The late stage of a paradigm is extremely boring.

All of the requisite variety in the system has been slurped up into the small number of hyper gravity wells.

There's little movement in the system except in the hyper gravity wells.

Those gravity wells move slowly because they're so large, so swaps of position happen less often.

All the remaining energy goes into adding ornamentation and differentiation into increasingly small details and niches, so much so that at the 100,000 foot view you can't see any changes at all.

Like a universe approaching its heat death.

Everything slows to a crawl.

Because everything slows, on a relative basis you don't notice anything getting slower, but you feel like you're trapped in amber.

Like Ted Chiang's Exhalation.

Like watching wallpaper dry.

Stagnation.

The right move in that case?

To help catalyze a big bang.

A new landscape of requisite variety to play in.