All my writing is musing and open discussion as I learn and navigate my experience, and is not making any normative claims - see my approach to writing for more on how I intend to share!

Meteors: Conceptualising social change

24 Jan, 2025

I, like many people, have spent a lot of time thinking about the term ‘social impact’ - what it is, and how I can have it.

Like many people too, I’ve struggled to answer this question. Google AI kindly tells me ‘social impact’ is ’the positive effect that an action or inaction has on a community or people’. But this can feel incomplete and insubstantial - what is ’the positive effect’? What is action? Where is the answer I can hold, and act upon immediately?

Background

This section provides context for the ‘meteors’ conception of social change. Feel free to skip if you want to just dive into the concept!

In my quest for these answers I have considered and been witness to a few methods. While at University with RAG, our social impact was measured by how much we could raise for charitable causes. This was explored further in my first job, in which I spent some of my time with their philanthropic arm. Here, social impact was measured by how effectively chosen organisations met criteria for effective causes (for instance, how much of the money went directly to the cause, or how reliant the organisation would be on our donation - the latter looking to be minimised).

When working on Pyxium, conversations around social impact centred around how I would evaluate, for instance, how much someone had learned about topics like racism, or how much racism had decreased since Pyxium courses had been used and disseminated.  My last job was centred around finding impactful uses for technical research, and being a public organisation, this often included specific social impact not often prioritised by the private sector (for instance, free and open-source products, and community-led governance of those products).

There are also wider frameworks you can explore, like the idea of feedback loops, or the hyper-rational calculations of good running through the Effective Altruism movement. One example of such a calculation is the QALY, a homogenous measure of ‘good’ the government uses when evaluating the cost effectiveness of different policies.

Whilst these methods and some of the lessons I have learned have their place and use, especially in grounding, justifying and communicating reasons for action, they always left me unsatisfied for two main reasons.

Firstly, any measure of ‘good’ or ‘social impact’ used in this way is in danger of reducing morality to a mathematical equation, as if there is a form of morality we can easily universally define and turn into a number. I am unconvinced this can be done with confidence and certainty - if it could, I believe the question of morality would be a lot less complicated than it is!

Secondly, they leave a lot out. For one, such mathematical calculations are inherently impersonal. I am firmly engaged in and a part of the ‘good actions’ I take, and if I start to only think about my actions in terms of their ‘objective’, measurable and mathematical good, I remove the key ingredient of them - my agency in taking those actions. Whilst these frameworks might help me justify and communicate my ‘impact’, they are only abstracted reference points to real-world decisions I very personally choose and experience, and that impact me directly.

They also miss a lot else out. In my everyday life, I have all sorts of interactions that lead to some kind of ‘positive effect on community or people’. This can be through interactions with people; when I have discussions with people with different views to me, I can feel us both learning and changing as a result of the discussion; when I hear a political song I like I feel a sense of belonging and understanding that can galvanise and strengthen my stance on social issues. It can also be through interactions beyond people; when I witness a landfill site, it reinforces the need for me to consume more ethically; when I look into my family dog’s eyes, I sense the connection existing between humans and animals, and the resulting implications for animal rights. If I can’t measure these interactions, do they not count?

We could say I can measure the impact of these interactions by slapping measures on the results above - ‘increase in learning’ being a measurable impact, or ‘strengthening of political views’. However this feels clumsily reductive - you found X to be good because of Y, therefore I will label ‘increase of Y’ as good and so X as good because it leads to increase in Y, and assume and apply this conclusion until suggested otherwise.

Where is the room for just being able to feel change happening, and be empowered to recognise it throughout my day-to-day? Where is the chance to feel my social impact on a personal and interpersonal level, rather than under the authority of mathematics or logic? How can we account for the minutiae of trillions of interactions between people, animals, nature and objects every day which, taken together, make up the social and cultural context we live in?

A thought at a protest

These questions were ringing in my ears when I attended my first protest. There are always questions about how impactful and meaningful protests are, and how much they lead to change. One argument I remember from the Effective Altruism movement attempts to take a mathematical cost-benefit approach, comparing the effort of attending (and associated opportunity costs) with the difference your attendance makes, represented by you, the number of people required to make the change happen and the expected value of the change.

This approach feels wildly over mathematical (how many people does it take for a protest to work? I believe it’s 9,362, and you can call that Sood’s Law¹, and guilty of trying to reduce the highly complex phenomenon of political protest into definable measures. Indeed, a more recent report from the EA movement evaluating the effectiveness of protests lists in its limitations the difficulty of, when trying to measure the impact of protests, identifying cause, identifying attribution, identifying the long-term effects and identifying generalisable lessons from this kind of empirical study of protest movements - almost a comprehensive meme list of ‘all the reasons this mathematical approach probably doesn’t work’.

This kind of approach also reductively leaves out so much of the more personal and immeasurable aspects of the protest experience, and the intuitive sense that something is clearly happening when a protest takes place.

For instance, I’ve been overwhelmed attending protests, connecting with people and communicating an incredibly powerful collective political message. Attending in itself has encouraged me to directly learn more about the issue, discuss it with people and find different ways to engage. I have learned of the power of collective action, which has directly shaped my personal political approach.

I have also thought of how my presence specifically could lead to change. How, say, someone looking out their window, may, amongst many different factors, be influenced by specifically seeing me, or the person next to me, or anyone else, or a particular message on a particular cardboard sign, to change in a way they wouldn’t have done before. Perhaps friends and family who know of my presence may become more sympathetic and open to engaging in the issue.

I couldn’t help but feel that my presence, in and of itself, was leading to some level of change, however small, and this was true for everyone there. That regardless of whether the protest was successful at changing policy directly, or any other ‘measure’ of impact, with every single word exchanged, movement with people, piece of eye contact, text, picture, and more, something was changing somewhere.

I had the image of being an object moving in a particular direction, and transferring some of my kinetic energy to anyone I interacted with, whilst simultaneously absorbing some of their kinetic energy, and this resulting in constant change.

This spark inspires the below conceptualisation of change.

Meteors

This is not intended to be a measurable, scientific, coherent or complete argument, even if it uses scientific terms and concepts like ‘kinetic’ and ‘mass’. The function of those terms is purely linguistic, i.e. to communicate an idea, and not to situate it within a scientific framework. The below articulation simply holds based on whether it vibes with you or not - and all images/diagrams are purely illustrative!

Similarly, unless you find it conceptually helpful to do so, what follows doesn’t need to fit within mathematical laws. E.g. two speeds linguistically presented as moving in equal and opposite directions do not conceptually need to cancel each other out. Maths don’t rule us here, unless you want it to!

Please also bear in mind I only have a Physics GCSE so some of the physics-adjacent discussion below may not be very accurate - and please raise places where it’s confusing/misleading!

We are all meteors moving through space. We can move in any direction, at any speed and are not under the influence of any external forces like gravity, or other forms of friction. For our purposes, consider the reductive term ‘belief’ to represent anything we may do, think, value or communicate. Each of our beliefs points in a certain direction at a certain speed, and the amalgamation of all our beliefs gives us an overall direction and speed. The direction of one particular belief represents the content of the belief, and the speed is how strongly we hold/act upon/communicate it.

A belief, shown as the direction it is moving (content of the belief) and the speed it is moving (strength of belief). Our overall speed and direction is an amalgamation of all our beliefs

To use a crude football analogy - two Arsenal fans with different levels of devotion to the club will be moving in the same (or actually just very similar, as will be clarified) direction for ‘club devotion’, but at different speeds. An equally devoted Arsenal fan and Chelsea fan will be moving in different directions for ‘club devotion’ but at the same (or very similar) speed.

For the belief ‘club devotion’ - two Arsenal fans with two different levels of devotion vs an Arsenal fan and Chelsea fan with the same level of devotion to their respective clubs

Our speeds and directions change through interactions with other meteors - other people - or other stationary objects - nonhuman things like nature, God, animals (though as we will see, we can also consider nonhuman things as meteors too). Each interaction we have is a collision of our meteor with one of these things. The collision is shaped by the relative speed and direction of each thing colliding, and all things colliding will in some way change both their speed and direction going forwards. What this change will be can be estimated, but not guaranteed. Perhaps the two Arsenal fans will encourage each other, and increase the speed of their Arsenal-devotion beliefs respectively. Perhaps they will not particularly like each other, question their identity as Arsenal fans, and their speeds will decrease. Perhaps some other shaping will happen.

The possible changes to two Arsenal fans after a collision

What is certain, however, is there will be some change, however small, in their speed and direction - as there would be from any objects colliding in frictionless space. Bringing it back to the human context, this means every single one of your interactions with anyone and anything carries consequence and meaning, and alters the history of the universe forever.

Perhaps empowering. Perhaps terrifying.

Elaborating on the concept

Alternative formulations

There are many ways to change the formulation of the above outline, depending on what vibes with you - pluralism FTW!

Below are a couple of alternatives which come to mind for myself.

Meteors don’t need to just be people

I’ve laid out the meteor concept considering humans to be moving meteors, and nonhuman things we interact with to be stationary (that is, not shaped by the collision). This is primarily to introduce the concept more simply. The idea is people are more likely to be shaped differently by your interactions with them, than objects - for instance, a political discussion with a friend will likely change both you and the friend more than, say, your interaction with a tree will change the tree.

However, this is just how I personally have chosen to initially conceptualise the malleability of nonhuman objects. When pushed, I would actually argue that, spiritually, everything is connected, and thus everything changes when interacted with, especially animals and nature, but also inanimate objects, man-made objects, concepts, ideas, God… thus with a more nuanced understanding I would probably actually say everything is a meteor (an idea seemingly chiming with Actor Network Theory). I would then conceptualise some meteors as having greater mass than others, or different material/aerodynamic properties, meaning they are not as changed by collisions.

You can see how this can get complicated quickly! The main thing to say is - you can entirely decide for yourself what is a meteor and what is stationary. For instance, I have a very close connection to my family piano, and believe it is an animate meteor that responds and changes based on my interactions with it. However you may not have this same connection, and for you the piano is a stationary object - you can change through interactions with it but it won’t change. Both are cool.

How I perceive my collisions with my piano vs how you may perceive your collisions with the same piano

Similarly, you may want to think of wider human systems and institutions as their own meteors - for instance, capitalism as a meteor you can both be impacted by and impact. In such a situation I imagine the meteor of capitalism is much weightier than any one individual’s meteor, and so any collisions between myself and capitalism are likely to change me more than they will change capitalism (or maybe if you consider meteor mass to be spiritually constituted it could be the other way around).

It may help to conceptualise systems as their own meteors with speeds and directions

Personally, I’m starting to understand human systems as just the humans making them up (and therefore the system is actually just a collection of meteors of people) - something I want to write about in the future.

Each belief is its own meteor

Another way of conceptualising is to not see each person or thing as a single meteor that is an amalgamation of all their beliefs, but as each of their beliefs being a meteor in itself.

So for instance, when having a political discussion with someone I could see us as two meteors who are colliding in a certain way based on our overall speeds and directions (determined by all of our beliefs), or I could see our specific belief meteors related to this political discussion colliding. Then if we were to have a discussion about a different topic, say whether vanilla is anything more than a placeholder ice cream flavour, the two meteors colliding are doing so with very different speeds and directions.

An alternative conceptualisation where each belief is its own meteor

In this latter formulation, I would argue that to maintain the idea of our beliefs all being interconnected in some way, after the discussion each specific belief meteor will be on a different course, which will then lead it to collide with each person’s other, related belief-meteors, altering their course as well.

Though if this doesn’t vibe with you, ignore it!

Implications

Regardless of which specific, perhaps unique formulation works for you, there are some implications of the concept I believe apply across the board.

In the below implications, I write primarily in reference to the formulation I outlined initially, rather than the potential other formulations explored above. Please update the thoughts below with the formulation relevant for you!

No direction or speed is permanent

Every interaction and collision changes the direction and speed of the meteor in some way. Thus even your most strongly held, core beliefs will be still influenced by interactions and collisions, however subtly. In this case, the belief is moving with extreme speed in a particular direction. Even after a seemingly inconsequential collision, it will always be moving slightly faster or slightly slower in a slightly different direction. It will never remain the same.

Even seemingly inconsequential collisions will always change meteors in some way

This means nothing is a lost cause. Even the most firmly built belief system is open to change and transformation, whether at the belief, personal or systemic level. I find this particularly encouraging and empowering when advocating for political change - however hard it seems, it is always possible.

The result of collisions can never be known with certainty

As mentioned above, the change from a collision can be estimated, but not guaranteed. People’s direction and speed is made up of all their beliefs, and can’t be known with certainty.

Even two people who seem to be moving in almost an identical direction are going to be moving in ever so slightly different directions, based on their own unique, subtle differences as people. Therefore it is impossible to determine with certainty how a collision will impact both parties.

Two people who may initially appear to be moving in the same direction at the same speed will in fact always be at least subtly different in both regards

To return to the crude football analogy, two Arsenal fans may appear devoted in the same way to the club, however one is devoted as a result of family heritage (family has supported the club for generations), and another due to moving to the area when they were young. When we isolate their ‘Arsenal devotion’ belief, they may appear within a short space to be moving in the same direction, but when extended to infinity we will see their directions as different. Thus we may initially predict any interaction with the club will simply reinforce their devotion-direction, when in fact it may alter their direction and speeds differently. For instance, the fan whose devotion is based on family heritage may be more impacted by interactions around the history of the club, whilst the fan whose devotion is due to the area may be more impacted by interactions around the local community.

Similarly, the speed of people’s beliefs can be estimated, but not known with certainty. Two Arsenal fans might communicate the same level of devotion to the club (both suggesting they are “Arsenal ’til they die”), and thus be appearing to move at the same speed, but both respond differently to a test of their devotion (for instance, the club selling Bukayo Saka leads one to disavow the club, and the other to double down in faith in management). Even though they initially appeared to us to be moving at the same speed, one’s devotion was far more open to change than the other’s, suggesting they were, in fact, moving at different speeds initially. This could also be conceptualised in terms of changes resulting from different masses of each meteor, different aerodynamic properties, or something else, depending on what works for you!

In this way, though one can definitely do work to estimate the speed and direction of different meteors interacting based on available information (if someone has repeatedly told me they believe X, I can believe the speed they are moving in direction X is strong), one can never know with certainty the result of the interaction before or after it happens. All one can sense is the change in direction, or change in speed, or both, which has occurred.

Collisions can be impacted by medium

Take two people, one who strongly believes in the power of music to heal and another who believes in the power of nature. The first may then be much more impacted by a message communicated via a musical medium (e.g. a song), than one communicated via a natural medium (e.g. a stunning landscape). The opposite may be true for the second.

In meteor terms - the musical believer is moving faster in the direction of ‘belief in music’, and so when a musical interaction happens, subtle changes in direction or speed can still lead to overall significant changes in direction and speed, and future collisions.

A musical person may be more impacted by a message communicated via musical medium than other mediums

This is also applicable to the context of interpersonal relationships, through which the perceptibly same interaction will affect different people in different ways.

For instance, suppose I strongly believe X, and someone I don’t know presents me with opposing belief Y. Due to the fact I do not know or trust this person, I am not particularly influenced by this collision, and my belief in X does not really change. In this sense I can understand the speed at which I was hit with Y was slow. However, suppose someone I trust a lot presents me with the identical argument for Y. Because I trust them, the speed at which Y now hits me is much stronger, and firmly destabilises my view on X.

The perceptibly same belief can have drastically different impacts on collisions depending on your relationship to the person with the belief

This is where it’s important to recognise, in all collisions, speed and direction is always relative and not absolute. If meteor X is moving at speed Y in direction Z, this is simply its direction and speed relative to me, and not its objective speed and direction - for someone else, it will be moving at speed A in direction B. Indeed, given each of our belief systems is unique to us, it will be moving in a slightly different speed and direction for every single person.

Collisions don’t have to be live

Meteors don’t only collide when individuals interact face-to-face. For instance, when you read a book written by a now deceased author, you will still be shaped by your interaction with the author, via the medium of the book, even though you haven’t met the author.

Any form of interaction leads to a collision, whether it is live with someone or done via a separated medium. Communication and interaction can take many beautiful forms!

You can shape your own speed and direction

Separate to interactions with other people, animals, plants or objects, you can personally alter the speed and direction of your own meteor independently. This can be done consciously (e.g. thinking about and engaging in specific things that alter your belief system), unconsciously (e.g. you wake up one day and realise you feel differently about something), over extended periods (e.g. the retrospective change you notice in yourself after 6 months of daily yoga practice) - and more! I ain’t the arbiter of you!

What this all means

With all these further elaborations in mind, there are some extractable thoughts I find helpful to apply in my day-to-day.

The direction you bring will always have an impact

Whatever direction you bring to an interaction, there will be some change as a result of it, regardless of the speed you are moving at. Even if the collision occurs where, say, the other person is moving at an extremely high speed in the opposite direction, and your speed is slow, nevertheless after the collision, their speed will be slowed slightly. Higher speeds may have a greater effect on change, but low speeds still change things too!

This makes the direction you are approaching interactions from a critical thing to be happy with - if you are having collisions coming from directions you don’t fully believe in or value, they will still have an impact, and may actually do harm. For instance, regardless of whether I fundamentally believe in capitalist ideology, any time I communicate ‘profit = good’ in interactions brings a capitalist direction to that collision, resulting in an ultimate change towards capitalism as a result of the collision.

Therefore I serve myself best by ensuring as much of what I communicate as possible is aligned to my genuine values, thus ensuring as many collisions as possible I have shape towards the values and world I believe in.

The ease of doing this in practice is, of course, proportional to the liberation you are able to experience and inversely proportional to the amount of oppression you experience. The less you are able to be who you want to be due to oppressive power structures, the less likely you are to be able to easily practice what you believe in.

The power of collective action

I know the direction I bring to an interaction will ultimately change something towards that direction as a result of the collision. However I may be disheartened to estimate the colliding meteor is moving so firmly in the opposite direction to me that any change will be negligible.

However, many slow movements can equate, and surpass, a few fast movements. And the movement of many meteors with small mass can equate and surpass the movement of a meteor with high mass. Many people moving in the same direction can each make that small difference to the colliding force, slowly decreasing its speed, until, eventually, it is no longer moving in the opposite direction but the same direction. Each small collision from each person slows the colliding meteor ever so slightly, and once amalgamated this leads to significant change. For a nice visualisation of many collisions with a small mass changing the direction of a huge mass, check out this video.

While one small collision may not significantly alter a large meteor, many small collisions can, together, have a significant impact on large meteors - and even change their entire direction

Finding like minded people and connecting over a shared direction can have as much, even more, effect on change as a strongly pushed direction from a single person. This is why protest movements, community work and collective action are so powerful and important.

This can be applied on a more personal level too - suppose person X commits injustice against person Y and person Y calls them out. On its own, speeds and directions may not significantly alter the paths of each after the collision. If you step in and defend Y, you have effectively doubled the speed of the collision with X - towards a world in which injustice has no place. Calling out and addressing injustices in your day-to-day life gently and powerfully shapes the world towards the direction you want to see.

Choosing to engage can have a significant impact on the result of collisions

You can still be analytical with meteors

Even though this conceptualisation is premised on being a way to escape the need to be hyper-analytical about how and where we have impact, it is nevertheless compatible with analytical approaches.

For instance, you can do some work to think about the directions you are already moving in, the other meteors with which you hold trust and influence (and therefore are likely to have more impactful collisions), and the methods by which you want to work and communicate in order to estimate the greatest impact from your collisions. Even with the limitations of the EA report referenced earlier, there are still useful insights in the report to help steer approaches to protest movements.

However, analytical approaches are only ever an extension of this formulation, rather than a fundamental part.

You are having social impact with every single one of your interactions - this is the base starting point. The idea of analytically considering how and where you have interactions, is just an approach to the basic formulation.

So if the more analytic approaches to impact highlighted at the beginning of the background section don’t vibe with you, it doesn’t mean you’re not thinking about impact - it just means those particular approaches don’t work for you. It may suit you more to, for instance, feel out changes intuitively through your day-to-day, or prioritise change through social connection, or any other method that works for you! Time to end rational, empirical moral hegemony!

Personally, I do feel an important starting point for anyone who is able (see oppression point above) is to be as active as possible in collisions - not just observe the changes that happen, but look to alter speeds and directions either in ourselves, or through the spaces and communities we occupy, through conscious engagement. But even this is just a personal approach and not a necessary dogma!

A personal lesson on the importance of speed

I often have conversations with people about how fervently we hold certain positions and values, especially in discussions. For instance, I often find myself defending position X far more strongly in some discussions than I actually believe in position X.

This happens when I feel like the attacking of position X is happening too forcefully or aggressively - when something I believe in is being forcefully attacked, I feel the need to forcefully defend it.

This is often the stance I have found myself taking against Effective Altruism. Overall, I feel a lot of the EA movement offers helpful, pragmatic approaches to thinking about doing good (indeed, I found my last job through the EA job board). However, when arguments from the movement are presented as the definitive way to think about making moral choices, the intensity of this changes the collisions I then have with the movement.

In meteor terms - I am generally moving in the ‘power of EA thinking’ direction at speed X. However, when I meet an EA evangelist, I sense they are moving in the direction of ’the power of EA thinking’ at a speed of 100X. I therefore sense if we have a collision, in order to maintain as close to my speed of X as possible (a speed I am currently comfortable with, though of course always open to change), I actually need to enter the collision with (if we are being somewhat mathematically complete, for the sake of the example) a speed of -99X in the direction against ’the power EA thinking’.

Visualising how I sometimes change my ‘speed’ before collisions based on perceived speed and direction of those colliding

Thus for me the speed at which meteors are moving can be a massive influence on how I approach decisions and interactions - even if in my day-to-day life I move at a certain speed, I may need to temporarily speed up or slow down, or even change direction, before a collision, based on the relative speeds and directions I sense the other meteor(s) I am colliding with are moving - although of course I have no certain idea what will happen as a result of the collision, as discussed above!

Conclusion

At the beginning of this post, I asked for an answer to the question of social impact I can hold and act upon immediately. This formulation has helped me with both of these things - I, as a human being living in society, witness and hold all experiences I have. I can also act upon my own experiences immediately - by experiencing them.

Trying to reframe my existence within a lens of continuous social impact derived from my values has affected me in a number of ways. Firstly, it’s helped me generally become more mindful of my interactions - with people, with the world, with myself. Knowing everything I do changes the universe forever in some small way helps me be more present in the world around me and more of an active agent with the decisions I make, knowing I can change things where I already am. Secondly, it helps to reaffirm my general philosophy of life and society - we all equally matter, everyone is sacred, no one person or method or approach is necessarily, objectively better than another, and a robust and resilient route towards fulfilment comes through living and sharing my values. And thirdly, how important it is to make time to engage, communicate and discuss ideas with each other, if we want things to change.

I am reminded of this view from a bridge video, where Ethan discusses how, when his mother was young, she would attend raves purely as a participant - rather than as an explicit contributor like a DJ - and derive meaning from sharing social space and interactions with like-minded people.

Perhaps she could visualise her meteor moving in a speed and direction harmonious to the meteors around her, and could feel the impact on society and culture she was having through the meteoric collisions she experienced in these spaces.

Perhaps I, and if this has vibed with you we, can do the same.

The question for the comments is simply - what are your thoughts on meteors? Does it chime with you? If not, why not? Where does it fall down? How could it be improved? Applied? Any thoughts please share on the Substack post!

Thank you to MacGregor Cox, Youmna Hashem and Antonia Sood for feedback, advice and editing.