You are not the exception to the arc

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place. You can read my AI disclosure here.

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Draw a curve.

Take it up, over a peak, and down again.

You’ve just described a star. A corporation. A dynasty. A species. A language. A technology. An idea. Stretch the timescale from milliseconds to billions of years, and you’ll still draw the same shape: growth, peak, decline. Cosmologists trace the universe itself along it, from the initial expansion to the equilibrium they call the heat death.

Nobody has documented an exception.

We grant this for the abstract cases. Stars, sure. Empires, fine. But we avoid plotting the arc of the things we care about: our organizations, our fields, our countries, our ideas. We make an exception for those.

We’re wrong.

Why we keep finding the curve

Anyone who builds a system draws on a limited supply of something: energy, attention, capital, arable land, public trust, Beanie Baby buyers. The system grows as long as its builders convert those resources faster than they use them up. When they can’t, because the resources run out, competitors arrive, or conditions change, they peak and start to contract.

Physicists have shown that keeping an organized structure far from equilibrium takes a continuous input of energy; cut the input and you lose the structure.

Founders grow a unicorn by spotting an inefficiency and exploiting it. They attract capital, talent, and attention, and use all three to exploit it faster. Competitors pile in and close the gap. Eventually the company spends more defending its position than it earns by holding it. Some peak in decades, some in years. All of them peak.

The same shape at every scale

Entomologists give a mayfly a day of adult life. Botanists have dated bristlecone pines to more than 4,800 years. Geologists watch mountain ranges erode into plains over tens of millions of years. All three record a peak, a decline, and an end.

Engineers build a technology, dominate a market, and draw investment into the field, some of it into the rivals who’ll replace them. Steam gave way to internal combustion; internal combustion is giving way to electric motors.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn showed how scientists gather around a paradigm, hit anomalies it can’t explain, and abandon it for a rival their successors will abandon in turn. Activists give a set of ideas coherence, take power, fall out over their own contradictions, and splinter. In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee concluded that civilizations fall less to outside attackers than to elites who stop producing adequate responses to new problems.

Romans turned a city-state into a Mediterranean empire, then couldn’t control, through city-state institutions, the rival generals and landless citizens their conquests had created. Augustus ended the civil wars in 31 BCE, and Edward Gibbon later called 96 to 180 CE the happiest period in human history. Three centuries of lost territory, civil war, and partial recovery followed, until Odoacer deposed the last Western emperor in 476.

Second-century Romans building aqueducts had no evidence they’d peaked. Gibbon wrote with the whole curve in front of him. We live inside the ascent of most things we know, as those Romans did, and the arc surprises us for the same reason.

The exception we all make

If you’re growing a company, you’ll peak. You’ll run out of customers, a competitor will do it better, your core technology will be replaced, or regulators will change the rules. Nothing tells you when.

Mid-century universities treated sociology as a central social science; they’ve since moved money and attention elsewhere. Physicists took over from chemists as keepers of the fundamental science in the 1920s; now geneticists and structural biologists are pulling funding their way. Your field is on this curve too.

Americans held unambiguous global dominance from 1945 into the early twenty-first century; historians will argue for a century about when it peaked. Whatever country you’re attached to is riding the same curve.

So are our beliefs. People around us are adopting some, championing others at their peak, and abandoning others even as we hold them. We can’t tell which is which, but that doesn’t exempt them.

Why people tell myths of permanence

Romans called Rome the Eternal City. Nineteenth-century British imperialists studied the decline of earlier empires and concluded theirs was immune. Soviet leaders promised to resolve history’s contradictions for good. American exceptionalists argue that founding principles, geography, or democratic culture set the country apart from the curve.

These myths do real work. A Roman engineer designing an aqueduct to last five hundred years needed to believe his fellow citizens would keep it running. Myths of permanence motivate investment, build cohesion, and justify long horizons.

But once we’ve built our identity on lasting, we can’t describe our own contraction when it starts. We reach for explanations that protect the belief: saboteurs, corrupt insiders, outsiders we cast as alien rather than as competitors in the same process. Those enemies sometimes exist, but we can blame them at any point on any arc, and when we do, we put our effort in the wrong places. Church leaders facing the Reformation, Qing officials facing industrialized Europe, and Kodak executives facing digital photography (their own engineer, Steven Sasson, built the first digital camera in 1975) all had the information they needed. Each chose to defend its belief in its own durability.

Why people mistake the arc for failure

When founders dominate a market for twenty years and then contract, commentators say they failed. When activists take power and lose influence, journalists say the movement collapsed. When successors supersede a framework, critics say its builders were wrong.

But those founders succeeded on the terms available to them, and their customers got twenty years of what they built. We should credit the value they created and still record their decline.

If we read contraction as failure, we’ll fight it: commit more resources, extend the strategy that worked on the way up, double down on the founding premise. Near the peak, that can extend it, though we start a new arc when we do. Past the peak, we’ll speed our decline by pouring resources into a strategy competitors and customers have already made obsolete.

The better question is what we can do from where we are, not what we could do if we were still climbing.

Calibrating to your position

Nobody can stop the arc. You can calibrate to where you are on it.

On the way up, you have slack. You can absorb inefficiency, fund experiments you never recoup, and carry unresolved disagreements, because growth covers the cost. On the way down, you have none. Every dollar or hour spent on a failing strategy comes out of the one you need. People get this wrong in both directions: they run declining systems as if they were still growing, and constrain growing ones as if they’d already run short.

An excellent strategy executed from the wrong position does worse than a mediocre one executed from the right position. Leaders who recognize their peak before they can no longer deny it keep the most options; leaders who notice decline only after spending their resources keep the fewest.

Each of us is also on many personal curves at once. In 2015, the psychologists Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine tested tens of thousands of people and found that processing speed peaks around 18 or 19, while vocabulary keeps growing into the late sixties. If you take slowing reaction times as proof your mind is failing and stop learning, you’ve mistaken one curve for all of them. Work out where you’re falling, where you’re still rising, and where you haven’t yet peaked, and you’ll use the resources you actually have better.

What we carry past the curve

Sargon of Akkad founded the Akkadian Empire in the twenty-fourth century BCE; his successors lost it within two centuries to drought and rebellion. Mesopotamian kings kept using Akkadian methods of administration and warfare for a millennium afterward.

Europeans stopped speaking Latin over centuries, and hundreds of millions of people now speak the Romance languages that grew from it. European lawyers kept using Roman law long after the Western Empire fell.

Newtonian mechanics described the physical world accurately for more than two centuries. Quantum mechanics and general relativity showed where it stops working, but engineers still rely on it within its domain. Future physicists will put every framework we hold in the same position.

Believers in permanence are right about one thing: knowing we’ll lose what we build is no reason to stop building. But keeping a system alive and making something that outlives it are different goals, and only one of them was ever on offer.

You don’t get to stay at the peak. You do get to choose what you leave on the way down.

Draw the curve. Find yourself on it. Build for what comes after.