What We Lose When Everything Makes Sense
How Our Faith in Systems Undermines What Matters Most
We are living in an age that reveres systems. From climate response plans to leadership models, from moral crusades to evolutionary theories, the prevailing logic tells us that the world is a network of pressures to be adapted to, threats to be neutralised, and feedback loops to be managed.
Since the March 2020 lock-downs, it has felt as though this logic has crystallised into something more total. What began as a response to crisis now resembles a kind of collective faith. It promises safety, coherence, and control, offering an escape from the existential weight of thinking for oneself. The messiness of true independence, the disorientation of not knowing, has been outsourced to the comfort of structure.
But what if this comfort is part of the problem? What if our fixation on adaptation and coherence is a recursive trap, one that amplifies complexity and risk instead of resolving it?
Whether by pure coincidence or a strategic alignment of the stars, one article, one podcast and one book chapter all jumped out at me over the last few days, all asking me these same questions in their own way.
The systems we trust to protect us may also be the ones that quietly rob us of the chance to be fully, responsively, and unpredictably alive.
I. The Comfort of Systems, and Their Trap
Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS, were never meant to shape how we think about life. Originally, they were models drawn from ecology, biology, and economics, used to understand how systems evolve through feedback, pressure, and adaptation. Over time, these tools escaped the lab. They found their way into business strategy, leadership seminars, education policy, crisis response, and even personal development. The message is consistent: life is a network, always shifting, and the goal is to stay ahead by adapting faster.
At first glance, this seems reasonable. CAS thinking gives us a language for complexity. It suggests that no single agent is in control, that systems change from the bottom up, and that stability emerges from interaction rather than command. In a world that feels increasingly volatile, this offers a kind of logic, perhaps even a kind of hope. We do not have to fix the whole. We just have to adjust our part.
But as Bonnitta Roy points out in Complex Potential States, this logic has a hidden cost. The more we think in CAS terms, feedback loops, pressure-response cycles, adaptive resilience, the more we begin to see the world as a problem to be managed. Even our solutions generate more complexity. We fight disinformation with algorithmic filters, only to deepen distrust. We build smarter cities that become harder to live in. We respond to burnout with productivity apps. Every adaptation seems to demand another. It becomes, in Roy’s words, a "perpetual motion machine" of pressure that feeds itself.
This mindset has become so natural that we hardly notice it. It shapes how we talk, how we plan, and even how we furnish our homes. Visit a dozen different apartments, and you will see the same IKEA chairs, the same faux-industrial lamps, and the same algorithm-approved art prints. These are not just style choices. They are symptoms. CAS thinking rewards efficiency, interchangeability, and minimal friction. The result is a world where everything works, but nothing surprises.
In chasing adaptability, we risk losing touch with the things we claim to value: emergence, creativity, and change. CAS thinking can simulate those things, but it rarely invites them. True creativity is inefficient. True change is unpredictable. Real emergence requires stillness, ambiguity, and sometimes even failure. Yet these are precisely the conditions that CAS logic teaches us to avoid.
There is a difference between navigating complexity and becoming entangled in it. What began as a way to understand life has become, in many cases, a way to manage it into submission. The irony is sharp. In trying to evolve, we may be making ourselves less alive.
II. Straight Lines in a Wiggly World
The impulse to systematise life did not begin with algorithms or biological models. As Alan Watts argued, it runs deeper, into the metaphors that have shaped Western consciousness for centuries. In his lectures and essays, Watts contrasts two dominant myths: the "ceramic" model, in which the universe is crafted by a divine potter, and the "automatic" model, in which the universe is a machine operating on impersonal laws. Although these models appear opposed, both share a crucial assumption. Life is something external, something to be shaped, managed, or explained from the outside.
Watts believed this worldview had trapped modern humans in a kind of existential dislocation. We see ourselves as fundamentally separate from the world around us, positioned either as subjects trying to control an object, or as cogs reacting within a vast machine. Either way, the relationship becomes extractive. Meaning is something we impose or uncover, rather than something we participate in.
To illustrate this, Watts often spoke of the absurdity of trying to impose straight lines on a wiggly world. Rivers curve, clouds drift, trees branch, and bodies move in arcs. Nature dances. Yet we keep trying to measure, cut, and contain it with grids, boxes, and boundaries. We build in right angles and pave in straight roads. It is not just architecture. It is also thought. Even our maps, calendars, and legal systems follow this logic of containment.
Trying to hold onto the world, Watts says, is like trying to hold a fish in your hands. The tighter you squeeze, the more it slips away. So we invent nets. Systems, strategies, measurements, and ethical codes all become ways of catching the uncatchable. In doing so, we trade the experience of being alive for the illusion of knowing what life is.
This need for control has become so second nature that we rarely stop to ask what it costs. We forget that the world was never built to fit our categories. It moves in waves, not straight lines. It evolves, unfolds, recedes, and surprises. To live in it fully may require something closer to trust than to mastery.
Where Roy critiques the feedback loops of modern systems, Watts reveals the mythic foundations beneath them. Our discomfort with mess, movement, and mystery is not new. But our tools are getting sharper, and our nets are getting tighter. The more we try to catch the fish, the less we seem to feel the water.
III. The System is Not the Story
Joan Didion never trusted abstractions. In 'On Morality', she writes not about universal principles or philosophical ideals, but about particulars: a nurse whose partner stays at the scene of a crash with a body so it won't be eaten by coyotes, or a desert story passed from truck to truck on the night wind. For Didion, morality is not a system. It is a lived code, a set of promises we keep because we once told someone we would. Anything larger than that, she suggests, begins to slide toward delusion. The moment we start calling something a moral imperative, rather than a want, a fear, or a power play, we risk forgetting why we reached for it in the first place.
This scepticism lives in her fiction too. In 'Play It As It Lays', Maria drifts through Los Angeles like a woman trapped behind glass. Her choices, to drive the freeway, to have an abortion, to say nothing, are not acts of resistance or apathy. They are responses to a system that keeps moving whether she moves or not. Everyone around her is caught in it. Directors, producers, lovers, friends, they orbit one another in a closed loop, speaking in scripts that echo without landing. No one believes, but everyone continues. The machine keeps running.
This is Didion’s gift and her warning. She shows us the human cost of systematised life, not through critique, but through tone. The silences in her work speak louder than the lines. In Maria’s quiet, in the cold distance of the desert, in the casual repetition of unbearable events, we feel what it means to be alive in a world that no longer knows what life is for. It is not just about morality. It is about meaning, and what happens when meaning is outsourced to a structure that no longer needs us to believe in it, only to function within it.
Didion does not offer escape. She offers clarity. Her characters do not break free, but they know they are trapped. They recognise that underneath the veneer of high society or American exceptionalism or moral crusade lies something hollow. In a sense, this recognition becomes their last act of freedom: not to pretend. Not to lie about what is happening. Not to call it good when it is only ordered.
If Roy shows us how systems escalate, and Watts reveals why we keep building them, Didion reminds us what gets lost inside them. Connection, choice, and care, these are not values we lose all at once. We misplace them moment by moment, until the system becomes the story, and no one remembers who wrote it.
Interlude: Inside the Loop
There is an irony I cannot ignore. This piece began with something I read. Then it became something I heard. Then it turned into a string of notes and a folder of fragments. Eventually, it passed through a tool I helped build, a writing assistant powered by artificial intelligence. It helped shape the sentences I had not quite formed. It offered structure, rhythm, suggestions. In other words, it participated.
And yet, the very thing I am critiquing, the dominance of feedback loops, the encroachment of system thinking into every corner of thought and feeling, is built into the tool itself. Artificial intelligence is, by design, a machine of recursion. It absorbs patterns, finds structure, returns what is likely. It does not live in ambiguity. It does not pause in silence. It cannot feel the temperature of a thought that has not yet formed.
This is not a confession of hypocrisy. It is a reminder that the systems we live inside are not always chosen. Sometimes they are useful, even necessary. But they are never neutral. They shape what feels possible. They shape what feels real. If we forget that, we risk mistaking the tool for the idea, the model for the world.
The point is not to escape the loop entirely. That may not be possible. The point, perhaps, is to notice when we are inside it, and to remember that not everything has to be processed, optimised, or returned as output. Some things are meant to stay unresolved. Some ideas should make us pause rather than produce. Some thoughts deserve to go nowhere in particular.
IV. What Is Possible From Here
If there is a question that unites all of these voices, it is not "How do we solve the problem?" but something quieter. What becomes possible when we stop trying to control what cannot be controlled? What opens up when we stop responding on instinct, stop reacting to pressure, stop mistaking the loop for the world?
Bonnitta Roy speaks of "complex potential states," a way of thinking that begins not with adaptation but with relation. Instead of treating the world as a series of threats to be neutralised, we might begin to see it as a field of unfolding possibility. This does not mean ignoring difficulty. It means loosening the grip of inevitability. It means asking different questions. Not "What comes next?" but "What is alive right now, and how might I meet it?"
Alan Watts, too, points toward this. When he speaks of wiggly rivers and slippery fish, he is not dismissing the need for action. He is reminding us that control is a myth with consequences. The net may help us hold the fish, but it also keeps us from feeling it in our hands. Perhaps we can begin by noticing the difference.
Joan Didion never claimed that life would get easier if we stopped pretending. Only that it might get clearer. There is an integrity in naming what we see without spinning it into virtue. There is a kind of morality, though she might not call it that, in staying with the particular, in keeping our promises, in not abandoning the body on the side of the road.
This piece began in critique, but it does not end with a solution. It ends with attention. To how systems shape us. To where we might step outside them, even briefly. To what remains unmeasured, unresolved, unrepeatable. Not everything has to make sense on the scale of the system. Sometimes the right scale is the morning light through a curtain, a question asked without an answer, or a decision made because it felt right and not because it could be proven.
I do not believe we can live outside of systems. They are are an inevitable byproduct of existence. But I do believe that our awareness of the systems we inhabit, how they shape our thinking, how they limit our imagination, how they quietly govern what feels real, matters. Over a long enough timeline, that awareness becomes its own kind of participation. When we notice the loop, we have the chance to shift our posture within it. And when enough people shift, the system itself begins to change. Not quickly, and not always visibly, but slowly, like water reshaping stone. What emerges from that process may not be more efficient. It may not even be more coherent. But it might be more alive.
References:
https://thesideview.co/journal/complex-potential-states/
https://home.ubalt.edu/ntygfit/ai_01_pursuing_fame/ai_01_tell/jd_morality_.htm
https://www.organism.earth/library/document/image-of-man
[image is from Thornhill’s sophomore album, The Dark Pool]
Thank you to
, and for the various forms of inspiration to publish my first article.
Congratulations on your first article. Weaving Watts and Didion together - WOW!
I just want to let you know how much I enjoyed, valued, and learned from your article. We are swimming in a sea of paradoxes and contradictions. It might be that allowing the tension of these paradoxes to re-arrange the furniture inside us might be what is next.