When You're Thirsty, It's Too Late to Dig a Well

 

We experience life on multiple levels, reflecting the complex nature of life, our species' social and cognitive foundations, and the complex interactions of our senses, awareness, emotions, intuition and our ability to return to the past in memory and leap forward in time in anticipation.

I often refer to tacit knowledge gained through the accumulation of direct experience in the tactile, real world. Experiential knowledge/skills cannot be acquired by "book learning" or the purely intellectual processes of formalizing a model or system; this type of knowledge can only be acquired by doing, making mistakes, seeking to correct them, and pushing ourselves to expand our skills by pursuing tasks beyond the boundaries of what we already know how to do.

Author Michael Polanyi summarized the nature of tacit knowledge in seven words: "We know more than we can tell." We can't explain exactly how we came to "know how to fix this" or the steps we took to diagnose and solve the problem, as it's an intuitive right-hemisphere type of knowledge, not a linear, formalized left-hemisphere type of knowledge.

Both types are useful and work together without our awareness, until we're asked to explain something like "how did you learn to write?" This question can't be answered neatly because writing is thinking, and engages both our intuitive, tacit-knowledge capabilities and our linear analytic capabilities.

If we say "writing boils down to the rules of grammar and the definitions of words," this linear description misses the most important attributes of writing, which is the thinking that finds expression in what we call "voice," the writer's expression of their unique experiential knowledge/skills.

When AI tools "clean up" text, they homogenize/dilute the "voice" and the tacit knowledge that created it.

Improvisation is an example of what I'm describing. Learning to play a classic improvisation note for note is one thing - an advancement in skill - but that doesn't give the student the ability to improvise on their own. Learning to improvise as an expression of "voice" is far more demanding and experiential in nature - it cannot be formalized, for the formalization ("follow these rules to create an improvisation") isn't an authentic expression, it's just instantiating a formal program, an ultra-processed simulation of authentic improvisation.

Which brings us to recession and revolution: how we experience these socio-economic-political upheavals is different from how we understand them as formal models.

To those who lose their jobs or see their income drop precipitously, the experience of a deep recession is disorienting and distressing. Our world collapses around us, one piece at a time, and then altogether. We may feel trapped, and feel there's no way out. Our experience may not offer much guidance on how best to respond to financial stresses beyond our control.

The intellectualized explanation that capitalism generates prosperity by its very nature isn't helpful. Neither is looking at charts of interest rates and unemployment rates, or other abstract models that "explain" recession as the result of system dynamics: excesses of debt and speculation, rising inflation, and so on.

The disconcerting experience of navigating a decline or collapse in income and the dominoes that fall as a result cannot be "solved" by abstract models and systems. We can understand that our crisis is caused by larger forces, but that doesn't help us extricate ourselves from the downward financial and emotional spiral.

The same is true of experiencing revolution: technological, financial, political, social or cultural, or a mix of these revolutionary forces. In the present, we're each experiencing some exposure to the AI revolution, and there's no clear historical guide that can be formalized with any utility or accuracy for those experiencing the downsides of the revolution.

If deception, deceit, artifice and exploitation are the primary tools of those in power, human nature kicks in and demands some version of a truthful accounting of the parasitic elite pulling the levers in a Hall of Mirrors. This can manifest as formal processes — a truth commission or judicial proceedings - or as a tumultuous free-for-all of retribution and the settling of scores.

Formal models and systems help us understand the dynamics at work beneath the surface, but they're not guides to how we experience tumultuous disruptions in our own lives. Our experiences may be shared in part, but they are inherently as unique as our own life experiences.

From the start, my "job" here has been to explore and illuminate both worlds, the abstract realm of models, ideas and system dynamics, and the personal living-in-the-real-world experiences of navigating disruptive, non-linear eras. The abstract realm gives us a context in which we can locate our own experience, and illuminates dynamics that we can either avoid or slip-stream in our own responses.

But the experimentation, risk and potential ruin fall on us as individuals and households. These are not abstractions, these are often chaotic experiences with unpredictable outcomes.

No one individual can experience every variation of challenge and crisis, but many of us have experienced quite a few, from serious bodily injury to mental health crises to being broke to moving to a new place where you know no one to starting a business to changing careers to run-ins with authorities to situations where "doing the right thing" means sacrificing one's own interests - the list of potential challenges and crises arising in our own lives in tumultuous times is almost endless.

In the realm of experience, I promote self-reliance and formulating Plans A, B and C which can be summarized as setting a goal of acquiring tacit knowledge and skills and thinking through what options we have or can start creating before it's too late.

The Chinese proverb “When you're thirsty, it's too late to dig a well” summarizes an experiential approach to the challenges many of us will encounter should recession and/or some form of revolution upend our lives--and our Plan A.

Self-awareness is a critical component of tacit knowledge and skills. Being aware of the limits of o ur knowledge and experience - knowing what we don't know - and trusting our own intuition are both "skills" that can't be taught or learned by rote. It's the doing that teaches us what's most valuable - starting with humility and a willingness tp fail and persevere.

from the blog of Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com on May 4, 2026