Some thoughts on doubling for your thirt

Some thoughts on doubling for your thirty-second birthday.

What a time to celebrate a birthday. The end of one year of life, the beginning of another. The years count on at a constant rate. There is a stillness in cyclical time: trees bud out and bloom and die back to bud again. Meanwhile, we have learned a painful awareness of exponential growth.

Small problems accelerate past our humble ability to cope. Counts of the ill double and redouble like sensational news gone viral. Cooperative responses are insipring–a hospital built in a week–but they droop like a wilted tulip in logarithmic space. Our leaders, who could have been otherwise, reaffirm their membership in the class which callously rides the exponential tide. Senators sell their stock; their capital compounds beyond the petty acumulation of wages bought in sweat.

Exponential growth means that if you wait until there are symptoms, it’s too late to deal with the problem. We enter a new age of belief. Our action must be guided not by maximixing the concrete, but according to an invisible system. In medieval Europe, plague shaped Dante’s worldview of human triviality within God’s cosmos. To a modern eye, there is a beauty to accepting the boundaries of knowledge and action. The fruit of both trees, apprehended but uneaten.

It is hubris to think we can design our world, but maybe we can design our place in it. Or at least stay with the trouble. You have lived your thirty-two years one at a time, but memory and imagination belong to the exponential sublime. Thirty-two is just five doublings; the next is sixty-four. All you have been is present with you now, helping open worlds into which we will walk together.