We have reasonably good ways of recognizing things that already work.

A person develops a useful skill and someone hires them to use it. A business sells something people already know they want. A school teaches subjects whose value has been established by generations of experience. Institutions develop roles, procedures and expectations around activities they understand well enough to repeat.

Most of this is useful.

A society that had to rediscover everything from scratch with every generation wouldn't remain a society for very long. We inherit languages, tools, institutions and accumulated knowledge precisely so that most of our effort doesn't have to be spent reinventing things other people already figured out.

The difficulty is that everything we now know how to recognize was once less recognizable.

Someone had to try it before there was a role for it.

That creates an unavoidable tension between preserving what works and making room for things whose value can't yet be demonstrated.

I used to describe this mostly in terms of calling. A person feels drawn toward some unfinished work, and the danger is that ordinary demands interrupt the process before it has a chance to become whatever it might have been.

I still think that happens.

I'm less confident that the feeling itself tells us what deserves to survive.

People become fascinated by things that lead somewhere important. We also become fascinated by terrible ideas. We mistake temporary interests for permanent identities, spend years pursuing projects that never work and occasionally discover that the thing we thought other people were preventing us from becoming wasn't particularly good for us.

That's part of emergence too.

If we want genuine novelty, we have to accept the possibility of failure because there is no reliable way to select only successful experiments before conducting them.

This is obvious in childhood.

A child draws badly before drawing well. They make noises before speaking. They develop strange temporary interests, abandon most of them and occasionally carry one forward for the rest of their lives. Nobody seriously expects a seven-year-old to demonstrate the economic value of an interest before being allowed to explore it.

Adulthood changes the economics.

Time becomes expensive. People depend on us. An afternoon spent experimenting with something is an afternoon not spent doing something else. A society therefore can't provide unlimited resources to every possible becoming, and an individual can't enact every possible version of a life.

Selection is unavoidable.

The interesting question is how early we require it.

If every activity must demonstrate its usefulness before receiving time, attention or resources, we create a peculiar problem: things that already fit existing categories have an enormous advantage over things that don't.

The accountant can explain the job.

The aspiring accountant can explain the path toward it.

Someone developing something for which there isn't yet a familiar category has a harder time answering the same questions.

Maybe that's because the idea is genuinely new.

Maybe it's because the idea is bad.

At the beginning, those can look surprisingly similar.

Markets solve part of this problem by allowing people to test whether somebody else values what they're producing. Universities, laboratories, apprenticeships, families, foundations, investors and community organizations solve other parts by supporting experiments whose value may take longer to become visible.

None is a perfect judge.

Markets overlook useful things and enthusiastically reward useless ones. Institutions can protect long-term work that would otherwise be impossible while also spending years supporting ideas that go nowhere. Families can give someone the room necessary to develop an unusual ability or protect them from feedback they desperately need.

There isn't a mechanism that lets us escape uncertainty.

There are only different ways of carrying it.

That's why I think societies need some amount of slack.

Not unlimited slack, and not because every unfinished project contains hidden genius. Most probably don't.

Slack matters because a system optimized entirely around what can already justify itself becomes extremely good at reproducing its present categories.

That can look like efficiency for quite a while.

The same thing happens inside organizations. If every employee spends every available hour maintaining today's operation, there is nobody with enough unused attention to notice that the operation should change. If every dollar must produce an immediately measurable return, projects with uncertain or delayed benefits become difficult to attempt.

Sometimes that's appropriate. A struggling organization may genuinely need to concentrate on survival.

The danger comes when an emergency arrangement becomes a permanent philosophy.

People do this too.

We postpone something until the children are older, the business is stable, the mortgage is smaller or life becomes less complicated. Those can be sensible decisions. Sometimes the postponed thing survives and we return to it.

Sometimes "later" quietly becomes never.

There's no universal rule that tells us whether that was a tragedy.

The abandoned project may have become a masterpiece. It may also have been three mediocre chapters of a novel we're happier not finishing.

We don't get to inspect the unlived version of the life.

That uncertainty is important because otherwise emergence becomes another form of destiny. We imagine that somewhere inside every person is a completed self trying to get out, and that the job of a good society is simply to avoid interfering with it.

I don't think identity works that way.

We don't uncover ourselves like artifacts buried in a field.

We become through interaction.

Work changes us. Relationships change us. Obligations change us. Failure changes us. Things we initially resist sometimes become important parts of our lives, while things we once regarded as essential occasionally disappear without leaving much of a hole.

Other people participate too.

That means interference isn't always the enemy of emergence. Constraint can produce it.

A musician encounters the limits of an instrument. A writer encounters an editor. A craftsperson encounters the properties of the material. A business encounters customers who don't want what its owner was certain they needed.

The developing thing pushes outward.

The world pushes back.

What eventually appears comes from both.

This is one reason I no longer like the image of protecting becoming from everything that might interrupt it. Some interruptions are destructive. Others are information.

The challenge is preserving enough continuity for something to develop while allowing enough contact with reality for it to change.

Cultures face the same problem at a larger scale.

They need continuity because accumulated knowledge matters. A language that changed completely every generation wouldn't transmit much. Institutions that couldn't preserve procedures would continually relearn expensive lessons. Traditions can carry useful information farther through time than any individual life.

They also need variation.

New circumstances expose limitations in inherited forms. People encounter problems their grandparents didn't have. Technologies create possibilities for which old institutions weren't designed. Someone combines two familiar things in a way nobody thought useful before.

Most variations disappear.

Some modify what already exists.

Occasionally one changes the surrounding culture enough that, a generation later, it seems obvious.

We usually see the successful examples backward.

Once something has become useful, it's easy to tell a story in which its arrival was inevitable. The failures disappear from memory, along with all the competing possibilities that could have developed instead.

Living through emergence feels different.

Mostly it looks unfinished.

That's why I think unfinishedness deserves some protection, although not reverence.

We need places where people can learn before they're useful, experiment before success is assured, change direction without treating the previous direction as wasted, and occasionally pursue something whose value isn't yet obvious.

We also need feedback strong enough to let bad ideas fail.

Those requirements aren't opposites.

They're the conditions under which selection can actually happen.

Too little room and variation disappears before we learn what it might become. Too little feedback and variation persists without learning anything from the world around it.

Somewhere between those failures, new capability appears.

This is true whether we're talking about a person learning a craft, a newspaper trying a new way of serving its community, a scientist following an uncertain result or a child spending six months obsessed with something everyone else finds inexplicable.

We can't know in advance which experiments will matter.

We can know that a world containing no experiments will eventually have a problem.

That's what I now mean when I say emergence isn't optional.

I don't mean that every calling must be honored, every novelty protected or every unfinished thing allowed to continue indefinitely.

I mean that continuity alone can't produce the future.

Something has to vary. Something has to be tried before its value is known. Some of those attempts have to survive long enough to encounter the world, fail, adapt and occasionally become useful in ways nobody could have specified at the beginning.

The future doesn't arrive fully formed.

It gets tested here.