As we step into 2026, I wanted to start the new year with an essay on flux — on life’s impermanence. To frame this idea, think about change itself: the universe, your possessions, and even you. Think about your younger self, and the long, uneven journey from there to here.
And then think about the United States, and how quickly trust has eroded. How actions taken in the present are reshaping world order. When a nation becomes unpredictable, allies don’t wait for collapse or confrontation. They adapt. They hedge. They lower dependence. Not because they seek conflict, but because uncertainty leaves them little choice.
That’s why I think a more personal essay has more power here than an article.
Essays are different from the usual articles and books I write. One is personal; the other more formal. Articles and books aim outward—they explain, clarify, and teach. Essays turn inward first. They explore ideas in motion, connect across science, philosophy, and lived experience, and invite the reader to think alongside the writer rather than simply receive conclusions.
That makes essays the right place to begin this year.
The old Weekly Wisdom Builder was fun, but exhausting to try and create all new content each week. Going forward, I will center each week on a single, entwined idea. The goal is to present several intertwined timeless ideas with an engaging voice.
And it is only fitting that we begin with flux.
Let’s begin where philosophy itself once began: with a thinker who dared to say that nothing truly stands still.
The Dark Philosopher’s Light
Around 500 BCE, in the Greek city of Ephesus, a man named Heraclitus saw something most people prefer not to see: nothing ever truly stands still.
It’s hard to see this truth while living through it. But I think we may be in such a moment now. Whether the United States ultimately falls from grace or not, we are living in a time when an ending can be envisioned—something that, just a few years ago, did not seem possible.
Rivers flow. Fires burn. Bodies age. Cities rise and fall. Even the things that appear solid are only holding their shape for a while. Heraclitus didn’t write long explanations or systematic treatises. He wrote sharp, almost unsettling fragments like:
“Everything is in flux.”
And:
“No one steps into the same river twice.”
This earned him the nickname the Dark Philosopher. But the darkness wasn’t confusion: it was compression.
His core insight was disarmingly simple: reality is not made of fixed things, but of processes in motion.
His famous claim that “everything flows” is often treated as poetic metaphor. It isn’t. It’s a metaphysical claim. What we experience as stability is just change happening slowly enough to feel permanent.
Heraclitus didn’t deny order. He insisted on it. But he argued that order doesn’t come from stillness. It comes from balance, tension, and pattern. It’s like a flame that keeps its shape only because it never stops moving.
Two and a half millennia later, physics quietly agrees. But society rarely learns this lesson gracefully. When change accelerates people don’t experience flux as insight. When cultural norms shift, power structures wobble, and long-standing assumptions dissolve. They experience it as threat. Fear rushes in to fill the gap left by fading certainty. Some reach for nostalgia, for something they want to “make great again.” Others reach for anger.
What makes our moment feel different is not simply the presence of fear or division. History is full of both. It’s that the turbulence is radiating outward from a nation long seen as a stabilizing force. A country that once projected moral confidence, however imperfectly. A country that was trusted, by allies and rivals alike. A “beacon of light” of democratic ideals. When that light flickers, it doesn’t dim quietly. It casts long shadows. And those who once believed in it may feel not just disappointed, but betrayed.
Heraclitus would not have been surprised.
The Illusion of the Eternal Sky
We can see this tension between perceived stability and actual flux by looking upward.
For most of human history, the night sky felt eternal. The stars seemed fixed. The constellations felt timeless. They became maps, myths, and anchors for human meaning.
Modern cosmology reveals a subtler truth.
Yes, the universe is expanding. Yes, distant galaxies are racing away from us, eventually slipping beyond the cosmic horizon. But gravity acts as a tether. Our galaxy belongs to a Local Group of more than fifty galaxies — an island of matter gravitationally bound together for the long future of the cosmos.
The stars aren’t going anywhere.
And yet, flux still rules.
The constellations we recognize today were different ten thousand years ago, and will be different in another ten. The stars remain, but the patterns shift. What feels eternal is really a slow choreography of motion.
This same illusion plays out much closer to home.
Day to day, life feels remarkably stable. Most mornings resemble the last. Roads lead where they did yesterday. Institutions persist. Decade to decade, that sense of permanence is reinforced. The world you grew up in appears familiar enough that it feels natural to assume it was also better: simpler, safer, more grounded.
But memory is not a neutral recorder.
We tend to smooth the past, sanding down its rough edges while preserving its comforts. Known as the rosy retrospection fallacy, entire injustices fade into footnotes. Slavery becomes an abstract chapter instead of a lived horror. Legal barriers that once required women to have a man’s permission to open a credit card are quietly forgotten. Even though that was just in the 1970s. Whole categories of people remember “how things used to be” without remembering who paid the price for that stability.
The past feels orderly not because it was better, but because its chaos has already settled.
This is the deeper lesson: stability is not the absence of change; it is change settled into a lasting pattern.
The Flux of Ideas: From Irrational to Empirical
If the physical world is in flux, so is our understanding of it. Today we here strange statements from our leaders like, “Truth isn’t truth.”
In my Idea of Ideas framework, I argue that all discoveries begin as what I call irrational. That word often makes people uncomfortable, but it shouldn’t. Unless disproven, irrational doesn’t mean false. It means untested. It means an idea has not yet faced reality’s verdict.
Take Albert Einstein.
In 1915, his General Theory of Relativity was a new, irrational idea. It challenged Newton’s gravity, which at the time was one of the most successful empirical theories ever produced. For four years, relativity lived in a strange in-between state: mathematically elegant, conceptually radical, but not yet confirmed.
Then came 1919. During a solar eclipse, Arthur Eddington observed starlight bending exactly as Einstein predicted. In that moment, the idea changed state. It flowed from irrational to empirical.
This is how science moves. Ideas don’t arrive fully formed and eternally true. They emerge, wobble, get tested, and sometimes stabilize. Stable until new evidence pushes them back into motion.
But here’s the danger: flux without discipline collapses into fiction.
In healthy systems, ideas are allowed to move, but they are also required to answer to reality. Facts matter. Truth matters. Without a shared commitment to evidence, dialogue itself becomes impossible. This is not an accident. Extremist movements don’t merely reject conclusions; they reject the very idea of a common factual ground. As the book 1984 warned, the goal is never persuasion. It is submission. Reality must bend to belief.
This week’s philosophical idea was on the classic statement, “existence before essence.” And it applies here too. Just as individuals are not born with a fixed identity, ideas are not born with guaranteed truth. But what they become depends on what we demand of them. Do we test them? Refine them? Discard them when they fail? Or do we cling to them because they serve our side?
Even truth, it turns out, lives inside flux.
The Skeptic’s Anchor
Because everything is in motion, we must be careful about what we assume to be certain. This brings us to David Hume and the problem of causation, our critical thinking idea of the week.
We experience the world through patterns. Drop a ball and it falls. Strike a match and it lights. Over time, we grow comfortable saying A causes B.
Hume asked us to pause.
What we actually observe, he argued, is not causation itself, but simply a repeating pattern. We see event A followed by event B. We assume that “is” the order because that was the order. That’s not logic, that’s habit.
The sun has risen every day of your life. That doesn’t prove it must rise tomorrow. It only makes tomorrow’s sunrise extremely likely.
This is not pessimism. It’s intellectual humility.
Hume was not telling us to abandon everyday reasoning or deny cause and effect in practice. He was warning us against careless certainty. Do not collapse probability into proof. Patterns are patterns. They are not absolutes.
And this is where his insight matters most today.
When complex social realities are reduced to single causes, nuance is needed. When “we” blame, praise, or fear entire groups based on selective patterns, Hume’s caution becomes essential. Nuance is not evasion. It is accuracy.
Saying “immigrants are stealing jobs” is not confidence; it is conceptual laziness. The truth, as always, lives in details, contexts, and evidence — not slogans.
In our pursuit of wisdom, we must learn to distinguish causation from correlation, certainty from confidence. This is why language matters. Why nuance matters. Replacing absolutes with evidence-bound claims isn’t weakness. It’s how truth survives contact with reality.
Conclusion: The Presocratic Foundation
Heraclitus wasn’t alone.
He was part of a group we now call the Presocratic philosophers: thinkers like Thales, Pythagoras, and Democritus. They lived before philosopher was an identity. They lived in a Greek world where sophist still meant “wise,” not yet the later deceiver. Language itself was in flux, just as ideas always are.
What united the Presocratics was not agreement, but orientation. They were among the first to insist on looking at the world as it is, not as tradition, myth, or desire said it should be. Instead of asking what the gods intended, they asked what nature was actually doing. What is the world made of? How does it change? And is there an underlying order beneath the apparent chaos?
That shift, a shift away from comforting stories and toward observation, is science. And it changed everything.
Over the last 2,500 years, nearly every meaningful advance in human understanding has followed that same move: observe first, explain second. Progress does not come from asserting how reality ought to behave, but from submitting our ideas to how it does behave. This is the backbone of science, philosophy, and the rational tradition itself., and it sits at the heart of the Grand Rational Framework: reality first, models second, humility always.
Everything we explore here at TouchstoneTruth traces back to that original discipline: choosing truth over reassurance, evidence over inheritance, and revision over certainty.
But flux doesn’t stop with ideas. It shapes societies too.
Every era decides — explicitly or not — what kinds of inequalities it will tolerate, what stories it will tell about power, and which arrangements it will treat as “just the way things are.” When extreme concentrations of wealth and influence emerge, when a handful of individuals rival nations in power, that is not fate. It is structure. And structures, like constellations, feel permanent only until they change.
The Presocratics remind us that the world is not fixed, and neither are the systems we inherit. What persists is not sameness, but pattern. And patterns, once understood, can be redesigned.
As you move through this week, I encourage you to notice flux in your own life. Don’t fear change. Look instead for the logos, the rational structure beneath it.
Your identity is not found in staying the same.
It is found in the continuity of your growth.
