A Rational Surface

Sometimes you just got to let it go. Your expectations, goals, dreams, and the things you want to will into existence, the things you expect and demand to be true, because we don’t always have the power to make them true. Even if we nearly did, it’s all on the life of chance.

Every future has a chance of happening; they all have a probability. The only thing you can truly do is increase the chances by applying effort in some direction you have access and control of, which varies based on the situation. Sometimes you can do a lot and others not so much. But still, in the end, all you’re accomplishing is increasing the probabilities of it occurring: there’s still a world of chances out there. A world where it may never happen or go your way.

So you just got to be fine with it. If it doesn’t happen, it is what it is; if it does, great, but even then it’s still probably a bit different. That’s why you got to learn to let go: let go of the need for it to happen as you wish. Because when it doesn’t, and it most definitely won’t, you will feel pain from it, and that is wasted pain, not that which can propel you further.

Though it not going your way can propel you further, I don’t argue that. Only that obsessing over it not going your way can create wasted pain. Experiencing it, learning from it, growing from it is not wasted. And it can even be argued to be better than having it go your way: when everything is easy you don’t need to be hard, and then how can you be great?

So we should not be disappointed when things don’t go our way. Understand that outcomes are and will always be chances, chances that we may influence but never control. The best we may do is our best and truest. Be your best and truest self and let the outcomes come themselves. Life is not predictable and should not be.

Though we do wish it could be.

We can increase our understanding of it to gain better insight and predictive abilities, surely; yet still fall short of knowing it all. Knowing every little piece that makes it tick. If we did, would we then be able to predict it all? Maybe. I mean, causally yes, no? But then maybe things aren’t truly causal deep down and only appear so at a higher abstraction level, the one where we perhaps exist and understand. There’s nothing to say that the rationality evolved from our brains is a dictation of how the universe works at every level. It could simply be a higher-order abstraction that best helped us understand and survive our environments, and now that’s all we see and understand. Remember, life evolves to adapt to the environment and that is what we are. There would be no reason for our brains to evolve an understanding of the precise universe; what use would that be for survival? Would something like that even bubble up to the effects of life? No, nothing like that: only through higher-level abstractions will it have an effect. And perhaps somehow along the way, rationality and causality began to appear and dictate the world.

This is not to say that rationality doesn’t exist down below or cover everything; it’s more so an openness to the possibility that non-rational realities exist within our universe, meaning that our implicit bias toward rationality isn’t grounded by some proof (or is it?) but instead by our natural way of understanding the world. We understood the world rationally because that’s how the surface appeared to be, and so that’s how our brain evolved to become. Of course our brains would develop memory and pattern-matching skills to help adapt to a rational surface. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an irrational depth. The universe could be anything beyond our eyes.

It’s just an idea: one that I did not research.