There’s something in the air: people are edgy and worried. But about what, exactly?
Despite allegedly rosy economic statistics and endless cheerleading about how the markets have bottomed and how growth is poised to come roaring back, our heads and our guts instead tell us something is very wrong.
People everywhere can feel it. They're expressing varying levels of dissatisfaction: ranging from mildly concerned, to very worried, to downright pissed off.
We see it broadly in the hostility and opinion canyons of the election cycle. Perhaps we’ve experienced it personally, through the ending of a relationship that no longer works as we need it to.
These are the signs of tipping points. The human animal senses the coming tsunami and reacts from a very deep, visceral place where emotions hold sway and reason stumbles. We are social creatures; and not all of the cues to which we react are visible or quantifiable.
The Four-Minute Mile And The 5.15 Grade
This dynamic of humans reacting to self-generated social cues cuts both ways.
For a long time, the four minute mile was the holy grail of track competitions. There was a focused pursuit of running the mile in less than four minutes, which was long considered an 'impossible' goal made unobtainable by the limits of human physiology. But then finally, on May 6th 1954, Roger Bannister stunned the world with a time of 3:59.4.
Today, the four-minute mile is the standard of all male professional middle distance runners. Something that went from a historic achievement to an ordinary occurrence is one of the markers by which we are all linked.
Once one person does something, it passes from 'impossible' straight to 'doable'. And many others then follow suit.
I rock climbed pretty seriously for a long time. Technical rock climbing routes are graded by a system where a 5.0 rating indicated when a route passes out of the 4.x range (a steep scramble) to something requiring a rope and much more skill to proceed safely.
When first devised, a 5.9 rating marked the top of the range. That was considered the upper boundary of what a human climber was capable of scaling.
But later, equipment and techniques advanced. Soon, the range had to be expanded to 5.10.
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