Uni-context

Derek Thompson had a fascinating conversation with a University of Chicago Professor on “Uni-context.” Here’s a summary:

“One of my favorite conversations on Plain English in the last few months was my talk with the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard about her grand theory of the uni-context. For the purposes of the following paragraphs, I would define the uni-context as the ethical and value-based consequences of telecommunications technology making everybody feel as though they live in the same universal room together. Callard predicts that the uni-context nudges people to focus on negativity over positivity and identity over character, because in both cases, the former is more context-independent. (That is, I am a white guy in every context, but I am only jealous or patient in certain contexts, so my identity as a man is more context-independent than my character.)

I was particularly struck my Callard’s observations about comparison and envy. She asks us to imagine two schools in separate school districts. One day, the districts are redrawn, and the schools are in put in the same district. Suddenly, they are in competition. Parents now compare the schools as if they exist in one evaluative field. Over time, the schools might become more similar, or they might specialize to become more different. Either way, they change as they become part of the same evaluative field.

It is such a simple story. And I think it’s a stunning metaphor for life online. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, we see people just like us. They are happier or sadder, richer or poorer, funnier or crazier. They are small faces on a screen, just as we are. Life online seems to place us in the same evaluative field as thousands of strangers who are often more successful than us along some dimension, which makes it impossible to avoid comparing ourselves to them, or feeling a bit jealous of their success, or feeling quite righteous when we learn of their downfall. Jealousy and schadenfreude are more ancient than broadband technology. But there really is something about living in a universal room with everybody that makes it harder to live without that infamous thief of joy known as comparison.

More of life feels like a competition, because the uni-context encourages strangers to imagine themselves in competition, even if they will never meet.”

I haven’t stopped thinking about this since I read it.

A friend recently pointed out something curious. The big technologies of the eighties, nineties, and two-thousands, the personal computer, the internet, the mobile phone, all arrived on a wave of excitement. AI has arrived on a wave of anxiety. People worry it will take their jobs. The people building it worry about its impact, and about their own jobs too. There’s a lot of anxiety to go around.

I suspect uni-context is part of why. When everyone shares one room, the comparisons sharpen. You can see it in how people talk about the job market in technology. It is easy to walk away with the feeling that, unless you’re working at four or five “AI-native” companies, you’re left wondering what you’re even doing, and whether anything else is worth doing at all.

That’s uni-context at play, flattening a wide world of good paths into one narrow scoreboard.

Maybe it’s fitting that anxiety is the emotion of this era. We hold technology so wondrous that not long ago we’d have sworn it was magic, and still, inside the universal room, the loudest feeling is the worry that we won’t measure up.

Spiky or broad

I was talking recently with someone who spends time in the orbit of a hyper-successful, hyper-wealthy person. They described the schedule: back-to-back conferences and events, meeting the who’s who of the business world, closing deals, getting things done. A fantastic operator. The kind of person others in their orbit describe as walking on water.

It got me wondering what a life like that is actually like to live.

Nobody optimizes a single dimension. We’re all balancing some mix of health, career, wealth, family, friendships, community. What separates people is how they weight them.

Hyper-wealthy people usually get there by putting enormous weight on one component. They’re spiky. The ability to pour yourself into one domain and let the rest slide is exactly what makes you formidable in it.

The other option is to be broad. You spread your energy across work, family, health, and relationships, and you can end up with good results across many of them. Good, but probably a champion in none.

Both are fine. The trouble starts when you pick one strategy and then quietly grade yourself on the other’s scoreboard. You choose the broad life, then measure yourself against someone spiky and wonder why you feel behind.

Every path has its trade-offs. Maybe the most useful thing we can do is choose your strategy on purpose, and make peace with the trade-offs that come with it.

Wisdom

I heard a definition of wisdom from Naval Ravikant that’s stayed with me. Wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions.

It’s a beautiful, analytical way to put it, and I think it captures a real part of what wisdom is.

But there’s a second part. Seeing a trade-off clearly is one skill. Knowing which side of it you’d actually pick is another. The first is analytical. The second asks for a great deal of self-knowledge, and a fair amount of acceptance.

So maybe wisdom is two things held together. Understanding the long-term consequences of your actions, and knowing which of those consequences you could live with without resentment, and still be at peace.

Grumpy Grumperson

There’s a type of person you meet when you’re on holiday. I call them Grumpy Grumperson.

They live in or near the places tourists flock to — famous landmarks, national parks, pretty little towns — and somewhere along the way, they decided they’ll expect visitors to know what the locals know. So they throw their hands up when a car ahead slows to figure out a turn. They honk when they sense someone is tentative. They shake their heads when someone stands in the wrong part of the sidewalk, breaking a rule that’s obvious to them and invisible to everyone else.

But of course newcomers are still figuring things out. Of course they’ll make mistakes. That’s what being new means. All it takes is a little understanding to meet them there.

All of this inspired a note to myself: don’t be a Grumpy Grumperson. Wherever we live, there are newbies finding their feet.

A little grace goes a long way.

Always reaching, already enough

I came across this line recently and thought it was profound. “Always reaching, already enough.”

It speaks to the power of holding two opposite ideas at once. When you’re secure enough in yourself, you can keep reaching, knowing it might not work out… and that’s okay.

It encapsulates so much of the way I seek to approach life. It went straight into my daily commitments note.

Default alive

A friend running a company was telling me about a run of hard decisions he’d had to make recently to get to a major milestone – hitting cash flow positive. Or, as he put it with a grin, going from “default dead” to “default alive.”

It’s one of those lessons that’s easy to lose track of. Amid the noise of valuations and fundraising, it’s easy to forget that the whole point is to build a profitable business.

Right now there’s a huge gulf between the AI haves and the have-nots. The haves seem exempt from any of this. Profitability, cash flow, none of it appears to matter.

And for now, that’s true. While the party is on, it makes sense to dance.

But the party will end. All parties end eventually.

Which is why I keep coming back to a simple line: people come for the magic, but they stay for the math.

The magic matters enormously. It’s what gets people to the door. And a rare few can hold off the math for a very long time.

But the safe bet is that you’re not one of them. For the rest of us, the math is what keeps the lights on. Better to start making it work as early as we can.

Locations and drill bits

A few years ago, when we were house hunting, a friend gave me a piece of advice I still use. Better to buy a house that needs work in a good location than a perfect house in a bad one. You can renovate a house. But you can’t move it. The location is the one thing you’re stuck with, so it had better be the part worth keeping.

The more I sat with it, the more places it turned up.

Hiring is the obvious one. Better to work with a sprinter who has bad technique than someone with good technique and average potential. Technique you can coach. Raw speed you can’t. It’s hiring for slope, not just intercept.

Then there’s choosing which company to join. Think of it like drilling for oil. Better to be at place that’s struck oil but is drilling with a terrible bit than somewhere with a beautiful bit and no oil under it. You can always swap the bit.

The funny part is that all three analogies – the house, the sprinter, the drill bit – came from the same friend.

Maybe that’s the real lesson. The best ideas are simple and widely applicable. And the role of good stories and analogies is to help us remember them in different contexts.

Banff National Park

#OurWorldIsAwesome – Edition 25 | Context on this series – we live in a beautiful world and National Parks are akin to the crown jewels of this planet. These landscapes remind us of the fine balance and complexity woven into the fabric of the world around us. Every time I spend a while inside one of these places, I’m reminded of how precious that balance is, and how much it matters that we try to understand the complexity and our own small role within it.

I think that’s what awe really is. We reach for the word “awesome” in the moments something helps us see our own insignificance — and windows into nature do that for me every time. So this is my small way of sharing it, and passing it along.

Banff was Canada’s first national park, and one of the very first anywhere — the second oldest surviving park in North America, after Yellowstone.

Interestingly, Banff wasn’t established with a grand vision of protecting the wilderness. It started with an argument. In 1883, railway workers found hot springs in the Bow Valley, and the fight over who owned them — and who had the right to profit from them — got messy enough that the government stepped in and set the land aside. Conservation won, almost by accident.

On most lists of the most beautiful places on earth, Banff lands in the top five, and you can see why the moment you see one of the glacial lakes. This is the Peyto Lake.

That impossible blue isn’t a trick of the camera — it comes from rock flour, fine rock ground up by the glaciers and left suspended in the water, scattering the light back as turquoise.

Lake Louise looks similarly splendid (while remaining a frigid 4 degrees Celsius even in the summer) after a hike that involves traversing through snow in the summer.

Then you pair those lakes with peaks you can climb. At Moraine Lake, the Valley of the Ten Peaks rises straight out of the water.

I also loved the many wildlife crossings that have been built in Banff that you can see on the drive. I learnt that there are over 40 overpasses and underpasses built across the Trans-Canada Highway, now so grown over with grass and trees that they look like natural hills.

We didn’t see much wildlife near them as there were far more people than animals at Banff. But the crossings themselves were remarkable because animal-car collisions here have fallen more than 80% since the crossings went in.

Banff National Park earns its place as one of the most beautiful places on this planet. I hope to go back.