Old Roots, New Branches
Living between the slow layers of tradition and the fast layers of change
Marc Andreessen has this line about a sort of “barbell” pattern to learning. On one end you read old works, the classics and “lindy” foundations. On the other, the absolute bleeding edge of discourse in social media, YouTube, etc.
The old, and very new:
You draw from what’s proven durable and what’s just emerging; you ignore the middle. A pop-psychology book from the early 2000s isn’t old enough to be a classic, but it’s long past the point of novelty.
I’ve noticed a trend in my own habits where I’ve been unintentionally creating this barbell between my work and personal consumption. They seem to be mirror images.
At the beginning of this year I set out on my own professionally and started a product strategy agency: Liminal Lab. I’m working with a diverse slate of companies to incubate ideas, take new tools into the market, and to generally evolve their products (and teams) from one stage to the next — hence the name.
Central to my strategy is leaning as far forward into the latest tech as possible. Since most of these companies have been around a while, with existing customer bases and services to provide, it’s difficult for them to make time to study, understand, and embrace the latest trends. At the moment the hottest topic is AI, how to leverage it in ways useful and actionable. So one place we come in is in the effective deployment of AI tools: how to use LLMs for things like product ideation, tech architecture, marketing, prototyping ideas, and ultimately building products themselves. I’ve spent the last 10 months thinking and building and rebuilding as the tool stack keeps pushing forward at high speed.
I see a wedge here: an opportunity to build a product prototyping lab that embeds the capabilities and practices of the bleeding edge. We can be a go-to experimentation proving ground for companies looking to evolve, while retaining the essence that makes them who they are.
Any company starting in 2025 and beyond not including LLMs as a key weapon in the arsenal will have an uphill battle ahead of them. So I decided to “go native” and help my customers adapt. It’s working well so far.
But this need to stay on the knife’s-edge of technology is exhausting. Every day there’s a new tool or technique that purports to up-end everything. You’ll see posts almost daily about the next “___ killer” or “paradigm shift.” Things move so fast you barely have time to try one new thing before the next one drops.
Naturally, most of what’s new on the scene pops up, steals attention for a few weeks, fizzles, and dies off. Most of what we see doesn’t stick or really transform anything. Lots of sizzle, no steak.
But to be early to what is transformative, you have to be there. My job is to be in the vanguard, to find and test and separate signal from noise.
It’s thrilling and it’s fast-paced, but it can also leave one feeling unmoored, pulled in a hundred directions at once.
In contrast to this, my personal reading interest$s have tilted to the other end of the barbell. I’ve spent more time reading books over 50 years old in the past couple years than the rest of my reading history combined. And I haven’t sensed this slowing down. My interest in classics of literature, philosophy, and foundational works of nonfiction is greater than ever. Outside of the occasional contemporary novel or history book, my reading keeps skewing older.
For example, I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment the past few months, making my way through it with a deep, thoughtful read. While it’s great on its own merits as a work of fiction, it’s interesting to explore a story that’s been delivering readers the same value and insights for a century and a half. The classics become classics because they expose everlasting, permanent truths. In the case of Dostoevsky, he wrote things about the human condition as relevant in 2025 as in 1875.
It’s a reminder that some truths don’t change, and that there’s profound value in ideas that have stood the test of time.
So on one end I’m leaning as close to the front as possible, trying new stuff. On the other, the trend is reversed.
In the professional realm, we’re tempted to lean into the new and innovative. To move fast and try stuff and look for what others haven’t yet discovered. Not many jobs are structured around learning from and incorporating the timeless truths. In professional life we’re incentivized to look for novelty. We’re expected to be on the cutting edge, and rewarded for it.
In a personal context though, your time is your own. Deep reflection rewards you at home more than in work life. A slower presentness doesn’t leave you feeling left behind. My choice of professional career affords plenty of time for testing the edges. But when I’m back to the calmness of my reading chair, I want to learn from the old and durable, rather than what’s new and volatile.
Though I still believe a sense of wisdom for the timeless does carry value in the professional sphere. One of the things I hope I bring to work with customers is a recognition of long-lived patterns that work. We call it experience.
In an age of always-on connectedness, with everything driven by attention-mining algorithms, it’s easy to get sucked into a maelstrom of “newness” everywhere. You get FOMO from every new tweet in the timeline, thinking you have to keep scrolling to know what’s going on. But as many of us know (at least consciously if not subconsciously), 90% of the content we lay our eyes on — current events, ideas, stories — have no staying power. New ideas tempt us to believe we must keep up, and that they matter, but if we remain anchored enough we’ll recognize the fallacy. The “current thing” springs up and pervades the timeline for a couple days, then vanishes like it never happened.
Spend too long swimming in the zeitgeist and you end up exhausted. You can only hear “this changes everything” so many times before you drown in the attention-sapping rip currents.
There’s a kind of awareness that comes from appreciating the old while experimenting with the new. We could call it pattern resonance: a sensitivity not to novelty itself, but to the deeper patterns underneath. The more you’re anchored in what’s proven durable, the less likely you are to be swept up by every wave of excitement, fear, or hype that attends the latest technological shift.
We don’t want to reject newness for its own sake, but look for where new innovation matches up (or not) with ideas of the past. The more time you spend with enduring ideas, the more attuned you are to recurring motifs: the thrill, the panic, the overreach, the eventual settling into pattern. Over time you can sense continuity.
For something to be a pattern, it must recur. It must be something consistent and reliable. The burden of proof is on the “new thing” to prove itself. Only time and testing in the marketplace of ideas will let us know whether there’s a fitness to a deeper underlying problem. If an idea has legitimacy, it’ll stick around.
Yet we should maintain our exposure to the trend machine, not only to be early to the party on the newest, high-value ideas, but to inoculate ourselves against calcification. Together, they balance each other.
A foundation in classic ideas builds resilience against the constant drumbeat of “this is brand new and changes everything.” You start to recognize how often the “new” are just old ideas dressed up or reframed. A foundation of accumulated wisdom provides an anchor to keep you steady, while the frenzy of media and pop culture thrashes back and forth.
This fast vs. slow, volatile vs. stable duality reminds me of another idea I’ve written about: pace layers.
’s framework describes how complex systems move and evolve at different “paces.” At the upper levels, fashion and commerce change on the order of days or weeks. At slower, deeper levels, culture and nature transform gradually over years or generations.
As the layers shear past one another, the best-fit ideas, products, norms, or adaptations seep downward into a stiffer permanence in the layers below.
The paces match the purpose of each layer. We need them all. The slow-forming rigidity of culture needs the new ideas of fashion to push it forward. And fast-paced commerce can’t function without the strong, steady foundations of governance. We need fast and slow to counterbalance one another. Where you get in trouble is when you mistake something like a fashion trend for a long-term cultural shift.
Every complex system exhibits this kind of pace-differentiated stack of related subsystems, from whole societies to buildings to software applications.
If you can attend to multiple pace layers in different contexts, this pattern resonance develops. The sense for timeless patterns provides a model to match new ideas against.
I don’t want to be a nostalgic traditionalist, or a naïve futurist. I want part of myself grounded, but another part out playing in the sandbox. I feel like this new vs. old attention barbell is like creating a personal pace layers stack.
I’m not that interested in turning this into a specific premeditated plan. It’s feeling like the right fit for my goals and well-being. And it’s nice that I can see the parallel to pace layering. What’s most important to me is balance. Trying new things, while retaining appreciation for the timeless.
For centuries sailors have had a saying: “one hand for the sailor, one hand for the ship.” When you’re aboard you need at least one hand, you’ve got work to do. But you’re no good to the ship if you’re swept overboard.