As we step into 2026, I wanted to begin the year with a single idea: flux. The notion that everything flows—first framed in the West by Heraclitus, and echoed for centuries in Eastern thought as impermanence. Not as abstraction, but as lived reality.
To feel what flux really means, think about change itself. The universe in motion. The things you own and eventually let go of. And then, more quietly, think about yourself. Your younger self—and the long, uneven path from there to here.
Now widen the lens.
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 a more personal essay feels right here.
Articles and books tend to aim outward. They explain, clarify, and teach. Essays begin somewhere else. They turn inward first—following an idea while it’s still in motion, tracing how it threads through science, philosophy, and lived experience. An essay doesn’t hand you conclusions so much as invite you to walk alongside the thinking that leads to them.
With that in mind, 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. This sense of flux sat at the center of Heraclitus’ thought. He didn’t write long explanations or systematic treatises. He wrote sharp, almost unsettling fragments, such as:
“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.
Reality is made of processes in motion.
His claim that “everything flows” is often treated as poetic metaphor. It isn’t. It’s a metaphysical claim. What we experience as stability is simply change happening slowly enough to feel permanent.
For Heraclitus, order doesn’t arise from stillness. It emerges from balance, tension, and pattern—like a flame that keeps its shape only because it never stops moving.
Two and a half millennia later, physics 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, and was trusted by allies and rivals alike. A supposed beacon 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
For most of human history, the night sky felt eternal. The stars seemed fixed. The constellations felt timeless. People used them to navigate oceans, tell stories, and anchor meaning. Look up long enough, generation after generation, and it’s easy to believe nothing up there ever changes.
Modern cosmology tells a different and moving story.
Over ten thousand years, constellations subtly distort; over tens of thousands, they become strangers. And the universe itself is expanding, with distant regions receding faster than the speed of light. Galaxies at the edges are racing away, slipping beyond the seeable. Does that mean some day our night sky will have no stars? No. It will. Gravity still binds our local neighborhood together. Our galaxy is part of a small cluster—an island of stars that will remain intact for an unimaginably long time.
The stars aren’t going anywhere. And yet, flux still rules. What feels eternal is really just motion itself slowed.
The same illusion shapes our view of the past.
Day to day, life feels stable. Most mornings resemble the last. Roads lead where they always have. Institutions endure. Decade to decade, that familiarity hardens into a story: that the world used to be simpler, safer, more grounded.
But memory edits — something we’ve named rosy retrospection.
We smooth the past, sanding down its rough edges while keeping its comforts. Entire injustices fade into footnotes. Slavery becomes an abstract chapter instead of a lived horror. Laws that once required women to have a man sign for a credit card are quietly forgotten—even though that was only a few decades ago. We 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.
That’s the deeper lesson. Stability is not the absence of change. It is change arranged into a pattern that lasts long enough to feel permanent.
The Flux of Ideas: From Irrational to Empirical
If the physical world is in flux, so is our understanding of it. That truth feels especially fragile today, when we hear public figures say things like, “Truth isn’t truth,” as if reality itself were negotiable.
But this confusion isn’t new. It’s what happens when ideas move faster than our discipline can keep up.
In my Idea of Ideas framework, I describe how all discoveries begin as what I call irrational. The word sounds harsher than it is. Irrational doesn’t mean false. It means untested. It means an idea has not yet faced reality’s verdict.
To see what this looks like when it works, consider Albert Einstein.
In 1915, his General Theory of Relativity was radical. It challenged Newton’s gravity—one of the most successful empirical theories humanity had ever produced. For four years, relativity occupied an uncomfortable middle ground. It was mathematically elegant and conceptually daring, but still unproven. Beautiful, but uncertain.
Then came 1919.
During a solar eclipse, Arthur Eddington measured the bending of starlight exactly as Einstein had predicted. In that moment, the idea changed state. It crossed a boundary—from speculation to confirmation. From irrational to empirical.
This is how science actually moves. Ideas don’t arrive fully formed and eternally true. They emerge, wobble, face resistance, and sometimes stabilize—until new evidence pushes them back into motion.
But there’s a danger here.
Flux without discipline doesn’t lead to discovery. It collapses into fiction.
Ideas are descriptions, not reality itself. So they need to move, but they also need to answer to reality. Facts matter. Truth matters. Without a shared commitment to evidence, dialogue itself becomes impossible. That breakdown is not accidental. Extremist movements don’t merely reject conclusions; they reject the very idea of a common factual ground. As 1984 warned, the goal of authoritarianism is never persuasion. It is submission. Reality must bend to belief.
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 this 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 repetition. Event A followed by event B. Again and again. We assume 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 isn’t pessimism. It’s intellectual humility. Nuance.
Hume was warning us against careless certainty. Don’t 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 becomes essential. When “we” blame “them,” praise “others,” or fear a “group,” selective patterns replace careful thought. Hume’s caution is exactly what’s missing. Nuance is not evasion. It is accuracy.
Saying “immigrants are stealing jobs” isn’t confidence—it’s 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, and certainty from confidence. This is why language matters. Why nuance matters. Replacing absolutes with evidence is how truth survives contact with reality itself.
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, in a Greek world where sophist still meant “wise,” not 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 they wanted it to be. Instead of asking what the gods intended, they asked what nature was doing. Simple. Powerful. Science.
That shift—away from comforting stories and toward observation—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 comes from submitting our ideas to nature itself. This is the backbone of science, philosophy, and the rational tradition, and it sits at the heart of the Grand Rational Framework: reality first, models second, humility always.
But the flux of ideas doesn’t stop with science. 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, as we see with modern oligarchs, that is not fate. It is structure. And structures, like constellations, feel permanent only until they change. Whether it makes sense for a handful of individuals to wield wealth and power rivaling nations is ultimately a choice societies make.
Whether it makes sense for a handful of individuals to hold wealth and power rivaling nations is not fate—it is a choice societies make. Societies made of people.
As you move through this week, I encourage you to notice flux in your own life. Don’t fear power or change. Look instead for the logos—the rational structure beneath society, driving humanity forward, and consider how you can influence it.
Just as your identity is not found in staying the same, neither are societies.
Both are found in the continuity and intertwining of their becoming.