Rules did not make Beethoven. Beethoven made the rules.

This is very true. When I look at music, I see three groups of music creators.

There are the artists who are the trailblazers. They challenge the norms. They push limits. They ask why when everyone has accepted the way things are. And they go places where others dare not go. They have a sort of a genius to them that is almost uncontrollable, often to themselves. Whatever it is that touches them, call it a muse, call it madness, it is not something they own. It owns them. You cannot schedule it, and you cannot switch it off, and the artist is often the last person in the room to understand what has taken hold. Like a pot boiling over, and the only way to stop the overflow is to either share what is boiling, or remove the pot from the fire, which often results in these people chopping off their ears or joining the 27 club.

Once these people have paved a new path, we run into the musicians. These are talented people who lack the intense energy and creativity of the artists. These people often follow close behind and adapt quickly to the newest genre or trend and ride the wave. Often producing really good content, but they are a few steps behind the true creators who have been touched by a muse. They are also the ones who make the artist legible. Nobody understood the trailblazer until a musician translated the noise into something you could hum.

The final group, often laggards, are the entertainers. These are people who have some base level talent but they have an intense willingness to follow rules and gain success based on what has now become the mainstream norm. These are people who are identified by talent hunters like American Idol. While extremely successful, they are the bottom feeders from the cauldron of art!

There is a distribution and the true artists sit in the right tail. Then come the mainstream musicians who are in the central part of the distribution, often followed by a tail of entertainers, trying to play to an algorithm developed by the artists and fine tuned by the musicians.

Being from the finance field, I have to talk about returns. So notice who gets paid.

The entertainer conforms to a demand that already exists, so the market can price him. The artist is an out-of-the-money option: most expire worthless, and the few that pay off will often pay off long after the artist can spend it. Van Gogh sold one painting in his lifetime. The famous Indian poet Mirza Ghalib spent his entire life chasing after a pension from the government. We remember them because their options paid. We do not remember the thousand whose options did not, and that is the trick our memory plays on us when we tell dreamers that genius always wins.

But this is not just limited to music or art. It is the case everywhere in life. We see the same pattern in business, politics, economics, academia, religion, etc. And every time as we reach the left tail, there is a need for a new burst from new artists, the pioneers to revive a dead and decaying field.

And what about AI? Isn’t that the new genius? I would say the opposite. The AI we see today has been trained on everything that has already been made, and it gets better and better at producing what sits in the middle of the distribution. It plays the algorithm, and it plays it beautifully. But it cannot sit in the right tail. The visionaries who built it were the artists, dismissed for decades until their option paid. What they built is the entertainer phase of their own idea. That is the cycle, happening in front of us.

And the world sits in the left tail for most things. The brand new ideas that built the world we live in were generated many years ago. The pioneers who came up with brilliant ideas have had their thoughts stripped and dissected, first by the musicians of life, and now by the scavengers, and what is left is a set of rules that nobody remembers the reason for.

There is a need for a new breed of pioneers to come up and challenge all the norms. These people, when they are creating, often come across as dreamers, removed from reality, and often, insane. But within the insanity lies the seed of the next brilliant idea. The problem is that from the outside, the insanity with a seed and the insanity without one look exactly the same. We cannot know in advance who is Beethoven and who is simply breaking the rules. We cannot tell them apart, so we shun both. Where are my dreamers at?

We need you. Know that we are greedy and lack vision so we will shun you and shame you, sometimes because you are wrong, and sometimes because you will challenge how we live. You will threaten the status quo. We will call your ideas ill-conceived, and sometimes they will be. But sometimes what looks ill-conceived is simply a reality for which the rest of us do not yet have a model.

So please know that when we challenge you, it is because we are limited and cannot begin to comprehend what you are seeing. Our challenge is not proof that you are wrong. Nor is your conviction proof that you are right. I will not promise you that your ideas will prevail. Most will not. But the ones that do will become so normal that the next generation takes these as normal and we are into the next cycle of creation-replication-corruption.

A new idea becomes a new convention. A new convention becomes a new rule. And eventually someone has to ask Beethoven’s question again: who forbade it?

Do it anyway. I cannot wait to see what new world you can create!

In a world where truth and intelligence are both being outsourced to AI, these are the smartest and truest words I have heard in a long time. I came across them watching a short video about Kurt Cobain, and how he was able to create such brilliant songs because (or some would say, despite) he refused to learn the rules of music and chords properly. He just played.

That is a beautiful truism, and it is lost in this age of rules, and silos, and specializations. We have gatekeepers on knowledge who are there to police us and keep us small. They remind us when we try to enter a room we are not supposed to be in. “Get out. You are not from the guild, so we cannot let you speak. We do not care about your ideas. We care about your affiliations.”

Kher, where it really matters, the gatekeepers’ track record is not convincing. Da Vinci carried the painters’ guild card, and his best ideas came from outside the guild: the anatomy, the engineering, the flight studies, work no guild existed to admit or approve. Al-Ghazali was the ultimate insider, holding the most prestigious chair in the Sunni world, and he quit it to write al-Munqidh min al-Dalal, indicting the scholarly establishment itself. The silo was not a space that genius wanted to enter. It was a room that genius exited.

Over time the guilds have become so strong that it takes a special kind of person to push against them and get into a space they do not want us in. Every being has a breath of genius in them. Then the genius is trained out of them to make them behave in a rules-based system. We need to raise a society that challenges the reality it is being sold. People who step into the room and ask about the stench of the corpse of dead ideas and thoughts that we peddle as fresh research.

We need the rule breakers: the artists who refuse to follow the rules that the gatekeepers have decided define and limit their art, the geniuses who cross silo walls and go wherever their ideas take them.

Because the guilds have finally built their perfect student. AI has memorized every rule of every art. It is the ultimate rules-based machine. It knows all the chords of tunes ever played and all the books that were published. But if rules made works of art, the machine would already be Debussy. It is not. The gatekeepers cannot explain that gap. Cobain could have.

“Our pale reason hides the infinite from us.” — Rimbaud

Be who you were meant to be before they told you who you should be.

These words were written by Milton Friedman in 1962 and repeated in his famous 1970 New York Times essay. Much of the corporate world eventually followed this principle almost blindly. But over the years, as its costs have started to emerge, the naysayers have increased in number.

We hold shares in companies and celebrate the gains when these businesses, guided by this principle, squeeze a little more out of their employees (or fire them), or when a secondary market that often has little to do with company fundamentals rewards us for having trusted our wealth to it. At the same time, we criticize these same companies in our alternate role as humans who care about what happens to the other stakeholders...the workers, the supply chain members, and the planet. I don’t know if that is us pretending to care or if it is one of those me vs. the world trade-offs that showcases our hypocrisy.

Kher, I work in academia, and we are above all these worldly pursuits. Or so we say. Much of what we do is about expanding young minds. To teach students to become lifetime learners. To set them up for success. That is our primary goal. We are not about teaching them skills to help them find jobs. That is what vocational colleges do.

But at the same time, universities talk about ROI on education. They talk about job placements, and this is not just business schools but other departments too. So it gets a little confusing. Maybe they are a blend of the two…high-end vocational institutions that also help students learn to think!

But this new toy known as GenAI has come in and messed things up. It promises to help increase productivity. Yay! That means we can have fewer people doing more work. That is a win-win...or maybe a win-lose. A win for the shareholders and a loss for the employees who are getting more work. It is an even bigger loss for the group more unfortunate than the ones with more work: the ones who got no work! So obviously, businesses have rushed to embrace this technology. More money, more happy shareholders.

What makes this situation absurd is that GenAI companies and experts in the field are warning us that the technology poses a very real risk of going rogue and destroying society. This is just an upside-down world, and it does not make sense. Can you imagine if the weapons, oil and gas, and tobacco industries openly said, “We sell our products and make loads of money, but you should know that these can kill you or the planet”? At least these industries are kind enough to play the game, hide the research, and pretend that their products are good for us.

What world are we living in where CEOs talk about the destruction of humanity but refuse to slow down? This honesty is not something we are used to. Is there no decency left?

Unless, of course, the honesty is the marketing. “Our product is so powerful it may end the world” is also a valuation pitch, and a convenient moat if regulators end up licensing only the responsible doomsayers. So we get two possibilities. Either the warnings are true and we are insane to keep buying, or the warnings are theater and we are the marks. Neither one is flattering.

What makes this even funnier is that, in the tradition of Pavlov and his favorite animal, we are so conditioned to accept addictive products that we, the people, have taken on the task of denying the claims the companies are making. Slow down for a moment and think about it. The company that produces a product is telling us that the product carries the risk of destroying us, and the consumers are arguing that the company is lying and the product is safe. Are the people now the unpaid PR division for these companies? I have no idea what is happening anymore.

And this is the moment when academia has the opportunity to step in and be the responsible adult in the room. We are about teaching inquiry and learning. Skills may be a by-product. In the tradition of being cautious gatekeepers for society, we can resist the lure of GenAI and first collect data to see what the true cost of this technology is.

The early evidence on cognitive atrophy is mixed, but enough of it is pointing in an uncomfortable direction. Surely the burden of proof should sit with adoption, not with caution. We failed to protect kids from social media, and we now have a generation of kids who are paying the price. This is our chance at redemption. I am sure academia will be the voice of reason. We are educators. We deal in knowledge, and knowledge does not play by optimization models.

But what do we see?

We see academics rushing to adopt GenAI and celebrating it. For a sector that asks for years of data before making the smallest decision, we are rushing headfirst into a technology that its creators are warning us about. Why?

Go back to Friedman. Universities stopped being above worldly pursuits a long time ago. We price our product in ROI. We advertise placement rates. We call students customers when we think no one is listening. We are also Friedman firms, just wearing better masks. And when a productivity tool shows up, a Friedman firm adopts it. That is not a betrayal of the mission. That is the mission, finally visible.

And how can I be sure? We see firms embracing AI because if they don’t, their competitors will do it. The AI firms argue that if they don’t develop the terrifying technology, other AI firms will. And now, universities are doing exactly the same. They are afraid of getting left behind because the other places will become “leaders in AI” and own innovation in their brochures. We do not need a PhD in game theory to see how this ends. The competition does not make universities firms. But the fact that they justify their choices in exactly the same way tells us which logic now governs them.

This technology is creating a separation between the knowledge function and the skills function. With cognitive atrophy on the table, we cannot argue that AI will make students better thinkers. It may make them more efficient employees, but not smarter people. And sadly, academia is standing on the wrong side of the table, coming out as a job-placement optimization industry.

Will the adults in the room please stand up? Or maybe there were never any.

I have been working on a few Islamic economics ideas over the last few months and I am quite surprised (and not so surprised) to see the pushback I get when I share some of these ideas. But the biggest challenge is not the pushback. It is when people agree with me and then, very nicely (and in honesty) suggest that I should come up with an alternate system that essentially provides the same output that the current system does.

Some do argue back, of course. Some argue that Riba (usury, forbidden in Islam) is not the same as interest. Others say that Islam, as a philosophy, is taken out of context and it is not meant to expound on economics. I met a scholar who argued that interest is not riba because we deal with fiat currency these days and it is not backed by gold. He has a point worth taking seriously, since the classical rulings were worked out for gold and silver. But most jurists have held that what matters is what money does, not what it is made of.

Those arguments I can have. The friendly one I cannot, because it is not an argument. It is a specification: same output, just permissible.

And here lies the main issue with Islamic economics. Since its rebirth in the twentieth century, it has tried to gain acceptance by trying to look like the capitalist system. Islamic economics may look like a market based system but only because academics/scholars/practitioners, fearing rejection by the mainstream system, have dressed it up like that.

The first step is to remove all anchors to the current system. Put that fear of loss of wealth on hold. And then look at first principles to see the goals of an Islamic economic system. Goals first, then the rules, then the prohibitions that follow from them, then the institutions, and only at the end the instruments. The industry ran that sequence backwards. With that, build a system no matter how different it may seem from the existing version of Islamic finance.

I also realize no one individual can change their behavior while the system continues to behave like an apologist to the capitalist model. We need the group to come together and rebuild a new order. One day maybe...but now I have to run as my portfolio needs attention - money doesn’t grow on trees...it grows in highly speculative, albeit shariah compliant, markets!

[More to follow]

Kher, as always, here comes the pivot. This post is not about TV shows and the complexes we carry. I was reading an article about someone who just bought a home in the UK that costs more than $250 million. My first reaction was the same as most people would probably have, “Wow, what a cool house it must be.” And then I started thinking of all the amenities it must have. As part of the thinking, my mind went to how I would feel if I had just acquired that property.

But then my brain was stopped by my mind and I thought what is it that must have made the person buy that property. What happens to our sense of enough when each luxury becomes ordinary and the next one becomes necessary? I am not going to ask how many children could have been put through school or how many hungry people could have been fed with that money. No, that would be hypocritical as I am sure I also spend on things where the money could be better spent on the poor - and if you are reading this, chances are that you are also in this position where the wants we spend on are way beyond our needs.

This is about the numbness that we feel when we spend and the bar keeps on going up. I wonder whether a $250 million house gives its buyer any more satisfaction than a $100,000 house gives someone with much less wealth (marginal utility…for my econ friends). And that is where the sadness comes from. Material wealth does not necessarily produce spiritual wealth. In fact, the constant pursuit of more may prevent us from noticing what we already have.

Money has always been a target of chase so we glorify it and teach our kids to pursue it. We probably give them the wrong priorities - but with good intent and poor action. To be clear, I am not romanticizing poverty. I want us to help our children understand the difference between wants and needs, and to recognize when their needs have been met. It is difficult to do that - for everyone else is doing it and we do not want our children to be left behind. I always give the example of the CFA - there was a time when one did not need a CFA to break into a finance career - and then a handful of people did it and then a few more and soon it became a baseline expectation - when a want started disguising itself as a need.

I wish we could raise a generation for whom spiritual wealth mattered more, and material wealth was not the measure of a successful life. I am reminded of the story of a wise old man who lived in a small home in a village. Many kings and members of royalty would visit him for advice. So one day a nobleman who was in the area decided to visit the man. He went into the hut and was surprised to find that all it had was two pieces of cloth on the floor and a small table with a candle on it.

The nobleman sat on the floor and asked the wise man, “Oh sage, so many rich and noble people visit you here. Why do you not have more things in your hut?”

The wise man asked him, “Why don’t you have more things in this hut?”

The nobleman replied, “But I am just passing through.”

“So am I,” came the reply.

Maybe what I really have is “You-have-already-figured-out-what-is-enough” envy. Unfortunately, that condition is also greatly researched, mainly in my head.

Here ends the lesson.

He is a very smart guy, and has been trying to warn us. I am wondering why people are so sure that he is wrong. Why we keep insisting that AI is nothing more than a fancy word-prediction model in a fancy new app.

It seems to me that business and academia have decided to embrace AI with open arms, in a kind of trance, like children celebrating the comic start to a horror movie. But we are supposed to be adults. Why are we doing that? Is it laziness? Or is it that education has become little more than teaching students to make money by running calculations that AI can now run for them?

If education were about thinking, AI would not really change what we do. It would just give us a better opponent. That we reached instead for the labor savings says something about what we thought the job was.

When did society make a conscious, deliberate decision about its stance on AI. Or did tech become so powerful that we lost all agency and now the AI tsunami carries us whether we like it or not.

Too many questions for a Tuesday night. Let me go ask my best friend Claudia Anthropius what I should think. She will probably agree with me, which is exactly the problem.

But this blurb is not about the problem with tracking these silly numbers. It is about paying attention to how these measures are developed and what they quantify. We often take these blindly and do not worry about what it is that the measure is really capturing. If a holistic measure is not possible, we often prefer to go with a flawed measure. And then the flaw is forgotten and the measure becomes the goal.

Here is the trick to watch for: a measure improves not only when things get better, but when costs are moved outside of what it measures. Draw the box smaller, and everything pushed outside the box becomes someone else’s problem while the number inside the box looks great. Keep that in mind for the two examples that follow.

The first is this idea of privatization. We know government departments tend to be inefficient and operate with fat. Privatization implies that the efficiency will kick in and the business will turn to profit. And the numbers agree. But the numbers are measuring the box, not the system. What sits outside the box? The tax breaks and subsidies given to the company. The loss making assets that were quietly dropped before the sale. The people who were laid off, whose output is now lost to the economy, at best working in suboptimal jobs that pay a fraction of what their old skills were worth. And the services that were dropped because they were unprofitable, like an airline route serving a remote area that may not have made money but was needed by the people who lived there. None of these disappeared. They were simply moved outside the measurement, where the government, which is to say the taxpayer, picks them up. We need to understand that not everything is about efficiency. Not everything should be measured in dollars and cents. Just because something can be optimized does not mean it should be.

Now the next conversation is about productivity gains through the use of AI at work. We need fewer people. We can do more by employing machines. And sure enough, the measure will improve: revenue per employee goes up the moment the employees are gone. But it is the same trick. The displaced workers do not vanish, they move outside the box, and the cost of absorbing them lands on the same system that is applauding the productivity number. Nobody sat down and decided that a higher number matters more than a healthier society. That is what makes it dangerous. The metric decided, and everyone downstream just followed it.

To understand why these measures, which are clearly inadequate, are still being used and celebrated, we need to ask one question. Who pays the cost that the measure fails to reflect? The taxpayers bear the costs pushed outside the box, and the shareholders keep the gains inside it. That is a transfer of wealth from the general taxpayer, a very large group, to shareholders, a much smaller one.

So the next time someone tells you that we should be happy about an upcoming privatization, pause. Ask what was left outside the measurement. Ask who pays for it. And ask who is standing to gain.

All that we really need to live an examined life is to hold just one rule in the citadel...that it must remain empty at all times. The paradox is obvious and it is the point. A rule held in the citadel is a resident of the citadel, so the rule must in the end empty itself along with everything else. It is not a belief but an operation. Something done rather than something held, and when it has finished its work there is nothing left of it to keep. We need to drop all our priors, all knowledge, all things borrowed from others...and then examine life. This is not free. The citadel is shelter, and to empty it is to agree to be cold. And the only thing that remains at the end, must be the truth. And the truth does not need to be defended in a citadel. It can be argued for, and the argument can fail, which is a different thing from being protected. And if the argument fails, we hold a new truth...and leave it in the open...for the truth needs no citadel.

We vilify Friedman for shareholder wealth maximization, but the case competition worked exactly as its incentives told it to. The counter to Friedman, arriving about thirty years late, was to swap shareholders for stakeholders. I like the idea. I don’t think it works.

But not for the reason people assume. Change the ownership structure all you like. Socialism, cooperatives, stakeholder capitalism, the Triple Bottom Line. Every one of them assumes a person who will optimize for something other than personal gain, and then hands that person a system where optimizing for personal gain still pays. Communal experiments have tested this honestly for a century and most drifted back toward differential reward, because the members who could earn more elsewhere eventually did. Equality held only where leaving was hard.

So was Friedman prescribing or describing? Both, and that's the uncomfortable part. He described how we had already been trained to behave. Then business schools taught it back to us as the definition of management, and the description hardened into architecture.

We come from different places, worship differently, speak different languages, eat different foods. What we share is a blind obedience to money. Every alternative on offer is a patch on a system whose smallest unit is a self trying to win.

Which leaves one thing untried. Not redesigning the system but dismantling the self that the system runs on. Every tradition that attempted it worked one person at a time, voluntarily, from the inside, and none of them scaled. Every attempt to do it at scale, from the outside, produced something worse than what it replaced. So the only hope left is that the individual decides to change. No external force can make that work, and no external force ever has.

This reads like a counsel of despair. It isn't, quite.

If the change can only happen inside a person, then the only useful work is on the conditions that shape what a person wants before they're old enough to argue about it. Homes, schools, universities. And here I'm implicating myself.

We measure students on GPA, then on starting salary, then on the value of what they own. Every number we hand them says the same thing: your worth is a figure that can go up. We don't do this because teachers are shallow. We do it because rankings, accreditation and placement statistics measure us that way, and we pass the measurement down. The saint in the classroom loses to the structure just as reliably as the saint in the CEO chair.

So the practical question isn't how to teach kids to care about community. It's what we would have to stop counting first.

I wanted new ideas about how to heal the world. A brainstorm. Yes, I thought, this is finally the room where the thinkers and the problem fixers unite and talk about getting things done.

Instead I got a continuation. A very learned, very well cited continuation of what is wrong with healthcare, with Spotify, with green energy projects. And every road, no matter where it started, seemed to loop back to the same tollbooth: capitalism.

Let me be clear about one thing. I think capitalism and democracy are completely and utterly broken systems. So this is not me defending capitalism. Maybe if my idea landed a billion dollar valuation I would soften, but until that check clears, I think it is a horrible system that, much like a movie with 24 headline actors, looks great on the poster and falls apart on screen. I was just tired of watching people celebrate these systems while their pockets are being picked and their rights quietly filed away. Democracy and capitalism have a nice soothing feel to them. They numb the brain. You can lose a great deal and still feel represented.

But not one good suggestion came up. I was promised a brainstorm and did not even get a mind drizzle. I wanted bad ideas and good ideas thrown into the same pot, stirred, argued over. That is not what happened. And maybe I understand why. These are researchers who need tenure, which means they need to stay inside the playpen. Climb out and neither the orthodox nor the heterodox gatekeepers will ever publish you again. Academia has its own bouncers, and they work both doors.

Kher, I digress, as I always do.

When we teach with cases, we run a series of Whys to get wise. We do not accept the first answer that shows up looking respectable. Yet the conclusion from nearly every session was the same tired first answer: capitalism is to blame. Enough. Why is nobody willing to run the next Why?

So I ran it myself. Here is where it goes.

The Yardstick, Not the Villain

We keep saying the problem is money. That greed corrupts, that markets crowd out virtue, that if we could just care about the right things instead of profit, the machine would run clean. It is a comfortable story, because it puts the fault in a substance we could picture giving up. Swear off money like sugar and get healthy.

The fault is not money. The fault is that we run everything as an optimization problem with one number sitting on top, and money is simply the number that won the job.

Watch what a benchmark actually does. The second you crown a single measure as the thing to maximize, every other value in the system gets repriced against it. Not deleted, repriced. Clean air still counts, but now it counts in dollars, which means it counts exactly as much as someone can be made to pay for its absence and not a cent more. A teacher’s patience still counts, but the metric is test scores, so patience survives only where it moves scores. The scalar does not ask what you love. It asks what you can count, and then it quietly retires everything you cannot.

Money did not invent this. Money is downstream of it. Hand people any single yardstick and something scarce and convertible floats to the top, because a scarce convertible thing can buy movement on every other axis. Under feudalism the yardstick was land and the scarce thing was bloodline. Under the Soviets it was Party position. In a monastery it might be the appearance of holiness. Capitalism’s only real distinction is that it is honest about it. It prints the unit, publishes the exchange rate, and lets you watch the capture happen in plain numbers instead of hiding it in lineage or piety. Part of why we resent money is that it refuses to lie about what we are doing.

So the reformers who want to swap money for a nobler goal have the whole thing backwards. Pick a new single benchmark, call it wellbeing or sustainability or national greatness or follower count, and you have not left the trap. You have walked back into it through a prettier door. Whatever you elevate to the one number becomes the thing people game, hollow out, and convert into power. This is Goodhart’s law with the volume all the way up: a measure that becomes a target stops measuring anything, because everyone reorganizes around the proxy and lets the real thing rot behind it. The failure does not care which noble word you painted on the scoreboard.

Which is why the conference was aiming at the wrong wall. The interesting question was never “how do we stop worshipping money.” It was “why do we insist on one scoreboard at all.”

A human life is not scalar. You are not maximizing a single quantity when you decide how to spend a Saturday, and if you were, we would call it a disorder and gently take your phone away. We hold several goods that do not convert into each other, and we trade between them badly, locally, by feel, refusing to name a master metric that settles the trade in advance. That refusal is not sloppiness. It is the only thing stopping any one value from eating all the others.

Systems lose this the moment they scale, and here is the part I cannot wave away. A master metric is exactly what lets a large organization coordinate millions of strangers who share no common judgment. The scalar is a coordination technology. That is its use and its poison in the same motion. You cannot run a country on vibes and good intentions, so you reach for a number, and the number reaches back and remakes the country in its own flat image.

I do not have the exit. Anyone selling a clean one is just selling you the next benchmark, and I have met enough of those to know the pitch. So no, this essay is not the brainstorm either. It is a complaint about why the brainstorm never starts. Everyone in that room could see the yardstick. Nobody wanted to say that the problem is the act of measuring by one stick at all, because their own careers are ranked on a stick, and you do not saw off the branch that seats the tenure committee.

But I am fairly sure the fight is aimed at the wrong enemy. As long as we govern by optimizing a single figure, that figure will hunt down the scarcest convertible thing and hand power to whoever is holding it. Money is only the current holder. Fire money tomorrow and the throne stays warm for the next scalar in line.

The task was never a better number. It is learning, at scale, to live without one. That is the session I wanted. Nobody scheduled it.

Not a Solution. Yet.

I want to be honest about where this leaves me. I am not prescribing a fix. Not yet. I am working on a few ideas and I will put them down when they are less embarrassing than they are today. But I already know they will not be enough, because this is not a problem one person solves from a laptop. It is too big for a single head, and anyone who marches out with the complete answer is either selling something or has not understood the size of the room.

What it needs is a community that stops gathering to groan. We are very good at the groan. We have refined it into a genre. What we have not done is sit together, agree on the crux, and then actually argue about options, the bad ones included, especially the bad ones, because the bad idea said out loud is what gives the next person something to push against.

So here is my one disposable contribution, thrown on the table precisely so someone can knock it off: if the disease is single-metric optimization, then maybe the direction is not a better metric but deliberately competing ones, several scoreboards that are never allowed to reconcile, each holding the others honest, none permitted to become the master. It is probably wrong. That is the point. It is on the table. Kick it.

Let us start there. A mind drizzle, at least. And if enough of us show up willing to be wrong out loud, maybe, just maybe, we work our way up to a brainstorm.

For years I assumed someone was in charge.

Not a guy with a cat and a swivel chair, exactly. But someone. A committee. A logic with a name and an office, who had sat down and decided the rest of us should feel slightly replaceable at all times. [The purists may be wondering if that is a Blofeld reference while the humorists may be reminded of Dr. Evil. And if the reference was lost on you...I feel bad for you...while I judge you!]

Kher, I wanted that to be true. A villain you can fire. A plan you can leak. A conspiracy at least has the decency to be a thing.

There’s no guy. There’s no chair. That’s worse than the guy.

Here’s how it actually goes. A company has to grow, or a bigger one eats it. Growth means you keep buying. Buying means you keep wanting. And wanting means you have to feel, in some background hum you’ve stopped hearing, that what you’ve got is not quite enough yet. Every link is just someone doing their job and going home. Nobody’s twirling a mustache. The anxiety isn’t the goal. It’s the exhaust. And the exhaust runs the engine.

You can watch it everywhere now. The warehouses with their little productivity timers. The apps that ping you so you don’t wander off and have a thought. Workplaces treating how long you’ve stayed as a cost to trim. The insecurity isn’t a bug in how these places treat people. It’s the spec sheet. Someone who feels disposable works harder and complains less. You don’t need a cabal for that. You need a quarterly number and one competitor willing to be slightly worse to people than you are.

So we walk around in two fears, holding hands. Fear of being replaced, which keeps us at the desk past dark. Fear of missing out, which keeps us at the checkout past sense. One whispers don’t fall behind. The other whispers don’t get left out. Same whisper. Not yet enough.

Then the real trick. The contentment is always coming. Tomorrow. After the raise, the upgrade, the trip, the thing. We’re never miserable, exactly. Just not done. Happiness sits one purchase away, one rung up, forever, and the gap never closes, because the gap is the product. Nobody’s selling you the shoes. They’re selling you the version of you that owns the shoes. The shoes are just shipping.

Did the Machine put that hunger in us, or just find it lying around and plug it in? I honestly don’t know. That’s the one I can’t answer with a straight face. The Machine strikes the match. But we were sitting there bone dry. Status, comparison, the old terror of falling behind, nobody invented that in a marketing meeting. Look at the people who already got out. The rich, the retired, the ones who need nothing further and buy it anyway, on a Tuesday, for no reason. If escaping need cured the wanting, they’d be the calmest people alive. Have you met them.

So drop the manhunt. Swap every executive tonight for a saint who wants you free and home by five. Give it a year. They’re running the same playbook or they’ve been replaced by someone who will. It was never the person. The chair shapes whoever sits in it. It would shape me, and I’d feel terrible about it, and do it anyway.

The Machine can take a punch. It survives anger, protest, the guy on the corner who is, annoyingly, correct. The one thing it can’t survive is a population that simply stops wanting. That’s the input with no substitute. Which is why a life with not one quiet minute in it is so useful to it. A person who never stops never gets around to asking whether they needed any of it.

I don’t have the exit. I’m typing this on a device I’ll replace before it breaks, for reasons I’ll dress up as practical.

But you can notice the wanting. Watch it show up. Ask where it came from before you do what it says. Check whether the contentment you keep filing under tomorrow was on the desk the whole time, before someone taught you to wait for it.

I read a story as a kid, Forster’s “The Machine Stops.” People live so far inside the Machine they’ve forgotten there was ever an outside. When it breaks, it breaks badly. No clean ending. But that’s not the last note. The last note is that a few people, out on the surface, were never fully swallowed. And from them, something human starts again.

That’s all the hope I’ve got, and I think it’s enough. Not that the Machine stops neatly and we stroll into the sunlight. It won’t be neat. But there’s a part of us it never fully digests. The part that goes quiet. The part that asks why. As long as that part is breathing, the Machine doesn’t get the last word.

And whatever it couldn’t swallow is where we begin again.

"I was looking for a job and then I found a job. And heaven knows I'm miserable now" - J Marr/S Morrissey

I like stories...we all do...especially the ones with hidden messages in them. I think it was Aesop who claimed this space, but there are other storytelling traditions that do not receive the same titled recognition. And we are not here to change that. We are gathered here today for me to share a story that resonated with me. Obviously, in this age of narcissism, if something resonates with me, I must share it with the whole world, which essentially means the 10 people who will read it, and of those, the 7 who habitually like everything they come across.

So this is a Koan. What is a Koan? It is a cool-sounding word from Zen Buddhism which basically means a story or a riddle that, much like a meal from KFC, will sit uncomfortably with you for some time and may lead to enlightenment...or indigestion...goals that explain why I keep eating from KFC...I have only achieved one outcome...still waiting on the second...I will let you figure out which one!

If you are still reading this, I should share the story with you.

There is a Master and a Student - yes, knowledge loves a hierarchy - who are walking by a stream when the Master notices a scorpion struggling to get out from the muddy riverbank. So the Master immediately extends his arm to lift up the scorpion and put him on dry land. But the scorpion stings him. Luckily, this was not the poisonous type of scorpion, so the sting does not kill the Master but just leads to some indigestion sprinkled with bouts of enlightenment.

Kher, the Master, not deterred by the scorpion, goes in again and this time uses a leaf to scoop up the scorpion and move it to dry land. Then the scorpion turns into a prince and tells him that this was a social experiment and he will post it on his Insta reel. No...they were living in a blessed time, for it was an age free of gadgets. So the scorpion slowly runs into the nearby woods. At that point, the utterly useless Student turns to his Master and asks why the Master continued to help the scorpion even though the scorpion had stung him.

The Master turned back to the Student, smiled (they always do), and said, “The water’s nature is to make the bank muddy. The scorpion’s nature is to sting, and saving it is mine.”

Here ends the lesson.

I love being around little children, for they remind me of our primal nature: kindness, and compassion - they only know to love. They are beings full of curiosity...and excitement at all the little wonders in life that the adults find boring. They are brave, for they ask questions that the adults are afraid to ask...they question why the world smells of evil when we have gone quiet and accepted the stench of the bullies.

There was a time when we were these children...but as we grew up, our curiosity, our kindness, our love were all beaten out of us - both literally and metaphorically.

And here is the part we do not like to say out loud: the bullies were these children too. The scorpion stings because stinging is its nature. The bully stings because somebody stung them first...when there were small, and stuck them in the mud, but nobody came with a hand or a leaf. Cruelty is not our nature. It is our trauma, handed down.

We were taught to live in a reactive world...to react to others’ actions. Be kind-ish to friends (but watch out if they cross you) and be mean to people who are mean to you. This is not natural...it is a corruption of our nature...we are told that we need to stand out, but not by being kinder, more gentle, more compassionate. No. The goal is to get ahead of others. To compete.

If we start competing in a world of plenty, the winners will end up with the gains and the losers will end up with less than enough...and it is no longer a world of plenty. And as it is not a world of plenty, it starts to feed the narrative that we need to push the children even more. We create the problem by our actions that are designed to solve a problem which did not exist.

But can’t you see that the kids are not okay? They are collapsing under the pressure of competition...the expectation of getting ahead of others because it is not a beautiful world for the non-winners. We have put them on a hamster’s wheel and they have no place to rest.

Being told that you are acting like a kid should not be an insult but a goal...the only goal...for the kids but especially for all the adults. We require new ideas. We need courage. And we must show kindness. Yes I am talking about the adults.

And before you object that kindness is how you get stung, remember the leaf. The Master did not stop saving scorpions...his nature was never up for negotiation. His method was. The first time he offered his hand, and the second time he offered a leaf. The sting could not change who he was, but it was allowed to make him smarter. Kindness is not the sport of collecting stings...you are permitted, encouraged even, to reach for a leaf.

We need to break the wheel and let the kids rest and give them an opportunity to return to their nature.

And while we work on the wheel, remember that the koan was never really about the scorpion. The scorpion will sting. The water will muddy the bank. The bullies will bully, and the world will keep handing you excellent reasons to become smaller, colder, more sensible. None of that is news, and none of it gets a vote. The Master was asked why he kept helping, and notice that he did not answer with a reason. He answered with an identity. The water's nature is to make the bank muddy. The scorpion's nature is to sting. And yours...yours was never theirs to decide.

And now, I will return to my KFC...I need some enlightenment.

“When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful

A miracle, oh, it was beautiful, magical

And all the birds in the trees, well they’d be singing so happily

Oh, joyfully, oh, playfully watching me

But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible

Logical, oh, responsible, practical

And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable

Oh, clinical, oh, intellectual, cynical”

- R Davies / R Hodgson

Have you ever thought about what it must feel like to be a cool spot on the sun?

Just sit with that for a second.

Every single thing around you is on fire. Raging, blazing, absolutely committed to burning. And there you are. Cool. Still. Not broken. Not defective. Just…different. And not by choice either. You didn’t apply for this position. You didn’t fill out a form saying “yes, please make me the weird one.” You just are. And now you have to figure out what to do with that.

Does it feel like belonging? Or does it feel like being at a party where everyone got the dress code memo except you?

Kher.

I think we romanticize being different. We put it on motivational posters with pictures of mountains and sunrises. “Dare to be different!” Great. Thanks. Very helpful. What the poster doesn’t tell you is the part where you sit quietly while the world roars around you and wonder if maybe they’re right and you’re the problem.

That is the actual experience of the contrarian. Not the cool movie version. The real one.

It is lonely. But here is the thing about that loneliness…it is a loud loneliness. It is surrounded by people. People who disagree with you. People who tell you to catch up, warm up, burn up already. And there is something almost beautiful about that. Because the alternative is worse.

What is the alternative?

The alternative is this: one day all the flames burn out. And you are standing there. Right. Proven correct. Completely alone.

No thank you.

I would rather be the cool spot in the middle of the inferno, wrong by everyone’s count, than be the last man standing in a world that has gone quiet. Because what is the point of being right if there is nobody left with you? What is the point of surviving the fire if surviving means watching everything you knew go dark, one flame at a time? It is not about being right. It is about letting others be even when they tried to not let you be!

Every flame that goes out is a grief. Not a victory.

Remember that.

Now. I want to tell you that my whole spiel about being a spot of cool on the burning ball of fire extends beyond people onto systems. So let me talk about Islamic economics. And I say this with love, I really do.

For decades now, Islamic economics has been standing at the edge of the market-based system, watching it with a combination of awe and insecurity, and slowly, quietly…rearranging itself to look more like it. Adjusting the terminology here. Packaging the products differently there. Making sure the math checks out in a way that the conventional economists will find acceptable. Respectable. Legit.

It is the older sibling copying the younger one.

Which, if you stop and think about it, is genuinely bizarre. Islamic economics is not a new idea trying to prove itself. It is a tradition with centuries of jurisprudential depth, with its own account of justice and exchange and what wealth is actually for. It predates the neoclassical framework it keeps trying to impress. And yet here it is…trying to fit in. Trying to be recognized. Trying to get a seat at a table that was built on entirely different assumptions.

The cool spot has learned to perform warmth.

And that is the sad part. Because the performance doesn’t work. You can dress up a fundamentally different worldview in the language of efficient markets and you will not convince the market believers. You will just confuse the people who came to you for something real. You will call it Islamic Finance and Islamic Banking - and the true searchers will scratch their heads wondering where you went wrong.

Here is what I think. And feel free to disagree because that is, somewhat ironically, the whole point of this piece.

Stop trying to be something you are not.

It will feel exposed. It will feel vulnerable. People will say you are not rigorous enough, not modern enough, not practical enough. The flames will burn very brightly and very confidently and they will tell you that your way of thinking is quaint at best.

Let them.

Because the world does not need another framework that looks like the one already causing all the problems. The market based system has failed - the naysayers from a decade ago are now just a handful. Like some old uncle who is still dreaming of the past. They are in denial but that is okay cause they are irrelevant and not what the world needs.

The world needs the cool spot to just…be cool. To say: yes, I have a different set of assumptions. Yes, I think about risk differently, and about the relationship between capital and labor differently, and about what markets are for differently. And no, I will not apologize for that.

That takes courage. Real courage. Not the motivational poster kind.

And yes, it will be lonely sometimes. But it is a loneliness worth choosing. Because the alternative, a tradition that gave up its identity just to belong, is lonelier than anything.

Be the cool spot.

Grieve the flames.
Stay anyway.

“But I know we all can't stay here forever. So I want to write my words on the face of today. And then they'll paint it” – Blind Melon

Still burning-ly,

4Rookie

Chomsky points out a tension that feels almost too familiar to name. There’s a traditional view: human beings are naturally curious, and education is supposed to be inquiry, discovery, and intellectual self-defense. And then there’s the other model...education as an apparatus for training compliance, sorting people, and keeping the machine running.

But in the words of U2, “her lips say one thing, her movements something else” (Borrowed from the Bible?). What I mean is that no matter what we claim education is...what it is, is what we can observe on the ground.

So the question becomes less poetic and more concrete. Is a university a center for creativity...or is it a commercial enterprise where knowledge is commoditized and credentials are the product? Is it a place where questions like “What will the exam cover?” trump “What can we discover?”

The credential problem (and why it matters)

We live in a world where university versus high school can lead to vastly different lives. Some of that is clearly skill building. But a big part of it is signaling and gatekeeping. Employers often treat the degree itself as evidence that you can finish difficult things, follow through, and operate within institutional expectations...even when the degree content is not directly related to the job.

And this is not just an intuition. A hiring survey experiment with German employers found they were nearly 1.8 times more likely to invite otherwise identical applicants for an interview if they had completed a degree, compared to those who started higher education but did not finish.

So yes, education can be about enlightenment...but it is also a sorting mechanism. And once that is true, “scaling” becomes the obsession.

Scalability turns learning into logistics

If university access must scale, then pacing becomes the invisible dictator.

This takes us to learning objectives and sequencing. In a finance stream, the destination is the destination. We are trying to get students ready for a certain type of competence...and often a certain type of job. So the learning objectives will be broadly stable across cohorts. The question is not the goal. The question is the route.

Right now, the system treats the route like a factory belt. If my course feeds into another course, then I’m no different from a worker on an assembly line. There are dependencies and time constraints. I must produce a standardized output at a standardized time...or the belt jams.

But learning does not actually work like that.

Bloom’s mastery learning framing was blunt about the variable we pretend does not exist: different learners often need different amounts of time to reach mastery, and one of the key levers is the mismatch between time required and time allowed.

This is where the GPS analogy matters. The destination stays the same. But when a road is blocked, the GPS reroutes. It does not scream “FAILURE” because you didn’t arrive in the exact same number of minutes as the person in the car next to you. Education, sadly, refuses that flexibility. It keeps everyone on one route...and then punishes people whose brains needed a detour.

The motivation trap: carrots, sticks, and the slow death of curiosity

And because the system refuses to treat learners like humans with different pacing needs, it leans on behavioral management: “positive reinforcement” and “consequences” (euphemisms for carrot and stick). Grades. Awards. Honors. Ranking. Praise as control. Fear dressed up as “standards.”

There’s strong evidence that this backfires. A large meta-analysis (128 studies) found that many kinds of expected, tangible rewards significantly undermine intrinsic motivation, especially when rewards are tied to doing, completing, or performing a task.

And for a lay example that matters: Butler and Nisan’s classic work showed that when students received task-focused comments, their interest held up better than when they received grades (or no feedback). In other words...feedback that helps you improve can support motivation, while evaluation that controls you can shrink it.

So when we say “students are unmotivated,” we should sometimes translate that into: “students have learned that school is not about learning.”

Competition and grading: Alfie Kohn’s warning label

Alfie Kohn has been arguing for decades that competition is often sold as “motivating” when it is actually corrosive. His critique is not sentimental. It is built on a research tradition comparing competitive versus cooperative conditions, and a major review of that work notes a consistent pattern: competition typically leads to less creativity, poorer performance, and reduced satisfaction.

Now zoom out. If the classroom is a competitive arena and grades are the scoreboard, then a student’s relationship with learning becomes transactional. And transactional motivation is fragile. It works until it doesn’t...and then we blame the child.

Rubrics: transparency, or a creativity tax?

Rubrics are supposed to help. They make expectations visible. They can reduce arbitrariness. They can improve fairness.

But rubric-based grading can also produce a very specific kind of damage: students stop exploring and start optimizing. They don’t ask “what is interesting?” They ask “what gets the points?”

There’s a painfully revealing anecdote in a paper on rubrics and creativity: a child rejects suggestions for improving a project with, “No, that’s not on the rubric...this is all we’re supposed to do.” The authors take this as a snapshot of how rubrics can be experienced as restrictions rather than guidance.

And this is not just about one kid being literal. A research-informed review on rubrics notes that overly exact rubrics can “reduce learner creativity.”

This is the “average performance” problem. When students are handed a detailed analytic rubric, many will reverse engineer it. They will aim for the safest version of success...and safe success tends to look like sameness. Creativity becomes an avoidable risk, because the rubric rewards compliance with predefined boxes.

Ken Robinson’s core point lands here: if the system trains people to fear being wrong, originality becomes psychologically expensive.

If we insist on rubrics, then we should at least stop using them like cages. There is a growing push for process-based rubrics that assess thinking, iteration, risk-taking, and reflection...not just polish.

Tech and “modernization”

The tech conversation is often framed as inevitability. But the evidence is more sobering than the marketing.

OECD PISA 2022 data reports that students who say they are distracted by other students using digital devices in math lessons score 15 points lower, even after accounting for socio-economic profile.

And even when the device is used “just for notes,” there are tradeoffs. A well-known study found students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than those who took notes by hand, partly because laptop notes tend to become verbatim transcription rather than processing.

Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s recent work is part of this broader critique of classroom tech being treated as automatic progress.

So...what is education for?

If the purpose of education is human development, then the current model is often failing its own mission. It standardizes what should be personal. It times what should be flexible. It motivates with control, then acts surprised when curiosity dies. It claims creativity matters, then grades students into conformity.

And yes...this is a systems problem. But it also starts at home. Parents and educators can choose to prioritize emotional wellness over prestige. Meaning over medals. Growth over rankings. Real learning over performative achievement.

Hope is not a vibe. Hope is a redesign.

We are all damaged. Every single one of us.

From the toughest to the weakest, the loudest to the quietest. We’ve all been broken, battered, shaken, shattered...pick your verb of choice.

As kids, we were told to adjust the volume on our souls. Be better at school. Be taller. Thinner. Fatter. More respectful. Gentler. Less gentle. More godly, less weird.

We became the porridge searching for Goldilocks...forever tweaking the recipe of who we are so that someone, somewhere, might finally say, “Ah, just right.”

And that’s where it begins. The conditional love story. The “I will be loved if only I were more… or less...something.”

Dr. Gabor Maté calls it trauma. I call it the great forgetting. Because in that pursuit of approval, most of us never grow up into who we truly are.

Imagine a lake. Perfectly still. Across it, a breathtaking scene...trees, clouds, sky...the beautiful self. Now look down at the water. You see the reflection...the revealed self.

We are the scene. But we live as the reflection. The demons we inherit from parents, teachers, friends, society...keep us showing the version that floats on the surface.

And if we keep doing that long enough...we start believing that the reflection is us. We gaslight ourselves. We tell the truth to shut up. We learn that the true self is not good enough to be loved.

Now, to be fair, society isn’t evil. It’s just...efficient. It tells us to change, to polish, to perform...because that’s how we succeed. Materially. Meanwhile, the emotional and spiritual versions of us go completely bankrupt.

We live in a system of optics. What’s visible matters. What’s inside...not so much.

When the lake is calm, the reflection isn’t so bad. But life is windy. And people...they keep throwing pebbles. Each ripple distorts the image. And if the pebbles keep coming, we stop being ourselves altogether.

Now imagine a world where everyone is just their distorted reflection. A room full of mirrors showing mirrors. A world of insecure people giving love only to each other’s masks. No one really knows who they are...they just trade reflections.

Escaping this isn’t easy. It requires surrender, vulnerability, honesty...the kind that burns when it touches your skin.

But our real self...it’s trapped. Locked in the basement of our soul. And to free it, we have to walk into the dark and tell the child hiding there, “It’s okay. You’re safe. The world can love you as you are.”

The problem is...most of us don’t even know the way down anymore. We’ve built too many floors above it. And the child...The child has gone quiet. A silence so loud it keeps us awake at night.

That’s what people call the search for meaning. It’s not mystical. It’s just your soul trying to remember your own name. But the remembering hurts. So we drown it out...with work, with phones, with therapy, with shopping, with noise. Anything to not feel the ache of the child inside clawing at the dark.

Do it long enough, and you stop hearing the cries altogether. You become the reflection. And one day, when the noise dies down...when you’re old, tired, and out of distractions...you’ll realize you’ve been homesick your whole life.

So maybe start the journey home today. Tell yourself you’re good enough...not in the Instagram-quote way, but in the trembling, human way. Unlearn the rules about good and bad. Stop judging the shape of your own soul.

Build a bridge...or a staircase...one brick at a time. Not to escape this life, but to come back to it.

Fall in love not with who you’ve become...but with the child who still waits. Find the courage to let the world see you, unfiltered, un-airbrushed, unreflected.

Because that child...your child...is still there. Alone, but not gone. Waiting for you to say the words they’ve needed to hear all along:

“Won’t you come out and play with me”

“Step by step, we all fall down Like toy soldiers” - Martika

What a silly world we’d live in. So silly that someone could write a whole essay about it and call it The Unraced Life.

But isn’t it sad that we already do something just like that...with our brains?

We’ve been gifted this immensely powerful machine inside our skulls. And what do we use it for? Worrying about the future. Regretting the past. Chasing careers. Refreshing social media. Watching TV (yes yes, F1 is allowed, otherwise this analogy falls apart). Posting opinions on LinkedIn. Arguing in the comment section. And then worrying some more.

What if we took even a sliver of that time...to think? To think about how we’re living. What actually matters to us. What we keep putting off. And how we might show up tomorrow just a little more awake than we were today.

But we won’t...because we (yes, we, the adults...can we stop blaming the kids for everything wrong with Instagram and TikTok?) love the distraction. It keeps us from dealing with the baggage we carry around like emotional airport luggage no one wants to check in.

We’re fast becoming a world made up of the Thinking Class, the Skilled Do-ers, and the Unskilled Do-ers. Most of us live in the middle group. We rent out brain space to learn how to do something, and then spend the rest of our lives repeating it...with slight upgrades.

Let me be clear...this isn’t about money. We all need to work. But work shouldn’t be what defines us. This is about leaving your F1 car in the garage because you’re reheating leftovers again. We need to raise our game. We need to start thinking. Thinking unthought thoughts.

And I believe most of you reading this are capable of doing that kind of heavy-duty thinking. It’s difficult...our minds are cluttered. But don’t you want to clear the freeway and take your mental Ferrari (or whatever the brand is) for a proper run? Or are you content numbing it with dopamine hits and endless scrolls?

This reminds me of the story of Ibn Arabi, who once heard a voice say to him, “It was not for this that you were created,” as he was consuming a certain beverage. The same goes for our brains. They were not created to post blogs, collect likes, or doomscroll TikTok (do you scroll on TikTok?). They were meant for bigger, more beautiful things.

If I may borrow your brain for 15 seconds...just imagine the kind of world we could create if more of us used it for thought rather than just reaction.

And this is just the brain. We haven’t even entered the realm of the mind and consciousness...territory that science still struggles to grasp, tethered as it is to reason. I’m talking about Rimbaud when he said, “Our feeble reason hides the infinite from us.” And Blake, who wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

Most people file that under “unthinkable.” But don’t you even want to dream of getting to a place where reality finally surrenders its mask?

To get there...we need to start thinking.

Since this post is about thinking, I would really like to know your thoughts. You have too beautiful a mind to have your thoughts shrunk into one of 7 emojis. Share your thoughts...not a thumbs up emoji! Say your thing!

Full disclosure: I’m not a fan of F1. I don’t even know if the car is technically called a race car or a fast thing or “now you see it, now you don’t“. But when I said F1 race car, I meant that extremely low center of gravity, huge-tired, spoiler-fitted machine that goes around in circles for hours while we all cheer like it’s something meaningful. I know I know that great innovations come out of the F1 circuit. But if you really want to impress me, give me a 2.2 second fuel-up at the gas station.

Until then, you’re just burning rubber...and the planet...for bragging rights.

And here’s a question for everyone, I guess.

When you speak to students, the thing they hate the most...other than any course that I teach...is taking exams and getting graded. Ask faculty, and they’ll tell you grading is the worst part of their job. So are we all just masochists? Have we all collectively signed up for something that everyone hates...and that, quite frankly, reflects very little actual learning?

Yes, I’ve heard the urban legends. The one course where grades motivate students to learn. The rare classroom where assessment captures deep insight and real growth. I’m not saying those don’t exist. But most of us know, deep down, that they’re more myth than norm.

Anyone who came across the recent report from a very well-known university knows the grading system is failing. And those who claim they’ve “figured it out” either don’t understand the problem...or think we don’t.

So let’s imagine. Let’s imagine the world is inching closer to Finland. As I understand it (full disclosure: I haven’t studied it yet), Finland’s model is built on gradeless schooling. No rigid evaluations. No GPA calculators defining lives.

Now contrast that with other systems, where every breath a student takes is assessed by someone who may have never had a day of formal teaching training.

“You sneezed too many times in class? That’s a C+.” “You memorized answers from past tests and highlighted all the right phrases? Wow...A+ potential.”

It gets worse.

Some believe educators are really just recruiters for corporations or graduate schools. That our job is to stamp students with grades so the HR team can sort them out. And that’s where we start sliding...fast. I’ve heard academics argue that schools should give more A’s to help students land jobs...because other schools are doing it.

Let HR do its job. Let me do mine.

I’m here to teach. And that’s already a hard enough task. Don’t turn me into a filter in some industrial feeder system.

Now, if schools are too scared to go fully progressive, here’s a compromise: Make every course Pass or No Pass.

And if that’s too soft, fine...add a Distinction. But that “Distinction” has to mean something real. Not “turned in everything on time.” Distinction comes from distinct and if everyone gets a Distinction, then how is it distinct? It should signal deep learning, consistent reflection, actual engagement. Not perfect compliance. We’re not raising machines.

Under this system, the truly motivated students would aim for Distinction. The students who would have gotten Bs, Cs, or Ds would settle for Pass. And yes, I hear the counterpoint...“But what if a B motivates a C student to work harder?”

Does it? Really? And does the grade really reflect learning?

We criticize corporations for earnings management. GPA management is no different. It’s just a more polite version of the same dysfunction.

If the only way we believe students will learn is by dangling grades in front of them, then we have much bigger problems than grade inflation. We have a motivation crisis.

From childhood to adulthood, we need to create environments where learning is about more than an external reward. And yes, there may be new issues we face under a Pass/No-Pass system, but are we supposed to keep working with a failing system until the perfect solution arrives?

It’s no secret that I’m firmly against grades and awards...for students and academics. If we’re always pushing people to do things only for recognition, for medals, for validation...then we’re raising a generation of mercenaries.

People who will only act if there’s something in it for them.

What do you think? I would love to hear from students (current and former) - am I a naive dreamer or are there (other) ways to make this work?

I believe that we can do better than this. We have to do better than this.

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[I recently took up walking.

Yes. Walking.

Before this, I apparently spent decades crawling or floating or otherwise gliding through life like some confused sea creature, but now I walk...a new skill I have bravely acquired at the tender age of “old enough to know better.”

And on these excruciatingly long walks (because everything is excruciating when you don’t yet identify as a non-couch potato) I listen to my thoughts doing full Simone Biles style gymnastics in my head. My thoughts, I’ve realized, are far physically healthier than I am. Emotionally? Hard to say. We don’t talk about that.

So on my last walk, somewhere between kilometre two and total existential collapse, my mind wandered to academic integrity violations. Cheating. As educators we spend an absurd amount of time plotting how to police it...building traps, setting timers, rewriting assessments, playing a pedagogical version of “Catch Me If You Can” with students who, frankly, are sometimes much better at this game than we are.

When students do get caught, we hold meetings about penalties. Should it be a zero? A warning? A disciplinary note? A plague upon their house?

And this is the moment where my brain...always unstructued like a Tarantino movie... smash-cuts to another scene entirely.

Pharma.

Yes, the next great satan.

(After banking. And consulting. And gaming. And tech. Honestly, how many faces does satan have... and why are they all incorporated?)

We often complain that doctors treat symptoms instead of causes. “Another pill,” we groan, “instead of getting to the root.”

And suddenly I thought: aren’t we doing the exact same thing with academic integrity?

We treat symptoms...cheating...with penalties.

But we refuse to ask the more uncomfortable question: why are students cheating in the first place?

Let’s take a step back...unless you’re already sitting or lying down, in which case please remain horizontal for your own comfort.

Why do students cheat?

Sure, we can rattle off the usual suspects:

Didn’t study! Procrastinated! Pressure for a good grade! Weak prerequisite knowledge! Laziness! Want an award or Dean’s List Standing!

But these are symptoms. No student comes to school thinking they will cheat their way out of courses. These are surface-level explanations we use because they’re tidy and convenient and let us avoid thinking too hard.

If we dig deeper...and my mind, currently a bustling marketplace for moronic thoughts, is digging eagerly...it always, consistently, relentlessly comes back to mental health.

We are raising children who carry childhood trauma into adolescence and adulthood...trauma that stands directly in the way of learning. And before someone starts chanting “In my days...”with misplaced superiority...let me gently inform you that this tone is the emotional residue of trauma. No one escapes it by invoking nostalgia.

Parents do not deliberately traumatize children. But unprocessed trauma travels generationally. And it arrives in our classrooms disguised as anxiety, avoidance, perfectionism, disengagement, procrastination, burnout...and yes...cheating.

Now, academics will argue, often correctly, that they were trained to conduct research, not provide therapy. Teaching was already a stretch...mental health coaching is laughably beyond scope.

And genuinely, no one is asking them to do therapy.

We’re simply asking for compassion.

Just a little bit. As we stagger through our own struggles, maybe we can extend some humanity to students slogging through theirs.

Here is the actual solution...

We need formal, mandatory mental health courses embedded in the curriculum.

Not optional workshops no one attends. Not pamphlets in the counseling center. Not a “wellness week” involving cupcakes and a golden retriever.

A real course.

Every student.

First semester.

And then a half-course in each subsequent year.

Because the high-achievers and the barely-hanging-on students need the same thing...to learn about themselves before we expect them to learn about supply curves, regression models, and discounted cash flows.

And while we are redesigning the first-year curriculum, let’s add ethics before they see a single “core” business course. Help them think about purpose, responsibility, and moral reasoning before they learn how to optimise profit.

I am still searching for a school...and a faculty...with the courage to do this. In the style of Ben Stein asking “Anyone, anyone?” in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I wait for someone to raise their hand and say they will try it out. And if you do, call me...maybe! (Too cheesy?)

We ask students to take risks, to innovate, to dream, to dare.

But the adults?

We hide behind precedent and policy and the familiar comfort of how things are done.

It is, frankly, unfair.

And until we face the causes, not just the symptoms, we will keep treating cheating like a crime rather than what it actually is: a signal. A plea. A mirror held uncomfortably close.

Maybe it is time we stopped looking away.