What’s Staying the Same

People are fascinated by change/novelty because it’s exciting and surprising. The urge to avoid uncertainty and know the future is hard to resist.

But predicting what’s going to change is hard. There are a lot of variables & how they will play out is what one needs to predict correctly. And then one has to wish that everyone else and didn’t prepare for that version of the future. Considering the probability where odds are constantly changing, it rarely works, and when it does it’s mostly luck.

On the contrary, not enough time is spent on things that have been the same over decades, such as — how people behave, how they think, how they’re persuaded. How people think about fear, greed, opportunity, scarcity, and tribal affiliations has moved from one medium to another but the basics haven’t changed.

For example: Humans are social animals. We like to get together. Indeed, there is a biological imperative to do so! This basic drive will continue to bring people together for face-to-face events of some form for as long as we roam this planet.

Instead of predicting the future, one can focus on a handful of behaviors that show up constantly in the past. This will possibly help to handle uncertainty to a certain extent & understand why it’s happening, and behaviors surrounding it to deduce how people will react to it.

Things that never change are the most important things to pay attention to.

As Will Duran famously said — “People spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on the last 6,000 years.”