If you aren't on a pendulum, you're probably falling down a hole

09 Oct, 2025

Getting to the rightness of something complex looks like a pendulum. You overshoot one way. You overshoot back the other way. But you overshoot a little less each time. You approach a balanced rightness. To focus a lens, you turn the focus ring one way until the image starts to come into focus, but you don't stop there. You keep turning until it starts to go out of focus again, and then you can find tune it from there. We learn what that focus looks like by comparing it to what it doesn't look like.

This is why advice reversal is a legitimate tool. When you swing to the other side of the pendulum, the advice reverses. The opposite advice given to the same person on 2 different days might be perfectly appropriate in both instances. If you told me last week "just knock something easy off your to-do list for a guaranteed success and call it a day", that would be good advice. If you told me today "put yourself out there and risk rejection or failure", that would be good advice. What's the difference? Last week I felt depressed/paralyzed and this week I have the inner resources to deal with the challenges of growth.

This is why "just get up and do it" is good advice and bad advice. And "just be as you are in this moment" is good advice and bad advice. The truth of the statement is based on who's saying it and what the audience is. All context is important. A comparison to art: I believe that the artist is important context for one truth of the art. If I don't know who the artist is, the truth of the art is something different. Not better or worse, but the truth of it is different. Context is a truth modifier.

But living pendulously forces you to confront the infinite complexity of life. It's pretty scary. It can be very tempting to seek the comfort of falling down a hole. The hole is false certainty. The hole is avoidance. The hole is escapism¹. The hole is human nature. Confirmation bias urges us to find evidence that what we're doing is what we should be doing. We avoid the reversal. We find communities of like minded people. We solidify our identities so we know how to be in the world.

But damn, denial sucks. When I'm constantly denying the complexity, I'm living in defense mode. I'm losing adaptability. I'm creating unnecessary work for myself. I'm not living.

I'm especially tempted to solve uncertainty with black and white thinking. I can even fool myself into thinking I'm on a pendulum that way: "Oh yeah, fuck thinking about decisions, I'm done with that lame-ass shit. I'm just going to do what I feel in any moment. And I'd love to see you try and prove that the alternative choice would have been worse bitchhhhh have fun in that alternate reality while I laugh my way to ultimate freedom." But like with the camera lens analogy, if we go from one extreme blurriness to the other extreme, then we aren't really getting closer to the truth. Nimbleness/fine movements in some way can feel like you're constantly wrong even though that actually ensures you're closer to the truth then you could ever otherwise be. This is why making mistakes is a necessary sign that you're actually learning something real.

Just notice when you aren't constantly changing your mind about things. Feeling confused about things. Feeling torn between opposing views on an issue. You're probably off the pendulum and into the hole. This can be especially tricky for experts in some domain. They spend so much time developing this high level of understanding, only to still feel the weight of how much they don't know about the world? That can be tough to grapple with.