I don’t think it’s death.

Death sucks, and the drive for life is good. But inability to make peace with the utter inevitability of death can lead a person to things worse than death.

I’ve written on this theme before (here most recently) as it’s cropped up in my life with increased frequency. Panic and denial over death can lead humans to do ugly, shameful things. The goal of a human life ought not to be death denial (though pursuits of life extension are awesome) but dignity from start to finish, including a dignified death.

Dignified death has more to do with the frame of mind of the dying than physical circumstances. There’s a reason the peaceful martyr moves us (and sometimes causes a massive social movement). Seeing someone approach death without fear, but with courage, resolve, peace, and dignity reflects the highest human spirit and inspires those of us still living.

The fight for life is noble. Until it’s not. We’ve seen enough epochs of history and fictional portrayals to know the depths of depravity humans can reach when they fall into a zero-sum trap and maniacally compete with their fellow humans for any last gasp of life. We’ve seen what a fever of fear can do to a mob beyond reason.

Each of us has an individual duty to live well. And living well includes dying well. We can’t control the external circumstances of our deaths, but we can control our mentality and example as we face it.

The Overton Window is a simple framework for understanding what is politically possible at any given moment and how the range of options can shift through time.

I used to work at the think tank where the concept originated, from the late Joseph Overton who was the VP there just before I started. I found it useful and valuable, and built much of my understanding of social change and the direction of my life and career around it. (Here’s a talk I gave explaining this process.) It had amazing explanatory power.

Now, it’s broken.

I don’t mean the window has shifted. I mean the entire framework of a continuum of political possibility from total freedom to total tyranny that shifts, shrinks, or expands is broken. It doesn’t explain the current world or where it might go.

I had no idea this was even possible, but it seems to me to be the case. Anything and nothing are politically possible at the same time. There is no boundary, no framework, no popular principles to shift. There is case by case chaos, openness to everything and nothing.

It happened fast. Within a few weeks, legible political paradigms disappeared.

It is possible the window has just shifted in the extreme, allowing for total tyranny. Or expanded to include a broad range that ends in total tyranny. But it feels less legible than that. It feels like there is no window at all. I suspect that in this chaos, anything is within the realm of possibility.

A good way to judge what’s in the window is to ask, “Could a political figure talk about this idea without losing election”. It doesn’t have to be a passable policy, just one that you’re allowed to talk about. For example, for most of my life, any politician who even talked about the idea of slavery as something worth considering would lose election. Or someone who talked about ending all public schools would lose election. The window didn’t extend that far towards tyranny in the first instance, or freedom in the second.

But right now, it feels like almost anyone could mention almost any idea and I’m not sure it would be too far from whatever is now normal to eliminate them from political discourse. I wouldn’t be surprised to see calls to make the income tax 100%. Or calls to eliminate it altogether. There are already states that have moved to totalitarianism, with 24/7 house arrest and tanks in the streets. Maybe some will cease government operations altogether.

I have no idea. No framework. No clear picture of a window or its shifting or direction.

The Overton Window of a few weeks ago seems to have exploded. There’s no legible direction. I have no idea what comes next.

Many digital platforms have become active in removing articles, posts, links, and accounts that they think are offensive and incorrect.

This is a good thing. It is the solution to censorship, it is not censorship.

Censorship involves force. Shut up about this or you will be stopped with threat of physical violence. It is an evil committed by a state backed with police.

Free association, free exchange, and free speech are different. If I invite you to my house I can ask you to leave if you don’t abide my house rules. If I own a product or service I can choose to sell to whom I wish, and stop selling to any customer at any time for any reason. If I do not have this right, then property rights don’t exist in practice, and with no property rights there are no individual rights, and therefore no rights at all and we are all slaves to the diktats of bureaucrats and/or the mob.

Companies who offer free access to platforms they own and maintain are free to remove anyone at any time for any reason. No matter how dumb the reason may be – how ignorant, fear based, dangerous, or cowardly – I will never do anything but support their right to do it.

Personally, I can’t think of a single case of de-platforming that I liked. Personally, I prefer platforms with a wide range of crazy, insane, offensive, and controversial takes. Personally, I think it’s almost always cowardly and promotes dangerously conformist discourse. I get bummed when people get banned. But I would never turn that bummerness into cries to prohibit the practice.

The fact that platform owners are free to associate or dis-associate, and the fact that users are free to support or protest these moves, and the fact that new platforms are free to emerge anytime with any rules they want, means we have a peaceful, dynamic, evolving process of creating competing niches, mainstreams, counter-mainstreams, and on and on. And they change all the time! Most “mainstream” platforms started as niches. They grew around a niche, outgrew it and became safer and more boring, until the cool edgy users fled looking for a new one. This is happening constantly and it’s beautiful.

Instead of trying to replace it with rigid government rules and force, we should be trying to replace rigid government rules and force with voluntary de and re-platforming.

I should be able to de-platform any politician or policy I want. I should be free to join and leave whatever associations I want, pay or not pay whatever fees or taxes I choose for the services I choose, and peacefully abide only by what I’ve voluntarily agreed to.

The beauty, flexibility, freedom, growth, dynamism, humaneness, and civility that emerges from such choice is many times better than fighting over who gets to wield the baton of absolute power at any time and finagling so that they use it to beat our enemies.

To favor freedom

Only when convenient

Is tyrannical

When you watch The Hunger Games, or Braveheart, or think about the American Revolutionaries, it’s easy to see yourself as one of them. Rebellion against a tyrannical power looks inspiring and enticing.

These portrayals are all about the people – of which you are one – against the big nasty government tyrant. You see the price paid by the rebels – physical threat, torture, death – and you see the inspiration they create and the crowd of people behind them. It looks doable.

The problem with these portrayals is they aren’t very realistic. They make it look too easy. A common scene is a crowd of frightened, oppressed people, all of whom hate the tyrants equally but stand still only for fear of physical retribution, until a brave soul defies them. Even if no one says it, the rebel knows they all stand with her in spirit.

In the real world tyranny looks different and rebels rarely get praised.

The thing most often preventing resistance to tyranny isn’t the guns of the tyrants, it’s the people’s love of tyranny. Rebels rarely inspire in real-time. Instead, their oppressed fellows hate them. They call them names. They accuse them of being selfish, ignorant, crazy, dangerous. They heap more shame and derision on the person who stands against the tyranny that oppresses them all than they do on the tyrants.

To defy tyranny does not make one popular among the oppressed, because the oppressed are part of the tyranny.

Our idea of sacrifice for a good cause doesn’t go deep enough. It’s not that you must have the courage to die for what you believe in. It’s that you must have the courage to have your reputation murdered. You have to be willing to not only face physical threats from the state, but to be seen as evil by the majority of people. You will not only suffer for a cause, you will be utterly misunderstood and vilified by the very people you represent. They will view your cause as stupid and your suffering as just.

Why don’t people stand up to tyranny more often? There’s so many more oppressed than tyrants, and the oppressed have so much more power. Except that most of them view resistance to evil as evil.

If you stand for freedom don’t expect to be saluted and thanked by your fellow man. Don’t expect to start a movement. It rarely happens. You’re more likely to lose your reputation at the hands of the masses than your life at the hands of the tyrants.

As I’ve written elsewhere, death is not the ultimate sacrifice.

The latest edition of the Inner Game of Startups Newsletter.

Available to all subscribers here.

Humans used to mostly live in villages. Clusters of families where the adults did work and the kids roamed and observed and played and learned work by being around it.

With specialization, mass scale production, and technological advances the arrangement changed. People lived in neighborhoods or cities that were often much larger, adults commuted to cities during the day vastly larger still, and kids were shipped off to huge age-segregated clusters, before smaller immediate families came back together for dinner in the evening.

The benefits of technological progress are astounding and I wouldn’t trade them. The benefits greatly outweighed the costs, which is why just about everyone who had the chance chose it. But shifting living arrangements were (often) one item on the cost side of the ledger. It was sometimes necessary, not necessarily optimal.

With increasing automation, software, robotics, and information access, the equation is changing again. Humans don’t need to cluster together en masse for economic production. That means one of the costs we had to pay to get the benefits of economic progress has been removed. Now there is choice. You can do the commute to cities and office buildings while kids commute to age segregated schools thing if you want. But you don’t have to.

This is a pretty new choice. And so far, only a handful of early adopters see an seize it. People can now live where they want with who they want with kids and adults alike doing their work and play near the home. Most people still do not realize this is an option. They are wedded to the status quo by inertia, not necessity.

Recent voluntary and forced quarantines are waking some people up to this possibility. More people than realized can work from anywhere. People also realize how they might want to change their living arrangements if they were to continue this more flexible, work and learn from home arrangement. For example, you might want to choose your neighbors more deliberately if you’re spending more time in a village-like setting. If you and your kids social life and work life and learning will be more local, spontaneous, and collaborative, you might change the kind of natural environment you’re in. Climate, house type, access to outdoors, etc.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a slow steady uptick in deliberate village-like communities. Clusters of families with some shared interest, ideology, religion, or profession who have adults who can work from anywhere on flexible hours and kids roaming around learning through mixed-age play and imitation.

It’s possible the reason few people do this now is that few prefer it. It’s also possible the reason few do it now is because they’ve been conditioned for several generations into the assumption that it’s not on the table. More short-term experiments in this type of arrangement could inspire more to do it.

Sometimes you’ve just gotta do hard stuff.

Just look it right in the eye and plow through it.

Sometimes the only way forward is to continue digging ditches and piling inches of dirt.

Sometimes time and repeated effort is the only remedy.

There’s no telling how long until things start moving on their own momentum. But there’s no option but to keep making momentum bit by bit for as long as it takes.

Sometimes there’s no escape from the pain.

Sometimes you gotta swallow the medicine.

The only thing worse is denial and delay.

That’s what I’ve been working through both in business and my life in general. And I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. I can’t go back in time, but I can keep moving forward through time until time compounds effort into outcome, persistence into clarity, work into results.

No silver bullets or magic pills. As Morgan Freeman might narrate, just time and pressure.

A talk I gave in the fall on one of my favorite topics.

I’ve never noticed as great a disconnect between Twitter and the real world as I do now.

I’m not sure if the divergence has grown over time, or if I’m just more plugged in to Twitter than I used to be so I notice it more. But the real world and the Twitter world are now two entirely different places. So different that they hold mutually exclusive descriptions and assumptions about the state of the world at any given time.

I joked yesterday that my neighbors are much more sane right now than Twitter people, and wondered if any of them are also Twitter people when I’m not looking.

So great is the disconnect between every social surface in real life and Twitter that I can’t help but wonder who the Twitter people are when they’re not on Twitter. Do they morph back into the normal people I experience out in the world? Or am I just experiencing two completely different sets of people, and they’d be the same online or off? Am I a different person on Twitter than in real life? I hope not.

My Twitter feed is fairly broad and generous. I follow quite a few people (over 1,500), I’ve never muted or blocked anyone, and I’ve only ever unfollowed maybe half a dozen or so. I like having a snapshot of a pretty broad set of people. The bulk of the feed are people either interested in startups, education, careers, personal freedom, entrepreneurship, cryptocurrency, the NBA, human liberty, or parodies of the same. There are other random accounts, but most would be strongly identified with one of those buckets.

Until about the last 6-12 months, I’d say on average my Twitter feed was pretty consistently more reasonable, logical, commonsensical, and intelligent than the real world people I interact with. On average, it’s a more technical, autodidact, curious, and dynamic group than most of the flesh and blood people in my neighborhood, at the grocery store, etc. So the Twitter people tended to have what I thought was a more reasonable take on most things.

That has completely flipped.

My normie neighbors are now quite reasonable compared to the more intellectual Twitter people in my feed. By a long shot. Something weird has happened on Twitter. It used to be that there were very unreasonable corners of Twitter, but the bulk of my feed was people poking fun at them for this. Now I’m hard pressed to find any reasonable quarters of Twitter at all. And anyone poking fun is in danger of some serious social censure. It’s disconcerting.

Twitter people seem like the most frightened, panicky, unreasonable brewd imaginable, capable of tolerating or advocating almost anything, no matter how inhumane and dark, if it allays their pet fears. And it seems to be re-enforced by the very intelligence that once made them more reasonable than the common folk.

Maybe when times are good, intelligent people are better. Maybe when times are bad, intelligent people are worse.

I don’t know, but for the first time in my life, I am somewhat troubled about most of the people I enjoy reading and following. They seem to me to be becoming the monsters they decry, while my neighbors, who mostly remain blissfully unaware of monster potential at all, aren’t becoming any worse.

Maybe it’s a return from two weeks unplugged that makes it more stark. Either way, my relationship to Twitter has changed. It’s not nearly as fun and full of open curiosity and play as it was. I still like it. I’m still using it (at least for now), but I have a more hardened, distanced experience than I did.

No work. No email. No Slack. No social media. No blogging. No Voxer. No internet of any kind. I had a few text messages, and watched a few things on Netflix (The Evolution of Hip-Hop is a wonderful series!), but otherwise nothing but rest, walks, a crazy diet and daily routine, and books – physical books, not even kindle.

It was a pretty cool experience. I’ve never done anything like that before.

But since I was doing a crazy bodily reset at the same time that involved mostly fasting, very hot baths, and some limited and not very tasty or filling food, I didn’t think as much about deep spiritual truths as I had hoped. I did think a lot about hamburgers and beer and coffee and donuts.

I’ll share a little more detail about my two week experience later. But it feels good to get the daily blog revved back up.

You won’t see my daily blog posts for the next two weeks. I’m trying something a little crazy for health reasons. Look for me to be back around the Ides of March.

Good time to go check the archives! ;-)

Yeah, I might be losing my mind.

Or preventing myself from losing my mind.

Either way, I’m doing something a little crazy that I know is right but still feels weird.

Read about it in the latest issue (subscribers only).

I don’t know how many times I’ve written about the stupidity of politics. Plenty.

I’ve given countless talks, podcast interviews, and most of my first three books were about how soul-sucking, distracting, useless, degrading, and pointless political involvement is. The combination of Public Choice theory, which explains how politics works and why it doesn’t, and understanding social change, plus lived experience of working in politics, policy, education, and finally entrepreneurship have made it abundantly clear to me that politics is at best a ridiculous spectator sport. At worst a terrible addiction that makes you an asshole and a moron all at once.

I’m a political atheist. I don’t acknowledge its power, because in my day to day life, I experience my own. It only matters when you believe it does. And I don’t.

Politics turns friends into enemies. It breeds fear. It creates mental blocks and blinders to reality. It indulges the most socially destructive vice, envy. It deceives us into downplaying our own agency and becoming victims. It makes us feel pressured to pretend to know and care about everything.

Doing nothing. Having no opinion. Not following the news. These are steps towards personal emancipation.

Building a life you want. Cultivating mindsets that add to your sense of life. Going about your business as if you own your outcomes. These are steps toward a creative and fulfilling life.

These acts of productive omission and commission are indifferent to politics. Best case it’s a distraction to the good life. Worst case it’s destruction of the good life.

To all my brothers and sisters mired in the struggle, try walking away. See if your life doesn’t improve.