E2: Statistically Significant Ant City; S14: Why not get smaller than right-sized? Life is fractal anyway.

This episode begins with a very comforting question:What is the worst that could happen?I actually like that question.I remember watching a video with Peter Zeihan and several younger people who seemed to have come up through his orbit, all trying to work out what a plausible version of deglobalization, demographic decline, supply-chain disruption, and general societal wobbling might look like.Which I found reassuring.Not because I want civilization to collapse.I just like knowing where the floor might be. It is a strangely comforting way to plan a life.That has often been how I make decisions. I don't need to know that something will work. I need to know what happens if it fails spectacularly—and whether I can live with that.When my partner and I had been together for about two years, I quit my job, sold my condo, left my family and friends, applied to immigrate to Canada, and then moved with him to Indonesia while we waited.Worst case?We finally land in Canada, have a gigantic fight at the airport, break up, and there I am.In Canada.Fine.People had been telling me, essentially, If you don't like it here, leave, for most of my life.Okay.Done.I'm very glad to be here.Unfortunately, Canada lives upstairs from the United States, and when America sneezes, Canada gets a cold.America is currently doing considerably more than sneezing.So perhaps we're trying to get vaccinated through Europe and Asia.We'll see.This episode is another attempt to finish thinking about The Big Big City, which apparently required The Big Big City, The Bigger Big City, and now whatever this is.Because the thing that kept scratching wasn't really cities.It was scale.How large can a human system become before the human beings inside it become abstractions to one another?In a small school, the quarterback may also have to build the stage, help with the prom, and move some chairs because otherwise the chairs do not get moved.In a huge institution, every desirable role can have fifty applicants.In a village, you know the person selling you bread.In a metropolis, if you emotionally registered every human being you passed on the sidewalk as a complete person with grief, desires, hemorrhoids, childhood memories and plans for Thursday, you'd probably make it half a block.So we get efficient.We get specialized.We get competitive.We become statistically significant.And I know something about wanting to be significant.Art school. Plays. Reviews. Grants. Programs. Songs. Standing-room-only audiences. Being wanted in the room.Not necessarily fame.More like: Tell me I matter enough to have been invited.And then, once invited, I often wandered off and made something smaller.Which raises another possibility.Maybe right-sized is still too big.Why not get smaller than right-sized?Life is fractal anyway.An ant does not need to understand globalization.An ant gets up.An ant encounters whatever the enormous incomprehensible forces of the universe have put in front of it.Sugar.Rain.A shoe.And it does whatever an ant can do.That's where the coda ends up after briefly considering reincarnation, alien intelligence, God with stranger furniture, the blue genie from Aladdin, solipsism, world events, and several other little conceptual devices I have apparently used over the years to keep existence from becoming completely unmanageable.Not beliefs, exactly.More like tools.Because if the geopolitical analysts are right and some very large systems become less reliable, I cannot personally restart global fertilizer production.If they're wrong, I also cannot award them a prize.I can go to work.I can walk home.I can make something.I can help somebody.I can notice what is directly in front of me.I can be an ant.Which may sound like giving up until you consider how much ants accomplish without ever becoming statistically significant.The sun came up.That's enough.