The Why – Our World Keeps Misunderstanding Itself – Solving for INTENTION

Picture this:

You text your friend:
“Hey, no worries if not, but would love your help moving this weekend 😅”

They respond:
“Haha sounds good”

Fast forward to Saturday… you’re surrounded by boxes. No friend. No truck. Just you, your cat, and a hernia waiting to happen.

What went wrong?

You thought they agreed.
They thought they were just being nice.
No one actually said what they meant.

Now imagine this scenario… but scaled up to nations, economies, marriages, and wars. Now multiply this by 8 billion people trying to share a planet. Welcome to my theory:
Communication – Solving for Intention.

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🧠 Wait, What Does “Solving for Intention” Even Mean?

Glad you asked, friend.

It’s simple:
Every time a human being opens their mouth (or sends a text, a look, a tweet), there’s a hidden “intention” behind it.

But often, what gets heard is something very different. Words are imperfect tools. Cultures, egos, and fear distort the message.
So instead of understanding each other, we play telephone with human emotions—until it all breaks down.

Solving for Intention means: instead of reacting to what someone says, try to understand why they’re saying it. What do they want? What’s the signal behind the noise?

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🍔 Let’s Break It Down with a Burger Metaphor

You walk into a restaurant and say:

“I’ll have whatever’s popular.”

What you mean: I’m new here and I want a safe choice.
What the server hears: You’re too lazy to read the menu.
What the kitchen cooks: The expensive Wagyu burger with truffle fries.
What you get: A $37 bill you didn’t see coming.

Nobody’s evil here. But everyone misunderstood the intention.

Now scale this up to Russia and Ukraine.

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🌍 When Countries Talk Past Each Other (Spoiler: It Ends Badly)

Let’s walk through what happened between Russia and Ukraine—not politically, but communicatively.
Here’s the chain of escalation I see in all human conflict:

Indirect:
Russia makes vague threats. “We don’t like NATO expansion…”
Ukraine shrugs, world shrugs. Mixed signals.

Direct:
Russia parks tanks at the border. “We’re serious.”
Ukraine prepares defense. Words become warnings.

Aggressive:
Russia invades. Sanctions fly. Missiles fly.
Now it’s not just words—it’s actions.

Violent:
Cities are bombed. Civilians die. Each side doubles down.

Inhumane (Singular):
Individual acts of cruelty emerge—torture, rape, fear campaigns.

Inhuman (Plural):
Entire systems break down. Refugees. War crimes. Genocide.
We stop seeing “others” as humans. Just enemies. Noise. Collateral.

It all started with misread intentions, indirect communication, and no shared “vocabulary” to solve it.

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📡 So… What Do We Do About It?

If we can learn to solve for intention, we might stop so much of this escalation before it even begins.

It means:

1. Listening with humility
2. Asking better questions (“What do you actually want?”)
3. Translating across culture, class, and trauma
4. Teaching this stuff in schools, not just debate teams

It’s not just therapy talk. It’s survival strategy—for your marriage, your startup, your democracy.

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🧪 Coming Up Next: The Innovation-Scarcity Theory

If “Solving for Intention” is the how, then our next post is about the why escalation happens in the first place.

I call it the Innovation-Scarcity Theory.

It’s the idea that new technology, when it collides with limited resources or attention, causes fear… and fear leads to confusion… and confusion leads to bad decisions.

Think:

1. Printing press + politics = revolutions
2. Social media + attention = cancel culture
3. AI + jobs = ????

We’ll dig into why people fight harder when there’s a new tool in the room—and why the fastest innovator often gets misunderstood the most.