The 2020s are obsessed with existential risk, but most people don’t live in the vocabulary of ontology or cosmic tail events. They live in “can I eat today?”
That’s not a contradiction—that’s the point.
Existential concerns aren’t abstract. They’re embodied.
They’re:
Existentiality is not abstraction. It’s what happens when abstraction becomes embodied care. And when you live it—really live it—it looks a lot like...
The daily grind. The rhythm of subsistence.
The woman waking before dawn to cook, commute, care.
The man working night shifts and watching his kid sleep.
Operational life is where meaning lands.
But this layer is brittle. You can survive today, but what about tomorrow?
Here comes the game of sustainability.
Strategy is the anticipatory structure behind operations.
But strategy operates under uncertainty—never full knowledge.
It’s always a gamble. You get a strategy wrong, the whole operational layer collapses.
Strategy sits on the knife’s edge of information and uncertainty.
It tries to tilt the odds, but it never guarantees the outcome.
This layer feeds strategy, but never fully satisfies it.
Information is not truth. It’s fragmentary, noisy, incomplete.
Too much = paralysis. Too little = blunders.
It’s a dangerous drug:
Thus, information is potential.
But...
The moment potential collapses into necessity.
Where the luxury of analysis is gone.
It’s what a jazz pianist does mid-improvisation.
It’s a medic choosing who to save.
It’s the punch thrown, the bridge burned, the word said.
Improvisation is not anti-existential. It is the existential in motion.
Tactics do not wait.
And therefore, tactical improvisation is where every other layer gets tested.