There’s a saying for communities: if you’re not gaining members, you’re losing members.
This heuristic is totally worth turning into a snowclone and applying almost everywhere. If your net worth is not going up, it is probably going down. If your house isn’t being remodeled, it is probably falling into disrepair. If your health isn’t getting better, it is probably getting worse. Etc.
The general form of the underlying claim is that that the derivative with respect to time for any measurable characteristic is almost never zero, it is usually either positive or negative, and without attention, the direction is usually not the one that humans typically prefer.
The variant I most often use is: if you’re not planning on arriving (to some event or meeting or whatever) early then you’re almost certainly going to be late.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that achieving a perfect Goldilocks equilibrium, that’s stable for more than a brief period, is much harder than sustaining small, but non-zero growth (or just allowing things to fall apart naturally).
This heuristic is totally worth turning into a snowclone and applying almost everywhere. If your net worth is not going up, it is probably going down. If your house isn’t being remodeled, it is probably falling into disrepair. If your health isn’t getting better, it is probably getting worse. Etc.
The general form of the underlying claim is that that the derivative with respect to time for any measurable characteristic is almost never zero, it is usually either positive or negative, and without attention, the direction is usually not the one that humans typically prefer.
The variant I most often use is: if you’re not planning on arriving (to some event or meeting or whatever) early then you’re almost certainly going to be late.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that achieving a perfect Goldilocks equilibrium, that’s stable for more than a brief period, is much harder than sustaining small, but non-zero growth (or just allowing things to fall apart naturally).