No. 2: The flock you can’t see is the one to watch.
To unflock is to unherd.
The old kind of flock was obvious. Everyone wanting the same things, saying the same things, wearing the same things. You could spot it a mile away. Easy to see. Easy, if you were paying attention, to sidestep.
The new kind is subtler. It doesn’t look like a flock at all. It looks like a very busy life, moving very fast, in a direction that seems perfectly reasonable because everyone around you is moving in it too.
The pace itself is the herd. The breathlessness. The sense that slowing down is a kind of failure. The feeling that a quiet afternoon spent with your own thoughts is somehow less productive than one spent at full tilt, consuming, responding, keeping up.
Nobody decided this was how it would be. It just became the default. And defaults, as a rule, deserve more scrutiny than they get.
To unherd doesn’t require a dramatic exit. It requires a pause. A deliberate, slightly countercultural, deeply underrated pause – long enough to notice which direction you’re actually moving in, and whether you’d have chosen it yourself.
Fun Fact
Here’s how we see it: Slow is not the opposite of productive. It is the opposite of unconscious. There is a difference, and it is worth knowing.