Nonlinear Life Quotes

Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we’re thrown when they don’t. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities... We’re all comparing ourselves to an ideal that no longer exists and beating ourselves up for not achieving it.

So we pour in data from the past to fuel the decision-making mechanisms created by our models, be they linear or nonlinear. But therein lies the logician's trap: past data from real life constitute a sequence of events rather than a set of independent observations, which is what the laws of probability demand.[...]It is in those outliers and imperfections that the wildness lurks.

Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse). There is absolutely no benefit for someone in such a position to propose something simple: when you are rewarded for perception, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a “scholarly” paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: Non-skin-in-the-game people don’t get simplicity.

If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it suppresses, by its very way of life, the evidence that would contradict that belief.

Whenever the whole is different from the sum of the parts—whenever there’s cooperation or competition going on—the governing equations must be nonlinear.

Remember, the thought experiment is the starting point, not the end. The process is messy and nonlinear. And the answer, as we’ll see in the next section, will often come when you’re least expecting it.

The most important question for every client is "W X ho are you?" I'm not as interested in an answer as I am in teaching a process that the girl can use for the rest of her life. The process involves looking within to find a true core of self, acknowledging unique gifts, accepting all feelings, not just the socially acceptable ones, and making deep and firm decisions about values and meaning. The process includes knowing the difference between thinking and feeling, between immediate gratification and long-term goals, and between her own voice and the voices of others. The process includes discovering the personal impact of our cultural rules for women. It includes discussion about breaking those rules and formulating new, healthy guidelines for the self. The process teaches girls to chart a course based on the dictates of their true selves. The process is nonlinear, arduous, and discouraging. It is also joyful, creative and full of surprises.

Primed to expect that our lives will follow a predictable path, we’re thrown when they don’t. We have linear expectations but nonlinear realities. Even people who are linear in one area (a stable career, say, or long-running marriage) are nonlinear in others (recurrent health problems or frequent changes in their religious identity).

So we pour in data from the past to fuel the decision-making mechanisms created by our models, be they linear or nonlinear. But therein lies the logician's trap: past data from real life constitute a sequence of events rather than a set of independent observations, which is what the laws of probability demand.[...]Even though many economic and financial variables fall into distributions that approximate a bell curve, the picture is never perfect.[...]It is in those outliers and imperfections that the wildness lurks.

The Procrustean bed in life consists precisely in simplifying the non-linear and making it linear—the simplification that distorts.

Though it was nonlinear and nonsensical, my path made perfect sense once I truly started walking it. I’d finally discovered an outlet for everything that had been trapped inside me.

In a non-linear and relative world, each person is empowered to change the course and meaning of their life completely. That change only takes an instant; it is a leap through a wormhole. Perceived

Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. People think that if, say, two variables are causally linked, then a steady input in one variable should always yield a result in the other one. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. For

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.

If you need to visualize the soul, think of it as a cross between a wolf howl, a photon, and a dribble of dark molasses. But what it really is, as near as I can tell, is a packet of information. It’s a program, a piece of hyperspatial software designed explicitly to interface with the Mystery. Not a mystery, mind you, the Mystery. The one that can never be solved. To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. But say you’ve inflated your soul to the size of a beach ball and it’s soaking into the Mystery like wine into a mattress. What have you accomplished? Well, long term, you may have prepared yourself for a successful metamorphosis, an almost inconceivable transformation to be precipitated by your death or by some great worldwide eschatological whoopjamboreehoo. You may have. No one can say for sure. More immediately, by waxing soulful you will have granted yourself the possibility of ecstatic participation in what the ancients considered a divinely animated universe. And on a day to day basis, folks, it doesn’t get any better than that.

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This applies to the sales of books, the spread of ideas, and success in general and runs counter to conventional logic. The information age is worsening this effect.

When one combines the new insights gained from studying far-from-equilibrium states and nonlinear processes, along with these complicated feedback systems, a whole new approach is opened that makes it possible to relate the so-called hard sciences to the softer sciences of life—and perhaps even to social processes as well. (Such findings have at least analogical significance for social, economic or political realities. Words like “revolution,” “economic crash,” “technological upheaval,” and “paradigm shift” all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by Order Out of Chaos.

This synergistic character of nonlinear systems is precisely what makes them so difficult to analyze. They can’t be taken apart. The whole system has to be examined all at once, as a coherent entity. As we’ve seen earlier, this necessity for global thinking is the greatest challenge in understanding how large systems of oscillators can spontaneously synchronize themselves. More generally, all problems about self-organization are fundamentally nonlinear. So the study of sync has always been entwined with the study of nonlinearity.

In daily life, the Lorenzian quality of sensitive dependence on initial conditions lurks everywhere. A man leaves the house in the morning thirty seconds late, a flowerpot misses his head by a few millimeters, and then he is run over by a truck. Or, less dramatically, he misses a bus that runs every ten minutes—his connection to a train that runs every hour. Small perturbations in one’s daily trajectory can have large consequences. A batter facing a pitched ball knows that approximately the same swing will not give approximately the same result, baseball being a game of inches. Science, though—science was different.

The previous two chapters can basically be distilled to the following: —“Break it down to its component parts” reductionism doesn’t work for understanding some vastly interesting things about us. Instead, in such chaotic systems, minuscule differences in starting states amplify enormously in their consequences. —This nonlinearity makes for fundamental unpredictability, suggesting to many that there is an essentialism that defies reductive determinism, meaning that the “there can’t be free will because the world is deterministic” stance goes down the drain. —Nope. Unpredictable is not the same thing as undetermined; reductive determinism is not the only kind of determinism; chaotic systems are purely deterministic, shutting down that particular angle of proclaiming the existence of free will.

Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out.

Key to the success of many with ADHD is finding the “right life” in which to live. This means a job in which their particular talents for nonlinear thinking and quick emergency response are prized, and a spouse who can appreciate, or at least learn to live with, an often uneven distribution of work within the relationship. Without these things, many with ADHD feel that they don’t really fit into the world, or that the face that they put forward in order to fit in is false. The other critical factor for the success of an ADHD spouse in a relationship is for both partners to continue to respect differences and act on that respect. Here’s what one woman with ADHD says about living a life in which others assume that “different” is not worthy of respect: I think [my husband] uses the ADD as an excuse to be bossy and stuff sometimes but I find it very upsetting and hard on my self esteem to have my disorder and learning disabilities used that way. We do have very different perspectives but reality is perspective. Just because I see things differently from someone else doesn’t make one wrong or right…how I experience life is colored by my perception, it is what it is. I hate how people try to invalidate my thoughts feelings and perceptions because they are different from theirs. Like telling me [since] they feel…different[ly] from me [that their feelings] should make me magically change! It doesn’t work that way. Even if my ADD makes me see or remember something “not right” it’s still MY reality. It is like those movies where the hero has something crazy going on where they experience reality differently from everyone else.

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

Interestingly enough, creative geniuses seem to think a lot more like horses do. These people also spend a rather large amount of time engaging in that favorite equine pastime: doing nothing. In his book Fire in the Crucible: The Alchemy of Creative Genius, John Briggs gathers numerous studies illustrating how artists and inventors keep their thoughts pulsating in a field of nuance associated with the limbic system. In order to accomplish this feat against the influence of cultural conditioning, they tend to be outsiders who have trouble fitting into polite society. Many creative geniuses don’t do well in school and don’t speak until they’re older, thus increasing their awareness of nonverbal feelings, sensations, and body language cues. Einstein is a classic example. Like Kathleen Barry Ingram, he also failed his college entrance exams. As expected, these sensitive, often highly empathic people feel extremely uncomfortable around incongruent members of their own species, and tend to distance themselves from the cultural mainstream. Through their refusal to fit into a system focusing on outside authority, suppressed emotion, and secondhand thought, creative geniuses retain and enhance their ability to activate the entire brain. Information flows freely, strengthening pathways between the various brain functions. The tendency to separate thought from emotion, memory, and sensation is lessened. This gives birth to a powerful nonlinear process, a flood of sensations and images interacting with high-level thought functions and aspects of memory too complex and multifaceted to distill into words. These elements continue to influence and build on each other with increasing ferocity. Researchers emphasize that the entire process is so rapid the conscious mind barely registers that it is happening, let alone what is happening. Now a person — or a horse for that matter — can theoretically operate at this level his entire life and never receive recognition for the rich and innovative insights resulting from this process. Those called creative geniuses continuously struggle with the task of communicating their revelations to the world through the most amenable form of expression — music, visual art, poetry, mathematics. Their talent for innovation, however, stems from an ability to continually engage and process a complex, interconnected, nonlinear series of insights. Briggs also found that creative geniuses spend a large of amount of time “doing nothing,” alternating episodes of intense concentration on a project with periods of what he calls “creative indolence.” Albert Einstein once remarked that some of his greatest ideas came to him so suddenly while shaving that he was prone to cut himself with surprise.

He ran long at the White House, and arrived late to his next meeting with Hillary Clinton, Jake Sullivan and Frank Ruggiero—their first major strategy session on Taliban talks after the secret meeting with A-Rod. She was waiting in her outer office, a spacious room paneled in white and gilt wood, with tasseled blue and pink curtains and an array of colorfully upholstered chairs and couches. In my time reporting to her later, I only ever saw Clinton take the couch, with guests of honor in the large chair kitty-corner to her. She’d left it open for him that day. “He came rushing in. . . . ” Clinton later said. “And, you know, he was saying ‘oh I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ ” He sat down heavily and shrugged off his coat, rattling off a litany of his latest meetings, including his stop-in at the White House. “That was typical Richard. It was, like, ‘I’m doing a million things and I’m trying to keep all the balls in the air,’ ” she remembered. As he was talking, a “scarlet red” flush went up his face, according to Clinton. He pressed his hands over his eyes, his chest heaving. “Richard, what’s the matter?” Clinton asked. “Something horrible is happening,” he said. A few minutes later, Holbrooke was in an ambulance, strapped to a gurney, headed to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where Clinton had told her own internist to prepare the emergency room. In his typically brash style, he’d demanded that the ambulance take him to the more distant Sibley Memorial Hospital. Clinton overruled him. One of our deputies on the SRAP team, Dan Feldman, rode with him and held his hand. Feldman didn’t have his BlackBerry, so he scrawled notes on a State Department expense form for a dinner at Meiwah Restaurant as Holbrooke dictated messages and a doctor assessed him. The notes are a nonlinear stream of Holbrooke’s indomitable personality, slashed through with medical realities. “Call Eric in Axelrod’s office,” the first read. Nearby: “aortic dissection—type A . . . operation risk @ > 50 percent”—that would be chance of death. A series of messages for people in his life, again interrupted by his deteriorating condition: “S”—Secretary Clinton—“why always together for medical crises?” (The year before, he’d been with Clinton when she fell to the concrete floor of the State Department garage, fracturing her elbow.) “Kids—how much love them + stepkids” . . . “best staff ever” . . . “don’t let him die here” . . . “vascular surgery” . . . “no flow, no feeling legs” . . . “clot” . . . and then, again: “don’t let him die here want to die at home w/ his fam.” The seriousness of the situation fully dawning on him, Holbrooke turned to job succession: “Tell Frank”—Ruggiero—“he’s acting.” And finally: “I love so many people . . . I have a lot left to do . . . my career in public service is over.” Holbrooke cracked wise until they put him under for surgery. “Get me anything you need,” he demanded. “A pig’s heart. Dan’s heart.

Post-1970s neoliberalism is economic theory under the influence of nonlinear complex-metastable-systems theory. Or, rather, it is the co- opting of the principle of metastability from theories of emergence as a means of providing quasi-scientific rationale for the economic exploitation of the protean qualities of organic life—what Cooper calls capturing “life as surplus.” Whereas Cooper focuses on the conversion of the principle of metastability in economic theory into socioeconomic precarity, I am interested in the materialization of emergence in extreme infrastructure and its appropriation toward realizing a new form of extreme capitalism that exploits the dynamic qualities of collective life. Neoliberalism, in my argument, is thus not just the expression of government or corporate economic policy: it is the result of subjugating to economic form the attempts in a number of related academic fields to overcome material limits by thinking with technology.

I want the reader to get the feeling that the text is trying to rearrange itself, upon every reading or in the act of reading. I don't want the presentation of narrative; I want a life told out of order.

is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions

And what happens when all the threads of the tapestry have been traveled? Do you then go over them again and again in an attempt to relive the best parts? Because nothing will be like that first experience. Nothing.

Here, it seems to me, is where sync has been uniquely successful. As one of the oldest and most elementary parts of nonlinear science (dealing, as it does, with purely rhythmic units), sync has offered penetrating insights into everything from cardiac arrhythmias to superconductivity, from sleep cycles to the stability of the power grid. It is grounded in rigorous mathematical ideas; it has passed the test of experiment; and it describes and unifies a remarkably wide range of cooperative behavior in living and nonliving matter, at every scale of length from the subatomic to the cosmic. Aside from its importance and intrinsic fascination, I believe that sync also provides a crucial first step for what’s coming next in the study of complex nonlinear systems, where the oscillators are eventually going to be replaced by genes and cells, companies and people.

I prefer to remain a skeptic. People frequently misinterpret my opinion. I never said that every rich man is an idiot and every unsuccessful person unlucky, only that in absence of much additional information it is preferable to reserve one’s judgment. It is safer. Ten • LOSER TAKES ALL—ON THE NONLINEARITIES OF LIFE The nonlinear viciousness of life.

These nonlinear dynamics have a bookstore name, “chaos theory,” which is a misnomer because it has nothing to do with chaos. Chaos theory concerns itself primarily with functions in which a small input can lead to a disproportionate response. Population models, for instance, can lead to a path of explosive growth, or extinction of a species, depending on a very small difference in the population at a starting point in time. Another popular scientific analogy is the weather, where it has been shown that a simple butterfly fluttering its wings in India can cause a hurricane in New York.

Key to the success of many with ADHD is finding the “right life” in which to live. This means a job in which their particular talents for nonlinear thinking and quick emergency response are prized, and a spouse who can appreciate, or at least learn to live with, an often uneven distribution of work within the relationship. Without these things, many with ADHD feel that they don’t really fit into the world, or that the face that they put forward in order to fit in is false.

Statistics to the layman can appear rather complex, but the concept behind what is used today is so simple that my French mathematician friends call it deprecatorily "cuisine". It is all based on one simple notion; the more information you have the more you are confident about the outcome. Now the problem: by how much? Common statistical method is based on the steady augmentation of the confidence level, in nonlinear proportion to the number of observations. That is, for an n time increase in the sample size, we increase our knowledge by the square root of n. Suppose i'm drawing from an urn containing red and black balls. My confidence level about the relative proportion of red and black balls after 20 drawings in not twice the one I have after 10 drawings; it's merely multiplied by the square root of 2.

Whereas the goal of the ego/mind is primarily to do, act, acquire, or perform, the intention of contemplation is to “become.” While the intellect wants to know “about,” contemplation seeks Knowingness itself and autonomous wisdom. Rational thinking is time related, sequential, and linear, whereas contemplation occurs outside of sequential time. It is nonlinear and related to comprehension of essence. Devotional contemplation is a way or style of being in the world whereby one’s life becomes a prayer.

A hallmark of our time is that life is not predictable. It does not unfold in passages, stages, phases, or cycles. It is nonlinear—and getting more so every day. It’s also more manageable, more forgiving of missteps, and more open to personalization, if you know how to navigate the new outbreak of twists and turns.

Cases are usually not linear or very straightforward, in an attempt to replicate the complexity and information overload of real life. According to Jackson (2011): Whereas textbooks are logical and coherent in their presentation, cases attempt to introduce more realism by adding uncertainty, fluidity and contingency. Thus, many cases have ‘complicating properties’: information that includes ‘noise’ (irrelevancies, dead ends, and false, biased or limited testimony by characters in the case), unstated information that must be inferred, and a nonlinear structure in which related evidence is scattered throughout the text and is often disguised or left to chance.

… all living systems are complex - i.e., highly nonlinear - networks …

I am also realizing the nonlinear effect behind success in anything: It is better to have a handful of enthusiastic advocates than hordes of people who appreciate your work—better to be loved by a dozen than liked by the hundreds. This

He understood that the sources of the gravitational field were not just ponderable matter but also field energy. He realized that gravitational field energy is to be included as a source and that the gravitational field equations were therefore bound to be nonlinear.

Stephenson summarizes his communication policy as follows: Persons who wish to interfere with my concentration are politely requested not to do so, and warned that I don’t answer e-mail… lest [my communication policy’s] key message get lost in the verbiage, I will put it here succinctly: All of my time and attention are spoken for—several times over. Please do not ask for them. To further justify this policy, Stephenson wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent.” At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.

If you feel you’ve lost the thread on your life or anything resembling motivation, what can help is to actually get lost—and by that I mean immerse yourself in the nonlinear, explore the full dimension of who you are, what you’ve experienced, and all the things you have right in front of you that you might have overlooked.

McNeill’s hypothesis is that explosive, self-stimulating (“autocatalytic”) urban dynamics cannot emerge when hierarchical components overwhelm meshwork components. Fernand Braudel seems to agree with this hypothesis when he asserts the existence of a “dynamic pattern of turbulent urban evolution in the West, while the pattern of life in cities in the rest of the world runs in a long, straight and unbroken line across time

Our brain is not cut out for nonlinearities. Our emotional apparatus is designed for linear causality. This is why there are routes to success that are nonrandom, but very few people have the mental stamina to follow them.

Grief is nonlinear. It’s sneaky and sharp, like a serial killer in a movie where there’s no warning. No suspenseful music. No screeching of violins. And one night, when you think you’re fine and everything is fine and oh, look at me living my life—thriving, even—it’s like, BOOM BANG, then suddenly you’re on the floor with no memory of how you got there. Grief put a roofie in your drink and now the room is spinning. Grief is supposed to be a Mack truck but, really, it’s a Prius with its lights off. No way to know it’s coming until you are under its wheels.

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.

The mathematician Stanislaw Ulam once said that calling a problem nonlinear was like going to the zoo and talking about all the interesting nonelephant animals you see there. His point was that most animals are not elephants, and most equations are not linear. Linear equations describe simple, idealized situations where causes are proportional to effects, and forces are proportional to responses. If you bend a steel girder by two millimeters instead of one, it will push back twice as hard. The word linear refers to this proportionality: If you graph the deflection of the girder versus the force applied, the relationship falls on a straight line.

But linearity is often an approximation to a more complicated reality. Most systems behave linearly only when they are close to equilibrium, and only when we don’t push them too hard. A civil engineer can predict how a skyscraper will sway in the wind, as long as the wind is not too strong. Electrical circuits are completely predictable—until they get fried by a power surge. When a system goes nonlinear, driven out of its normal operating range, all bets are off. The old equations no longer apply.

A depressing corollary of the butterfly effect (or so it was widely believed) was that two chaotic systems could never synchronize with each other. Even if you took great pains to start them the same way, there would always be some infinitesimal difference in their initial states. Normally that small discrepancy would remain small for a long time, but in a chaotic system, the error cascades and feeds on itself so swiftly that the systems diverge almost immediately, destroying the synchronization. Unfortunately, it seemed, two of the most vibrant branches of nonlinear science—chaos and sync—could never be married. They were fundamentally incompatible. Plausible as it sounds, the argument outlawing synchronized chaos is now known to be wrong. Chaos can sync.

THE LINEAR LIFE IS DEAD ↓ THE NONLINEAR LIFE INVOLVES MORE LIFE TRANSITIONS ↓ LIFE TRANSITIONS ARE A SKILL WE CAN, AND MUST, MASTER

Instead, life is filled with chaos and complexity, periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. In place of steady lines, observers now see loops, spirals, wobbles, fractals, twists, tangles, and turnabouts.

More to the point, nonlinearity helps explain why we all feel so overwhelmed all the time. Trained to expect that our lives will unfold in a predictable series of stately life chapters, we’re confused when those chapters come faster and faster, frequently out of order, often one on top of the other. But the reality is: We’re all the clouds floating over the horizon, the swirl of cream in the coffee, the jagged dash of lightning. And we’re not aberrations because of this; we’re just like everything else.

THE LINEAR LIFE IS DEAD ↓ THE NONLINEAR LIFE INVOLVES MORE LIFE TRANSITIONS

Nonlinearity suggests that instead of resisting upheavals and uncertainties like these, we should accept them. Yours is not the only life that seems to be following its own inscrutable path. Everyone else’s is, too.

The once routine expectation that people will have one job, one relationship, one faith, one home, one body, one sexuality, one identity from adolescence to assisted living is deader than it’s ever been. This is what it means to live a nonlinear life, and it has profound consequences for decisions we all make every day.

The fundamental dilemma underlying the major problems of our time seems to be the illusion that unlimited growth is possible on a finite planet. This, in turn, reflects the clash between linear thinking and the nonlinear patterns in our biosphere—the ecological networks and cycles that constitute the web of life. This highly nonlinear global network contains countless feedback loops through which the planet balances and regulates itself. Our current economic system, by contrast, is fueled by materialism and greed that do not seem to recognize any limits.

It is only when we accept that development and improvement takes place in the now that we can consciously look upon our manifestations non-linearly and understand them as evergreen fulfillment.

Logic doesn’t work well for such nonlinear systems as chess and life.

My thesis holds that a revolution in the nature and content of communication—the Fifth Wave of information—has ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. For this to be the case, I need to show how the perturbing agent, information, can influence power arrangements. Information must be seen to have real-life effects, and those effects must be meaningful enough to account for a crisis of authority. A century of research on media and information effects has delivered confusing if not contradictory findings. The problem for the analyst is again one of complexity and nonlinearity. Intuitively, it should be a simple matter to establish the effects of information. I see a truck bearing down on me, for example: that’s information. I move out of the way: that’s behavior caused by information. Or I watch television news of the US invasion of Iraq: that’s information. I form an opinion for or against, and agitate politically accordingly: that’s behavior caused by media information.

Most of everyday life is spectacularly nonlinear; if you listen to your two favorite songs at the same time, you won’t get double the pleasure. The same goes for consuming alcohol and drugs, where the interaction effects can be deadly. By contrast, peanut butter and jelly are better together. They don’t just add up—they synergize.

Stephenson wrote an essay titled “Why I Am a Bad Correspondent.” At the core of his explanation for his inaccessibility is the following decision: The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.

Could you do things out of order and end up at the same place?