I think one of the strangest things about living right now is how little anyone is expected to see.
Not in a moral sense.
In a practical one.
We move through our days surrounded by objects, services, and systems that appear fully formed. Food arrives. Water flows. Trash disappears. Packages show up. Lights turn on. Phones work. Streets exist. Heat hums quietly in the background.
And almost none of us are asked to know how any of it actually happens.
This isn’t ignorance.
It’s design.
Somewhere along the way, modern life trained us to focus very narrowly. Do your part. Stay in your lane. Be good at the thing you were hired to do. Don’t worry about the rest — someone else has that covered.
Except no one really does.
Away Is an Abstraction
Take waste, for example. We throw things away, but “away” is an abstraction. Nutrients leave farms and end up in rivers. Plastics leave our hands and end up in oceans. Metals leave products and end up buried or shipped overseas. Water moves through pipes like magic. Labor hours vanish into spreadsheets.
Inputs feel infinite.
Outputs feel invisible.
So inefficiency starts to feel normal.
And loss feels like the natural order of things.
Work Narrows People, Too
The same narrowing happens at work.
Tradespeople, operators, technicians, and laborers are not lacking intelligence. Far from it. They’re deeply skilled. But they’re rarely shown the whole machine they’re inside. They know their task, their tool, their deadline — but not how upstream decisions constrain them or how downstream consequences ripple outward.
People become specialists by necessity, not choice.
And specialists, by definition, don’t see the whole.
That might work if the world were stable. If systems changed slowly. If mistakes stayed small. But that’s not the world we live in anymore.
We live in a world of long feedback loops and quiet failures. Of small decisions compounding over years. Of infrastructure aging invisibly. Of ecosystems absorbing stress until they can’t.
Which means the people who do notice patterns — who feel that something is off — often find themselves alone.
They see failures coming early. Not dramatically. Just as a sense that things are getting thinner. Less resilient. More fragile. They say something. It doesn’t land, because nothing has broken yet.
So they stop talking.
Or they leave.
And slowly, the system loses its early-warning sensors.
Burnout isn’t just exhaustion — it’s confusion about where effort goes.
A Culture That Can’t Hold Context
What’s left is a culture where no one is encouraged to hold context. Attention is fragmented. Work is segmented. Responsibility is scoped so narrowly that no one feels authorized to ask, Is this actually working?
We’ve trained ourselves to behave a little like insects — hyper-specialized, efficient, responsive — inside systems that actually require mammals.
Humans didn’t evolve to live this way.
For most of our story, survival depended on generalists. People who could notice weather shifts, track animals, remember seasons, fix tools, read land, and care for others.
It’s hard to take responsibility for a whole you’ve never been allowed to see.
