The Depth of the Roots Watercolor Mandala Art

The Depth of the Roots
On effort, originality, and what lasts
by Chris Keeney

I’m worried about our society. I’m worried about myself. And I say that not as someone standing outside the problem looking in, but as someone who is very much inside it, trying to figure out what it means.

This morning I was driving to the beach when a thought hit me — not a gentle thought but the kind that arrives uninvited and refuses to leave until you pay attention to it. So I did what people do now: I reached for my phone and dictated it into a recorder as I drove toward the ocean, and it caught my words and held them so I wouldn’t have to.

Sit with the irony of that for a moment. Here I am, about to write an essay about the value of effort and originality and doing things yourself, and I’m dictating the opening thoughts into an AI engine on my way to go surfing. I’ll use that same AI to help shape these ideas into cleaner sentences than the ones I’d produce alone. The man writing about authenticity is using one of the most powerful homogenizing tools ever built to find his voice.

I know how that looks. I’ve thought about it. And I’m going to keep going anyway, because there’s something worth saying here that doesn’t get simpler by pretending the contradiction isn’t real. More on that later.

The waves were awful this morning — onshore wind, no shape, the kind of conditions that send most surfers back to their cars. But out in the water was a kneeboarder friend of mine. He works constantly and doesn’t get out as often as he’d like, so when he does, he makes it count. You can see it in the way he moves: no wasted time between sets, always positioning, always reading the water. He was out there in the mess making the most of it, and he was smiling the whole way through.

I was swimming out when I saw him, already positioned, already moving. I felt something I can only describe as inspired. Because what he was doing wasn’t complicated. He wasn’t performing anything. He wasn’t pretending the waves were good. He was making the best of what the ocean gave him, completely, without waiting for better circumstances before deciding to enjoy himself.

There’s a concept in sports science called deliberate practice: the idea that mastery isn’t just about accumulating hours, but about the quality of attention you bring to every single one of them. My friend isn’t just logging time in the water. He’s fully present in it, reading each wave as it actually is rather than wishing it were something else, finding the workable line in what everyone else dismissed. That’s not talent. That’s a discipline built over years of going out, especially on the days nobody else thought were worth the effort. That discipline — that refusal to wait for perfect conditions — is what makes him exceptional on the good days too.

That is a skill. And like most real skills, it looks effortless from the outside and is anything but. What looks like natural ease is almost always the residue of accumulated effort, the work that happened before anyone was watching.

The Hole You Dig

There’s something I’ve been noticing for years that bothers me more the older I get. We’ve stopped building things to last.

Walk through a hardware store, a furniture showroom, a clothing shop, run your hand along almost anything made in the last decade, and you can feel it. The lightness of something that wasn’t meant to be kept. The particular hollow sound of materials chosen for cost rather than quality. We’ve become extraordinarily good at making things that look fine in the store and fall apart eighteen months after you get them home. And the remarkable thing is that we’ve also become comfortable with this arrangement, almost without noticing it happened.

What most people don’t realize is that this didn’t happen by accident. There’s a term for it: planned obsolescence. It began in the 1920s as a deliberate corporate strategy, products designed not to last so that consumers would have no choice but to keep buying. In 1924, a cartel of the world’s major lightbulb manufacturers agreed to limit bulb lifespan to a thousand hours. Not because the technology couldn’t do better. Because a bulb that lasted forever was bad for business. We were trained to be a throwaway society. The disposability we take for granted today was engineered into the products long before we ever got our hands on them.

The logic makes a certain kind of short-term sense: why pay more for something when you can pay less? But the math only works if you stop the calculation at the moment of purchase. Follow it out and the picture changes completely. The cheaper thing breaks sooner. You replace it. You replace the replacement. And somewhere in the third or fourth cycle you’ve spent more than you would have on the well-made thing that still would have been sitting in the corner doing its job. The false economy of cheap isn’t a conspiracy anymore. It’s just a habit we inherited and never thought to question.

But it goes deeper than money. What we’ve really lost is something harder to price: the satisfaction of owning something made with care, by someone who took the work seriously, and that shows it. I’ve spent time in Japan, and one thing that stays with you is how that culture treats craft, any craft. There’s a word for it: shokunin (職人), roughly translated as artisan or craftsman, but the word carries far more weight than that. A shokunin doesn’t merely practice a skill. The work is seen as a direct reflection of character. Who you are shows up in what you make, without exception. This applies as much to the chef perfecting a bowl of ramen as to the carpenter joining wood without nails.

In Tokyo, a sushi restaurant serves only sushi. A ramen shop makes only ramen. Mastering one thing deeply is valued above doing many things adequately. Jiro Ono, the sushi master documented in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, ran a ten-seat restaurant inside a Tokyo subway station for decades and earned three Michelin stars. At eighty-five he was still at it every day, still adjusting, still unsatisfied. “I do the same thing over and over,” he said, “improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more.” That’s not perfectionism as neurosis. That’s a man who understands that the work is never finished, and has made peace with it, even found joy in it.

Craftsmanship isn’t merely a set of skills. It’s an expression of character, a relationship between the maker and the thing being made that goes far beyond technique. There’s a reason people still pass down cast-iron skillets and hand-stitched quilts and wooden furniture with dovetail joints. Those things carry within them the evidence of what went into them. Effort isn’t just a means to an end. It’s an ingredient. It shows up in the result, and the result carries it long after the maker is gone.

I have a SCUBA regulator that’s a marvel of engineering, still functioning perfectly after decades of hard use. But I can’t dive with it anymore because the manufacturer stopped making parts, which means it can’t be properly serviced. The object held up its end completely. The system around it didn’t. I also have tools I inherited from my father that still do exactly what they were built to do. No planned obsolescence in either. No expiration date engineered in. They were made by people who understood, the way a shokunin understands, that what you put into something outlasts you.

There’s a principle worth saying plainly, because it doesn’t get said enough: give it everything or don’t do it. That’s not a demand for perfection. It’s a recognition that half-effort produces half-results, and the people on the receiving end of your work can feel the difference even when they can’t name it. When you bring your full attention to something, though, the opposite happens. You can stand behind what you made. The person who receives it gets something real. Your integrity in the work and their experience of it aren’t separate. They’re the same transaction, viewed from two sides.

As a gardener, I tell people this all the time: if you buy a $20 tree, dig a $300 hole. Most people look at me like I’ve lost my mind. But that hole is where everything happens. It’s where the roots will go, where they’ll find water and anchor against wind and slowly build the strength that no one ever sees. Spend the money on the dirt. Do the work before the tree goes in.

Few do. Digging is hard. It takes time and energy and there’s no visible reward for it. You finish and you’ve got nothing to show but a hole. So they dig cheap. They drop the tree in, fill it back up, walk away. And then they’re surprised, years later, when the thing hasn’t thrived.

The tree didn’t fail. It didn’t choose to be planted in shallow soil, two inches above a shelf of rock and clay that no one bothered to check for. You chose that spot. You dug that hole. The outcome was decided before the tree ever went in, and the tree had nothing to do with it.

We do this with everything. We underinvest in the foundation, plant the thing anyway, and then blame the result. Poor outcomes usually aren’t mysteries. They’re the logical consequence of cheap holes.

The Same Impulse

Here is what I’ve come to believe connects all of it: the cheap products, the AI-generated writing, the overnight-success mythology. They are not separate problems. They are different expressions of the same underlying impulse — the desire to get the result without doing the work. To have the thing without paying its true cost. To skip the slow, unglamorous middle where depth actually gets built.

We’ve applied this logic to products, and we got throwaway culture. We’ve applied it to careers, and we got a generation that mistakes visibility for achievement. We’ve applied it now to language itself, to the very sentences we use to express who we are, and the result is what people are starting to call AI slop: content that is technically correct and emotionally weightless, that could have been written by anyone because in a meaningful sense it was written by everyone and therefore no one.

There’s an old principle from computing: garbage in, garbage out. Feed a system shallow input and you get shallow output, regardless of how sophisticated the machine is. The same rule applies to voices. The shokunin principle holds that who you are shows up in what you make. AI slop is the precise inversion: content from which no one’s character can be read, because no one’s character went into it. Researchers are now documenting what writers have been feeling in their gut: AI outputs converge toward a shared center regardless of the prompt or the person asking. The more we rely on these tools to do our thinking for us, the more our collective voice begins to flatten.

This is what I mean when I say I’m worried about my voice being absorbed into the collective. Not that AI will steal something from me. But that I’ll hand it over without noticing, a little at a time, because it’s easier than doing the hard part myself. Before smartphones, most of us knew the phone numbers of the people we loved. We held that information in our own minds because we had to. Now the phone holds it, and if someone asks you for your daughter’s number without your device nearby, you might genuinely not know it. We didn’t decide to forget. We just stopped having a reason to remember. The muscle atrophied while we were looking at something else.

I think the same thing can happen with thought. With language. With the capacity to sit with a half-formed idea long enough for it to become something real. The messy drafts, the awkward sentences, the multiple attempts that go nowhere: that friction isn’t the obstacle to finding your voice. It is how your voice gets built. Replace that process with a clean AI output and you save time, yes. But what you lose are exactly the imperfections that made it yours.

I use AI to help me write. I also use it to catch the typos that used to paralyze me — a thing that probably sounds trivial until you understand that the fear of making a mistake on the page was once bad enough that I avoided the page entirely. A tool that removes a barrier between you and your own expression is a good tool, whatever its other complications. But there is a meaningful difference between using a tool and substituting it for the work you’re supposed to do yourself. The noticing. The remembering. The specific thing that happened on a specific morning that no algorithm was present for and no training data contains.

When my kneeboarder friend was out in the water this morning, making do with what the ocean gave him, that observation belongs to me because I was there. I was in that cold water, with that particular worry in my chest, at that particular hour. No AI generates that. It can help me shape what I do with it. It cannot be the thing itself.

What Las Vegas Doesn’t Show You

Most things in life are hard. What gets promoted instead is the other story: the shortcut, the hack, the overnight success, the lottery ticket that changes everything. Las Vegas is built on this story. The advertisements show you the winner — arms raised, chips stacked, lights blazing. What they don’t show you is the overwhelming majority of people who drove home with less than they arrived with, in the dark, replaying the moment the night turned.

We are drawn, almost by instinct, to the exceptional case: the person who made it big fast, the company that went from nothing to everything in eighteen months, the investment that returned five hundred percent. These stories are real. They happen. But they are the statistical outliers, and when we make them the template, we set ourselves up for a particular kind of confusion. We do the thing, it doesn’t produce the overnight result, and we conclude that something must be wrong with us rather than with the expectation.

Things of real value are built over time with a lot of hard work and dedication. The photographer who makes images that stop you in your tracks has taken hundreds of thousands of frames to develop the eye that knows which one matters. The writer whose sentences feel effortless has written sentences that weren’t for years before the ease arrived. The surfer who makes a difficult wave look like nothing has fallen off that wave more times than he can count. The craft is always in the back story. And critically, it isn’t simply a matter of hours logged — it’s the depth of focus brought to every one of them. My friend is exceptional not because he’s put in the time, but because every session, even the bad ones, he’s actually there.

Even when you’ve put in the work, genuinely, fully, without cutting corners, the outcome still isn’t guaranteed. You do everything right and the wave closes out anyway. The business you built carefully doesn’t survive the recession. Effort is not a transaction. It does not obligate the universe to deliver a specific result on your preferred schedule.

But here is what effort does guarantee: you will be able to look at whatever happens and know that you gave it what you had. That you didn’t protect yourself from failure by withholding your best. That accounting — the internal one, the private one that has nothing to do with outcome — is not a consolation prize. For some people, in some moments, it ends up being the most important thing.

Finishing What You Start

There’s a related problem that the Las Vegas story doesn’t capture, and it has nothing to do with outcomes. It has to do with whether you stay in the game long enough to find out.

If you never finish what you start, how do you know what the outcome would have been?

Most worthwhile things have a middle. The beginning is usually energizing: there’s novelty in it, possibility, the particular pleasure of not yet having made any mistakes. The end, if you reach it, brings its own satisfaction. But the middle is where everything gets tested, because that’s where it gets hard and the initial energy has burned off and the result still isn’t visible and there’s no particular reason to keep going except that you said you would. Most things die in the middle. Not from failure. From abandonment.

There’s a kind of self-protection in not finishing. If you don’t complete the thing, you can’t be judged by what it turns out to be. You preserve the version that existed in your imagination, which is always more perfect than what you’d actually produce. But that protection comes at a serious cost. The person who never finishes lives permanently in the subjunctive: what might have been, what could have happened, what they would have achieved if only. The person who finishes and fails has something that person lacks entirely. They know. They know what they’re capable of. They have the raw material of genuine learning rather than the comfortable fog of potential.

And if you’re doing the same thing repeatedly without getting the result you want, that’s worth paying attention to. Persistence and stubbornness look identical from the outside. Both involve continuing to try. But they are fundamentally different in their relationship to feedback. Persistence adjusts. Stubbornness repeats. One is a virtue. The other is an expensive habit dressed up as one.

The commitment is to getting through. The specific line changes with the water.

The Waiting

There is a version of optimism I don’t have much use for — the relentless, reflexive kind that insists everything is fine and that the right attitude can substitute for actual conditions. That version is a defense mechanism, not a philosophy. It protects the person holding it from having to look clearly at what’s in front of them.

What I respect is something harder. It starts with an honest look at the situation: the waves are bad, the circumstances are difficult, this is not what I wanted. And then it asks a different question: what can I do with this? Not what this should be. What can I make of what it is.

And here is the harder truth underneath that: unhappiness, for a great many people, is not something that happens to them. It is something they choose.

That claim tends to land hard, so let me be precise about what I mean. I am not talking about grief, or clinical depression, or the real and serious suffering that life delivers without asking. I am talking about a different category entirely: the chronic, low-grade dissatisfaction that follows certain people through every circumstance, through the good jobs and the bad ones, through the relationships that worked and the ones that didn’t, through decades of changed conditions that somehow never change how they feel. That kind of unhappiness is almost never caused by circumstances. It is maintained by habits of attention that have calcified into something that feels like personality.

These people are waiting. Waiting for the right conditions. The better job, the fixed relationship, the circumstances that finally justify feeling good. Those conditions, conveniently, never quite arrive. There is always one more thing that needs to be resolved first. The waiting becomes permanent. And here is the part that rarely gets said plainly: the waiting is a choice. It rarely feels like one, because habits rarely do once they’ve set. But it started somewhere, in small decisions about where to put your attention, what to dwell on, what story to tell yourself about what happened.

Those decisions compound. The person who habitually notices what’s wrong will, over time, become genuinely better at finding it. The person who habitually looks for what’s workable will, over time, become genuinely better at finding that. Neither is lying. Both are seeing clearly. They’ve just trained themselves to see different things. The first person will tell you their life is hard and be right. The second person will tell you their life has things worth building on and also be right. Same life, different practice.

This is not a small distinction. The habit of dissatisfaction is not a neutral default you fall into; it is a posture you maintain, reinforced every time you choose to focus on what’s missing rather than what’s present, every time you defer enjoyment until conditions improve, every time you tell yourself the story of everything that’s wrong before you’ve looked at what’s right. That posture, repeated enough, becomes the lens through which everything gets filtered. And once it does, no circumstance can fix it, because it isn’t caused by circumstance.

Happiness is not a feeling that shows up when everything lines up correctly. It is a practice — one you either commit to or don’t. My friend wasn’t out there this morning because the surf was cooperating. He was out there because he has spent years building the habit of being present in whatever is actually in front of him, and that habit now runs deeper than conditions. The ocean didn’t earn his good mood. He brought it.

You can build that habit or you can decide not to. But you don’t get to skip the decision. Not choosing is itself a choice, and it tends to produce predictable results. The people who seem most chronically unhappy are almost never the ones with the hardest lives. They are the ones who have practiced, with great diligence and consistency, the art of finding reasons not to be happy yet. They have become very good at it. They could, with equal effort, become very good at something else.

You can choose otherwise. That’s not a guarantee it will be easy, or that circumstances don’t matter at all. It’s just an observation that the choice exists, that it is a real and consequential one, and that most people never quite fully make it. They wait instead. And waiting, as it turns out, has predictable returns.

The Roots

I started this morning worried. I still am, a little. Worried about things getting built cheaply and falling apart. Worried about voices blending into a single undifferentiated hum. Worried about the skills we’re forgetting because we’ve built tools that remember them for us. Worried about a society that is very good at producing things quickly and less skilled at producing things that last.

But I also watched my kneeboarder friend this morning. Out in the water everyone else had already written off, fully committed, finding something worth riding in conditions most people had dismissed before they even got their boards wet. Not making a statement about it. Not posting it. Just out there. The roots of a person who keeps at it like that go deeper than anyone paddling past him can see.

A tree that grows fast in shallow soil looks impressive early. Tall, full of leaves, visible from a distance. Then a storm comes through and you find it in the street. The deep-rooted one, the one planted in a $300 hole, in soil someone cared enough to prepare, in ground that was checked before anything was committed to it — that tree is still standing the next morning. Not because it was lucky. Because the work was done before anyone was watching. Because someone dug the hole that deserved the tree.

You get what you put into it. That’s not a promise of a specific outcome. It’s a description of how depth is built, and it works in both directions. Put in shallow effort and you get shallow results, regardless of how much you wanted otherwise. Bring your full attention to something, bring the best you have, and something else happens. You can stand behind what you made. The person who receives your work gets something real. Your integrity in the work and their experience of it are the same transaction, viewed from two sides. That’s what the shokunin understood. That’s what Jiro is still doing at his ten-seat restaurant. That’s what my friend was doing out in the water this morning in conditions nobody else thought were worth their time.

None of this is lost on me, dictating these thoughts into a machine on my way to the ocean. The worry, the morning, my friend in the water, the shape of this particular fear — that part is mine. The tool helped me organize it. It didn’t live it.

Put something real into it. Whatever it is. The rest follows from there.

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For those of you that are interested, here’s the prompt for the watercolor mandala art created by ChatGPT.

The Depth of the Roots — Watercolor Mandala Prompt
Inspired by the essay by Chris Keeney

Copy Prompt