The future
The past is not bound to the future. It is mainly comprised of dead ends.
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The JC’s amateur guide to systems theory™
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Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend: future events, such as these, will affect you in the future.
- —Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space
Extrapolating where the future is going from what you already know is like reversing into the future. This is to use finite tactics in an infinite game.
Letting your assumptions about the past colour your view of the present and therefore approach to the future— especially your narratives about private injustice, and the natural urge to correct them — ensures your future will be like your past.
This history of the world is stuffed with injustice. Few people in the history of the world cannot tell you a story about how they were done wrong.
Pioneering periods
Unstable non-equilibrium periods of discovery. War, internet, scientific Revolution, computers, rock ’n’ roll, crypto, feminism, social justice — periods of unregulated revolution and utopian aspirations for freedom with seemingly unlimited possibilities. You cannot thrive in these periods using traditional/conventional techniques.
These periods are not stable and may crash altogether, but there is a chance for real change, for those who are bold and brave and imaginative enough to see the adjacent possibilities brought together by the new conjunction of ideas.
But pace layers fight back, and generally established instituions have an interest in prevailing and dominating. Hence, banks move into crypto. Corporations eventually oven file sharing etc.
Life and cruelty
“The world needs peace and love.”
But peace and love in implies stability, solution, resolution. Peace and love is room temperature. Entropic. A stable state.
But no great love story began with yin and yang already aligned.
Life, development, growth, improvement requires challenge, discord, contradictions, disharmony