I found another pattern y’all.
Which means y’all are about to lose a little more faith in civilization along with me.
So, here it is.
Everybody tells you what they care about.
Usually with a mission statement pinned to the wall like it’s the Ten Commandments.
I do not care what a system says anymore.
I want to know what earns the fucking treat, because that’s what it’s learning.
You don’t train a dog by giving speeches. You train it by rewarding certain behaviors over and over again.
Soon the dog isn’t wondering what you believe. It’s wondering, “What gets me another treat?”
We as humans are not that different, and neither are the systems we build.
Take almost any company, “Our employees are our greatest asset.” (barf)
Who’s getting promoted? The person making everyone’s life easier? Or Dave?
Dave’s been surviving entirely on caffeine and corporate guilt since 2022. Dave gets promoted, and EVERYBODY notices.
Funny how nobody remembered the mission statement.
Everybody remembered Dave.
You have taught the whole company what earns a doggie biscuit.
Mission statements do not train culture.
Promotions do.
Schools crack me the fuck up.
School: “We value curiosity.”
Student: “Awesome. I have twelve questions.”
School: “Please save those for after the standardized test.”
It’s not that teachers do not care. They do.
But systems drift toward whatever they can measure.
Curiosity is messy.
A multiple choice test fits nicely in a spreadsheet.
Guess which one wins.
Kids are incredibly smart.
They quickly learn what earns a treat.
We say we reward curiosity.
Then we grade compliance.
Meetings.
Professional time laundering.
Meetings were supposed to help everyone communicate.
Now they reproduce.
One meeting creates three more.
Then those meetings have babies.
Suddenly half your calendar is just adults reading bullet points to other adults who already read the email.
We’ve somehow optimized talking into scheduling.
And along the way…
The meeting became the job.
Then there is email.
Whoever invented email probably thought,
“This will save everyone so much time.”
That sweet little delusion never stood a fucking chance.
Instead we built an economy around replying to messages that only exist because someone replied to yesterday’s messages.
Half of modern work feels like forwarding responsibility one inbox at a time.
We've mistaken "Reply All" for collaboration.
We didn’t eliminate work.
We gave it a Send button.
Social media might be the funniest one.
Every platform starts with some version of,
“We are here to bring people together.” (barf)
Okay.
Then why does opening the comments sometimes feel like walking into Thanksgiving dinner right after somebody says,
“So…politics.”
Because connection isn’t always what gets rewarded.
Attention is.
And outrage burns longer than calm.
The algorithm isn’t sitting there thinking,
“How can I make everyone miserable today?”
It’s doing what it was rewarded to do.
Keep people looking.
The algorithm isn’t evil.
It's a Labrador that discovered outrage earns bacon.
We didn’t break the algorithm.
We trained it.
Every system starts with a purpose.
Then life shows up.
Budgets. Deadlines. Lawyers. Metrics.
Consultants with 62 slides and one recommendation that somehow costs 6 million dollars.
Little by little…
The goal begins to shift.
Survival became the new priority.
The original mission is hanging out in the lobby.
Civilization eventually learns this the hard way.
Reward speed. You’ll sacrifice craftsmanship.
Reward certainty. You’ll discourage curiosity.
Reward appearances. You’ll create performers.
Reward outrage. You’ll manufacture outrage.
Reward bureaucracy. You’ll drown in paperwork.
Reward busyness. You’ll confuse motion with progress.
Reward quarterly numbers. You’ll borrow from tomorrow to impress today.
The reward changes.
The trick does not.
The scoreboard becomes the sport.
Bureaucracies learn where the treats are too.
Election season is pretty much humanity promising itself it’ll start going to the gym on Monday.
“We’re going to fix everything.”
A year later…
The problem has a new name.
A new department.
A fresh logo.
Three committees.
A strategic framework.
A 12 month review process.
And somehow, the exact same problem strolls back into town…
…asking for another budget increase.
Bureaucracy is what happens when paperwork starts hiring.
Families aren’t immune either.
Every family has the responsible one, the funny one, the peacekeeper, the black sheep.
Nobody sat everyone down and assigned characters.
The roles just worked.
So they kept getting rewarded.
Fast forward twenty years…
And everybody’s still reading from the same script.
Families do not just pass down recipes.
They pass down operating systems.
I’ve started believing something that’s deeply inconvenient.
Not politically inconvenient.
Humanly inconvenient.
Systems do not become what they promise.
They become what they reward.
I truly believe everything I’ve written above…
…is evidence.
Explaining an uncomfortable amount of modern life.
Every gold rush rewarded speculation.
Every factory rewarded efficiency.
Every bureaucracy eventually rewarded paperwork.
Every social network rewarded attention.
Different centuries.
Different technology.
Different people.
Same damn Labrador.
Different leash.
Same tricks.
Reward speed. You’ll get speed.
Reward appearances. You’ll get appearances.
Reward paperwork. You’ve invented another form nobody wants to fill out.
Reward outrage.
Well…
gesturing at literally everything.
Exactly why mission statements do not impress me anymore.
They are introductions.
The reward system is the biography.
Incentives write the autobiography.
Culture is not what you print.
It is what survives.
If you want to understand a company, do not read the website.
Watch who gets promoted.
If you want to understand a school, don’t read the brochure.
Watch what students get praised for.
If you want to understand an app, don’t read the marketing.
Watch what keeps everyone coming back.
Behavior leaves fingerprints.
Speeches do not.
The strangest part?
We train ourselves exactly the same way.
Funny enough…
We are systems too.
We reward ourselves all the time.
Avoiding uncomfortable conversations.
Looking productive instead of being productive.
Choosing convenience over intention.
None of that makes us bad.
It just means we’re trainable.
Sometimes by other people.
Sometimes by systems.
Sometimes by habits we do not even remember creating.
I don’t think civilization is broken.
I think it’s incredibly obedient.
It keeps repeating whatever works.
Whatever gets rewarded.
Whatever survives.
Like a Labrador that figured out exactly where the treats are hiding.
Maybe civilization isn’t nearly as mysterious as we pretend.
Maybe it’s just repeating whatever earns another treat.
Which explains why changing the slogan almost never changes the behavior.
Turns out civilization isn’t impossible to understand.
You just have to stop listening to what it says…
…and start watching what it sits for.
The dog was never confused.
We were.
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