Nature has the first move

I love Panda Express. Most of the time I go with the old standby… orange chicken. When I pay for my meal I am handed a fortune cookie. As long as I can remember I have had the same ritual on eating fortune cookies.

This is a ritual for me. I am not looking for anything from the words of the mass produced fortune, printed in positive-biased messages. But this ritual also affords me a chance to reflect on something that is important for my own resilience. I have many mini rituals that often remind me to slow down, take notice, and be mindful.

There is a dangerous, pervasive, belief that is found out there that should be up rooted wherever possible. You may have heard of it:

and so on. It is called Belief in a Just World, or BJW, and if just taken at face value it can rob people of their resilience. How? It is victim-blaming on a massive stage. Victim-blaming carries with it an added dimension of a moral judgment. You deserve your fate because you are a bad person. Add this to the self-serving bias, where we view other people as deserving their ill fortune, or lucky for their good fortune, and the exact reverse for our own selves, and you have a toxic lens to view challenges that may arise.

With only the self-serving bias to contend with we can view the negative events that happen to ourselves as bad luck and take action to overcome it. It is rotten luck the meteorite smashed into my car, better find another ride to work! However, with the belief in BJW, or ‘everything happens for a reason’, there is an added emotional component to the already existing stress. If you were to feel unworthy, guilty, blameworthy, shamed, at the mercy of forces larger than you, and so on…. what would this do to your motivation levels? Would you feel a sense of agency? of autonomy? Would you be compelled to move forward? Or rather, would you sit alone feeling isolated? Of all the cars on the planet, it hit my car. Why? There must be a reason!.

When I eat half of my fortune cookie first before reading the paper fortune at all, I am reminding myself that in the card game of life the Universe deals first. I may be handed a good hand, a bad hand, or whatever. The cards used in games of great players are the same cards used by lousy players. Its how they play the game and yet even so, good things happen to shitty people and shitty things happen to good people, and all manner of things in between. So I eat that first half and I reflect that the Universe acts first, that I have autonomy, and I choose, or not, to act. I may eat the other half, I may dunk it in my coffee, I may throw it away, I may give it to a squirrel.

There is a long debate in philosophy and religion about the autonomy of human beings and the existence, or illusion, of free will. I believe they are all correct. Wait… what? For me it resonates what Spinoza wrote about free will and, without making this longer I will just say that to the extent that we do not exercise our rational mind, looking to be aware of the motives behind our actions, we remain not free agents, but puppets of chance at the mercy of all the actions around us. Over the past couple of years I’ve worked with many people who are not at all free, autonomous beings, but instead are slaves to passion and circumstance. At any moment of the day they can easily, and energetically, point a finger at someone or something that has brought about their latest rage, depression, anxiety, sadness, frustration, etc…

Yes, the Universe deals first. You had no choice in being born in the circumstances you started from, don’t congratulate or berate yourself for it, something I wish rich, white men would remember. Some of them are too busy making arguments that they are the most deserving people because they are privileged. It is a strange, circular argument, that is employed often. Even still, if you would be a free being, you must act as a free being. To borrow from Forest Gump, “a free mind is as a free mind does”.

Related posts:

The clocks have gone forward, the days are getting longer and the weather is starting to warm up, which means the four day Easter Weekend is almost here. Good Friday & Easter Monday (with an…

I had the pleasure of interviewing Akshay Bansal, an Author, Entrepreneur and an Inventor, credited with chemical engineering and MBA. After finishing his post grad, Akshay started his research on…

Has the machine decoded human language yet? How Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used today and what it is capable of tomorrow. Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply hold your smartphone to…