In the previous piece, we stopped at something that sounds almost trivial: we are made of matter. Of the same atoms as stars, rocks and air. In that sense, nothing in us is “outside the world” – we’re simply a fragment of the same physical-chemical whole, governed by the laws described by physics and chemistry. But when we look at a human being only as a pile of elements, we very quickly run out of words for what is most alive in us. At some point it turns out that this matter doesn’t just sit there – it’s constantly doing something: exchanging, reacting, organizing, maintaining itself. And at that point, the simple question “what am I made of?” stops being enough.
That’s the moment when it’s worth asking a slightly uncomfortable, but very honest question: how is it even possible that we can say for years “it’s still me”, when most of the molecules in our body have long since been replaced? What is it exactly that keeps us going when we sleep, get sick, fall apart in a crisis, or feel like we’re completely breaking down? What makes it so that out of all that movement, noise, micro-failures and repairs, something still emerges that we recognize as “me”? This is where systems thinking really begins: instead of looking only at the pieces, we start looking at the relations between them; instead of asking “what am I made of?”, we start asking “how does this work?” and “how does this hold together?”.
In everyday life we talk about ourselves as if we were things. This is my body, my head, my hands, my heart. It sounds like a description of equipment: something you can put in one place, look at from all sides, stick a label on saying “this is me” and be done with it. That language is convenient, but it’s also very static. In the background it smuggles in an image of a human as a kind of meat-furniture: it stands, sometimes it moves a bit, sometimes it breaks. The problem is that when we look at this piece of “furniture” from the inside, we discover that nothing in there ever really stands still. Blood is circulating, neurons are firing, cells are dividing, others are dying, the immune system is running its quiet wars, and body and mind are constantly reacting to everything that reaches us. From this perspective, a human being much less is and much more is happening.
To even begin to grasp this, we need one word: system. In the most human sense: a system is something made of many elements, between which there are relationships, and which together do something none of the elements could do on their own. A forest is not just trees, fungi, bacteria and animals added up – it’s a forest, with its own microclimate, water cycles, ways of responding to change. A city is not just buildings, streets, people and regulations – it has its rhythm, traffic jams, tensions, a certain “character”. An organism is not just a bag of cells and tissues – it is someone who can run, be afraid, love, remember, plan. Modern biology and the sciences of the human are moving more and more boldly in this direction: organisms are complex dynamic systems that maintain order through constant exchange of energy, matter and information with their surroundings. If that movement were to suddenly stop, we wouldn’t reach some kind of “perfect peace”, but a very quick end.
So if we want to describe a human being honestly, it’s better to stop seeing ourselves as a lump of flesh and bone, and start seeing ourselves as a living, self-regulating system. A system that exists only because it’s constantly doing something: exchanging, adjusting, reacting, sometimes defending itself, sometimes breaking down and trying to put itself back together. Even when you’re lying on the couch saying you’re “doing nothing”, your body and mind are doing an enormous amount of work just to keep you from falling apart. And this is where three words appear that will keep coming back: homeostasis – how the system maintains balance; embeddedness in ecosystems – how it is woven into other systems; and emergence – the moment when something more than the sum of the parts appears out of the whole. It may sound academic, but you can feel it in very simple examples.
Let’s start with the most down-to-earth level: the body. We usually notice it only when something stops working. But long before you say “I don’t feel well”, regulation is already happening inside. Go out in winter without a hat – after a while you start to shiver. That’s not your “weakness” – I mean it might be too in some degree, but mostly it’s a very clever way of turning up heat production in your muscles. Roast yourself in an overheated room – you start to sweat. That’s not “embarrassing”, it’s your built-in air conditioning switching on. Go a long time without eating – suddenly you’re irritable, foggy, desperate for immediate fuel. That’s not a moral failure of your willpower, it’s the system signalling: we’re out of fuel, sort something out before this gets worse. All of this is homeostasis – the ability to keep conditions inside within a workable range, even though outside things are constantly changing. And what matters here is this: balance does not mean lack of movement. It’s more like dynamic stability – millions of tiny micro-corrections every second, like the small movements of the steering wheel that let you drive “in a straight line”.
You can see similar mechanisms in the mind. When there are too many stimuli – informational, emotional, relational – the system tries to maintain something like psychological balance. You start avoiding topics that hurt too much, minimising the problem, rationalising, going back to old, familiar patterns even if you consciously know they’re bad for you. From the outside it can look like laziness, self-sabotage or “toxic choices”. From the inside it is often simply an attempt to protect yourself from overload. Psychology is taking this idea more and more seriously: just as the body has its homeostasis, the psyche has its own kind of balance system – something that tries to protect a coherent sense of “me”, a sense of meaning, a minimum level of emotional stability. And what’s more – body and mind are so tightly coupled here that separating them is almost artificial: the way you experience emotions affects your immune system and hormones, and the state of your body affects your mood and your ability to think. Bodily and psychological homeostasis are, in practice, one intertwined process.
Of course, this system has its limits. It’s not a magic shield that always holds. A useful metaphor is a ball in the hollow of a bowl. When everything is “within normal range”, the ball can roll around a bit, but it comes back roughly to the centre. When you live with chronic stress, little sleep, constant tension, the bowl begins to tilt and the ball hits the edges more and more often. And sometimes there comes a moment – another loss, another blow, another crisis – when the energy is simply too much and the ball jumps out of the bowl. In life, this looks like a breakdown, illness, a depressive episode, burnout, panic attacks. That is no longer just a “temporary dysregulation” that will “go back to normal” on its own – it’s a sign that the previous way of maintaining balance isn’t enough anymore. And instead of asking “why am I so weak?”, you can ask: “how did my system try to keep going, how much did it cost, and where did it finally give way?”.
At this point it’s worth pausing with yourself for a moment. Asking a few really simple questions: in what ways is my body trying to hold me together? What does it say about my homeostasis that I suddenly get overwhelmingly sleepy, irritated, that I have to eat something right now, that my brain stops working? What in my life is an attempt at psychological homeostasis – what do I use to numb myself when there’s too much? My phone, work, food, alcohol, fantasies of a completely different life? And what am I actually trying to protect myself from by doing that? It’s not about beating yourself up. It’s about seeing that a lot of what we file under “my flaws” is, at least partly, a desperate attempt by the system to stay together.
All of this is happening inside, but the system doesn’t exist alone. Your body is a small ecosystem. Inside live billions of bacteria, fungi, viruses and other microorganisms that together make up what science calls the microbiome. This inner forest helps you digest, modulates immunity, influences mood and stress responses. On a purely biological level, “I” is from the very beginning a collaboration of many beings, not a lonely hero. And that’s just the start. As a human, you’re plugged into a web of larger systems: family, social structures, the economy, culture, ecosystems. The breakfast you eat is not just “my oatmeal” – it’s the combined work of soil, sunlight, farmers, drivers, warehouses, transport networks, laws, and the economy. The air you breathe is part of a global circulation that involves trees, oceans, factories and other people. The language you use to describe yourself is the heritage of countless people who spoke it before you.
All of this means that your “I” is systemically co-regulated by its environment. If you grew up in chaos, your system learned to survive in chaos. If you grew up in a culture where emotions were punished with shame, the system learned to suppress them. If you live in a world that constantly demands “productivity”, psychological homeostasis will try to save itself in all sorts of ways – very often in patterns you later call “my issues”. You could say that identity has its own kind of immune system – mechanisms that protect a coherent sense of “me” – and that this system is constantly negotiating the terms of its work with the surroundings.
There’s a very simple experiment you can try: next time you leave the house or just walk through the city, for a moment, stop seeing yourself as a separate object and see yourself as part of a larger circulation instead. The circulation of air, traffic, other people’s work, the emotions of the strangers you pass. Notice what this does to your sense of “I”: does it shrink, expand, feel lighter, or more uneasy? There’s no right answer here. It’s just a brief honest check-in: you don’t exist separately from what you’re immersed in.
There’s still a third word: emergence. It sounds strange, but it points to something we actually know quite well from experience. Think of it in the simplest way: a single note on its own is not music. But when you arrange thousands of notes in time and pattern, suddenly there’s a mood, a feeling, a “something” that isn’t in any single sound. A single bird just flies according to a few simple rules, but a flock of birds turning together in the sky, swirling and folding back on itself, looks like one living organism. Individual atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are not “wet”. Wetness appears only when billions of molecules line up in a specific way. That’s what emergence is: the moment when a complex whole has properties you can’t find in any individual part.
With humans it’s similar. A single neuron has no consciousness. It’s a tiny unit that receives and sends signals. But a network of billions of neurons, wired together in intricate ways, embedded in a body, fed by experience, memory, relationships and language, starts to produce something that no single cell has: consciousness, a sense of “I”, the ability to say “this is me, and this is not me”. What we call “me” doesn’t sit in one little spot in the brain that you could point to. It’s much more honest to say that “I” is a dynamic property of the system – something that emerges from the flow of energy and information between body, brain and world. It’s not an object you can take out and put on the table, but a process that keeps happening as long as the system is running in a certain way.
If we go one level up, we see the same pattern in culture. No single person “owns” a language, customs or social norms. They emerge out of what many people do, repeat, negotiate and pass on over time. Just as your individual “I” emerges from your body, history and relationships, the world you live in day to day – language, culture, institutions – emerges from all of us together. At every level – cells, organisms, relationships, societies – something new keeps organizing itself, something new “appears above the parts”.
If we now pull all of this together, the picture looks roughly like this: a human being is a system in motion. A system that maintains its balance through homeostasis, both bodily and psychological. A system that is woven into larger networks – biological, social, cultural – and co-regulated by the environment it lives in. A system that, at a certain level of organization, starts to produce something we call consciousness, a sense of “I”, a life story. That shifts the question “who am I?” from “what am I made of?” to “how do I work, how am I organized, what am I entangled in, how am I trying to stay in balance and what price am I paying for it?”. It may turn out that more important than the list of parts is the web of connections – and the way this whole thing is trying to keep itself together.
In the next texts we can go deeper into particular layers – starting with the body, not as packaging for thoughts and soul, but as the first stage on which experience happens. To see the body not as “a project to fix”, but as the place where all of this is actually unfolding: exchange of matter, movement, tension, fatigue, recovery, pleasure, illness, healing. But to enter that in a meaningful way, it helps to first see the wider frame: that you are not a solid object placed in the world, but a living system that is constantly negotiating with the world the conditions under which it can stay here a little longer.