Let me tell you about the oldest written customer complaint in history! Picture this: it’s 1750 BCE in the city of Ur. A man named Nanni has just been swindled. He ordered copper, paid in advance, and what does the merchant Ea-nāṣir deliver? Junk metal. To make the insult sting, Ea-nāṣir even disrespects Nanni’s servant during delivery. He says to them “If you want to take it, take it. If you don’t, go away.” So what does Nanni do? He grabs a clay tablet and presses his fury into history. In it, he essentially says: “Look, Ea-nāṣir, I’m not some fool you can cheat. You promised me quality copper, and this rubbish won’t do. Next time, I’m picking the ingots myself.”
If you did the math, that was almost 4000 years ago. The Complaint Tablet to Ea-nāṣir was unearthed in the early 20th century Mesopotamian excavations and eventually made its way into the British Museum, where it still sits today. The text wasn’t immediately understood. It had been a “lost script” for years until the mid 20th century, when scholars cracked it using the Behistun Inscription. By comparing repeated names and phrases across trilingual carvings, they recognized patterns that unlocked the script’s phonetics and meanings, much like solving a massive code. Thanks to this earlier pattern-based decipherment, modern readers today can hear Nanni’s almost-4000-year-old customer frustration loud and clear.
Stories like this get me thinking about the human instinct for problem-solving and how it has propelled us through history. From scientific to technological breakthroughs. Almost like we’re constantly unlocking new levels of human experience. That’s what led me to wonder: Are we living in a puzzle? And then I noticed how often patterns sit at the heart of both the questions we ask and the solutions we discover.
I found these two meanings of patterns according to Merriam Webster Dictionary, incredibly useful for the topic I want to share with you.
A pattern can be a:
- Form or model proposed for imitation.
- Reliable sample of traits, acts, tendencies, or other observable characteristics of a person, group, or institution.
And I wanted to share this with you because, believe it or not, you’ve been interacting with patterns far more than you probably realize. In art, in music, in poetry . Even in the seemingly mundane rhythms of daily life, patterns are everywhere. It’s as if we’re hardwired to notice them.
Why do we seek patterns?
Patterns as a survival tool
Since the beginning, human survival has depended on recognizing and interpreting patterns. Early societies, for instance, relied on weather cycles to guide their farming. In agrarian communities, the rhythm of rain was more than a natural phenomenon—it was a calendar. How long until the rains returned? Which crops flourished in which seasons? Over time, people noticed that rain fell at predictable intervals, lasted for a set period, and then gave way to dryness. This recognition helped them prepare. Planting during the wet months and storing harvests to endure the dry ones.
Pattern recognition was a survival tool that allowed people to predict and adapt.
Patterns as a gateway to undiscovered knowledge
This human impulse to predict, to feel a sense of control, did not stop with agriculture. Centuries later, in 1860, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev applied the same instinct to the building blocks of matter. He noticed that when he arranged the elements by increasing atomic weight, their chemical behaviors repeated in a regular pattern. This recognition gave him the courage to leave gaps for elements that hadn’t even been discovered yet. He predicted their weights and properties so precisely that when gallium and germanium were later found, they matched his forecasts almost exactly. Mendeleev’s periodic table was a groundbreaking discovery in chemistry. It laid the foundation for the modern periodic table we know today.
Patterns as a hint to a much bigger reality
There have been studies of self-similarities and fractals in nature—This is when smaller parts of an object resemble the whole, so that the structure appears similar at different scales. For example, the branches of a tree echo the shape of the larger branch they come from, and small tributaries mirror the structure of an entire river system. But some patterns pop up in completely unrelated places. Like the golden spiral appearing both in a seashell and in the arms of a galaxy. Take this with a pinch of salt (or wonder); it’s almost as if the same fundamental patterns are at work in the tiniest and the grandest scales. A hint that there might be a deeper, interconnected reality underlying everything we see.
Why do we create patterns?
I think we have an innate appreciation for the patterns already present around us—in nature, in the world we move through every day. Or maybe it’s an affinity for things we long to understand, so we replicate them in our own creations. Patterns are one way we make sense of the world.
Patterns as a way to create meaning
The most obvious way we create patterns is through art. We tend to break the messages we want to relay, into identifiable bits: rhythms, rhymes, symmetry. We take something unique and dress it in familiar structures so that the person on the receiving end can decode it, connect with it, and feel it resonate.
Patterns as a means for Memory & Continuity
Patterns also help us remember and connect the past to the present. Our brains are wired to recognize recurring forms and sequences, which makes it easier to store and retrieve information.
A good example of this are The Incas of the Andes Mountains of South America. A civilization that thrived from the 13th to 16th centuries. The Incas created a system called quipus. Which was basically a series of knotted strings that carried meaning. The placement of knots, their spacing, and the colors of the cords all encoded information. For the Inca empire, quipus recorded taxes, censuses, and even chronicles of events.
For a long time, scholars thought quipus were little more than accounting tools, but recent research suggests they may have been far richer, encoding stories, names, and histories. Though they haven’t been fully “decoded”, quipus show how patterns themselves can become a language, connecting one generation to the next.
Patterns are fun!
There’s just something about recognizing patterns that sparks curiosity and excitement in us. Jigsaw puzzles, Rubik’s cubes, board games. I’m sure you can name twenty more games that rely on pattern recognition. Maybe more. Our brains love it. Patterns relax us, challenge us, and make us feel clever for spotting the hidden order in what might at first seem like chaos.
What are patterns telling us?
As much as patterns have guided generations across fields of knowledge, they’ve also left us with questions. Much like having a conversation with a wise teacher. Perhaps patterns are teachers themselves, masters of their craft, inviting us to pay attention, to explore, and to learn. They’re nudging us to stay aware, to make room for both questions and answers, to uncover what lies beneath the surface.
So, are we really living in a puzzle? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know yet. Maybe someday, someone will discover the pattern that gives a definitive answer to that. What I do know is this: patterns have been a worthy companion so far.
