On loving The Way Things Work and never quite outgrowing it

When I was young, I loved The Way Things Work. Not in passing, not as a novelty, but as a book I returned to—again and again—until its logic felt familiar. It was charming, illustrated, playful, and above all explanatory. Things were not magic. They were systems. Levers pulled gears, gears turned cams, cams opened valves. Even the whimsical mammoths existed only to make causality legible.

What mattered was not the picture of the machine, but the sequence.

Looking back, it is obvious that I never stopped reading that book. I simply changed the subject matter.

From “how it works” to “why it doesn’t”

Most people outgrow The Way Things Work in the expected way. They internalize enough of its lessons to stop wondering. Doors open. Engines run. Organizations exist. Authority functions. They move on.

I did not.

Instead, my curiosity inverted.

I became less interested in why things work than in why they fail when they shouldn’t.

That shift is subtle but decisive. It marks the difference between admiration and diagnosis. Between celebration and audit. Between instruction manuals and post-mortems.

Where the children’s book delights in clean causal chains, my adult work is absorbed by broken ones:

when the lever is present but never pulled when the gear exists but is misaligned when the valve opens too late when the entire mechanism jams because two parts were never designed to meet

In other words: when the diagram still looks right, but reality no longer follows it.

The moral seriousness of mechanisms

What The Way Things Work taught me—quietly, without sermonizing—is that systems are morally neutral only in fantasy. In reality, systems always have consequences. If a mechanism fails, something downstream is crushed, starved, delayed, or endangered.

That lesson never left me.

It is why I am uncomfortable with:

visionary rhetoric unaccompanied by logistics authority structures that cannot explain their own operation institutions that reward belief in the diagram rather than attention to the mechanism

A broken system is not an abstraction. It is a jammed gear that overheats. A misrouted force that snaps a pin. A cheerful illustration that conceals a real injury.

My writing reflects that seriousness. I am not trying to be clever. I am trying to understand where the force actually goes.

Cute mammoths, serious consequences

There is something almost comic about tracing this sensibility back to a children’s book filled with smiling mammoths. But the continuity is real.

The Way Things Work assumes:

every component has a role every role can be explained every explanation can be followed step by step

It does not say, “Trust the machine.”

It says, “Look closely.”

That posture—look closely, don’t assume, follow the chain—is exactly what animates my adult work. Whether I am writing about boards, churches, bureaucracies, publishing systems, or late-stage institutions, I am still doing the same thing I did as a child on the living room floor:

I am tracing the arrows.

When something doesn’t work, I don’t reach first for blame or ideology. I ask:

What was this supposed to do? What did it actually do? Where did the force dissipate? Which part was overloaded? Which connection was never designed for this stress?

That is not cynicism. It is fidelity to reality.

Why I resist magical explanations

One reason my work sometimes feels alienating is that I resist magical thinking—especially institutional magical thinking.

I don’t believe:

mission statements create outcomes authority guarantees competence sincerity substitutes for design good intentions repair bad mechanisms

This puts me at odds with cultures that prefer affirmation to analysis. But that resistance was formed early, in the quiet insistence of a book that never said “because it just does.”

Everything had a reason. Even if the reason was messy. Even if it required turning the page back and forth to follow the chain.

I learned, long before I had the words for it, that explanation is an ethical act.

Growing up without growing out of it

Most people grow up by leaving children’s books behind. I grew up by applying their standards to adult systems.

That is why my writing so often asks uncomfortable questions:

Why does this organization exist if it cannot do what it claims? Why is this role granted authority without mechanical responsibility? Why are failure modes treated as moral flaws instead of design flaws?

I am still asking the same childhood question, just with higher stakes:

How is this supposed to work—and why doesn’t it?

The difference is that now, when it doesn’t work, people get hurt. Communities fracture. Trust collapses. Institutions hollow out while insisting they are fine.

The mammoths are gone. The consequences are real.

A quiet continuity

There is something reassuring in recognizing this continuity. It means my concerns are not a phase, or a contrarian posture, or a reaction to the present moment. They are the mature expression of a temperament that has always been there.

I was never drawn to spectacle.

I was drawn to mechanisms.

I was never satisfied with slogans.

I wanted sequences.

I was never impressed by authority alone.

I wanted to know how the force moved.

The Way Things Work did not make me curious about machines.

It made me curious about truthful explanations.

Everything I have written since is simply an attempt to hold adult systems to the same standard I accepted, instinctively, as a child:

that if something claims to work, it should be able to show its gears.