☞ The Messiness of Reality and Stories
We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no obvious purpose. Think of William James’s “blooming, buzzing confusion,” or what Joan Didion called “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We make this chaos workable, as Didio... See more
Jake Orthwein • Why Frame Problems? — Frame Problems
Second, because genius isn’t linear . You can’t create something world-changing by simply following steps 1 through 10. You need chaos. You need disorder. But it has to be tethered chaos 1 —chaos that’s guided by a deep sense of purpose and vision. It’s about engaging with the unknown while keeping one foot grounded in reality.
Lane Watson • Critical Creative Genius at the Intersection of Order, Disorder, and Chaos
This region of the dynamic spectrum, where outdated order dissolves into a creative and responsive chaos from which novel order can emerge, is often referred to as “the edge of chaos.” Stuart Kaufman suggested: “The best place for a system to be, in order to respond appropriately to a constantly changing world, is at the edge of chaos.” He explains
... See moreApplying universal logic gives our experiences a certain weight and our lives a certain order. I assume this is why we’re so drawn to recasting our life stories into tidy narratives and lessons to be shared with others. But in doing this we risk underestimating chaos, nuance, idiosyncrasy, and the occasional dose of self-delusion.
Haley Nahman • #155: How to be delusional
The more I grappled with the complexity of reality, the more I suspected that we have all been living a comforting lie, from the stories we tell about ourselves to the myths we use to explain history and social change. I began to wonder whether the history of humanity is just an endless, but futile, struggle to impose order, certainty, and rational
... See moreBrian Klaas • Fluke
The world is not a chaotic jumble of people, objects, and events clanging together in disarray. The world is a place of order and logic, a place of predictability. The world is a collection of logical systems!