People are constantly changing. From birth, we are perpetually deciding, learning, aging, making habits, shifting identities, and creating new results.
All changes start with conflicting thoughts or an external conflict.
Response
Our changes are always responses to our environment. We never form a “new” change that didn’t come from an outside source, though we can act on “refined environment” desires based on predictions of the future.
Contrary to what many more intelligent people imagine, changing isn’t by acting on logical conclusions. Instead, it’s based on how well we can feel the benefits of the results of making a change.
We can always choose to generally direct where our changes will go and the values our changes will associate with:
- Physically – exercising creativity/control on the world around us
- Empirically – adding/invalidating things we’ve understood
- Psychologically – changing our story of how the world works
- Socially – anything involving others including venting, directing, and politics
- Habitually – intensifying what we’ve done before and adding to our certainty
We’re changing/responding proportional to the degree we wish to act. Those responses are often driven by subconscious faith in past habits.
We always change at least as far as we can feel our environment. We won’t have to change if we don’t feel a connection to something, but absolutely will change if we do.
Adaptation
We change to conform to our expectations of what the good life requires.
With the exception of rebellion, we’re always conforming toward something. Rebellion’s conformity is essentially “anti-something”, driven directly by simple hatred of that thing.
We can’t easily calculated how much we’ll conform to something. Like with nature’s physics, there’s a type of “slack” between when the environment provides situations for us to make decisions, when we actually make those decisions, and when we create some sort of change.
Inner changes show themselves less directly on reality, but they’re much farther-reaching than external changes.
Typically, every change has most parts of the following story:
- Suffer repeated consequences that could indicate there’s a need to understand more or act.
- If applicable, emotionally recuperate from the trauma of the experience.
- Admit personal connection to those consequences and a need to make a decision over it.
- Research and observe someone else about how to fix that problem.
- Adapt habits and get emotional support toward fixing that problem.
While we may be changing, our rate of change stays relatively constant, proportional to our openness to experience. A mind in motion stays in motion, a body at rest stays at rest, and we adopt new things at about the same interval. We can change that rate, but it’s difficult for us because we’ll grow very uneasy with the shift.
Time
We don’t imagine ourselves to be changing very much, mostly because of how gradual it is, but a mere five years can give us enough time to swing over to believing the exact opposite idea we had.
Each decision is relatively unimportant in a grand sense, but it slightly tweaks what we are and identify with. Plus, that decision is easier to make the next time around, which makes us more extreme versions of ourselves if we leave our decisions unattended. By combining a decision with results, then another decision with its results, and so on, anyone with enough perspective will see the slow story of how a person changes.
Over a long time, we can clearly see the products of our decisions. A decade of living the good life will yield a philosophically well-established person, but a decade of mindless living will create a bore.
Across a lifetime, natural trends will emerge regarding a person. They’re only approximate, but they’ll usually give a relatively reliable prediction of that person’s future decisions.
No matter how we live, we’re building additional understanding. That understanding comes from how we can recall the perspective we had when younger compared to now, a bit like a friendship with our past selves.
Ripples
After enough time, our changes spill into others’ lives. This can dramatically shift our culture, especially when we break others’ expectations.
Generally, a social group will face huge conflicts when the power dynamics shift from someone changing. This comes from the desire for safety pushed against the benefits of taking risks.
Application
We tend to only change toward what we can feel, mostly because things we can’t feel don’t seem important to us. Successful leaders feel strongly over abstractions like charts and calculations because they understand what those things imply.
The minimum changes we must make are what we feel, so our choice of what and how much we consume will dictate what influences us. Enough bad art will distort our sense of taste. Bad friends corrupt good character. Reading the news constantly will require political opinions, but not as much from skimming headlines once a week.
From terrorism to entrepreneurs, people do what they believe is ideal for living the good life.
Reality often destroys anyone who does habitual bad things, but we must work harder to ensure our understanding of the good life is always correct instead of merely trying to change habits.
We must change, but we don’t like change, and too much or too little change will make us go crazy. For that reason, we must always stay only a little bit uncomfortable to keep growing. If we’re perfectly satisfied we’re not reaching our fullest potential, and without any inner peace we’ll start making very bad decisions.
Rebellion is always anti-[something], so we don’t have much control over who or what we oppose. It could be any version of the opposite of something, including its ideological inverse, ideological reverse, absence, or destruction, and we will vacillate between them unless we form principles we conform toward instead.