On boundaries, attention, and decisive exits
I had a call on Monday afternoon with someone I’ve only spoken to over the last month, largely because of my role and proximity to a situation that’s been unraveling for a while.
The call was recorded, like every call I have had for the last three months. He did not participate much, but he is smart and technical. We do not have a material relationship, and I am aware that my perception is probably skewed by proximity and personal perspective. Still, we talked for over an hour about how he and the broader group might salvage what remains. Broken systems. Missing processes. Dysfunction layered on top of dysfunction. All in the name of maintaining relationships and continuity.
Over the last few months, I put everything on the table. No hedging. No softening. No concern for how it landed. At some point, you stop managing impressions and start telling the truth. The people who know me understand that line. If someone else is offended, I can live with that. When the call ended, I did not sit there and ruminate. I hung up, picked up my phone, my iPad, my laptop, and my desktop, and deleted the applications. All of them. I activated an open-ended out-of-office auto-reply and walked away. Just like that. It felt strange. Light. Not relief exactly, but reclaimed bandwidth. A sudden return of energy.
I am still finalizing a broader digital transition, but I set one rule that made everything else easier:
“I will only retain materials that are unquestionably mine, non-confidential, and reusable without reference to any prior organization, clients, counterparties, or internal communications. If there is doubt, it does not get kept.”
That rule is final. It exists to eliminate second-guessing later.
I am not erasing the past. I am compressing it into signal and carrying only what compounds.
That logic has started bleeding into everything else. Closet. Email. Messages. Physical clutter. Bags of donations leaving the apartment. Fewer objects. Fewer inputs. Less noise.
Cutting the knot
The story goes that cutting the knot
The story goes that Alexander the Great arrived in Gordium and was presented with an impossibly tangled knot. An oracle had declared that whoever untied it would rule Asia. Many had tried and failed.
Alexander did not sit there patiently picking at it forever. In the most famous version of the story, he drew his sword and cut it clean in half.
The symbolism matters more than the historical accuracy. Some problems are not meant to be delicately untangled. They are too intertwined. Too loaded. Too costly in attention.
Naval Ravikant (@naval) talks about this in a modern context, especially around emotional baggage:
At some point you just have to cut your past. If your past is bothering you, you will eventually get tired of trying to untangle it. Life is short. The more you want to accomplish, the less time you have to unravel the knot.
That framing unlocked something for me.
Knots are not partially cut. They are either intact or they are not. That is the uncomfortable part. Incremental progress can still leave you bound. I have struggled with that. Making progress, but not all the way. Holding onto artifacts just in case. Keeping symbolic ties that no longer serve me.
A small but telling example was throwing away a brand-new box of business cards. Stickers. Branded items. Objectively wasteful. Psychologically necessary. I needed to sever the identity connection, not intellectually, but materially. It felt like the only way to make real progress across multiple dimensions at once.
Attention is the real currency
Naval also makes a point that ties this all together. Money isn’t the real currency of life. Time isn’t either. You can’t actually buy more of it, and a lot of it gets wasted when you’re not present. The real currency is attention. What you choose to pay attention to is what you’re buying with your life. News. Old emails. Half-dead relationships. Systems that no longer work. Every lingering thread has a cost.
Cutting the knot, for me, wasn’t about drama or burning bridges. It was about reclaiming attention. Redirecting it toward things that actually matter. Things that compound.
I’m not running from my past. I’m choosing not to drag it forward unnecessarily.
Sometimes the cleanest move is the hardest one. One cut. No second pass. No cleanup tour. Just clarity.