There is a branch in the well. You’re alive because of this branch. It’s what you’re holding onto. It’s what is keeping you from falling into the darkness. But you know, sooner or later, it’s going to break. And you’re going to fall. You try not to disturb it too much lest it breaks unexpectedly. Everyday you look at it, checking for signs of weakness. Then one day, it sprouts. At first a bud. Then bud then becomes a leaf. Vibrant and green, in this desolate hole. Life to this seemingly dead branch you are holding on to. And it fills you with wonder. And it makes you happy. And you no longer want the branch to break. You’re presence can now only cause harm. And so you do what you think is best.
A Person
A person is smart. People are Dumb. There’s benefit in camaraderie. That explains why someone is highly likely to agree with you (or at least not disagree with you) in a one on one conversation. There’s benefit in doing so. We are social creatures. And social interaction feels rewarding to us - you actually release dopamine, serotonin and a whole other bunch of stuff from just interacting, and this includes with people you don’t know. Put two people of differing views in one room, and more likely than not, they will find a discourse.
But it is precisely because of the benefit of camaraderie that a person will go back to the views of the social system they are part of. Because belonging to a social system beats being an outsider. It means having a home. Having a people. Different is not generally accepted in social systems. It is more looked at as a threat to the system. Any of you who have tried subverting a system knows how hard it is. You face resistance both internally and externally. You’re mind will constantly nudge you to agree. And the environment will do the same.
A Memory
Sometimes you feel stuck. Things are falling apart. And you crave the feeling of being unstuck. And you desire to put it all back together. In that moment, a memory will reach out. A memory from the past. A painful one. A delightful one. A nostalgic one. And it will spread its arms, welcoming you in. It’s okay to look at the past. Just. Don’t. Stare. Let go. But don’t close the door. No matter how much it’s frowned upon, there is grace in letting go.
Causality
I have an unconventional belief that only about half of someone’s success is causal. The half that is causal is made up of two things predominantly. The first is the initial conditions. By that I mean where you were born and how you came up. Put simply, a person born rich is more likely to get rich because they already are. This person will get the best education. They’ll have powerful connections. It’s not to say that some of them don’t fail. It’s just to say that they have a much higher chance. The chances get slimmer if you are born only middle class. They get even slimmer when you are born poor. If you go down the list of billionaires, you’ll find that a lot of them had initial conditions that were out of the ordinary.
The second would be the things like hard work, determination, and talent. These factors go a long way. Look at the wealthiest people and you find that a lot of them are working all the time. Just take a look at Elon’s schedule. And for a lot of them, it took an incredible amount of work to get their now gigantic companies off the ground. It meant working 16 hours a day. These people don’t just take a holiday. A holiday for them is to go to France to get a grant or tax benefit from the government - while also visiting the Eiffel Tower with their kids. There’s no wasted space.
But out of eight billion people on the planet, I’m willing to bet that there’s at least one hundred million hard working people. And yet the vast majority of them are just surviving. Hard work, talent and determination don’t fully explain explain success for me. If they did, there’d be a million billionaires and a billion millionaires. There has to be another factor. For me, that factor is chance.
Men
Because we are men. And what we, men, want more than anything, is to taste greatness, no matter how fleeting. To know that we mattered.
Statistics
It was fascinating to watch people’s obsession with some rich people stuck in a submarine. That was the biggest news and social commentary topic for almost two weeks. As for that situation, I’ll just quote Nassim Taleb. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. And statistics stay silent in us. Lives saved are a statistic, a person hurt an anecdote. Statistics are invisible. Anecdotes are salient.
Trust
What would happen if she cheated? To be honest, I don’t have an answer. There would be a lot of factors that determined what I’d do. But I can’t know now these factors now. And I can’t anticipate how I’d judge these factors - my views now will not be the same as my views then. But what I do know is that there are only a few things that hurt more than a betrayal of trust. There's a reason the lowest level of Dante's Inferno is reserved for people who betray. There's a reason God says betrayers are worse than murderers. Revelations 3:16, For you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out my mouth.
Nature
There are no straight lines in nature. If you ever see a straight line in your physical environment, it is man made. In fact, nature doesn’t have any of the shapes we use in our daily lives. Circles, ovals, triangles, rectangles, squares. None of these shapes exist in nature. at least never precisely. That’s because nature's shape is something that is not yet in our vocabulary. Nature is made up of self-similar patterns. Take a branch as a whole and it resembles the tree. Take the veins of a leaf and it resembles the branch and the tree. A child resembles the father and or mother. Humans resemble each other. So do fish. Nature is fractal.
Average
“He’s just an average joe.” This, in today’s world, equates to an insult. We don’t have the tolerance for average. A psychiatrist I watch observed that society is built to help the people on the extremes. It’s helps the people on one end of the spectrum - the bad one. The people in shitty situations. The poor. The marginalized. On the other end, its focuses on how to optimize the lives of those on the other end of the spectrum. People who are doing a lot, but want to do more. How do we optimize productivity. Time. Money. But everyone in the middle of that spectrum is left to fend for themselves. The vast majority of the people around average are stuck trying to do two things. Keep themselves out of the low end of the spectrum, and try as hard as possible to get into the higher end of the spectrum.
Average people are always running. From something and towards something. All their life. Non-stop. And when someone settles for average, they are silently ostracized. They are not ambitious. They are lazy. ‘Why settle for less when there’s more?’ Someone in the circles of professional sports remarked at how that group of people live. A newbie in professional sports will make 700K a year. By any measure of wealth, he is rich. But in a field where he’s playing with someone making 25 million a year, he feels decidedly poor. The newbie might want to come to practice with a Prius, but the parking lot is filled with Ferraris and Bugattis. Let’s assume he’s okay with this. Well, his teammates will ostracize him, loudly and silently.
We are social creatures. Hell for us is other people.