I want you to answer this question honestly:
What’s the weather like today?
Being the year 2025, there’s a chance you reached for your phone just now.
That was me the other day. Standing in my living room just 2 steps from the door, wondering what the weather was like outside.
But I didn’t open the door. I opened the weather app.
We both know that’s absurd — a little comedic even. But it’s also just the beginning. Today, I’ll help you realize the dangers of this kind of living — and how it’s hardly “living” at all.
My goal is to get you back into the real world. See you in 2 minutes 😉
Life by Proxy
This is what I call the disease I just described above. It’s a tendency to live your life through secondhand experience — which isn’t really experience at all. It’s trusting in tools, meters, metrics, and data to tell you how something should feel instead of feeling it for yourself.
Like the weather app. It even has a fancy “Feels Like” temperature now.
Or think of the last time you purchased something online. How many reviews did you read or watch? Maybe even after you decided to buy.
Most people would say this is just responsible spending. But why does it feel responsible in the first place? Here’s my take:
We think that decision making boils down to one thing: having the right information — and enough of it.
But information that we draw from experience and experience aren’t the same thing. Why does this matter, you ask?
Death by Proxy
Drawing information from experience isn’t the problem. It’s the sleight-of-hand we fall for next. We start drawing information from information. And we just keep drawing. Until we’ve lost the plot. Tell me if this sounds familiar:
You want to be happy. So, you do well in school, so you can get into a good college, so you can get a good degree, so you can get a good job, so you can make enough money, so you can afford the things that will make you happy.
That whole plan seems airtight. But it all rests on that last part even being real: “things that make you happy”. If that turns out to be not-as-advertised, the whole project could fall apart. But it may take you 8 years of ifs-and-thens to find out.
And 8 years later, the sleight-of-hand is that you never actually tried being happy. You tried getting the things that were supposed to make you happy.
You started out trying to optimize something that actually mattered — happiness. But you ended up in a never-ending cascade of optimizing your own optimizations — getting further detached from reality with every step.
It’s like driving your car while looking at the map instead of the road. You might get too caught up in where you’re supposed to be according to the map and lose sight of where you actually are according to your own senses.
But the map is supposed to help you navigate the world — not replace it entirely.
This is Death by Proxy.
The Real World
Maps, tools, information…they’re wonderful things — when they’re in their proper place. Interfaces help us to interact with the world. As long as we use them to do just that.
The danger is in using interfaces to merely interact with other interfaces — and never actually getting back into the real world.
This is a life where you never actually get around to living. You’re always just on the verge of experience.
And that’s no way to live life.
I want you to live life. Truth is, that’s all there is to do. That’s all there’s ever been. At the end of all your efforts to make your life better — to make your life the best — make sure you actually get around to living it someday.
That means you’ve got to get out there.
Open the door.
Because life isn’t something you can take someone’s word for.
You’ve got to see for yourself.
— David Kennedy