There’s no such thing as potential.
But you act as if it exists.
Potential.
It’s a concept we hear about it all the time. The potential of new technologies like AI, the potential of young prodigies in elementary schools, the potential of rookie professional athletes, and even the potential within ourselves. We have a vague, at least a general, sense of what it is, which is why we hear and talk about it all the time. But if you really think about it, there’s no such thing as potential: we can’t see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, or taste it.
So what exactly is potential? Is it real if it’s intangible?
First, let’s define potential. Potential is something that “could be, but isn’t.” In other words, potential represents the possibilities that are not yet fully realized — whatever that means. It’s an idea, which is intangible by any form of physical standards. Because of this intangible property, you might think that potential doesn’t exist. In the physical standards, surely it doesn’t exist. But we act as if it exists — just like how we believe that time exists by acting accordingly in our lives despite its absence of tangible property. It’s an abstraction of certain patterns. Arguably, the abstraction of patterns is more real than the patterns itself. It’s hyper-real.
We know potential exists. It manifests itself in every aspect of our lives. For example, imagine you open your eyes at 6 AM in the morning. You know that you should do something before the day ends — whether that be going to school, making breakfast for your family, or doing your laundry. You know that if you don’t do anything and just lie down on your bed for the rest of the day, something bad is going to happen.
We have an acute awareness of time, which is also intangible but arguably one of the realest things in our lives. Ever since our discovery of time — god only knows when that was — we discovered the existence of the future too. From there, we discovered that potential exists, at least clearly within ourselves.
How we should act in accordance to our awareness of potential is another question. But for now, I think it’s worth thinking about what potential is, and how we act as if it is real.
