Lens 003 - Eddies

If you grew up in a family home with a pool, I'm sure a fun thing that your dad may have taught you was how to make a whirlpool. He'd tell you to follow him around the edges, and keep going around in circles forever. Eventually, you'd feel a strange force pushing you along. Walking feels easier and easier until you create a current so fast that it practically sweeps you off your feet. The limit here is yourself, unless you are including the strength and speed of your father.

This is an eddy in the traditional sense. We call it a whirlpool supposedly because it's much bigger and longer-lasting, but if you were to look at it on a grander scale, then it would just be a regular eddy. A much better example would be if you were to stir something. Consider the 'tornado' effect that gets produced when you quickly swish your spoon in a glass of water - or even better, pour milk into your coffee. You will find that as the milk starts mixing with the coffee, you get these really cool turbulent patterns. Those are eddies, and I think that we can model certain events and features of reality around this concept.

When I travelled to South Korea in 2025, I was in immense awe at their infrastructure and ways of living. Part of me wondered how a society like this was capable of constructing such huge buildings and cultivating such lavish lifestyles. Perhaps there was a lot of human labour? Maybe massive investments from government? Laissez-faire political regime? Why aren't other parts of the world like this? It was unlike anything I had seen, and I had no explanation for it. I would go to one suburb and find a mall that had more floor space than a couple football fields, then in the suburb over, another one. Every nook in the city had a shop within walking distance. You were never really far away from anything. Driving to and from the airport took us across enormous bridges and mega-highways. It was built as if it were made to service millions of people for eons - such care, craft, rigor, engineering, thought, and dedication. I would even go as far as to say that there was no way that I could think it can be better.

Society itself, I would describe as an eddy, and for the significance of Korea, this particular eddy has had a lot of energy put into it.

Think of the whirlpool example from earlier, except you are in the ocean rather than a pool. In order to get a decent whirlpool going, you need probably a dozen people. Consider this an ancient clan. Then as more people are sustained by this eddy, the more that join the whirlpool. Eventually you create a dynasty, and then a diplomacy, and a society where millions - sometimes billions - of people are sustaining this whirlpool. It becomes huge. So huge that it's gape could swallow a continent. In the case of a society, it can be considered exponential, right? So long as a mother and a father produce 2.1 children on average, we should theoretically see exponential growth in population - and hence the eddy.

So to explain Korea, my thoughts are that its grand evolution to its current state was the product of facilitating the eddy. I haven't studied history, so these are simply my speculations, but I believe some things like this were involved in the facilitation of the eddy:

The same thing goes for my occupation - software engineering.

Consider a startup of some sort, things are slow and scrappy. Stuff doesn't work, it's a mess, and people are just generally trying to make it to the next day. There's not a lot of money floating around, and often there's so much to do that you just have to drop certain things that don't make as much difference to the customer experience. This is the eddy struggling to form.

I once worked at a US-based tech startup (Instawork) that received VC funding from Silicon Valley. When I had been made redundant, and I began working at an Australian-based SaaS (Weel), I saw a stark difference - most particularly that of the anemic flow of money. Instawork had money to burn, they would throw it wherever it needed it to be. They saw that they can solve most of the problems they currently had with establishing their customer base from simply paying someone to look after specific ones. This I am specifically talking about software subscriptions and also contractors rather than long-term employees. This distinction I want to make because the fuel that drives the eddy in this case is cash, and it's very easy to forecast when that would run out. Long-term employees on the other hand are far superior investments, they are someone who swims around in circles trying to push the business forward in exchange for money. The more hands that you have, in general, the deeper and stronger the eddy - that is, if everyone is swimming in the same direction. This human capital gives your eddy the momentum to continue, rather than just the thrust. This momentum survives even after some shocks, and it is far more sustainable than capital flow - somewhat of the approach that Instawork was going for.

Weel however showed me a story of survival instead. There was general hesitation with spending any money - which was very much justified given the disparity in VC funding that you get between Australia and the US. For the first 2-3 years of my work there, I had watched the business barely move above or below about 50 employees. This was a sign that there weren't enough resources to deepen the eddy - only to sustain it. That's particularly what I felt during this time - surviving rather than thriving.

Although as I write this, I believe the situation at Weel may have reached some sort of inflexion point that is yet to play out in 2026.

These two examples so far have been from an anonymous observer looking into each system. In each of these, you are an onlooker who sees countless people swimming around in circles forever - it's seemingly absurd. You probably even scoff to yourself and tell yourself that you'll never get trapped in one of those. That is, without realising that you are in fact in one right now, no matter whether you like it or not. Often this "stuckness" is the reality of the situation. If you want to survive in modern day, generally you have to be apart of a society, and by being apart of that society, you engage in the activities that perpetuate that eddy. The most common of these interactions is a financial transaction - the microscopic component that brings the economy to life.

You go to work in your eddy to earn money, then you use that money to buy stuff that you need and also stuff that you want - each small action is pushing the economic eddy slightly forward. That 1% GDP growth this year? - that was you increasing your spending by 1%, then multiplied by tens of millions of people. Also in the society, you probably go out with friends. The act of hanging out and bonding is swimming in the eddy. Starting a family? Yet another eddy, you must dump money, food, time, love and other resources into your husband/wife and also your kids in order to sustain them. But even beyond survival itself, social media is its own infinite eddy - as in, the fact that you can infinitely scroll and find more content. Often a question I ask myself when browsing movie streaming platforms, for example, is "do I really want to commit to a new TV show right now?", i.e, do I really want to let myself into this eddy?

These are all eddies that we get ourselves into, and when we are in an eddy, either we are unaware of it, or we are aware of it, but we simply do not wish to spend the energy to swim out of it. But it is important to explicitly note that there are chances that you can stumble upon an opportunity to choose which eddy you fall into. This here is the greatest thing about the concept of eddies, which is that once you understand what they are and how they work, then you grant yourself the freedom to realise what eddies you are apart of, whether you want to be apart of them, and whether you want to let yourself enter other eddies.

Now I'm not sure how many people can relate to this, but when I was much younger, I had some deep superstition which only now I have the words to convey. I would abstain from engaging in quite a lot of things as a kid due to the fear that I can only describe as "getting stuck in the wrong eddy". There was a very novice level of self-awareness that I had which was to realise the feeling of potentially getting roped-into an eddy - but I did not possess, at the time, an intuition to listen to that particular emotion and make sense of it, so instead, I just became cold, jaded, and distant. But now that I do have the knowledge, I have far greater trust and confidence in myself to deal with the eddies as they are, and knowingly let myself go as deep as I want in them because I now know how to become aware of them and get myself out if I need to.

Let's probe this a bit deeper. I want to go into a little bit of depth over one particular eddy, and then try and show you that all eddies are formed from a symbiotic relationship. I could choose an eddy like work, for example, however, this is a particularly complicated situation involving a lot of people, and is also an activity that we as creatures subject ourselves to on the expectation to receive a delayed reward. This sort of mechanism really strips the humanity and nature out of what I'm trying to convey, so instead, I'll pick something more artistic.

I like cars, but in a very particular way. You probably wouldn't see me driving anything flash, instead, quite the opposite. The cars you'd see me drive would be teetering on the edge of breaking down at all times. But for the sake of explanation, let's suppose I like them enough to want to dump all of my money, time, and energy into them. Here's how this would go down...

I'd probably buy a Subaru WRX-STI 2011 Hatchback - my actual dream car. In order to get this car, I'd need a couple of things: A lot of money, someone who is selling the car, the capacity to pay for insurance and other maintenance, and the skills to drive it and work on it.

Starting with money, it's actually not necessary, I could actually just get a loan. To get a loan would mean I need an income of some sort, and I would need to work together with a creditor in order to finance my purchase. My actions here mean that I will probably need to be working somewhere - helping others to complete a goal. I would also be helping the creditor earn some bank too - with interest repayments. In the end, the seller of the car would receive the money - that is, they would only sell the car if they find that the money itself is more valuable to them than the car.

But how did we find the seller? With that of course, we would also need the help of someone or something else. Perhaps I found it online. This would mean that I had to use some sort of service to search and find the car. My activity here might involve some ad space on the website, so without a thought in my head about what it meant, I had helped to fund whoever or whatever runs the website. To emphasise, the simple act of me browsing or travelling had meant that someone else received some benefit at no cost to myself. I want to be here searching for the car, and the owner of the website wants people viewing their site with the ads on it. Now to be excruciatingly clear, neither myself or the person running the site loses - we both gain.

Finally the skills. In order to learn how to drive this car, I need training of some sort. If I'm lucky enough, I'd probably have some friends who know, and they can teach me at their own leisure. It would be a moment of bonding, a situation where they have some knowledge that they would love to pass onto someone - or perhaps they wish to become the teacher so that they can hone their own skills. It will cost me fuel, and probably some wear on my car, but in the end, I will have a bit better knowledge of how to drive this thing.

In the end, you'll probably find me at some JDM car meets showing off my car and mingling. The pleasure I get for showing off my ride at one of these events is in my own self-interest, however, another younger version of me might be at one of those meets, and simply by having my car there, I'm able to bring some happiness, awe, and potentially inspiration to someone else.

Step back for a moment now, feel free to go and re-read everything after I tell you this. Pretty much every action I performed was in my own self-interest. I didn't really have a care in the world for many of the other people there or what they were giving me - but now I can look back and truly be grateful for it. The point of this is that the world can operate in this way. Unlike what I had once believed before, selfishness is not the root of all evil. In fact, what I have demonstrated here is that it has the potential to create some of the most pleasurable experiences that we know of.

Considering the example of work here, we lose something every time we walk into the office or log onto our computers - our time, and souls. But after some effort, we get a reward in the form of a paycheck. The employer benefits from our labours at the loss of capital, and we benefit by receiving this wealth in exchange for our time, energy, and expertise. These sorts of exchanges are favourable, but are not the best that we can achieve. We knowingly put aside our instincts and animalistic feelings in order to delay some sort of gratification. Consider also that work is limited by resources, that is, the eddy here is limited by how much money the company can make. Instead, we can find more pleasure (potentially limitless) in situations where both sides benefit without having to lose anything.

This concept I believe is the force behind some of the strongest and most pleasurable eddies that we find in our reality at present. The fact that two selfish agents, both without regard for one another, can engage selfishly with each other in a way that actually benefits both of them. This is the true definition of symbiosis, and we see it in nature too. Rhetorically, why would you not want a situation like this? I believe it is just to take this eddy as deep as you possibly can.

Consider the next time when you come across someone you think is a little self-centered, or is acting in a way that should only benefit them. Instead of making any judgement, first consider that they are simply 'testing the waters' in order to find such an eddy. They are actually searching for an ideal configuration of their environment in order to engage in this symbiosis. That is, they need someone else, with the right conditions, personality, resources, and understanding in order to cooperate in a mutually beneficial fashion. Given enough time and resources, they will discover this eddy themselves, but in order to do so, they must actively engage in conflict with others.

I want to end this lens with one small note for myself. I might come back to this piece sometime later once I better study the laws of thermodynamics. I believe that the concept of eddies here runs far deeper than simply an interaction of two agents. I believe thermodynamics can be used to explain why this is pleasureable - because it is a law of the universe.