We don’t have full control
I have faced difficult challenges throughout 2024. Through these, I have learnt tons about life and how best to deal with it. I am writing this blog post because I fully believe that learning from other people’s experiences is one of the most potent ways to learn. The benefit to this is that, when we face similar situations ourselves, we can find the most advantageous ways forward or avoid the mistakes the other people had made. To follow a kaizen lifestyle of continuous learning, we must be open-minded.
How life can be merciless
These are the series of events that happened to me that I have drawn important lessons from.
- Got laid off from my job
- Prepared to move back to my home country
- Applied to NUS1, got the offer
- Decided to move to Singapore and accept the offer
- Found abnormal results on an MRI
- Discovered I had Multiple Sclerosis after spending a week at the hospital
- Chose to not go to NUS to pursue treatment
Within this arc of a story, a lot happened, none of which I’ll ever forget. I want to record the lessons that each situation flashed brightly in front of my eyes as a self reminder and so anyone else reading this can benefit from it.
There will be many ideas I’ll be talking about in this post but the one idea that will connect all the pieces together will be the unpredictability of life and how we cannot control everything.
I must confess, it would be awesome if we lived in a world where, like video games, one button press would lead to a definitive action. In other words, life would be simpler if we had full control over the environment at all times. However, the world is a much more complicated place, filled with uncertainty. What is certain is that the world is uncertain. Therefore, we need to have ways to attack the problems that uncertainty gives us.
Mental models. Managing our thoughts. Specific ways to insulate ourselves from difficulties.
Many of these will sound like common sense and they probably are. But common sense is not so common, especially in times of stress.
The problem with plans
We make plans all the time. It is our primary way of dealing with the uncertainty of the future. A plan-less future looks bleak and murky. The infinite possibilities of the world have a paralyzing effect and we could end up doing nothing at all.
Should I go to the gym tomorrow? Or should I meet my friends? When? Who? What workout program? What am I going to do with my future?
AAAAAAAGH
On the other hand, a definitive plan made sets our mind at ease. Like computer programs, having a set of instructions to follow simplifies everything in a magical way. There’s a problem however. Our plans are just wishful ideas that live in our head and don’t have any bearing on reality. We need to prepare for plans failing all the time; otherwise, we’ll get disappointed.
Bashed expectations and hopes are not fun. We can protect ourselves from this problem by making plans but not getting attached to them. Attachments, by themselves, provide no real value to our plans and their fruition. All they do is potentially blind us to alternate pathways we could take to achieve the same thing or something greater. Identifying with our plans make them seem to be the end all be all for us. We need to shield ourselves from that.
Making plans is still valuable because they’re really useful tools to give conscious direction to our lives. But once we make them, we need to resign ourselves to fate. Whatever happens will happen and I will make the result good nonetheless.
Murphy’s Law
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong
Edward A. Murphy Jr
Does it ever seem like everything’s falling apart? Maybe this “law” will explain it. Murphy’s law is not like the physical laws of nature. Although people call it “Murphy’s law,” nothing specific in our existence makes it a law like Newton’s laws of motion. Yet, there’s an inkling of truth in this statement if we observe nature.
Murphy’s law doesn’t mean that everything is doomed, you need not try, and if you try to cook steak tonight, you’ll set your house on fire. It is simply a way to push the principle of preparing for worst case contingencies, because they may just happen.
My employer could have laid me off at any point during my 2 years at my previous job. In fact, there had been mass layoffs happening since the beginning of my tenure at the organization. Yet, for some strange reason, it coincided exactly with my diagnosis. I could have never predicted either events happening and they occurred in succession.
This is a pretty depressing thought but it showcases how important it is proactively prepare for the future. Save money when the economy booms to protect yourself during a recession. Get strong in times of peace so you’ll be ready if war strikes. Expend your energy wisely when you can so you don’t regret it when you cannot. Because life is filled with uncertainties and anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Entropy is your enemy
The second law of thermodynamics states, “as one goes forward in time, the net entropy (degree of disorder) of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same)”. Although we often frame the law in terms of heat and energy, entropy influences our lives in various diverse ways.
Take the simple example of dirty plates. When we place dirty plates in the sink, the food stuck to it is initially soft and easily washable. However, when you wake up the next morning and try to wash it, the food stains are much more difficult to wash. The whole reason why we prefer to soak dishes after eating is due to entropy.
Entropy affects any problem you can think of. If solutions don’t address problems as soon as they’re identified, over time, disorder starts to work its dark magic. This results in the problems either remaining the same (best-case scenario) or worsening.
We must act fast to deal with entropy. The moment we notice any problems, we must begin formulating a plan to attack it as soon as possible. The attack can either solve the problem completely (wash dishes immediately after eating) or find a pathway that tremendously reduces the acceleration of entropy (soaking dishes overnight).
Good relationships and social support
We must invest into our relationships. Modern society applauds investments in the stock market, but it fails to advise people to invest in their relationships.
“The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” covers this idea well. The author draws a parallel between bank accounts and our relationships with people. Every single good interaction with other people, where you are trustworthy and a decent person, adds value to the emotional bank account and bad interactions subtract your net balance.
It is a fascinating way to look at relationships and is certainly true. I’d like to take things further and suggest people to add positive value to the emotional bank account every day. These are investments in your relationships and are equally as important as your stock market investments.
The types of relationships and people in our lives directly impact our reality. Our lives and happiness are linked together very strongly to others. Thus, aiming to invest in the important people of our lives makes our own lives better. The power of a strong support system becomes even more paramount in times of trouble, as it was for me. It made my situation infinitely more tolerable and I am forever indebted to it.
Maximize your options
In life, we should do our best to have as many options as we can. Being boxed into only one path is a difficult situation, so we should always have alternatives we can pursue. This is the philosophy that made me apply to universities and was the only reason why I got into NUS.
Initially, I was convinced that I wouldn’t get in and my mind had formulated 1000 reasons why I wasn’t the ideal candidate for that university. Even applying would just be a waste of money. But when my dad advised me to solely apply to increase my options, I gave it a shot. On top of that, a core Hindu philosophy that had been ringing in my ears convinced me to forget my initial fears. The principle states:
You have the right to work, but never to its fruits
In others words, you can act to try and increase your options, but do not be disappointed even if none of them pan out because you have no right over the fruits of your action. Work to maximize your options, without attachment. Never put all your eggs in one basket. Do not be disappointed if some options fail. We’re expecting that some will not work out which is why we create many in the first place.
Why to be flexible
Everyone knows that adaptation is the mechanism by which all organisms evolved. It is more popularly phrased as “survival of the fittest.” Adaptation is important in everyday life too, especially when things happen that rock your everyday life to its core.
Oftentimes we become obstinately attached to our own ideas and we hold on to them like Bitcoin, a reflection of a closed mind. In times of trouble, holding onto our own rosy version of reality, where everything happens the way we want, can make better paths invisible to us. We can incorrectly choose more difficult, inefficient ways of doing things because of our stubbornness.
Someone may argue that this is common sense but trying to have a conscious open-mind and being flexible is not always easy. Our brains start whispering to us:
“Hey man, I think you may just be losing control of it all”
“This is your life and you need to take control and be in charge”
And so we will push hard, as that is our nature: to try and control situations, to shape them to our liking. This is not the way to go. Instead, we need to relax and surrender. Let life and the situations that happen, happen. In due time, the path forward becomes clear. We need to let go of our former ideas and replace them with better ones that we entertain through radical open-mindedness and who knows? We may just solve the problem that way!
This does not mean do nothing and let problems get worse over time because they will. Remember the dark magic that entropy casts over all of us. It simply means: don’t jump to conclusions about the best path forward. Entertain all possible ideas seriously.
On regret
When things go wrong, it becomes paramount to know how to deal with regret. I am often haunted by images of myself studying at NUS, fulfilling the dream I had as a teenager of attending one of the world’s top universities. I was this close. If it had not been for this stupid disease…
Regret is tough to deal with but there are a few strategies that can help. First of all, life is long. There is no train to catch. We can keep building and rebuilding ourselves until the day we reach the grave. We most commonly feel regret when we believe that we should have acted but did not. If that’s the case, can we not start acting today?
“The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time is now.”
Secondly, self-love and forgiveness is lacking and important in this world. I have felt this acutely in my life, always judging myself for not performing, not getting those jobs, not this, not that. Seeing the people on social media doing the things I wanted to do would not help and I would loathe my own laziness. I was not the self forgiving type!
Comparison seems to be at the regret’s fuel. Without it, regret’s machinery cannot operate. If I had none of those social media figures to compare myself against, I would proudly appreciate anything I had accomplished, no matter how trivial.
Given the circumstances of my life, I did the best I could. That was the past, but right now, I can do even better. And I will.
There is no better way to deal with regret than a mentality like this. With this, we may just give the uselessness of regret some meaning.
Health is wealth
Forgive me for sounding like your grandparents here, but I must offer you my two cents given the recent health issues I have had. Multiple Sclerosis, the disease I have been diagnosed with, is a potentially debilitating neurological disease. It is progressive and can make a person bed-ridden, unable to walk, see, or perform normal daily tasks without aid. Doctors and scientists still have no idea what causes this mysterious disease.
But there’s a catch though.
Here’s one thing experts know for sure: MS is a disease that develops and progresses due to lifestyle conditions. And it’s not just MS either. Many of the most common chronic diseases in the world are lifestyle diseases, meaning they develop and progress as a result of a person’s daily life. Diabetes, heart disease, other auto immune conditions, you name it. The effect that a simple series of healthy changes in a person’s life can make on such a wide array of conditions is incredible.
Obvious advice builds resistance
The frustrating part is that these changes are ones that we all know. Getting adequate sunlight, Vitamin D supplementation, exercising, meditating, eating a healthy, plant-based diet, and so on. I knew of these changes prior to my diagnosis! But did I act on what I knew? Definitely not. It is starkly clear to me that the nature of humans is to only take things seriously once everything goes to shit. This I’ve learnt just by observing myself.
Now that I am facing an uncertain future, the words “health is wealth” have taken on a new depth of meaning. I could wake up any day tomorrow and start experiencing an entirely new set of MS symptoms, potentially resulting in new lesions (or scarring) in my central nervous system. This means progression of the disease. How much money do you think I would spend to prevent that from happening? Collect your $100 if you guessed that I’d spend everything.
The ultimate good, according to Aristotle
Now, the most important thing in my day is preserving my health. I do the things that the experts have recommended me, which are things that maximizes any person’s life whether or not they have any conditions. A long, happy life is what everybody wants. We may think we want this or that but if you dig deeper into anything, you will know that you had happiness in your mind’s eye the whole time. This is the same conclusion that Aristotle came to when he tried to find “the ultimate good”, or the ultimate purpose of life. Happiness.
We must do what we can to ensure the “long” part of the equation by leading a healthy life, filled with exercise, robust stress reduction techniques, good diet, and avoiding bad habits. Without a long, healthy life, we have no opportunity to enjoy any other wealth we may accumulate. This is the first and most important thing we must strive for.
Things happen in batches
Misfortune comes in threes. Many cultures across the world hold this fairly common superstitious sentiment. In my own country of Nepal, people believe in this. We may dismiss this as “superstitious claptrap”, but one must give it a closer look when the different cultures, geographically separated, converge to the same ideas, even if they’re superstitious.
Good fortune or bad, both comes in threes. Why would the world work that way? At a basic level, one bad event can shake up the chain of dominoes that surround our lives enough that it falls on top of another bad event. Why would one bad event attract another bad event? This, I believe, is the work of inertia.
The dark power of inertia
Inertia, like entropy, is a standard force that permeates life. The level of effort it takes to get out of bed, after spending hours in it, seems doubly difficult than getting out of bed immediately on waking up. When we get into the groove of a habit, it becomes automatic and performing it is effortless. In fact, you’d need some strong external force to shake up your routines and cause you to miss going through your habit.
Due to inertia, when a bad event happens, it’s more likely to attract another bad event. And then another one. At that point, we need an external force to break this chain of misfortunes, which often involves us reacting to the bad circumstances and taking action to lessen their impact.
When everything is going wrong, be wary. It wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility that more things could follow. Logically speaking, when everything goes right, the same could occur. So make sure to buy a lottery ticket and ask that girl out, if you’ve recently had a round of good news.
People and their many flavors
People are all different. We have different motivations, interests, irritators, and desires. No two persons are exactly the same. In the span of 1 month, I have had to interact with more types of people than I had in the last 3 years. I saw people who were rule followers and malleable rule breakers, people centric and indifferent, competent and completely incompetent. There were two events that communicated the importance of this observation to myself.
1. The bed alarm
At hospitals, staff change daily, particularly the nurses and technicians. Therefore, you see a rapid succession of different nurses and how they interact with you. I was admitted to the hospital for a neurological issue and was placed in the neurology department. The protocol of the neurology team was to set a bed alarm so that the staff is notified whenever someone gets up from the bed. The logic is to prevent falls, as balance issues are fairly common in people with neurological conditions.
In my case, however, I wasn’t having threatening coordination issues. I could walk up and go to the bathroom without issues. So I decided to appeal to one of the nursing staff to turn the alarm off, so I could walk around in my room. The first nurse was a stickler for the rules. They turned me down by saying “Them’s the rules”. The next day, I was greeted by a different nurse. So I had a chat with them and asked the same thing again. After some coaxing and promising that I wouldn’t fall, the nurse turned my bed alarm off and I enjoyed a non restrictive stay in my hospital room for a couple of days until the next vigilante nurse showed up and ruined the party.
2. Insurance customer service representatives
I had to call my insurance to get a list of infusion clinics for a medication I needed to get for my condition. In theory, this should’ve been a very simple thing, as the city I live in is a major US city and there are hundreds of such clinics around. However, every single time I met a representative, I was told that there are no clinics within network for my insurance policy.
The first time I was thrown off but accepted it. But I kept calling them for answers at the behest of my uncle, who is a doctor.
The second time I called them, the person gave me a different, but unhelpful answer. They sent a list of urgent care hospitals near my area and told me that they would provide me the infusions I required. I was new to all this so I accepted it as the truth, but later on, I learnt that it wasn’t at all what we wanted.
The final time I plainly told the person what had happened the last couple of times and how I thought it was beyond implausible that my insurance didn’t have one single infusion clinic, in a city teeming with clinics, that was in network. This person then sent me a list of 2 clinics. If I had access to this list in the very beginning, I could have saved several weeks of time and gotten my medication quicker but it was delayed by these different answers I had gotten by the personnel.
Why knowing people deeply is important
I have chosen to describe these stories because they reveal how the different natures and abilities of people affect work, even if they were trained at the same organization. The natures and competencies of the people I dealt with gave me vastly different results and one should take the variability of humans into consideration when dealing with offices and businesses.
This is even more important when our collaboration with people results in important consequences, such as the time-sensitive nature of my medication. Our live are linked to others tightly and we need our understanding of the people we’re dealing with to guide us.
Ambiguousness, gratitude, and faith
Every situation in life will, to some degree, be ambiguous. You don’t know when or where you’ll get married (if you’re single), whether or not you’ll get divorced (if you’re married), when and how you’ll die (if you’re not immortal). These are the big ones, but, honestly, it is hard to even determine if there’ll be a traffic jam when coming back home from work tomorrow.
Life is ambiguity and this is painful. In my situation, the MS lesions I have could never go away. Any day, I could have another relapse and find new scarring on MRI scans. Some days, I find it hard to fall asleep because I do not know what will happen the next morning.
“Will I be fine?”
“Will I be able to see, walk, and talk like before?”
“Am I going to be normal tomorrow as well?”
Like me, millions of people are pained by the vagueness of life because we do not know what the future holds. But the reality is that whether or not we think about tomorrow is not going to actually change what happens. Worrying about it does little. The only things that can prepare us for tomorrow are the two P’s: preparation and patience. Like discussed earlier, I am going to make a deal with myself. I will surrender my controlling nature and give it up to fate.
Faith and gratitude
When faced with the ambiguity of life, the only thing that can heal the incessant worry in our heads is faith in something ambiguous itself. People believe in powerful deities whose existence is ambiguous as well, just as ambiguous as the future. The only way we can offset the pain of something unanswerable is to believe in the inexplicable.
Since the events of last month, I have started praying to gods seriously for the first time in my life. I did not expect the level of strength and peace of mind my prayers would bestow onto me. Not only does it give me hope and confidence, it also makes me feel gratitude more acutely. These are potent weapons which have made my life tremendously better in light of recent events. I am convinced that it is probably the greatest and most time-tested tool we have to deal with feelings of despair, hopelessness, or sadness.
We don’t necessarily need to follow a religion or god. But we need an unshakeable faith that tomorrow will be better than today. Faith and gratitude are our two saviors, ones that save our mental health and peace of mind. Armed with such powerful tools, and the other advice written on this article, I believe we are well insulated to move through life, even when things are falling apart.
Conclusion
So there we have it. The situations I’ve been through have led me to these conclusions yet I do not know whether they’re correct or not. Nobody has the answers and anything can go wrong (or right!) in the very next instant. All we can really do is put our seatbelts on, look up to the sky, and hope everything is going to be alright. That is possibly the greatest thing we can do because…
All human wisdom is contained in these two words–“Wait and Hope“
Alexandre dumas, the count of monte cristo
- National University of Singapore ↩︎
