We've been sold the idea that experiences matter more than possessions. Travel over trinkets. Memories over materialism. But experience-chasing has become its own form of consumption—and often a worse one. We collect experiences like trophies, optimize for Instagram moments, and skip the boring parts where actual growth happens. Experience culture doesn't free you from consumerism. It just makes you consume differently while feeling superior about it.
We've been told empathy is always good—the foundation of morality, leadership, and human connection. But empathy is a spotlight, not a floodlight. It makes us care intensely about the suffering we can see while ignoring equal or greater suffering outside our emotional range. It makes us favor the beautiful over the ugly, the relatable over the foreign, the immediate over the distant. Worse, it makes us feel virtuous for these biases. Sometimes the most moral thing you can do is turn empathy off and think clearly instead.
We worship clarity. Simple frameworks. Clear principles. Five-step processes. Binary choices. But reality is messy, contradictory, and context-dependent. The pursuit of clarity forces us to flatten complexity into neat categories—and then we mistake the map for the territory. We make worse decisions with crystal-clear frameworks than we would with messy, nuanced thinking. The obsession with clarity isn't making us smarter. It's making us stupid with confidence.