The Economics of Mutuality
On living practice, self-authorship, and what can’t be optimized
PSA: There is a new place for this community to connect
We’ve been trained to think of ourselves as closed systems. Feedback loops. Input and output. Optimize, measure, repeat.
This is the language of cybernetics, and it’s everywhere — in how we track our bodies, how we manage our attention, how we scroll and click and swipe our way through days that feel somehow both overfull and hollow. It’s in the wellness apps that turn recovery into a score. In the productivity frameworks that turn life into a project. In the way we’ve learned to describe our emotional states in terms of regulation, baseline, and return to equilibrium.
But life runs as a continuous analog wave, not a sequence of on-offs. There are no clean edges, no discrete samples — just a living signal, always in motion.