for Elizabeth and Santiago
What feels inevitable is often just familiar.
Once you see that our number system is arbitrary, it becomes a lens for questioning all sorts of assumptions we carry around.
Language is full of these. We think of “tree” as somehow naturally connected to that woody thing with leaves, but it’s just an agreed-upon sound. Other cultures carve up color differently. Some have one word for what we call blue and green; others have dozens of words for different kinds of snow or rain.
Even time, which feels so natural, is an invention. Our 24-hour days, 7-day weeks, and January-starting years aren’t written into the universe. The Mayans had entirely different calendars. We could have 10-day weeks or 8-hour days if we’d chosen differently.
Social structures do this too. The way we organize work, basic ideas like property ownership, these vary wildly across cultures and centuries. What feels inevitable to us might look bizarre from another time or place.
And here’s the tricky part: these conventions aren’t useless. They coordinate reality. They solve problems. But the moment we remember they’re conventions we can ask: Is this serving us well? Could we do better?
It’s liberating. And a little unsettling. Which is exactly where this begins.
I remember the moment it cracked open for me.
It was high school. Our math teacher, in one of those rare off-script digressions that end up mattering more than the syllabus, said the best way to understand numbers was to realize that base-10 isn’t sacred. It’s just one way of putting things together.
“We count in tens,” he said, “because most of us have ten fingers. That’s it.”
Then he mentioned that in some cultures, people count using their thumb to tap the twelve segments of their fingers. Twelve. Not ten. Which means you can build a whole number system from that, one with cleaner divisors. With twelve, you get halves, thirds, and quarters with no remainder. In base-10, you only get two and five.
That was the moment the universe opened up. Not just mathematically, but metaphysically.
If base-10 is just habit, shaped by anatomy and repeated long enough to become invisible, then what else isn’t fixed? What else have we mistaken for truth, when it’s only convention?
It wasn’t just about numbers anymore. It was about everything.
That moment never left me. It made me realize frameworks shape perception. What we think of as “real” is often a reflection of the tools we use to read the world.
Most of the time, we don’t question the lens. We just look through it. It’s the water the fish doesn’t see. But once you realize base-10 is just one way of seeing quantity, you start to suspect other “givens.” You wonder how many things feel inevitable simply because they’ve been framed that way. And how often we confuse familiarity with truth.
Once you’ve had that kind of moment, you develop a cognitive side-eye. A healthy suspicion that what looks natural may, in fact, be constructed. That’s the beginning of discernment.
Once you start noticing the frame, you start seeing defaults everywhere.
The 40-hour workweek. The fiscal quarter. The five-day school schedule. The résumé. The slide deck. The assumption that growth is always good. That busy is better than still. That what can be measured must matter most.
These aren’t laws of nature. They’re choices someone made. Some sensible at the time, others arbitrary from the start. But repeated long enough, they begin to feel inevitable. Just how things are.
These defaults are the epistemological base-10 of modern life: familiar and efficient in some ways. But limited. And limiting.
Because the moment we forget they’re choices, we stop imagining alternatives. We stop asking whether they still serve the problems we face. We optimize the existing base instead of asking whether it’s the right base at all.
That’s the danger of a default. Not that it’s wrong, but that it’s unexamined. Somewhere along the way, we confused standardization with wisdom. And we lost sight of the fact that other ways of counting might be more truthful for the world we actually inhabit.
This has everything to do with management.
Management is full of inherited frames: roles, reporting lines, performance cycles, job descriptions, incentive schemes, even the idea of “managing” itself. We step into these systems assuming they’re natural and efficient. But many were designed for problems we no longer have, or for conditions that no longer exist.
And yet we keep trying to solve new problems using old frames. We tweak. We optimize. We invest in tools and trainings to help people succeed inside a base-10 logic that may no longer fit the work.
What if we’re optimizing the wrong thing entirely? What if the frame itself needs examining?
When I watch managers wrestling with performance reviews or struggling to make team structures work, I sometimes see people trying to count in base-10 when the situation might call for something else entirely. The tools feel clunky not because they’re being used wrong, but because they were built for different mathematics.
What would it look like to ask not “How do I manage performance better?” but “What counts as performance here, and how did we agree on that?” Not “How do I make the team more efficient?” but “Efficient at what, and why does that matter most?”
I’m not suggesting we throw out structure. I’m curious about what becomes visible when we remember structure is designed, not discovered. That the way we organize human effort is a choice we can make, not something we inherit.
Once you realize ten isn’t the only way to count, management becomes design. A way of framing human effort. A way of shaping what is made possible.
And when the world around you is changing faster than your frameworks can keep up, continuing to count by tens out of habit starts to feel less like stability and more like stubbornness.
What frame are you looking through? What assumptions about work, performance, and human organization feel so natural you’ve stopped noticing them? And what might become possible if you adjusted the lens, even slightly?
The most dangerous defaults aren’t the obviously broken ones. They’re the ones that work just well enough to keep us from questioning whether there might be better ways to count.
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