May 4, 2026 May 4, 2026 2026-05-04

In 2011 I used a card castle as a metaphor for life’s fragile structures and wrote about the art of keeping them standing. Since then several of my own structures have come down, and in today’s post I’ll try to understand the “whys”.

What Has Collapsed Since 2011

I’ll be specific, because vagueness is its own kind of cowardice.

A business I was proud of dissolved. And it did so quite dramatically, forcing life altering decisions that rippled for almost a decade. A long relationship ended. A living situation that had seemed permanent became, without much warning, something that needed to be dismantled. A creative project I’d invested years in was abandoned, not because it failed, but because I realized the version of myself who needed to make it no longer existed.

That last one was like the straw that broke the camel’s back, in the sense that something clicked around the whole understanding of losing something. I expected the losses to feel like losses. Well, some of them actually feel like relief.

Which Ones Surprised Me by Holding

The things that held were not the ones I’d engineered most carefully. They were the ones with the simplest structure and the most flexibility.

The blog has held — not because I protected it, but because it’s never required much protection. It’s a habit with infrastructure. The friendships that lasted are the ones that didn’t require constant maintenance to survive gaps. The practices — writing, daily meditation and exercise — these held because they’re self-renewing. You can leave and come back and they’re still there.

What I notice about the structures that survived: they weren’t trying to be permanent. They didn’t create a sense of urgency and they were not identity defining. They were just worth returning to.

Fragility – Design Problem or Design Feature?

The 2011 post treated fragility as a condition to manage, as something weak. I’d bring the same careful attention to my structures that you’d bring to a card castle — steady hands, no sudden movements, awareness of where the soft points are.

That framing was solid, but partial – something was missing. Some of the structures that fell were supposed to fall. I’d built them to hold something I was at a particular stage of life, and when I left that stage, the structure became a rock tied to my neck, something that pulled me down, rather than a container for the current me. Fragility wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem was that I’d invested in permanence where impermanence would have served me better.

The card castle metaphor is actually better than I knew: you build them, they fall, and then you build a new one. The pleasure is partly in the building and partly in having built. The falling is priced in. It will happen anyway.

Careless Versus Inevitable

Some structures fall because you’re not paying attention. You stop investing, stop maintaining, stop noticing the micro-deteriorations that precede the visible collapse. That’s careless failure, and it’s mostly avoidable with attention.

But some structures fall because they were always going to fall. The relationship that ended wasn’t careless — it was the product of two people growing in different directions. The business that crashed wasn’t mismanaged — it was serving a market that was itself changing in ways that would have made our specific model obsolete regardless. The card castle fell not because of wind but because the table it was built on was moving. There was no room for a castle anymore.

Distinguishing between these two types of failure is fundamental. Because blaming yourself when the second type occurs is a mistake, it will happen with or without your input. Learning from both is what counts.

What I Build to Be Temporary Now

Explicitly: most things.

I structure projects with fluid end dates and follow up using my own personal AI assistant, AIGernon. I enter arrangements — professional, creative, sometimes personal — with the understanding that they have a natural lifespan and that reaching that lifespan isn’t necessarily failure – it’s just part of life. I try to be clear about this upfront rather than discovering it through collapse.

This sounds more calculated than it feels. In practice it means I’m more present to what I’m building while I’m building it, because I’m not counting on it to last forever. The card castle you know you’ll dismantle for sure at the end of the process is the one you build with the most attention – sort of like Buddhist practitioners build beautiful mandalas, only to dismantle them when they are finished.

What I know about building that I didn’t know in 2011: the goal is not to prevent things from falling. The goal is to build things worth building, to be genuinely inside them while they stand, and to take what’s real from them when they don’t.

The rest is just gravity: it was there before you, it works without you and it will still be there when you’re gone.