Cathedral Work in a Marvel World

P0.5: Why Structural Reform Feels So Pointless

You don’t have to be particularly political to feel it. Just... conscious. That sinking sensation of watching the same movie over and over. Different faces, different costumes, same plot. You know the one: introduce hero, create stakes, third-act battle, villain defeated, nothing fundamentally changes, set up the sequel.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe perfected this formula. The early movies worked because the formula was fresh. By Phase Four? You weren’t watching new stories. You were watching the same story with different special effects.

American politics has the same problem. Crisis → outrage → promises → symbolic gestures → nothing changes → next crisis. The actors change. The specific outrage changes. But you already know how it ends, because you’ve seen this one before.

This essay is about the weird kind of exhaustion that comes from seeing the system clearly, trying to think architecturally, and wondering if it matters when almost everyone else is stuck in hero–villain stories.

The Trail Runner

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing Michelino Sunseri. If you haven’t heard the story: accomplished ultrarunner, attempted the Grand Teton Fastest Known Time, succeeded, set a new record. Two hours, fifty minutes, fifty seconds to run 13.2 miles with 7,000 feet of elevation gain. Incredible athletic achievement.

Then came the federal charges.

Sunseri had taken a quarter-mile section of trail called the Old Climber’s Trail. It was marked with two signs: “Shortcutting causes erosion” at the top, “Closed for regrowth” at the bottom. He spent two minutes on this section and beat the previous record by two minutes and twelve seconds.

When he found out the National Park Service was questioning his record, Sunseri reached out to them directly. He volunteered to help officially close the trail. He tried to resolve it without involving the courts.

The Park Service responded: “We’re pressing charges.”

Here’s where it gets interesting: Six of the seven previous record holders had used this exact trail without issue. Kilian Jornet—one of the most famous ultrarunners in the world—used the same trail in 2012, and the Park Service issued a warning but no charges.

Sunseri went to trial. Twenty federal employees showed up. Six armed guards with assault rifles and body armor. They subpoenaed his Instagram messages and read them aloud in court. For cutting a switchback.

The initial plea deal: five-year ban from Grand Teton National Park, class B misdemeanor, fine. Later they offered 1,000 hours of community service—that’s 25 weeks of full-time work.

My friend’s immediate reaction: “Ridiculous. Evil bureaucrats. The penalty doesn’t fit the crime.”

And I felt it too. That clean narrative: Hero conquers mountain. Petty enforcement. Disproportionate punishment. Armed guards for a trail violation. It’s absurd.

But then I noticed something about my friend’s reaction—and my own.

My friend isn’t a Trump supporter. He probably rolled his eyes at every “witch hunt” tweet Trump ever sent. He sees through that narrative when Trump is the hero character.

But give him a hero he identifies with—a badass ultrarunner conquering mountains, living free, pushing boundaries—and he runs the exact same script.

“I like this person” → “Therefore this penalty is persecution” → “Therefore the system is corrupt” → “Therefore we should tear it down.”

Same cognitive architecture. Different hero character. Same result.

The Villain Trap (In Both Directions)

I’ve written before about the Villain Trap - how we skip from “this outcome feels wrong” to “therefore the system is corrupt” without examining the actual architecture. But the Sunseri case shows something I didn’t fully appreciate then: the trap works in both directions.

You can fall into it by identifying with the hero (like my friend did, like Trump supporters do). But you can also fall into it from the opposite side—by identifying with the rules being violated:

Direction 1: Focus on the absurd enforcement (armed guards, Instagram subpoenas, 1,000 hours community service for a trail violation). Conclusion: evil bureaucrats, overcriminalization, tyrannical system. Solution: Pardon him, defund the agency, dismantle the rules.

Direction 2: Focus on the rule violation (signs said closed, he ignored them, ecosystem protection matters). Conclusion: entitled influencer thinks rules don’t apply to him. Solution: Make an example, enforce consistently, protect our public lands.

Both feel righteous. Both have valid points. Both completely miss the architectural question.

Which is: Why did six of seven previous record holders use this trail without consequence, but Sunseri got prosecuted with overwhelming force?

That’s not a hero question. That’s not a villain question. That’s a systems question.

• Is the trail actually closed or not? (It still appears on mapping apps as legitimate.)

• If it’s closed, why wasn’t Jornet prosecuted in 2012?

• If enforcement is inconsistent, is that a prosecutor discretion problem or a signage problem or a policy problem?

• If Sunseri proactively tried to resolve it, why did that escalate instead of de-escalate?

• If the Park Service withdrew support for charges the day before trial, why did the trial proceed?

These are questions about how the system works—about incentives, discretion, consistency, and what rules we’re actually trying to enforce and why.

But you can’t think about those questions when you’re in Villain Trap mode. Because in Villain Trap mode, asking “How should we want permit enforcement to work?” sounds like you’re defending the villains. Asking “What’s the alternative management system?” sounds like you’re missing the point.

Here’s what makes the Villain Trap so seductive: anger feels like power.

When you’re in the trap, you get:

• Energy - Righteous indignation is energizing in a way complexity isn’t

• Clarity - “I’m right, they’re wrong” feels so much cleaner than “this is a multi-variable systems problem”

• Control - When everything else feels fuzzy and uncertain, moral certainty feels like solid ground

Anger gives you something to do. Someone to blame. A clear enemy. A simple story.

Architectural thinking gives you... a spreadsheet of trade-offs and a decade-long timeline. Not remotely emotionally satisfying.

So part of us actively resists letting go of the anger. Because we’d rather feel powerful and pissed than calm and vulnerable.

When you let go of the villain narrative, you lose:

• The sense of power anger gives you

• The protection of moral certainty

• The control of having a clear enemy

And you’re left with: structural complexity you can’t just fight your way through. Problems that don’t have villains to defeat. Systems that require patience, nuance, and accepting you might not see the payoff.

That IS vulnerability. You’re exposed to uncertainty. You can’t protect yourself with righteous anger anymore.

So we hold onto the anger. Even when it isn’t actually accomplishing anything. Even when it’s preventing us from seeing the real problem.

This is why the Villain Trap doesn’t just prevent architectural thinking—it actively produces inaction disguised as engagement.

You identify the villain. You feel righteous anger. You share the outrage. You call for someone to be fired or pardoned or defunded. You feel like you did something.

Meanwhile, the architecture that produced the problem remains untouched. The same inconsistent enforcement discretion. The same unclear signage. The same system where whether you get charged depends on... what? Who’s in office? Which prosecutor sees your case? Whether you went viral on social media?

Different heroes and villains will slot into this same structure next cycle. And we’ll all watch the same movie again.

We’re All Running the Same Software

This is what makes the exhaustion so profound. It’s not “those people over there are stupid and falling for tricks.”

It’s: Even my smart friend who sees through Trump’s bullshit uses identical reasoning when the hero is someone he likes.

We’re all running the same software. We just have different heroes.

And before you think, “Well, I wouldn’t fall for that”—yes, you would. I do. We all do. The Villain Trap isn’t a bug in other people’s thinking. It’s a feature of human cognition. We’re wired to think in stories, in heroes and villains, in tribal identity and vibes.

Thinking architecturally—asking “how should the system work?” before asking “do I like this outcome?”—is unnatural, exhausting, and rare.

The Villain Trap doesn’t just happen at the individual level. It operates at scale.

The week I was processing the Sunseri case, I turned on Fox News to see what reality looked like from inside that information universe. Trump was heroic. The economy was booming. Democrats were praising him. The things I know are happening—things that have been documented, verified, made public—simply didn’t exist. Not disputed, not spun differently: absent.

This isn’t primarily about whether Fox is right or wrong on any given claim. It’s about watching an information architecture that pre-selects which heroes and villains you encounter. If the only trail runners you hear about are the ones being persecuted by evil bureaucrats, and you never hear about the ones who violate rules and actually deserve penalties, your pattern-matching gets trained one direction.

Same thing happens in reverse on MSNBC or in progressive media ecosystems. Different heroes, different villains, same cognitive architecture.

We’re not just individually falling into Villain Trap thinking. We’re swimming in information environments specifically designed to make that trap feel like clear-eyed analysis.

Now here’s the uncomfortable part: we’re not ALL exactly the same.

Some people can learn to notice when they’re in Villain Trap mode. They can catch themselves mid-reaction and ask: “Wait, am I reasoning about the system, or am I just identifying with the hero?”

But that capability isn’t distributed evenly. And it’s not about intelligence—my friend has a PhD. It’s about... something else. Willingness to sit with cognitive dissonance? Tolerance for complexity? Interest in mechanisms over narratives?

I don’t know what to call it. I just know it’s rare.

And that’s when the real exhaustion hit me: If even the smart, thoughtful people I know can’t or won’t think architecturally... what’s the point?

Two Types of Exhaustion

That question—”what’s the point?”—has been sitting with me for weeks now. And I’ve realized something: not all exhaustion is the same.

Type 1 Exhaustion is the exhaustion of being emotionally whipsawed by the cycle.

Your side wins → euphoria! Your side loses → despair! This scandal will change everything! → No it won’t, nothing changed. This time it’s different! → No it’s not, same pattern.

The architecture stays the same, but you keep getting pulled into the emotional thrash of each new episode.

Most people on my Substack feed are experiencing this right now. “Trump administration crumbling!” “People are finally waking up!” Each headline feels urgent, each development feels like the turning point. The emotional investment is real and exhausting.

Here’s what’s interesting: understanding structural thinking helps with Type 1 exhaustion.

When you can see the pattern—when you understand it’s the architecture, not the actors—you stop being surprised. You stop hoping “this time will be different” at the symptom level. You can watch the wave come in without getting swept away, because you know it’s going to retreat. You expect it.

For a long time, I thought this was cynicism. That I’d become jaded and disengaged. That tuning out the daily outrage meant I’d given up.

But it’s not cynicism. It’s discernment.

Cynicism says: “Nothing matters, nothing can change, everyone sucks, why bother with any of it.” That leads to apathy. To checking out completely. To doom-scrolling and despair.

Structural detachment says: “This particular scandal doesn’t matter, but the architecture that keeps producing these scandals—that can change.” That leads to... well, to this. To writing essays about load-bearing beams. To looking for the parts of the system that actually matter.

Cynicism is giving up on everything. Structural detachment is choosing where to invest your energy based on what actually has leverage.

I don’t need to get emotionally invested in whether Trump’s approval rating went up or down this week. I don’t need to refresh my feed to see if the latest scandal is gaining traction. I already know how this episode ends, because I’ve seen this show before.

That’s not cynicism. That’s pattern recognition. And it’s actually protective—it keeps me from burning out on symptom-level battles so I have energy for the structural work.

But then there’s Type 2 Exhaustion. And this is where I am right now.

Type 2 is the exhaustion of seeing the pattern clearly while trying to change it. You’re not being thrashed by the symptoms anymore—you can see past those. But now you’re looking at the architecture itself, trying to point it out, and watching everyone around you stay locked in the symptom-level game.

You watch your smart friend fall into Villain Trap thinking. You watch both sides use identical cognitive architecture to reach opposite conclusions. You watch the same structural failures produce the same outcomes, cycle after cycle. And nobody else seems to see it.

Type 2 exhaustion doesn’t come from being surprised by the pattern. It comes from seeing the pattern so clearly and realizing: most people can’t or won’t look at it this way.

It’s the exhaustion of trying to build a cathedral while everyone else is arguing about which paint color to use on the burning house. It’s the exhaustion of knowing the timelines are all wrong—that this work takes decades—while watching everyone expect change by next election.

It’s lonely. And some days, it feels utterly pointless.

But here’s the thing: you can’t get to Type 2 exhaustion without first developing the structural lens that helps with Type 1. So in a weird way, Type 2 exhaustion is... progress? You’re exhausted because you can see clearly. The clarity itself is the source of both the exhaustion and the possibility of doing something about it.

Emotionally Hopeless vs Structurally Hopeless

Here’s the thing about Type 2 exhaustion: the timelines are all wrong.

Symptom work gives you immediate feedback. You protest, you get headlines. You argue online, you get engagement. You vote, you get results (good or bad). The dopamine hits come fast. You feel like you’re doing something.

Structural work doesn’t work that way.

You’re building foundations that might not matter for years. You’re planting seeds that might not sprout in your lifetime. You’re creating language and frameworks that might not reach critical mass until you’re tired of saying them. You’re trying to make invisible architecture visible, and most people don’t want to look down.

This creates a brutal emotional experience: Today feels hopeless. This week feels pointless. This cycle feels like nothing is changing.

And emotionally, that’s true. It IS exhausting. It DOES feel futile. Those feelings are real and valid responses to the structure of the work itself.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: emotional hopelessness and structural hopelessness are different things.

Every major institutional shift—civil rights, labor protections, voting rights, even the original Constitution—had long stretches where it felt like nothing was moving. The people doing that work didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. They didn’t know the arc of history would bend their direction. They just knew that from where they stood, on a random Tuesday, after another failed effort, it all looked hopeless.

Until suddenly it wasn’t. Until the architecture shifted. Until what seemed impossible became obvious.

I can’t promise you that structural reform will work. I can’t promise it’ll happen in a timeline that feels satisfying to human beings with finite lifespans and short attention spans.

What I can tell you is: this is the only kind of work that has ever led to actual architectural change. The people who changed systems didn’t do it by winning the next election. They did it by slowly, painfully, inconsistently making the invisible visible until enough people could see it.

So when I ask “what’s the point?”—when I feel that Type 2 exhaustion—I have to remind myself: My emotional state is not evidence about the structural reality.

The fact that it feels hopeless today doesn’t mean the architecture can’t change. It just means I’m human, and humans weren’t built for cathedral timelines.

What Meaningful Work Looks Like Today

So what does meaningful work look like when you’re deep in Type 2 exhaustion? When architectural thinking feels pointless because everyone around you is still stuck in Villain Trap mode?

It looks... small. Unglamorous. Not heroic at all.

It looks like: noticing when you’re in Villain Trap mode.

Here’s a practical tool I use: I take my emotional temperature when I read a headline, an article, an essay. When I notice I’m feeling angry or righteously indignant about something, I pause and ask: “Am I reasoning about the system, or am I just identifying with the hero in this story?”

That pause doesn’t make me better than anyone else. I still fall into the trap constantly. But it helps me notice when I’m doing it and climb back out.

It looks like: one conversation where you name the pattern.

Not trying to convert someone. Not winning an argument. Just saying: “Interesting—I notice we both did the same thing there. You with the trail runner, them with Trump. Same cognitive move, different heroes. I wonder what that means about the system itself?”

You might not change their mind. But you planted something. And maybe months later, in a different context, they’ll remember.

It looks like: writing this essay instead of doomscrolling.

I can’t write the piece about why democracy shouldn’t require heroic effort that I planned to write today. That piece requires energy I don’t have. But I can write about what it feels like to not have that energy. I can make this exhaustion itself into something useful.

It looks like: keeping a sliver of cognitive space open where better architecture is still thinkable.

The default is learned helplessness. The default is “nothing can change, so why bother?” The meaningful work is resisting that default, even when—especially when—the default feels accurate.

That’s it. That’s the work. Brick by brick. Essay by essay. Conversation by conversation. Emotional temperature check by emotional temperature check.

It’s not inspiring. It’s not a rally cry. It’s just... continuing.

The Long Game

I started this essay feeling the weight of watching the same movie over and over. I wanted to write about heroic democracy, about vision and possibility. Instead, I wrote about exhaustion.

But here’s what I’ve realized: this exhaustion is information.

It’s telling me something true about the structure of this work. Structural thinking is rare not because people are stupid, but because it’s unnatural. It fights against how our brains are wired. It requires seeing patterns that evolution didn’t prepare us to see.

The exhaustion tells me: you’re doing something genuinely difficult. Something most people can’t or won’t do. That’s not arrogance—it’s just recognition that this particular cognitive mode is distributed unevenly, like any other capability.

And that means: my job isn’t to wake up the whole populace. That was never realistic. That’s a job that generates only Type 1 exhaustion—running sprints in an endless game.

My job is to give the people who CAN think architecturally better tools, better language, and the knowledge that they’re not alone in seeing what they see.

Maybe that’s 1,000 people. Maybe it’s 10,000. Maybe, eventually, it’s 100,000. And among those people are the judges, legislative staffers, think-tank researchers, local activists, and civic engineers who actually move the architecture.

I won’t see most of that payoff. That’s the nature of cathedral work. You lay stones you’ll never see assembled. You plant seeds you’ll never see bloom.

But the alternative is accepting the current architecture as permanent. Accepting that we’re stuck watching the same movie forever, with different faces in the same roles, playing out the same inevitable plot.

And I’m not willing to accept that.

Not because I’m certain structural reform will work. Not because I have some special faith in progress or the arc of history.

But because I’ve looked down at the beams. I’ve seen what’s actually holding this thing up. And I know—with the kind of certainty that comes from years of building systems—that this architecture is not inevitable. It’s designed. And designed things can be redesigned.

So if you’re reading this and feeling that Type 2 exhaustion—if you’ve watched your smart friend, or more likely, a family member, fall into Villain Trap thinking, if you’ve felt the loneliness of seeing patterns nobody else seems to notice, if you’ve asked yourself “what’s the point?”—

You’re not broken. You’re not crazy. You’re awake.

And being awake is uncomfortable. But it’s also the only place actual change has ever started.

The movie will keep playing. We can keep arguing about whether the armed guards were justified or whether Sunseri was entitled—keep arguing about heroes and villains while the underlying architecture stays broken. Or we can start asking different questions. Why was enforcement inconsistent? What does a functional permit system look like? How do we design rules that work?

The question is: do you want to keep watching the same movie, or do you want to start building different theaters?

I’m building. Even on days when it feels pointless. Especially on days when it feels pointless.

Because someone has to look at the beams. And today, that someone is us.