You can’t escape!

Gravity is one of the most fascinating and mysterious forces in the universe. The universal law of gravity states that two objects are attracted to each other proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them squared.

In other words, the bigger the objects, the more attraction. The closer you get to said object, the pull it has on you intensifies rapidly.

The most mind-boggling part of gravity to me is that it’s a field that extends into infinity. No matter where you are in the known universe, the earth, for instance, will want to pull you into its core. Think about that for a moment. At the seashore, wading through the waves, you are being pulled towards the center of Earth at a constant rate of 9.81 m/s^2. Every second. You go instead to the highest mountain on the earth, the rate of drops off, but not by much. You literally have to launch yourself into orbit to feel free.

You’re not.

The only reason satellites don’t fall into the earth is because they are moving so fast sideways they miss the earth while falling. That’s all an orbit is. Falling forever. Missing forever. Easiest job ever.

Let’s go farther out. Let’s go to the moon. Yes, the Earth’s pull on you still exists. Go out to Pluto? The Earth is still tugging. Travel a few light-years away to Alpha Centauri? Yep. The Earth still wants you to fall into its loving (gravitational) arms.

Let’s extend this idea even farther. We like to think of the Earth as the only object with gravity. Wrong! Everything exerts a force of gravity on everything else. It’s just really, really small. From where you sit right now, reading these words, every single bit of matter in the entire universe is tugging a bit on you. The moon. The earth. The sun. The phone in your hand. My body to yours. Every single atom of matter has a gravitational pull.

Magic.

We’re all stars! (Or at least those of us who got an A+ in First Grade)

The human collective social web is like all those bits of gravity. People have influence. Names have weight. Families and lineage have pressure. Reputation has gravatas. Each one of us has a pull of our own, an influence on the rest of us. Most of us hold very little influence. We live, and we are. Then there are the few who command a presence that none can ignore. Celebrities. World leaders. Historical figures. That’s right, not only is our pressure upon human history for the here and now, it can also stretch far into the future.

Let’s think of Jesus, Hitler, and Aristotle. They’re in a hot air balloon. They look at each other and…

Oh, never mind.

Back to my point at hand, we each have a meaningful impact on each other’s lives. Don’t ever forget! What you say and do to others, matters. We influence each other in small and large degrees. Depending on our weight to society, depending on how close we are to each other. Your brother Bob might not be known to anyone in the greater sphere, but to you, with how close he is to you, he matters a lot.

Social gravity!

Velocity, Position, and acceleration, oh my.

Now, not only do we need to account for all the social gravitational fields in our lives, the way others push and pull us around, the way we push and pull others, but we also have to worry about the ΔT, the changes in these fields relative to time.

Normally finding our place in the world, finding our voice, is a slow and tedious process. It comes in spurts and starts, in constant intentionality and hard work. However, mass adds mass which helps add mass. Success breeds success. Compound interest! One of my other favorite forces. We as humans have a rough time trying to perceive small changes to small numbers. We have an even more difficult time understanding how small changes over time can have huge implications.

Launch a rocket to the moon. If you’re off by one degree, you’re either smack in the middle of your own named crater (and have made your mark on human history for sure!) or are flung out into the cosmos (still, probably being known the worldwide as the fool who missed). In this analogy we don’t want to land among the stars with our attempts, we want to orbit the moon and come back home safely. Still, small differences added up matter.

A silly saying with a fun math outcome. Do your best to be simply 1% better tomorrow then you were today. You do that for a full year, and you’ll find yourself 37x better by the end of the year!

(37.7834343 to be more precise, but hey, who’s counting?)

However, the slow trudge isn’t the only way to find your way out here in the crowd. Fame can come overnight like a blast, a bomb. The big bang! You know the phrase, ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’? Being talked about is like rocket fuel. Doesn’t matter if you’re on fire, they can all see you. You leave a memory, a point of touch. We see this in real time with the viral nature of the internet. Millions of us are adding content into the ever-growing pile of voices. Many of us reach only our small circle of influence. However, every once in a while one of us steps on a rocket and launches ourselves into the stratosphere.

To continue this fraughtful analogy, when something becomes viral, we have no control over where it lands. Sometimes it crushes us. Sometimes it sputters out. Sometimes it gives us the boost to reach that next level.

Never give up, never surrender!

To add one final zingy cherry to this otherwise tasty sundae, remember, hard work always pays off. It may not give us what we were hoping… our goals may never be reached… but the hard work is worth the effort. We may trudge and scrape and save for years and Fate has other plans. A hurricane rolls in. Instead of going on that grand trip to Everest to test how much I weigh at the summit, I’ll have to replace the roof of my house. Did I fail? No. I taught myself perseverance, discipline, and acceptance for reality.

Rhetorical question: Who lived the better life, the farmer who planted his crops and fed his family year after year after year till he died, or the roaming minstrel, entertaining the masses? How does one weigh the soul of a man? Neither’s life was better than the others, they simply had different paths.

How about we add some color. Whose life was better if the farmer worked hard and did all he could, fighting blizzards and buzzards and rot. He had a few slim years in there but on the whole he took immense happiness out of his toil. Or the minstrel who went from town to town, used his fame to drink and whore and eventually came to nothing? What if the farmer had no children and died alone? What if the minstrel on his deathbed gave all of his money to the poor?

Wait, I thought this was a post about science? Philosophy too? What are you doing to me?

Isn’t it all related?

I have no answers. Simply questions. If I made you think, whooo! I have done my job.

My view? We all have our own paths in life. Yours is not better or worse than theirs. Only different. What you do while walking your path is what truly matters.

Value what you have. Try not to let the little joys slip by. Give yourself grace. And with what time we all have been gifted, let us all do our best and use our small or planet-sized social gravitational forces to help each other become better people. 

And when you try to launch yourself into the moon, make sure you hire a really, really good rocket scientist.