The needle’s tip, sterilized by a flame that flickered 11 times in the draft, finally found the edge of the cedar sliver. It was a minute, jagged intruder, perhaps only 1 millimeter long, yet it had managed to dictate the entire rhythm of my morning. There is a specific, sharp clarity that comes from focused pain, a narrowing of the world down to a single point on the thumb. As the wood finally slid free, leaving a tiny, clean well of red, I realized that most of our modern problems are exactly like this splinter: small, structural failures that we ignore while we try to build towers that reach the clouds. We are so obsessed with the height of the spire that we forget the integrity of the individual grain.

The Illusion of Expansion

Lily J.-C. knows this better than anyone I’ve ever met. She spends her nights as a moderator for a livestream that frequently peaks at 10001 concurrent viewers. To the people running the show, those numbers are a badge of honor, a metric of success that they can take to investors to prove they are ‘scaling.’ But to Lily J.-C., sitting in a dark room with three monitors, that number is a swarm. It is a chaotic, noisy sea of 21-character insults and 11-second loops of mindless spam. We keep expanding the room, but we’ve stopped checking if the floor can actually hold the weight of all those feet.

This is the core frustration of our era: the confusion of expansion with excellence. We’ve been sold this idea that if something isn’t growing by 31 percent every quarter, it is effectively dying. But look at the splinter. Look at the way a single, tiny misalignment can ruin the function of a hand. If you have a business, or a community, or a piece of software, and you add 111 new features without fixing the 11 original bugs, you haven’t grown. You’ve just increased the surface area of your eventual collapse. I’ve made this mistake myself. Once, in a fit of misplaced ambition, I tried to write 31 articles in 31 days. By day 11, I wasn’t writing anymore; I was just arrangement-recycling, pushing words around like cold peas on a plate, hoping nobody would notice the lack of nutrition. I was scaling my output, and in the process, I was murdering my voice.

Physical Decay and Ancient Honesty

We see this in the physical world, too. Walk through any city that saw a ‘boom’ in the late 1990s or early 2011. You’ll see buildings that were thrown up with the speed of a fever dream, now showing their age in the most pathetic ways. The mortar is crumbling, the bricks are weeping, and the structural integrity is a suggestion rather than a rule. It’s a strange irony that in our rush to be modern, we’ve forgotten the ancient wisdom of the mason. There is a profound honesty in a wall that is built to last 101 years instead of just 11.

When you see a house where the joints are tight and the lines are true, you’re looking at a refusal to take shortcuts. This kind of preservation requires a specific focus on the small stuff-the repointing, the cleaning, the invisible work that keeps the visible work from falling down. If you’re looking at your own home and seeing those warning signs, the slow decay of the exterior, you realize you can’t just paint over it. You need someone like Bricklayer Hastings to actually get into the gaps and restore the strength that the original builders might have rushed. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s the only work that actually matters when the wind starts to howl.

Digital Repointing

I think about Lily J.-C. again, banning her 301st bot of the hour. She is, in a way, doing digital repointing. She is trying to scrape out the rot so the conversation doesn’t collapse entirely. But she’s fighting a losing battle because the platform itself is designed for the rot. It’s designed to reward the loudest, fastest growth, regardless of whether that growth is toxic. We’ve built these massive digital cathedrals on foundations of sand and then we act surprised when the walls start to crack.

I used to think that ‘more’ was always better. I wanted more followers, more projects, more 1-percent gains. But after removing that splinter, I realized that I’d much rather have a hand that works perfectly than a giant monument I can’t even touch because my fingers are too sore from neglected maintenance.

There’s a contrarian angle here that most people hate: stagnation might actually be a form of stewardship. If you stop growing for 51 days to focus on making what you already have 101 percent better, the world calls you a failure. They say you’ve lost your ‘edge.’ But what is an edge if it’s jagged and covered in rust? I would argue that the most radical thing you can do in a world obsessed with ‘more’ is to say ‘this is enough, let’s make it right.’

I remember a time when I thought I needed a staff of 11 people to run my small consultancy. I spent all my time managing their 11 different personalities and their 21 different problems. I wasn’t doing the work anymore. I was just a manager of a growing mess. When I finally scaled back down to just me and 1 assistant, my revenue actually went up by 41 percent. Because I stopped leaking energy through the cracks in a bloated structure.

Wide vs. Deep

It’s uncomfortable to admit when we’ve built something poorly. It’s much easier to just keep adding floors. If the first floor is shaky, maybe the tenth floor will somehow stabilize it? It’s a delusion that costs us everything. We see it in our relationships, too. We try to ‘scale’ our social lives, having 501 ‘friends’ on a screen while we haven’t had an 11-minute conversation with our neighbor in years. We are wide and shallow, like a puddle that’s 21 miles across but only 1 inch deep. The moment the sun comes out, we evaporate. We need depth. We need the kind of thickness you only get from slow, deliberate layering. We need to be more like the bricklayer and less like the software developer who ships a broken product and promises to ‘patch it’ later. Because in the real world, you can’t patch a crumbling foundation with a software update.

Lily J.-C. told me she’s quitting the moderator gig on the 21st of next month. She’s going to work at a local library, where the number of people she helps in a day might only be 31. But she’ll know their names. She’ll see the 1-on-1 impact of her work. She’s trading scale for substance, and she’s never looked happier. It made me look at my own work-this constant drive to reach a ‘wider’ audience. Who is this audience? Are they real people, or just 101-pixel avatars on a dashboard? I’d rather write something that changes the life of 1 person than something that is skimmed and forgotten by 10001.

I’m looking at my thumb now. The tiny hole is already starting to close. The body is amazing at repointing itself if you just give it the chance. It knows how to focus on the 1-percent repair that makes the 100-percent system function again. We should be more like our own skin. We should be obsessed with the integrity of our barriers and the strength of our connections. We should stop asking how big we can get and start asking how much weight we can actually carry without breaking. It’s a slow process. It’s a 31-year project, not a 31-day sprint. But at the end of it, you might actually have something that stands. You might have a life, or a business, or a home that doesn’t need a miracle to keep from falling-just a little bit of honest maintenance and the courage to pull out the splinters before they turn into infections.