what happens to the enormous quantity of human hours that artificial intelligence is about to hand back. Somebody is deciding where those hours go right now; we need to leave our trenches and demand a voice.
And I want to offer mine from outside the trench, or at least with the lantern lit.
Thank you for waiting.
