This is the second of a two-part series. Here’s part one: Feelings are Faster.

I’ve had an image of grey cinder blocks in my head for 15 years. It’s the sad, spartan walls in my Dad’s nursing home room in North Carolina. He was dying from Parkinson’s.

Our attempts to juice the vibe with Christmas string lights, music, and picture frames made us feel a tinch better for trying, but his body was done. There’s no way that xmas lights from a party store would change that, not in this place that was not designed for living in the first place.

Dad’s room had its own soundtrack: across from him was the beauty salon, which doubled as the home’s social center. Every noise carried over into his room, somehow louder. Each soft-shoe footstep, each ‘Gladys, I thought that was you!,’ each tink-dip of a comb in the blue jar of barbicide.

This was late 2010. After decorating and wishing him a happy 70th, he looked up at my brothers and me and asked for mercy. ‘You’ve been good sons. Please, this is miserable. Can we end this now?’

His request was a revelation, not because this wasn’t him (it wasn’t), but because it fit the moment in a perverse way. We didn’t want to accept that things won’t be getting better for Dad here. But he said the hard part out loud.

Cinder blocks. Gossip chit-chat. Dread and finality.

Deep sighs.

Nobody designed the room to produce that moment. Nobody designed it at all. It simply accumulated, cinder block by cinder block, decision by non-decision, until the place became exactly what it looked like: somewhere that people wait.

Crueler spaces are built with more intention: a prison cell, an interrogation room. Someone asked ‘what should this feel like’ and made every decision in service of that answer. The mission was clear. And the feeling was designed.

Dad’s room lacked this clarity. Nobody asked the question.

Five years later, on another continent, I spied the same question missing.

My wife, kids and I were stuck on a weather layover in Ho Chi Minh City. Someone official shuffled us into a dingy lounge and as the night dragged, families flopped out everywhere hoping to sneak a few winks. Service staffers came by with glasses of water and glasses of vodka. My wife and I took both, and then our 11-year-old daughter grabbed the wrong glass. Things got shrug-worthy messy.

Ten weeks ago I was back in HCMC. I visited the same airport, same lounge, same table. Today it’s a paid lounge, with a minor facelift and a buffet. But it’s still slapdash. Beer can on the floor. Dumpling debris on the table. Iffy power outlets.

Flying as an act of leisure is a modern miracle I don’t take for granted. But someone invested in the idea of ‘premium’ without asking what it should feel like.

This isn’t a Goofus and Gallant piece about thoughtfully designed experiences. Nobody wants the cinder-block nursing home. But you might already be contributing to it.

In my last piece I wrote about felt intention getting quietly evicted — the creative brief replaced by a performance number, the product vision replaced by a PRD, the person who knew when something wasn’t right replaced by a dashboard that said the metrics were fine. Each step reasonable in isolation. Cumulatively, the feeling left the building.

Jane Jacobs spent her career watching cities get improved to death. She called it organized complexity. The neighborhoods that looked chaotic were the ones that worked. Mixed uses, crooked streets, residents and merchants and strangers making it work. The mess was the mechanism. Where planners saw inefficiency, she saw interaction. They saw old buildings. She saw social infrastructure that couldn’t be rebuilt after demolition.

I lived in New Orleans in my early twenties and didn’t understand any of this yet. But I knew the city did things to people.

When my wife and I went back to get married, my dad — who was neither partier nor urban adventurer — kept materializing at unexpected corners every night. We’d turn down a street and there he’d be, standing, smiling, absorbed, slowly sipping a drink or talking with a stranger. I was watching someone become briefly, uncharacteristically, alive.

I wrote in my last piece about Füsun Aydın, a sex worker who has lived in Amsterdam’s red light district for twelve years. She’s counted one woman killed there in that time, versus 15 in four years on the streets of Istanbul before that. The safety wasn’t a feature. It accumulated through presence, familiarity, and density. Amsterdam is now considering moving the district to a purpose-built location on the outskirts. To somewhere cleaner and better planned.

Jacobs would know what gets lost.

The same wheel turns everywhere. In products, services, organizations, digital interfaces, healthcare systems, airport lounges. Every designed thing that actually feels like something has the same invisible ingredient: someone was asking the question all the way through. Every designed thing that doesn’t has the same invisible absence.

In the LinkedIn comments from my last piece, Joshua LeMar connected this to Jane Jacobs and put the mechanism into a single image: intention arrives, meaning accumulates, scale comes, meaning gets stripped, wreckage gets noticed, wheel turns again. Same wheel. Different materials.

The only thing that slows it down is a person — usually one, rarely more. They almost never have the ‘right’ job title.

Every designed thing that ever made you feel something had one of these people behind it. Not a committee, but a person. They know what the thing is supposed to feel like, often before it exists. The organization experiences this as vision, then taste, then obstinance, then a problem to be managed. Because this person is almost always a pain in the ass.

When they leave, the soul doesn’t die, it just degrades in ways that don’t show up in the metrics. The product still works, and the building still functions. But something is different and nobody can quite name it, because nobody really named what it was when it was there.

You’ve felt this: an AI product that looks like all the others. Or an app that used to feel like something and now doesn’t. A library that was once well cared for and now isn’t. A restaurant the year after the original chef left.

Then there’s the role that exists specifically to hold the felt dimension: Creative Director, Chief Experience Officer, Head of Brand. It has a title and a budget. And then come the metrics. Once it gets metrics it optimizes for the measurable version of the thing it was supposed to protect. Awards, brand guidelines, NPS scores.

Karla Starr — whose TED talk on the pitfalls of optimizing for data was cancelled because the organizers obsessed over data — said the obvious thing: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

The person who survives longest in that role learned to speak dashboard while privately tending things the dashboard can’t see. It’s a specific kind of professional loneliness. Often a quiet and powerless one … knowing exactly what’s being lost and lacking the authority or the energy to stop it.

Then: no founder or creative director with real authority. A brand guidelines PDF, a design system, a conversion optimization team. Soul by committee, producing the average of what nobody objected to strongly enough.

The cost of all this doesn’t disappear. It transfers through the system to the patient. To the traveler. To the elderly person navigating a system never designed to be experienced by a human being. Ninety minutes helping your mother with a hacked bank account. Three hours on hold with a health insurance company that billed twice and doesn’t recognize its own members. A hospital waiting room unconsidered since 1987. A housing project where the eyes on the street were replaced by a parking structure.

Nobody made a decision to harm them because — poof! — there was no decision at all.

The difference between the jail and the nursing home? The jail knew.

There are other realities where the question gets asked.

A while back, in a conference room at Weee!, a grocery delivery service, I sat with people who owned different moments in a customer journey: operations, logistics, product, marketing, delivery, customer service. All of us were focused on the question ‘given what you control, what would it take to get the customer one step closer to feeling what we said we wanted them to feel?’

We did this once a week, for an hour. Ideas surfaced. Changes were prioritized, and ownership followed. Things got better.

This is our responsibility as creators, builders and leaders. It’s also our competitive advantage, since clarity about how something should feel is a scarce resource.

It just takes someone asking the question. And a willingness to be the occasional pain in the ass.