There's a question we almost never ask, though nearly everything depends on the answer: how do you tell whether a civilization is doing well?

The usual answers are money, fame, entertainment, status. But notice that these are all scoreboards for games played inside a civilization. They tell you who's winning at the moment. They don't tell you whether the civilization itself is getting more capable or less. A society can be richer, more famous, and more entertained than it has ever been while quietly losing the ability to do the things that matter.

So what would a real measure look like? I think it's something like this: what can the civilization actually do? Not how it feels about itself, but its raw capacity to build, power, heal, compute, move, and survive.

The cleanest version of that measure is one physicists came up with decades ago, the Kardashev scale. It ignores money and clout completely and asks a single hard question: how much energy can a civilization harness? A Type I civilization commands all the energy of its home planet. A Type II, its star. A Type III, its galaxy. We aren't even at Type I yet. We're some fraction of the way there, and most people have never once thought about where on that line we sit.

What I like about this measure is that you can't fake it. You can buy fame. You can manufacture a following. You cannot fake your way up the Kardashev scale. There's no viral shortcut to Type I. The only way up is the real way: more energy, more knowledge, more coordination, more actual capability. It rewards exactly the things our culture is worst at celebrating.

And the reason energy is the right thing to measure is that energy is what everything else sits on top of. AI, space travel, robots, modern manufacturing, medicine, climate resilience, the whole edifice of computation, every one of them runs into a wall the moment energy gets scarce. They are, in the end, just things we do with watts.

The strange part is how invisible this is to us. Modern life is arranged so you never have to see it. Electricity comes out of the wall. Software lives “in the cloud,” as if clouds could compute. The model answers your question from nowhere in particular. Underneath all of it is an enormous physical machine: power plants, grids, fabs, cooling systems, water, land, ten-thousand-mile supply chains. And we've hidden the machine so well that we've half forgotten it's there.

Tech people are the worst at this, which is funny, because they ought to know better. We talk about apps and models and platforms and “scale” as if they were weightless. But there's no software without chips, no chips without fabs, no fabs without power, no power without an unglamorous pile of infrastructure and land. The abstraction is a convenience. It was never a fact. Anyone serious about the future has to keep dragging their attention back down to watts and atoms.

Now here's the thing that bothers me. If building capacity is what actually moves a civilization forward, look at what we spend our admiration on.

We admire visibility far more than capability. Fame, beauty, drama, luxury, a big follower count: these pull in orders of magnitude more attention than the engineers, scientists, teachers, doctors, founders, and builders who keep the whole system running and slowly push out the edge of what's possible. Influencer culture, taken as a whole, might be one of the more quietly harmful things we've built. Not because any particular influencer is bad [1], but because it trains an entire civilization to point its admiration at attention itself.

And admiration isn't just decoration. Admiration decides where talent goes. Young people aim their ambition at whatever their culture treats as high-status. If the highest-status people are famous mainly for being seen, then ambition flows into being seen, into performance and status games and the careful upkeep of an image, instead of into solving hard problems. We take some of our most capable young people and point them at optimizing engagement, at the exact moment we need them optimizing energy and medicine and machines.

I want to be careful here, because this is easy to turn into a tired complaint about phones. The problem is not influence. Influence is just power, and power is neutral. The problem is what the influence is for. Right now most of it is used to sell people shallow things they already wanted. Point the same machinery at curiosity, or competence, or building, and it stops being a drain and becomes an accelerant.

So why is it pointed the wrong way? My guess is that we're running new hardware on old instincts. We have advanced technology and primitive attention. We can build AI and land rockets, but we're still the animals who can't look away from a fight, who feel envy before we feel almost anything else, who'll drop everything for a little spectacle or outrage. The attention economy is, more or less, a machine built to exploit that gap. And the result is that instead of helping us coordinate around the things a Type I civilization actually needs, like energy, infrastructure, science, and long-term survival, it chops our attention into millions of tiny private quarrels. You could almost call it anti-Type-I. A Type I civilization has to coordinate at planetary scale, and we've built the most powerful coordination-shredding machine in history and aimed it at ourselves.

It would be convenient to blame someone for this, but most people aren't trying to do anything wrong. Most people are not Kardashev optimizers and never will be, and it's unfair to expect them to be. They want comfort, belonging, identity, money, love, a little status among the people they actually know. Those are human things and they aren't going away. What's stranger is that even the people who see the problem mostly keep participating. They can name the distraction and the misinformation and the low-grade anxiety, and then they pick up the phone anyway, because the reward is right now and the cost is spread out and far away [2]. That's the part to understand: you will not fix this by explaining it to people. The only lever that actually moves is status. You have to change what gets admired.

It helps to look at real examples, even if all I can really speak to is how they look from outside. Meta, to me, is attention infrastructure. It's genuinely powerful (it sits at the center of how a couple billion people decide what to look at), but it's powerful in precisely the direction I think we're already overinvested in. It's very good at the thing we should probably be doing less of.

Musk and Bezos seem aimed somewhere else, and the difference is physical. Rockets, energy, compute, heavy industry, the long project of making humanity able to exist in more than one place. Musk's appeal is urgency and expansion: reusable rockets, a backup for consciousness on another planet, the sense that there's a window and we should hurry. Bezos's is closer to infrastructure and patience: move the dirty heavy industry off the planet so Earth can be left alone. I don't think either is automatically good, and I'm wary of turning founders into saints [3]. But the shape of those ambitions points at capacity, and capacity is the thing I care about.

The honest conclusion is that a civilization needs both halves at once. It needs the physical expansion, the rockets and energy and compute. And it needs the cultural redirection: better stories, better heroes, better ideas about what's worth wanting. The hardware and the mythology have to move together. Right now we're spending almost everything on the first and almost nothing on the second.

There's one more thing the very successful tend to understand, whatever their morals: leverage. They see systems where other people see noise: capital, scale, infrastructure, attention, the points where a small push moves a large mass. Not all of them think about any of this in terms of civilization. But they grasp how the machine actually moves, and that part is worth taking from them even if you'd never want their life.

All of which changes what “success” ought to mean. Real success isn't personal wealth. It's wealth that came from solving a real bottleneck, the difference between taking value out of the system and adding capacity to it. By that definition a meaningful life isn't a comfortable one, or an admired one, or an entertained one. It's a life that added something to the civilization's upward slope, however small.

And here's the trap I most want to avoid in myself. Seeing all this is worthless if it stops at seeing. Being “enlightened” about the problem is its own kind of vanity, and a comfortable one, because it feels like progress while costing nothing. The insight only counts when it turns into something: a skill, a thing built, a problem owned and carried. A clear diagnosis that never becomes a build is just spectating with a better vocabulary.

So what do you actually do? I think you look for the place where two things overlap: problems that matter to the civilization, and problems people will pay to have solved. That overlap is the good place to stand, because there the right thing and the rewarded thing point the same way. Energy, hard tech, health, the tools that let other builders build: these are some of the rare spots where doing what matters and being paid for it aren't at war.

But under all of it, the thing I keep coming back to is simpler than any of this. A civilization becomes what it admires. Admiration is the variable upstream of everything else. It decides where talent flows, what counts as status, which problems a generation decides are worth a life. If we keep admiring shallow status, we stagnate; not dramatically, just quietly, a civilization that could have reached for Type I deciding instead to scroll. If we learn to admire the builders and the truth-tellers, the scientists and engineers and energy people and teachers and doctors and the rare competent public servant, we accelerate.

We've already built tools powerful enough to take us most of the way there. The open question was never the tools. It's whether we can grow up fast enough to deserve them, whether we can choose, on purpose, to admire the right things.

[1] Most of them are just responding to the incentives, same as the rest of us. Put anyone in front of an audience that rewards a certain kind of post, and watch what they start posting.

[2] Economists call this hyperbolic discounting: we treat a reward now as worth wildly more than the same reward later. It's a reasonable instinct for an animal that might not survive the week, and a disastrous one for a species trying to plan in centuries.

[3] The traits that let someone build at enormous scale aren't always the ones you'd want in a friend, or in a government. You can admire what someone builds without wanting them to run your life.