Splish, splash.

Lost somewhere on the moondark seas, adrift between the ordinal points of freaked, frustrated, frightened, and pissed, I'm thinking we're overdue for an honest reckoning.

The topic floating up to the toilet top: the trap of transactional thinking.

Due respect to all those preening TV Sharks, but maybe we get blunt about what a focus on the tactical, the monetary, and the momentary, really means.

In the advertising industry, it's plain as the bleeding stab wounds on too many backs.

At advertising’s biggest and, literally, baddest levels,  there's a tragic determination to leverage AI technology to turn the industry into a mere shadow of a Silicon Valley simulcrum.

This is balance sheet gymnastics at its nadir, working to please the equity markets at the cost of creativity, talent, and impact.

Not to mention the durability of advertising's underlying value proposition.

For inside ballers: I'm not sure that WPP's decision to walk away from IBM, a 30+ year client, was wrong from an economic standpoint. But seeing the decision made on cold financial grounds, not the ability to make a creative difference, and build something better, irks the hell out of me.

Unfortunately, in our world, seeing the tactical supplanting the strategic is only one chunk of the iceberg.

And the Titanic is bearing down.

Notice there are exactly zero Cinderella stories in this year's NCAA basketball madness on either the men's or the women's sides. Okay, credit to the women for at least having Virginia, a 10-seed, in the Sweet 16, but that's as close as it gets.

Once we turned college sports into mini- (and not so mini-) camps for the pros via NIL and the transfer portal, we turned it all into Moneyball.

No Billy Beane challenger brilliance in sight.

Going deeper, we need to take official notice of catastrophic evisceration of newsrooms; the consolidation of media channels in tandem along political lines; the rise of and fall of financial sucker bait like private equity and crypto; our national approach to climate and healthcare; so much more.

You name it, we're short-changing it.

Of course, the latest is a war of choice being waged like some kind of bizarre and bloody game of Let's Make a Deal.

The German general von Clauswitz may have said, "war is diplomacy by other means," but when the guy in charge talks about making peace "when I feel it in my bones," and citing "gifts worth a lot of money" as evidence of progress, our collective heads need to start twirling.

If we ever needed more proof that thinking about life as a series of transactions is fatally flawed, this must be it.

It's cold out here in these evil seas.