The North Changes

The North Forgets

Photo by Chris Curry on Unsplash

Our Social Studies teacher insisted: Always check where the north is.

The first seven questions in Social Studies were meant to be a walk in the park, but for some reason, and from the vein that popped up on his head, they were the hardest to teach. Simplicity is not simple.

These seven questions were derived from a map, hand-drawn and fictitious, with the questions derived from it. There would never miss a question asking where a certain centre was from another. For instance, it would ask where the quarry was from the church or the mosque.

If you assumed the north pointed up, to the head of the paper, you would occasionally be wrong. For that reason, the map always had a compass on the side. Sometimes it would point to the left, other times to the right, and most of the time to the top of the paper. You were never to assume.

But we assumed.

It’s natural. We assumed and yet the north always changed. This is not only true in our make-shift maps, but in life as well.

Morality

In the past, morality was the north. If you were to recommend someone, morals were the highest form of criteria used to gauge them. In some groups, it still is.

The immoral were chastised. Mary Magdalene was openly rejected by the people when he approached Jesus and cried at her feet. The people had spoken — she was immoral. She was unworthy. But the north changes.

Jesus silenced them. He did not come for the moral; he came for the sinners. He partied. He flipped tables in the temples. His mother approached him when the wine was over at the wedding. He worked on the Sabbath and reminded the ‘highly moral’ Pharisees that man was built for the Sabbath and not the reverse.

Morality was typically guided by religion. It had shaped society so much that religion was taken as the gospel truth. There was hardly a difference between religion and morality. The interpreters of the truth were the people of the way or the keepers of the faith. What they said reigned supreme.

King Henry VIII flipped the script. Like Jesus, he changed his north, and the church of England was born. Martin Luther also changed the script, and the protestant churches were born. In 1859, Charles Darwin did what these icons did, and flipped the script and natural selection came to life.

Science had something to say. The north changed.

Science

Science was like water climbing up a sponge. It occupied all spaces where religion previously reigned supreme. For instance, in the past, some tribes believed their gods were angry with them whenever they saw the eclipse.

Eight minutes of prayer, chest-beating, crying, and offerings were taken as a sign that their gods heeded their atonement. Isaac Newton later explained why a total eclipse lasts around that time. It was not the gods.

The north changed.

Darwin described his theory as showing that over time, species diverged through competition and Natural Selection. No overarching deity was necessary to explain life on Earth. Although the beginning of life remains mysterious, science still has plausible explanations for where it emerged.

Even among science, the fickle nature of the North is the reason science thrives. At one point, we had Newtonian gravity, described as a force between two masses that weakens with increasing distance between them. Einstein’s gravity defined gravity as a distortion of spacetime fabric.

The north changes.

Art

Science changes. And the creation of new theories is just as artistic as any piece of art you can think of. Art, therefore, always changes.

During the Renaissance age, artists like Michelangelo and Da Vinci embodied art. It was an age when artists were held in high regard. Florence was the hometown that attracted all types of minds.

The Renaissance mind was not only fixed on one thing. They would paint during the day and investigate corpses in the evening. Most were generalists. Today, generalists are dwindling. Educational institutions encourage specialization.

Grants and funding would not be interested in your project if it was not specific enough. They would like to see a well-defined path for your project before they can fund it. A Gantt chart and timelines. Despite this, greatness cannot be planned. But funding can.

Specialists are preferred over generalists. The north changed a long time ago. As for funding, it is also evident in scientific projects. It is present in business. Here, the north does not just change, the north is mobile.

Business and Money

You cannot beat the market.

That’s the gospel in economics. But the gospel would not be powerful if there weren’t others to defy it.

Howard Marks calls these individuals alphas. That’s because the market’s performance is referred to as the beta metric. If you defeat the beta, then you must be an alpha. These are the Warren Buffets and the Peter Lynchs.

For startups, venture capitalists invest in promising ideas hoping they would reap a unicorn from one of them. Theirs is a losing game and they are comfortable with it. They know the single unicorn will reap more profits and returns than the twenty others that failed to take off.

Most startups work with a North Star metric. This is the long-term goal the founders have for their ideas — hold or sell. Yet, the north cannot be predicted.

Money was initially metal tokens. It changed into promissory notes. Several regions used cowrie shells. At some point, it was humans as slaves. Today, it is an online figure. Some people project that cryptocurrency will be an open-source and acceptable currency.

In money and business, the north is ever-moving. If you don’t move with it, you get swallowed by the wave.

Algorithm

Entertainers have to follow two things — their audience and the algorithm.

Today’s entertainers are not found in circuses. They populate the online space. Last month, the TikTok influencers in the USA learned that they don’t own their audiences. It was a shocking reality.

Alternatively, TikTok can close shop, shattering the TikTok influencers. But while it’s still active, one has to keep posting videos to remain relevant.

At times, you have to stick with a persona or behaviour that boosts your audience. This might conflict with the kind of content you would like to share. When you become a slave of the audience, your north changes.

Meanwhile, the owners of the platform might keep the algorithm a secret. Many will claim to have cracked the algorithm only for consumers of the content to realize it was all a sham, clickbait for people to go through their content.

Writers on Medium are currently packing their bags. The reason? They can never know what the owners are doing with the money. Every month, readers and writers pay at least $5 to access all the content on the platform. Writers get paid from these regular contributions. But times have changed.

If your article is not boosted, you have slim chances of having readers. Several times, when I compare my claps with those who have six-figure followers, there is little difference between the number of claps they get and mine, although claps say little about one’s readers. Engagement cannot be fully captured.

Companies such as Meta, X, and TikTok, however, prefer to gamify it with likes, shares, and retweets. But as long as the algorithm is unknown, the north will always change.

Substack is different from all these platforms. We hope it doesn’t change. It was a platform for writers and readers, but now, it’s populated by many other creators. We hope they don’t lose the magic that brought writers to the platform.

If they do, we are assured of the audience we amassed through the email subscriptions. We can also carry our content through the export function. We hope we never get there. Still, we cannot predict, because:

The North Changes.

Passion

This is perhaps the craziest of them all. It encompasses all of the above. Morals create philosophers and saints. Science immortalizes the founders and discoverers of ideas. Business idolizes investors. Art risks giving artists peanuts for magnificent, timeless pieces. It even pits artists against each other. Online, it subjects creators to critics, who can be harsh while hiding behind an avatar.

Regardless, passion can still keep you in the game because it does not come from outside; it comes from within. Following the path that passion carves for you is like Alice getting into the rabbit hole. It takes you to a world you never anticipated. An adventure of a lifetime, as Coldplay sings.

When you follow your passion, your heart beats differently. Passion, however, could be a metric for naivete. Details can wash it off. Genuine passion, however, gets amplified by detail. I have grown in the field of evolution to the point that I can at least hold a firm stance against Darwinists.

The strong heartbeat is one of fear but also anticipation. You never know what the future holds. You only cling to your interests. At some point, Darwin’s ideas were almost shattered by Lord Kelvin, whose calculations defied Darwin’s estimates of billions of years of life on Earth. It took a whole wave of change and understanding of radioactivity for Darwin to be vindicated.

That’s how fast the north can change.

What I’m trying to say is…

If the north changes this often, is it even the North?

I think the only thing we can say is things change. As Tupac said:

That’s the way it is.

[embed]This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube

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This article was published on February 12th, 2025 in Long. Sweet. Valuable. publication.