Summarising Human Loops so far...
Looking back over the summer's posts, we have made great progress together.
Right, we are over 1,000 subscribers now, with another couple of hundred people joining over the past week, and I have written two dozen posts over the summer, so that is a good spot to summarise where we are up to with explaining Human Loops and what the framework proposes. A reminder and some catch up.
The model comes out of 15 years of messy notes and a decade of very in-depth reporting on different stories across Spain as a journalist, from the abdication of the King at one extreme down to cleaners mopping up blood and vomit in restricted Covid wards in hospitals before the vaccines at the other.
As I went along through the different adventures—and some of my own in my personal life of course—I realised that we, all of us, whether in courtrooms, politics, hospitals, accidents or marriages, seemed to be following remarkably predictable patterns, emotional loops shaped by past experiences, layered identities and the pressure of having to do something next.
And it seemed to be fractal or scale invariant: I could apply the same basic framework to individuals struggling with some pressing problem, companies with a generational values crisis or political parties during elections, and even the evolution of whole societies over time: why, say, Spain in the 1970s managed a peaceful Transition to democracy versus why Germany ended up with Hitler and the Nazis. The really big picture stuff.
It’s also applicable across all sorts of different fields and areas of life.
I haven’t outlined the full thing yet, it’s mostly still in my head and my notes, but we have made great progress. Let’s say there are approximately 15 major chunks or elements or parts to the model, which is also dynamic, in the sense that Boyd’s famous OODA loop is dynamic: we are constantly moving through life encountering new twists and turns to our situations, creating new layers of meaning all the time and accumulating outcomes in different directions.
The framework allows for construction or destruction, growth or collapse, and it does so across timeframes, while taking into account the nested nature of our lives.
You will like this if you are familiar with systems thinking, behavioural science, psychology, psychoanalysis, chaos theory, strategy, complexity science, scenarios or mysticism and awareness. Some readers suggested Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop (self-referential minds), Geoffrey West's Scale (physics, biology, universal laws of growth) or the Buddhist or Hindu concepts of samsara (cyclical wandering through existence) and karma (consequences, cause and effect).
Human Loops will certainly resonate with you if you are familiar with any of those but it isn't any one of them, per se. Freud and Jung are welcome to the party, as are the faithful of all religions, and the atheists. All of those go some way to explaining bits of it, but none of them match the whole. Because we are all humans trying to work our way through life somehow. So Human Loops proposes a kind of common Human OS in which all of those other theories seem to fit. A bridge, if you like.
Also important to note is that Human Loops is not an academic or an intellectual theory now looking for proof but rather an integrative, ground-up applied model that already appears to describe how we as humans actually process all of these different layers of life in something which I call the constant now (an external realm counterpart to the spiritual eternal now perhaps).
It's about how we process it all continually to replay or to regenerate or to create meaning, which then drives decisions, actions and outcomes, which then accumulate in some way and in some direction (so we can get into morality and purpose), and always within some structures, situations and set of relationships.
At the highest surface level, we have the environmental and structural factors surrounding your existence….and indeed how many of those structures are designed to influence your constant meaning making process. Also think about the structural factors when you are struggling with some problem and your inner work and progress appears not to be providing as much change as you had hoped for.
The arrival of AI is a massive new structural element, for example. It is going to hit economic structures, sources of family income, the state of relationships, including families, status and trust, and how we process and assign meaning to what we do and the memories we accrue in life, the very stories we tell ourselves about our lives.
So there are the structural layers across all of the things you are involved in in your life, and then, on the next layer down, some set of relationships in each of your situations too. Then those structures and relationships and your involvement in them have evolved over different previously meaningful slices of time and adventures.
Before you get to interpreting or understanding present moments, think about or become aware of your time stack or the layers of your past up to now. Depending on how old and wise you are, this can be anything from mult-generational things down to previous years, months, weeks or days. If we continue with the computer metaphor, these could be programs for some aspect of life that were installed at some previous point.
Environment to structures to relationships to layers of past you and then consider your immediate arrival state and surroundings before whatever it is. There is an enormous range of options there but they are always precisely describable. Are you tired right now? Fatigued from days of sleeping badly? Exhausted after 10 night shifts in two weeks? What about hungry or thirsty? Drunk? Injured?
Now you are on the very edge of becoming. This is the moment where who you have been in the past meets who you are becoming into the future. This is the moment all advertisers, phone apps and politicians want to intercept to grab your attention so they can manipulate it towards their own interests and ends (read this for an example).
Then you move into your actual reaction to the thing that just entered your reality. The way you react, even though the moment only lasted 10 or 20 seconds, can already be analysed for outcome, energy states, accumulation and directionality. 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.
Depending on what just happened and how you reacted, we can also then talk about how it just affected other people: 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.
So post-by-post I hope I am getting the Human Loops structure, layers and dynamics out of my head and into yours in a mostly relatable way. There is still lots to be explained and your comments and questions lead us to exploring it all together.
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A fascinating synthesis of lived experience, systems thinking, and deep introspection. Human Loops feels like a blueprint for navigating the complexity of being layered, dynamic, and profoundly human.
Thanks for this summary. I think this helped me to understand what this is all about at a birds eye level, which is what I needed before starting to read the other posts to get more detail.