The Unbreakable Lie: What Masons Know About Enduring Systems

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The Unbreakable Lie: What Masons Know About Enduring Systems

The mouse pointer is frozen over the green button. It’s a performance, a tiny hesitation I do before every important call, a deep breath before the digital plunge. But the performance is for an audience of one, and today, it fails. My thumb slips on the trackpad and in that split second of unintended contact, the world collapses. The soft, blurry placeholder icon of my initial vanishes, replaced by my actual, unscripted face-deer in headlights, hair clearly unacquainted with a comb, a background of pure domestic chaos. The system I had built to present a calm, collected professional for the first 8 seconds of the call-my little digital curtain-was not just bypassed; it was annihilated by a single, clumsy twitch.

Rigidity is just brittleness waiting for the right kind of shock.

We build these systems everywhere. These rigid, carefully constructed facades of competence and control. We call them resilient. We call them solid. We believe that if we just add enough concrete, enough rules, enough redundant servers, we can build something that will not fail. This is the great lie we sell ourselves. We are not building things to last; we are building things to be rigid. And rigidity is just brittleness waiting for the right kind of shock.

The shock doesn’t have to be a thumb slipping on a trackpad. It can be a supply chain disruption, a key team member getting sick, a sudden market shift that makes your five-year plan look like a child’s crayon drawing. We build for the world we expect, a world of straight lines and predictable inputs. We spend 48 days creating a process map that accounts for every known variable, and then on day 49, an unknown variable shows up and snaps the entire thing in half.

My fortress didn’t bend. It shattered.

I confess, I used to be a high priest in this church of rigidity. I built project plans so detailed they could have served as schematic blueprints for the Death Star. Gantt charts cascaded into infinity. Every dependency was mapped, every risk was assigned a mitigation strategy. I believed I was creating a fortress. But all I was building was a very, very expensive eggshell. The first time a client changed their mind about a foundational feature eight weeks into a project, my fortress didn’t bend. It shattered. The ensuing chaos cost the company an estimated $88,000 and me a significant amount of hair.

It sent me into a spiral, rethinking everything I thought I knew about strength. The day after the project post-mortem, I couldn’t stand the sight of my own office. The whiteboard, covered in the ghosts of my failed diagrams, felt like it was mocking me. I grabbed my laptop, needing a complete change of scenery to even begin thinking straight. My first instinct was to find a place with no history, no memory of my failure, so I just searched for places to work remotely and picked the one with the least corporate-looking name. It was in that anonymous coffee shop, watching the world go by, that I started to dismantle my entire philosophy of work, and maybe even life.

That’s when I remembered Claire K.L.

“Old buildings breathe,” she said, wiping her hands on a dusty rag. “This one has survived fires, floods, and 18 major renovations. It’s not because the original builders were perfect. It’s because they understood humility.”

She explained that the original lime mortar they used was, by modern standards, weak. It was porous, soft, and forgiving. “Modern Portland cement is incredibly strong,” she said, pointing to a disastrous patch job from the 1970s that was cracking and spalling. “It’s so strong it doesn’t move. So when the old bricks expand in the summer heat, the new mortar doesn’t give. It forces the brick to break. It’s a bully.”

“

I met Claire on a walking tour of the city’s historic district about a year prior. She was a master mason, a specialist in historic restoration, and she was working on the facade of a 238-year-old customs house. While the tour guide droned on about architectural styles, I watched her work. She wasn’t just slapping mortar into joints. She was listening to the building. She’d tap a brick with her trowel, close her eyes, and tilt her head, as if waiting for a reply. Later, I asked her what she was doing.

The old mortar was designed to be the point of failure.

– This sentence rewired my brain –

That sentence rewired my brain. The original builders knew the system would be under stress. They knew the seasons would change, the ground would shift, and the materials would swell and shrink. So they built a system where the weakest part was also the most easily repaired. The mortar was designed to crack under pressure, creating tiny fissures that could then be repointed every few decades. The cracks were a feature, not a bug. They were the building’s exhaust valve for stress. The system healed itself by being imperfect.

Rigid Systems

💔

Brittle to shock

→

Flexible Systems

🌿

Heals itself

This is the opposite of how we build almost everything today. We build software that tries to handle every possible error, until an impossible one comes along and causes a total system crash. We build careers based on a single, specialized skill, and then we’re shocked when automation makes that skill obsolete. We create social personas of unflappable perfection, and then crumble when a moment of genuine, messy humanity-like an accidental camera activation-slips through.

“We keep trying to strengthen the foundation without realizing we are destroying the structure.”

Claire’s work is a form of quiet rebellion against this. She spends her days undoing the damage caused by brute force solutions. She painstakingly chips away at the unyielding modern cement to replace it with forgiving, breathable lime mortar. She told me about a cathedral she worked on where a 1968 ‘upgrade’ to the foundation with reinforced concrete was causing massive structural damage 188 feet up in the bell tower, because the tower could no longer flex the way it was designed to. The attempt to make the foundation invincible was threatening to bring the whole thing down. They had to spend millions to surgically remove the ‘improvement.’

It’s a powerful metaphor, isn’t it? We keep trying to strengthen the foundation without realizing we are destroying the structure. I see it all the time. Companies that enforce rigid work-from-home policies, measuring productivity by keyboard strokes, then wonder why their most creative people are leaving. They’re replacing the flexible mortar of trust with the brittle concrete of surveillance. It feels stronger, more controlled. But it will eventually crack the bricks.

This isn’t an argument for chaos or for having no plan at all. Claire doesn’t just splash mortar on a wall and hope for the best. Her work is incredibly precise, based on centuries of knowledge. She understands the chemistry of lime, the geology of the local stone, the specific weather patterns of the region. She has a deep, intricate plan. But the plan is not about preventing failure; it’s about gracefully accommodating it. It’s about designing for stress, for movement, for life.

Designing for stress, for movement, for life.

It reminds me of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. The point is not to hide the break, but to illuminate it. The pottery becomes more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken. The cracks are a part of its history, a testament to its resilience. Claire’s work is a kind of architectural kintsugi. She’s not trying to make the building look new; she’s honoring its scars and ensuring it can gain new ones for centuries to come.

After that project of mine failed so spectacularly, I stopped making Gantt charts. At least, not the kind I used to. My new plans look more like sketches, with dotted lines and open spaces. They focus on principles and objectives, not on rigid, sequential tasks. We plan for the first 8 steps, not the first 80. We build in slack. We assume things will go wrong, and we treat those moments not as catastrophes, but as information. The unexpected client request isn’t a crisis anymore; it’s data that tells us our initial assumption was wrong. It’s a hairline crack in the mortar, telling us where the pressure is.

You get something that doesn’t shatter when a thumb slips. You get something that breathes.

It’s a much more vulnerable way to work. It requires admitting you don’t have all the answers. It requires trusting your team to adapt instead of just follow instructions. Like the accidental video call, it exposes you. There’s no perfect facade to hide behind. But what you get in return is something that doesn’t shatter when a thumb slips. You get something that breathes.

Embrace the cracks. They are where the light gets in.

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