What you cannot see from inside
When I built yachts, I never once thought about what would happen to the yacht at the end of its life. It had nothing to do with not caring. The question simply never had a reason to come up. A yacht being built is a birth, not an ending. You see a hull taking shape, a client walking around it with a kind of glow on their face, a shipyard proud of something new that did not exist few months earlier. Nobody stands at that moment and asks what happens in thirty years when the material can no longer be recycled and has nowhere to go but a landfill. The question was not being suppressed. It simply was not part of the frame I was looking through.
It was only years later, once I started developing DANU, a fully recyclable high performance composite material built from natural fibre instead of the glass and carbon fibre yachts are normally built from, that the question even became visible to me. Nobody convinced me to feel guilty about the yachts. Working every day on a material designed to have an actual end of life solution, instead of one that simply goes to landfill, forced a different question into the frame, what happens after, and once that question exists, you cannot look at your old work the same way again. I did not become more caring. I became able to see something that had always been there.
That is the part I find strange to sit with. It was not hidden information. Every yacht built with certain composites was always going to end up somewhere at the end of its life, that fact did not change the day I noticed it. What changed was the lens I was looking through, and once one lens is in place, an entire category of question either exists for you or it does not.
I think this is true of far more than yachts. Most people are not avoiding a hard truth about their work, their health, their relationships, their choices. They are simply standing inside a frame that has never once required the question to be asked. You cannot feel guilty about a blind spot you do not know you have. You can only notice it once something, a new job, a new relationship, a new field entirely, hands you a different set of questions to carry around.
It also works the other way, which is the part that gives me more hope than regret. The materials available today are not only better for what happens decades from now. They are already better for the person standing in the workshop cutting and shaping them right now, safer to breathe around, safer to handle, cleaner for the hands doing the work today, not just for a future none of us will fully see. The frame that made me notice the end of a product's life also made me notice the beginning of it, the people building it, in a way the old frame never asked me to.
I do not know what frame I am standing inside right now that is hiding something from me the same way yacht building once did. I suspect everyone is standing inside one. Maybe the real question is not whether you have blind spots, you certainly do, but what would have to change around you before one of them became visible at all.
