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Yesterday we talked about the world as representation: that everything we encounter always appears as experience in consciousness, and that it is therefore the representations – understanding, meaning, what we take for granted – that in practice carry the reality as we know it.
Today we add a key concept that makes it possible to understand both stability and collapse without resorting to morality, blame, or conspiracies: attractors.
An attractor is a stable pattern of meaning that arises when the same thing is experienced many times and understood and taken for granted in the same way each time. An attractor lasts as long as the understanding continues to match lived experience.
Put slightly differently: an attractor is a pattern of experience that has become stable because it has worked long enough to be taken for granted.
An attractor is thus the dominant, stable meaning of what something we experience is. We need and use them every second of the day: the walls around you are “walls,” the door is a “door.” This is “like this,” while that over there is “like that.” An attractor is what we know with certainty – individually and collectively: there is broad agreement that a sunset is beautiful. Most people agree that children must go to school and learn what everyone else knows.
Attractors are conventions in our minds – not as conscious agreements, but as stable ways of understanding the world that are rarely questioned. They are the representations we live in and believe in. A society, a family, a nation, and all individuals are full of such “truths” that govern everything in their lives.
Notice what this means: an attractor is not a thing. It has no will. It does not “do” anything. It is simply what happens when a particular pattern has worked long enough to become self-evident. Like a path that grows deeper because we walk it again and again.
You can recognize this in everyday life: a relationship develops a certain dynamic. A workplace develops a certain culture. A person develops a certain self-image. All of this can feel like “that’s just how it is.” But it is not because it is true in itself – it is because the pattern is stable, and stability is experienced as reality.
Attractors exist at all scales. In you personally, an attractor can be a core narrative: “I must be strong,” “I must be useful,” “I don’t fit in,” “the world is dangerous,” “I must perform.” In relationships it can be a repeated role distribution: one carries, the other withdraws. In society it can be entire institutions and arrangements: money as value, work as identity, growth as solution, authority as safety.
And now comes the crucial point: attractors do not last because they are correct. They last because they work – very concretely, as orientation. They make the world predictable. They reduce uncertainty. They provide a sense of meaning, direction, and coherence. That is why people cling to them, even when they begin to become dysfunctional. For the alternative is a void in which one does not know.
When an attractor begins to lose strength, it rarely happens suddenly. It most often dies slowly, in three phases.
First, friction arises: more and more things no longer fit. What used to be easy becomes heavy. What used to make sense begins to grate. You can feel this in a relationship when the same conversations no longer lead anywhere. You can feel it at work when motivation disappears even though everything looks good on paper. And we can feel it in society when the “solutions” become more complicated, but less effective.
Then comes artificial maintenance: the system tries to keep the attractor alive by adding more force from the outside. More governance, more control, more money, more communication, more rules, more morality. It looks like action and leadership, but it is often a sign that an attractor is already in the process of dying: it has to be pumped up because it no longer carries itself.
Finally comes the phase transition: at some point, enough people stop investing experience in the pattern. They stop believing in it, even if they may still pretend. They stop feeling it as true. And then it falls. Not because someone “tears it down,” but because there is no longer any living meaning holding it up.
When you see this, many things in our time become easier to understand. We are not just living in “problems.” We are living in a time when many central attractors are losing strength simultaneously. That is why it feels as if everything is shaking. That is why polarization increases: people feel insecurity and seek back to the strongest, oldest patterns. That is why communication becomes harsher: one tries to force meaning where meaning is in the process of disappearing.
And this points directly toward what we will talk about tomorrow: emergence. Because when an attractor dies, space opens up. And that space can feel frightening – but it is also where new, more precise and more harmonious understandings can arise.
Question: Which pattern in your own life do you experience that you no longer “believe in,” even though you may still be living in it?
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