The Devil Is in the Misalignment

All torture begins with wanting too much and understanding too little. Misalignment isn’t technical—it’s human. The devil hides in unchecked ambition.

If you want to understand why people suffer, especially the smart and ambitious ones, look not at what they fail to achieve, but at what they want too much. The real torture doesn’t come from loss. It comes from being hooked on something — a goal, an identity, a future — that you’ve mistaken for reality.

This isn’t about greed, or pride, or even delusion in the usual sense. It’s more subtle than that. It’s a structural failure — a misalignment — between the size of your ambition and the depth of your understanding. You want something big, but you haven’t built the foundation to bear its weight. So you fake it, not maliciously, but necessarily. You have to. Otherwise, the dream falls apart. And when the dream becomes your identity, letting it fall apart feels like death.

The core misalignment is existential. We build castles in the sky and then try to live in them. We imagine success not as a slow accumulation of understanding, but as a sudden arrival — a transformation, a crowning. That’s the illusion: that you can skip the boring part. That you can leap straight into significance without paying the price of comprehension.

But reality doesn’t work that way. It’s granular. It moves in small steps. And it punishes shortcuts.

The truth is, real understanding is slow. It’s inconvenient. It’s often boring. And worst of all, it’s humbling. If you’re honest about what you don’t know, you’ll seem slower than the people bluffing confidence. And if your ambition is tied to appearing impressive, that’s intolerable. So you compromise. You perform knowledge instead of earning it. You replace depth with momentum. You hope no one notices.

And that’s when the real suffering begins. Because now, your sense of progress depends not on actual growth, but on the feeling of moving forward. And that feeling is fragile. You need constant reinforcement — validation, traction, applause — just to keep going. You’re not addicted to progress. You’re addicted to the illusion of progress.

This is what people miss when they try to explain the collapse of charismatic founders or visionary startups. They look for malice. They look for lies. But what you usually find is something much more ordinary — a slow drift away from the ground. A mind stretched too far into the future, and no longer anchored in the present.

Take the now-familiar stories: a biotech founder whose devices never worked, a real estate visionary who sold community instead of cash flow, a crypto genius who thought virtue could justify theft. These people didn’t fail because their ideas were too big. They failed because their understanding was too small — and they didn’t stop to catch up.

They were misaligned, not just with the world, but with themselves. With what they actually knew. With what they could actually build. But the higher their ambition climbed, the harder it became to admit uncertainty. So they pushed forward. They talked bigger. And in doing so, they drifted further from reality — until the whole thing snapped.

Misalignment, in its deepest sense, is forgetting where you are. It’s mistaking your idea of the thing for the thing itself. It’s confusing clarity with confidence. Momentum with meaning. Performance with presence.

And the modern world makes this mistake easy. Especially in tech. We reward vision, charisma, audacity. We love people who seem like they’re two steps ahead. But the danger of being two steps ahead is that it’s easy to lose track of whether the ground beneath you is solid. And if you’re not constantly checking, you’re not just risking a fall — you’re inviting it.

Because here’s the quiet rule no one wants to admit: if your ambition outpaces your understanding, you will hallucinate. You will start filling in gaps with faith. You will make decisions based not on what’s true, but on what needs to be true for your story to hold together.

This is the real alignment problem. Not just for AI. For humans. We want to build things that are smart, ethical, safe. But we ourselves are often ungrounded, unaligned. Addicted to bigness. Desperate to feel like we’re part of something epochal. So we cut corners — not in code, but in thought. We declare the destination, and trust that the path will appear.

It won’t.

The cure for misalignment isn’t humility in the abstract. It’s specificity. It’s learning the thing, not gesturing at it. It’s being able to explain your product without metaphors. It’s being more interested in the next hard question than in the next big pitch.

That kind of alignment is rare. It’s slow. It doesn’t trend well. But it’s what keeps the real builders sane. The ones who are quiet while others are loud. Who ask dumb questions when others pretend to understand. Who don’t scale until they’re sure they’ve built something worth scaling.

So if you want to suffer less — in startups, in careers, in life — don’t just dream less. Understand more. Stay in the moment long enough to see what’s actually happening. Drop the addiction to bigness. Drop the urgency to be recognized. Drop the craving to feel like you’re changing the world.

When you’re really doing something good, you won’t need to tell yourself a story about it. You’ll just be doing it.

Because the devil was never in ambition. The devil was never in scale.
The devil was in the moment you stopped checking whether what you wanted was something you actually understood.