Everything is a system. The economy, society, relationships, nature, traffic.
You don’t need math to reverse engineer a system. You just need to pay attention to it. You can say the right words to make a date happy. You can figure out which lane is the fastest route, better than Google Maps can. You don’t need an app or data – your brain is a wonderful data processing machine.
Don’t be angry at the people who are benefiting from a system, or at the system itself. Most just end up that way, the same way a river meanders towards the sea, or an electrical current tries to find ground.
If you don’t fix a system, few will. Most people are reactive to it and try to live with it as background noise.
Fixing/improving a system often requires deep understanding of it. An action here will cause a response there. People often document it, but few will do a proper design.
If you don’t control a system, it will control you. You don’t have to change its fundamentals, just move out of the way of harm.
Neatness/order is a way to understand a system. All systems tend to fall to disorder. Disorder is not always a bad thing. Order is very expensive, and only serves as better documentation to those who do not understand it. Very often, excessive order is a symptom of someone who does not understand or control it.