May 27, 2026–You live life on a continuum.
Imagine a giant control panel with sliders. Each slider is a track, representing one facet of your life.
For example, in the control room of your existence, there would be separate sliders for athleticism, musicality, intelligence, appearance, and congeniality, for starters. Then you could have sub-categories for business acumen, hygiene, fashion sense, maybe cooking ability and ambition. Make up your own categories.
When you adjust the sliders from zero to 100 across the board, you would create a curved line that would reflect how you lived your life. It would show what you consider important. It’s your personal algorithm.
Let’s examine one category to illustrate this half-baked concept: Clutter Tolerance.
Clutter definitely rides on a continuum.
Each person’s comfort with clutter follows no logic. All my life, people have been disturbed at the squalor I work in. Piles of papers, computers and monitors linked with snarls of wires, dust bunnies underfoot and tablecloths as window coverings.
I don’t see it. In fact, I embrace it. When I need a highliter, there it sits in a Cacahuates can I bought 48 years ago in South America. When I need a cable connecting my 2010 vintage Nano iPod to a USB, by golly I have one hanging from the towel rod tacked up over my computer. From this pile of jetsam I produce my pearls of wisdom week in and week out. Some even say weakly.
Yet, when I recently visited a close relative, I was consternated by the amount of clutter he lived in. Moose heads on the wall with Mardi Gras beads in the antlers. Exercise equipment in the front yard. Dusty books filling an entire wall of bookshelves, raising both intellect and R-factor. A used microwave perched on top of another unworking microwave. Yet from this accumulation of debris, he runs a commercial empire that is stupidly successful.
At the other end of this spectrum live the minimalist mavens whose austere steel, glass, and pine-flooring living rooms grace the pages of seemingless endless piles of lifestyle and architectural digests that ironically clutter every professional’s minimalist waiting room.
Let’s explore another category: Musicianship.
Place yourself on an imaginary scale, where zero is never progressing beyond playing Hot Cross Buns on a black plastic recorder in 2nd grade, and 100 is a doctorate in Reticulated Oboe Performance from Eastman School of Music.
The first year you learn to toot that clarinet, you are distinctly aware in which end of the talent pool you wallow. It’s probably somewhere between high school pep squad and Benny Goodman entertaining swing dancers at the Savoy Ballroom. On stage, the Musical Talent Continuum manifests by how many members of the ensemble irritate you because they are not as good as you, and how many intimidate you because they are so much better than you. That point is your slider level.
Every skill we attempt is measured. Footraces in grade school. Lifting weights in junior high. The science fair in high school. Heck, college admissions is built around filing you in a box inside a matrix. These days, heartless social media mavens casually rank every person on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether they are mid, thicc, or crusty.
I used to play role-player video games where the avatars walk around with colored bars overhead that give instant readings of their power and roles. I believe we all inhabit our world wearing that same ranking system, whether apparent to our peers or carefully hidden up our sleeves. It defines who we are, what we do, and who we do it with.
Happy sliding.