Stock and Flow

From a post by Robin Sloan that he wrote 5 years ago and which I continue to think about frequently:

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank, or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour, or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy. — Snarkmarket

He goes on to say:

Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.

Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

In 2010, streams were taking off. And writers equate everything to content. The great flowification of content had begun.

But the stock and flow ideas apply to a lot more than just content.

As physical beings, we are merely tubes. Our mental lives can be described as processes that receive experiences and create stories. Economically we can be described as tax-producing processes that support states and governments. Chemically, we are dust that flows into a complex, self-replicating, dance before flowing back to dust, leaving a chance for a tiny speck of random mutations that incrementally increase the duration of the next dust dance.

What we eat, what we experience, what we make, these are our flows.

What we store as fat, what stories we tell, what tax we pay, the genes we pass, these are our stocks.

But our stocks are really just flows in larger systems, which become flows and stocks in still larger systems. Eventually our fat flows into the stock of long-term energy, which gives us the ability to tell stories that create the stock of relationships and quality time, which feed societies and institutions that can ensure we are taken care of when the stock of our remaining life is close to depletion.

If flows are the river and stock is the gold that catches in our pans, how do we collect more? With more river or better pans?

Is this the right river?

Is this the right kind of pan?

And if my stock will just become the flow in some larger pan, will it really matter how much is collected anyway?

This BART writing experiment is all about flow. The stock it creates, for me, intentionally and by accident, is found as things fall out of my subconscious.

What kinds of things during your day have a chance of creating stock? What are you panning for?

— written on BART