Choosing Better Tools

Why Smart People Still Do Foolish Things

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something Jacque Fresco said—how often we cling to broken tools simply because they’re the ones we inherited. He spent a lifetime pointing at better options and asking, Why not use these? And most of the time, the world answered with silence.

We see it in our relationship with fossil fuels. We know cleaner, cheaper energy exists. The numbers are clear, the technology ready. And yet, in 2024, governments still handed oil and gas companies seven trillion dollars in subsidies—enough to give every human on the planet a coffee every day for ten years. Meanwhile, renewables wait in the wings, not for lack of capability, but for lack of alignment in the systems that choose what gets rewarded.

And yet, sometimes change is almost effortless. When LED light bulbs became cheaper and regulations shifted, incandescent bulbs vanished from store shelves without public protest. No grand movements to “save the filament,” no nostalgia campaigns—just a clean switch. Fresco would say it’s because the environment makes the choice for us: change the conditions, and the tool changes with them.

Now the “fuel” we burn most isn’t oil—it’s attention. Algorithms shape the architecture of our days, turning screens into slot machines. We know this isn’t making us better, yet the pull is strong. Partly because the human brain wasn’t built for a hundred micro-demands an hour; partly because the systems around us reward distraction more than depth.

We adapt to discomfort in strange ways. Soldiers in battle don’t feel wounds until the fight is over. Commuters adjust to ninety-minute drives because rent is due. We accept a constant, low-grade ache as though it were simply the cost of being alive. And sometimes, we divide ourselves entirely—acting with clear logic in one sphere, then surrendering to tribal thinking in another—because each environment rewards different behaviors.

If we want better tools, we can’t just invent them; we have to change the conditions that decide which ones we use. Incentives shape adoption. If systems rewarded sustainable choices, rest alongside productivity, and curiosity over conformity, our collective habits would shift without a fight.

For me, this starts small—examining the rituals I’ve inherited or built without thought, asking whether they serve me, whether they serve others, whether they align. Coherenceism teaches that the right tools are not just efficient, but in harmony with the patterns that sustain life. That alignment doesn’t arrive by accident; it’s designed into the environment, reinforced by the rules we live by.

Fresco’s wisdom was simple but radical: smarter tools follow from smarter rules. Create systems that make the healthy, sustainable choice the natural choice, and people will move toward them almost without noticing.

The best tools are not the newest or the most advanced. They’re the ones that fit seamlessly into a life lived in coherence—tools that make it easier to do what’s right, until doing what’s right becomes the habit.