You Can’t Fake Yourself into Engineering
In the real world, gravity doesn’t care about charm.
A bridge either holds or it doesn’t. A circuit either lives or dies. You can’t talk your way into building an aeroplane. Reality has no audience. It simply is.
That’s why I respect the builders, the ones who answer to the laws of nature. No posturing. No rhetoric. Only the quiet dialogue between mind and matter: steel, current, pressure. A world that doesn’t flatter.
In that world, truth has teeth. Nature enforces honesty. If your calculation is wrong, something breaks. Feedback is immediate, brutal, and fair.
Outside that world, almost everything can be faked. Life runs on interpretation, on what people can be made to believe. Influence becomes the art of appearing real.
The guru, the expert, the performer, all fluent in illusion. In that arena, attention replaces truth. There is no gravity, only applause.
And when nothing resists you, you stop knowing what’s true.
That is the quiet corruption of a world without weight.
So what holds you upright when nothing holds you accountable?
What replaces the laws of nature when you live by words, symbols, and stories?
That’s the real question.
You can borrow conviction, sell confidence, even build a following, but none of it proves you are right. Without resistance, integrity is a self-declared virtue.
I’m not above it. Living by words is a dangerous profession. The boundary between reflection and self-deception is thin. Sometimes I hear my own echo and wonder if it’s still me.
Still, the two worlds meet somewhere.
The builder works with matter, the rest of us with meaning.
What we can borrow from the builders is resistance, the discipline of testing what we make against something that can push back.
For one, feedback is physical.
For the other, it comes in many forms: conscience, consequence, silence, or collapse of their fabrications, years later.
What makes it harder for the rest of us is that there is no single law to trust, only the openness to listen.
We must test our constructs, in classrooms, offices, clinics, against the quiet verdict of the grand old judge: life itself.