We have reasonably good ways of recognizing things that already work.
A person develops a useful skill and someone hires them to use it. A business sells something people already know they want. A school teaches subjects whose value has been established by generations of experience. Institutions develop roles, procedures and expectations around activities they understand well enough to repeat.
Most of this is useful.
A society that had to rediscover everything from scratch with every generation wouldn't remain a society for very long. We inherit languages, tools, institutions and accumulated knowledge precisely so that most of our effort doesn't have to be spent reinventing things other people already figured out.
The difficulty is that everything we now know how to recognize was once less recognizable.
Someone had to try it before there was a role for it.
That creates an unavoidable tension between preserving what works and making room for things whose value can't yet be demonstrated.
I used to describe this mostly in terms of calling. A person feels drawn toward some unfinished work, and the danger is that ordinary demands interrupt the process before it has a chance to become whatever it might have been.
I still think that happens.
I'm less confident that the feeling itself tells us what deserves to survive.
People become fascinated by things that lead somewhere important. We also become fascinated by terrible ideas. We mistake temporary interests for permanent identities, spend years pursuing projects that never work and occasionally discover that the thing we thought other people were preventing us from becoming wasn't particularly good for us.
That's part of emergence too.
If we want genuine novelty, we have to accept the possibility of failure because there is no reliable way to select only successful experiments before conducting them.
This is obvious in childhood.
A child draws badly before drawing well. They make noises before speaking. They develop strange temporary interests, abandon most of them and occasionally carry one forward for the rest of their lives. Nobody seriously expects a seven-year-old to demonstrate the economic value of an interest before being allowed to explore it.
Adulthood changes the economics.
Time becomes expensive. People depend on us. An afternoon spent experimenting with something is an afternoon not spent doing something else. A society therefore can't provide unlimited resources to every possible becoming, and an individual can't enact every possible version of a life.
Selection is unavoidable.
The interesting question is how early we require it.
If every activity must demonstrate its usefulness before receiving time, attention or resources, we create a peculiar problem: things that already fit existing categories have an enormous advantage over things that don't.
The accountant can explain the job.
The aspiring accountant can explain the path toward it.
Someone developing something for which there isn't yet a familiar category has a harder time answering the same questions.
Maybe that's because the idea is genuinely new.
Maybe it's because the idea is bad.
At the beginning, those can look surprisingly similar.
Markets solve part of this problem by allowing people to test whether somebody else values what they're producing. Universities, laboratories, apprenticeships, families, foundations, investors and community organizations solve other parts by supporting experiments whose value may take longer to become visible.
None is a perfect judge.
Markets overlook useful things and enthusiastically reward useless ones. Institutions can protect long-term work that would otherwise be impossible while also spending years supporting ideas that go nowhere. Families can give someone the room necessary to develop an unusual ability or protect them from feedback they desperately need.
There isn't a mechanism that lets us escape uncertainty.
There are only different ways