Going With the Flow
As we all recognize, the world has changed on many levels. It has right along over the millennia and is doing so right before our eyes. The good news is that we are pretty adaptable creatures within a certain range of change and a certain pace of change, but there lies the issue on an increasingly common basis. The work of archeology has consistently pushed further back the origins of man on earth. It used to be that we marked time from 10,000 years ago when the first evidence of farming came to light, assuming that hunter/gathering was primitive enough to suggest that we were more animal than human in nature. Since then things have gotten pushed back further and further based on forensic evidence unearthed at various sites around the world. Tools like fishhooks and spears appeared in the physical history about 20,000 years ago. Representational art (Cave drawings and petroglyphs) show up from 45,000 years ago. And things like boats can be traced back to 65,000 years ago. Before that we have to focus on things like brain size to draw conclusions about what man was capable of doing and how he lived. We start to see modern brain size become meaningfully similar to our brains today from about 500,000 years ago, so for the time being, anthropologists are saying that man has existed as more or less the creature that he is for about 300,000 years.
We have all seen those great docudramas that are heralded by one crackpot wannabe pseudo-scientist or another that explores ancient civilizations that looks at certain physical evidence and extrapolate that there was either an earlier version of highly advanced human society or perhaps (put on your Twilight Zone hat) some extraterrestrial culture that brought advanced technology to earth and allowed a few brief shining moments of greatness to certain remote and and now long-gone mysterious cultures that built megastructures and did intricate celestial math that cannot be otherwise explained. I like going down those rabbit holes as much as anyone as it is quite stimulating to the imagination, but we all know that for every fantastic theory there is an equally mundane explanation that can usually be offered up. If we ignore those whimsical possibilities, we are left with a slow dirge of human progress over hundreds of thousands of years wherein change came about very gradually even if very directionally consistent.
I am not really a mathematician, but I do understand the fundamental differences in the types of growth that exist in the natural world. To begin with there is bounded growth. Think of this as “trees don’t grow to the sky” type of growth. Then there is logarithmic growth that is continuous and without absolute limit, but starts slowly and gets even slower. Then there is simple linear growth, which goes up continuously at the same rate…forever, but does so steadily. There is arithmetic and geometric growth, which are more robust and grow in multiple leaps quite rapidly. Then we get to exponential growth, which uses the power of compounding to grow at a very fast pace. The only thing faster than exponential growth that we as mere non-Einsteinians can fathom is factorial growth (this is where I have to generally get off the calculus bus). There is something called tetration (iterated exponentiation) and the Ackerman Function that are supposedly even faster growing, but it takes a brain size that is beyond my native abilities to even explain. I have read the Dummies books on quantum physics and get lost in the table of contents, so I’m not the guy to explain any of that.
A guy named Malthus 225 years ago told us that population growth is exponential if we eliminate the bounds of limited resources. But remember how trees don’t grow to the sky? Well, limitations always seem to exist when it comes to scalable things like population and trees and mountains. It is unclear if those limitations apply to less physical things like ideas. What I take that to mean is that we can have things like Moore’s Law that has defined the Information Age by telling us that about every two years you can double the capacity of transistor chips and thus vastly expand our computational and storage powers. Who among us has not lived that reality in terms of the amazing pace of advancement in information technology during the course of our lifetime. I am old enough to remembers Buck Rogers’ rockets and Dick Tracy’s wrist phone, not to mention Star Trek’s flip communicator. We may not have flying cars due to the limiting bounds of gravity, but we can sure send shit through the airwaves as well or better than futurists ever imagined. And here’s the thing, while some of us occasionally sit in stupidity and amazement over the advancements of technology, most of us just go with the flow and eventually learn how to adapt to it and even use the technology and embrace the change it entails. The curmudgeons among us (you know who you are!) grumble that we won’t do this or that, but eventually we find ourselves doing exactly this and that as change mandates. This happens because we are mostly forced to adjust or what? Get off the merry-go-round?
What I think we can all agree on is that the pace of change has accelerated, as it does in exponential growth systems and technology may not be perfectly exponential, but its pretty damn close. Its interesting when you think about cash flow in today’s world and think about how its progressions work. FinTech has been focused for a dozen years on payment systems and what has been called quantum finance. We all recognize (perhaps not admit) that wealth is a digital phenomenon these days. Yes, it can be embodied in real property, but mostly it resides in digital form and causes lots of movies to be made about eradicating “The Man” by erasing the digital vault where his wealth resides and wiping the egalitarian slate clean. People try feebly to fight that with gold bullion and a gun vault, but hose are fringe efforts. In fact, the best attempt by brainiacs to make that fear go away is the blockchain, which tries to be a way to make it so that a digital trail is always accessible on a distributed basis and is thus very, very hard to eradicate. All the cyber-security in the world cannot make the security tree grow to the sky. It can strengthen it and make it stand taller, but even blockchain has its limitations and loopholes.
So what are we to do to protect what we have supposedly accumulated (I say supposedly because anything, even real property, can be taken away or reclaimed by others or nature, in the blink of a cosmic eye)? The answer is that we can’t. We cannot live forever and those who think we might be able to in a few years are denying the evidence that our history on earth has proven to us. All progressions are bounded and inevitably halted. All trees stop growing and eventually die. It is the way of nature. I look out over my hillside this sunny morning and see a boulder that has been here longer than the 300,000 years that thinking man has been here and will be here long after thinking man will be here. I don’t own that boulder as much as I might think I do. That boulder is smarter than any of us because it knows that it only needs to go with the flow and not fight the inevitable. It does not try to maximize its cash flow or preserve its wealth, it just succeeds by going with the flow. That is my new mantra. Bobby McFerrin had it right. Don’t worry, be happy. Its all about going with the flow.