Matter, Energy and Time; Maybe Sisyphus is not a happy but a stupid man - A framework inspired from the CoViD-19 experience

Dear friends, colleagues, business partners and interested people,

 After a rather long time of silence, I wanted to come back to the train of thought started on CoViD-19 during the first wave. After having spent quite a significant span of time to re-think, reflect, collect information, combining different strands of hypotheses, applying accepted economic and social theories to the current situation and challenging my own thoughts, I had to adjust and extend some findings.

I do not want you to bore you to death with details on the process, so here’s the tag-line: While trying to solve fragmental or focused issues, most settled theories of social sciences – to which I count economics and business administration – miss the fact that we all are based on matter. At first glance, our ‘behaviours’ look very different from those of seemingly lifeless matter. But still, social (inter)actions of human beings follow physical laws and/or rules maybe more than we think. Especially when looking at larger numbers of individuals or systems which want or need to cooperate.

That means for broader aspects such as CoViD-19, Brexit, competition of economic areas or nations and the like, we should look on top of accepted mechanisms to a triad of matter, energy and time. Things become clearer then. And that we somehow behave like Sisyphus though we could do better. Meaning that cannot be happy people contrary what Camus concluded on Sisyphus. If you’re interested, follow the concept and please comment. Or jump into parts of it further down below.

And now ‘for the fans’, let’s dive into it – Some details to understand the concept and derive guidelines for actions. And apologies upfront to all physically proficient readers. The physical concepts are used for this purpose to transport the idea, not to use the terms physically correct yet. The translation of the physically correct concepts into this sphere is an interesting and worthwhile discussion in itself and open for further work. Meaning it’s postponed, not cancelled.

I.                What was the starting point?

My starting point was that several phenomena cannot be explained by the settled theories completely. Often, there are rules where exceptions rather present the norm. Which is dealt with a lot of adjustments in the theories to cater for those exceptions. Secondly, observations of the current situation – sparked by CoViD-19 – seem to lend a hand to the thought that human beings tend to be quite irrational or, better saying, unreasonable. What do I mean?

We all knew that CoViD-19 is real. That it is dangerous, at least to a certain extent, even if not lethal for everybody. We knew that it is – see my first post on this – a time problem (life expectancy, time to vaccine readiness, time to having vaccinated sufficient number of people globally, time to contagion of a sufficient number of people etc.). Still, a significant number of humans of which many are very intelligent or even settled in society deploy doubtful hypotheses or act as if the problem was something else.

A similar observation can be made in other areas: Nutrition, keeping fit and healthy but as well in business life. E.g. the tendency of seemingly larger corporations to take myopic decisions, trying get around rules & regulations, even if this costs more effort long-term than there is to gain by such a behavior. Or that e.g. purchasing decisions are made based on a mixture of availability and price rather than on expected value or what really is needed. You are free to add as you see fit.

So, what is it? There are theories about perception biases, asymmetric information, preferences, barriers etc. However, in some and even many cases, those effects prevail even if people and organizations are aware of those. Maybe, there’s something more.

II.              Matter

All life forms are being made of matter. We often tend to forget about this. And matter is directly impacted by other matter. In physics, the analogous concept is about gravity in the Einsteinian way of thinking. In this, gravity is not a force which is applied actively by e.g. a planet on other matter. But is the effect of an amount of more densely packed matter on not so densely packed matter in its reach. Resulting in the fact that some matter tends to move to already existent other matter of greater mass. In Einsteinian physics, gravity is defined as curvature or slope in space-time. Meaning that the seemingly ‘attracted’ part is not being actively attracted by the gravitational center but that it follows the inherited inertia of its mass.

When looking at the illustration, you’ll see that the smaller globe is not attracted by a force of the larger globe, but rather at some point, its own inertia (if no further gravitational effects or energy is added; see next section) will lead to a the smaller globe joining position with the larger and leading to a joint center of gravity eventually. Or in skiing: Once you commit to gravity, you move because of your own inertia of mass, not because something pulls you actively down the mountain or you applying any further action. Once you exposed yourself to the effect, the inertia of your mass does the rest.

If one looks at societal tendencies and economic activity in the way of applied gravity, some trends are clearer than with other theories.

Overriding question is, whether there is already a relatively larger amount of people (or thoughts, activities, ideas, concepts, wealth, economic output etc.) which could enfold a gravitational effect on other alike types of people.

How can we define matter? Not having finished my whole thought process, my current hypothesis is that everything which represents a stock quantity would qualify as matter with gravitational effects in this regard (money as stock quantity e.g. as amount of wealth, cash stock etc., too).

To cut a long story short: If there is enough matter (or people, thoughts, activities, ideas, concepts, wealth, economic output etc.) being gathered ‘visibly’, it will attract others as long as there is no counterbalancing gravitational effect either stabilizing or redirecting them based on their own inertia of the mass. And criticism of this effects does not yield anything unless combined with an effort to create this gravitational counterbalance.

Which leads to the second constituent of the mentioned triad:

III.             Energy

The above mentioned concept is missing something which is the actual delineation between seemingly lifeless matter and living creatures (from single cell organisms over plants to animal beings): Living creatures are able to direct energy onto another vector than physics for lifeless matter would advise. Meaning it consumes energy (in various forms like photosynthesis or intake of nutrition) and transform it into movement of different forms. Ultimately to collect more matter (meaning growing) or change places (actual physical movement) or both.

That means that contrary to lifeless matter which is seemingly a cue ball to alien effects, living creatures have the ability to become such forces which have an effect on matter and other living beings and re-direct such forces.

 This represents the ability to counter the gravitational forces. Even if one feels the gravity as depicted above, nobody is deterministically pulled to the center of gravity. One could even by applying enough energy build its own center of gravity which will then attract on its own further matter.

And we have a name for this. It’s called ‘gravitas’ or sometimes ‘charisma’. Or one is a ‘great leader’. It means somebody has the ability to direct energy in a way that transforms this energy into gravitational effects, meaning moving matter. In businesses, successful so-called platform companies have done exactly this. They have transformed energy into new ecosystems which now enfold heavy gravitational effects.

So in business and society, what would be energy? As said above with some caveats, I’d define flow quantities or the ability to generate those as energy (e.g. change management capabilities, capabilities to influence and cash flows).

However, you might see already limitations to this concept: Energy is limited, it can deplete, it needs to be focused, is a relative measure (meaning two similar quantities of energy directed at each other will cancel out each other) and its effect on matter is often not fully known; as neither the quantity of energy nor the real gravitational effect of matter in focus is transparent to the user of the energy.

This is the time to introduce the final constituent of the triad:

IV.            Time

You might have made the connection already yourself. As matter and energy are to an extent interchangeable, the final question is the one of available time. A nice illustration indeed is the Greek figure of Sisyphus. Leaving aside the philosophical question raised by Camus, the fact is that Sisyphus is not able to apply the necessary level of energy onto the rock for a long enough time to redirect the rock. Which would be that the inertia of the rock would work towards another gravitational effect (= rolling into a different valley) or counterbalancing gravitational effects (= remaining on a ledge or ridge). However, this quantum of energy applied is missing every day for one single time period, so the previous state is re-instated. The rock is rolling back.

 The point I want to make is that a certain level of energy needs to be applied for a certain period of time to initiate a sustainable new status in terms of matter/gravity. E.g. going once to the gym or abandon alcohol for one day won’t do the trick to improve your health. But doing it regularly over a long period of time will do. The word we have for this is discipline. Discipline means directing energy for a long enough time to a certain activity to make a difference. It’s often not a lack of energy in general to do things and affect change. But a lack of time span that energy is applied to an activity.

And there is another effect with time. Time is the ultimate currency of human life. It’s not exactly the same for everybody but much more equally distributed than matter or energy. And it is the only variable which directly impacts our life. It is the only thing we have at hand to deal with directly. How much time do we direct to certain activities (or the lack of)?

The more matter and energy one ‘has’, and the less deferring gravitational effects one has to care for, the less time he will need to deploy to initiate changes. And vice versa. But the determination of the time span needed to arrive at certain states (or the way one can go based on available matter and energy) is prone to erroneous conclusions. Because time amalgamates all three constituents of the triad.

Conclusion

From my point of view, matter is understood best implicitly by people. Because we all consist of matter. Which gives us a natural connection to the concept even if one does not grasp it intellectually. Energy is already more difficult to get a hold of. Matter and energy in the context of society and business often look alike at first glance such as money. As stock quantity and flow quantity, it might look the same. But in fact, it is not. Additionally, the fact that energy can cancel out itself if two energy sources are used directly against each other leads to effects we currently see in the world, but which are hard to accept for human beings. As it means that one potentially invests a lot of energy but nothing ever changes. And then time. As indicated in the beginning, I assume that the most misinterpretations are to be observed on the issue of time. Mainly since the effects of matter and energy are immediate while time is not. Humans live in the present. Not in that past (which we partially even make up in our minds to create sense and preserve the assumptions we have about ourselves) and not in the future (which is uncertain and hasn’t happened yet). And therefore, combining the effects of matter and energy over a span of time and concluding about causalities takes a lot of intellectual capacity.

The spark of the thought process was CoViD-19 and the associated time problem. Just one paragraph to explain it with the triad: CoViD-19 is there, that’s a matter of fact. And we have people which have some inertia of mass which ‘pulls’ them to wherever they are geared to. I.e. towards their natural behaviors and beliefs (e.g. adhering to rules, rebellion, skepticism, fear of loosing etc.). CoViD-19 does nothing than amplifying these inertias. But why? I) For some there is not enough energy to counterbalance this natural effect. Either because of a general lack of energy (and this is no criticism on personal level!) or because available energy needs to be directed elsewhere (e.g. to care for the family, secure the job, help with home schooling of kids, fighting anxiety etc.). II) The time problem was underestimated. While the immediate reaction was to counterbalance CoViD-19 in the present, early measures have proven to not being sustainable over a long enough period of time (hygiene measures, contact reduction, lockdowns) to really solve the problem or the energy has been mainly directed to fast or unfocused for too long (e.g. economic state aid programs) to achieve a new status.

Meaning that Sisyphus has rolled the rock up the hill (we flattened the curve), but the rock rolls back again and again (second, third waves etc.). What I am concerned about is that we tend to do the same mistakes twice due to a lack of energy to change course of action and a misunderstanding of the associated time problem. Sure, the vaccine is a game changer. Energy can be applied more focused. But it will take longer than generally accepted until the vaccination will have been effective on global scale. Until then, we will stay being Sisyphus. Which means that we are not happy men. But rather unintelligent ones wasting energy and time.

What to take with you?

I recommend playing with the concept and applying it to real life issues. Ask yourself for any given decision

i) how are gravitational effects working and what is the desired target state,

ii) do you have the ability to direct energy at the matter in scope to initiate a change in status and

iii) do you either have enough time until the target state is reached (meaning in absolute terms; will you be willing or able to invest the time you need given the energy at your disposal) or do you have enough energy for the necessary change in status and the time span you can afford.

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