Everything Is a System
I didn't learn to see systems on purpose. I was just a confused kid. Things that seemed obvious to everyone else made no sense to me—the amount of rules people followed without knowing they were following them. Rules nobody wrote down but everyone enforced. I wanted to understand, so I watched. I'm still watching.
I didn't realize this until I started studying art more seriously, but every good caricature artist can draw realistically. Really well. That's not optional—it's prerequisite. The only way to know which features to exaggerate is to first understand how faces actually work.
They know where to look because they know how to see.
That's what watching systems gave me. Not total control—nothing gives you that—but more agency than I had before. The ability to see which parts are load-bearing and which parts are decoration. Which rules exist because they have to, and which exist only because nobody ever questioned them. Seeing doesn't magically free you, but it gives you more ways to move than just "comply or rebel at random."
I should admit: even that distinction—"load-bearing" vs. "decoration"—is something I learned somewhere. The way I judge rules is also a rule I inherited. There is no pure outside. I'm still in the systems I'm mapping. But I can see more of them than I used to, and that's already different. A system you can name is a system you can at least lean on differently.
Someone in a house dies. A family member. How long before it's "acceptable" to throw a party there?
Most people feel the answer is not now. Almost nobody can say when.
A week? A month? A year? After the funeral? There's no number. Just a shared sense that doing it now would be wrong.
That sense is a system rule. Nobody wrote it. Nobody voted on it. Nobody knows when it ends. But people follow it anyway.
There are thousands of these. The stated rules are easy to find. "We love each other." "We value work-life balance." "We're all honest here." The actual rules are harder. They live in what people do when no one's keeping score. In what gets punished without being named. In what everyone knows but nobody says.
The gap between those two is the system. The real one. Or at least, the part of it you can see for now.
Once you see a rule, the question shows up: does it deserve my obedience?
Some do. Don't lie to people who trust you. Don't take what isn't yours. Show up when you said you would. Not because someone wrote them in a book, but because they quietly hold up things you're not willing to lose: trust, safety, the ability to look at yourself in the mirror. Break them and you don't just break a rule; you become someone you like less.
Other rules are just inherited habits dressed as truth. The ones that say saying no requires justification. The ones that say you owe loyalty to people who only share your past. The ones that say wanting something for yourself is selfish.
Those aren't automatically evil. Some old rules carry real wisdom: traditions that keep people woven together, rituals that make grief survivable, loyalties that mean someone will show up when everything falls apart. But age isn't proof of goodness either. A rule can be ancient and still be a parasite.
The question isn't "is it old?" The question is:
What does this rule protect? Who does it protect? And who does it quietly sacrifice?
When you answer that honestly, new options appear. You might not be able to scrap the rule entirely, but you can bend it, opt out in certain contexts, or create a different rule for your own life. That's agency—not magic, but more room to choose than "this is just how it is."
I've broken rules I should have kept. I've obeyed rules I should have broken. I still get it wrong. But at least I'm asking.
I've brought up things nobody wanted to talk about. Sometimes someone exploded. Sometimes someone cried. Sometimes someone quietly respected me more and never said it. Sometimes they all pretended I hadn't spoken.
I've set boundaries and watched people adapt. I've set boundaries and watched people punish me. I've set boundaries and discovered who was only around because I was easy to use.
The price isn't evenly distributed. Some people can break a rule and get called bold. Some people break the same rule and get called crazy, difficult, ungrateful, disposable. The system has favorites, and if you're not one of them, your "no" costs more.
You can't escape the price. You can only choose whose pocket it comes from, and for what. Breaking rules doesn't reset a system. It triggers more of it. If you're going to swing a hammer, know what's made of glass, and notice who will be made to sweep it up. Sometimes agency looks less like "smash it all" and more like "hit this specific spot, in this specific way, at this specific time."
There's another price that doesn't leave obvious marks: once you learn to see systems, it's hard to stop. You walk into a room and instead of just being there, you start tracing the seating chart, the power lines, who is performing for whom, whose smile doesn't reach their eyes. It's like getting stuck backstage at a magic show: you understand the trick, but you lose the easy joy of being fooled. That vigilance is useful, especially if you've been hurt, but it's also exhausting. Your brain keeps running analysis in the background, burning energy you never exactly agreed to spend. Part of agency is learning not just how to see, but when to let yourself look less closely for a while, to let a moment be just a moment instead of another diagram. And if you keep checking every angle anyway, it's worth noticing that this, too, is a kind of rule: stay alert, stay analytic, never relax.
Which brings me to another kind of system: the one that runs inside your own head.
I had rules I never said out loud. The ones that said I had to earn rest. The ones that said asking for help was weakness. The ones that said if someone left, it was because I wasn't enough.
Those didn't come from nowhere. They were built out of what worked once: families, teachers, survival strategies, the way I stayed safe or loved or invisible. Some of those rules deserved a medal for getting me this far. They also deserved retirement.
I don't get to map everyone else's patterns and then call my own "just the way I am."
Same questions. What is this rule doing for me? What is it doing to me? Who gave it to me? Did it keep me alive once, and is it still needed now? Is it true, or just old?
The moment you can see an internal rule as a rule and not "just me," you get a sliver of distance from it. You may still follow it today. But now you can experiment. Bend it on Tuesdays. Test what happens if you rest before you've "earned" it. Say no once and see who's still there after. Tiny tests, but they add up. That's how self-systems change: not by hating them, but by trying new moves.
If you ask those questions, be gentle. Don't turn "see every system" into a new law to beat yourself with. Sometimes "I don't know yet, but I'm looking" is a good enough answer.
There's a pull, once you start seeing this, to fight everything. Or to collapse into "it's all broken anyway."
Neither helps.
I don't blow up every broken dynamic I see. I don't quit every job the moment I spot the pattern. I don't confront every friend about every quiet hypocrisy.
Sometimes I stay quiet because the cost isn't worth it. Sometimes I stay somewhere bad because I need what it gives me while I build something else. Sometimes I go along with something I don't respect because it's simply not my hill and I only have so much blood to spend.
Maybe that's patience. Maybe it's fear wearing patience's clothes. Often it's both. I'm not always the best judge of which is which, but I try to ask, and I try not to call myself a coward for needing time.
Choosing your battles is still a choice. Endurance can be wisdom; it can also be self-betrayal. No slogan will sort that for you. Only attention will. But the more you see the pattern of when you endure and when you move, the more deliberate those choices can become.
I should be careful here. This isn't a theory of everything. Randomness is real. You meet someone because you both turned left instead of right. You miss the one person who would have understood you because the train doors closed a second too soon. Chaos doesn't care about your pattern recognition.
You can understand exactly why you're afraid and still be afraid. You can see the system clearly and still get wrecked by it. You can map a pattern and miss the one human being who doesn't fit it at all.
The caricature artist analogy holds, but only so far. Faces follow rules. People mostly do. But every face has something that escapes the sketch. Every system has something that slips through your model of it. You never see the whole of anything.
You don't control the universe. You don't control other people. You don't always control yourself.
But you can stop treating invisible rules like the word of God. You can decide which games you're willing to play, which roles you'll no longer audition for, which scripts you're done reciting. You can't rewrite every system around you, but you can rewrite your part in it more than you were told.
They're just systems. Some are kind. Some are cruel. Some are tired and ready to be changed. Some are doing a job you'd miss if they vanished.
You're allowed to look. You're allowed to ask what a rule is costing, and who. You're allowed to keep the ones that hold up the kind of life you actually want, and lay down the ones that only keep you small.
And if you need to go slowly while you practice new moves, that's allowed too.
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