Intro
So there was no Weekstarter last week and to be honest, I haven’t done much else too. Of course I did lots of stuff but it was less work and more everything else kind of week. Sometimes you need a week like that too, especially when it’s really cold outside.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
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- It seems like a scheming kind of week. Lots of thinking, planning, talking with people and reading.
- House needs some attention as well, so this week and possibly next week will have that on my plans.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Change Makes the Constant
If you ever had interest in philosophy and its history, you probably heard the name Heraclitus and his famous quote about the river. The version most people know goes like this: “It is not possible to step twice into the same river”, but an older and now more accepted version is this one: “On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.” The first one says everything is constantly changing, while the latter one says things can stay constant only by constantly changing.
Even though most people know the version made famous by Plato, Heraclitus is the first philosopher who understood the importance of change and flux and made it the centerpiece of his philosophy. This is probably why he was my favorite during my first year in university, when we were mostly studying ancient western philosophy. His way of understanding the change influenced me mainly because that’s how I always thought about change as well, not something to be afraid of but something to understand and embrace.
But you probably know that this is more of an exception than the norm. Throughout the history and in many parts of our lives, we see how change is seen and how people generally react to it. This is why I love this Douglas Adams quote:
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
- Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
- Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
- Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
It’s mainly about technology but you can easily adapt it to the other parts of our lives. Most of the time, people don’t want to accept change and prefer fighting against it. You can find examples of it everywhere, from online discourse to current political developments. This fear of change and reactionary tendencies against it shows itself as nostalgia-bait, cultural fracking or reactionary political movements. You can also see the fear of change motivating the people who seems like the most accepting of the change at any point as well. In those cases, fear of being left behind or disrupted by that change motivates them to blindly accept whatever is coming their way. Same emotion, different result.
It’s important to keep in mind that this fear is not something unique to one group or ideology. Like the reverse reading of the Plato version of Heraclitus quote, fear of change is a constant as well. There are multiple reasons and explanations for this but it generally boils down to the fact that change is a hard thing to deal with and fear is a really powerful emotion. That’s why it’s hard to have a sensible discussion with someone whose ideas are shaped by fear.
But this is also why we need more people who look at change from that curious and positive perspective because one of the things fear does really well is to take away your agency. Whether that’s fear of change itself or its results, you’ll end up in a position thinking you’re a bystander and there’s nothing you can do. On the other hand, when you have a more positive relationship with change you can focus on better understanding it, learning from it, adapting and evolving with it. Most importantly, you realize that you can find ways to push that into different directions and we all need more of that.
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Song of the Week
I have to admit trash metal is not really on my daily rotation like it used to be. When I saw Kreator has a new album, I realized I need more metal in my rotation these days.
PS: Video has your usual amount of metal gore so feel free to skip if you don’t like that kind of stuff.
Reading Log
“The fact that the severity of extreme events is hurtling up at a pace which we did not previously understand, and this affects an asset category as big as real estate, could leave lenders exposed to uninsurable properties that fall in price,” he says. “If I was to search anywhere in the world for something that could produce a financial crisis, that’s where I would primarily focus.”
How the next financial crisis starts — Financial Times
“If we are biophysically entering a systems world, the primary unit of strategy shifts. It is no longer adequate to optimise isolated components or to allocate capital as if domain separability still holds. The core question becomes whether we can build the infrastructures that allow collective action under coupling: early sensing, credible interpretation, coordination surfaces, commitment protocols, and adaptive allocation.”
We Are Really Biophysically Entering a Systems World — Indy Johar
“Culture wars over the science establishment, Robert Kennedy Jr, China-US, Cambodia, supply chains, the COVID shock …. Here we are well and truly in the world of uneven and combined development. In the end perhaps the lesson here is that though Trump’s obsession with Greenland may still be a stretch, what expresses itself in the gyrations of lab monkey prices is, indeed, the polycrisis of our age.”
Chartbook 426 Greenland v. the price of lab monkeys. — Adam Tooze
Outro
And that’s pretty much all I have to start this week. Hope you’re enjoying these weekly posts. If you do and want me to write even more, make sure to share these around and even consider joining my Patreon to make sure I will have more time for writing.
Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you around!
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