Why everything is the way it is: How ordinary people built the world you take for granted

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 French lunch culture being a holdover of preventing airborne tuberculosis.
We live among artefacts
The book publishing industry has been organising books into "Fall" and "Spring" release schedules for centuries. If you ask why, people will make something up to preserve the ritual. "It makes sense, don't you see... because XYZ."
The dirty truth is it all goes back to the Erie Canal.
Before the canal, publishers in America were distributed among Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. But the canal enabled NYC publishers to reach stores in the American interior by boat. This was by far the most efficient way to ship these heavy objects. There was just one problem: the canal froze in winter.
But publishers aren't stupid; they adapted. They started shipping a whole bunch of new books before the canal froze over (the "Fall list"), and another batch after it thawed (the "Spring list"). Catalogues reflecting that organisation became standard.
The Erie Canal opened in 1825, but only now, nearly 200 years later, amidst the boom of e-books and audiobooks, are people beginning to question "seasons" as an organising structure for the industry.
Two centuries of infrastructure, expectations, and practices — all because of ice.
Now think about the QWERTY keyboard beneath the pads of your fingers. How easy was it for you to learn to type? Would you gasp if I told you that this keyboard layout wasn't designed for typing efficiency?
QWERTY was created to stop typewriter keys from jamming by placing commonly used letter pairs far apart from each other. It intentionally makes it harder to write, in favour of making typewriters more resilient. And now you're probably reading this on a phone. You type into a flat pane of glass, yet your keyboard is the same.
The mechanical problem disappeared decades ago, but the solution remains, embedded in our muscle memory and manufacturing standards.
You'll see this pattern everywhere:
You can't ride scooters on the pavement in the UK because of laws written for horse-drawn carriages. Your work schedule is designed around factory shifts. Educational systems were built for the Industrial Revolution. Religious practices developed for agricultural societies. Political structures proliferated before mass communication.
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.
Socialism doesn't work for the same reason democracy often fails. We like so-called 'strongmen' who can come in and shake things up - but we only like the strongmen that share our values. We'll vote for our strongman but not the next one. But sometimes 'our strongman' turns into the next one. And then we hate it.
There's a primate study where researchers gave monkeys cucumber slices as rewards for completing simple tasks. The monkeys were perfectly happy with this arrangement, until researchers began giving grapes (a preferred treat) to some monkeys while continuing to give cucumbers to others.
The cucumber-receiving monkeys, previously content, began rejecting their rewards. They threw the cucumbers back at the researchers. They banged their fists and shook the cage in outrage.
Every monkey is happy with a cucumber until one monkey gets a grape.
Building the future
Should we make sure everyone gets cucumbers, or should we make sure everyone can have grapes? The only way out of the paradox is to reimagine things from the ground up. You'll have to give all of them something new.
The most powerful engine of change is not just seeing that things could be different, but seeing that they may already be different somewhere else.
We could switch from QWERTY to a more modern keyboard layout, or we could completely reimagine how we interface with computers.
Travel and exposure to other cultures and systems is important because it breaks the spell of inevitability that surrounds our own arrangements. We see how people have adapted to a different set of constraints and why their lessons might be useful in our context.
I'll tell you another week in detail about how predictive text software was invented to save the Chinese language.
The world is a museum of passion projects – but it's a living museum where new exhibits are always possible. The question is whether we'll passively observe the artefacts of history or actively curate what comes next.
The most dangerous idea isn't that things should change. It's that things couldn't possibly be any other way.
The world is more malleable than it appears. The systems that seem most permanent are often the most arbitrary in origin. The institutions that seem most timeless are often offspring of forgotten circumstances.
If the world around you is the way it is because someone made it so, then you have equal agency in shaping what comes next.
You can inherit the world, and accept its status quo, or you can reinvent it.