The responsibility lies not just with those who spread misinformation but with all of us who choose whether to nurture it or call it out for what it is: A betrayal of trust for the sake of likes and shares.

The evidence is clear, four hours of deep work is not a limitation to be overcome but a natural threshold to be respected. The question isn't whether we can push beyond it but why we keep trying to force ourselves into an artificial schedule that serves neither our best interests nor those of our clients and employers.

I remember the exact moment I realized we were in trouble. I was watching what should have been an absurd scene, a respected astronomer, their decades of research and observation reduced to a mere "perspective," forced to debate a flat Earth conspiracy theorist as if both viewpoints deserved equal consideration. The host, in what they surely thought was admirable fairness, insisted that the audience respect both sides equally. That their individual "expertise" held the same weight.

Most of us are just a few misfortunes away from losing everything we've built. Our towers aren't nearly as sturdy as we pretend, our foundations not nearly as solid as we believe. Yet we can't – or won't – see it, because acknowledging this truth would mean confronting our own vulnerability, our own potential to fall. The question isn't whether we'll learn empathy, but when.

The scratch was nothing, barely a graze from a dried branch while retrieving a golf ball from the rough. No blood, not even broken skin. Just a faint red line across my leg. But in that moment, my mind launched into overdrive, constructing an elaborate scenario of flesh-eating bacteria, of tissue deteriorating hour by hour, of death creeping through my body before I could make it home. On the outside, I continued playing, swinging clubs and tracking balls across the fairway and into the rough. Inside, I was drowning in terror.