How systems knowledge guides everyday attention

Millions of us are disoriented.

In this podcast, I explore what foresight tells us about disorientation.

We’ve all been raised, educated and trained to understand the world around us. Much of that understanding, though, is tethered to notions about the shape and behavior of systems. Many of those notions, in turn, we absorb in a variety of informal ways that are lived, social or cultural — what we often think of as common sense.

In times of essential continuity, common sense plus a decent education is a powerful mix.

In discontinuous moments, though, they break down. I’ve written before about how hard we have to work these days to update our education and training to maintain a sort of evergreen expertise:

Recently, though, I’ve had the chance to think a bit more about the emotional impacts of losing our sense of future direction.

We orient ourselves amidst change by looking for familiar landmarks, comfortable analogies between the new and the known, parallels that allow us to apply common sense to uncommon situations.

When we face a moderate tempo of change, this reference to the ordinary works — and comforts us.

But when we face rapid upheavals, it breaks down.

We find ourselves facing personal discontinuity, since if the world is suddenly different than we thought it was, our lives are different than the ones we thought we were living. We experience horizon collapse, as our experience and common sense no longer offer us a way of anticipating what comes next. We may even confront despair, as the world around us becomes so unfamiliar it just feels wrong.

That’s when it really helps to remember that we should feel this way, at least initially.

The planetary discontinuity we’re in is unprecedented. We’re not supposed to instantly adapt to that. We have to undertake a process of becoming at home in the present.

—Alex

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