Since Apple TV+ released in 2019, I’ve been a day 1 subscriber and have enjoyed shows like Ted Lasso, Severance, Pluribus, and The Morning Show. But the one show I almost never hear people around me talk about is For All Mankind.
I do suggest watching Joel Kinnaman’s 3 minute summary of this show as he describes the premise and his experience really well! It’s hard to do the show justice in 2 sentences.
As Joel explains above, the show starts with an alternate scenario:
What if the Soviets landed on the moon first?
This one small decision in our history changes everything. Instead of the space race cooling off, it accelerates. Every season jumps forward about a decade, and before each one you see how the world has changed because of earlier decisions.
What makes For All Mankind my favourite show, is how it forces viewers to look beyond the tip of an iceberg: space exploration, rockets, engineering, mars and instead to look at what’s beneath: tradeoffs, ambiguity, and the depth of human problems.
In this post, I’ll explain the major themes that resonated most with me, and why they are quite thought provoking to my own life.
Progress Is Never Free
One line from the show that has stayed with me is:
“Progress is never free, there is always a cost.”
The show never treats space progress as purely heroic. As humanity pushes outward from the Moon to Mars, the same tensions kept resurfacing: political conflict, labor exploitation, and people getting left behind. Even though its world is fictional, the patterns are not. Watching it made me more aware of how easily the same societal flaws show up in new forms, whether in an alternate universe or in the real world around us.
Progress always seems to involve choosing what to prioritize, what to neglect, and who absorbs the cost. That idea started to feel familiar in much smaller decisions in my own life too.
I especially notice this with social plans and personal commitments. I used to say yes because I did not want to miss out, let people down, or make things awkward by saying no. But over time I started to notice the hidden cost of that habit. When I said yes too freely, the first things to slip were the routines that keep me energized: getting enough sleep, exercising consistently, and eating well. Nothing dramatic would break, but I would feel less present. I am starting to see that protecting my energy is not the same as withdrawing from life. Sometimes it is what allows me to show up more fully to the things I do choose.
The idea isn’t to say no to everything, otherwise life would be mundane. But this theme has got me to reflect on how every decision protects something and costs something else.
Work the Problem
This theme shows up again and again in the show whenever a situation looks impossible. The phrase is simple, but what I like about it is that it turns panic into method. It treats uncertainty as something you can work through.
Growing up, I was always much more comfortable with constrained problems than ambiguous ones. If you gave me a math equation and asked me to find x, I found that fun. There were rules to follow and a clear sense of what success looked like. What felt much harder were word problems or creative projects, where the real challenge was not just solving the problem, but figuring out how to approach it in the first place.
I do not think there was one specific moment where this changed for me. Engineering school and work kept putting me in situations where there was no clean blueprint and no obvious first step. Over time, that stopped feeling frustrating and started feeling energizing. I began to enjoy the process of taking something messy and making it tractable.
That is what work the problem means to me now. At work, I genuinely enjoy investigation: reading documentation, looking through logs, and building a mental picture of what is actually happening. I like starting with incomplete context and slowly working toward clarity. The show gave language to something I had slowly grown into myself.
Human Problems Are Different
What makes For All Mankind even more interesting to me is that it shows limits towards an “engineering” mindset. Margo Madison is such a compelling character because she embodies work the problem at its best.
In engineering, there is a lot you can do by working from first principles. But human problems are fundamentally different. Many of them cannot be reasoned through in advance.
This quote from Margo at the end of season 4 stood out to me:
“the world is not as simple as we want it to be, can’t be boiled down into an equation, especially when it comes to human beings. We are flawed, unpredictable, and full of contradictions… our feelings may not be convenient, they may even slow our progress, but they are also the only way to truly begin to understand the world around us”
By the time she says this, she has spent decades trying to navigate the world through intelligence, discipline, and control, only to learn how limited that mindset can be when human relationships and moral consequences are involved (this quote actually does hit once you realize what she’s been through).
Living after graduation has made that tension feel more real to me. I can work through technical problems with patience and structure, but not everything meaningful in life can be approached that way. More and more, I find myself wondering which parts of life are meant to be solved, and which parts are meant to be experienced.
It is kind of wild that this show has been around for seven years now, because it still manages to leave me thinking long after each season ends. For all the grand sci-fi scenes and rocket launches, what has stayed with me most are the questions it raises about tradeoffs, ambition, and what it means to live well.
Apple TV+ definitely has my money for at least a little while longer, especially with nine more episodes in season 5 and a spin-off Star City coming right after. I’m very curious about Star City, because it aims to retell the same events from For All Mankind but from the Russian point of view. So if I ever turn down Friday night plans, do not take it personally. There is a decent chance I am at home watching the latest episodes.
Interesting Ideas
- 3 rules for life | James Hoffmann: Loved seeing James Hoffmann (goat of coffee youtube btw) talk more personally here. I actually love the question he leaves viewers with:
Would you still do something if you couldn't tell anyone about it?. - The real message of One Battle After Another: I guess I’m in my long form video essay arc now haha, but this was a movie that had a lot of depth with it’s message and themes. What continues to stand out to me is how two things can be true. It explores how someone can hate and be infatuated and how darkness can directly lead to light.