A theory of everything
A large part of my professional work involves looking at numbers, analyzing trends, finding anomalies and helping fix them — mundane to many but something I enjoy for the most part. Meanwhile, I am usually the first one at gatherings to start jiving to the music (something that has not ended well on at least one occasion). To many, this leg-shaking side of mine seems like an anti-thesis to the excel-sheet junkie me. I find this odd.
I believe an interest in both these pursuits circles back to the exact same thing — a disposition towards patterns.
It’s time to move from a rather self-indulgent introduction to a more generic lowdown into what I intend to convey. Human beings are accustomed to look for patterns in everything - an instinct that has been internalised over thousands of years of evolution, since understanding of patterns yielded itself to predictability, which in turn aided survival. Patterns give us comfort by eliminating a primal survival anxiety.
This is why most traditional poetry has a meter, pleasing music has a rhythm with a progression played over & over, and a majority of aesthetically admirable human faces tend to be symmetrical.
On the flip side, disruption in patterns is a source for discomfort - something that we see being put to use everyday, esp. in sport. A fast bowler mixes up the short ones and the slower ones, a footballer running with a defender in tow switches direction to fox him, a paddler engages his opponent in a humdrum forehand rally and suddenly flicks it the other way to beat him, and women baffle men by meting out a different response to the same action each time.
There is a reason why a host of mind numbing drugs force a person to become hysterical. Breaking oneself from the inertia of an action requires conscious mental effort. And while nearly all of us have a innate affliction for patterns, some of us are able to / train ourselves to spot them better.
Music experts are able to infer and create beat patterns/ rhymes that might seem incongruous to the untrained ear. One of my favourites in this context is this video about the evolution of rhymes in rap music. Most of us would not be consciously able to deconstruct these verses, but as a summed whole, they appear mellifluous. Meanwhile, bright analysts are able to avoid getting bothered by volatility over short periods, and spot trends over decades by zooming out.
In a more indirect sense, this is why human beings marry and ‘settle down’. The short cycles are full of peaks and troughs even in a relationship, but the zoomed out equation-curve seems more stable with that one person. And thus the more evolved human species chose monogamy over a primal polygamous instinct.
Put another way, there’s music in everything around us. Some people like to up the tempo while others don’t. Some of us listen to the beat around us and modulate our own, while others set their own beat and look for the beats outside that resonate.
I find this to be a convenient way to explain a lot about life. As I deliberated on what to title this brief note, I humbly bowed to vastness of nature and avoided the brashness in Hawking’s biopic — thus dropping the The and opting for a safer A.
