Last weekend I went mountain biking with a couple of friends. We had a route mapped out from one point to another, and we were excited to get out there.
It ended up taking about three and a half hours. It rained on us for half of it. There were long, grinding hills, and by the end it had turned into a bit of a slog. It was also a lot of fun, both in the moment and afterward.
When we got back, showered, and sat down to rest, we started talking about the ride, and it reminded me of four terms I’ve picked up this summer. They’ve stuck with me; they applied directly to that ride, and I think they apply to a lot of the challenges we’re facing as leaders right now: type 2 fun, misogi, Gell-Mann amnesia, and enshittification.
Type 2 Fun
I learned this one from my friends on the trip. Type 2 fun is fun that isn’t fun while it’s happening but is fun when you look back on it. These are the experiences that are hard, or frustrating, or difficult in the moment, but that carry real meaning and value once you’re past them.
The bike trip was a perfect example. It was hard. There was cursing. We were soaked. At more than one point, I just wanted it to be over. And looking back on it now, we had a great time. The difficulty wasn’t separate from the fun, it was part of what made it fun. There’s a fuller scale here too: type 1 fun is enjoyable in the moment, type 2 fun is enjoyable in hindsight, and type 3 fun is never enjoyable at all.
Misogi
The second term is related. Misogi is rooted in Shinto spiritual practice: standing under a waterfall or immersing yourself in cold water as a way of purifying yourself from negative experiences, proximity to death, or anything you’d consider toxic. I want to name and honor that tradition before I say anything else about it.
More recently, the term has been picked up in some circles to describe taking on one genuinely hard challenge a year, something you’d put at a 20 to 50 percent chance of failing. Not something dangerous, not something you’re likely to get hurt doing, but something you might not actually pull off. It could be a big hike, writing a book, or any similar challenge.
I don’t think our bike trip had a 20 to 50 percent chance of not getting finished, though I suppose there was some chance. So it doesn’t quite fit the category, and it’s made me think that, at my age, I need to reconsider what that 20-to-50-percent threshold even looks like. My risk tolerance isn’t what it used to be. My three goals for the trip were: not to get hurt, to finish, and to have a great adventure. We hit all three.
Gell-Mann Amnesia
The third term comes, interestingly, from the science fiction writer Michael Crichton, who wrote Jurassic Park among many other things. He noticed that when he read a newspaper or media story about something he knew well, he’d spot the obvious flaws, the bad analysis, the things the story left out. And then he’d turn the page to a story about international affairs and take the whole thing at face value.
Crichton didn’t want to name the effect after himself. He thought it wouldn’t carry any credibility that way, so he named it after his physicist friend, Murray Gell-Mann. I experience Gell-Mann amnesia all the time. I’ll read something in the New York Times or the Washington Post about higher ed and think, “That’s not really how it works; if you understood this, you’d see it differently.” And then I keep reading and take everything else in the paper at face value. It’s a good reminder to be just as critical of the stories where I have less expertise as I am of the ones where I have more.
Enshittification
The final term comes from the journalist Cory Doctorow, who wrote a blog post, then a couple of pieces, then a full book on the idea. It describes a pattern, especially in tech: a company builds something genuinely useful, gives it to you free or nearly free while it earns your trust and your dependence, and then makes it worse.
Take Facebook. It started as a network for college students. I’m old enough to remember that version of it, when it was genuinely great for seeing what friends and old acquaintances were up to. Now it’s mostly an ad platform that occasionally shows me something a friend posted. And I still love parts of it: back-to-school photos, seeing where friends’ kids are headed off to college, the daily “memories” feature that shows me pictures of my own kids from eight or fifteen years ago. Because it was so useful early on, I uploaded years of photos and memories into it, and getting all of that back out would be a real project. So I’m locked in. Facebook was built for people like me first, then for advertisers, and now for shareholders.
Doctorow points to what allows this: a lack of competition, regulation, and worker power. His antidotes are interoperability, meaning it should be easy to leave Facebook for something else, and data portability, meaning it should be easy to take your photos and your history with you. Right now, neither is really true, and he’d argue that’s not an accident: once you’re locked in, there’s no incentive to make things better.
Putting It Together
These four terms have me thinking about two different kinds of scrutiny. Type 2 fun and misogi are about how I judge my own experience: what’s actually valuable, even when it doesn’t feel that way, and what’s actually worth the risk. Gell-Mann amnesia and enshittification are about how I judge the systems around me: what I’m taking at face value, and what I’ve quietly gotten locked into. Different directions, same underlying question: am I seeing this clearly, or just going along with it?
As summer ends and fall begins, I’d invite you to sit with a few questions. What’s actually meaningful and fun for you, even if it doesn’t feel that way while you’re in it? What challenge might be worth taking on to expand your growth? What news or information are you taking at face value that you probably shouldn’t be? And what have you gotten locked into that you might be able to break free from?
I’d love to hear what comes up for you with any of these four terms. They’re ones I expect I’ll keep coming back to.
