The Great Gap
Before you invest your attention, time, energy into anything, you've got to ask: will this last?
Not - will it make me a buck? Not - will people look at me? But first and foremost - will this last? Will it compound into the future? Will it still matter once the novelty wears off?
Most things fail because they don't align with how we actually live. Durable systems don't win by being exciting or sexy. Durable systems win by becoming invisible, trusted, and hard to replace.
Anything that lasts tends to anchor itself to some tiny but critical real behavior. Not theatrics. Anchored to what people actually do without expectation or consideration of anybody else. Anchored to selfish action. Behavior for its own sake. And then that durable thing reduces friction again and again until it's seamless and you forget about it. Like Visa and Mastercard.
Visa and Mastercard didn't try to change how we behave. They slid themselves into one subtle action we all do: buy things from people we don't personally know. When you pay at a terminal, that system asks two questions: (1) is this payment real? (2) are funds available? If Yes and Yes, then "trust" between strangers is "solved". The bank pays the merchant, you walk away with a product/service and you pay your bank later. That's all Visa/Mastercard do: solve trust between two strangers. Their 2-part question, solved by a chip glued into plastic, makes trust portable so you can buy anything anywhere with enough money from anyone. That system has lasted for decades because it's stupid simple.
Social networks are durable for a similar reason. Instagram didn't survive because the content is good. Most of it is a dumpster fire. It survived because your identity accumulates there: your handle, your photos, your relationships, years of attention harden into "history." Leaving feels like you're losing part of yourself. Twitter isn't still alive because there's actually smart things being said on it - most of it is unoriginal and makes you dumber. But it too still exists because we all want to be heard. Fack - why am I writing this?
Payment and identity systems run modern life. The first our trust, the latter our ego.
Payment networks capture action without meaning. A grocery run and a massage session look identical on a bank statement. Money is moved and that's all that matters. The system doesn't acknowledge repetition nor relationship. It just calls it "trust" because the bank says you have enough money or credit to afford that thing. The merchant you're buying from doesn't actually know anything about you.
Social networks capture identity without action. You can scroll forever without showing up anywhere, without paying anyone, without committing to anything real. They record attention, not participation, so time on screen scales while your real presence dies. many online personalities are empty inside.
This is the Great Gap: one network for trust, the other for identity, nothing to bridge the two.
A massage therapist's work only exists when someone actually lies on the table. A jiu-jitsu gym only exists if people return week after week. A farmers market only exists if locals physically walk there. A church only exists if people gather together. Presence is not counted. Only the payment. Or only a social post after. Payment and identity exist in silos.
Consider Sunday morning mass: people attend, they donate, they bring family and friends. Trust and community compound silently over years. But there's no proof of presence. No quantifiable gravity. The only durable artifact is money collected in the basket at the end of mass. Often without knowing from whom. Everything about church exists in memory. That or it's an advertisement for some event in the future. But nothing that is time = present.
Meanwhile, seemingly great technologies scrub life of its human touch. You Uber from the airport. You Zoom into work. Amazon delivers to your door. The phone eats it all: wallet, map, camera, workplace, church. You carry the abstraction in your pocket. And slowly, without noticing, the abstraction becomes your primary experience.
Abstraction is a mental disease, and it kills from the inside out: heads down, shoulders collapsed, eyes locked into glass. Even the most intimate moments feel filtered: people don't watch their child take their first steps with their own eyes but instead record it from their phone in front of them and watch it through a screen, making sure the screen sees it first.
We tell ourselves this is "connection." It isn't. It's missing the most important part. The very lack of self-awareness. Presence.
Social systems reward attention without presence. Payment systems record money without relationships. Between them, the most important human interaction is amiss: actually showing up for each other.
This is why people are more connected than ever and starving for connection simultaneously. Why people buy more things than ever yet nothing lasts. We feel vaguely unwell without knowing why, like there's some impending doom. The systems we live inside reward watching, buying, not durable living.
If we ever bridge the Great Gap, for good, then the solution needs to start with presence. It needs to create status and identity out of it... or will this very measurement diminish its intrinsic value? If mind and body are one, then are attention and action? It seems like mind and body are so disconnected for so many... and therefore so are attention and action... the great bridge can't be another layer of abstraction... there's already too much icing on the cake--I don't even want to eat it now...