Sometimes I feel genuinely detached from the world. Not in a poetic, tortured-artist way. Just... detached.
I open a shopping app and stare at the homepage—the best-selling stuff, algorithmically curated, battle-tested by millions of clicks—and I think: who is buying any of this? I walk down the street and every third person has a furry little toy called Labubu strapped to their backpack. It's from Pop Mart. People line up for it. Grown adults, losing their minds over a blind-box figurine with vacant eyes and soft fur.
I get it, intellectually. I understand consumerism, branding, the neurochemistry of surprise and reward, the social signaling, the whole machinery. I can explain it in a lecture. But understanding something and feeling it are entirely different countries, and I live in neither.
Here's what actually worries me, though: I'm not claiming superiority. Genuinely. The iPhone in my pocket disqualifies me from that argument immediately—though for the record, the liquid glass update is a disaster and I will die on that hill. My concern isn't moral. It's practical. When you're this detached, you risk sliding into something more dangerous than indifference. You risk illusion.
So I've given myself a rule: respect the market.
Not worship it. Not agree with it. Respect it. If a product is flying off shelves, that's data. If a stock is climbing despite everything your analysis says, that's data. The market is simply millions of people making real decisions with real money in real time. When reality consistently deviates from your model, the model is wrong. You are wrong—not as a person, but on this specific question, in this specific moment. That's a crucial distinction.
Ignoring that gap doesn't make you principled. It makes you broke. Or irrelevant. Or both.
This is the knife's edge most people never find: holding your beliefs firmly while remaining honest about what's actually happening. Your beliefs are deep, slow to form, woven into who you are. But they cannot be allowed to filter out observable truth. The moment they do, you've stopped navigating reality and started decorating a fantasy.
A lot of people are living in that fantasy. I suspect I've been closer to it than I'd like to admit.
Maybe I've been reading too much Hayek lately. Or maybe philosophy, at its best, is just the long way around to saying: look at what's real, even when it's inconvenient. Especially then.