Pendulums run the world

There’s a tension I keep coming back to. Two competing instincts about how the world works—and neither one is wrong.

The first: people should be left to their own devices. Let things unfold. What’s meant to happen, happens. Interference is arrogance dressed up as care.

The second: the natural state of anything left alone is decay. Businesses that aren’t grown are dying. Relationships that aren’t tended drift apart. Institutions that aren’t reformed calcify. The world doesn’t coast—it corrodes.

I’ve watched this tension play out in religion, politics, business, parenting. And for a long time, I thought the goal was to pick a side. To figure out which philosophy was right and commit.

That was the wrong question.

Newton Already Told Us

In biology, there’s a concept called homeostasis—the tendency of a system to resist change and return to equilibrium. You push a cell out of its preferred state, and it mobilizes everything it can to get back.

Newton said the same thing in different clothes: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We learn this in physics class and immediately forget to apply it anywhere else.

But the insight is profound. Every ordered system builds reverse potential as you push it in any direction. The harder you push, the more latent energy accumulates in the opposite direction. The system doesn’t disappear. It waits.

This is why overcorrection is so common and so predictable. It’s not a failure of wisdom—it’s a law.

You’ve Seen This Everywhere

Politics swings left. The cultural immune system kicks in, and it swings hard right. Then the cycle repeats. We call it polarization. It’s actually just Newton.

A company spends a decade obsessing over margins—clean GAAP accounting, disciplined cost structures, earnings beats every quarter. Then they wake up and realize a scrappier competitor owns the customer relationship they forgot to protect.

Parents who raise their kids in strict religious households sometimes produce the most aggressively secular adults you’ll ever meet. Not because religion is wrong. Because pressure, sustained without relief, creates its own escape velocity.

You can almost always predict the overcorrection by studying the original correction long enough. The pendulum doesn’t lie about where it’s going.

So What Do You Do With That?

Here’s where most frameworks stop. They diagnose the pattern—oscillation, balance, entropy—and leave you nodding along with no better sense of how to actually move through the world.

I think there are two honest strategies. Not one right answer. Two.

The first: Commit fully, knowing the reversal is coming—and go hard enough that what you capture on the way up more than compensates for what you lose on the way back down. This is the culture warrior. The true believer. The founder who bets everything on a single thesis and wins, or doesn’t. You’re not trying to escape the pendulum. You’re extracting maximum value from one arc of its swing, before the other takes over.

The risk is real. If your timing is off, or your execution falters, you can get buried by the very momentum you were riding. But the upside is also real: concentrated conviction, when right, compounds.

The second: Never fully commit to a direction. Stay nimble. Read the room obsessively. Ride whatever has momentum, then shift when the tide turns. This is the trend-hopping influencer who somehow always seems to be talking about the right thing at the right time. They’re not lucky—they’re watching more carefully than everyone else.

The cost here is different. You don’t build something enduring. You don’t shape culture—you follow it. There’s an intellectual honesty to admitting that, and also a quiet frustration that comes with it.

What This Is Really About

I’m not prescribing one over the other. The honest answer is that most of us operate somewhere between them—sometimes fully committed, sometimes opportunistic, rarely consistent.

But the meta-point matters: knowing the pendulum exists changes how you move through any system. You stop being surprised by reversal. You start asking, where is the momentum right now, and where is the reverse energy building? You make decisions with the full picture instead of half of it.

From Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump. From lean startups to enterprise moats. From strict households to libertine children. The pattern is everywhere once you start seeing it.

Better to know, than to not.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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p.s. I’ve had to stray from my weekly writing habit over the past month as I prepare to take my first medical licensing exam this Saturday. It has been the absolute hardest thing I’ve yet done, and though I’m scoring well on practice exams, I still doubt myself throughout it. Once this is over, God willing, I will return to my regular writing.

This was written as I simply needed an outlet to get the thoughts out of my head so that I can go back to studying.