Making systems more human.

I've worked with students who can't sit with themselves for ten minutes. And I don't mean they're distracted by a phone — I mean that even without it, they're uncomfortable with their own mind. They talk to themselves constantly, but they're not actually thinking. They're filling space. They're avoiding the discomfort of being alone with a thought that doesn't have an answer yet.

That's the real issue, and it's worse than screen addiction, because you can't solve it by taking the phone away. You can remove the device and the reflex is still there: the need to fill every gap, react to everything, never sit with uncertainty.

These students grew up in a world built to exploit that exact reflex. Bo Burnham nailed it in Welcome to the Internet — everything available instantly, all of it, forever. But something has changed since then. It isn't just about distraction anymore. Attention is monetized. Every platform is built to hold you long enough to sell you something, and the fastest way to hold someone is to make them angry. Outrage is a career now. People get paid to do it.

And then we ask these same students to develop executive function. To sit with discomfort. To think through a problem slowly. To work toward something that won't pay off for months. We're asking for the opposite of everything they've been trained to do.

Reflection used to be normal

People kept records of themselves. A journal, a diary, a notebook. You'd sit down and think about your day. What happened? What did it mean? What would you do differently? That was just a normal thing people did.

We've gotten rid of all of that. Instead of journaling, people post. But posting isn't reflection — a post is a performance. You're performing for an audience, and the feedback you get back isn't real feedback. A like tells you a stranger's thumb moved. It doesn't tell you anything about whether you handled a hard moment well, or whether you kept a promise to yourself.

And it's gotten worse. When you post something real now, something that's actually yours, you're not joining a conversation — you're taking a risk. People get piled on for saying the wrong thing. So most people work that out fast and they stop. They stop participating. They stop thinking out loud. They find a side that already sounds right and they let that side do the thinking for them.

We're all getting lazier about it, and I include myself. But the students I work with don't have another reference point. They didn't grow up in a world where reflection was normal. They grew up watching people be punished for thinking out loud. So the idea of sitting down and working out what they actually think, what they actually want, what they actually believe — that feels dangerous. It feels unsafe.

Why this matters so much here

For students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, this isn't just a distraction problem. It lands exactly where things were already hardest.

Executive function is just the machinery for running your own life. Holding a goal in your head. Breaking it into steps. Doing the hard thing instead of the easy thing. Noticing you've drifted, and adjusting. For people with intellectual disabilities, those processes are already harder to develop — the research is clear on that. What's much less clear is how to actually build them. The literature itself describes treatment in this population as under-researched. Which means what gets done is mostly invented locally, by practitioners, in whatever time they can find.

There's a line of work I keep coming back to that puts self-reflection at the center of the whole thing. The argument is that noticing and evaluating your own thinking is what lets you steer it. I'll be straight that this is more theory than settled mechanism, and the training studies that try to test it usually can't separate reflection out from everything else they're doing at the same time. But it lines up with what I watch happen in front of me.

Whose account gets recorded

Life plans run on a six-month cycle. The review pulls together the documentation and what staff can recall — and that recall is real work, done carefully, by people who were there.

What's mostly missing is the other account. We rarely see genuine reflection from the people we support. Not because anyone prevents it — because the system was never built to expect it. We ask them to follow a plan. We don't often ask them what they made of it.

So the record comes out one-sided: precise about what was delivered, quiet about what it was like to receive. And six months is long enough that the specifics have gone anyway — what survives is whatever was loudest, not what mattered most.

I'll be careful not to overstate this. People do learn from summaries. Stepping back is exactly how you catch a pattern you were too close to see while you were living it. Zooming out isn't the problem. But a summary built on a daily record — with both accounts in it — is a different object entirely. It has grain underneath it, and you can point at any line and go look at the day it came from.

What actually seems to change outcomes

Here's the strongest data I've found. A survey of roughly 22,000 adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities across 37 states found that the people who took part in building their own service plan did better on all five outcomes measured — quality of life, control, satisfaction, the lot.

That's an association, not proof. You could tell a story where the people already doing better are the ones who get invited into the room in the first place. And the older review work on person-centered planning is honestly mixed: the clearest effect was on community participation, and the studies behind it weren't strong. So I'm not going to tell you this is settled. But the direction is consistent, and it points the same way as everything else I'm describing.

And the reason isn't a value statement. It's a mechanism. A plan someone helped build is something they can act on. They can argue with it. They can fail against it and revise it. A plan handed to them is just a document about them.

But we don't give people that opportunity very often. We manage their lives and call it support.

The system isn't going to fix itself

Let me be honest about something. This system isn't turning itself around, not really. I'm not going to change how it's funded, or how it's staffed, or the six-month cycle. None of us are — not quickly. But we can see roughly where things are heading, and we can adjust as we go.

What I keep landing on is that what matters most isn't the content. It's knowing how to learn — and more than that, actually wanting to.

So I've stopped thinking about the job as teaching people. I'm trying to motivate people to teach themselves. That's a different job. And the tools for it are the ones I keep coming back to: reflection, keeping your own schedule, being accountable to something you said you'd do. Those are the most valuable things that come out of any education system. Not the content. The habits underneath the content.

Because the rest of it — the direction, what you actually go after — needs passion for something specific. And that's hard to reach when what someone wants sits outside what they can currently do. Which is not a limit on them. It's that all they have ever practiced is watching. Consuming. You can't develop a passion for something you've only ever been an audience for. Passion comes from making something badly, then making it slightly less badly, and noticing the difference. That loop is the whole thing. And nobody has ever had them run it.

What Tervik is actually trying to do

Tervik came out of all of this. It is not a replacement for the official system — life plans, the six-month reviews, the compliance work all still happen. Tervik runs underneath all of that, at the speed a day actually moves.

The core idea is simple. Students build their own schedule. They see which activities count toward their credential. They reflect daily, in short prompts, at their own pace. Mentors respond — and students respond back. And if a goal needs to change, it can change on a Tuesday. The record keeps why it changed.

So instead of one big feedback loop every six months, you get small ones every day. A student takes a risk on Monday. They look at the result on Monday, with someone sitting next to them asking: What happened? What were you thinking? What would you do differently? That's the conversation that turns an event into a lesson.

And then the six-month meeting gets better too — which is the part I didn't expect. It stops being assembled out of what anyone can still remember and starts being built on what was actually written down, day by day, by the student and by the people beside them. The meeting is no longer where the thinking has to happen. It becomes where the pattern gets named. The reporting falls out of the work instead of being a second pile of work.

The software doesn't do the thinking. The software protects the space where the thinking can happen.

But we can't keep smoothing everything over

I understand why the system is slow and protective. People got hurt when it wasn't. We learned to move carefully. Every delay was put there by someone trying to protect someone else.

But protection has a cost, and we don't talk about it enough. When someone never feels a consequence, they never get the information a consequence carries. When someone is never trusted with a real risk, they never find out what they're capable of. We can spend someone's whole twenties keeping them comfortable and file it as support.

The honest goal is a middle ground. Real risk, real feedback, happening fast — with the net still underneath, and someone next to them who won't reach down and fix it. Small failures, close together, with good questions afterwards. That isn't a lower standard. It's the only thing that has ever built a skill in anyone.

These students aren't short on potential. They're short on repetitions. They're short on time to think about their own lives. And they're short on opportunities to feel like their choices actually matter.

We can't quiet the noise they live in. But we can build one place where they get to think out loud without getting attacked. Where the record has their account in it, not only ours. And where the feedback loop closes today, instead of in six months.