The beauty of aging is that we become more comfortable with ourselves, our natural inclinations and interests.

And some of us choose to slow down a little bit.

When I say slow down, this is the mood board I envisage for myself (hear a lazy, funky jazz soundtrack playing softly in the background).

The idea of slowing down, tending to myself and doing more of the important things is such a warm, comforting thought.

Today, slowing down is not the default.

Slowing down goes against the grain. It requires a quiet defiance against the billboards, sponsored ads, Twitter feeds, Shorts videos, and tech culture that tells you that you are falling behind.

Who are “they” to know your path and whether you are on time or late, when they themselves are still grasping who they are and what they’re doing?

As someone who works at an innovative early-stage startup in a leadership role in the year 2023, I recognize there are just some things that are changing at an exponential scale (e.g. AI advancements and the federal debt the U.S. is accruing).

But my time and attention does not scale at the same pace of these changes.

So at the same time that I have the most options of things to learn about, I have less time before my world makes another big shift.

Slowing down doesn’t mean ignoring the troubles of the world so that I can build a false comfort in my tiny day-to-day world, it means grounding myself and choosing the most important topics to learn.

Speeding up anything - consumption of news, spouting off opinions, taking action, making a real change - can only be done once you’ve slowed down enough to understand the landscape and assessed what the true problem statement is and what game you want to play.

Social inequity isn’t inevitable

Social inequity is frequently on my mind because my startup’s mission is to make direct giving by people on the Forbes 400 to everyday people the new normal.

Even if this topic isn’t part of your day job, you probably already intuitively know that social inequality is on the rise.

But when people talk about social inequality, we hear the same arguments and counter-arguments on both sides of the political aisle.

Andrew, the guy in the video, makes a really good case for a third set of possibilities.

I won’t ruin the punchline for you, but I’ll lay out some false historical assumptions here that Andrew addresses that stop us from seeing new possibilities.

• Assumption #1: Agriculture improved our society by most measures.

• Assumption #2: Top-down structures of rule (AKA centralized governments) are required for successful large scale social organization.

• Assumption #3: Inequality is inevitable in a complex society that has concepts of private property, wealth accumulation and oreos.

• Assumption #4: The only way to dismantle our highly bureaucratic and unequal social system is for total catastrophe to wipe it all out.

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Until next time,

💖