Intentionality - the fact of being deliberate or purposive. How deliberate is your every act ?
Do you know where you boat is sailing to?
Why are you on this boat?
Would you have preferred trains?
Or not going at all?
Do you miss home?
Do you know the price you paid? or are paying?
Is it still worth it now?
Will it it be worth it tomorrow?
Are you afraid to go back? My current fascination is systems thinking and one of it’s trending topics - emergentism.Science as I was taught had undertones of determinism and reductionism. What’s determinism? The idea that universe and it’s constituents are essentially like a continuous running clock. If you understand the patterns and are able to know the current state of the system - the system is now solved and you can accurately know it’s state unto perpetuity . What’s reductionism? Want to understand the behaviour of a system? Decompose the system into a set of smaller systems and try to solve each one. Solving each and combining will allow you to solve the whole.

Though these ideas have had a decent success in physics, they fall woefully short in a variety of other areas. Instead of determinism, we get chaos. The universe and it’s constituents are not a fine tuned clock but a spinning tornado . Some semblance of order but many parts in disorder. I guess most of us, inherently accept the unpredictable nature of life.

A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan which causes tiny changes in the atmosphere, which ultimately cause a tornado in USA. The flipside to reductionism is emergentism. A single particle in gas has no temperature. When thousands of particles form a gas, a new property called temperature emerges which exists in a new level of abstraction. What’s a football team? 11 people kicking a ball around a reductionist would say. Collectively the whole unit develops it’s own style. Some teams are know for graceful passing, while some others are great with counter-attacks. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and has some interesting new characteristics So why are we talking about this? Systems are all around you.
We are subject to the education system, the sewage system, the political system. Heck, we are a system. And systems are changeable and tuneable. Your ideas, thoughts and actions stem from your belief system.
My gripe is that people don’t ever consciously choose the systems they accept, they just go with the flow propagating the systems whose tradeoffs they’ve never stopped to think about. We make choices and consequently design our systems with a very low level of intentionality . When you accept, use or buy into a system, be fully aware of it’s tradeoffs. Make sure the tradeoffs are what you want to make. Know the chaos the new choice brings.