Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 13, 2026
I spent sixteen minutes yesterday talking into my phone about quantum mechanics, and by the end of it I was talking about my life. I did not plan that. It is generally how these things go.
I had been reading Robert Lanza's Biocentrism, which argues that consciousness is not a byproduct of the universe but a precondition for it — that observation is what turns possibility into a thing that is actually somewhere. It is a bold claim and a contested one, and I want to walk through why before I get to the part that ambushed me.
The standard objection to consciousness having anything to do with quantum measurement is that "observer" in physics does not mean a person. It means an interaction. A detector clicks. No mind required.
The response I kept arriving at, on my own, in the car: the detector is never the end of the line. Somebody eventually reads it. You can put a machine between the experiment and the human, but you have not removed the human — you have just moved him back a step and put furniture in the way.
It turns out this is not an original thought, which I discovered with a mix of vindication and deflation. It is roughly the von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. Von Neumann demonstrated that the dividing line between the quantum system and the classical observer can be placed anywhere along the chain without altering any prediction. Wigner drew the conclusion that it terminates in consciousness, and built a thought experiment around a colleague sealed in a lab who has a definite result while, from outside the door, he does not yet.
So the intuition is respectable. It also has two problems I would rather state than skip.
The first is Roger Penrose's, and it is fatal to the simple version. Collapse was evidently happening for billions of years before anything existed that could observe it — stars forming, chemistry running, the long biological climb that eventually produced observers. If consciousness causes collapse, consciousness caused the conditions that produced consciousness. My chain of "somebody eventually looks" does not reach back that far.
The second is decoherence. The machine in the middle is not a placeholder for a person; it is where the physics happens. Once which-path information leaks into the environment, interference is gone, and it stays gone whether or not the record is ever read.
What survives is smaller but real: decoherence explains why interference vanishes without fully explaining why one particular outcome happens rather than the others. The measurement problem is genuinely open. Wigner himself backed away from his own position later. So I hold the intuition loosely, and I notice that I want it to be true, which is usually a sign to hold something more loosely still.
Then I remembered something about grandfather clocks and could not place where I had read it.
It is Christiaan Huygens, 1665. He was ill in bed with two pendulum clocks mounted on a shared beam, and he noticed over several days that they had settled into a perfectly opposed rhythm — one swinging left as the other swung right, holding that relationship indefinitely. He called it an odd kind of sympathy. It is now understood as the founding observation of coupled oscillation, the same mechanism behind fireflies flashing together and heart cells beating as one.
Here is the part I had forgotten, and it is the part that matters.
The clocks do not synchronize through the air. They synchronize through the beam. Tiny vibrations pass from each clock into the wood, and each clock feels the other's rhythm through the thing they are both mounted on. Take them off the shared beam and set them on separate walls, and they drift apart forever, no matter how close together they are in the room.
Alignment is not a property of the clocks. It is a property of what they are sitting on.
Which is where the recording stopped being about physics.
I have done a lot of different things. I ran a newspaper in college and another one after. I practiced law and made payroll for ten people. I was a federal prosecutor. I have worked in policy. I write songs and put them out. Now I build software, and I write, and I am starting a coaching venture.
The private worry underneath that list — the one I finally said out loud into a phone because nobody was listening — is that it is a list rather than a direction. That a life of many things is a life that never quite aligned in one. That I have been a polymath in the flattering sense and a dilettante in the accurate one.
I have carried that quietly for a long time. And I think the clocks just answered it, in a way I did not see coming.
I was looking for alignment in the wrong layer. I was looking for it in the form of the work — one career, one title, one line on a business card — and that is the room, not the beam. Two clocks on separate walls can be inches apart and share nothing.
So the real question is not why haven't I picked one thing. It is what am I mounted on.
And when I actually look at it, the answer is embarrassingly consistent.
The company I built exists so that teams own their automation instead of renting a black box they are not allowed to inspect. The product underneath it captures your own expertise and hands it back to you as something you control. The free tools I put out run entirely in your browser, because I did not want anybody's data leaving their machine to use them. The venture I am starting is about entrepreneurs keeping their values at the center rather than outsourcing them to whatever the market rewards. Two weeks ago I pulled a stack of articles I wrote in my twenties off a decaying corner of the Internet Archive and put them on a domain I own. Last week I spent an afternoon reclaiming the first page of my own name from companies that had made a business out of it.
That is not six things. It is one thing, six times: do not surrender custody of what matters to you.
It has been the beam the whole time. I just kept auditing the clocks.
I am wary of tidy endings, so let me be careful about what I am and am not claiming.
I am not claiming that every scattered career has a secret unity, and I am not claiming that noticing yours resolves anything by itself. Huygens' clocks still had to keep ticking. The beam does not wind them.
But it does mean the question most of us ask ourselves is malformed. What should I be doing with my life assumes the answer is a category — a job, a field, a direction on a map, something out there to be chosen and moved toward. That is the same error I have been writing about all week: the farmer selling the land to look for the diamonds, the pilgrim traveling toward a kingdom he was already standing in, the soup can nobody thought to look at.
The alignment is not out there waiting to be selected. It is underneath, already load-bearing, doing its work whether or not you have named it.
Which is fortunate, because you cannot go get one. You can only go look at what you are already sitting on — and then, having seen it, stop apologizing for the shape of the clocks.