For years, I have lived by a private code. I thought of it as wisdom.
As part of that wisdom, I had decided that the phone would be treated as dead weight from a certain time of night until 9 am. Those who know me well knew of this rule.
The narrative in my head was that I had solved something fundamental about modern life. I had beaten the algorithm to reclaim my mornings and protect my nights. I was being disciplined. Consistent.
I was also being insufferable. The idea of the phone as dead weight went from a habit to a philosophy to a “way of living”. I proselytised freely. Mornings, I said, belong to the self. Evenings belong to family. If something was truly urgent, people who mattered would know how to reach me. Everyone else could wait.
Then I spent a few weeks away from home, last month, and the silence I had protected started to feel like exile. Nobody could reach me, because I had made myself unreachable.
One morning, at an hour I would have considered a moral failure, I picked up the phone. A sharp, unpleasant sensation of hypocrisy crept through me. To do this was to admit that the rule I had defended so confidently for so long was no longer working.
That is when I realised the rule had been sustained not because it served me, but because I had spent years telling other people it was the right thing to do.
I made the call I wanted to make. I did it again the following day. What surprised me was that the world didn’t rush in as I had feared. I didn’t return to the endless doomscrolling. I suffered no collapse of attention.
The outcome I had chased through rigidity arrived through flexibility. The rule changed, but the intent did not.
This is where things get risky. There is a difference between bending a rule to protect what one cares about, and bending a belief just to keep up. The first approach helps one survive. The second quietly wears one down. Inside, they may feel identical, at least at first. But I’ve watched this confusion play out at scale.
Years ago, while researching the future of digital payments, I became acquainted with a fintech entrepreneur who could see what lay ahead.
When the opportunity arose, he exited his first company for roughly $400 million, just as others were rushing into the digital payments space. Then he waited. He watched how convenience became cheap, how speed stopped being scarce. When he made his comeback, it was with something entirely different: a system that rewarded users for engagement rather than efficiency, in exchange for their data and attention.
This wasn’t an evolution of his earlier philosophy. It was a reversal.
It may have been commercially viable, but it was a negation of what he believed: about technology, about purpose, and about who his products were meant to serve.
This is why hypocrisy is a slippery slope. Not because the first exception damns you, but because the second requires less effort. Soon enough, there is no need for explanations; survival starts to stand in for principle.
This is what unsettles me now. I gave up my phone deadlines and gained flexibility. But I also learned how quickly I can convince myself that compromise is clarity. If one boundary can move so easily, what else is negotiable?
Rules are easy to break. Beliefs are harder to rebuild. And once you’ve learned to ignore the discomfort of contradiction, you may find you’ve also lost the friction that once told you who you are.
That is the risk I sit with now. The most dangerous thing about breaking your own rules isn’t that you might be wrong. It’s how quickly you stop needing to ask yourself if you are.
(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com. The views expressed are personal)
