In 2020, a spacecraft nearly got swallowed by an asteroid.
The mission was an elegant concept: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx would travel to asteroid Bennu, touch its surface briefly, grab a small sample, and return home. A cosmic reach into the past, given that Bennu is older than the solar system. Touch, grab, and bring back in a cannister for study.
What happened instead was far stranger. When the spacecraft touched the surface, the material didn’t behave like rock. Bennu isn’t solid, it’s a loose rubble pile. Billions of fragments of space rock are held together not by significant gravity but by weak forces: static, friction, the gentle pressure of proximity. When the spacecraft made contact, the surface particles cohered around it. The asteroid began to swallow the orbiter whole. Only by firing its rockets and asserting a strong vector back toward normal physics did the spacecraft escape.
We are in that place right now in our everyday lives.
Social media doesn’t bind us with strong forces. Instead, it binds us the way Bennu’s rubble binds, through proximity, repetition, and the low-grade noise of the attention economy. Disruptive politics, algorithmic feeds, and the daily theatre of outrage are weak forces operating at scale. Thin ideas spawn violent cohesion. The slightest push changes the shape of the crowd. And the memes, flags, the grievance-shaped slogans don’t stand up under scrutiny.
No one expects them to hold up, at least, not any longer than it takes to capture your attention and show you a targeted ad.
Our entire social model works just like an asteroid. Not through the strong gravity of real ideas, but through the accumulation of weak forces across billions of fragments. No single piece is in charge. No single piece knows what the whole is doing. The pile just coheres, and shifts, and coheres again.
This isn’t new, by the way; we just have a hard time learning from history.
In the 1920s, advertising became a science long before anyone understood the volatile chemistry. Madison Avenue learned to manufacture desire, not for things people needed, but for shapes people wanted to take. Buy this car and become that man. Wear this and belong here. The signals were weak but they were everywhere, and they cohered into a decade of manufactured confidence. Wall Street learned the same trick: manufacture value, leverage it, leverage the leverage, and the whole thing holds together beautifully right up until the moment it doesn’t.
The mechanism wasn’t greed, exactly. It was weak forces at scale. Millions of small bets, each individually reasonable, each nudged by the same low hum of manufactured desire, until the pile was so large and so hollow that a single tremor brought it down.
What we’re living through now feels less like a war and more like that: a social depression. The same hollowness. The same cohesion built on nothing load-bearing. You unravel the ball of yarn and there’s nothing in the center.
Through this churning cloud, something important is going quiet.
Not gone, but pushed into the background, behind the curtain. The stronger forces in human nature are being sidelined. Decency, common sense, the small daily acts of empathy that hold communities together are becoming B-stories. You can still see them: the neighbor who shows up with food after a death; the stranger who steps in when you can’t reach the cereal on the top shelf; the person in the comment section who says, simply, that’s not right, and means it without any self-promoting performance. These forces are real, but they’re being drowned out by the static of the rubble pile.
It is not that people have become morally unrecoverable. It’s just that weak forces are winning on sheer volume.
Here is what the Bennu probe teaches us.
You cannot study an asteroid without touching it. Likewise, you cannot live in modern society without making contact with its memes, its currents, its shapes of the moment. Withdrawal isn’t the answer; that’s just another way of getting lost.
But before you touch the surface, you need strong retro-rockets.
Things you actually stand for, not just against. A moral physics you’ve chosen consciously; principles sturdy enough to give you your own orbit. Not a manifesto or a brand, just a clear sense of your own gravity, so that when the weak forces start to cohere around you, you can find your way back. Principles that keep you out of the quicksand.
Over the years I’ve worked out seventeen of them. They’re not commandments handed down from Moses on the mountain. They’re more like physics, the physics I actually try to operate by: tested against real experience, revised when they fail, kept when they hold.
We’ll get to all seventeen, and we’ll riff a lot on how they’re applied. But I’ll tell you the first one now, because it’s the one that makes the rest of them honest:
Distrust all claims for the one true way. Even this one.
Except pizza. Pizza is always the answer.
Bill Wear writes about the physics of living at billwear.github.io.