How the World Actually Works (And the Only Lever You Have)

I grew up in a small village. For most of my life there, "how the world works" meant whatever the village could see: which jobs were realistic, which ambitions were embarrassing, which decisions counted as reckless. I left, and the world kept correcting me. A factory shift at 16 corrected me. University corrected me. Moving abroad corrected me. Quitting a six-figure job at 27 corrected me again. Every time I thought I finally understood how things worked, the walls turned out to be smaller than I'd assumed.

Last week I watched a two-hour conversation on The Diary of a CEO that did it once more, this time not about careers or startups but about power, war, and what's actually running underneath both. It reminded me of a story that is 2,400 years old and explains my own life better than anything I've written about it so far: Plato's Allegory of the Cave.

The Cave I Didn't Know I Was In

Plato's version goes like this: prisoners have been chained in a cave since childhood, forced to face a wall. Behind them a fire burns, and people pass in front of it carrying objects, throwing shadows onto the wall the prisoners face. The prisoners have never seen anything else. To them, the shadows aren't a representation of reality. The shadows are reality, full stop, because reality is whatever you've been positioned to see. (Plato, via the Republic, Book VII)

One prisoner gets freed. Dragged toward the fire and then out into daylight, and it hurts: his eyes aren't built for that much light yet. He adjusts slowly. First shadows, then reflections in water, then the objects themselves, finally the sun. He understands, for the first time, that the wall he spent his life staring at was never the whole story. It was the smallest, dimmest part of it.

Then he goes back to tell the others. And this is the part of the story people skip: he can't see in the dark anymore either. To the prisoners still chained to the wall, his stumbling looks like proof that leaving is dangerous. Proof the cave was the safer bet all along.

I recognize both of those prisoners. The one who left the village to find out how big the actual room was: a Silicon Valley-backed scale-up, teaching AI to executives at Católica Lisbon, building products from Zurich and Lisbon instead of the town I started in, all things that from inside a small village don't just sound unrealistic, they sound made up. And the one still adjusting, because you never fully arrive. Every new room turns out to have another wall in it that used to look like the whole world.

The Room Above the Room

The conversation I watched covers a lot of ground. Why wars keep recurring. Who actually holds power at the scale of nations. Why most of that sits outside any individual's reach, no matter how informed or well-resourced they get. And it covers something much harder to argue with data: the idea that we don't experience the world as separate, disconnected observers. That what looks like "the totality of things" from any one seat is, underneath, one thing looking at itself from billions of angles.

I'm not going to pretend that claim is provable the way a conversion-rate lift is provable. It isn't. It's a belief, and people have held versions of it for millennia, not because anyone ran an experiment but because of what it does to the only two responses available to a world this size.

As Above, So Below: Why You Can't Fix a War

There's an old phrase for this, older than the cave story even: as above, so below. Whatever pattern shows up at the scale of the whole shows up again at the scale of the part. It's usually filed under alchemy and mysticism, and most of what's been built on top of it deserves that filing. But strip the mysticism away and there's a genuinely useful claim left standing: if you are, in any sense, part of the same system as the whole, the system isn't somewhere else, run by someone else, immune to you. You're inside it. Your character is a working piece of it, not a spectator to it.

Which changes the two questions people actually ask once they feel the size of the world:

• "How do I stop these wars, this system, this mess?" You don't. Not you, not alone, and pretending otherwise is where despair usually starts, because the scoreboard for "did I fix the world" only ever reads zero.
• "Where do I put my time and money to get more of it?" Also, mostly, not up to you, no matter how good your spreadsheet is.

The only question with an answer inside your own two hands is: what kind of person am I choosing to be today, in the room I'm actually standing in?

That's not a slogan. It's close to something Seneca and Marcus Aurelius were already arguing 2,000 years ago, dressed in Roman clothes instead of cosmic ones: separate what you control from what you don't, and stop spending your one unit of agency on the second pile. I've written about running that practice weekly for five years; this is the same math, zoomed out from "my week" to "the world."

What I Actually Do With This

None of this makes the world smaller. Wars still happen for reasons that have nothing to do with me. Markets still move for reasons no single founder, however well-funded, controls. What it does is stop the size of the problem from being a reason to do nothing. I can't out-strategize geopolitics. I can decide, this week, whether I'm the kind of person who tells a co-founder an uncomfortable truth on time or a month late. Whether I built something today or just talked about building it. Whether the people around me left a conversation slightly better off than they started it.

That's the actual content of my weekly reflection practice: not "how do I get bigger," but "was I, this week, the person I'm trying to become." It's a small unit of measurement for an enormous claim, and that mismatch in scale is the point. The village taught me the world was small. Leaving it, and eventually walking away from a job most people would have kept, taught me it was much bigger than I'd been shown. This is the correction after that one: the world is bigger than any of us, and still, somehow, the only lever that's actually yours is the size of one person, doing one thing, today.

The cave story doesn't end with everyone leaving. Most of the prisoners never do. That's not a tragedy to fix from the outside. It's just the shape of the thing. The only part of the story anyone actually controls is whether they walk toward the light once the chains come off, and what they do with their eyes once they can finally see.