Why We Wrote This
What the whole series was for.
A companion essay series to Complex Adaptive Markets: How Living Systems Shape Finance
This series was never really about physics.
It borrowed physics, and biology, and markets, because those are places where the point is hard to argue with. But the point was always closer to home than any of them. It was about how to live in a world that will not hold still, when nearly everything in us is built to want one that does.
We wrote it for a particular reader. Not the specialist, who has other books. The person who senses, somewhere under the day’s business, that the solid world they were promised keeps failing to be solid. Whose plans dissolve. Whose certainties age badly. Who has noticed that the map they were handed, of a career, a market, a life, keeps disagreeing with the ground under their feet. This was written for them, because we have been them, and because there is a way to stand in such a world that is steadier than the one most of us were taught.
We know the feeling from the inside. The plan that was sound until the week it was not. The position that was right until the market decided otherwise. The certainty that felt like bedrock until it moved. Every one of those is the same collision, a mind built for objects meeting a world made of process, and the ache in it is real. But the ache is not a sign that something has gone wrong with you. It is a sign that the picture was wrong, and a picture can be changed.
We are not offering comfort of the usual kind, the kind that promises the ground is solid after all. It is not, and we will not pretend it is. What we are offering is stranger and more useful: a way of standing that does not need the ground to be solid, that works precisely because it expects the ground to move. That is the one footing that never fails you, because it never asked the world for something the world cannot give.
What the Series Took Away
Look back at what these essays actually did. Each one took something away.
The first took away the foundation. Reality is not built up from the bottom, brick on brick, toward the world we see. It is carved, the way a statue is carved, by the removal of everything that could not hold. What stands is not what was added. It is what survived.
The second took away the nouns. Our language hands us a world of things, and we mistake the handing for the truth. Under the nouns there are only verbs, only doings, and the solid words we lean on are conveniences we have forgotten are conveniences.
The third took away the substance. Drill into any thing, the coin, the cell, the price, and it thins into process, and the floor you were reaching for never comes. There is no basement. Only the doing, all the way down.
The fourth took away the edges. A process has no fixed size and no fixed boundary, because its boundary is something it is doing. Ask how big it is and the question comes apart in your hand.
The fifth took away the map. You cannot chart a territory that is still being carved, and you cannot stand outside a system you are part of. What is left when the map is gone is not helplessness. It is navigation.
Five essays, five removals. And this was the pattern the series was quietly teaching all along, in its shape as much as its content. It did not build an argument up. It carved one out, taking away one false comfort at a time, until what remained could stand on its own.
There is a discipline in that, and a quiet courage. It is easy to add, to reassure, to build another storey onto a house that is already leaning. It is harder to take something away, to let a comfortable belief fall because it could not carry weight, and to trust that what stands afterwards will hold. The series asked that of itself, essay by essay. It has been asking the same of you.
What Remains
Here is the thing about removal that is easy to miss while you are still frightened of it. What survives a removal is not made poorer for surviving. It is made truer. The figure the sculptor frees from the stone is not a diminished block; it is everything the block was worth. The trend left standing when every incoherent position has been washed out is not a remnant; it is the market’s actual verdict. And a person, worn by time down to what they could not lose, is not what is left over. They are what they were, finally shown.
This is why the subtractive view, which sounds at first like a philosophy of loss, turns out to be its opposite. It is a philosophy of what lasts. It says that the things which survive the pressure of an unforgiving world, a real friendship, a sound method, a settled character, a true sentence, are survivors, and that their having survived is the whole of their worth. Nothing that endures is arbitrary. It endured because it could, when so much else could not.
You have watched this happen, whether or not you had a name for it. Someone you loved grew old, and the inessential fell away from them, the poses, the defences, the borrowed opinions, until what remained was simply and unmistakably them, more themselves at the end than in the middle of their life. That is not only decline. It is also revelation. The world was taking away everything that was not them, and what it could not take was the person. We are all under that same patient hand. It is not our enemy. It is part of what makes us real.
How to Live in a Verb
None of this stays abstract for long. It changes what you do on Monday.
If reality is process, you can stop demanding that it behave like an object, and a surprising amount of ordinary suffering is only the friction of that demand. You stop waiting for the market to settle into the thing your model says it is. You stop expecting the plan to survive contact with the world. You stop grieving the map. And in the space that clears, you start doing the thing that actually works: reading what is in front of you, moving with it, correcting, and reading again.
For the trader this is the whole of it. Complex Adaptive Markets is the long, practical working-out of exactly this stance, in the one arena where being wrong about it is measured to the dollar and paid at once. It does not teach prediction, because prediction is incoherent in a living market. It teaches participation: how to read a system you are inside, how to hold a position lightly, how to adapt yourself to what the market is doing rather than break yourself against what you wish it would do. Everything in these essays is, for the trader, a preparation for that book, and everything in that book is, for the reader of these essays, the proof that they were never merely pretty.
But the stance does not stop at the market, and neither did we. The same discipline that keeps a trader solvent keeps a person steady. Read the state you are actually in, not the one you planned for. Act without waiting for a certainty that is not coming. Hold your direction lightly. Adapt faster than the world can leave you behind. You do not bend the world to yourself. You bend yourself to the world, and in that bending, which looks like surrender and is in truth the highest skill we have, you become one of the things that lasts.
It shows up in the smallest choices. The conversation going somewhere you did not plan, and the decision to follow it rather than drag it back to your script. The life that bends away from the map you drew at twenty, and the sense to bend with it instead of breaking against it. The grief that will not resolve on your timetable, and the mercy of letting it take the time it takes. None of these is solved by a better plan. Every one of them is met by a better reading.
A Determined Sea
There is one more thing to say, because it is the hardest and the truest.
The sea is determined. What it does next is fixed by what it is doing now, and no wish of yours will alter it. That was the finding of the fifth essay, and it can sound like the end of freedom. It is not. It is the beginning of the only freedom there is. You were always going to be one of the forces in the water. The question was never whether you would affect the outcome, you will, because you are made of the same process as everything else, but whether you would do it blindly or with your eyes open. Navigation is not the power to choose the sea. It is the power to see it, and to be, knowingly, one of the currents in it.
This is not resignation, which sits back and lets the sea have its way. Resignation stops reading. The navigator never stops reading. The determinism is not a reason to go slack at the tiller. It is the reason the tiller matters at all, because a determined sea responds, exactly and without exception, to the boat that is actually in it. Your corrections are not futile gestures against a settled outcome. They are part of how the outcome settles.
A life carved by an unforgiving world is not a tragedy, though it will contain them. It is the only kind of life there is, and the only kind worth the name. You do not get to keep everything. Nothing does. But what you cannot lose is yours in a way that nothing added from outside could ever be, because it has been tested against the whole weight of a world that takes back everything it can. Whatever survives that is real. Whatever survives that is you.
Why We Wrote This
So, why write it?
Not to inform you. You can get information anywhere, and information was never what was missing. We wrote it to change, by a few degrees, how you see, so that the next time the ground moves under you, and it will, you meet it with the right instinct instead of the wrong one. So that you reach for the tiller instead of the map. So that when something you built dissolves, you understand that dissolving is what the world does, and you look, without panic, for what remains.
If it has worked, you will not remember most of the arguments. You will remember the images. The board that carves itself rather than building. The flame that is an event and not a thing. The coin that thins to nothing under your attention. The murmuration with no edge. The wayfinder reading a sea that will not hold still. Keep those. They are the argument, folded small enough to carry.
We had a single test in mind the whole time. Not whether you would agree, since agreement is cheap, but whether, having read it, you might put it into someone’s hands and say, you have to read this, not because it taught them a fact but because it changed the light they saw by. If it has done that even once, it has done the thing it was for.
The universe is a verb. It is not a collection of things that happen to move. It is the moving, and you are a part of the moving, carved by the same pressure that carves everything, holding your shape for exactly as long as you cohere, and real, entirely real, for as long as you last.
That is not a bleak thought, though it can look like one from the wrong angle. It is the plainest description of being alive that we know how to give. You are not a thing the world is keeping. You are something the world is doing, briefly, with great particularity, and then is done. Make it a good doing.
Read the swell. Set the hull.
Go.
The Universe is a Verb is a companion essay series to Complex Adaptive Markets: How Living Systems Shape Finance by Richard Brennan. The way of seeing set out in these six essays is carried into full practical depth in the book, where it is put to work on the markets we trade.
Richard Brennan writes on systematic trading, complex adaptive markets, and the philosophical foundations of trend following at atstradingsolutions.com. His books include The Fractals of Finance, Complex Adaptive Markets, Carved by Impossibility and The Aussie Turtles Trend Following Guide.
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