Yes, the odds are always stacked against you!

We all might have had this feeling that the odds are always stacked against us. Trust me, it is very true. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not you but everything else!

When it comes to dealing with things, we generally make our decisions based on how they would affect us. Make no mistake, I’m not suggesting that we should turn our other cheek to accept the unfavorable things just like the favorable ones. In fact, we are wired this way. I mean, we are all egocentric, but that is the mechanism we are bestowed with, thanks to evolution, for our survival. However, I believe that this very nature is directly responsible for our hypocrisy and double standards even when it comes to understanding things around us.

There is a saying which runs “to destroy is easier than to create”. It looks like it makes a lot of sense on the surface, right? Well, let’s run some test cases and see it for ourselves: a) It is easy to decimate a building, but it takes a whole lot of time to erect one. b) It is easy to kill someone in no time, but the reverse is obviously not easy. It is easy to enumerate so many things along these lines, but the saying abstracts out a key detail. Before getting into it, let me give a case where it fails. It is very difficult to shed some pounds, but it is a pretty straightforward process to push our BMI scales to call us out as “obese”. So, the key detail that we have always been missing is the number of constraints!

Yes, when we deal with things we miss this key thing of the number of constraints. If we look closely at things that are favorable to us, we invariably add a lot of constraints to them. Even if one of them fails, the result will be unfavorable. To have a favorable outcome, everything (read: constraints) should fall into place. On the other hand, missing out on just one of the constraints will be sufficient for an unfavorable outcome. Imagine that you just want to get good grades at school. What can possibly go wrong? It’s anything and everything. I mean, you should learn well, you should not fall sick during classes, you shouldn’t miss your bus on your day of exams, you shouldn’t be worried about the bullies, you should have a peaceful and unbroken family — you name it! Everything should fall into place to get good grades, but missing out on just one thing could ruin your academics. This is true for everything else including your career, your relationships, and your life.

Let’s rerun the test cases in this light. It is easy to decimate a building than to erect one because we have more constraints when erecting a building compared to destroying it. I mean, we have to build it brick by brick, we have to have a perfect concrete mixture, etc. But, when we think about destroying a building we do not have any such constraints. You know the difficulty of destroying the building brick by brick. See, it's all about the constraints. It is also true for the pounds and BMI example. It’d be easy to shed some pounds if we agree to offer a pound of flesh like the Venetian merchant Antonio. Well, we do have the constraints like “being alive”. Interestingly, Portia saved Antonio’s life by imposing the implicit constraints.

“Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more. But just a pound of flesh” — Portia, The Merchant of Venice.

Yes, the odds are always stacked against you. It’s not because you are being targeted by the universe. It’s the constraints that we fail to see in different things. However, we can increase the probability of favorable outcomes and it is always only so much, but then we have to deal with it to survive!

Write a comment ...