Survival isn’t mandatory
"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory."
W. Edwards Deming
Previously at the Volcano Base I’d been auditioning for the new blockbuster movie “The Unemployables”. Since then, I’ve been migrating this newsletter to beehiiv, but it’s taken longer than I’d hoped, mainly due to struggles with their newish website builder. It’s good, but I’m pushing its limits.
Mission Briefing
Survival isn’t mandatory
Let’s start with a heresy:
Staying the same is not neutral. It’s a bet. A gamble. A long-term subscription to whatever is currently broken. There was probably an annual discount.
But because change tends to come wrapped in uncertainty, effort, and awkward metaphors about butterflies, we pretend inertia is the smart move. Inaction never hurt anyone, right?
How much does change really cost?
There’s something like this algorithm running in our heads when faced with change. Something like:
Cost of Change = (Energy × Uncertainty) + Ego Fees – Potential Regret Avoidance
Where:
- Energy = time, money, therapy, caffeine, can-I-be-arsed-ness
- Uncertainty = fear of looking like an idiot or a startup founder
- Ego Fees = the sting of admitting you were wrong
- Potential Regret Avoidance = “future me will be thanking past me”
The trouble is, we rarely include the cost of not changing in the calculation.
We ignore:
- The slow bleed of bad systems
- The gnawing frustration of stagnation
- The opportunity cost of better paths not taken
- The quiet soul-death of “meh, it’s fine I guess”
- That weird smell
We act like the current state of things has no maintenance cost. But you’re paying it every day in time, mood, attention, and battery life.
The cost is front-loaded
Change asks for payment up front. Not in results, but in discomfort. It demands awkward first steps and weird transitional hairstyles. No wonder we hesitate.
But, once the change is made, its cost often vanishes. The fear dissipates. The complexity shrinks. You look back and think: “Why did I wait so long?”
You can’t skip the cost…
…but you can get better at identifying which costs are worth it. Consider:
- Is this discomfort permanent, or just the initial friction?
- Will future-you be grateful, or annoyed?
- Are you avoiding effort, or avoiding accountability?
The real question isn’t “how hard will this be?” It’s: how expensive is it to stay the same?
Change doesn’t knock. It short-circuits the doorbell and lets itself in. Might as well be dressed.
Classified Intel
Some interesting stuff I discovered on my adventures.
Antigravity is Google’s freshly‑launched IDE that treats AI not as a typing assistant but as a full‑blown “agent”: it can plan, write, even test code (via terminal/browser) and hand you a neat package of “artefacts” showing what it did. If you've tried Cursor, Replit, AI-enhanced VS Code etc, you'll be surprised how good Antigravity is.
Sundar Pichai
Gemini 3 is out now: a state‑of‑the‑art multimodal model that reasons, codes, and “gets” context from images to long documents. For devs, that means smoother tool use, fewer “lost variable” bugs, and effortless context‑heavy work. It's very impressive, I think.
This new AI startup (backed by Jeff Bezos) plans to push AI beyond bytes and onto manufacturing, aerospace and physical engineering, merging digital smarts with real‑world metal, machines and maybe rockets.
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