I find the concept of “harm” far more fascinating than I probably should. The ethical questions around harm – how much should we seek to minimize harm to others? To ourselves? What even is harm? How can we accurately define it? – occupy my mind frequently.

Can you harm someone simply by your inaction? What about your knowing inaction? Is “absence of help” the same as harm? Can there be a neutral place, or are you harming everyone you aren’t helping? Or perhaps, are you helping everyone you aren’t harming? What’s the default?

Can some harm be healthy? Certainly, I don’t believe I should shield my children from all harm, but I only feel that way because I believe that there will be harm I can’t shield them from and I want them to be prepared for it. But if I could actually guarantee that they would never be harmed… would I?

What about “net” harm? Giving someone a shot of medicine to save their life is helpful, but strictly speaking, you also had to stab them with a needle. We think on net then that we’ve helped, but that’s an easy example. They get more complicated. I think lots of harm gets done by people trying sincerely to help, especially at scale.

Maybe it shouldn’t be “First, do no harm.” Maybe it should be “First, figure out what harm is.”

“Someday Soon” is a very pleasant, very poetic way of saying “never.”

Time is a thief, not an altruist. Very few things happen automatically with the passage of time that you would think of as positive. If you plant a tree today, it’s a better tree ten years from now. That’s pleasant, but it’s the exception, not the rule.

Learning is not automatic, and becomes more and more difficult to organically learn from simple experiences as you get older. You have to actually care enough to put in effort, You have to write, and consider – not just pass through those moments.

Some moments are for joy – if you’re walking through the park at sunset with a loved one, you can experience that for what it is. You don’t need to take pictures, because the moment itself is the most lovely thing. But some moments are for experience, for learning, for self-improvement. Take those seriously.

For most exchanges, the math is relatively simple. If you get something you value more than what you give up, the deal is good for you. If the other person values what you give them more than what they give you, it’s a good deal for them. And if it’s a good deal for both of you, an exchange happens and you both win. That’s the whole story – if you value a cup of coffee more than two dollars, then you buy it from the guy who values two dollars more than the cup of coffee he’s selling. Win/win.

That math holds up well for individual exchanges. Points in time. But new factors are introduced when you start talking about exchanges that extend over long periods of time.

Time isn’t just an input unit; all time is also some fraction of your entire existence. Consider: would you spend a year away from your home, family, and friends for a million dollars? You might – I feel pretty confident that I would! Returning with a million dollars would be great, certainly a major boon for all the time after. But would I spend ten years away for ten million? Almost certainly not. And I definitely wouldn’t spend fifty years away for fifty million dollars.

But why not? If a year is worth a million dollars to me, why doesn’t that scale? Because “one year” is more than just an input. It’s also a fraction of my total life – and my total life with my children. Ten years is the majority of their childhood, and I would miss it. Trading time for money is much easier than trading money for time. No matter how much money I made, what would be the point if I had to give up the thing I care most about? Even a year would be painful, but the potential payoff in terms of the quality improvements in the remaining years might (might!) make it worth it, because a year is still only just over 5% of their childhood and (hopefully) between only 1-2% of my life.

When you consider time as a fraction of a very finite and non-renewable resource, you then introduce a sort of friction on all non-instantaneous exchanges. You create stress. And you have to factor that in when deciding whether an exchange is worth continuing.

This is why people can get burnt out of jobs that they initially thought were good trades. Let me show you this in a different way, with a different question:

Which is worth more to you: 20% of your life, or 25% of your life?

The answer is straightforward: 25% of your life must naturally be worth more than 20%. But think about what that means: each year that passes, “one year” represents a greater percentage of your remaining life! It’s not a raw input, because its value changes as long as we’re measuring its value as a fraction of your limited pool. So you agreed to a job paying $75k/year. Let’s assume simple math and say you took this job at 30, and you’d live to be 80. So when you took this job, you took it at a rate of $75,000 for 2% of your remaining life. But the next year, at 31, you’re now trading $75,000 for 2.04% of your remaining life. It might be barely noticeable over one year, but the trade is getting worse. You might ask for cost-of-living increases to cover inflation, but what about cost-of-dying increases to cover the increasing value of what you’re giving up?

Always be careful of the long-term consequences of your exchanges. Things evolve and erode; the path of time is bumpy. Don’t fall into the pattern trap of thinking that every year is the same. Last year wasn’t and next year won’t be, and eventually every one of us has a Last Year. Make sure you get good value for it.

Cancer is terrible. Even the treatment for it (when one is available) is terrible; surely we’d only be performing a combination of a series of invasive surgeries and bombarding the body with harsh chemicals and radiation if the alternative was grisly doom.

I’m going to make a statement, and then I’m going to present several possible meanings behind the statement. In other words, the statement will be what I say, and then all the choices that follow are possibilities of what I mean. I would like you to guess which choice is the correct one.

Okay, here’s the statement: “Not every disease is cancer.”

Now here are the possible things I might mean when I say that:

1. “It’s possible to morally rank diseases, and I’m doing so right now.”
2. “Cancer isn’t real; there’s no such thing as cancer.”
3. “Because you didn’t/don’t have cancer, I’m dismissing any other harm you may have suffered from other diseases as irrelevant.”
4. “I’m pro-cancer; I actually want there to be more of it, and I especially want people I don’t like to get it.”
5. “Different bad things can have different causes, effects, and – most importantly – solutions.”

So, which do you think is most likely to be the actual meaning behind my words?

Well, if you’re smart, you picked number 5, which is the only reasonable meaning to infer. But if you don’t like me, there’s a strong chance that some part of you practically screamed that it was one of the other four, or something equally uncharitable.

There are some words that universally represent negative concepts. Bad Things. Words like “rape,” or “terrorism,” or “racism.” Each of those words is, to our society, as bad as “cancer.”

Because those words are universally bad, they carry power. No one wants to condone those things. This means that a certain kind of grifter can pull a certain kind of grift by referring to something that isn’t one of those things as one of those things.

Why this grift is so effective is that it’s never used to make a good thing seem bad. It’s just used to make a mild-to-medium bad thing seem horrible. And if you raise any objection, you’re defending something bad!

Example: someone violently attacks someone else. An assault. Someone else calls it “a terrorist attack.” If you object and say “that wasn’t a terrorist attack,” someone else will yell “why are you apologizing for terrorists?! Why are you defending someone who attacked an innocent person?!”

See the position you’re in? Unless you love being a pariah, you pretty much have to keep your mouth shut and let everything become terrorism.

Okay, so why is that bad though? If someone does something bad, why should we care if they’re labeled as worse? Here’s why: even leaving aside the issue of justice (that people should get the punishment they deserve, but not more), different problems have different solutions. Remember the cancer example above? Imagine if we treated every single disease with invasive surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. That would be bad! And not just in a “doing more than is strictly necessary way,” but in a way that actually harms way more people than it would help.

Some things are rape, racism, terrorism, or cancer. When that happens, we should respond accordingly. But lots of bad things, even very bad things, aren’t those bad things. And the solutions may be very different.

Because of the nature of communication, tribalism, rhetoric, and so on – you don’t gain much by fighting against this grift. That’s a shame, but I don’t want to change your position there. I just want you to recognize the grift when you see it. I want you to see the shell game for what it is. People don’t always want a reasoned, just response – even to a bad thing. They want something extreme, especially if it’s in their favor. So they’ll pull a switcheroo and take a bad thing and label it as a Horrible Thing to put you in the position of accepting that or defending the bad thing.

It’s a good trick. That’s why you should be savvy when it happens.

During the American Revolution, there was a really, really badass guy named Daniel Morgan. At one point Morgan was in command of forces that were going up against the British Colonel Tarleton. Tarleton was an intimidating figure with a reputation for brutality and he had an infamous legion of dragoons. Morgan knew the men under his command would break ranks and run when the dragoons bore down on them.

Instead of fighting it, he gave them permission – in fact, he ordered it. He told every man to give him exactly two shots – the one that started in their rifle, one reload, then the second shot – and then run. But he also told them where to run: a specific exit route he had mapped out. They did, and exactly as Morgan predicted, the bloodthirsty Tarleton gave chase. But where the American soldiers fled, Morgan was waiting with his own cavalry and he rallied the riflemen and together they trapped and defeated Tarleton.

Anyway, apart from being an awesome story (one of many about Morgan!), it carries a really interesting lesson. People are going to run. They’ll quit. That’s just inevitable, and if you try to act like it’s not you’re going to be really disappointed most of your life. No matter what thing you care about, other people may help for a while – but at some point, your paths may well diverge again.

Instead of trying to stop that or being mad about it, predict and direct it. Is every employee you ever hire going to stay with you until retirement? Probably not – so be open to learning about their own career ambitions and predict when and why they’ll leave, and plan accordingly so that you all benefit both from your time together and even the manner in which they leave. Not every friend you make will be a “lifer,” so plan accordingly – have fun now and make sure you send them off on good terms when it’s time for them (or you) to move on.

These things happen. Life ebbs and flows. Rocks sink to the bottom, but sailboats ride those currents to new and exciting places.

You can no more control the actions of other people than you can control the weather. Most people would consider it foolish to get mad at the wind for blowing or a raincloud for raining, even if the rain and wind harmed and inconvenienced you. Yet we get mad at other people’s behavior and consider it normal.

“But other people are thinking beings, able to make conscious moral choices.” Sure. Doesn’t matter even a little bit. Whether they are morally blameworthy for their actions does not mean you can control them. Just because they should make better choices doesn’t mean you can make them make the ones you want. They are tornados, and you have to grapple with that.

In the parable of The Scorpion & The Frog, the scorpion is no more the villain than is the rising river. In fact, from the point of view of the frog, the river and the scorpion are exactly the same. Both are deadly forces that the frog cannot control – and that is the only thing the frog should have considered. In the parable, the frog’s final thoughts are of frustration and anger at the scorpion – “why did you sting me, now we’ll both drown” – when he should have been, if angry at all, angry only with himself. “Through my own actions, I have doomed myself. I should have let the scorpion drown.”

And this is the vital moral distinction – the frog letting the scorpion drown is not a moral failing on the part of the frog, and nor is it the frog punishing the scorpion for his nature. That is some guilt that the scorpion will try to lay on you, but that’s just part of its nature, too. It’s just a trap to get you close enough to sting.

You can watch the scorpion sinking beneath the water and feel sympathy. You can even mourn. But sympathy is not obligation, and you should see the stinger for what it is.

I have successfully gotten into the woods. Appalachia called and I answered, so the season has not been a total loss. It was wonderful and perfect to watch the sun set over the valleys below, to explore the same forest with the sun up and under the stars.

Whatever you love to do, do more of it. Climb a higher mountain.

All growth comes from discomfort. When you feel awkward and embarrassed, you’re on the cusp of greatness. Jump!

Challenge is our only teacher. We must fit improperly to learn whether we will bend to the world or change it around us, and how. We must dislike our circumstances to improve them.

Seek discomfort!

The first step to building all good things is the belief that they can exist.

There’s a pervasive cynicism that says that you’re being fooled any time you believe anything good, especially about a business or organization. That you’re “drinking the Kool-Aid.” You’ve somehow been suckered to ever repeat a good thing you’ve been told and have come to believe.

Hogwash. If you can’t give the benefit of the doubt, at least a little, to a group you want to work with – how will you ever work with them effectively? How will you be more than a drag on the whole operation?

Look, sometimes Kool-Aid turns out to be snake oil. Sometimes people lie, and adapt to new movements in positive language to co-opt that language for nefarious ends. But more often, people are trying their best and doing an imperfect job of communicating what they want to believe.

If someone gives you some generic positive affirmation, like “believe in yourself and you can achieve anything,” it’s easy to dismiss that. “Sure pal, great advice. All my problems are solved. What are you selling?”

But why? The advice was generic, but it was true. It might not have been maximally helpful, but it wasn’t harmful. What good do you do for the world by pushing back against that? For that matter, what good do you even do for yourself? In our efforts to defend ourselves against being taken advantage of, we often completely throw away any positivity that we can’t prove is perfectly altruistic and completely relevant to us specifically.

But lots of good is just “laying around,” or is part of a win/win arrangement. In fact, a tremendous amount! Some of it, some genuine good, is just mixed in with the Kool-Aid. If we only accept positivity in these extremely specific forms, we often get none at all.

The collection of things you’ve done in the past are not ingredients for a specific, singular meal. They’re utensils and cookware you’ve collected, with which you could make many things.

When people view their progress through time, they often feel as though they’re walking down a steadily-narrowing corridor. With every passing day, the possibility space decreases as more and more options are whittled away by the knife of time.

Preposterous!

It’s the exact opposite. You’re not walking down a steadily-narrowing corridor, you’re walking down a rapidly-widening one! With each new day, you wake up more capable than the day before. More opportunities are available to you because you know more things, more people, more ideas. Your life’s choices haven’t been coiling around you, constricting like a noose. They’ve been opening doors left and right.

The only thing narrowing your pathway is you. Your belief that your past must somehow define and dictate your future. It certainly can do that – if you let it. But the control is yours.