Manifesto: The Inertia We Carry

There is a quiet tragedy in the way we approach commitment. It’s not loud or dramatic, but it’s pervasive—woven into the fabric of our lives, unnoticed in the hum of our day-to-day routines. Humans, for all their brilliance, seem to resist commitment like a force of nature, and this resistance isn’t simply a matter of personal failure. It’s a collective inertia that stretches across society, where decisions linger, desires fade, and intentions become little more than echoes of dreams that never quite materialized.

Consider this: we know what we want. We know the big things—climbing a mountain, running a marathon, traveling the world, becoming an artist, a writer, a creator. But even with the clarity of vision, we falter. The simplest commitments become mountains in themselves, as we wrangle with our emotions, the fears of the unknown, and the crushing weight of our own inaction. Our minds, clever as they are, are slow to pull the trigger, caught in the uncertainty of a world too vast, too complex, and too demanding.

We delay. We postpone. And before we know it, months have passed, years have flown by, and we find ourselves standing in the same place, dreaming of the same things, but without having taken a single step towards them. It’s not laziness; it’s not a lack of desire. It’s something deeper—something structural in our very psychology. We are programmed for survival, not for commitment. The systems that have kept us alive for millennia are not necessarily optimized for living the life we dream of.

Now imagine if, instead of wrestling with ourselves, we were more like the machines we have so enthusiastically created. A computer, after all, makes decisions with a level of consistency and commitment that humans could scarcely hope to match. A machine isn’t bogged down by doubt, by emotion, or by the fear of regret. It performs tasks with exactitude, staying true to its code, executing without hesitation. There is a kind of beauty in this, a grace in the certainty with which the computer moves through its instructions. A machine doesn’t waste time wondering if it’s making the right decision. It simply commits.

What if we, as humans, could be more like this? What if we could tap into the same simplicity and efficiency in our decision-making? What if we could outsource the commitment part to a machine—a cold, emotionless entity that simply sees the facts and acts on them without hesitation? Imagine the possibilities.

We might actually start living the lives we want to live. The long-awaited novel might be written, not next year, but tomorrow. The dream of traveling the world might become a reality, not in five years, but in the next month. We would no longer be plagued by the endless cycle of pre-commitment contemplation, forever paralyzed by the fear of the unknown. Instead, we could act, and in acting, we would realize the potential that sits dormant within us, waiting for the moment when we finally decide to leap.

This isn’t a call to abandon our humanity, to strip away the complexities of our emotions or our sense of self. On the contrary, it’s a recognition of those complexities—a recognition that, despite our best efforts, we have yet to find a way to make decisions and act with the speed and decisiveness that our dreams demand. Technology, for all its flaws, offers us a model for what’s possible: a world in which we stop deliberating, stop doubting, and simply start doing.

There is a kind of elegance in this. It’s the elegance of a life that doesn’t wait for permission, that doesn’t hesitate in the face of uncertainty. A life that trusts itself, its purpose, and the simple power of making decisions and acting on them.

In a sense, we are caught in a loop of delay, ever delaying the action that might unlock the life we’ve always wanted. But the solution is not to abandon hope or resign ourselves to endless waiting. The solution is to learn from the machines—those perfect, emotionless agents of action—and let them guide us into the future we’ve long dreamed of, but never quite reached.

- Randy Perecman