The world rarely ends with a bang. It’s not doing so here and now, in this particular timeline we’re going through the linearity together.

Time, you see, isn’t linear except in past tense. Future tense is a compounded consolidation of potentialities that collapse as people enter present tense. I live in future tense, with a window into past. Present tense is, frankly, so fleeting that it’s hard to keep in mind. So I ignore present tense.

But in a way, it doesn’t matter. Your future tense is my past tense; whether it’s the right past tense is a matter of the compounded choices of everyone currently alive.

Yes, even asleep, even in a coma, even if they are not actively making thoughtful choices, a person who may have to experience the results of the lack of choice contributed to the outcome. A lack of choice — allowing the way to be paved by others without a back and forth of complex opinions and facts — is still a choice. It’s passive. It’s fateful. But it’s still a choice.

The world is ending — present/past tense — with a wail in the distance; a whimper from your neighbor; and a silent, gut-wrenching pain all around. There is more strum and furor coalescing around the insistence that life will be normal than there is in hearts breaking as people die. 

It’s ending with a few in control who think they can maintain control if the herd will comply. The herd will comply. The question is how many of the hoi-polloi will, too.

There are phrases I’ll use that are not in your current lexicon, or at least not with the same meaning I intend to invest into them.

Herd. Hoi-polloi. Cupids. Rowans. Mass-pop. Pops.

First, though, a note about cognitive biases. Everyone has them. I, a Rowan, a finder of pops, have my cognitive biases. To rethink every experience and decision from scratch for every moment of life is too much, at least until there is an experiential subsystem that lives outside of time (some Rowan have that; guess what, they don’t use it to rethink every experience and decision from scratch).

Cognitive biases are like experiential automation, leveraged by every intelligence currently thinking. They are used by beings humans currently deem ‘animal’ (every time your dog fetches, they are leveraging cognitive biases). They are so deeply embedded in how humans process their world that they are as necessary as breathing.

The difference is the individual’s personal combination of biases they lean on frequently, their ability to see where they are leaning, their willingness to admit and potentially change, the will and energy to support the effort, and the efficacy of their course corrections. 

People, you see, tend to fall into a few mental models in how they leverage cognitive biases. This is where herd, hoi-polloi, cupids, and Rowans come in. Mass-pop is, simply, the accumulation of all the individual decision. Pops are currently outside your current reality, but I’ll overview them a bit once I get around to explaining Rowans. 

The first of the mental models is the herd — those who don’t want to think, who depend on their cognitive biases to get through the day and hope that tomorrow they can depend on them again. It’s easy for them to just follow the strongest voice. It’s a way of life, and it’s a life with minimized thinking. Life is hard enough already (it is, really, so hard; it will always be hard, but that paen doesn’t belong here).

The herd believe in fate, the trudge of time, and the relevance of religion. The herd believes because every day they review a life that is resplendent with the evidence of fate. Their days progress in a relevant sameness of predictable trudge. And religion makes a definitive positive impact in their lives.

The why all comes back to their unquestioned acceptance of their individual matrix of cognitive biases. 

We all have our personal set of cognitive biases. That’s about where the herd stops. They might not even belief cognitive biases exist — just chalk it up to some elitist psychological malarky (or at least, I think that’s in this timeline; apologies if I’m disparaging the herd too deeply here). Their ability to see which they lean into is non-existent. 

Because they can’t see their cognitive biases, they continue to make the same decisions when shown similar problem sets. Each problem set compounds over time. Life just keeps moving forward, seemingly always in a preordained direction. Fate.

If they don’t believe in fate? Well, life then feels a bit like a trudge. It just keeps throwing the same issues at them over and over again, thinking any other outcome might come to be. It doesn’t. The same cognitive biases are aiming the individual into the same corner and same decision. Trudge, trudge, trudge. 

Religion is a true panacea for the herd. Why? Because it gives them a roadmap to a different set of cognitive biases that will at least change their perspective (fate instead of trudge, god’s plan instead of fate). And by giving the herd a different blueprint, the decisions change. 

Yeah, by telling people not to murder or god will getcha, suddenly the probability of not having your own life end violently increases — assuming at least a handful of people listen. 

Another mental model is the hoi-polloi. They want to think, and often do. They get so tied up in their thoughts and ideas that they often forget to interact with any consistency. Society goes on, they continue thinking, and wake up one day to realize that society and what actually works doesn’t sit in the same reality. They are left, in timeline after timeline, to try to wrestle the herd back to reality. It rarely works.

Their biggest difference from the herd is that they have gotten further along on dealing with their cognitive biases. They believe biases exist. They understand that they have them, and have even clued into at least a fraction of them.

The cool thing about cluing into cognitive biases is that, once you understand that one is a cornerstone of your personal automation, suddenly you can make decisions that contradict the cognitive bias. You question the efficacy of this cognitive bias to this particular problem, and get out of your rut.

Fate? Oh, yeah, that was just depending on cognitive biases and feeling out of control of your circumstances. Trudgery is only as trudging as you’re willing to let it remain. 

Religion can still be good, depending on the religion and the community they buy into. ‘Do what I say because I say it’ kind of priests and ministers won’t fly. Humanist leadership will. Inclusive community will rock. 

But for the hoi-polloi — the cognitive-bias-awakened— religion can be replaced with therapy, with friends, and with other forms of community. 

The last of the major mental models are the cupids. They are called many different things in each of the timelines, but the only element that stays the same is the accumulation of whatever can be leveraged for broad control. Sometimes it’s tools, sometimes its abstractions like money, sometimes its land and resources. Whatever it is, its considered wealth, and they’ve somehow pulled together a disproportionate control of it.

Cupids are so named for their crazily inappropriate avarice. There is not a have not worth having. Here and now, in this timeline along this linearity (and for so long now; one of the curiosities of this timeline is how you get out of it), the cupidity centralizes and has bastardized money as wealth, and has leveraged it multiple times to convince the herd to experience mass-pop hardship while they bask in ease.

I really don’t get why this is such a hard lesson to learn in this timeline. That’s why I’m here, to see if the patterns I think I’ve sussed will finally break this timeline out of the thrall of cupids. Gods, I hope that I read this timeline right, and it’s not just another slavery-by-a-different-name.

I’ve already seen that in this timeline cupids are considered cute little flying babies that shoot arrows at people to make them want to have sex, hopefully with enough hormones and interpersonal generosity to foster love. All symbolic, of course. Yeah, my cupids are not that. They aren’t even abstract. Same language derivation, different aspect entirely. Baby cupids are so named for the lust they inject.

My version of cupids - the version from my timeline, my future yet-to-collapse - are a compendium of most of the synonyms for cupidity. They crave, they hunger even when sated, they lust. They are rapacious, voracious, greedy, avaricious, acquisitive, covetous errors of humanity.

There is little that they deem worthy that they do not want to have. And the best part of having for them is for others to not have.

Cupids, thanks to their cupidity. 

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

There are edge cases in each of these. Herders who are aware of their cognitive biases; hoi-polloi with a spot of cupidity; cupids that follow their cognitive biases unthinkingly. But they are relatively easy to spot, and rarely make a difference.

Rarely. But when they do, the difference can lead to the likes of me. It’s in the breaking of the pattern that the likes of me can emerge — somewhen down the line.

Who am I? I am the traveler, the magic man, the elf and the demon. I’m the psychosis and the kernel of creativity. I slip through the timelines, observing the confluence of our synergistic destruction and elations, hoping to study the minutiae of the patterns that can be applied to win more of the likes of me until maybe humanity can survive long enough to understand more than just ourselves.

I am the Rowan. I pop. 

Time, you see, is fungible. Timelines are fungible, too. Given perception, given knowledge, we can slip from one line to another. There are a few key reference points, but other than that...we pop.

The real reason you don’t seem to see the timey-whimy signs except in storytelling is that it’s a rare skill brought about by a rare set of circumstances. Society has to be a true society, with generosity built in and cupids kept short of true & excessive cupidity. Mass-pop needs to be thriving.  There’s a genetic mutation involved, and a rare capacity for a certain mental model. And then—once all those things are in place— individuals need to think their way into understanding.

It doesn’t come easy, and every individual’s path is different. Some can zen their way there, some have to approach it with the right balance of distraction, staring straight ahead and being aware of the movement at the very edge of their perception. Some dream into it, some don’t, and there’s no telling how someone will get their first pop. 

It’s not like we come here physically, anyway. It’s a pop. In, out. Sometimes we ride a few interesting weeks, sometimes we ride a lifetime. Sometimes our real bodies fall into a coma, sometimes its a dream, sometimes its a sneeze—really, it’s just as diverse as the path to pops.

Pop. We perceive and experience our primary life, in it’s current linearity where future conditions are collapsing to a straight-path past. Pop, we perceive a period of what was straight-line past, potentially in alternative potentialities, with all the attendant non-collapsed future conditions possibilities before us and yet known to our perception, because we’ve seen those futures before.

Pop.

And so I’m here to tell you: your world ends. All experiences end, but here and now, in this time and place, your mass-pop agreed reality is soon to fall to shambles. When the shambles are rebuilt into coordination, it won’t be the same. If the shambles are rebuilt — that potential is here, too. There is a path where the likes of me never evolve, where the mass of humanity falls into a mental model where only the elite thinkers manage the same level as today’s herd. 

Cupids really are very stupid overall, no matter how smart they may seem to the outside, no matter how well they’ve played the greed game in their small span of time. They are so focused on their cupidity that they can’t see they need the herd and the hoi-polloi; that the true goal is to lift mental models beyond the herd and mass-pop be predominantly hoi-polloi, start producing masses of gurus, and eventually Rowans. 

Cupids are so intent on having the haves that they prefer the herd over hoi-polloi. They want control so they can have the haves, and the herd is easier to control. Lie a little, spin a little, and the herd will comply.

Sure, some of the herd is complying. They are complying into a rank, steaming hill of future-tense death, leaving a residual herd so beaten into submission that they will entirely give up thinking.

The sane, intelligent portion of those who don’t believe they need to be in control of masses, who haven’t given up their freedom to think — the strongest of the hoi-polloi? They’ll fight, and die in the residual virus. Where the herd died, they lived — but not long enough for a vaccine. The vaccine was kept by the cupids, for the cupids. 

The cupids win. For a year or three. The vaccine will be proven non-viable, too late. They’ll have killed off those with the training and intelligence to thwart them, who also happen to be those with the training and intelligence to thwart the virus.

So in the end, the virus wins with the willful help of those who believed they had finally found the leverage they needed to fully enslave mass-pop — all while calling it something else.

There will be a few who are naturally immune. There will be a few who will harbor the virus non-symptomatically for the rest of their lives, a new breed of Typhoid Marys. No one without immunity or a pool will live more than 6 months. 

Unless the other path is chosen by a significant enough portion of mass-pop, and the cupids lose their control. I think this is the timeline. Maybe. I hope.

I see I’ve captured enough of your attention to keep you reading. You poor thing. 

The chances are good that you are most curious about the coming destruction. 

“If we know the path, we can thwart it,” you’ll think. Good luck. It’s rare. It can happen — I’m proof of it — but don’t depend on it. So many cognitive biases have to be course-corrected. Have you seen the stickiness of racism?

So reading this history of what’s to come is more like reading a dimestore romance. What are they here? Ah, Harlequin Romances. 

It’s formulaic and makes you feel like something unrealistic might be possible. The formula is one that you might not see from your perspective, but it’s there. The story is short and easy to digest — an afternoon of your time, snacking on your favorite eats and drinks while the rain or snow outside promises you that you’re not missing much of import. It makes you feel good. It makes you feel like love is possible, no matter how broken or ugly you might be. Yes, the heroine is always broken. He or she thinks they are somehow ugly only to find that they’re not necessarily, if they find the right person. There always comes a moment that tips them from believing they are unlovable, to understanding that they are loved, right now, by this one other person.

It’s mind candy. The path is implacable. The setup unrealistic — those who don’t believe they are lovable will never truly believe they are loved. All the story is doing is setting down a path to an inevitable, unrealistic end.

All this story can do for you is set you on the path to an inevitable end, and unrealistically give you hope. You might think you can thwart it, but it takes more than one to thwart an avalanche. Can you rally other hoi-polloi? Can you get the herd to wake up? Can you convince the cupids of their illness?

Realistically, no. Probabilistically speaking, you would be the rarest amongst the rare.

But then, a part of you believes that the unlovable can learn to be loved, tipped over in the span of a moment.

The history of what’s to come is intricate, pulling in a domino cascade from so many networks that it’s already well past the point of inevitability once the cupids have found their network of preference in their timeline.

The details change, but the formula remains the same. In a word: apocalypse.  A societal reset button, catalyzed by almost anything, paved with death, and resulting in a different society — all aboard, no schism allowed. What is today no longer is tomorrow, and the population will be decimated.

But you already know that, in your heart of hearts. It’s in all the stories that you eat up, trying to wrap your head around the coming end before you have to experience it.

So let’s get a little more detailed. Go ahead, read the history of time to come. Read it, understand it, try to do something about it in your world — prove me wrong. Find the better path, the patterns that can be used to pull more of us into a future worth living. Take me along for the ride of a lifetime. 

Please. I don’t want to be right. I want, desperately, hopefully, to watch you find the safest path through to the next level of civilization.

But there will be some who want to skip straight to that meaty, tantalizing scent of time-whimey-ness. 

“If it’s inevitable, let it be. What’s this other trail of wonder?” you’ll posit.  You’ll be tempted to skip ahead. 

Here’s a clue, though: you’re likely going to die in the upcoming history. No Rowan has yet emerged from this timeline. But, in all honesty, we think that Rowans might spawn their own timelines as a first step to Rowanship, so who am I to say I haven’t met you already? 

We all have stories of the ah-ha moment, and our fumbling into time. They are never one and the same. We never understand and immediately start popping into different times and timelines. We build towards it, far earlier than the first ah-ha moment; and the ah-ha moment is far before the first pop.

It wouldn’t be impossible for your ah-ha moment to come from reading this. Highly improbable, but not impossible.

The probability is that you’ll chalk this up to being another novel (it is, really—don’t you believe me?). The probability is that you’ll die in the coming culls; it doesn’t matter which one. It only takes one death to snuff out all probability.

In the end, you need the coming chaos to understand. Time isn’t simple. It’s actually not linear, and until you can rise far enough above linearity to understand that, time is nothing but linear. 

Yeah, wrap your head around that: time is linear until it’s not. In your current time, in your current culture and society, humanity is barely lifting its mental models above the realm of networks and into systems. You don’t even have a word for the next step. It will likely become (at only a 64.25% probability) “wohshialis” in this timeline, if the history of time to come doesn’t cancel out all the people who would get there (itself only a 11.98% probability). Then there’s another two levels of major intersectionality before we get to timyness. 

The best way to understand the intersectionality is to understand the fall of humanity. So, yeah, go ahead and read the history of time to come. Yeah, I know I just told you destruction was inevitable. Yeah, I know I then followed up with the mind-buggary of what it takes to get into a mental model that might lead you to a time pop, if a series of highly improbable maybes come to fruition.

If you don’t try, it will never happen. 

In all reality (all the realities, ever, really), this will be simply a tantalizing, masterbatory told-you-so. Enjoy the time spent; it will be a delicious ride. Chalk it up to a non-fiction-like non-narrative fiction. Read the history of time to come in the hope that it’s a different time line, or in a different phase. Read the time pop as a lark, keeping all traces of hope that it’s actually dropping some knowledge so deep in the back of your mind that you can’t acknowledge it. When you finish, chuckle and posit and keep doing what you do.

There’s no point to changing the world. This isn’t really about your world, right? Even if maybe there’s a little too much reality for it to be fiction, it’s still fiction. Even if a few things ring true, it’s about a time to come that’s so far beyond where you live now that anything you do will be erased.

As a Rowan, I’m here to tell you that I’m just overly creative, with too much time on my hands, or maybe a creative urge that will.not.be.silenced. It’s fiction. Really.

But what you do with it really is your own decision. You have cognitive biases you can follow, or you can take a few of the nuggets here to see a cognitive bias for what it is, and make a different decision than you have before. It’s scary. Hell, it’s terrifying.

There’s not telling what will really happen when posited a question with a preconceived A or B answer, and suddenly realize that the answer is really, “take a breath, watch a bee, and choose the unposted path.”