The 14th-century North African historian Ibn Khaldun observed that civilizations don't collapse from external conquest first — they collapse from 'asabiyyah' decay, the slow dissolution of the inner cohesion that made them worth conquering in the first place. The enemy walks through doors that were rotted open from within, often decades before anyone noticed. What he spotted at the civilizational scale, the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan tracked at the individual scale: the habits that ultimately cost people everything are rarely the dramatic ones. They're the ones that quietly degrade what Sullivan called 'selective inattention' — the mind's ability to notice signals that contradict its preferred story about itself. The habit of surrounding yourself only with people who confirm your current direction. The habit of reframing every piece of friction as evidence of others' misunderstanding. These don't feel like destruction; they feel like comfort, even sophistication. What actually gets lost is the internal early-warning system — the capacity to register when something that once worked has stopped working, before the bill comes due at scale. Monday is a good moment to ask a specific question: what are you currently explaining away that you were genuinely troubled by six months ago?

What is the most recent piece of information — a number, a reaction, a silence — that you registered briefly and then found a reason to set aside?

Drawing from Historical sociology / Interpersonal psychoanalysis — Ibn Khaldun (Muqaddimah, 1377), cross-referenced with Harry Stack Sullivan (The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, 1953)