It’s an all too familiar pattern.

For those who go on that favorite bacchanal of Type A personalities: the morning walk, as you circumnavigate its varying path you’ll come across these little gridlocks of walkers, the smaller and more frequent your rounds the more you see it.

All these bodies in motion, each following their own paths but always at a steady pace designed to avoid interactions with their fellow human being so early in the day (unless they voluntarily choose to run with others, and the world does make all kinds), still collide at certain points into what cascades into a pedestrian gridlock, each unit jamming up the other as they try to make their way across the board.

It was while stuck at one of these and musing how much more polite we are in the mornings because the rest of the day hasn’t had a chance to cock up our mood, that I began to think, naturally, of the abacus.

Abacuses, and other counting machines, may at first thought, seem fairly primitive to us, cushioned by thousands of years of mathematical theory and reasoning, and aided for generations by machines built to compute everything under the sun and beyond it, but it’s still wild to me.

That thousands of years ago, different cultural groups around the world came up with these three-dimensional visual and demonstrative aids to add up numbers we suddenly had, as humanity moved from survival to permanence. And that ultimately led to us having the techno-industrial capabilities to create machines that are currently flying outside of our solar system. That’s pretty fucking cool.

But maybe as cool is the fact that all these first tools, developed in different regions and timelines, all had a grid pattern, be it the cells of the abacus or the placement of counting stones.  And that got me thinking, if humans love grid systems so much, why don’t we just marry them. Or to use language more fitting for grown ups, why don’t we always follow them?

From the time of ancient India and China, where mathematicians used dust on segmented wooden boards and bead-on-rods respectively to tabulate numbers, to a later vintage when  Romans started laying down regimented highways to conquer Europe and West Asia to the days of the British riveting railway tracks for better movement and utility of goods and the colonized across their empire, to the Wild West coming under the sway of the commercial Eastern seaboard as its roads bisected life and wilderness to create civic authority to the air traffic lanes that light up news media screens to demonstrate the reach of the latest global crisis, grids have always been our go to operating system.    

So then why do we have traffic jams? And flight delays? And long lines at the grocery store?

The trouble with grids is that they are designed for a very particular fantasy: that everything will behave exactly as expected. A grid is essentially a low-entropy container built to carry a predictable load. It works beautifully as long as the world cooperates. But grids have very little elasticity. They do not stretch when demand (no matter how polite) exceeds the design limits. Instead, because everything inside them is tightly coupled to everything else, one small disruption spreads with alarming efficiency.

A stalled car becomes a traffic jam. A delayed aircraft ripples through the day’s flight schedule. A missed meeting cascades into a calendar meltdown. The very logic that makes grids efficient also makes them brittle.

By stripping away every bit of “wasted” space in pursuit of perfect flow, we remove the buffers that absorb mistakes. And once the buffers are gone, the smallest deviation is enough to bring the whole beautiful lattice to a halt.

But that’s just the systemic inevitability of the working parts of any large machine, a mechanical fault or error that ripples across the functioning.

But methinks there’s another one. Us.

Not the system, not the mechanics, not the structure. Us. Human free will.

It’s why we’ll never have flying cars. At least I hope we won’t, or that I’ve moved on to the next plane of existence when we do. Because handing over basically mini-planes and access to the sky to the general populace is definitely going to impact people’s existence. It just takes one guy (or girl, or person, but statistically guy) to get blasted on space vodka, distilled in a state-of-the-art factory in near earth orbit, or whatever other bullshit they get high on in the future, and ram his flying car into a low-income high-rise to wipe out some life.

Just like self-driving cars on the road make absolutely no sense unless every single vehicle on the road in that network is self-driving. Because it only takes one human to add variability to an equation that tech bros will have you believe is all laid out and predictable.

Not because we’re incapable, or incompetent, or uncaring, or impractical. But because we’re human. Because we’re late and in a rush. Because we get distracted by a call or carrion. Because we may not feel too well in that particular moment. Because we may just be having a bad day and need just an instant of quiet and self-reflection. Because we think we need to reach our destination faster than anyone else.

And suddenly you’ve missed a turn or a light or seeing someone else drift into your path and all that carefully calibrated choreography (whether of road, air, park, schedule, or queue) comes to a grinding halt.

Humans create structure because the logician in us craves it and it makes sense to us. It’s why we divide our passage through life, whether we consider it a flicker in the churn of the universe or a seemingly endless plane of existence, into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and so on.

It’s like when we create a game plan. For a work day, for a holiday, for a career change, for sobriety, for a business plan, for a media strategy, for an orgy, for a picnic, for a life. Things happen because we’re in a system, often out of our control. But also because we let them or want them to. We adjust, we handle it.

Or we don’t. And it’s a jam on the road or in your life or at the queue or at that orgy. Things slip by, messes are made, clean ups are required.

And it’s okay.

We go on. When systems might fail us. When we fail them.

Dry January may break but functioning February is right there at the next turn (never mind the Ides of March). The job interview may not work out but another LinkedIn contact might. You may miss your chance to visit the cathedral but you may find a cool little gastro-pub nearby.

Sometimes the structures we spent centuries crafting, or the week-long holiday we spent so painstakingly planning, the daily morning walk we look forward to walking, may be monetarily held up because one jackass got distracted by abacuses.

It’s an all too familiar pattern.