When I was finishing college in the early 90s, one of the trends that was starting to go viral back then was the concept of fractals. Although the term had been invented in the 70s by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, it didn’t really take off in the public consciousness until about twenty years later, due in no small part to computer-generated graphics of the Mandelbrot set. Something about psychedelic imagery of Mandelbrot sets really clicked with the zeitgeist back then (largely thanks to boomers coming into their ascendancy and reliving some of their highlights from the 60s).
The core concept of a fractal is a never-ending geometric pattern that repeats itself at different scales. The word comes from the Latin fractus, meaning broken or fragmented. The pattern is very common in nature, with snowflakes being the best example: as you zoom in closer and closer into a snowflake, you see the same pattern repeating at different levels of magnification.
But like anything else that goes viral, the mathematical concept of fractals has taken off and found life well outside university math and science departments. Of course there’s all the fractal digital art that you’ve seen floating around the Internet from the last 30 years onward. And anyone who’s been a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has probably witnessed the weirdness of the Mirror Dimension in the Doctor Strange movies.
But it takes on a new level when you find yourself living inside one.
If you haven’t noticed, it’s been several years since I last posted to the website. For the last three years real life threw a monkey wrench into my life that has turned the world upside down. In 2023, I was laid off from my job, took a short-term contract job, and was laid off again in 2024. That was probably the worst time to find yourself out of work in the tech industry, as Big Tech was going through multiple rounds of layoffs and flooding the market with job-seekers. I burned through all of my savings and took on massive debt trying to stay afloat.
Sound familiar? Yeah, I went through the exact same thing twenty years ago in 2004, as I wrote about here and here.
But that’s just the beginning. In 2025 I made the acquaintance of a few people who reminded me of people I knew in 2005. And in 2026 I changed churches, twenty years after I started going back to church after an extended hiatus. In fact, pulling into the parking lot and getting guided to my parking spot brought back flashbacks of the megachurch I joined in 2006.
As Yogi Berra once famously quipped, it’s like déjà vu all over again.
The further out I zoomed, I could see many eerie parallels:
- I moved to New Hampshire in 2021, during the pandemic. I moved to Louisville in 2000, one year before 9/11.
- I started looking for churches in NH in 2022. I made the decision to leave one church in 2002 and started looking around.
- In 2006, the US was bogged down in a war in Iraq. In 2026, the US is bogged down in a war with Iran.
When I brought this up in my online mastermind group, two of them brought up the concept of fractals. One in particular made a very astute observation that I tended to be drawn to certain stories symbolically, and every time I revisited them it resulted in a leveling up.
All of us are familiar with the idea of seasons and repeating cycles. As I write this, summer is drawing to a close, the days are getting shorter, and in some parts of New Hampshire the leaves are starting to change color. Meanwhile, the Winter Olympics and World Cup both concluded earlier this year and won’t be played again for another four years. Businesses have their own cycles of boom and bust, growth and reorganization.
But some cycles occur on much longer time scales that are harder to notice. In 1997, William Strauss and Neil Howe published The Fourth Turning, a historical analysis of the rise, fall, and sometimes rebirth of civilizations. Astrology refuses to go away, because the alignment of planets and constellations at major and minor civilizational milestones seem too coincidental to ignore.
History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme a heck of a lot.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” George Santayana once wrote in The Life of Reason. But when you’re on a 20, 30, or even a 76-year cycle, you can’t see the cycle while it’s still unfolding. Sometimes you have to wait until the second arc has passed before the pattern reveals itself.