Why are parents like this?

Are parents deterministic or entropic?

Yes, entropy again. It’s the cornerstone of my life philosophy so I keep coming back to it to either build, review or modify my understanding of all things life.

Today’s topic is fate.

In a conversation last night I was faced with an argument that went like this – “What if if I don’t do this and 10 years later I get a terrible life threatening disease because of it?”

And my response was – “How do you know that doing this will surely prevent the life threatening disease?” It’s all just entropy. You could do this and still get the disease. Or not do it and still not get the disease. Shit’s random!

Stochastic behaviour overpowers the complex system that is our universe!

Here, I made a visual depiction of it –

Anyway. This got me thinking about things from the other end. What if the disease is bound to happen, then whatever you do today will have no bearing on the outcome. That’s fate, isn’t it?

So look one way, things are entropy. Look another, they are fate. Huh?

But I have grown up attributing these deterministic notions of fate and karma to religious people. I am not a religious man. I dabble on the boundaries of scientific atheism, optimistic nihilism, and well, religion. I don’t believe in any of these things fully. I have carved out my own belief system from these larger ideas. Entropy! Entropy was my friend all along.

And now it turns out that it’s just the mirror image of a deeply religious idea? Fucking hell.

“History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.”

We are such creatures of repetition. I hate it.

This feels like my parents, or rather all parents in the world, telling me – “We too used to think like this when we were your age. When you’re older you’ll see our point of view.” As a kid I hated this idea because I thought I was living an original life. And as I have grown older I have begun to see that the parents were right. And so I get even more annoyed by it because fuuuuck they were right all along!

I had one (somewhat) original idea about life. As in, of course I did not invent the idea, but I discovered it on my own from books and conversations and navel gazing.

And now it’s gone.

Sigh. I hate growing up.

Yes, I missed sending a newsletter last two weeks. My apologies. I don’t think I need to tell you why I missed it because practically 90% of you who subscribe to this newsletter know that I was away on a holiday. I mean, I was away on a holiday with some of you.

What’s next? I’ve still got a bunch of questions that I want to write about. I will be honest though, I don’t feel so strongly about them anymore. So I’ll take my time. I do want to maintain the once a week writing frequency though. It keeps my brain happy.

I should ask though – Is there something that you would want me to write about? Any modifications you’d want me to make to this newsletter? Do you want me to add a meme of the week? Or an idea of the week? (I have many)

Let me know? I just want to exercise my writing muscle. If I can use it to make something useful for you, that’d be sweet.

Okay, see you next week.