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Charles Dickens published Bleak House in twenty monthly instalments between March 1852 and September 1853. He wrote it in the middle of his career, after David Copperfield and before Little Dorrit, at the point where his comic energy and his anger at social institutions came under his fullest control. It is the most tightly constructed of his novels, and the one most often named as his best.

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As a founder and PhD scholar researching the outer space economy, I find it foolish to think I can even come close to knowing everything. There was this glorious period in my early twenties when I felt that I knew who I was, had a clear sense of where I wanted to be, and had figured out how to get there. Life turned out differently. In many ways, I exceeded the wildest expectations of my younger self. In others, I disappointed myself. Being comfortable, or at least knowing that such contradictions are a normal part of becoming not-so-young, is growth. That’s what I tell myself.

Since I am not young, am I middle-aged? To suspect everything is to have been wrong enough times that you start reading the fine print on your own enthusiasms. The middle-aged have learned that the calling can become a cage, that the person you swore you’d never become is often just the person you become slowly, one reasonable compromise at a time. It is the scar tissue of disappointed expectation. I have some of it, but not enough to surrender at its altar. I think the best - for my loved ones and me, and for the world at large - is yet to come. All factors considered, I am energized by the future. I don’t think anyone who knows me would call me a skeptic. Clearly, I am not middle-aged. Maybe I am old? Do I believe in everything? Becoming not-so-young exposed me to enough ideas and ideals that belief without consideration seems far-fetched. So, not old. Not really.

So, where does that leave the other somewhat young people and me? The unshakable belief of the early twenties is gone, the settled wariness of the middle-aged has not crept in, and the naiveté and wisdom of old age seem far away. I don’t have big plans for the birthday. For a change, it will pass without fanfare. I will go to my college lake in Oxford, dip my toes, and watch the sunrise, with a glass of Dom Pérignon.

I think age is less about certainty than Wilde would have us believe. As a somewhat young person, I think maturity or lack thereof comes down to what we pay attention to and how much time we think we have. I have loved being around people all my life. It has energized me thus far, and I doubt it will be any different in the future.

Just when I started working at Microsoft, I stumbled upon Blaise Pascal’s quote, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Since then, I have consistently carved out time for myself to think, reflect, and enjoy solitude. However, even in those moments of quiet, I have been in a hurry to get to the next big thing on my calendar. This birthday, I thought I’d try something different, so I cleared out my calendar. There is nothing for me to do except to be grateful for what I have, be hopeful for what I want, and accept that fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or like the young say, FUD, is part of the adventure.

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Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have each built internal capacity for normative reasoning, often quietly. At Anthropic, Amanda Askell leads the effort to shape Claude, the company’s language model, through a written constitution: a document articulating the principles by which the model should respond when requests pull in different directions. OpenAI is less explicit in its philosophical titles but is engaged with closely related questions; its public work on alignment and model behavior involves frameworks for how systems should respond in situations that no one can fully anticipate. Iason Gabriel, a political philosopher at DeepMind whom I once heard lecture as a student at Oxford, has spent years on the value alignment of AI systems.

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Allegedly short for“Facebook Transformation Week”. All meetings were canceled so that people could learn the newest ways to build things with AI. Thousands of employees set up “second brains” using Claude. They unleashed agents with cute names like “Pikachu”. Security was relaxed, and even PMs and designers were allowed to ship code to production. It felt like Meta was back at the cutting edge, like the frontier AI labs - Anthropic and OpenAI.

Then, executives pushed employees to start creating “Skills” and teaching AI how they work. A dashboard was built to track how AI-native an employee was. Meta employees can’t resist the numbers on a dashboard - Uploading AI skills and releasing AI tutorials earned more points, so it naturally became competitive. Now there are 10,000+ skills & Plugins, hundreds of MCP servers, Hooks, and at least 5 different flavors of Open Claw in the company.

A flashy new team called Applied AI (AAI) was launched with the promise of low bureaucracy, fast decisions, and a new AI-native operating model: managers will not bother employees with regular 1:1 meetings, comms will be async, each Manager will manage up to 50 employees, and employees can create ad hoc meetings when they want to talk. Eerily reminiscent of call center operations, I thought.

Then, the CTO announced that Meta will now start recording the screens of employees so that AI could be trained on how to use a computer. Someone asked if Privacy approved this - the CTO’s answer was tone-deaf “we went through some sort of privacy process, don’t know which one, the usual one?”

Then, a plan to lay off 8000 people was leaked to the news. Meta’s HR team got bombarded with questions. Showing some grace, HR wrote a post to offer clarity:
“we’re going to lay off 8,000 people, and cancel hiring plans for 6,000 roles. We will flatten some management layers. And there will be a draft. We will draft employees from every domain of the company to AAI to create training data for Meta’s AI models.”

On the positive side: “Meta will pay 4+ months salary as severance, and pay for 1.5 years of family insurance.” This emergency fund and 1.5 years of insurance helps in a scary job market. Most employees appreciated the generosity. But then the questions began.

People asked if they can opt-out of their laptop recordings when they’re looking at sensitive stuff. No. “You cannot opt-out of tracking on a company issued laptop” said the CTO.

People asked if they can volunteer to be laid off; No. The company will decide whom to retain.

People asked if they can opt-out of moving to AAI; No. The company decides who works on what.

In a way - I understand the need to prune a company with 80,000 people.

Meta has a unique culture. Every six months, teams commit to certain goals and do everything in their power to meet those goals. Usually it involves changing the products to move some metric: ex: getting more click-through on e-commerce ads. Everything is measured. People are graded based on how their work moved the metrics they set goals for. Every six months, everyone writes an 800-word essay laying out their ‘impact’. High impact leads to a good grade and bonuses.

Competent Managers grow their ‘impact’ by finding more problems to solve and moving the right metrics. Their grade (rating) is driven by impact. BUT manager promotions are driven by how many people they manage. To rise up the corporate ladder, managers pitch projects and hire more people. Incentives drive behavior. Inevitably, people build empires.

This leads to people fighting for work to do. People “grab scope” by copying or even stealing ideas and urgently shipping the code. Imagine that a Facebook team figures out that people click on ads more if they add clickable stickers on ads. IG engineers will spot the experiment results and immediately get to work on trying to ship a similar change. This creates a flywheel of urgency - if you spot something that could improve a metric like ads click-through, you have to start socializing the idea to get all the permissions and you also have to rapidly build and test it before another team steals the idea, rebrands it with another name and ships it.

source: macrotrends.net

But announcing that you’re mandating employees to teach their Skills to AI, recording their screens, and then planning a layoff in a month… is tricky business.

After the announcement, a chill set into the company. Managers held meetings trying to bring back morale. The most common phrase I heard was “focus on controlling what’s in your control.” Many managers admitted they had no idea who would get laid off, and described how they are preparing to be laid off themselves.

One VP described to me how he had mentally prepared himself for how he was going to restructure his team and how he was not majorly affected by the emotional side of it, because he had been making such decisions for 4 years now.

At 4 AM, on Wednesday, May 20, people across the company got emails about whether they were: 1) laid off (effective immediately), 2) reassigned to Applied AI, or 3) flattened (managers who lost their team and now had the option to become an individual contributor).

A program manager on maternity leave was laid off, she said “My entire team got cut” - she worked on data security and privacy. A Product Manager who just built a team of 5 lost his entire team and was offered the chance to take an IC role to keep working on his mandate. Many, many engineers found themselves assigned to Applied AI with no idea who their manager was, and a dreadful sense that they’re well-paid data-labelers now.

That evening, the efficient VP who was “mentally prepared to restructure his team” got a call from his best friend at work. Someone he had worked with for 10 years said that they had been “impacted” by the layoff. That phone call hit him like a gut punch. He was horrified at the idea that it could happen to someone so close (closer than the people who work for him).

The day after the layoff, folks returned to the office with many feelings - some felt survivor’s guilt, some felt a renewed sense of imposter syndrome, some felt relief.

There was plenty of performative empathy on display. Managers held meetings to discuss “how we can all support each other during this tough time.”

7 days have passed now.

The dust is swirling in the air… it hasn’t quite settled yet.

All teams were reminded that they cannot miss the goals they set at the beginning of the year even if their team was cut in half … “use AI”. Missing goals would lead to a bad rating for this half.

There will also be no need to write your “impact essay” yourself or give peer feedback anymore. An AI tool called Checkpoint will now assign employees into buckets and assign their grades, and managers can choose to override the AI’s decisions if they are prepared to defend it.

Multiple employees from ICs to VPs who were hoping to get laid off have announced their resignations. Many of them already had other jobs lined up and were just waiting to see if they could collect the severance.

Morale might be down. But App engagement is up, revenue is up, profits are up, and most importantly, the stock is up 4% today.

FTW.

Darth Vader’s stormtroopers live to fight another day.

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Durant introduces us to several philosophers in the book, and they mark their entry much like actors on a stage. That’s potentially why reading the book can feel like watching an intellectually stimulating play addressing pertinent questions about the nature and meaning of life. The Story of Philosophy is Durant’s story; hence, it doesn’t promise to be objective. If it did, the book would be outrageously dull, much like this chart below.

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Plot

The novel opens in Marseille in February 1815, with nineteen-year-old Edmond Dantès, second mate of the merchant ship Pharaon, bringing the vessel into harbour after the sudden death of its captain. His safe return seems to secure everything before him. He is on the verge of being made captain, marrying the Catalan girl Mercédès, and settling into the steady life of a respected sailor.

Three men cannot bear this. Danglars, the ship’s accountant, wants the captaincy for himself. Fernand Mondego, Mercédès’s cousin, wants Mercédès. Caderousse, the tailor next door, wants only what such men always want, which is to be in the company of his betters when they fall. Together they compose an anonymous denunciation accusing Edmond of secretly carrying letters for Napoleon Bonaparte and place it in the hands of the local prosecutor.

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Harvard Business School Professor Matthew Weinzierl joined us on Network Capital to talk about why the space economy is much more woven into daily life than people realise. GPS, weather forecasting, satellite comms, disaster response, precision farming, and the timestamps that keep card payments and stock trades honest.

The focus of our conversation was his new book, Space to Grow: Unlocking the Final Economic Frontier. He argues that space is a place. A real economic environment, with geography and scarce real estate, where one operator’s mistake quickly becomes everyone else’s problem.

Once you accept that framing, the questions change. Here is a glimpse of what we discussed:

• Why did US manned spaceflight stagnate for decades after Apollo, and what does that tell us about central planning?

• What changed when NASA’s COTS programme shifted from cost-plus contracts to fixed-price ones in the early 2000s?

• How did the Space Shuttle end up costing roughly $1.5 billion per flight when it was sold as a reusable workhorse?

• Can a government act as a smart anchor customer without crowding out the private innovation it’s trying to seed?

• How do you price a slot in low Earth orbit when supply is finite, and the externalities are shared by everyone?

• Is orbital debris a textbook tragedy of the commons, and if so, who realistically pays to clean it up?

• Should governments tax debris-generating activity the way they tax pollution on Earth?

• When are subsidies for positive spillovers in space justified, and when do they just pick winners?

• Why do commercial space stations keep stalling on a chicken-and-egg problem, and what would actually break it?

• How should property rights work for resources no one can physically guard?

• How is geopolitical competition reshaping the rules of orbit?

• How do you ensure the gains from the space economy are broadly shared rather than captured by a handful of incumbents?

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The plot, despite the book’s reputation for difficulty, is straightforward. Hans Castorp, a calm and well-mannered young engineer from Hamburg, travels to the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim Ziemssen, a soldier recovering at the Berghof, an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium high above the town of Davos. Hans plans to stay three weeks. He stays for seven years.

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What professionals are experiencing today seems different. The anxiety is harder to name and harder to resolve, because it is no longer enough to work harder or perform better. Many people doing everything right are still finding themselves laid off, passed over, or suddenly redundant in ways they did not see coming and could not have prevented. The rules that were supposed to govern how effort translates into security have shifted, and most of us are still operating as though they haven’t.

That is worth sitting with. Because if the old strategies are no longer sufficient, and the old sources of reassurance are no longer reliable, then the question is not how to try harder within a system that is working. It is how to think differently about your professional life within one that has changed

Over the past three years, more than 500,000 technology workers alone have been laid off across hundreds of companies. The pattern is striking not only in scale but in its apparent arbitrariness. At Meta, a memo from Mark Zuckerberg in January 2025 announced that the company would move low performers out faster, in preparation for what he described as an intense year. Thousands of people lost their jobs, many of them employees who had received strong reviews the previous cycle.

What makes the current environment genuinely different from earlier periods of economic disruption is that layoffs no longer correlate neatly with company‑level distress. In previous recessions, workers at struggling firms lost jobs, while workers at profitable ones largely did not. That correlation has broken down. Companies are now cutting headcount as a first‑order strategic tool, used to fund AI investments, satisfy investor pressure for efficiency, or reshape organizational structure, regardless of how individual employees are performing.

When Klarna announced in 2024 that its AI assistant was performing the work of hundreds of customer service agents, it was making a public bet on a strategy that dozens of companies were quietly running in parallel. That bet turned out to be premature. By spring 2025, Klarna was rehiring human workers after customer satisfaction fell and service quality became inconsistent. Its leadership later admitted that cost had been too predominant an evaluation factor. Yet the correction did not undo the disruption to the people who had been displaced in the interim, and it did not slow the broader industry appetite for automation. If anything, it refined it.

The professionals living most anxiously through this period are often those in roles that feel adjacent to what AI can do. Close enough to feel the heat, but far enough that the exact line between “automatable” and “human‑dependent” is unclear. That ambiguity is a core driver of the free floating dread the essay describes.

Understanding these causes does not dissolve the anxiety, but it reframes it usefully. If the instability is structural, then the response needs to be structural too. Not a doubling down on individual performance optimization, but a deliberate effort to make your career a shared project with people you trust. Three things, in particular, are worth building now.

First, reframe your relationship to tenure. Most professionals still carry a mental model in which a stable job is the norm and job searching is the exception, the emergency mode you enter when something goes wrong. That model needs to be inverted. Keeping your CV current, maintaining a loose familiarity with the market, and reserving regular time for reflection and skill development should not be activities you do only in crisis. They should be standing practice, the professional equivalent of physical maintenance. Upskilling should be part of that frame specifically. The roles that will be most resilient in the next several years are the ones whose skills are hardest to replicate cheaply and at scale. Staying close to where your field is moving, and building capabilities that sit at the intersection of technical literacy and human judgment, is one of the most durable investments you can make right now.

Second, invest in peer networks, and do so before you need them. Networks activated in the aftermath of a layoff tend to be thin because they are being built under time pressure and emotional strain. The relationships that actually move the needle on what comes next are usually ones that predate the disruption by months or years. This means staying genuinely connected to former colleagues, being generous with introductions and information when there is nothing immediate in it for you, and contributing to communities of peers who share knowledge honestly about what the market looks like. The value is not just practical, though it is that too. A trusted peer who worked at a company six months ago can tell you things about its culture that no job description will. A well‑placed referral still accounts for a disproportionate share of successful hires at most firms, not because the labor market is fair, but because trust travels through relationships. The second value is psychological. Navigating genuine professional uncertainty alone is much harder than navigating it with a community of people who are facing similar pressures and willing to say so honestly.

Third, begin the gradual construction of income streams that do not depend on any single employer. This idea tends to provoke resistance, partly from exhaustion and partly from the reasonable sense that not everyone has the bandwidth or capital to build a side business. The point is not to build a side business. The point is to begin, incrementally, to reduce the concentration of your financial life in a single source. The creator economy, now estimated at well over 250 billion dollars globally, is increasingly made up of professionals who have converted specific expertise into something that earns independently, such as paid newsletters, courses, template libraries, or consulting arrangements maintained alongside full time employment. None of these is built quickly. Most require one to three years of consistent effort before they generate meaningful income. That timeline is precisely why starting during stability matters. The professionals who enter a period of disruption with even a modest secondary income stream are in a categorically different position from those who are starting from zero when the disruption arrives.

Career anxiety, honestly confronted, is a rational response to a genuinely unstable environment. The goal is not to eliminate it through positive thinking or relentless productivity. It is to reduce the underlying vulnerability that makes the instability so threatening. That means building, steadily and before you need it, the kind of professional life that can absorb a shock without collapsing under it, whether that shock comes from a layoff at a profitable firm, a pivot toward AI‑driven workflows, or a broader market shift.

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Today, we are going to dive into Nikolai Gogol's masterpiece Dead Souls. Readers of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake will recognise the author's name. The novel's protagonist, Gogol Ganguli, is named after him because his father had been reading a Gogol story on the night he survived a train accident. The name stays with him into adulthood, where it sits awkwardly between its literary weight and its oddness as an everyday first name, sometimes mistaken now for something closer to Google.

Gogol wrote Dead Souls in the early 1840s, a period when Russia still lived under serfdom but had begun to organise itself through paperwork, censuses, and official records. The country’s wealth and social order rested on the ownership of serfs, who were counted every few years in a government audit known as the revision. Between revisions, the registered count remained fixed, even as people were born, married, moved, or died. Land, labour, and status were rooted in an older, feudal order, yet increasingly defined on paper by the state. Gogol recognised what this produced: a setting in which documents could carry more weight than lived experience, and in which conduct was shaped as much by appearances and advantage as by any deeper sense of responsibility.

The novel follows Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a minor official who arrives in a provincial town with polite manners and an air of purpose. He calls on the governor, dines with the police chief, charms the postmaster, and within a few days has been received as a man of consequence, though no one can quite say where his consequence comes from. His project is at once ingenious and absurd. He seeks to purchase from landowners the legal rights to serfs who have died since the last census but who remain registered as living. These so-called souls still exist on paper, and the landowners must continue paying tax on them until the next revision corrects the record. To be relieved of that burden, even at a small price, is for many of them a quiet relief. For Chichikov, the same names carry a different value. Registered serfs could be used as collateral against state-backed loans, and a man who appeared to own several hundred of them could borrow against that paper wealth, settle himself on a distant estate, and pass into the gentry without ever having farmed an acre. The premise carries the faint logic of a financial instrument, yet it rests entirely on the gap between fact and record.

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In August 1602, a maid named Neeltgen Cornelis invested 100 guilders, saved on wages of 50 cents a day, in the Dutch East India Company, a venture that sent ships across the Indian Ocean to trade in nutmeg, mace and cloves. She was among 1,143 people to participate in what historians recognize as the world’s first initial public offering. The company’s charter had declared that any resident of the Dutch lands could buy shares, with no minimum or maximum investment. That principle, of universalized access to ownership in a productive enterprise, is what every IPO since has inherited, and what India, four centuries later, has taken further than any country on earth.

In 2025, India produced 367 new listings, accounting for 28.4% of all IPO activity globally, more than the United States, China, and Hong Kong by deal count. India’s arrival at this position required decades of institutional building. In 1991, facing a balance of payments crisis, the government dismantled the License Raj and opened the economy to market forces. Capital markets were reformed, SEBI was formally empowered as a market regulator, the National Stock Exchange was established, and foreign institutional investors were allowed to participate in Indian equity markets.

What the 1991 reforms also did, unintentionally, was create a new dependency. India’s capital markets became driven by foreign institutional investors who would pile in and drive share prices up, resulting in multiple IPOs taking place. When that foreign liquidity was inevitably withdrawn and deployed elsewhere, IPO activity would cease. In their 2002 paper “IPO Market Cycles: Booms and Busts in New Issues Activity,” economists Michelle Lowry and G. William Schwert showed that IPO waves sustain themselves through the information each successful listing generates for the next company in line. India ran this cycle repeatedly through the 1990s and 2000s, each boom imported on foreign capital, each correction arriving when that capital left.

The structural shift of the past decade has changed the source of the fuel. The share of domestic investments in Indian listings reached nearly 75% in 2025, the highest for any year in which proceeds exceeded one trillion rupees. India’s GDP has grown at one of the fastest rates of any large economy. Its manufacturing base is expanding as global companies diversify supply chains away from China. A middle class that did not meaningfully exist in 1991 now drives consumption and savings in equal measure. Global companies are rushing to list their local business units in India, lured by a valuation premium.

Of the 367 listings in 2025, 270 came from small and medium enterprises, a category of companies that has almost no equivalent IPO pathway in comparable markets. IPO fundraising accounts for 49% of all private capital exits in India, against 9% in the United States and 13% in Europe. The public market is load-bearing in India’s economy in a way it has never been required to be in countries with deep private equity and venture capital ecosystems.

Sometime in the coming months, Reliance Industries is expected to file paperwork to bring Reliance Jio public. Investment bankers have estimated Jio’s valuation between $130 billion and $170 billion. The offering would be the largest in Indian history. It would be absorbed almost entirely by a domestic investor base that in 1991 was largely locked out of the markets it is now expected to anchor. Analysts have been cautious about predicting the listing’s reception, but broadly agree that the pipeline it represents reflects a market built on stronger foundations than any previous cycle.

Neeltgen Cornelis, the maid who invested her savings in a company headed to the Indian Ocean, could not have imagined that the country at the end of that voyage would one day lead the world in the financial instrument she helped inaugurate. The Dutch East India Company’s voyages to the Indian Ocean were about extracting value from the subcontinent. India’s IPO market, four centuries later, is about distributing it.

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His career unfolded during a period of political upheaval, from the aftermath of the 1857 Revolt to the rise of Gandhi and the communal and agrarian tensions of the interwar years. In 1921, he resigned from the colonial education service in response to Gandhi’s call and thereafter supported himself precariously through editorial work, a small printing press, and a brief, unsuccessful period in the Bombay film industry. He died in 1936 at the age of fifty-six, shortly after completing the novel now widely regarded as his finest.

The Novel: Godaan

At the centre of Godaan is Hori Mahato, a tenant farmer in a village in the United Provinces whose ‘dream’ is to own a cow. For him, it represents a small increase in dignity.

From this simple desire, Premchand builds a slow and deliberate tragedy. Hori buys a cow on credit from a neighbour. Soon after, his younger brother poisons it out of jealousy. To protect the brother from prosecution and thus preserve the family’s honour, Hori must pay bribes to officials. These payments force him into debt, and each loan leads to another. The novel traces, almost transaction by transaction, how Hori’s attempt to own a cow turns into an expanding cycle of loans, penalties, and obligations.

Premchand avoids melodrama. There are no clear villains. The landlord is not cruel, but distracted and burdened by his own concerns. The priest who collects ritual fees appears sincere in his beliefs. Even the village council, which punishes Hori for his son’s actions, consists of men who are otherwise his companions. Oppression here is ordinary, familiar, and sustained by the very people it harms.

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Paine arrived in November 1774 with almost nothing. Within months, he was editing the Pennsylvania Magazine. A year later, he had written the most consequential political document in the history of the American republic. He was a man the colonies had never seen before and, in certain ways, have rarely seen since. An outsider with no rank, no wealth, no militia, and no institutional standing of any kind, whose only instrument was the quality of his argument.

That turns out to have been enough.

January 10, 1776

The timing of Common Sense was not accidental. Paine had coordinated its release with the arrival, in Philadelphia bookshops, of King George III’s speech to Parliament. It was a speech that slammed the door on any remaining possibility of negotiation.

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Van der Vat was a Dutch-British journalist and naval historian who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands and went on to become a foreign correspondent for The Times, opening bureaux in South Africa and Germany before moving to The Guardian as its Chief Foreign Leader-writer. He was not a military romantic. He had spent his professional life watching governments convince themselves they had no choice and then living with the consequences of that conviction. His first book, The Grand Scuttle, grew from a chance visit to the Orkney Islands, where he became fascinated by the 1919 scuttling of the Kaiser’s fleet at Scapa Flow, an act of naval self-destruction that nobody had yet properly explained. That set the pattern for everything that followed. Van der Vat was drawn to the naval episode that seemed purely military on its surface but revealed, on examination, a story about the catastrophic distance between what decision-makers believed they were doing and what they were actually setting in motion.

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Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, serializing it in his own literary journal, All the Year Round. By that point, he had already secured his reputation as the defining voice of Victorian social conscience, having produced Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and David Copperfield. The novel arrived during a period of considerable European anxiety, with revolutions still raw in cultural memory and class tensions simmering across the continent. Dickens drew directly from Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution, a history he claimed to have read hundreds of times, and from his own stage performance in Wilkie Collins’s The Frozen Deep, a play about self-sacrifice that seeded the moral core of the story. A Tale of Two Cities remains among the best-selling novels in recorded publishing history, and one that speaks to the times we live in.

The novel opens in 1775 with one of the most famous sentences in the English language.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

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John Mackey built one of the most recognisable brands in American retail history. From a single natural foods store in Austin, Texas in 1980, he grew Whole Foods Market into a 550-store chain that redefined how a generation of Americans thought about what they ate, a company ultimately acquired by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. By any conventional measure, he had made something of himself. The bitter irony is that in doing so, he managed to wound both of the people whose approval he most wanted, disappointing the mother who thought him capable of better, and betraying the father who had believed in him from the start.

Margaret Mackey was, in her own right, a remarkable woman. Raised in Bastrop, Texas during the 1920s and 30s, deep in the Baptist Bible Belt, she smoked, drank, gambled, and danced, habits that invited condemnation in a community built on propriety and piety. She was college-educated at a time when that was genuinely rare for women, and she wore her intelligence with pride. It shaped everything about how she understood a good life. Education was the gateway to it, and professional respectability was its proof.

It was precisely this conviction that put her on a collision course with her son. When Mackey dropped out of college to pursue his passion for natural foods, Margaret was unable to reconcile his choices with her vision of what his potential demanded. “You have such a good mind and you could do anything with it,” she would tell him on his visits home. “Law. Medicine. Finance. Politics. What are you doing wasting your great potential being a grocer?” The criticism was painful, but Mackey held his ground. He believed he was doing exactly what he was meant to do.

His relationship with his father was warmer and less combative than with his mother, and for good reason. Bill Mackey was an original investor in Whole Foods, and for nearly fifteen years he served on the board and as his son’s closest mentor. Mackey largely deferred to him. “Before then, I pretty much did whatever my dad suggested,” he has said. The two were genuinely close, their bond built on shared investment in the same fragile enterprise.

The fracture, when it came, was philosophical rather than personal. Bill Mackey was shaped by the Great Depression and had spent his adult life in fear of another financial disaster, favouring caution and the conservation of cash above all else. His son, watching Whole Foods grow, wanted something altogether different, pushing to reinvest aggressively and pursue expansion without hesitation. The tension became most visible during the 1992 IPO, when his father urged him to sell company stock. Mackey trusted him and obliged, and later came to deeply regret it. From that point, he knew the mentorship was over in everything but name.

In 1994, after nearly fifteen years of his father’s involvement, Mackey asked him to leave the board. He encouraged his father to sell half his remaining shares and simply watch what happened to the other half. Whole Foods doubled in stock price over the following year. The decision, painful as it was, had been vindicated almost immediately. “That was the most difficult thing I ever did,” Mackey has said. “It took all the courage I had. I love my dad so much, and it hurt him so badly.”

What neither man knew at the time was that the emotional rigidity and uncharacteristic outbursts Mackey had noticed in his father were not mere stubbornness. A year after leaving the board, Bill Mackey was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Mackey later realised the signs had already been present, that what he had taken for irrational conservatism was the early onset of a devastating disease. They did eventually reconcile, but the knowledge arrived too late to undo the pain of that boardroom conversation, and added a layer of retrospective grief to what had already been his hardest professional decision.

The Lasting Regret

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This week, I interviewed Santanu Bhattacharya, a management consultant turned award-winning novelist. Check out the episode to learn how he nurtured his love for writing while having a full-time job, how he cracked the opaque publishing market in the UK, and what led him to quit his job.

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These are challenging times for many people, but the quote below puts things in perspective.

“The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.”— Alain de Botton

Women in Love: D.H. Lawrence

England in 1913 was a country vibrating at a frequency it could barely sustain. The industrial north churned out coal and steel and a particular kind of human being: hollowed by labour, shaped by machinery, estranged from the land and from himself. The old class structures held, just barely, like ice in March. Meanwhile, Freud had begun publishing, the suffragettes were in the streets, and a generation of young artists sensed that the Victorian moral framework had become a cage dressed up as a cathedral.

Into this charged atmosphere came D.H. Lawrence, a coal miner’s son from Nottinghamshire who had climbed out of the working class through sheer intellectual ferocity. He was slender, red-bearded, frequently ill with tuberculosis, and burning with a kind of visionary intensity that unnerved almost everyone he met. He had already published Sons and Lovers in 1913, a largely autobiographical novel about the suffocating pull of maternal love, and The Rainbow in 1915, which was seized by the police and declared obscene. Women in Love, written alongside The Rainbow as a kind of twin volume, would take another five years to find a publisher, eventually appearing in 1920 in a private edition in New York.

Lawrence wrote it during the First World War, a fact that saturates every page. He watched the war from a distance, barred from service by his health, and what he saw confirmed his darkest suspicions: that Western civilisation had arrived at a point of terminal self-destruction, that the rational, industrial, democratic project had produced a culture capable of sending millions of men into the mud to die for abstractions. Women in Love is his reckoning with that horror. It is a love story set at the edge of an abyss.

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We are not short of wars. We are short of the patience to inhabit another person’s story long enough to find them irreplaceable

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Middlemarch

In 1869, Mary Ann Evans, who published under the name George Eliot to be taken seriously in a world that dismissed female intellect, sat down to write what would become, in the estimation of Virginia Woolf and nearly every critic since, the greatest novel in the English language. She was fifty years old. Her partner of two decades, the philosopher George Henry Lewes, was ailing. The optimism of mid-Victorian England with its faith in progress, in science, in the reforming power of good institutions, had begun to curdle into something more anxious and uncertain. The Reform Act had expanded the vote, the railways had collapsed the country into itself, and Darwin had unsettled the cosmos. Everything, in other words, was changing, and nobody quite knew into what.

Evans was a woman who had lived, by the standards of her age, scandalously: she had abandoned Christianity, lived openly with a married man she could not legally wed, and built one of the most formidable intellectual reputations in Europe. She understood, from intimate experience, what it cost a person to want more than the world was prepared to give them. That understanding is the engine of Middlemarch.

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.”

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Would you consider tying your shoelaces an achievement? If you’re able-bodied, probably not. Now imagine doing it with one hand, or no hands at all. Suddenly it is. Fewer than 10,000 people have stood on the summit of Everest. It takes months of training and tests the limits of human endurance. However, if you helicoptered to the top, stepped out for a photograph, and flew back down, would that be an achievement? The outcome is the same. Same summit. Same view, but most of us would not consider it an achievement.

A new kind of helicopter has now arrived. Artificial intelligence can draft reports, write software, compose correspondence, and generate ideas in a matter of seconds.

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Dr. Zhivago

There is a scene near the middle of Doctor Zhivago that is hard to move past. Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet of uncommon gifts, sits in a frozen house in the Ural mountains as a civil war rages outside. He can hear the artillery. He has almost nothing to eat. And yet he writes poems by candlelight — love poems, nature poems, poems about rowan trees bending under snow. He cannot help it. The poems are are simply what a human being does when the human being is still, against all odds, intact.

Boris Pasternak published Doctor Zhivago in 1957 in Italy, because no Soviet press would touch it. The manuscript had been written in secret over a decade, during the years of terror, during the purges that swallowed Pasternak’s friends and colleagues whole. He handed it to an Italian publisher with the calm finality of a man who had made his peace. “You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad,” he reportedly told him. He was not entirely joking.

The Soviet authorities understood immediately what Pasternak had done. Doctor Zhivago is not a political tract; there are no speeches against communism, no manifestos. But it commits a deeper heresy. It insists that a human life, with its loves, its doubts, its private loyalties, matters more than the abstract logic of history.

For a revolutionary state built on the opposite premise, that was unforgivable.

The novel follows Zhivago across the convulsions that remade Russia in the early twentieth century. He begins life as a child of Moscow’s educated class, orphaned early but raised among cultured people who believe in books, music, and the quiet dignity of professional work. Zhivago becomes a doctor. He writes poetry on the side. He marries Tonya, the daughter of his adoptive family, and for a moment it seems possible that Russia’s coming storms might pass without entirely destroying the private world.

Then comes the war.

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