The Collapse of Competence

The Collapse of Competence

“The world isn’t falling apart; it’s just forgetting how to work.”

It started at 8:15 a.m., with the first hold tone of the day.
Not the cheerful kind, either; the kind designed by someone who hates human ears.
I was calling the doctor’s office. Again.

Same prescription. Same routine. Same mistakes.
They had lost it. Again.

The nurse said she would “send a note.”
The pharmacy said they “never got the note.”
The billing department said I owed for a visit that never happened.
And by noon, I had three different versions of the same lie printed neatly on official letterhead.

In the span of four hours, I watched three separate medical offices forget how to perform the most basic function of civilization: communication.

This was not malice.
It was entropy.

A world so automated, so bureaucratized, so insulated from consequence that competence itself had become optional.

I sat there in the parking lot, hands on the wheel, waiting for another call back that would never come, thinking: This is it. This is how civilizations die, not with war, but with voicemail.

We live in a world allergic to mastery.
Everywhere you look, systems are fracturing: medical, educational, corporate, governmental.
And the people inside them do not even seem embarrassed anymore.

Nobody knows how to do their job, but everyone knows how to justify why it is not their fault.

The nurse blames the system.
The system blames the insurance.
The insurance blames the doctor.
And the doctor blames “policy.”

Meanwhile, people die waiting for a phone call that never gets returned.

Preventable medical errors kill more people every year than car crashes.
Wrong doses. Missed charts. Mixed-up files.
Lethal consequences of small incompetencies multiplied by scale.

And when it happens, there is an investigation, a statement, an apology, and then everyone goes back to business as usual, as though human lives are acceptable casualties in the name of workflow efficiency.

It is not just medicine.
It is everywhere.

Our age has replaced craft with compliance.
Nobody strives to be good at something anymore; they just want to be unblameable.
It is all checkboxes, metrics, and “notes in the system.”

Accountability has been replaced by plausible deniability.

And the more screens we add between people, the worse it gets.
You cannot yell at a screen.
You cannot shame a spreadsheet.
You cannot appeal to a conscience that has been replaced by a ticket number.

The problem is not just incompetence; it is apathy codified.
We have institutionalized not caring.

And the irony?
Every system is designed to look like it is working.
The emails go out.
The forms are filled.
The hold line plays its endless music.

Everything looks alive.
But it is a corpse that twitches.

I have worked in engineering long enough to know this: when feedback disappears, failure becomes inevitable.
Systems need tension. They need friction. They need someone to feel shame when something breaks.

But we have built a culture that kills shame.
We call it “emotional safety.”
We call it “work-life balance.”
We call it “policy.”

And the result is a world where nobody gets fired, but everything keeps failing.

The ancients feared famine, plague, and sword.
We will die of clerical error.

And I do not think it is just inefficiency; it is a spiritual rot.
Competence used to be a moral duty.
To do your work well was not just a skill, it was righteousness.
A way of honoring both God and neighbor.
Now, work is just a paycheck.
And people wonder why the lights flicker and the prescriptions get lost.

I do not know what the fix is, except maybe this:
To care again.
To hold ourselves accountable when no one else will.
To treat the smallest act, typing a name, filing a form, answering a call, as a moral act.

Because when the world stops caring about the little things, the big things collapse overnight.

I used to think civilization would end with revolution.
Now I think it will end with an auto-reply.

The machines did not replace us.
We replaced ourselves with ghosts who take messages and never call back.