The Economics of Mutuality
On living practice, self-authorship, and what can’t be optimized
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We’ve been trained to think of ourselves as closed systems. Feedback loops. Input and output. Optimize, measure, repeat.
This is the language of cybernetics, and it’s everywhere — in how we track our bodies, how we manage our attention, how we scroll and click and swipe our way through days that feel somehow both overfull and hollow. It’s in the wellness apps that turn recovery into a score. In the productivity frameworks that turn life into a project. In the way we’ve learned to describe our emotional states in terms of regulation, baseline, and return to equilibrium.
But life runs as a continuous analog wave, not a sequence of on-offs. There are no clean edges, no discrete samples — just a living signal, always in motion.
Digital thinking pretends otherwise. It slices the wave into bits so it can be counted, stored, and fed back. Something survives the conversion, but a lot of what makes the signal alive doesn’t. The pauses between the samples are where most of life actually happens.
The loop, and what breaks it
Media has filled a lot of the space where we used to know ourselves. Thoughts come pre-shaped by feeds and frames. Desires get recognized before they’ve been fully felt. We scroll past grief and beauty and delight in roughly equal measure, each sensation lasting just long enough to trigger the next. We often end up inhabiting scripts we didn’t write — scripts tuned less for flourishing than for continued attention.
The loop is complete, or so it seems.
But a living practice breaks it.
When attention is actually given–without performing or transactional networking–there’s no algorithm for what happens. Presence can’t be optimized. What’s alive in the exchange doesn’t translate cleanly into data that can be stored, scored, and fed back.
This isn’t a retreat from rigor. It’s where value actually lives. Call it the economics of mutuality.
Two economics
Transactional economics is built on legibility — everything has to be nameable, countable, comparable. Value is what can be priced, moved, and stored.
Mutual exchange runs on something else. What circulates between two people genuinely present — care, attention, recognition — doesn’t add up cleanly. It spills over. It changes both sides in ways neither could have predicted at the start. Think of a conversation that leaves both people larger than they arrived. Care that compounds without a ledger. Two people making something together that neither of them could have brought alone.
In a transactional frame, two people trading attention come out even. In a mutual one, both leave richer than they arrived, and neither can quite account for the gain.
Todd Rose, in The End of Average, writes about monolithic thinking — how we’ve collapsed enormous human variation into a single curve, a single average, a single narrow definition of what it means to be capable or successful or normal. Cybernetics serves this collapse. Systems need standardization to function. They need variables that can be isolated, inputs that can be controlled, and outputs that can be measured.
Lived life doesn’t cooperate with any of that. It isn’t average. It doesn’t follow a predetermined arc. What it brings into a room, into a connection, into a moment of contact is radically, stubbornly particular.
Self-authorship is not an idea
Self-authorship is the developmental psychologists’ term for the transition from living out values and identities handed down by family, culture, media, and algorithms to actually constructing one’s own. It sounds intellectual. Like something arrived at through reflection and insight. And that’s part of it.
But the deeper point is that self-authorship can’t happen in the head alone. It happens in a living practice — in how attention moves, in what discomfort can be stayed with, in whether contact can be risked without performing.
Media shapes us in ways we rarely notice, patterns of attention, modes of desire, ways of valuing ourselves and each other, often before there’s time to question them. A living practice is where those shapes can actually shift. Not through more content, more information, more optimized feedback. But through practice, presence, and mutuality, where neither person is primarily an audience.
Complexity and open-endedness are the philosophical commitments that follow from this. The cybernetic worldview requires closure. It needs to know what the system is trying to do in order to calibrate the feedback. But human beings aren’t trying to do anything in that sense. We’re unfolding and generating in ways we can’t fully anticipate.
A life in motion is always producing something new — a sensation, a response, a memory that surfaces without invitation, an emotion that reframes what seemed already understood.
The alternative to cybernetic thinking isn’t rejection of rigor. It’s the simpler, harder insistence that some things–presence, growth, genuine mutuality–can’t be optimized. They can only be practiced. Lived. Returned to, again and again, with the kind of attention that doesn’t require a metric to justify itself.
Cybernetics, in the end, is a form of media turned back on itself — a way of seeing that we’ve aimed at our own lives until the model starts to feel more real than the living. But your life isn’t a map. It’s a signal, richer and stranger than any diagram of it. It asks to be sensed, not charted. Felt, not graphed. Met, not measured.
The economics of mutuality is the one we’re already in, whether we’ve learned to count it or not. Living itself already points beyond the frames that try to flatten it.
This week, I invite you to notice feedback loops that are trying to flatten you.