Accumulation, directionality & outcomes
Once you understand how your automatic responses accumulate and ripple inward and outward, you start to see why some people's lives spiral up and others down.
So you just reacted to something in life. For a few seconds, something broke through and got your attention, triggered you, meant something to you in the immediate situation you were in, and you reacted in some way. And remember we are still with the pre-programmed, automata, habitual version of you here.
The pilot pushed or pulled the control stick. The cop pulled the trigger, or didn’t just yet. Hopefully the doctor got the right dosage into the right tube for the patient. Mum yelled at her teenage kid, or perhaps managed to take a breath and say nothing.
Which way did it go? Was it a win in that little situation? Did you get those last 20 seconds right in some way? Are you feeling better or worse right now? Has your initial reaction just created another problem you have to deal with? As we were starting to say yesterday, even though this is just one little reaction in the middle of your day somewhere, we can already analyse what it might mean for your loops.
It might have been a mini shift without consequence and you roll straight into the next moment, or it might have been a mini shift that changes your whole day. Or life.
Whatever you did responded in some way to the little situation that presented itself, and that has now evolved one step further in some direction. Which direction? A nudge forward or a nudge backward?
That next little paragraph in your life story, that you just wrote, is immediately added onto whatever came before it: it accumulates and it likely does so in some direction, in some sense, perhaps towards a goal or a desire that you have been consciously working towards or hoping would happen, or perhaps it does so towards some end that you would much rather avoid or prevent from happening.
So then we can talk about preferences or desires, advance or retreat, attack or defence, attraction or avoidance. And is your general direction with that situation in life, with that relationship, with that project mostly towards something constructive or towards something destructive? Are you building something up or pulling something down?
Constructive and destructive, of course, can be seen from a more absolute moral perspective at the highest level of life but then can quickly become relative in terms of your particular Russian-doll set of life situations, relationships and interests. And then they can be constructive or destructive for how you view the situation, from your perspective, but completely the opposite for someone else in your life, especially your enemies, competitors, rivals or antagonists. That’s how fights happen.
As well as moving in a particular direction, or adding to a particular direction that you can perceive, and especially if we are talking about habitual or even addictive automata reactions, your new reaction in the past 30 seconds can accumulate on top of previous examples of that same thing.
If we’re talking about love and enjoyment, so much the better! More love, more joy, more happiness is a good thing. Or you did another good little trade with your Bitcoin or something in the investment world. Had another great meeting with your boss at work. They would be constructive accumulations of reactions, very positive loops.
But so often, as we know, stress begets stress, worry begets worry, panic begets panic.
And if you are addicted to something, well, there goes another beer, another joint, another fix, another cigarette, another bit of porn, another fight with your spouse.
And if you know you have been under a lot of repeated stress or worry lately, or you know you’re addicted to something, and you already feel bad about all of that, what just happened to your image of yourself, your identity?
It took another hit.
So there we have outcome, we have directionality, we have accumulation, and we already have some inner feedback into the past layers of you and your own identity and image of yourself. Just from 10 or 20 or 30 seconds of reaction.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Whoever was next to you (your partner, your copilot, your colleague) just saw and heard whatever you did too, so now they are probably thinking about what just happened. And whoever you’re responsible for in that situation (your passengers, your patients, your clients, your kids) might also now be affected by your new move.
Which is to say that your reaction was a reaction, an action, a little event, but it also immediately broadcast information outwards into the loops of other people around you: sounds, words, emotions, effects, results, a little outcome or change.
Even a 10-second reactive interaction can change the situation and the story for a lot of people if their connections to you are tight enough in that moment and that place.
Has your reaction improved their situation and lives in some way? Or did you just create a problem for a whole bunch of other people? Do you think they feel better about things now or worse?
At the extremes, and going back to where we started with Human Loops, your little reaction in that moment might even have just had some relevant impact on a whole strucutral or environmental level that is now going to affect hundreds or thousands of lives.
Once whatever happened between the pilots in the cockpit of the Air India plane at the start of the summer had happened, in those few brief seconds after take-off, that was it for the whole structure and everyone that was sitting in it, nothing else could be done to save them.
As I type these lines out for you tonight, reports here in Spain say the country has lost nearly a million acres of forest and land this summer in some 240 wildfires.
Who knows what the causes will turn out to be, if they ever find them, but it is not infrequent to read reports or suggestions of summer arsonists starting some of them, so there we have another example: the toss of a match or a lit cigarette, a 10-second chunk of criminality, can torch tens of thousands of acres of the environment, can lead to tens of thousands of people being evacauted from country towns and villages.
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