The Butterfly Effect

I've read about the chaos theory. This was developed in France by Henri Poincaré in 1890 when he was renovating his basement.

The butterfly effect is some kind of metaphor that encapsulates the concept of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; namely that small differences in the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. What this means is that once you take away someone's washer and dryer, they lose the will to live.

You'd think these two are completely unrelated but nay. I used to eat healthy food for breakfast. Today? School chalk and a cup of coffee. Because I have no washing machine. Bear with me...

Although this may appear to be unusual behavior, according to Wikipedia it makes perfect sense: for example, a ball placed at the crest of a hill might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. But if one of those valleys is renovating its basement, it will likely go there and explode into a million peices causing the owners of the valley to stab themselves repeatedly with forks.

Where do butterflies come into it? The theory is that one butterfly could have a far-reaching ripple-effect on everything. Philip Merilees said, Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? And the resounding conclusion was, "Who the hell cares, where's my washing machine!?"

All my self-soothing platitudes like, "It's only downstairs, it won't affect us at all" are utter bullshit of course. I just didn't realize it would cause me to lose all interest in tidiness and organization. I don't care what I wear because I can't find anything clean under the mountain of clothes in my closet. And when that happens, I don't put things away, my kitchen becomes ruled by crumbs, and the dog is allowed on the furniture.