Why move through life any faster than these cows?

Slow Down

Ways to increase agency in our contingent existence.

I think a lot about the role of contingency in my life. It took a long time to understand that is what it’s actually called, but a while back I learned that contingency is the name of the thing.

I bet you think about contingency, too, but you also might not know that that’s what you’re thinking about. So let’s get an explanation of it out on the page here at the up-top: Contingency refers to the fact that if we consider how it is that we have come to live our lives in the way that we are currently doing — with all the people and things in it that are there — much of that is the function of a series of highly specific, and somewhat unlikely events that have occurred in our lives.

You have the job that you have because of all the other jobs that you either did not take or (more likely) were not offered to you¹. Your life partner (if you have one) is your life partner because of the specific and particular circumstances in which you met, and from which your relationship proceeded. The children that you have are yours because of a specific instant in the fertilization process when two genetically unique and singular gametes combined to produce them². If we follow back far enough, combining all the circumstances, choices, and luck that combined to produce you here and now, the infinitesimally…