Fucking With The Wind

There are two ways of dealing with the wind. You can build walls to shield yourself from it, or you can learn to dance with it. Most of human progress has been about building better walls - both literal and metaphorical. But as our walls grow taller and our cocoons more comfortable, we risk forgetting how to dance altogether.

The Art of Not Getting Blown Away

I learned to sail relatively late in life. The first few lessons were terrifying - the boat heeling over, waves splashing, ropes everywhere. My instinct was to fight against the wind, to try to force the boat to go where I wanted. This, of course, was exactly wrong. The art of sailing isn't about fighting the wind - it's about understanding it, working with it, using its power to go places that would be impossible to reach by muscle alone.

The same principle applies far beyond sailing. Take social media algorithms, for instance. You can try to fight them, disable them, build walls around your attention. Or you can learn to work with them, understanding their patterns and using them to amplify what matters to you while staying true to your course.

The Dance of Adaptation

The trees that survive strongest winds aren't the most rigid ones - they're the ones that know how to bend. Natural selection has given us countless examples of species that don't just survive despite environmental pressures, but because of them. The wind shapes them into forms more beautiful and resilient than any predetermined design could achieve.

Yet in our technological society, we often forget this wisdom. We try to control everything, to eliminate uncertainty, to build systems so rigid they can't possibly fail. But they do fail, catastrophically, precisely because of their rigidity. The financial crisis of 2008 wasn't caused by too much flexibility in the system - it was caused by too little. The system became so interconnected and brittle that when one part failed, everything collapsed.

Finding Power in Surrender

There's a profound paradox here: sometimes the path to greater control lies through surrender. Not the surrender of giving up, but the surrender of working with forces larger than ourselves rather than against them.

I see this playing out dramatically in the current AI revolution. Those trying to fight against AI, to build walls around traditional human activities, are likely to find themselves increasingly irrelevant. But those who learn to dance with AI - to understand its patterns, to work with its capabilities while maintaining their own direction - will discover new forms of creativity and agency that weren't possible before.

This isn't about blind acceptance or thoughtless adaptation. The sailor doesn't just go wherever the wind blows - they use the wind to go where they want to go. Sometimes this means tacking back and forth, taking an indirect route. Sometimes it means waiting for better conditions. But it never means simply fighting against the wind.

The Price of the Dance

Of course, there's a price to pay for this approach. Dancing with the wind means accepting a degree of uncertainty, of messiness, of imperfection. It means giving up the illusion of total control. It means being willing to adapt and change course as conditions change.

But what's the alternative? Building ever-higher walls requires ever-more resources, ever-more energy, ever-more control systems. And in the end, no wall is high enough to keep out every wind. The higher they are, the harder they fall.

Learning to Fuck with the Wind

So how do we learn this dance? How do we develop the sensitivity and skill to work with forces larger than ourselves?

First, we need to cultivate awareness. The sailor feels the wind on their face, reads the ripples on the water, watches the telltales on the sails. In our technological environment, this means developing literacy about the systems we're embedded in - understanding how social media algorithms work, how AI systems think, how financial markets move.

Second, we need to maintain our direction while being flexible about our path. The sailor knows where they want to go, but they're endlessly creative about how to get there. This is the essence of strategy in a complex world - having clear intentions while remaining adaptable about methods.

Finally, we need to embrace play. Children naturally understand how to fuck with the wind - they run with it, against it, throw things in it, let their kites dance in it. They intuitively grasp that engagement with natural forces isn't about domination but about playful exploration.

Perhaps this is what we need to remember: that progress doesn't have to mean building higher walls. That there's joy and power in learning to dance with the forces that shape our world, rather than trying to control them completely. That sometimes, the best way forward is to fuck with the wind.