You're Not in a Funk - by Alex Oppenheimer
Business Model Logic
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You're Not in a Funk<br>You are not stuck. You are pointed the wrong direction.
Alex Oppenheimer<br>Jul 15, 2026
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You feel off. You can’t say exactly why. Work is fine, your health is fine, nothing is wrong on paper. So you call it a funk and you wait for it to pass.<br>Most funks are not funks. They are missed turns. You are running a mode that the moment stopped asking for, and the longer you run it, the worse you feel. The fix is not to push harder. The fix is to turn the corner.<br>This piece is a framework for taking that corner on purpose instead of by accident.<br>The Two Modes
There are, at least for me, two basic ways of moving through a stretch of life.<br>Expansion : you are out in the world. Meeting people, opening doors, saying yes, widening the aperture, collecting inputs.<br>Introspection : you pull in. Narrow, deep, quiet. You spend your time with the few people and ideas that actually move you, and you process everything the expansion brought in.<br>Before you sort yourself into one of these camps, stop. This is not introvert versus extrovert. Those are identities, answers to the question “what am I?” Modes are positions, answers to the question “where am I right now?” The most extroverted person you know needs introspective stretches, and the deepest introvert you know has seasons where the only right move is to go wide. Nobody lives in one mode. Nobody should.<br>Here is the constraint that makes all of this matter: you cannot run both modes at once. I have tried. When I am in full expansion and I try to also do the deep inner work, both come out thin. When I am deep in introspection and I force myself to go network, I come home drained and I have not actually connected with anyone. The two modes use the same part of you, and that part does not split cleanly.<br>So at any moment you are on one road or the other. The question is never which road is better. The question is when to turn.<br>The Corners
Picture the shape of a good stretch of life as terrain. Expansion is the climb. Introspection is the descent. And here is the thing most people get wrong about it: the slopes are the easy part.<br>When you are mid-climb, you know the job. Say yes, take the meeting, open the door, collect. When you are mid-descent, you know that job too. Go deep, process, write, sit with the few people who matter. On the slopes you are running at full speed, and the experience is basically linear. More effort in, more progress out. The slopes take fitness. You already have fitness.<br>The corners take skill.
Somewhere about half way up the Haleakala switchbacks<br>Anyone who has ridden a switchback knows the difference. The straightaway asks for legs. The corner asks for judgment : when to brake, the right line, how much speed to carry, when to get back on the pedals. And the road turns whether you are ready or not . Turn with it and you carry your momentum straight into the next stretch. Miss it and you are off in the shoulder gravel, still pointed the old direction, on a road that has already turned.<br>That shoulder gravel is the funk . Staleness is not a mood and it is not a mode. It is a corner you refused to take.<br>Stay in expansion past the top and every new meeting returns less than the one before it: conversations become performances, inputs pile up unprocessed.<br>Stay in the descent past the bottom and every new thought returns less than the last: the journal circles, ideas go unpressure-tested, your inner voice stops surprising you.<br>Nothing has gone wrong in either case. The road turned and you didn’t.<br>There are two corners in every cycle , and they are different skills. The top of the climb, where expansion hands off to introspection, is the harder one for most ambitious people, because it feels like slowing down while you’re winning despite feeling the marginal gains start to slip away. The bottom of the descent, where you have to point yourself back out at the world, is often the scary part, because the deep and quiet is comfortable and the world is critical.<br>And here is where the identity trap comes back around. Your weak corner is not random. It is almost always the turn that points away from who you think you are. Anyone who has met me knows I am an extrovert. Expansion genuinely gives me energy, most of the time. Which is exactly why the top of the climb is my weak corner: when the moment calls for turning inward, there is a voice that says, “but I’m an extrovert , this is what fuels me.” That voice is not lying. It is answering the wrong question. It knows what I am. It does not know where I am. The introvert runs the mirror image of this at the bottom of the descent, staying in the quiet past the turn, because the quiet is who they are.<br>Know which corner is your weak one. You will not have to think hard. It is the one that turns you away from your identity.<br>Reading the Corner
So how do you know a corner is coming? The tells are surprisingly...