The Chaotic Theory of 5 Year Plans

27 Jan, 2025

In 2018, in the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) work area, I sat with a few members of my cohort as we tried to imagine what would come next for us after the program ended. As Meg lamented her lack of a 5 year plan, Tim responded with something that has sat with me ever since: He prompted Meg to recount the last 5 years of her life. Listening to the recounting, it was abundantly clear that the choices she'd made over the last 5 years had lead her to this very significant life moment. Whether she knew that this specifically was what her life was arcing towards or not, she had manifested it ¹.

For most of my life, I haven't had a formal 5 year plan connected to love, career, or housing. As I've started to explore longer term planning, it's always with the recognition that the world, environment and my relationships are shifting, and I expect these plans to shift too. My heart is similar to a compass in that it is reliably pointing me forward. It does not, however, point north. It runs a circuitous path around and through my nervous system, and tightly networks with a brain that says "let's try this on and see what happens."

Even so, as a young child and consistently ever since, I have shamelessly told people, places and institutions that I will love them forever and that has often held true. It's a strange planning paradox that it can feel nearly impossible to create a time-based plan, but so very possible to commit to forever. It reminds me of a data visualization piece I made for my 1 year anniversary with my partner which (as of writing this) happens to have been approximately 5 years ago ².

The piece (that you can see here) is a scrolling data visualization of our first year together tracing back through markers of time we spent together. As you scroll, a fractal slowly unfurls behind these long distance relationship milestones. Fractals are considered “chaotic” by mathematicians because while you can step through it step by step and yield the result of the equation, you can’t predict how the function will resolve several steps ahead. ³

Watching this fractal evolve behind the text, I remember that I’ll never know how she and I will change in a year; instead we evolve day by day growing and shifting together. This "Chaotic" collaborative growth arc doesn't actually feel chaotic at all of course, it feels like a constant flow of meeting and re-meeting of our past, present and future selves.

I have had moments when a 5 year plan was covertly tucked away inside the pregnant pause that happened after someone said "I think you're cute...", or in the aftermath of saying something like "I'll only live here for a year." And even more moments when I look up at the plot-line of my life and feel a deep sense of gratitude to my past selves who helped me arrive here. Which is mainly to say... I don't always know where to find my 5 year plans but, as Tim alluded to, every time I look back 5 years I am unsurprised that all the things I've been building have lead me to where I am.