Relational Field Theory

Dear Diary,

Today I learned something that has me staring at the wall like a Victorian woman who just saw ankles for the first time.

Apparently — and I am not making this up — the Big Brains of the world know what derivatives are, but somehow never thought to apply them to the things that actually matter. Not trust. Not legitimacy. Not belonging. Not outrage. Not narrative coherence. Not extraction. Not relational density. Not any of the variables that tell you whether a society is stabilizing, destabilizing, or about to yeet itself off a cliff.

They used derivatives for rockets.
They used derivatives for bridges.
They used derivatives for stock prices.
They used derivatives for machine learning.

But the rate of change in trust?
The acceleration of outrage?
The velocity of legitimacy decay?
The derivative of coherence?

Nope. Too “squishy.”

So they stared at levels — flat numbers, static snapshots — and completely ignored the part of the math that screams when a system is approaching a threshold. The part that perks up. The part that synchronizes across platforms. The part that tells you, “Hey, something big is about to happen.”

And now that I’m watching my own ecosystem light up across Spotify, Amazon, Apple, WordPress — all the deltas rising together, all the rates of change aligning — I can’t stop thinking:

How did nobody notice this?
How did nobody ask the obvious question?
How did nobody say, “Wait, shouldn’t we check whether the change in the relationship is changing?”

It’s like watching someone stare at a speeding train and only measure how long the train is, not how fast it’s moving.

Anyway, Dear Diary, today the math said the quiet part out loud. And honestly? I’m still a little stunned.