# Embracing the Variability By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2024-06-04 Sometimes, events pile up to create a flurry of activity. Sometimes, this is good, such as when on a lucky streak. Other times, one can feel like the unluckiest person in the world. As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours. These ebbs and flows seem as much a part of life as the sun rising each morning. Yet, these natural occurrences are the enemy of the productivity and efficiency paradigm, whether good or bad. They are the enemy because they represent variability, and variability with its cousin uncertainty makes effective resource planning much harder. For example, if one knows that the day's grocery delivery always happens at 8 am, one can plan to have someone there to receive it. But, if the delivery occurs sometime over an eight-hour window, it's very hard or expensive to have someone receive it. Think of how one feels when the plumber gives you a four-hour window for when they might arrive. It's frustrating and annoying. As one goes deeper into this variability problem, one sees how irksome variability is within the efficiency paradigm. How many people will show up today to buy a sandwich? Should we offer two or four movie showings? Will an additional t-shirt manufacturer produce the same quality of shirts so one can keep expanding their business? The list goes on forever. However, variability is a necessity for life. Without it, one and everything one knows ceases to exist. While modern industrial notions have created great material wealth and innovations, they have done so in a way that forces conformity and ignores the nature of variability and existence. Henry Ford famously said customers could buy his innovative Model T car in "any color the customer wants, as long as it's black." This decreased prices and variability, so more people could afford a car. But this required us to sacrifice something important about our existence and relationship with the world and each other. This problem exists beyond modern economic and political paradigms, as capitalism and communism desire efficient production. It's a fundamental issue in the contemporary age. Finding alternatives requires not a strict departure from production but rediscovering and integrating the nature of the self and universe with all the ebbs and flows that make life interesting and worth living. #### Related Items [[Economics]] [[Productivity]] [[Efficiency]] [[Luck]] [[Life]] [[Nature]] [[Variation]]