How Problems Spread

It's a fractal, crystalline process it seems

I have a hilarious but tragic problem on my hands.

We need some background.

I’m in the house I grew up in which I just moved back into after 40 years. My parents bought this place in 1978 and it was built in the 60’s by an architect, amazingly.

My mom died in 1983 and I’m convinced she’s the reason this place was bought, I was born, my dad was ever married(she proposed to him) and she wore the pants around here, which was fine with my father. When she died, I was on my own though. I moved out and went off to boarding school coincidentally. A very great coincidence.

Flash forward 40 years and I move back when my dad is about to turn 80 and has a grandchild(my daughter) and hasn’t worked or done anything since. Nothing. Inert. I don’t know how he’s paying for himself for all this time. But the house has become a rotting stump. Nothing around here works.

Destruction by negligence. I’m afraid to touch anything. Everything has fallen apart and been half-assed if “repaired.” But nothing worked. He finally called plumbers last week and then sent them away before getting a quote for fixing the biggest problems.

I’ve figured out that destruction by negligence isn’t a linear process, but a sporadic one. Meaning, a problem doesn’t pop up, regularly over time. What happens is that each time a problem surfaces, it emits spores of other problems that then need tending to. And those may grow, and may die, but they’re now active problems to contend with, as time is continuing to progress. And then another, and other, and it’s fractal.

And when the responsibility is in the hands of someone who cannot manage such, it begins to get really big fast.

What’s usually best: scrap it all and go back to square one if you have the time and resources. Those are the bis variables—the ones that were overlooked to begin with. You’ll usually uncover a path of backwards half-assery over time it was allowed to fester.