The Death You're Avoiding

These words have haunted me: creative destruction. Originating from economics, it traditionally refers to new innovations supplanting old ones, like Netflix replacing Blockbuster. A classic “out with the old, in with the new”. Which leads us, naturally, to Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, a man who was a bit of a bastard.

Haussmann was responsible for renovating Paris between 1853 and 1870 under Emperor Napoleon III, but Paris was not at all like it is today. He resorted to tearing down old, cholera-filled, crowded medieval streets so he could install wide boulevards, parks, sewers, and the uniform stone buildings many of you know and love today. It wasn’t a pretty process, to say the least, but it worked.

The exact economic definition of creative destruction interests me less than its oxymoronic quality. How can destruction be creative?

In a world where more and more people are taking on mortality as a challenge to be solved rather than a reality to be accepted—and where AI may compress centuries’ worth of technological change into a few decades—I think we can stretch the notion of creative destruction beyond economics.

To me, Paris felt like a good place to start.

Oddly enough, much of the Paris that people now desperately try to preserve and freeze in amber exists because Haussmann refused to preserve the Paris he inherited. The descendants of the reluctant inheritors of his city became its staunchest preservationists, and despite that, like any city, Paris continues to evolve.

One of the hardest things to wrestle with about creative destruction is not really how it works (pretty simple) but reckoning with how often and where it happens.

For starters, it’s more helpful to treat creation and destruction less as opposites than as yin-yang complements; two volatile, unpredictable forces that are constantly bouncing off each another. Don’t just take it from me, just look at the world’s most popular religions. They tend to treat creative destruction as a feature, not a bug.

The Abrahamic religions, Hinduism, Buddhism – all of them acknowledge this unsettling dynamic. Buddhism places impermanence near the center of existence by teaching that much of our suffering comes from demanding permanence from things that were never permanent to begin with, yet we demand. In Hinduism, Shiva is the destroyer and transformer in the trinity, known as the Trimurti. His cosmic dance, called Tandava, balances creation and destruction to keep the universe moving in endless cycles of time, like two counterweights.

In John 12:24, Jesus said (bear with me, people): “very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

It’s such a tried and true cliché that it forms the plot of approximately all half the movies you’ve ever seen.

Your own retirement fund depends on a less poetic version of this same vicious dynamic. Owning index funds in the S&P 500, for example, does not mean you own some part of an immortal pantheon of America’s greatest corporations (womp womp). Instead, you own an index that tends to grow over time (at a pretty damn good rate) precisely because companies rise, fall, and get kicked out for something better — a better vehicle for growth. The average company went from lasting around 30 years in in the index in the 1960s to only around 15 years nowadays. Again, the classic “if you’re not growing, you’re dying”.

This isn’t even that harsh compared to evolution. Morgan Housel writes “evolution is ruthless and unforgiving. It doesn’t teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn’t.” You don’t really get the chance to even be put on a performance improvement plan.

And you can most definitely apply this to your own silly little life (just like mine!). I previously wrote about the things you should kill — your darlings, your worldview, and your status; parts of you that you once deemed useful but no longer serve you, at least in the same capacity.

If this whole thing is causing panic to slowly swell from your rib cage into your chest, there is a mildly irritating irony here (don’t hit me plz): one of the better ways to deal with both panic and creative destruction is acceptance: “it is the search for the exit that convinces our protection system (fight/flight) that there is a problem; this causes the fight/flight to kick in to protect us from that problem.” The only way out is through, to let it consume you.

Neither you nor I are grand enough to stop the millions of decisions, discoveries, accidents, inventions, failures, births, deaths, mergers, breakups, migrations and mutations happening simultaneously around us all at once that will, at some point, land on a new revolution that changes everything_{, like the McChicken}. We can’t just pull a Thanos-move of snapping our fingers to control this.

However, please don’t misunderstand me either — this is not an appeal to surrender, or to curl up into a little fatalistic ball while Sam Altman steals your job. It is an appeal to try and recognize, make peace, and navigate patterns that have been around long before either of us arrived, and will continue to be. “History does not repeat, but it rhymes.”

Haussmann famously ordered the demolition of his own childhood home in Paris as part of his reconstruction efforts.

And then there’s Robert Moses, New York’s famously ruthless master builder, who mostly demolished other people’s homes, avoiding Haussmann’s fate.

Whether you are more like Haussmann or Moses, or more of a passenger on this boat, progress has a sour taste to it when it’s suffering that’s close to you.

So none of this means destruction is inherently good or absolves cruelty, displacement, war, or our very human tendency to gussy up somebody else’s suffering as “progress.” As my mom would say, it’s kind of like putting lipstick on a pig.

Nor does it mean when we are condemned to some singular, hopeless path where everything good must first be fed through a wood chipper.

Take cancer. I don’t know if you saw recently, but a mRNA cancer vaccine developed by Moderna and Merck successfully prevented advanced melanoma from returning or spreading in a landmark Phase 3 trial. HUGE.

For much of the history of modern medicine, some of our most effective weapons against cancer, like chemotherapy and radiation, kill cancer cells but inevitably damage healthy tissue as a cost. But these newer approaches, from targeted therapies to immunotherapy and experimental mRNA cancer vaccines, are hopeful steps forward.

To me, creative destruction reveals more of the fact that creation usually comes with costs, but it doesn’t always necessitate destruction, nor its maximization.

Civilization constantly gravitates towards chaos, as biology does atrophy and physics does entropy, but little by little, as we get better at creating, we can get better at minimizing destruction. And despite it all, there’s a beauty to the unpredictable path forward.

We stand not only on the shoulders of giants, but on the beautiful, glowing ashes of past, alien worlds that were once our own.

Through the chaos, as the next wave comes, I find an odd solace in the words of historian Ada Palmer on how none of us can control the downstream consequences of creation, but we trust in the good that may come of it:

“Trains and bicycles come in, and we get feminism because it's easier for people, especially women, to move freely and independently. They can organize. They can mobilize. We get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women's liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes.”

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

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