Practicing Wisdom — Issue #11
1. What I Learned This Week
Theme: The Cost Is Never Eliminated — Only Reassigned
This week’s reading circled around the following: systems that promise frictionless progress are almost always hiding where the friction goes. Risk, pain, effort, and responsibility are never destroyed — they are merely deferred, disguised, or pushed onto someone else.
That idea surfaced first in markets. In Is It a Bubble?, Howard Marks doesn’t try to answer the headline question so much as decompose it. Bubbles, he argues, aren’t about valuation errors — they’re about psychology. What makes AI feel different isn’t the technology, but the scale of conviction combined with the absence of clarity. Capital is flooding in not because future cash flows are known, but because not participating feels existential. History suggests this is exactly when infrastructure gets overbuilt and returns get socialized unevenly.
That misalignment becomes starker in Eric Cinnamond’s The Ones Writing It Off. Once, a write-off was an admission of error. Now it’s an operating model. Adjusted earnings allow companies to turn repeated mistakes into “one-time” events, indefinitely. Risk doesn’t disappear — it accumulates quietly, usually on the balance sheet, while investors cheer narratives instead of cash flows. The market hasn’t become irrational; it’s become permissive.
Crypto offers a purer version of this dynamic. Patrick McKenzie’s Perpetual Futures, Explained reads less like a critique and more like an anatomy lesson. Perps are brilliant financial machinery: maximum leverage, minimum capital, constant motion. They don’t pretend to serve the real economy. They optimize for velocity, speculation, and the survivability of the casino. What struck me is not that this exists, but how similar its incentives feel to far more “respectable” markets — just without the moral camouflage.
The same pattern shows up in startups. In Will There Ever Be a Worse Time to Start a Startup?, Benn Stancil raises a destabilizing idea: when tools improve exponentially, waiting becomes rational. Why build today if tomorrow’s model will rebuild it better, faster, cheaper? But deferral has a cost. Progress that cheapens execution also cheapens commitment. Eventually, the only advantage left is the willingness to choose to bear the consequences.
Even culture isn’t immune. Scott Galloway’s The Cult of Therapy argues that we’ve turned a tool into a doctrine. Therapy can help individuals, but when it becomes the default response to structural insecurity, loneliness, and lack of purpose, it quietly absolves systems of responsibility. Pain gets individualized. Solutions get privatized. The bill — emotional and economic — still comes due.
Across markets, technology, finance, and culture, the through-line is consistent: we are living in an era obsessed with removing cost, friction, and discomfort. But systems that eliminate visible pain tend to accumulate invisible fragility. Eventually, that fragility asserts itself — not as a surprise, but as a reminder.
The lesson this week wasn’t to reject progress, leverage, or innovation. It was to remember that anything worth building still demands someone pay the price — in capital, in effort, in accountability. The only real question is who.
Sources Referenced
Is It a Bubble? — Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital (link)
The Ones Writing It Off — Eric Cinnamond, Palm Valley Capital (link)
Perpetual Futures, Explained — Patrick McKenzie, Bits About Money (link)
Will There Ever Be a Worse Time to Start a Startup? — Benn Stancil (link)
The Cult of Therapy — Scott Galloway, No Mercy / No Malice (link)
2. Key Distillations
Risk eliminated in one place usually resurfaces somewhere more dangerous.
“One-time” adjustments repeated annually aren’t adjustments.
Leverage is most seductive when it’s disguised as inevitability.
Faster tools penalize indecision and optionality.
Systems rot not from failure, but from unowned responsibility.
3. One Contrarian Viewpoint
What if friction is the feature that keeps systems honest?
Modern systems prize scalability, automation, and smoothness. But friction — delays, costs, embarrassment, failure — is often what enforces discipline. When you remove friction entirely, you don’t get efficiency; you get excess. Emotional friction keeps relationships accountable. Financial friction keeps capital selective. Creative friction forces conviction.
A world optimized to feel painless may actually be one that accumulates the most hidden risk.
4. One Investable Idea
Truth-aligned businesses are becoming scarce assets.
As markets normalize adjusted metrics, deferred losses, and narrative-driven earnings, companies that insist on boring transparency stand out. Not because they grow the fastest, but because they compound trust. In an environment where stories are cheap and accountability is optional, credibility becomes a moat.
Look for businesses that resist perpetual adjustment, disclose real costs, and treat trust as infrastructure — not marketing.
5. From the Archives: A Recall Highlight
“The most dangerous systems are the ones where no one feels responsible for the outcome.”
