# [[Everything is forever until it is no more|Everything is forever, until it is no more]] ###### September 20, 2023 Our human brain is a very energy efficient device. It prefers to see predictable patterns of change, or even better: no change at all. Therefore humans struggle to imagine that things are changing For example, historians have frequently failed to properly describe transitory situations between periods of historic stability. Skipping complicated intermediary states and layered causalities, they often framed what happened as one status quo following the other, without all the nuances in between.[^1] Creating a precise mental image of the future is even more difficult than imagining the past. Thinking about the future shows similar effects of simplified dynamic processes. Most prominently, we tend to misjudge processes of exponential growth, because their early phases seems unsignificant compared to linear growth patterns that are easier to imagine.[^2] The cognitive challenge of anticipating non-linear change reflects theories of Creative Destruction and Disruption, creating the impression, that things often change "gradually, then suddenly".[^3] The Tech Economy has turned this frequent feeling of surprise towards exponential change into a universal expectation by evangelizing a "10xMindset" for entrepreneurs, often used as an excuse for all kinds of ugly side-effects. I dont think it is a problem that we are not great in predicting exponential dynamics, but I think it is a problem when a blindspot in our cognition filled with the claimed inevitability of disruptive change. Looking back in history it becomes evident that history always has taken unpredictable paths, way before the "10xMindset" and the discourse around Singularity. Most importantly, significant success of social movements has often emerged surprisingly, only explainable in hindsight by a longterm accumulation of grassroots activity towards a critical mass.[^4] Rebecca Solnit has illustrated these social dynamics with the growth pattern of mushrooms, evolving beyond the surface long before their heads become visible.[^5] I like this image a lot and I think it is worth holding on to it. Engagement for a good cause may seem futile in the present, but this can change any time, because we are not determined by technological progress, because we are bad at anticipating non-linear change. This way, a gap in our cognition becomes a source of hope. There is one thing, we can rely upon: Everything is forever, until it is no more.[^6] [^1]: *"The chronic fallacy is a kind of misplaced temporal literalism in which a historian forces his story into an overrigid chronological sequence and tells everything in the precise order of its occurrence, with results that are dysfunctional to his explanatory purpose. (...) The static fallacy broadly consists in any attempt to concept­ualize a dynamic problem in static terms. This form of error represents an intermediate stage of historical consciousness, in which change is per­ceived merely as the emergence of a nonchanging entity."*<br>[Historians' Fallacies. Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, David Hackett Fischer, 1970](https://ia903009.us.archive.org/32/items/HistoriansFallaciesTowardALogicOfHistoricalThought/historians_fallacies_toward_a_logic_of_historical_thought.pdf) [^2]: The initial disappointment towards exponential change caused by the expectation of linearity has been called the „Plateau of Latent Potential“ [by James Clear](https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits).<br>![[plateau-of-latent-potential.jpg]] [^3]: [The Hemingway Law of Motion: Gradually, Then Suddenly](https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-hemingway-law-of-motion-gradually.html) [^4]: *"Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change comes upon US like a change of weather."*<br>Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p.4 [^5]: [Rebecca Solnit on Twitter, 2022](https://twitter.com/rebeccasolnit/status/1558109482286100482?s=21)<br>![[mushroomed.jpeg]] [^6]: *“Soviet socialism was based on paradoxes that were revealed by the peculiar experience of its collapse. To the people who lived in that system the collapse seemed both completely unexpected and completely unsurprising. At the moment of collapse it suddenly became obvious that Soviet life had always seemed simultaneously eternal and stagnating, vigorous and ailing, bleak and full of promise. Although these characteristics may appear mutually exclusive, in fact they were mutually constitutive.“*<br>[Everything was forever, until it was no more: The Last Soviet Generation](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121178/everything-was-forever-until-it-was-no-more)