Are we living in a loop?

Tonight is the last night of Navratri. Somewhere near your house a ground that was swept and strung with lights nine days ago is about to go quiet. By next week the lights will be down, the poles stacked and the ground will be a ground again. Next October it will all go back up: the same ground, the same lights, quite possibly the same person up the ladder having the same argument with the same wire. Nothing about it will be new and yet a few thousand people will walk through the gate on the first night feeling that it is.

That is the odd thing this paper is about and here is the idea in one line: a returning event works like a ruler for yourself. It stays exactly the same so that you can see how much you have not.

Fair warning on what kind of claim that is. It is an original hypothesis, not an established finding. The rest of this paper shows you the published work it is built from and how you could prove me wrong.

0101Everything comes back

The day comes back. So do the month, the monsoon, the mango tree (flowers, fruit, flowers again) and the moon, which has been turning up on schedule for a very long time. These loops have nothing to do with each other. Orbits are physics, blossoms are seasonal biology, hormones are chemistry and Navratri is something people built and put on a calendar. I am not saying they work the same way. I am saying they share a shape and that you live inside most of them at once. (Figure 3)

0202You are already a loop

Your body keeps time without asking you. Temperature shifts, hormones rise and fall.. and at roughly the same hour every afternoon you feel the pull towards sleep as though someone had set an alarm.

Someone had, in a sense. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for working out how the alarm is built. In fruit flies they cloned a gene called period and the work that followed showed a feedback loop inside cells where a protein builds up, switches off its own gene and breaks down so the cycle can restart, over about twenty-four hours (Huang, 2018). Picture a bathtub that fills until a float shuts the tap, then drains and starts again, except that this one sits inside nearly every cell you own and takes about a day to turn. A similar loop runs in mammals. So the human mind is not built for a straight line. It is built to expect a return.

0303Dates make us take stock

You know the January version. Your phone fills with people who are going to run, learn the guitar and stop looking at their phones. The joke is old, but the effect is large, measurable and not limited to January.

Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis (2014, Management Science) went looking for it in three real places: how often Americans googled “diet” over 3,104 days, when 11,912 members of a university gym turned up and when 43,012 people signed 66,062 “commitment contracts” on stickK.com, a website where you set yourself a goal and stake money on keeping it. The question each time was the same. Do people behave differently on landmark days than on ordinary ones? In the contracts, new ones jumped 145.3% at the start of a year, 62.9% at the start of a week, 55.1% on federal holidays and 23.6% at the start of a month, against ordinary days. Birthdays managed 2.6%, which the authors found only marginally significant (so much for your birthday resolution). Searches for weather and laundry did not rise at all, which is the control: it suggests the rise is about goals and not about people simply being online more. (Figure 2)

The authors’ explanation is that a landmark separates the person who failed last month from the person you are now. For this paper the useful part is simpler: a returning date is not neutral. People use it to take stock. That is the first half of the ruler.

0404The familiar goes invisible

Think of the tree outside your window. You have seen it for years and could not tell me how many branches it has. Whatever stays the same disappears from view, which is a mercy, since a mind that noticed everything all the time would never leave the house.

Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman (1978, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) found a version of this when they tracked down 22 people who had won the Illinois State Lottery (prizes from $50,000 to $1 million) and compared them with 22 people picked from the phone book. Everyone was asked how happy they were right now and how much they enjoyed seven small everyday things, such as a breakfast, a joke or a compliment. The winners were not reliably happier (4.00 against 3.82 out of 5) and enjoyed the small things less (3.33 against 3.82). The authors read it as adaptation: after something extraordinary, ordinary things feel less striking. The sample is small and nearly half the winners approached said no, so I use it for one narrow point only. People stop noticing what stays constant and notice what moves against it.

0505The Spiral Hypothesis

Put the last two sections together. A recurring event holds its shape, so the changes in the person standing inside it show up against it. Without a recurring frame, change feels like drift. With one, change becomes a story: last Navratri I was this, this Navratri I am this. The loop looks like a circle from outside and works like a spiral from inside, because you come back to the same place on the loop and not to the same place in your life. (Figure 1)

0606What about the uncle?

On the third night somebody’s uncle, who has not danced since last year, walked into the circle, miscounted the first step, recovered by the fourth.. and by tonight he looks like he does this daily. Scott Wiltermuth and Chip Heath (2009, Psychological Science) offer a clue. Groups of three strangers first did something in time together, such as walking in step or singing an anthem, then played economic games. In one, everyone picks a number and the group only does well if everybody picks high, which takes trust. In another, each person gets 10 tokens and decides how many to put in a shared pot that helps everyone but costs them personally. In the first study (30 people) the in-step walkers picked higher numbers than normal walkers (5.4 against 3.6). In a later one (105 people) the synchronised groups kept contributing to the pot while the out-of-time group’s contributions fell. Singing in time without moving worked about as well as moving, so it is not simply exercise bonding people. Small lab groups, simple tasks, no garba, so treat it as a reason to be curious and not as proof.

0707What it means if you run a brand

If the hypothesis holds, a returning moment is more than a slot in the calendar. It is the one place where people measure a brand against its own past. Keep the frame and change what is inside it: the colour, the greeting and the ritual stay, the story moves. A frame that never changes inside becomes wallpaper, and you have just read what happens to wallpaper. A frame that changes completely every year leaves nothing to measure against. The same goes for the work behind the brand. A report in the same shape every quarter lets an owner see the business move. A report rebuilt every quarter hands them a new picture each time and takes the comparison away. None of this is tested on a campaign yet. It is reasoning from the evidence above.

0808A philosophical aside

Heraclitus is remembered for saying you cannot step into the same river twice. Scholars are more careful: usually only one fragment is treated as his own words, roughly “fresh waters are ever flowing in upon those who step into the same river”, and the “twice” version is a later paraphrase. The point survives either way.. the river is the same river because it keeps changing. The Buddhist idea of impermanence gets to a similar place from another direction: nothing stays as it is and suffering comes from expecting otherwise.

Put either beside a garba ground on its last night and the festival looks like a small proof. The music is the same, the steps are the same, the lights are the same and you are not. The permanent thing is what lets you see the impermanent thing, which is you. Think of years as a road and what is behind you keeps shrinking. Think of a year as a lap and you see the same place from slightly further up and feel less lost for it.

0909Where it lands

Nothing comes back the same, because you are not the same. Tonight the lights go off. Next October they come back on, exactly as they were, so that you can see how far you have moved.

1010Sources

1. Brickman, P., Coates, D., and Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927 (volume and pages from memory). Findings via a secondary summary.
2. Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., and Riis, J. (2014). The fresh start effect: Temporal landmarks motivate aspirational behavior. Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901
3. Huang, R.-C. (2018). The discoveries of molecular mechanisms for the circadian rhythm: The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Biomedical Journal, 41(1), 5-8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29673553/
4. Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291.
5. Wiltermuth, S. S., and Heath, C. (2009). Synchrony and cooperation. Psychological Science.
6. Heraclitus fragments and their authenticity: summarised from the “Panta rhei (doctrine)” article (second-hand).

Figure 1 is an original schematic by 1&O and plots no data. Figure 2 plots the relative increases reported in Dai, Milkman and Riis (2014), Study 3.