Consistency vs evolution

I've noticed over the course of writing these posts that there's a certain evolutionary effect at play. Over time, I seem to have picked up some habits, dropped others, and sometimes picked up and then dropped a habit shortly after. Some of those were deliberate experiments, like my ill-fated dalliance with brevity, but mostly they just sort of happened.

But, digging into that a little further, the reason these changes have a chance to take hold is because I'm not terribly consistent with my format. Unlike a newspaper column or something where every one follows the same pattern, I seem to change things fairly frequently, even if they're minor things. This has the downside that it may not be easy to predict or rely on certain features of what I'm doing, but the upside is that this kind of constant mutation provides a fertile ground for evolutionary improvements.

And I see that tradeoff – consistency vs evolution – as a general one. Often you find comfort in things around you being predictable, like a long-running TV show, or the behaviour of an old friend. And it's certainly a virtue to be reliable and consistent, at least in many areas. But, fundamentally, if you commit to doing something a certain way, you commit to stopping its evolution. Sometimes that might seem worth it, but I wonder who can really say "this is my environment, and I'll never need to adapt to another"?

Luckily, it seems like consistency is a fundamentally difficult thing for us to achieve. I once heard that if you want to develop your own style, a good strategy is to just copy people you like. You won't be able to do it exactly, and your poor imitation of their style becomes a good representation of your own style. I also can't help but observe the strange way that we seem to stumble once in every hundred thousand steps or so, even after walking for decades. You'd think, of all things, that would be a good time to call it quits and stop iterating.

Yet we don't – or, can't – and I suspect that even today your gait is some miniscule degree more efficient than it was the day before.