It seems like one of the ways people try to show their love for others is by acting like "money is not an issue when your life is on the line" which results in a tremendous amount of spending per healthy day of life generated (poor QALY trade off).
https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
A great book to realize that the reasons you give for what you do are not the real reasons is Strangers to Ourselves
https://www.amazon.com/Strangers-Ourselves-Discovering-Adapt...
There are pragmatic parts that determine what actions would best serve your interest. These parts mostly make the decisions.
There are other "press secretary" parts that come up with good sounding motivations for these decisions. You will believe those reasons, and state them with conviction.
You may then be lying, if the press secretary lied to "you", but you don't consciously know that. Apparently evolution has favored that model, and here we are.
I learned this reading "The Elephant in the Brain" (https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...)
The big thing to understand is that we lie about these things to ourselves, so we can easier lie about them to others. Unconscious parts of your brain lies to the conscious part!!
I learned this here: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
The book that gave me much of my cynicism on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
Yes, people talking self serving nonsense are lying. But they're primarily lying to themselves!!!
Essential book: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
TED talk version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V84_F1QWdeU
Re the above -- I don't mean to imply that any of this is malicious or even conscious on anyone's behalf. I suspect it is for a few people, but I bet most people could pass a lie detector test that they care about their OKRs and the OKRs of their reports. They really, really believe it. But they don't act it. Our brains are really good at fooling us! I used to think that corporate politics is a consequence of malevolent actors. That might be true to some degree, but mostly politics just arises. People overtly profess whatever they need to overtly profess, and then go on to covertly follow emergent incentives. Lots of misunderstandings happen that way -- if you confront them about a violation of an agreement (say, during performance reviews), they'll be genuinely surprised and will invent really good reasons for everything (other than the obvious one, of course). It's basically watching Elephant In The Brain[1] play out right in front of your eyes.
Every manager wants to grow their team so they can split it into multiple teams so they can say they ran a group.
When there is a lot of money involved, people self-select into your company who view their jobs as basically to extract as much money as possible. This is especially true at the higher rungs. VP of marketing? Nope, professional money extractor. VP of engineering? Nope, professional money extractor too. You might think -- don't hire them. You can't! It doesn't matter how good the founders are, these people have spent their entire lifetimes perfecting their veneer. At that level they're the best in the world at it. Doesn't matter how good the founders are, they'll self select some of these people who will slip past their psychology. You might think -- fire them. Not so easy! They're good at embedding themselves into the org, they're good at slipping past the founders's radars, and they're high up so half their job is recruiting. They'll have dozens of cronies running around your company within a month or two.
From the founders's perspective the org is basically an overactive genie. It will do what you say, but not what you mean. Want to increase sales in two quarters? No problem, sales increased. Oh, and we also subtly destroyed our customers's trust. Once the steaks are high, founders basically have to treat their org as an adversarial agent. You might think -- but a good founder will notice! Doesn't matter how good you are -- you've selected world class politicians that are good at getting past your exact psychological makeup. Anthropic principle!
There's lots of stuff like this that you'd never think of in a million years, but is super-obvious once you've experienced it. And amazingly, in spite of all of this (or maybe because of it?) everything still works!
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
Cf Brian Kaplan "The Case Against Education" https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
Robin Hanson "Elephant in the Brain" https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
On the fiction side from this year that I'd recommend, I reread Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion and read Unfinished Tales for the first time, all were great. I've read Tolkien as a kid, a teen, and now an adult, enjoyed him each time but I think I got even more out of some things this time around. I also liked Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and in the last month or so I read two enjoyable tearjerkers: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and Still Alice by Lisa Genova.