The world around you wasn’t always this way.
The streets weren’t always laid out like this. The buildings weren’t always in these locations. The industries, institutions, and systems that frame your life weren’t inevitable.
They were built by people. Fallible, limited people making decisions in specific moments of history, responding to circumstances that may have been unique to a moment in time.
John Collison, co-founder of Stripe, put it perfectly:
“As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren’t just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.”
What we take for granted as fixed features of reality—from institutions to infrastructure—are actually the lingering echoes of human decisions, often made for reasons that no longer exist.
I’ve written before about Indonesian food being a psyop and why most cars are boring, but you could take anything as an example.
Look at the layout of the roads you drive on. In many places, they follow paths carved by horse-drawn carts or ancient trade routes. The specific width of streets in your city might be determined by regulations written in the 1800s. Traffic patterns that frustrate you daily weren’t designed by urban planners—they emerged from decades of incremental decisions, each one seeming reasonable at the time.
Or consider the 40-hour work week. It wasn’t handed down from on high. It was fought for by labour movements in the early 20th century, replacing the 60-70 hour weeks that were common during the Industrial Revolution. The specific number—eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of recreation—was a slogan before it became law. And now many knowledge workers treat it as if it were a natural constant, like the speed of light.
The very concept of childhood as we know it was largely invented in the 19th century. Before that, children were treated essentially as small adults. The systems of education, child labour laws, and developmental psychology that we now consider fundamental are all relatively recent inventions.
Even something as basic as how we eat has been shaped by arbitrary decisions. The three-meal-a-day structure isn’t biological—it’s a cultural convention that solidified during the Industrial Revolution when factory schedules required predictable breaks. In medieval England, people typically ate only two meals a day.
The point isn’t that these things are bad. Many of them serve us well. The point is that they were choices, not inevitabilities.
And because they were choices, different choices are possible.
The question of alternatives
The real power in recognizing the constructed nature of our world isn’t just intellectual. It’s practical.
When you understand that a system was designed, you realize it can be redesigned. When you see that a norm was established, you understand it can be re-established differently.
This is threatening to some people. There’s a psychological comfort in believing that the way things are is the way they must be. It’s a form of learned helplessness on a societal scale.
But it’s also incredibly empowering.
Consider how many major shifts seemed impossible until they happened. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the internet, the civil rights movement—each of these transformed systems that seemed permanent.The natural state of things is for systems to proceed as they are, unless shifted by some outsized exogenic force or by incredibly willful humans who find cracks in which to grow their orchards.
Most people live their entire lives within these inherited structures without questioning them, not because they’re ideal, but because they’re familiar.
The change-maker’s paradox
Our systems have their own gravity. They pull in additional structures, habits, and expectations until they become virtually immovable.
There can be wisdom in not reinventing the wheel with each generation. But when conditions change dramatically, stability can become a prison, holding us back from new ideas and a more functional society.
So when should we change things, and when should we leave them be?
The very stability that makes systems resistant to destructive chaos also makes them resistant to constructive improvement. The forces that keep bad ideas in place are often the same forces that maintain good ones.
This means that changing anything meaningful requires tremendous energy—not because the change itself is difficult, but because you’re fighting against the accumulated weight of everything that’s been built on top of the original decision.
It’s like trying to move the foundation of a house while people are still living in it.
The people who do manage to change things tend to share certain characteristics. They see the constructed nature of reality. They have the audacity to imagine alternatives. And they possess the tenacity to push against enormous resistance.
Not all change is good change. But the inability to change is always eventually catastrophic.
What this means for you
You don’t have to be a revolutionary to benefit from this perspective.
Simply recognizing that the constraints you live within were designed by other people—people no smarter or more capable than you—can fundamentally shift how you approach your own life.
The career path you’re on? Someone designed it. The expectations you’re trying to meet? Someone set them. The rules you follow? Someone wrote them.
That doesn’t mean you should break all the rules. Many of them exist for good reasons. But it does mean you should examine which rules serve you and which ones you simply follow because they exist.
I’ll tell you another week in detail about how predictive text software was invented to save the Chinese language from being made obsolete by the QWERTY keyboard.
The world is a museum of passion projects – but it’s a living museum where new exhibits are always possible.
The most dangerous idea isn’t that things should change. It’s that things couldn’t possibly be any other way.
