🚶♂️ Scott Adams (Dilbert)
R.I.P. (1957 – 2026)
“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:12 (ESV)
I learned today that Scott Adams has died, at 68, from prostate cancer.
Like many people, I first encountered him through Dilbert. Those cartoons were sharp, funny, and often uncomfortably accurate. They captured the small absurdities of work life in a way that felt honest rather than cruel. Over time, they became part of the background hum of my own professional life. I didn’t just read them. I recognized myself in them.
But Adams was more than a cartoonist.
Over the years, I also read his nonfiction. The Dilbert Principle helped explain why organizations so often reward the wrong behaviors and promote the wrong people. Later books pushed further, sometimes controversially, into persuasion, belief, and how humans actually make decisions. Even when I didn’t agree with him, I found myself thinking because of him.
What surprised me most, though, was his willingness to wander into spiritual and philosophical territory. God’s Debris wasn’t a religious book in any traditional sense. It was closer to a long question posed as a story: What if God had already spoken, and what remains is our struggle to hear? Its sequel, The Religion War, continued that exploration, mixing belief, doubt, and power in ways that felt more curious than dogmatic.
I didn’t read those books looking for answers. I read them because they invited thought. Adams seemed interested in how people believe, why they persuade, and how certainty forms. That curiosity mattered to me.
Years ago, I exchanged a brief email with him about an idea involving AI-powered prediction and publishing. He replied the next day. It was a small thing, but it stayed with me. It reminded me that behind the public figure was someone paying attention, still engaged, still thinking.
Like many public figures, his later years were complicated. His work became harder to separate from the noise surrounding him. I won’t try to resolve that here. What I can say is that for a long stretch of my life, his work sharpened how I saw the world—its institutions, its contradictions, and its quiet absurdities.
This morning, before I knew he had died, I opened my annual Dilbert calendar for the coming year. That small coincidence felt fitting. The work was still there, doing what it always did, even as the person behind it was stepping away.
Legacy is rarely simple. It is layered, human, and unfinished. Scott Adams leaves behind questions, insights, missteps, and moments of clarity. For me, he leaves behind a trail of ideas that helped me notice things I might have missed.
That feels worth honoring.
🙏 Scott