Practice: Discerning Accursed Shares

Set aside judgment and blame. This practice is about learning to see.

Choose a moment—your own or someone else’s—where good intentions clearly produced unintended consequences. Don’t ask who is responsible or what should have been done differently. Ask instead: What surplus did this action create?

Look for what lingered after the goal was achieved: exhaustion, resentment, waste, dependency, noise, fragility, distraction, cleanup. These residues are not failures. They are the excess produced when energy is successfully expended toward a purpose.

Trace the sequence slowly. What was accelerated? What was simplified? What was pushed aside to make the action possible? Where did the leftover costs settle, and who now lives with them?

Practice stopping there. Seeing precedes judging. Ethical discernment begins when consequences are allowed to appear without immediately being moralized.

A more advanced step:

Ask how these unintended consequences follow from the form of energy expended. Was the effort centralized or distributed? Repetitive or extractive? Fast or sustained? Every expenditure of energy creates surplus. Learning to anticipate accursed shares means learning to recognize which forms of power reliably generate which kinds of excess.