When we ask why things move, change, or accelerate, we feel we are asking the deepest possible questions about the world.
But this feeling is mistaken.
The truly fundamental question is not why things change, but why anything persists at all.
The misdirection of change
From Aristotle through Newton to Einstein, explanation has been magnetised by change.
Change presents itself as active, dramatic, and in need of justification. Persistence, by contrast, is treated as inert background — the absence of explanation rather than its core.
From a relational ontology, this priority is exactly backwards.
What persistence really means
Persistence is often misunderstood as endurance: an object remaining the same while time passes.
But we have already refused the ontology that would make this intelligible.
There are no objects that endure independently of their actualisations. There is no time through which anything travels. There is no underlying substrate that remains self-identical.
What persists is coherence across successive cuts.
Each cut is a perspectival actualisation of relational possibility. Persistence names the fact that later cuts remain compatible with earlier ones — that re-actualisation continues without collapse.
This is not automatic. It is an achievement.
Why persistence is puzzling
If nothing acts, nothing moves, and nothing carries itself forward, then persistence cannot be taken for granted.
These are not poetic questions. They are ontological ones.
And yet, classical frameworks rarely ask them, because persistence is smuggled in as a default: objects persist unless acted upon; states endure unless disturbed; motion continues unless impeded.
Relational ontology refuses this smuggling.
The quiet inversion
The central inversion of this series is simple:
Persistence does not require explanation. Change does.
This does not mean persistence is mysterious or magical. It means it is structurally cheap.
Where relational constraints are stable:
re-cuts resolve compatibly,
dependency orderings remain open,
incompatibilities do not accumulate.
In such conditions, persistence simply happens — not because something sustains it, but because nothing prevents it.
Why change feels active
If persistence is cheap, why does change feel active and effortful?
Because change requires the reconfiguration of constraint.
To change is to:
close off previously viable re-cuts,
open new dependency relations,
or redistribute incompatibility boundaries.
All of this is architecturally expensive. It introduces asymmetry where symmetry once held.
Phenomenally, we register this expense as effort, force, or intervention.
But ontologically, no such actors are required.
Re-seeing inertia
In classical mechanics, inertia is defined negatively: resistance to change.
From a relational perspective, inertia names something much quieter:
the ease with which coherence reproduces itself.
Inertia is not opposition. It is continuity.
This series will show how what we call inertial motion is simply the smooth repetition of compatible re-actualisations under stable constraint.
Preparing the ground
This first post does not yet explain inertia.
Its task is more modest and more difficult: to make persistence visible as a problem.
Once that shift occurs, several familiar assumptions begin to wobble:
that rest is a natural state,
that motion requires sustenance,
that change is primary.
The next post will take the first of these apart.
Post 2 — Rest and Motion Are the Same Mistake.
For now, it is enough to recognise the inversion that will guide everything that follows:
The world does not keep going because something pushes it along.It keeps going because coherence is easier than collapse.
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