Nothing Changes Until It Collapses
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"Nothing changes until it collapses" may sound cynical, but it's the opposite of cynical: it's a description of human nature's response to when whatever worked well in the past stops working well and begins to decay, erode and unravel, a process that leads to breakdown / collapse.
This spiral to collapse is in many cases the first step in a positive evolution of adaptation, trial and error, reset and renewal. From this perspective, collapse is not negative, it is positive, for only when things that are failing finally break down are we forced to respond in a positive fashion.
Our default response to the slow unraveling of functionality is denial and hope: we dismiss or diminish the evidence that things are no longer working well, and we hope that doing more of what worked in the past but is now failing will once again fix what's broken.
Why do we deny evidence of decline? The basic answer is we're fearful: fearful of losing what we have, fearful of an uncertain future, fearful of losing control. Our instinct is to cling tightly to whatever we have and hope that whatever we're continuing to do will restore whatever is failing.
We deny that we're in denial. Yes, there are problems. But we persuade ourselves that the problems aren't that severe and that doing more of what's failing isn't magical thinking, it's an incremental approach to fixing problems.
Incremental advances can restore what's failing, but the advances have to be real, not just declarations and proposals. These incremental advances must be put in place early in the decline, or they will be outrun by the unraveling.
Ironically, our instinct to tamp down our fears with denial and magical thinking consumes the time we had to change the situation incrementally.
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