HALF TIME THOUGHTS, EPISODE 16: THE CHANGE-AND-STAY-THE-SAME CONUNDRUM

There’s a popular aphorism “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”, which we understand to mean having a choice to make between two options that cannot be reconciled.

Linguistic pedants – a group with which I’m occasionally associated – will argue that the phrase is perplexing, since ‘having’ your cake – like ‘having dinner’ – is the same as eating it.

Indeed, as Ben Zimmer explained in the New York Times Magazine some years ago, the proverb made more sense as it was originally formulated.  The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs cites a 1546 compendium:

“Wolde ye bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?” 

Far more satisfactory. But I digress...

Of late, I find myself recalling this aphorism, in whichever form, on a near-daily basis.

There’s a clamor for things to go back to how they were – to be the same as they were before COVID – and simultaneously for things to change.

How can this be?

The Same, But Better

Somehow, we think we can preserve all the good bits of how things are (or were) and improve upon the rest.

It’s as if we have some magical power to disentangle the fabric of life, pull out the broken threads, and weave in new and better ones.

We want all the cheap products but to bring back domestic manufacturing.

We want the range and growl and machismo of our internal combustion engine but the dramatically improved emission profile of an EV.

We want world-class healthcare and schools and veterans’ services and pensions but (even) lower taxes.

How in the world can any of this be possible?

The Same, Except Not

I find it even more stupefying when what’s harkened for never actually was that good – or didn’t even happen.

That we see the past through rose-tinted glasses is understandable. Our mental health depends, in part, on remembering the good and trying to forget the other.

But creating a vision for the future that’s predicated on a fictionalized past is no more sensible than chasing Utopia.

Nor, for that matter, does it help when we paint the unchanged future as a dystopian catastrophe.

I’m prone to optimism, but I’m not unrealistic. I see the issues our communities, countries, and planet are experiencing. We must do better.

But I also see the issues those same communities, countries, and planet have faced in the past. They weren’t pretty at the time, and we shouldn’t paint them prettily now.

Perhaps some things were better in the past. 

A life without the incessant noise and attention-sap of electronic media probably was less stressful. 

Fast food and flavor-enhancing chemicals surely aren’t superior to a diet of fresh proteins and produce.

And yet, sync your watches.

The era of analog communication and home-grown food wasn’t all pesticide-free flowers and vegan sausages.

Countless measures of the human condition have improved markedly since then – from literacy rates to infant mortality to lifting people out of extreme poverty.

Do you really want Dr. Emmett Brown to swing by in his DeLorean and give you a Lyft back to 1955?

(Side note: we’re in for some real shenanigans when Uber adds Time Travel Enabled to its choose a ride options. Meanwhile, new DeLorean production is still awaited near Houston.)

There’s much about today’s society that we should want to preserve without regressing.

Running to Stand Still

There’s another truism that says:

“If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.”

This is valid when we repeat futile efforts that stand no chance of succeeding, but that doesn’t mean it will hold true at the other end of the scale.

Repeating what’s worked in the past doesn’t necessarily assure us of success in the future. As the financial fine print says, past results are not an indicator of future performance.

As a practical matter, “same” doesn’t really mean the same.

What worked yesterday will probably work tomorrow, but it’s unlikely to work in a decade or two.

Populations change – increasing globally, becoming more urban, shrinking rural communities, and ageing everywhere.

Diseases evolve – mutating, becoming resistant to over-prescribed medicine, and finding new transmission pathways aboard our increasingly mobile population.

Things revert to the mean – winning teams lose their stars, differentiated businesses are copied, hidden oases are exposed on social media.

A big part of being human is how we adapt to change.

There’s an entire subdiscipline within biological anthropology dedicated to the flexibility with which humans – both as individuals and as a population – cope with changes in our environment.

We’ve been orchestrating change since the very beginning, and now definitely isn’t the time to abandon that tendency or throw it into reverse.

Perhaps more of today’s crises – present or imminent, measurable or perceived – are of our own making than was the case in the past, but that doesn’t mean we can rewind them any more than we could subvert the existential challenges faced by our ancestors.

We adapt, we respond, we improve.

Committed to Sameness

Despite the inexorable changes happening all around us every day, large swaths of the population are adamant about taking us back to some former glory.

They see how certain aspects of life were, in their measure, better at some point in the past and are determined to recreate the enabling circumstances.

Pointing to a gradual deterioration in that aspect of life over time, they argue against the present trajectory of change.  

And if we can’t rewind the tape all the way back to those Halcyon days then, they argue, we should at least try to stop the rot.

We can find extreme examples in technophobic groups such as the Amish and, further back, the Luddites. 

But every technological change is welcomed by early adopters, looked at sideways (for a while) by fast followers, and openly resisted by skeptics.

As Mahatma Gandhi is often quoted as saying (but almost certainly didn’t, while union leader Nicholas Klein might have):

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

Today’s advocates for sameness span the gamut of resistance – ignoring, dismissing, ridiculing, and openly opposing change.

But change waits for no man, or something like that.

Beholden to (Massive) Change

On the opposite side – of the aisle, as well as the argument – are those who also see the current trajectory of life leading to catastrophe but who believe much more change is needed to make things better.

Incrementalism is, to this group, as dangerous as inaction or regression.

They say that only immediate and drastic changes in the way we live can save us from a climate apocalypse, untreatable pandemics, and the disintegration of society as it wars over ever-scarcer natural resources.

There’s nothing like a good crisis to spur the lazy into action, right?

Perhaps, but only if they genuinely believe a crisis is afoot. Otherwise, up pops another aphorism about a boy who cried wolf.

We’re inherently resistant to change because it disrupts the comfortable, if less-than-perfect, life we’ve established and the stories we’ve constructed to explain why it’s the right life for us.

Change for change’s sake is generally unwelcome.

Loading every media channel with messages of doom and gloom doesn’t make us want to rise up and change, it makes us want to curl up and ignore.

What cake?

Let’s return to our metaphorical cake.

In many of the societal issues we’re wrangling today, it represents a consumable resource – sometimes local, sometimes global.

Would I have my cake and eat it? Yes, if either the cake can be replenished at least as fast as I am eating it, or the cake is so abundant that my eating from it makes a negligible difference.

And so we enter the realm of renewable energy and circular economies.

We cannot stay the same, flagrantly consuming finite resources at a rate that will exhaust them within decades. 

Nor can we cease consuming them overnight, plunging the developed world into a new Dark Age where people literally starve or freeze to death.

The middle ground, where we both reduce our overall cake consumption and find new cakes to consume, is what we euphemistically call transition.

The transition to a lower-carbon economy. The transition to sustainably manufactured goods.

This, of course, pleases neither those committed to sameness nor those beholden to massive change. 

History suggests that what we will do is neither as much as we could nor as much as we should but as much as we must to adapt.

Continuing that trend seems inevitable when trying to satisfy contradictory voices.

One might argue that those diametrically opposed views will guide us to balanced solutions. Unfortunately, lowest common denominator solutions usually please almost no one because very few people live in the middle.

There’s also a risk that those forces tear us completely apart, producing no unified solutions and a lose-lose situation.

Cake Envy

Fortunately, not everyone has succumbed to this polarized mentality.

Changes are taking place, albeit at modest scale and in inconsistent fashion, that might serve as a template for wider-scale adoption.

“Wouldst thou have thy cake or my cake, if my cake looks tastier?” (me, 2021)

Early adopters will put up with a suboptimal cake if it offers then something new. 

Fast followers will try the cake afterwards if they see the early adopters enjoying something new without suffering untoward consequences. 

Envy can be a strong motivator.

Laggards may never switch their cake; that’s just how some people roll.

Closing Thoughts

Faced with inexorable changes, often at time and length scales we find hard to comprehend, some people call for sameness – a return to the way things were – while others call for more drastic change to avert a catastrophe.

It behooves us to understand how each group arrives at its point of view but also to recognize the inevitability of change and the need to adapt in ways that can be practically implemented.

We should also stay alert to the early adopters who are prototyping and maturing the solutions that might eventually become blueprints for our future society. 

They might seem half-baked today (and that’s sometimes not a tasty cake) but they offer a pathway to something much tastier.

Woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn’t get us very far. New cake recipes might, given time.

Photo by Kofi Okyere on Unsplash