You start life with clean models. Genius gets discovered. Good people are rewarded. Work hard and you'll succeed. Then you work hard on something that goes nowhere. You befriend someone who betrays you casually. You watch mediocrity win because it knew the right people. The single game you thought you were playing turns out to be a thousand games, each with different rules, most of which nobody wrote down. One by one, the certainties crack. I remember when I first realized effort doesn't guarantee anything. I'd done everything right on a project—worked late, learned the tools, delivered quality. It went nowhere. Someone else's mediocre work got promoted because they knew who to have lunch with. I kept waiting for the mistake to correct itself. For someone to notice. For fairness to reassert itself. It never did. You start seeing it everywhere. Good people getting exploited because they can't say no. Talented people invisible because they don't know how to signal. Confidence that turns out to be improvisation. I used to think being gold was enough. Gold gets found because someone knows where to dig, recognizes what they're seeing, and decides it's worth extracting. Watching these beliefs fall apart is disorienting because you're realizing you never had certainty to begin with. The world you thought you understood was a simpler rendering. I'm still figuring out how to navigate the real one.