The Human Durability Test

This is the second article on durability in the AI era. The first piece focused on economic asset durability.

In the previous piece, I made the economic case for durability in the AI era: physical presence, proprietary operational data, and niche context that resists abstraction. Those are real advantages. They survive commoditization. They are defensible on a spreadsheet.

But economics is not the only source of durability.

Some businesses survive not because they are hard to replicate, but because they are hard to abandon.

They are sustained by human commitments embedded in the organization — relationships, communities, and convictions that competitors cannot easily reproduce even if they can copy the product.

I think of this as the Human Durability Test.

If the Durable Asset Test asks whether a business owns something competitors cannot replicate, the Human Durability Test asks a different question:

What human commitments make this organization difficult to walk away from?

Over the past year I have found myself thinking about this question more deliberately. That exploration has taken me through different sources of purpose — community institutions, craft traditions, and religious frameworks that have sustained organizations for centuries.

A recent interview with researcher Molly Kinder with friend of the pod Allison Salisbury at Humanist makes a similar point. Molly argues that conversations about AI focus relentlessly on predictions and capabilities while missing the deeper question underneath: what do we want work and economic life to mean? Across traditions — from Tocqueville to religious teachings to modern labor scholarship — work has been understood not only as a source of income, but as a source of dignity, identity, and belonging.

That framing matters here. The three forces I describe below — community, trust, and conviction — are not soft counterweights to economic logic. They are what happens when work accumulates meaning over time. Organizations that build them don’t just retain customers or employees. They become harder to replace because leaving them costs something a competitor cannot easily offer back.

Some organizations endure because they own assets. Others endure because they embed human forces that markets alone cannot replicate.

I think of those forces as three forms of human durability:

• Community — belonging networks around the organization
• Trust — relationships built through repeated cooperation
• Conviction — people who refuse to abandon the mission

These forces rarely appear on a balance sheet. But they often determine which organizations survive long enough for their economics to matter.

Community as a Durable Force

The first human durability force is community.

Some businesses become durable because people feel they belong to them. Not as customers in a database, but as participants in a shared outcome — a place where identity, routine, and relationships accumulate over time.

When that happens, the business stops being interchangeable with its competitors. It becomes part of the social fabric around it.

Physical location is often the catalyst. When people gather in the same place repeatedly, belonging emerges almost accidentally: conversations before a class, familiar faces behind a counter, the quiet recognition that the same people keep showing up week after week. Over time the location becomes more than a venue for transactions. It becomes infrastructure for community.

CrossFit is a useful example. On paper it is a fitness brand. In practice it functions as a distributed network of local communities. Each affiliate gym operates independently, but the experience inside those gyms is remarkably consistent: small groups of people pushing through difficult workouts together, learning each other’s names, celebrating progress, and returning day after day.

You see a similar dynamic in businesses that operate at a smaller, more local scale. Ace Hardware stores are typically owned by independent operators embedded in their neighborhoods. Customers return not only for supplies but for advice. Over years those interactions build a relationship that is difficult for national chains or online retailers to replicate.

Southwest Airlines provides a useful counterexample. For decades the airline cultivated a form of community uncommon in aviation. Its policies — open seating, no bag fees, and a straightforward fare structure — reinforced a sense of fairness and shared experience among passengers. The airline’s culture of humor and informality strengthened that bond further. Customers often described themselves as loyal to Southwest in a way that went beyond simple price comparison.

Recent changes to pricing and seating have begun to erode that identity quickly. By abandoning the elements that once reinforced its communal identity — without replacing them with a new form of belonging — Southwest risks moving from a durable position to the middle of the market, a difficult place for any airline to remain distinctive.

Community can take decades to build — and surprisingly little time to dismantle.

Trust as a Durable Force

The second human durability force is trust.

I think of trust in simple terms: I said I would do a thing, and I did it. The next time I say I will do something, you believe me.

Trust emerges through repeated cooperation. It forms when people interact over long periods of time and come to believe that the other party will behave predictably — not only when incentives are aligned, but when circumstances become difficult.

The industrial ecosystem around Toyota is a classic example. Toyota built decades-long relationships with suppliers, sharing operational knowledge and supporting partners through downturns rather than replacing them when costs fluctuate. Suppliers invest in Toyota’s success because they believe the relationship will persist.

Trust operates at a more personal level as well. In many professions, clients maintain relationships with the same advisors for decades — insurance brokers, financial advisors, accountants, or real estate agents. The relationship persists not because switching is impossible, but because trust compounds through shared experience.

Some technologists argue that systems like blockchains can replace trust by making transactions verifiable. I'm as much of a crypto fan as the average non-diamond-handed-hodler, but in practice blockchains solve a narrower problem: enforcing rules between parties who may not know each other. This verifies the transaction and produces a clean record, but cannot replicate relationships that make me want to transact.

The deeper form of trust — the willingness to cooperate over time, share knowledge, and resolve problems when rules fail — still depends on people.

Conviction as a Durable Force

The third human durability force is conviction.

Conviction is what happens when people continue building something even when the purely economic reasons to do so weaken.

Conviction is the refusal to abandon a mission, a craft, or a community simply because conditions have become more difficult.

Patagonia offers a modern example. When founder Yvon Chouinard transferred ownership of the company to a structure designed to preserve its environmental mission, conviction became embedded in the governance of the organization itself.

The Jesuit network offers a longer view. Jesuit schools and universities have sustained educational institutions for centuries — not through economic optimization, but because the people involved believe the mission itself is worth sustaining across generations.

And more locally, independent bookstores offer a more granular illustration. For two decades, the conventional wisdom was that independent booksellers were finished — first by the chains, then by Amazon. Many closed. But hundreds did not. The ones that survived did so largely because the owners refused to leave, often at significant personal cost, but then they reoriented around curation, community events, and local identity — things a fulfillment warehouse cannot replicate. The American Booksellers Association has grown its membership for several consecutive years. That recovery was not driven by a shift in unit economics. It was driven by conviction that held through the period when the economics were worst.

What conviction protects against is the moment of maximum doubt — the window when a competitor with less commitment would exit and cede the field. That window is when durable organizations separate from fragile ones. The cost is real: slower pivots, higher tolerance for underperformance, and occasionally the wrong call sustained too long. But in markets where relationships and identity accumulate over time, the organizations that stay often inherit the ground others abandoned.

Markets reward optimization. Conviction rewards persistence.

The Two Durabilities

In the previous piece I described the Durable Asset Test: physical presence, proprietary operational data, and niche context that resists abstraction.

The Human Durability Test asks a different question. Instead of focusing on what an organization owns, it focuses on what people inside and around the organization believe in and sustain over time.

Structural durability is built through control of scarce resources or capabilities. Human durability is built through relationships and meaning that accumulate over time.

The most resilient organizations often possess both.

One asks what makes a business hard to copy. The other asks what makes it hard to abandon.

Why This Matters Now

AI is making it easier to start things. It is not making it easier to sustain them.

The cost of building products and entering markets is falling rapidly. That will produce an explosion of new companies and experiments.

But when execution becomes easier, the advantage shifts from speed to endurance.

Community, trust, and conviction each resist what AI does best. AI can optimize a transaction; it cannot manufacture the sense of belonging that keeps someone returning to the same gym or hardware store. AI can automate an interaction; it cannot substitute for the credibility that a supplier or advisor has built through decades of showing up. AI can accelerate execution; it cannot replace the people who stay when staying stops making obvious economic sense.

Technology accelerates execution. Human systems sustain persistence.

In an era defined by velocity, the harder question is not how quickly something can be built.

It is what will still be here ten years from now — and why.

Final CTA: If you are building something that is durable from its humanity -- I am interested in the conversation and how I can help. I'm actively writing small angel checks in this space where that capital structure makes sense. Please reach out on LI, Twitter or via email.