The Cycles
Everything in the world moves in cycles - things go up, things come down. Civilizations rise, civilizations decline. Market goes up, market goes down. Corporations gave successes, they have failures. People oscillate between happiness and sadness.
There are few unique things about these cycles. Consider all of humanity to be nodes in a large network of nodes.
The node in the human universe moves with the shortest wavelength: i.e. individuals have the shortest times between relative happiness and sadness. A human can go through these emotions within the same hour, and multiple times during the day.
A small collective has longer wavelength: When you are at a party or a dinner table - the mood or energy once established permeates for much longer. The collective happiness or sadness of the group hangs for much longer duration. You normally will only see one half of a full wavelength of any community in any given day - happiness or collective boredom or sadness.
Tribes have much longer wavelength: If you are in a group of 1000s - the collective highs and lows of that tribe doesn’t change every day - it might take weeks or even months before shift happens from one state to another.
Large collective like cities have multi-year/multi - decade wavelengths: We see this in cities they don’t turn in a matter of weeks or months - they go in much longer cycles. Years, decades.
nations have century long wavelengths: Once a nation has established upward trajectory - it can sustain it for decades if not century or two before turning the other way around.
This framework is important for two reasons:
Managing emotions: When I was 15 I wrote a very simple thing on a piece of paper. Sadness and happiness are pointless and inherently contradictory. If I am extremely happy, the highest probable outcomes is that next moment is not going to be as joyous or fulfilling and even if the next one is, the odds are diminishing that the subsequent one will be extreme happiness too. So in my happiest moment - I have to know that chances are I am going to move to a future state that is less happy / fulfilling. On the contrary, when I am extremely sad and feeling like rock bottom, the chances are the next moment is probably going to better than this present one. That ought to bring a spring in my step. So in this state of flow of moving between highs and lows, we got to know nothing is as great or as bad as it seems - and life we will continue to move you on these cycles.
Understanding large movements such as history of European domination: The understanding of why Europe dominated the world from 1600-2000 is so poorly understood by most. Most people believe that europeans were doing something better, had better innovation and hence dominated and ruled the world. If we observe the world around us, it is very clear to see - domination and innovation stems from necessity. Those most desperate to get on a boat to travel to far off lands for better things are not the richest but the people who are trying to find their place in the world. Europe was not dominant, the roman empire or the greek didn’t hold a candle to asian empires from 1000-1500 AD. Europe had dark ages, had diseases, went through a dismal period for a few centuries and was the underdog. The thought of UK, Spain or France ruling the world would be laughable in 1500, just like America becoming the largest economy in the world would be laughable in 1700. It’s a classic underdog story about a community of people who pushed harder, embraced change faster, desired newer structures and all of that created one of the largest empires in modern times - the french, the british, the spaniards dominated not because they were better but because they were small, they wanted to be bigger and they were willing to try new things to succeed. They were moving from a cycle of being down and out (dark ages) to a cycle of innovation and prosperity (industrial age) and unfortunately they might be turning back towards a downward cycle.
