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[Primer] The Adjacent Possible

The concept of the Adjacent Possible has changed my personal outlook. Today, I seek to share this mental model, and further expand the lexicon with some personal derivations.


In book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson describes:

"Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible.[...]Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace."

Although he applies this concept to the natural history of innovation, I think it's also useful for modeling our understanding of time and identity:


Anything is possible. But not everything is possible at this point in time. The things that are immediately possible now, are your Adjacent Possibilities. This should be the focus of your immediate efforts.

Time moves only forward. This means that the possibilities of the past are removed from you, akin to doors shutting behind your back, its opportunities forever relegated to the imagination. I refer to these as Precluded Possibilities. It is time wasted to dwell in this space of "regrets".

This may also be what they mean in saying time heals all wounds— with enough passing of time, we may no longer be able to reasonably claim with certainty that our temporal equivalent of the room opened through an Alternative Path taken at the initial point of divergence will be a better circumstance than the Current Event, for it took everything happening the way that it did, for things to have happened this way.

Gratitude is thus recognising that a worse Alternative Possibility could have been realised, and being grateful that it didn't; Also conversely, being grateful for the serendipity that any desirable event of small probability had even occurred.

Happiness is being happy with who you are. Becoming who you want to be is to work toward your desired Advanced Possibilities. To do so, you must identify some Prerequisites, and work toward attaining them. These Prerequisites may not have direct causality, but are necessary.

The cumulative effect of consistent habits over time thus forms your Identity.
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