• Bipolar disorder, where the two equilibrium are the depression state and the manic state
• Cravings for different restaurants, each a different equilibria: when I order in one, I tend to only want to order there for some time.
• Tennis exchange, which is a very complex 3D trajectory of the ball, but end up being classified as a point for one player or the other.
• Chess move, which is a complex 3D object being manipulated in complex continuous ways, but result in a discrete state (the position)
• Market with much competition, where the equilibria capture who is on top/best, and this tends to be maintained until it is completely switched.

• Bipolar disorder: the kicks are really hard to know and find, probably the longer the period has lasted the more smaller kicks become able to move the state
• Cravings for different restaurants: eating once doesn't do it, but there's a bound on how many times I want to eat at the same place. Around it, thinking of another place/food might do the trick.
• Tennis exchange: The kick truly depends on how far the trajectory needs to be pushed to be inside or outside, or to reach the racket of the player on this side of the net.
• Chess move: the kick is the distance you have to move the piece so that it is in an ambiguous place between two cells, or in another cell.
• Market with much competition: the kick is for another competitor to beat the winner.

• Recycled goods. They seem to have two states - filled and sealed for sale, and clean, empty and sorted for recycling. The period in between, where they are in the process of being consumed, is often only a tiny fraction of the lifespan of, say, a glass beverage bottle.
• Broken windows theory. Under this crime-fighting theory, the existence of "crime breeds crime." So if you can invest in sprucing up and enforcing the law in a crime-ridden neighborhood, it will tend to become and stay a safe neighborhood. Those that accumulate damage will spiral out of control.
  • Factors like economic shifts or changes in policing policy might cause the equilibrium to shift from one stable regime to the other.
  • This suggests an empirical prediction: the majority of neighborhoods will cluster into low-crime or high-crime categories, with relatively few neighborhoods in a zone of moderate crime. Of course, a believer in BWT should specify the size of the zone in which BWT is expected to operate. Will we find crime clustered by city? By neighborhood? By block? By building? If we don't find crime clustering at the level of the city, should this shake our confidence in BWT? Or is the theory that crime clusters at the level of the neighborhood only?
• The Matthew Effect. "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away."
  • Most recently, I've been exploring this in the context of academic publishing. The distribution of citations has been explained by several models, one of which is the Matthew Effect. Personal crises in a researcher's life might cause them to shift from a high citation index to a low one. A dramatic success might cause movement in the reverse direction.

• Polar caps and glaciers. Albedo change sets a high barrier for new growth when gone.
• When getting to know a sect you can be in any social relation to them. At some point you will settle in one of two very distinct states. Entering isn't too hard. Exiting has a very high 'activation energy'.
• Acquired taste preferences (coffee or tea) seem to be bistable. (I'd guess many habits are)

1. Sleep / wakefulness; hypnagogia seems transient and requires conscious effort to maintain. Outside stimuli and internal volition can wake people up; lack thereof can do the opposite.
2. Friendships; I tend to have few, close friendships. I don't interact much with more distant friends because it's less emotionally fulfilling, so they slowly fade towards being acquaintances. I distance myself from people I don't connect with / feel safe around, and try to strengthen bonds with people I think are emotionally mature and interesting.
3. Focus; I tend to either be checked out or deeply zoned-in. There's strong momentum here, especially for cognitively engaging tasks. Anything which I expect to impair my work will push me into "maintenance" mode, where I conserve energy and do less object-level work. This takes engagement with interesting stuff plus willed focus to recover from.

 1. When my alarm rings in the morning, I can collapse into one of two possible equilibria: Either I stand up, or I hit snooze and continue to lie in bed for another couple of minutes.

2. In Schrödinger's cat example, either the atom will decay or not, so the cat will either be dead or not, and it doesn't make sense to describe it to be in a superposition. (Schrödinger's cat is terribly often totally misinterpreted by the media and others.) (Admittedly the cat already is in one equilibrium and needs a kick to get into the more stable equilibrium of being dead, so this example is bad.)

3. For a particular type of tech startups, those startups will either become relatively big successes or fail eventually (at least most often).

1. Actually I need to stand up anyway to put my alarm off, but sometimes I just hit snooze anyway and go back to bed. A kick that get's me out of bed may be sth like me thinking "oh I have a meeting" or "fuck it, let's stand up although I hit snooze" or so. A kick that makes me go back to bed after having stood up might be that I feel pretty tiered and decide it is best / most productive to go back and sleep a bit more.
2. alive->dead: The atom decays. Or you take a big axe and slam it into the box with the cat.
   dead->alive: Technology that doesn't exist yet.
3. big success -> fail: not adopting to technology changes (e.g. Kodak), not being innovative, ...
   fail -> big success: not really possible for the same startup I would say, though the people of the startup might find sth else and become a big success later.

 1) As a young man I spent some time jumping back and forth between being single and being in a relationship. Both states felt stable, like two distinct equilibria. 

2) Also as a young man I had friends who pursued higher education and friends who didn't; then there were those who alternated between the two states, once or twice or more. Perhaps not the best example because college is not an ending state but a beginning stage. 

3) I'm reminded of the first two lines in "All My Love" by Led Zeppelin: "should I drop out of my farmer life / to chase a feather in the wind". Both states, farming and being a merry gypsy traveler are states of equilibrium, in their own way.... 

 1) She breaks up with me! Or vice versa. Or I'm walking down Grosvenor Square and a girl catches my eye, with bells on her fingers and rings on her shoes. That may set my ball rolling toward the hypothetical equilibrium of her arms. I might as well try.

2) COVID-19 pushes classes online and a struggling student decides he should take the leap into the professional world instead of the academic. 

3) I think Robert Plant was singing about something similar to my answer for number 1). 

1. A seesaw on a playground. Either side will come back down again if it's perturbed a little (given it's reasonably well oiled etc).
   
   People sitting on it and literally kicking with their feet is enough to kick it into a different state. Random noise due to wind is not strong enough, except maybe in a heavy storm.
2. The handle of a window (usually). Pointing in one direction when closed and another when open. It will stay in either position unless explicitly moved (which makes it different from a door handle).
   
   The activation energy required to kick it depends on whether it's oiled or rusty etc.
3. The ruling party / coalition in a democracy. (In general multistable, but in the US you might call it bistable). One type of perturbation are attempted coups, which will be squashed when not strong enough.
   
   Elections are kicks. But only when the elected party is actually different, which might happen when the voters are dissatisfied with the previous one strongly enough, or the election campaign was just better, etc. Another kick would be a successful coup.