Skip to main content

A Random Universe?

Its funny how much randomness defines our lives and everything around us. And its funnier how we try to find order in all this randomness - in our lives and in things around us. We, as humans are designed not to really understand randomness. Our abilities are limited when it comes to understanding or truly grasping the randomness around us. And since we can't understand it, we assume its non-existence or maybe give less importance to its existence. This is more evident in the financial markets more than anything. People make charts, and graphs and do technical analysis to make sense of it all. But rarely do they beat the flip of a coin. Its in our nature to try to make sense and we spend a lot of energy doing that. In fact, a hell lot of energy and resources. But if we really do learn to accept randomness it will save mankind a lot of trouble and wasted resources. We make plans, only to see them fall apart. And the falling apart causes us misery and takes an emotional toll. And then what do we do? we make more plans. We try even harder to bring order. But what if there is no order and what if it meant to be that way. One of the characters that I truly admire (though not his sinister ideals) is the Joker from the batman series. He understood randomness, and hence nothing had value for him. He burnt money, and didn't care that he can die in the next moment when batman is holding him by his legs dangling off a skyscraper  He hated plans and truly believed there is no order in the universe. Albeit he takes his ideas to an extreme (the part I don't agree with!) and starts playing with (or rather destroying) other peoples lives. But at-least I can understand where he comes from, even though I don't understand (or agree with) where he goes.

In any case, I think you will be a much happier person if you just learn to accept the chaos, the randomness. Its not your fault, its part of nature, of the universe. This doesn't mean you completely give up on everything (like the Joker). You still make plans and have expectations, but be aware that randomness is going to play a major part in them. And the plans might not go as you expected. They might not work out.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

True Essence

My yoga teacher, who knows a lot about me and my story, recently asked me "what do you like about yourself, what is your true essence?". I gave the usual answer that I have been giving myself for most of my life - that I am kind, generous, helpful etc. etc. That was not the answer he was looking for. He said those things are in relation to other people i.e. these traits are what I think other people perceive me as. But what is really MY true essence and what do I like about MYSELF. He gave me a week to think about it. That did get me thinking. I talked to some friends about it over the week. I realised how much of my self-perception is dictated by other people. And it has been like that all my life. What I think of myself is really what I think others think of me. Or what I want others to think of me. But if I take other people out of the equation, what am I? What is my true essence? The more I thought, the more I realised that my true essence is creativity. Looking back...
1 comment
Read more

The limitation of language

Humans developed language as a means of communicating with other tribe members. Language is one of the most important, if not THE most important, reason humans are so successful as a species. It enables us not only to communicate immediate information (e.g. there is a lion in that direction, don't go there) but also form and communicate intricate ideas (e.g. myths, religions). Yuval Hariri in his massively interesting book "Sapiens" talks about how what he calls "fiction" (i.e. stories we humans tell each other) enabled homo sapiens to co-operate in massive numbers (much more than the Dunbar limit of 150) and made us such a successful species. Language was critical in all of that.  I believe the advent of language was what gave the biggest boost to cultural evolution in humans. Humans are the only species that significantly evolve culturally as well as naturally. Cultural evolution is exponentially faster than natural evolution - we homo sapiens effectively ...
1 comment
Read more