What if we just slowed down?
As someone who builds things for a living, I'm here to tell you that technology isn't the silver bullet that's going to solve all of our problems.
What if, before building or subscribing to the next app, we sat with the question of why it's hard to sell a service, or be healthy, or feel anything other than helpless while watching decisions get made by people who clearly aren't listening?
We tend to think about the tactical version of that question. We should be thinking about the strategy. Tactics answer "how". Strategy answers "why anyone would care." And the strategic question is about trust, and reputation, and how relationships actually form between people who need things and people who provide them. That's a slow question, and a tough one to answer. And it doesn't have a dashboard.
What if we got serious about the fundamentals instead?
In business: do people know you exist, do they believe you can help them, and is it easy to say yes to you? In health: are you sleeping, are you moving, is there something in your life that's making both of those things feel impossible? In life: are you connected to actual people around you, or just to representations of people on a screen?
None of this is new, or exciting. It just...is. And there's no app to solve it.
I think we're in a moment of genuine dislocation, a place where the pace of what's possible has gotten so far ahead of the pace of what's meaningful that a lot of people are building very fast and feeling very stuck at the same time. That's disorienting. But it isn't permanent.
The way through it, I think, is old and unsexy and genuinely hard: pay attention to what's actually in front of you. Not the next tool, not the next announcement, not the frantic scroll of what everyone else is shipping. The actual person you're trying to help. The actual problem they have. The actual, unglamorous work of understanding it well enough to do something real about it.
We'll probably be okay. But only if we choose, occasionally and deliberately, to slow down enough to notice what okay would actually look like.