A couple we know are both serious distance runners. Recently the wife got into the London Marathon. She has run marathons many times, always as a fundraiser for a charity.
I finally gave in to curiosity and asked what marathon fundraising actually means.
“You run the race, and people donate money to the charity I’m representing.”
“Sorry—I still don’t quite follow the logic. So someone who wouldn’t otherwise give to a charity sees you suffering through a marathon and decides to donate?”
“That’s basically it.”
For someone with a compulsion for logical tidiness, this was hard to swallow. Shouldn’t charitable giving depend on whether the organization is trustworthy and whether its work matches your values? What does another person’s marathon have to do with it?
The second incident happened in Japan, where I wanted to buy a suit—an odd errand, I admit. I went into a clothing shop, and the clerk picked out several for me to try on. Then she added, “You’re not going to a job interview, are you? If it’s for a job interview, neither of these will do.”
One was deep navy, almost black; the other was pure black. Both looked formal enough to me. Why couldn’t I wear them?
She explained that for interviews you can only wear solid black without stripes. One was the wrong color, and the other, if you looked closely, had a faint matte stripe. I held it under the light and stared—and there it was, a subtle texture.
That reminded me of another peculiar requirement in Japanese corporate recruiting: résumés must be handwritten. If you make one mistake, the whole page has to be redone—correction fluid? Are you insane? Does handwriting stop people from sending out applications far and wide? Of course not. New graduates end up spending enormous amounts of time carefully copying out one résumé after another.
On the day of the interview, you might be wearing a suit that produces micron-level stripes under laser light and is only 99 percent black—and be rejected before you even open your mouth.
These two stories are closely connected to Bitcoin.
Nobody cares whether the thing you are working hard on has value. Effort itself is the value. That is the core mechanism of Bitcoin: Proof-of-Work.
If you dig into the idea, the “work” in Proof-of-Work is not really the point. What is being proven is time—life.
Bitcoin dynamically sets the difficulty so that a block takes roughly ten minutes to solve. As mining equipment improves, the amount of work required keeps increasing, yet productivity does not change at all: it is still one successful block about every ten minutes. A meaningless puzzle, ever-rising difficulty, and unchanged output—that combination may be the ultimate definition of involution.
Behind the positive narrative that “effort itself has value” lies a brutal fact: the total amount of life in society far exceeds what is actually needed, and it must be burned off—even if it is spent on meaningless things.
Still, it seems possible to join the game of involution without admitting that you are “garbage that needs to be burned.” If we can really attach the value of life to the meaningless things that involution demands, perhaps involution can turn into a win-win.
Take Chinese kids in the U.S. who compete furiously in sports and arts to get into good universities. If they think only about using their extracurricular talents to help with admissions, and see those activities as a burden in the competition, then the energy and time they spend are literally life being burned. That burning happens before success or failure; you are doomed before you have even succeeded.
If you cannot escape an environment of involution, at least choose something you believe has value for your life—an instrument you love, a sport, a career. Even if it is not the most advantageous path to “ultimate success,” at least you have not wasted your life. And that matters far more than the former.