The Economics of Your Ignorance

 

Photo by Sivani Bandaru on Unsplash

“Hey honey!” I shout from the kitchen as I mix up my baking soda concoction. “Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Obama, and Kelly Clarkson told me I would literally not be able to stop losing weight if I drink this.”

Except none of them said that. The claim is viral, and false. I know because I checked. Also, I wasn’t in the kitchen. I was sitting on the couch, playing Wordscapes with one hand and eating sugar-packed homemade ice cream with the other, wondering how I got thirty pounds overweight and how to lose it fast.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the kind of person who gives trust away freely. When that trust gets betrayed, it’s hard to get it back, but people almost always start with my trust by default. That’s potentially dangerous. I know. It’s also why this subject has been on my mind so much recently.

Incompetence carries a negative connotation. So does ignorance. “Weaponized incompetence” entered the vernacular a few years ago. It’s the thing where someone pretends they can’t do a task so you do it for them. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about ordinary ignorance: the lack of ability, skill, knowledge, or qualification to judge a claim properly. That’s not a character flaw. It’s the default condition of being a human with a finite number of hours.

We can’t be experts at everything. That sentence, of course, isn’t revolutionary. In a world where knowledge expands faster than any of us can chase it, being even slightly educated on every topic is impossible. Most people will be lucky to develop high-functioning knowledge in one or two domains, with another dozen where they can pass for competent. Everything else is almost unknowable.

And as it turns out, that unknowable territory has tremendous economic value.

The old line says that if you don’t pay for a product, you are the product. Fine. Even when you are paying, there’s a decent chance someone is monetizing you anyway #capitalism. More to the point: a lot of modern marketing isn’t just selling you something you don’t need. It’s selling into the gap between what you need to decide and what you have time to verify.

Sometimes that looks like clothing brands promising fabric that gets “softer with every wash,” when what they mean is the large shirt will shrink two sizes the first time you ignore their thirteen-step care ritual and it ends up at Goodwill in the pre-teen section. (Not speaking from personal experience.)

Sometimes it looks like a deepfake celebrity pitching baking soda as alchemy to melt pesky belly fat.

The hard part is that we’re hit from too many sides to validate every claim. Full verification is impossible for a normal life. Blanket distrust has a cost, too. You might ignore something with legitimate value. Zero trust feels safe, even if it will eventually diminish you.

So where’s the middle ground? How do you live in a world where people will bald-faced lie to sell a product without paying a second tax for your own ignorance?

You don’t need a PhD in every subject to make decent choices. Competence doesn’t require omniscience. It requires knowing the basic concepts of a domain well enough to smell snake oil.

For weight loss, most of us already know the core: consume fewer calories than you burn, and make the calories you do eat better ones. That doesn’t stop me from eating homemade ice cream and half-hoping some miracle drug will cancel the math. It does mean I don’t need a chemistry degree to distrust a beverage that claims I’ll “literally not be able to stop losing weight.”

Same idea at the grocery store. A protein bar brags about thirty grams of protein. Fine. Flip it over. How many grams of refined sugar came along for the ride? One, two, forty? You don’t need to become a nutritionist to make a judgment call inside a tight scope of information.

Not all advertising is outright fraud. A lot of it aims at something a bit more sensible: a plausible life you could have if you owned the thing. Drink this beer and evenings with friends stay golden. Buy this software and your life gets ten times more productive. The pitch isn’t always “this is false.” Sometimes it’s “this is the shortcut past the part of your life that feels stuck.”

The pattern is usually the same. When you already feel behind in health, money, and relationships, marketing sells urgency, certainty, and simplicity as the escape hatch.

There’s a real temptation to answer that with total cynicism. All advertising is lies. That’s becoming increasingly true on the internet, but not absolutely true everywhere. Another temptation: only engage where you’re already competent. That sounds wise until you remember it’s impossible, and that living that way means paralysis, missed help, and a smaller life.

As we get older, we accumulate a core of useful knowledge: lived experience, plus what other people have paid to learn the hard way. If a claim requires the same suspension of disbelief as a superhero movie, it’s probably suspect by shape alone. Baking soda miracle weight loss qualifies in this category.

A few other questions help when you’re out of your depth:

Who makes money if you believe this?

Is the pitch built on urgency + certainty + simplicity? That’s a warning triad. Run, unless deepfake Michelle Obama is the one selling it, in which case run faster.

Where the downside is high around health, money, and family, raise the bar. Do more homework. Everywhere else, blissful ignorance is allowed.

And when you can’t verify quickly, buy time. Default to slow, boring actions you already understand. In many cases, the fad will fade while you’re busy making a boring decision anyway. That’ll spare you from more than one night writhing in agony after you try that Jell-o weight loss miracle.

There are still says when I’m sitting on the couch, wishing I could just wish away the pounds fast. I suppose I’ll always be capable of giving trust away before there’s a real need to be that open. The win isn’t becoming an expert in everything, and it isn’t deciding that everyone is out to get me.

The win is simple and pretty basic, actually. It’s simply refusing to let your blind spots become someone else’s easiest revenue target. Skip the baking soda. Keep the boring math that’s made sense for generations. Eat ice cream less often, not because a celebrity told you to, but because you already know enough.

Why We Long for Solace

 

Photo by Pyx on Unsplash

I love singing, and when I was nineteen years old, I had the privilege of participating in a religious choir made up almost entirely of young men who were nineteen or twenty years old. I was only part of the choir for about three months, but they are months I will never forget.

Our choir director lost three of his children in a car accident on Christmas Day as they traveled home from school for family activities. For a month afterward, he was absent from our rehearsals. When he returned, he stood in front of a room filled with young men who couldn’t comprehend the depth of his grief and told us about finding peace amidst tragedy-induced sorrow.

He read the words of a poem by Emma Lou Thayne called “Where Can I Turn for Peace?”

The poem opens with these lines:

Where can I turn for peace?
Where is my solace
When other sources cease to make me whole?

Thayne’s words were set to music by Joleen G. Meredith in 1971. As the story goes, Thayne called Meredith and read the poem to her over the telephone while Meredith composed the melody on the spot.

I have always loved that song, although I understood very little about the question when I was nineteen.

Where is my solace?

I don’t have a lot of peace in my life right now. The chaos of trying to hold together a business that has run out of money, inching two enterprise software products toward market readiness, working a full-time job to keep the lights on in my own home, and navigating the changes that come when children begin leaving the nest weighs on me every day. These pressures stacked on top of each other as they arrived in quick sequence. They’re all crowded together in the same mental space as they demand attention with roughly equal urgency.

I gained almost fifty pounds in two years, so my natural response has been to continue eating the same way because I eat my emotions and then attempt to outrun the consequences. This week, after barely running at all during the first half of 2026, I logged forty-five miles, nineteen of them in a single day. I won’t lie to you by calling this some kind of fitness strategy and sell you a course. It’s a prolonged negotiation with my own nervous system. Plain and simple.

I don’t enjoy running for running’s sake. I’ve never experienced the runner’s high people talk about, unless the runner’s high is the deep satisfaction of finally stopping. Running, for me, creates a space where my mind can finally become quiet.

There are only two places in my life where I consistently find that kind of peace: while listening to beautiful music and while running.

After enough miles of my feet hitting the pavement, my breathing settles into a rhythm. Fatigue pushes everything else to the margins until I don’t have any room left to rehearse business problems, financial fears, family concerns, or the long inventory of things I alternately celebrate and condemn about how I did things in my business. I can only think about the next step and the next breath, and maybe how many miles I’ve got left before I can lay down without making strangers think I died in the gutter.

Music reaches the same place for me, just from a different route. There’s nothing like a beautiful melody that can hold sorrow without offering up any explanation. It can also give shape to emotions that can’t ever be explained in words.

John P. Weiss recently wrote:

The many indignities, hardships, losses, and vicissitudes of life wear us down. We look in the mirror and see a different person staring back at us. Someone with life’s journey etched across our features and a corresponding understanding that time is growing thin.

I’m not sure how many people in their late forties regularly contemplate time growing thin. I do.

My mother died when she was thirty-nine years old. I am now nine years older than she ever was. Her death changed my relationship with time. Every birthday I’ve celebrated since I turned thirty-nine has felt like borrowed time.

I think about death frequently. The thoughts aren’t morbid, usually. They’re more like the occasional speculation about what’s over the horizon. I wonder what will eventually get me: cancer, a heart attack, excessive Diet Dr Pepper consumption, or the slow wearing-down Weiss describes, with life’s journey etched across my features and my mind gradually surrendering to Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Truthfully, none of us gets much control over the final answer. We can exercise, eat vegetables, sleep regularly, and reduce our daily intake of beverages large enough to require two hands, yet mortality remains remarkably uninterested in our personal optimization plans. A good friend who was the epitome of fitness dropped dead of a heart attack at sixty-five.

I suppose it’s that awareness of death that intensifies my hunger for peace. When we’re young, time feels limitless, and we can tolerate years of low-grade anxiety because we assume we’ll eventually arrive somewhere calmer. We’ll finish the project, earn the money, pay off the debt, get the children out on their own, repair the house, lose the weight, and finally, finally reach the point when peace becomes convenient.

But as the years pass, we begin to question whether the arrival of peace will ever really be a permanent condition.

We spend so much of our lives racing forward. We work to earn a living, provide for our families, raise children who can become decent human beings in a broken world, and prepare for disasters we hope never happen. Underneath it all? That’s where the steady current of anxiety lives. Something will always need attention. Someone, maybe a child, will always need help. There will always be another bill due. The body will continue to age. And dreams won’t arrive on the predicted and anticipated schedule.

Then one day, you wake up and realize you are older. Some of your children have moved out. They’ve entered the same rat race you’ve been running, and now they are beginning to absorb the same low-grade anxiety that followed you through adulthood.

The anxiety morphs to fit the phase of life. When children are small, you basically worry about keeping them alive by teaching them not to lick shopping carts, stick forks in wall sockets, and make decent choices. When they become adults, you suddenly discover how little control you had which shouldn’t be surprising because thousands of generations have done this before and arrived at the same conclusion. Control is an illusion.

One may live halfway around the world. Another may face problems you’re not equipped to help them solve. You can listen, offer counsel, send money when you have it, and answer a video call from thousands of miles away. You can’t stand between them and every difficult thing.

There’s grief in that realization, but there’s also peace in it too. Love, real love, eventually requires us to let go of the illusion that we can protect the people we care about from every sorrow. We can remain available, answer the phone when they text (or call), and sit with them through uncertainty. We can (and should) stop pretending that love always has a solution.

Maybe that’s why we long for solace. We’re all carrying so many things we can’t fix.

We can’t reverse a car accident that took three children from their parents on Christmas day. We can’t go back to 1993 and save a mother who has already been gone for decades. We also can’t guarantee that a business will succeed, that a product will succeed, that our children will remain safe and make good choices, or that our bodies will give us as many years as we would like.

Solace gives us somewhere to set those realities down for a little while.

It can’t get rid of them. Those things will always be part of this mortal condition. My business will still not have money when the song ends. My children will still be far away when the video call disconnects. The grief is still grief when the choir rehearsal is over. And the miles I run don’t solve the problems waiting for me at home.

This is the point though: something changes while we’re there.

For a few moments, sorrow becomes bearable. Somehow, our minds loosen their grip on the anxiety just a little and our breathing becomes easier. That’s when we remember that life can hold uncertainty and beauty at the same time.

At nineteen years old, I listened to a grieving father talk about peace. Now, decades later, I’m beginning to understand why the question posed in Thayne’s poem mattered so much.

Where can I turn for peace? Where is my solace when the ordinary sources of security, approval, and control can’t make me whole?

Sometimes I find it in a song written over the telephone more than fifty years ago. Sometimes I find it several miles into a run, after exhaustion has finally quieted every sound except my feet on the pavement and my breathing.

I think I’m finally beginning to understand that solace isn’t what comes when life becomes less complicated because it won’t. Solace is what helps us live while the complications remain.

Shaped, Not Sentenced

 

Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash

Like a lot of teenagers, I spoke first and thought later.

We were on a youth service project, with a few adult supervisors helping but mostly watching. We were scrubbing crayon and worse off plastic chairs with chemicals that required rubber gloves to protect your hands. At some point I said something, without thinking, that was completely inappropriate to one of the female leaders.

She slapped me across the face so hard it nearly knocked me off my feet.

What I said was wrong. Full stop. Also, I would never condone hitting someone for a verbal offense. And still, right after her hand landed, I told myself I deserved it.

I need to say this carefully: that is not how abuse works. In abusive relationships, the person with power often teaches the other that they deserve the punishment. I am not defending a slap. I am describing what a teenage brain did with shame while I could still feel the sting of her hand on my face.

I carried that scene for years as one of my most embarrassing moments. I still tell it sometimes. It’s not a war story. It’s a cheap, memorable, now-funny (to me anyway) lesson in think-then-speak. It became part of how my operating system runs. Though if I’m honest, the “speak first, thought optional” habit still showed up well into my mid-twenties.

Once, my wife and I went to a live concert with her best friend and her friend’s date. I didn’t like the band. In my opinion, they had a weak stage presence and they were off-key more than once. Honestly, their music was just not my style.

Most of the drive home, I railed on them while the two people in the back seat sat as a captive audience.

When we got home, my wife told me how deeply I’d hurt her. That music had seen her best friend through some dark years. It was a lighthouse. My review definitely missed the art, but it also stomped on someone else’s survival gear.

Those moments shaped me, and became an important part of my core OS.

And then I overcorrected.

I swung so far the other way that I started hurting myself by not speaking up when I should have. I stayed with a boss for far too many years because I refused to stand up for myself. Silence felt like maturity. It was often just fear of hurting someone else, wearing a better outfit.

The slap and the car ride taught me something real about the cost of careless words. The second lesson I wrote on top of them was wrong: that keeping quiet was always the nobler virtue.

It’s been more than thirty years since the slap. I can still tell you exactly where I was standing. I can still see the room. The concert. The years I swallowed what only I could say. All three taught me something about who I want to be, but they don’t get to decide that I am the worst version of those experiences. I’m not frozen at either extreme and calling that growth.

Those moments and those years have shaped me, but they didn’t sentence me to a life of “that’s just how things are.”

I’ve written a lot in recent months about building a company I love. I ran it ahead of revenue and ran out of cash. I had to let my team go. To close my own financial gap, I took a long-term consulting engagement. I am, once again, the load-bearer keeping the company limping along . I’m the sole developer on two enterprise applications, I’m preparing two 90-minute industry presentations that I’m delivering in two weeks, and working a day job that still has to fund the lights at home. All of it feels like it needs my attention at the same time. I’m juggling six medicine balls, and they’re all on fire.

It’s a pattern I’ve revisited so many times I wish I’d learned the lesson by now. When everything is clamoring for attention, silence-as-virtue and work-harder-as-integrity start looking like the same move: don’t add friction. Absorb it. That behavior has been my default for decades.

Several years ago, we hosted Thanksgiving for my wife’s entire extended family. Seventy people crammed into a house that struggles with a dozen dinner guests. The dishes were extraordinary. They were piled high on every available inch of counter space. All the tables were put away, and the chairs taken downstairs so the family could visit where it was a little cooler. I stayed upstairs alone at the sink. I was one of those kids who always made his bed because my mental chaos requires physical order if I’m going to function. Letting the dishes sit wasn’t really an option for me.

For the next three hours, I washed. At one point my sister-in-law’s husband came and sat across the counter from me. He talked for forty-five minutes without ever picking up a towel.

That was when I first noticed the swing toward “just carry the load.” It endured for another decade after that. Some days I wonder if it ever really ended, or if I just got better at calling it strength and integrity.

I don’t have a good rule-of-thumb for when to speak and when to stay quiet. I don’t have a system that sorts burning medicine balls into a righteous priority list. What I can see, finally, is the difference I’ve been pretending not to see:

Shaped is allowed. The slap, the car ride after the concert, the three hours of dishes—those get to stay because they taught me real things.

Sentenced is optional. I don’t have to keep proving I learned the lesson by never opening my mouth, or by standing alone at every sink the rest of my life.

There’s no credible way to wrap that in a bow. I’m still figuring out when silence is wisdom and when it’s just me absorbing friction again so nobody else has to feel it. For now, the only trustworthy thing is small: when I catch myself choosing the sink while the basement fills with people, I’ll ask whether I’m serving or disappearing, once again, into a role that feels safer than asking for some help.

Shaped is fine, but sentenced is not.