Unfortunately positive and negative feedback tends to cancel out over the long term.

Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken and there is no middle ground, other than the energy of the chicken becoming a brief moment of the fox.

What drives life is the tension and conflict between desire and judgement. The head and the heart. Youth and age. Liberal and conservative.

Potential is nearly infinite, while actual is a tiny fraction of that and the residual of memory and history a fading crumb of that.

Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree, but without acorns, there are no oak trees. With judgement we have taken some of the selection from nature and it is our blessing and curse.

Without the ups and downs, it would be a flatline.

So the price we pay to feel, is that much of it is pain.

If we weren’t so linear and goal oriented, though, we might better appreciate the cycles and feedback driving this and understand that we have both, or neither.

It is our obsession with the ideal that makes us think there must be some pot of gold at the end of the narrative arc, so that when the ideals fade, as with Hitler, we then chase after the moral opposites; anger, power, revenge, etc.

The reality is that we fluctuate between the absolute and the infinite and can never achieve either.

Fortunately.

Ps,

For example, efficiency is to do more with less, so the ideal of efficiency would be to do everything with nothing.

Interest doesn’t compound forever.