After six months at Cornell University, I left my entire freshman friend group. Of all the things I expected might have saved it, systems thinking was the last one.

We met at the orientation week ice cream social. The air hummed with sugar and chatter, cones dripping, sprinkles scattering on the grass, and a wall of noise so thick you had to lean within a foot of someone just to catch a sentence. I couldn't bring myself to approach a single group. It was on one of my retreats from yet another failed attempt that I bumped into Nathan, a skinny fit guy in a white button up and teal khaki shorts. We looked each other in the eyes and simultaneously realized we were in the same boat.

By the end of that night, I'd stumbled into a friend group: Nathan, Leah, Marcus, and Claire. The terror of orientation week made us stick together like cats glued at the tails. None of us said it out loud, but the math was simple: alone is dangerous, together is safe.

Within weeks, cracks I couldn't name started showing. None of them were into self-improvement. None of them were content creators. When I tried to talk about goals, or growth, or what we actually wanted from college, the conversation would politely redirect to homework complaints and weekend plans. I labeled them in my head without realizing I was doing it. I was sorting my friends into filing cabinets I didn't know I'd built. Not ambitious. Drawer closed. Not curious. Drawer closed. Not like me. Cabinet locked.

But I couldn't leave. The fear of navigating Cornell friendless kept me glued to a group I was quietly judging. I kept showing up to meals. Kept forcing laughs about how hard the homework was (it wasn't, I was a Human Development major). Kept pretending the weekend excited me (more conversations like these, great). Six months of sensing something was off and not having the language for what.

Then one night, we finally get together for dinner at RPCC. I'm buzzing. It's been weeks since we've all been in one place. I imagine us reflecting on the semester, maybe even going deeper. We sit down, and I prepare by first deep question, until one by one, every person pulls out their phone. Fingers flick upward in unison. TikTok laughter ripples across the table. Five minutes. Twenty. A full hour. My food went cold. The dining hall buzzed around us but our table had gone vacuum-sealed, each person wrapped in their own blue glow. I chewed without tasting. I couldn't participate. I didn't even have TikTok.

Watching them scroll, something buried under months of insecurity and homesickness finally surfaces: we are not friends. We are acquaintances, sealed together by the sticky slime of proximity.

I stand up, throw away most of my plate, and walk back to my dorm. I never see them again.

What I couldn't see then was the real problem. I spent those six months thinking categorically about my friends. Lazy. Unambitious. Wrong for me. I never once asked what patterns we were producing together that none of us were producing alone. I never noticed how I was shaping the group just as much as it shaped me. And I had no framework for understanding why I stayed so long in something my gut had flagged in week three.

That framework, it turns out, has a name. I learned it through reading Donella H. Meadows' Thinking In Systems, Nassim Taleb's Antifragile, and taking part in Robert Gilman's Bright Future Now course among many other things. Particularly Robert's Bright Future Now course inspired much of this article so I highly recommend checking it out. Systems thinking doesn't just explain friend groups. It explains why grade culture swallows students who know grades don't equal learning. Why toxic productivity infects people who genuinely value rest. Why political conversations on campus collapse into tribal shouting matches between people who all claim to value nuance.

The pattern underneath all of it is the same: we are embedded in systems we can't see, being shaped by forces we haven't learned to name.

What Is Systems Thinking And Why Should You Care About It?

Systems thinking is seeing the world in parts and wholes, whose complex relationships matter as much as the individual parts themselves.

There are a lot of types of systems. We probably learned about mechanistic systems like how temperature change works in our houses. But for the purpose of this article, we're going for the big beluga, the king of the systems thinking world: Complex Adaptive Systems, or CASs. A complex adaptive system is a system made of many semi-autonomous agents whose interactions produce emergent patterns that allow the whole system to evolve over time.

If that sounded complex, don't worry. I'm about to make it come alive with the power of humor and examples.

Our immune system is a CAS. The ecology of a forest is a CAS. Our selves, and all the parts which make them up, are CASs. Our entire university, with its grading culture, plastic undercooked pasta, clubs, majors, and silent hierarchies of who sits where in lecture, is a CAS.

CASs are much more complicated than the mechanistic systems we're used to. They're agentic, emergent, evolutionary, and self-organizing. They're paradoxical, looping back on themselves in non linear ways. If you didn't understand the words above, don't worry. I'll explain them in more detail later.

Let's narrow in on the CAS which I opened this article with: our friend circles.

Our friend circles are made of many semi-autonomous agents (friends) whose hangouts, texts, and late night procrastination binges create emergent patterns that shape us and our circles over time. My unawareness of systems thinking cost me my first freshman friend group. Nobody sat me down and said, "Aidan, your personality will now be co-authored by five people you met near a soft serve machine." But that's what happened. And I didn't like the outcome.

This might seem abstract, and that's the point. Most students, even many professors, don't think in systems. Systems are like clouds. We know they're there but defining their shape and how it's relevant to us is simply too much for most people. Which begs the question.

Why Don't We Have More Systems Thinkers?

I wrote in my article on Parsing Truth From Bullshit Amidst AI about the time I got in an argument with my friend Hayung in high school. I told him all fat people were fat because they ate too much. I took something as tangled as obesity: genetics, food deserts, mental health, cultural norms, corporate incentives, sleep deprivation, and crammed it into one categorical box.

If categorical thinking does that kind of damage to how we see a single person, imagine what it does to how we navigate an entire friend circle. Or choose a career. Or evaluate whether our education system is actually working.

Categorical thinking is the major reason we don't have systems thinkers. Categories are generalized abstractions for groups of objects. Apple. Tree. Christian. Lazy person. Categorical thinking is the reliance on these categories to interpret reality, and it riddles our college lives:

We judge friends as "good" or "toxic" without considering what the friendship system is producing in both directions. We treat grades like a holy grail, as if a 3.8 GPA is a fundamentally different species than a 3.4. We think about careers as monolithic things rather than hugely varied experiences depending on the country, the job, the boss, the Tuesday.

So why do we lean on categories so hard?

Because they simplify. They make communication possible. Without categories, ordering coffee would take forty-five minutes: "I'd like a medium-dark liquid, extracted from a roasted seed, heated to approximately the temperature of mild regret, served in a vessel I can cradle while pretending to study."

Categories are tools. Good ones. But without care, they harden. The richness gets sanded down, the edges disappear, and we start mistaking the map for the territory it was supposed to represent.

The reasons we default to categorical thinking go much deeper than convenience, though. Our minds, our bodies, and our culture all conspire to keep us there.

Mentally, most of us are stressed, emotionally dysregulated, and running on a cocktail of imposter syndrome and comparison. We aren't taught emotional intelligence in school. Most of society doesn't practice it. Categorical thinking is like the One Ring: powerful, tempting, and seductive. It promises clarity in exchange for nuance, and when our nervous systems are buzzing with cortisol, that trade feels worth it every time. The difference is Frodo knew the ring was dangerous. Most of us think we're just being logical.

The body participates too. Poor sleep, terrible nutrition, and vanishing exercise habits collapse us toward blunt thinking. It's hard to hold complexity when your nervous system is in survival mode (check out my article on stress regulation for more on this).

Culturally, college tilts toward grades, extrinsic motivation, and getting things done. None of this is any individual student's fault, or any professor's, or any dean's. It's the factory system we've inherited over centuries, optimized for sorting people into boxes rather than helping them see the connections between them.

Zoom out further and the picture gets worse. Gen Z and older Gen Alpha are climbing a financial ladder where someone sawed off the bottom three rungs and left a motivational poster that says "Just Jump Higher." Short form content structures compress our attention spans tighter and tighter, like a sponge wrung dry of patience.

But perhaps the deepest reason is this: the alternative is terrifying.

Imagine living your whole life on a planet, getting used to its biomes, flora, and fauna. Building relationships on its surface. And then realizing there is a universe a bajillion times bigger than you could ever imagine out there, and you are a speck floating in a splotch of black paint.

That's what our ancestors had to go through a few centuries ago. And it's what we're going through now, making the transition from categorical thinking to systems thinking.

But the transformation is worth it. It can save friendships. It can solve climate change. It can intellectually fulfill you more than any Dunkin Donut ever could. Let's uncover what systems thinking actually entails to learn how to do it ourselves.

Your Systems Thinking Toolkit

CASs have four unique aspects which differentiate them from other systems. By understanding these four things, we can not only identify CASs, but learn to navigate them. To make them digestible, I'll go back to showing how each one shaped the eventual loss of my first freshman friend group.

Agentic

Agents are the semi-autonomous parts of a CAS. Could be a student, a business, a country, or in this case, an individual friend in a friend circle. The defining feature of agents is they can influence the system regardless of the other agents. This doesn't mean they aren't affected by them. They very much are.

Each of my freshman friends was agentic, too agentic even. The terror of orientation week made us stick together. But once that fear faded, our American independent ideals led us to separate more and more, losing the initial group identity that made us feel close. We were less a friend group and more a loose coalition of people who happened to know each other's dining hall schedules.

Emergent

The sum of the individual parts of a CAS create properties which can't be found studying the parts in isolation. Immune cells come together to fight off disease. Introducing wolves to an ecosystem paradoxically changes the river's behavior by influencing plant and animal life downstream.

My friend group had its own emergent flavor. None of us individually were chronic procrastinators. But together, we procrastinated more, made jokes about how hard classes were, got Boba seemingly every day. The group had a metabolism of its own. It was only six months in that I tasted something bitter in it: this wasn't the type of growth I wanted. The emergent effect wasn't visible in any single friendship. It lived in the spaces between us, like mycelium running beneath a forest floor, feeding patterns none of us planted on purpose.

Evolutionary

CASs change over time. Monkeys evolved into humans. Flip phones evolved into the zombie devices we carry now. Friend circles are no different.

For me, the issue was paradoxically that I changed and my friends didn't. As I got more and more into self-improvement and self-actualization, they kept caring about grades. That's their right. Grades matter depending on your future. But what mattered to me was shifting beneath my feet, and the friend circle's attractor hadn't shifted with it. I felt like a plant growing toward light that was coming from a different window than the one the rest of the garden faced.

Self-Organizing

CASs don't have a central command hub. They self-organize. You can see this beautifully through murmuration: thousands of starlings flying together in synchronized, shape-shifting patterns at dusk, with no conductor, no plan, just local rules creating global choreography.

In my freshman friend group, there was no central organizer. Different people reached out at different times, depending on the occasion and the event. Until we could all sense the ending, and people reached out less and less. The texts got shorter. The hangouts got rarer. Nobody called a meeting to dissolve the group. It just dissolved, the way fog lifts off a lake in the morning. Slowly, then all at once.

Attractors

So why is thinking about our friend circles as CASs so powerful?

Because once we do, we can ask: how is my friend circle influencing me? In systems thinking language, what's the attractor of my friend circle? Attractors are equilibrium points in CASs, the states a system tends to settle into. We see them in population curves, grade point averages, and in the quiet gravitational pull of who we spend our Tuesday nights with.

Some questions to sit with:

• What behaviors is your friend circle attracting you towards?
• What future are you being pushed towards by the people closest to you?
• Do you feel your friend circle is a positive or negative influence? Who in specific might be contributing to that?

These questions can feel heavy. But the good news is, we don't have to change the whole system at once.

Requisite Variety: Finding The Bottleneck

Here's where it gets practical.

Requisite variety is the idea that our toolkit needs to be as varied as the system we're working with. If we're trying to navigate a CAS as complex as a friend circle with only one or two skills, we'll always be outmatched. The system has more moves than we do.

So what's in the toolkit? And more importantly, what happens when a tool is missing?

Self-understanding. Without it, we can't tell whether a friendship feels off because of them or because of us. I spent six months blaming my friends for not being curious enough. Turns out I was also not curious enough, just about different things. Like why I kept showing up to dinners that made me miserable.

Emotional intelligence. Without it, we miss the signals that a friend is pulling away or that tension is building beneath the surface. One night it detonates over something stupid, like who forgot to save a seat at the dining hall. We needed sonar, and instead we were navigating by squinting.

Time management. Without it, our friend circle dictates our schedule by default. The loudest texter wins the evening. The procrastinators absorb our study hours. We wake up wondering where the semester went while our grades quietly rot in the background like fruit forgotten at the bottom of a bag.

Social skills. Without them, we can't set boundaries without nuking the relationship, or start new friendships outside our bubble. We get trapped in a friend circle we've outgrown with no exit strategy and no incoming replacements. The system calcifies.

Purpose. Without it, we have no filter for who belongs in our life. Our friend circle assembles by proximity and convenience rather than resonance. Three semesters later we realize we've been shaped by a group whose attractor was Netflix and complaint sessions, and we've absorbed that attractor into our bones without noticing.

The question isn't whether we need all five. We do. The question is: which one is the bottleneck right now? That's where the leverage is. Not in trying to overhaul the entire system overnight, but in finding the one constraint that, if loosened, lets everything else shift.

Requisite variety changes depending on the system you're coming towards. The variety for a friend circle will be different then changing a political system which will be different from changing your studying strategy. But there are consistencies. Too much to dive into in this article, but know they are there.

We Need More Student Systems Thinkers (Conclusion)

We need systems thinking more than ever. And we can be a part of beckoning it into universities.

We are each a part of a myriad of systems. By changing ourselves, we become one small perturbation in the larger pattern. That's not going to produce radical change on its own. Radical change happens collectively. But it gives us something to do as we learn more about systems. Witness. Reflect. Act.

Witness things occurring in your life. Reflect on if they might be complex adaptive systems. How do they correspond to the things we learned about CASs above? And most importantly, what can you do with this knowledge?

I suggest you start with the most controllable CAS available to you: yourself. All the parts, contradictions, shadows, and aspirations that make up the system of who you are. Grow that, and the circles around you will start to feel the ripple.

This is the lens I wish I had when my first friend circle was drifting apart. I wouldn't have blamed myself or blamed them. I would have seen the system: its attractor, its emergent patterns, the way it self-organized around convenience rather than growth. And I would have known that leaving wasn't failure. It was evolution.

I still think about my first friend group. Six months isn't a long time to be friends, but in such a transformative time, it felt like an eternity. The more I learn about systems, the more I realize: my friendship story isn't separate from yours. The thread connecting your friend circle to mine is thinner than a strand of spider silk. And hopefully, as you work on navigating your systems, our threads will only become more and more connected.

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