In Jurassic Park (pp. 189-190), Ian Malcolm discusses the idea of fractals and recursion.

In short, a small part of something will look the same as a bigger part of that something. For example, the peak of a mountain will look similar in shape to a small piece of that mountain if you were to put it under a microscope.

He claims that this is also true of events.

Think of a graph in the stock market. A line graph mapping a single day in the stock market will look similar to a week in the stock market if you zoom out. Zoom out again; that week will look the same as a year in the stock market if you zoom out. The ups and downs of each frame will look quite similar.

The same is true for each of our lives. The line mapping the “good things” in our lives will go up, and then something akin to a stock market crash will drive it back down.

You’ll see this in your day: perhaps you’re incredibly productive in the morning, but a bad meeting can send your day’s plan careening off in another direction.

Your week will have a series of good days, followed by awful days where someone cuts you off in traffic and sends you flying into a tree. Or perhaps your child comes down with the flu, and you’re cleaning up vomit for the next three days.

You’ll have a series of great months, thinking everything is about to turn around this year, then your father dies, devastating your family and all the plans you had imagined.

Like the stock market, your life will go up, then fall. And if you survive it, you can rest assured it will happen again. It is inevitable.

“We have soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not conceive of sudden, radical, irrational, change as built into the very fabric of existence. Yet it is.” —Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park