THIS has been one of my favourite topics of late. A couple of months ago, I played poker, and yesterday I played monopoly. Honestly, games like this that involved chance and decision-making at the same time always intimidated me. They intimidated me because once I started losing money (or chips) I would go into a freeze, and treat it like the end of the world. The last two times though, I have realised what a roller-coaster these things are. The person who wins is quite often the one who is getting thrashed at the beginning. And then one crucial round, one crucial throw of the dice, and the winner's graph goes up from there. It is all randomness. We can never tell what is going to happen- whether we will come crashing down, or end up with piles of cash.
I see a connection to our lives too. Randomness reigns supreme. There is no telling what may happen next week, tomorrow, or even the next hour. We plan our professional lives, have perceptions about our personal lives, but the course is always changed by something completely unexpected. Fluctuating fortunes, people entering and leaving our lives when we least expect something to happen. Even great nations have made and make plans- and then there is a random spark that sets fire to them, and razes them to the ground. The control we believe we have on our life is an illusion.
What makes the difference between winners and losers then? The ability to keep cool when you are on the slide, take it in your stride, and lookout for the first chance to bounce back; the killer instinct: to make the most of your profits, to extract as much out of life as possible when it is being kind to you.
On the large scale, our lives are just a series of random experiments with random outcomes. The world collectively is just a giant random process, which we will always try to explain with science, religion, philosophy and social sciences.
But we will never get there, because we ourselves are the experiments, not the experimenter.
