From Quarks to Cosmos: A Hopeful Journey Through Abstraction and Systems Thinking
A shared hope where we see the world through systems thinking glasses
Since launching Meaningful Systems in January, I've found myself exploring ideas that span from the quantum scale to the cosmic. And with that exploration has come something unexpected: a growing sense of hope. When you begin to see the world as a collection of interconnected systems—and realize that we can learn to navigate and shape those systems—it opens up new possibilities. I’ve rekindled my own personal freedom to explore new abstractions—zooming in and out of problems until I land at the level where something meaningful can actually be done. In systems thinking, this isn’t just a mental exercise; it’s a key dimension. One that helps us cut through the noise, decompose complexity, and recombine parts into solutions that actually work.
Abstraction is one of the most powerful tools we have as systems thinkers. When something is too overwhelming, we can go up a level. When something is too vague or ambiguous, we can zoom in. Every problem has a "sweet spot" in terms of abstraction—a level where the context is clear, the system boundaries are well-defined, and interventions have real leverage.
In my own practice, I’ve started thinking of abstraction not as a ladder but as a kind of multidimensional landscape—like a fractal terrain. Each level has its own structure, its own behavior, its own rules. But you can only get somewhere new when you shift scale. It’s how we go from subatomic particles to atoms, to molecules, to cells, to organs, to people, to societies, to ecosystems, to planets, and beyond.
Meaningful Systems exists to help navigate this terrain. We start with a problem and keep asking: are we working at the right level of abstraction? Is this a technical issue, a human issue, a political issue, a planetary issue? We decompose the parts, search for patterns, and try to recombine them in ways that matter.
In my day job, I work at Medtronic in the Neuro Technology Development Center on Pelvic Health R&D programs. One of the primary projects I’m contributing to right now is aimed at improving treatment for urinary and fecal incontinence. It’s a complex system involving neuroscience, hardware, software, and human behavior. When I begin my workday, I’m focused at a very specific level of abstraction: my domain within the systems engineering team, and my specific responsibilities on the project within my role as a Lead Systems Engineer. That constraint helps provide clarity and focus. The problem space is bounded.
The same was true in earlier phases of my career. When I worked on silver nanowire transparent conductive films, my mind was focused on the long-term stability, reliability, and resilience of the nanowires in operating environments of phones and tablets terrestrially. I had to understand their behavior under stress and temperature and humidity cycles or ultraviolet light or salt water and even consider whether they would be optically invisible to the user once integrated and patterned into a touch screen. My level of abstraction was grounded in materials science, user experience, and real-world operating conditions.
Similarly, when I worked on the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite program, I wasn’t thinking about the entire satellite. My focus was on a small magnetics subsystem, and specifically, how that subsystem was manufactured in the electronics manufacturing center. The goal was to ensure that this small but critical piece of hardware met rigorous quality standards for mission success. Again, the system I was engaging with was small and tightly defined, but it was deeply connected to a much larger, more abstract system of national defense and space technology.
But when I “report” to work on Meaningful Systems, there is no predefined abstraction. There are no assumptions baked into the scope. There are no boundaries other than time, physics, and—occasionally—money. That freedom is exhilarating. It allows me to roam widely, considering how we might improve systems across every layer of human and planetary life.
I have a dream that one day, the tools of systems thinking will be as common as literacy or basic math. That people everywhere—from farmers to teachers to startup founders to policymakers—will naturally ask questions like: What system is this part of? What forces are shaping it? Where is the leverage? Imagine a world where everyone had the freedom to shift abstraction levels, to see both forest and trees, and to design their life plans with intention and context. In that world, we'd waste less effort solving the wrong problems, and spend more time creating lasting change. We’d become wiser stewards of our shared future.
Take climate change, for example. I’ve spent years forming a mental model of how it works, based on everything from thermodynamics to social systems. But I want to take it further. One of my goals is to build a discrete event simulation of climate change from first principles, grounded in energy flow and storage. Perhaps I will build a Monte Carlo simulation. I want to make the dynamics of global warming more understandable—and actionable—by modeling it from the ground up. I plan to write about that in a future post.
Earlier today, I reviewed a Science Fair poster on a system for reducing loss of life during and following a school shooting. It was a thoughtful and technically sound project even using machine learning with both hardware and software development—a great solution to the wrong problem. The student had approached it with care and clarity, but it raised a difficult question: Implicitly, has society accepted school shootings as a probability? What are we doing to prevent them in the first place? Who is the accountable person responsible for mitigating this issue?
This is what systems thinking invites us to ask: are we solving the right problem? Are we operating at the right level of abstraction? Designing a way or reducing casualties in this situation is noble and urgent in its own context. But zooming out, we might see the real leverage point lies upstream—in community health, mental health, policy, education, and prevention. That’s where the most meaningful, long-term solutions may be found.
And this leads to another critical systems question: What systems are in place to teach parents how to be parents? To support mental health in families? To help people build relaxed, stress-free lives where they feel socially connected and emotionally supported? These aren’t rhetorical questions. They point to systemic blind spots that have massive ripple effects.
If we want to prevent the downstream tragedies, we need to examine the upstream structures. Parenting education, accessible mental health care, community design, work-life balance—these are all interconnected leverage points. And most people don’t receive formal training in any of them.
What if we could build systems to fill that gap? Not just interventions, but environments that foster well-being by design. What if every new parent received not only diapers and check-ups, but also emotional coaching, community mentors, and long-term guidance? That’s not science fiction—that's a systems opportunity.
Recently, I created a survey and posted it online to gather input on what people believe are the most important problems facing the world. The survey will remain open for the next month while I continue to collect more voice-of-stakeholder data. So far, the responses—ranked by weighted importance—reflect deep concern and aspiration:
Climate Change
Artificial Intelligence
World Hunger and Food Supply
Optimal Human Life
Water Supply
These aren't small issues. Also, artificial intelligence isn’t an “issue” per se but rather an opportunity; each of these can be viewed as both a problem and an opportunity. They exist across multiple layers of abstraction and demand us to think both locally and globally, both technically and ethically. What excites me is that each of these topics has meaningful leverage points—places where the right intervention can cascade outward in positive ways.
At Meaningful Systems, we are continually prototyping ways to work at these levels. Sometimes that looks like a diagram. Sometimes it's a software tool. Sometimes it's a way of convening people who think differently. But always, it’s about surfacing the structure beneath the surface, and helping others do the same.
Abstraction, decomposition, and recomposition aren’t just academic ideas. They’re the cognitive moves that allow us to turn chaos into clarity and possibility into action. But imagine if this way of thinking—this ability to shift perspective freely—weren’t limited to a few technical disciplines. What if every person on the planet had the tools to explore problems at different levels of abstraction? What if we could all learn to think in systems, identify leverage points, and act with intentionality? What if this student who did this project had realized the right level of abstraction was further upstream? I’m sure actually that they do know that, but the level at which they felt they could control for their project was how they defined the scope. What if we all moved upstream in our thinking?
That’s a hopeful vision. A world where systems thinking is democratized could be a world where people feel more empowered, more curious, and more connected to the big picture. We could solve problems not just for ourselves, but together, with deeper insight and shared purpose.
The goal? To find leverage in complexity. To solve the right problems at the right level. And to keep going until the solutions we create are truly meaningful.
I’d love to hear from others: What level of abstraction do you find yourself working at most often? When do you know it’s time to zoom in or zoom out?
