A Bit of Continuity Does Us Good
Everything changes — but we need to feel that some things stay the same.
It seems to me to be just a little bit unfair that we talk about the ‘pre-Socratic’ philosophers, given that among them was Democritus, who first conceived of the atom; Pythagorus, scourge of the teenage maths student; and — the greatest of them all — Heraclitus, called the ‘obscure’ because his ideas were so bloody difficult to grasp. It was Heraclitus who perceived that ‘everything flows’ (‘panta rhei’) and that ‘we never step in the same river twice’, which is about as sharp an observation as it is possible to make, and one that anticipates recent findings in the field of quantum physics — namely, that there are no ‘things’; only events.
So things change. We age. Trees grow. Buildings crumble. My shoe collection expands. But that everything changes is not to say that everything changes in the same way or at the same speed, or that we have no say over how the process plays out. After all, the fact that we die that does not stop us from trying to prolong our lives. (Lord Salisbury, a Victorian prime minister so averse to change that nothing happened during his premiership and no one remembers him, made this notion the heart of his political philosophy: ‘Life is delay.’) In fact, we human beings have a basic need for continuity in our personal and social lives. We must have the perception that there is an unbroken and consistent existence or operation at work if we are to feel at home in the world.
Lord Salisbury, a Victorian prime minister, made this notion the heart of his political philosophy: ‘Life is delay.’
Now, you may have noticed this yourself, reader. After all, anyone who has embarked on some new undertaking — to learn the piano, say, or recreate the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling using only pastel-coloured nail polish — will likely have experienced for themselves a spell of intense motivation and effort followed by fatigue and a loss of interest, and this is because on a deep psychological level, we are profoundly suspicious of change. We register novelty of this kind, even of a beneficial kind, as a threat, and must proceed slowly so as to get ourselves used to its place in our lives. Hence the value of taking our time to build habits.
Those who work in the fields of user experience (‘UX’) like to talk about cognitive load, one of those slightly ugly constructions that could only have been dreamed up by someone with no sense of romance. In plain English, it describes the degree to which we are using up our available working memory, that is to say, our capacity to hold information in our minds temporarily. Familiarity, which is of course mixed up with continuity, dramatically lessens the burden on this important brain system, so conserving our energy while increasing the quality of our thinking. In other words, when we perceive events to be taking place in a series, we can focus on other things.
Familiarity, which is of course mixed up with continuity, dramatically lessens the burden on this important brain system.
Interestingly, when our life feels continuous, we are tougher—more resilient to the shocks that are unavoidable in any well-lived life. This is intuitive, I think: we are confident that we can deal with life if things have more or less continuous. We have faced up to challenges and overcome them. It is, unsurprisingly, particularly important for children. A very sound observation by Christopher Hitchens was that totalitarian states are not highly systematic and monotonous, as might be assumed, but very unpredictable, since they run on the paranoia and caprice of the ruler and his underlings. Hence the emotional atmosphere of such a place is highly febrile and anxious: you just do not know what will happen. (Anyone who has lived or worked with an emotionally volatile person will have experienced this in miniature.)
This points to something important: that both too little and too much control are to be avoided, and lie at the ends of a horseshoe-shaped continuum of control. The one who tries to control everything creates instability by over-estimating his capacity to control his conditions, just as the one who does not control anything allows instability to arise. Good judgement entails knowing what to change and what to conserve so that the overall impression we get is of stability through time. This is not the best example in the world (forgive me; it’s early) but consider the James Bond franchise. The lead actor can change every few films, and so long as the cars, women, villains, gadgets and all the rest stay more or less the same, no real harm is done. If nothing were to change while the actor grew too old to make a believable Bond, or if the storylines grew tired, or if everything were to change from one film to the next, much of the fun of watching the latest film in the series would vanish.
The one who tries to control everything creates instability by over-estimating his capacity to control his conditions.
Of course, there are different kinds of continuity, though we cannot separate them as cleanly as we might like to. Although there is, on the one hand, the sense of being the same person over time, of having a durable and stable sense of self, and, on the other, the sense that our circumstances are broadly the same over time, we are shaped by our environment and we shape it in turn. It seems that having a solid sense of self is a good predictor of our ability to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; indeed, adaptability springs in part from having a sense of personal continuity. But historically, it has been easier to feel this way, since we have had more common points of reference – values, faith traditions, family structures, etc. – and so common identities. In a liberal age in which we are invited to ‘invent yourself, then re-invent yourself’ (to borrow from Bukowski) we have to negotiate who we are with others. The distinct attributes of our selfhood are not necessarily affirmed by our communities in the way they once were by virtue of their reflecting or ennobling those attributes, and ideally we need who we are to be affirmed if we are to feel that who we are is valid. There is less continuity in our world (and I speak here about the Western world: sorry to be so parochial) in general.
It ought to go without saying that our capacity to tolerate change varies. (My partner hates surprises; I rather like them.) But we all need to have the sense that things in our lives remain stable through time. A world of constant change is perceived as a chaotic world, and in a chaotic world we cannot find a firm footing. Continuity creates stability. Stability produces security. And without security, it is very tricky for us to focus our attention on other things – let alone to go out into the world as sovereign individuals and live well.
