Inheritance shows up in places no genetic map accounts for. My boys run the exact same way I do. The same stiff stride, same achilles that screams if you look at it wrong, same knee that files a complaint halfway up a hill. It’s not “genetic” so much as it’s choreography that somehow made it into the family archive. Bodies remember things we never consciously learned.

Minds work the same way. We carry a quiet bundle of private stories, beliefs absorbed before memory was even online. Habits of interpretation. Unspoken rules. These myths run underneath everything, shaping our days with a kind of casual authority. Joseph Campbell wrote about heroic arcs, but most lives hum on smaller circuits: a handful of assumptions played on loop until they blend into identity.

How little the system cares about origin. A repeated idea, whether ancient or recently installed, gains the same weight. A posture practiced long enough becomes a personality. Patterns repeat until they become character, and once something becomes character, people swear it came from “the past.” But it didn’t. It came from recurrence. The mind, like the body, doesn’t store time. It stores whatever it sees often enough.

And every once in a while, you catch it in the act: beliefs stepping out of the shadows. These small recognitions reveal the architecture beneath it all, a prediction machine trained on whatever it’s seen enough times. And it’s always ready for the next instruction.

Watching Ken Burns: The American Revolution. You kind of know what you’re in for with the PBS stamp. Any of us with even a little Shane Gillis rattling around inside still look forward to the subject matter. Many rightfully offer at least a mild eye-roll to the, let’s call it, the Standard Accepted Lens of the Modern Documentary when it turns its lights onto a war fought some 250 years ago. That soft, assured tone that treats the past like it was always waiting to be interpreted by the present.

How confidently the modern mind supplies motives to people who would barely recognize the version of themselves being narrated. Every contradiction buffed down. Every rough instinct moralized. A thick layer of contemporary ethics like German schmear on brick. It’s not malicious; it’s habit. A whole era retold for our modern sensibilities.

There’s a familiar pattern in that. Once expression becomes predictable, everything starts drifting toward uniformity. Personalities turn polite. Opinions flatten into safe geometries. History behaves. It’s “company manners” on a civilizational scale.

Modern music has become the same. Immaculate production, flawless structure, and a noticeable absence of surprise, like the soul of it shipped separately. Prediction machines have quickly found high competence at this material. And we're not ready to discuss how much of what we call art is simply pattern-matching. The point-one-percenters like Bowie, Jagger and MJ built careers on doing something a reasonable algorithm would have flagged as an error. The rest is easy work for a prediction model.

Perhaps this will encourage our efforts to becoming unpredictable once again.