Nobody Is Coming 

What Can I Do About It?

Brian Connelly

I’ve been wrong about almost everything important at least once. If that bothers you, we’re probably not going to get along. If it interests you, pull up a chair.

I started my working life as a clinical social worker in Newark in the late 1970s. I was in my twenties, sitting across from people whose lives had been taken apart by systems that were supposed to help them. Poverty. Addiction. Community mental health that was more about getting the Medicaid billing correct than getting anyone well. Less about care, more about the dollars. Institutions that had long stopped caring whether anyone walked out the door in better shape than they walked in.

There was a man who used to take over the first-floor men’s room in our building. Violent drunk. The police knew him by name and refused to intervene. My supervising psychiatrist and I looked at each other one afternoon and did the math. Nobody was coming. No policy was going to solve this. No report was going to move this man from the bathroom floor to a treatment bed.

So we improvised. We slipped him a Thorazine in a small bottle of wine, in the format he preferred. We waited until he passed out. We shipped him as a medical emergency to the city hospital. He woke up in a bed with restraints. He detoxed. He went into a twenty-day treatment program.

I am not telling you this story because it’s a model for clinical practice. I am telling you because it’s the moment I learned something about myself that has never changed. When the system fails, and nobody is coming, I can’t just write about the problem. I have to be in the room.

I carried that into technology. I spent thirty years inside Fortune 500 companies, IBM, the New York Stock Exchange, building and rebuilding enterprise systems. I migrated organizations from ccMail to Lotus Notes, from Notes to Google Workspace. I didn’t write white papers about how to do it. I did it. I sat in the room with the client and owned the outcome the way a therapist owns the hour.

At one point, I took a job as an employee of a Google Workspace partner. They were charging Fortune 500 rates to produce beautifully written documents about how their clients should fix their problems. Long decks. Gorgeous formatting. Delivered on time and never implemented. 

I lasted three months.

There are two kinds of consultants. Ones that fix things and ones that write about fixing things. I have never been able to sit still while a solvable problem is turned into a deliverable because the organization was too afraid of litigation to actually address the problem.

But here’s what I learned along the way, and it took me decades to learn it. Not every system can be fixed from the inside.

At a previous employer, I was trying to modernize their operations. My boss pulled me aside and told me to dial back the energy. He wasn’t being hostile. He was being honest. He said he was just trying not to get fired before his retirement date. Don’t rock the boat.

I saw rocking as part of the change process. He saw rocking as a threat to his pension. We were both right, which is the worst kind of disagreement because nobody gets to be the hero.

That was the moment I understood that the biggest system I couldn’t fix was the one signing my paycheck. Not because the people were bad. Because the incentives were pointed at survival, not change. And no amount of energy or insight or clinical instinct can overcome a system whose primary function is its own preservation.

So I started asking myself a question that I now realize I’ve been asking my whole life. What can I do about it?

In Newark, the answer was: be in the room. Improvise. Meet the problem where it actually lives, not where the org chart says it should live.

In enterprise consulting, the answer was: fix it yourself, because the document about fixing it is just another form of avoidance.

But at some point, the question scaled beyond what one person in one room can solve. The government doesn’t work for the people it’s supposed to serve. The investor class accumulates wealth at the expense of the working class. The banks are running what amounts to a Ponzi scheme with the protection of the government that doesn’t work. The money itself is broken.

What can I do about it?

I can’t slip the monetary system a Thorazine. It’s too big. The cops aren’t coming. And unlike that man on the bathroom floor, the system isn’t going to wake up in a treatment bed and thank anyone for the intervention.

I discovered Bitcoin in 2014. I wasn’t looking for an investment. I was researching fault tolerance and distributed architecture for a consulting engagement, and I stumbled into something that answered the question I’d been carrying for forty years.

You can’t fix a system whose primary function is its own preservation. But you can build something outside of it. You can leave.

That’s not quitting. That’s not cynicism. There’s a moment when you realize that the thing you’ve been trying to manage, to moderate, to reform from within, is not going to change because your continued participation is what keeps it running. The healthiest thing you can do, for yourself and eventually for everyone around you, is to stop participating and start building something that works.

I can’t make anyone see this. You cannot get someone sober. You cannot make someone smell the smoke. All you can do is tell your story and leave the door open.

So that’s what I’m doing. I’m 73 years old. I’ve been a social worker, a systems architect, a consultant, a writer, and for the last several years, a Bitcoin educator. I’ve been wrong about almost everything important at least once. The thing I keep getting right is showing up in the room when nobody else will.

The room has changed. The problem hasn’t. The system is still broken. Nobody is coming to fix it.

What can you do about it?