A Really Flat Lens

Field Note 001 - Part 1

Where the question of purpose came from — years before AI made it urgent.

When I started my PhD program back in 2011, I didn't exactly get off on the right foot. In that first semester alone, I went through a broken engagement, my grandad died, my dog died, I was in the emergency room twice between final exams (that story deserves its own post), and I was living with constant impostor syndrome in the classroom every day. I felt like I was hanging on for dear life personally while trying to wrap my head around 80 hours a week of PhD candidate related duties. The aggregate of those circumstances was absolutely overwhelming my body. Thankfully, I have a love of running and exercise that preserved me well enough to keep going.

But after all that, at the end of the first semester, I was cleaning out my desk before the holiday season, and I thought I'd go check my school mailbox one more time. To my surprise, one of my professors had dropped a handwritten letter into my mailbox. I honestly thought it was going to be a letter of encouragement or something. I remember thinking "That was nice of him." in my head as I was opening it. But what I would read in that letter was the furthest thing from encouragement. The gist of the letter was that he felt compelled to tell me I wasn't cut out for this kind of work. He didn't want me to waste my time on something I wasn't capable of completing. He said I seemed distracted and disinterested, and that getting a PhD takes a "special type of person". Needless to say, that moment was the cherry on top of my first semester in the PhD program from hell.

But he wasn't entirely wrong about what he saw in me. I mean, I was distracted. I was falling apart on the inside. I was grieving in ways I didn't know how to process or express yet. He didn't know everything I was carrying when he decided to write that letter — the things that had nothing to do with whether or not I belonged there. I was literally crying myself to sleep (not sure how many nights I did that) in an apartment that was meant for me and my ex-fiancée, surrounded by all her things, and then I'd go to class trying my best to process lawlike generalizations and multivariate analysis for the first time. That professor took the few hours he had seen me in a classroom and treated those hours as totally indicative of who I was and what I was capable of.

Here's why it landed the way it did and why I still think about it. I knew what it felt like in my bones to have someone believe in me. My mentor, who was also my grandfather's best friend, used to remind me that I had immeasurable value — just the way I was — and he knew pretty much everything about me. He knew my big mistakes, childhood wounds, and tendencies I carried around with me. So I knew the feeling of being seen and valued as a whole person, not as one small sliver of something out of context. I could feel the difference. I knew, from the inside, that this professor was looking at me through a really flat lens.

So, I thought long and hard over the holidays, and I decided to come back and prove him wrong. Proving him wrong included sitting in another class he taught that very next semester after he told me I should quit. As much as I was determined to see what I was made of, the feeling that letter put in me never really went away because it confirmed the worst fear I had about myself, and I fought it every moment of every day for the next several years. What I did with that feeling though — and mostly subconsciously — was begin noticing how often that type of situation showed up in normal life: someone with a little power over someone else takes the small part they can see and treats it as the whole person.

I noticed it in business, sports, education, entertainment, and both national and global politics. Almost everywhere I looked, power seemed to behave this way. I also kept hearing things like, "That's the way it's always been." or "That's what I had to go through, so everyone else should too." I heard those two sentences a lot in academic circles. Like all the time. But it just made me wonder: why do people with power keep building systems, running rooms, and making decisions that quietly wear people down? Why is it so hard to point that power at making the people inside it feel more capable and more human?

It sounds almost naïve

I know how it sounds when I say it that plainly. But I just couldn't let it go. I did find in my research organizations that were offering counter-evidence to my experience — places where people described the culture as humane, trustworthy, and actually good to work inside. Patagonia was one of the examples I kept coming back to. Everyone could see that another way was possible, and yet it remained the exception to the rule. So I kept asking: what kind of person, sitting in a particular type of seat, looks at a system that quietly wears people down and does not try to change it? Is it really that hard to design intention into a company that makes its people feel human, its customers trust it, and its future worth wanting?

I ended up spending years on the edges of that question. My dissertation — if you want the receipts that I was serious about this — examined the shareholder wealth effects of cause-related marketing: what happens to a company's value when it publicly ties itself to a social cause. I was living at the intersection of Milton Friedman's argument that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits and the quieter, stubborn idea that a corporation might owe something more than that. The honest truth is that the research was mixed. The literature argued with itself. I couldn't get a clean answer to what felt like it should have a clean answer.

Underneath it all was a dominant operating logic: maximize shareholder value. The people running public companies are working inside legal duties, market expectations, pay structures and investor pressure that all lean the same way, and most of them feel shareholder return as something close to a moral obligation (thank you Milton Friedman). None of that is a law that dictates every decision, and it doesn't take away anyone's judgment. But it shapes what gets rewarded and what is easiest to defend.

Then look at where that logic lives: healthcare, social media, and other systems touching the most human parts of our lives. A tension opens up. What is rewarded at the level of the firm may be corrosive at the level of society. A social platform can become extremely good at capturing attention whether or not the result is good for the person whose attention it captures. A healthcare company can sit on top of human suffering while being rewarded for financial performance. I am not calling everyone inside those systems a villain. Most people are behaving rationally. It is the incentive that does the damage, and the objective underneath it that almost nobody stops to question.

That was already my puzzle. And then AI showed up.

This is Field Note 001, Part 1. Part 2 picks up where the puzzle stopped being personal and became a question about AI. → Parker Woodroof - Founder, Humanum Huis Amsterdam