Tag: opportunity

Posted in Philosophy

Carpe Diem

Posted on by Jinavie

Countless teenagers claim that “you only live once” and use that as an excuse to live a reckless, risky life. Although most adults have the sense to recognise how idiotic and juvenile that sounds, it seems that they live their life as if there is only one chance as well. Too many people give up everything after a big failure messes up their lives, thinking that their life is “over”. For example, if a person has trained to become a mechanical engineer and one day has an accident that prevents them from ever working as an engineer again, the most common response is to fall into a pit of despair. They believe that they are only trained to do the one thing, and not doing it contradicts their life entirely. They are afraid that their life is over – that they are “dead”.

According to a certain statistic, we are capable of learning and mastering something new in 7 years. This means that between the ages of 11 and 88, you have no less than 11 opportunities to be great at something. Ergo, even if one “life” is over, you still have 10 opportunities to start a new life. Some people are too afraid to let one of their lives die and cling to the past, never moving forward to live on. But you have many lives. You do not live once.

Spend a life writing poems, spend a life building things. Spend a life looking for facts, spend a life looking for truth. Be a doctor, a musician, a detective, a chef, a businessman or a wanderer. No life is wasted as long as you are doing what you truly want, while not hurting yourself or others. Never forget that you have numerous lifetimes that are waiting to be seized by you. There will be times in life when you are hit with misfortune, when your life seems to crumbling around you. But that is just life. Realise that you still have the chance to start anew. And in the meantime, enjoy the lifetime you are living. Seize the day, and all the other lifetimes that are lying ahead of you.

Carpe diem.

(Idea and image from: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2722#comic)

Posted in Life & Happiness

True Love

Posted on by Jinavie

Let us assume that everyone has a person they are destined to end up with. Can we calculate the probability of such a fateful meeting between a man and a woman?

Suppose that the woman is X and the man is Y. Firstly, X and Y need to be born as human beings. They cannot be born as a worm or an onion or something. Here, we will say that the total number of species is M and the population number of each species as P (technically this part is forcing it slightly, so we can skip it).

Although the two have to beat ridiculous odds just to start, just being born as human beings is not enough. One must be born with XX chromosomes to be a woman, and the other must be born with XY chromosomes to be a man.

Let us assume that the two were lucky enough to be born as a man and a woman. Next, they must live in the same space. If one lives in some Korean city and the other lives in some American rural village, it is unlikely the two will ever meet.

Even if they did live in the same place, X and Y must have subjective qualities that the other person finds attractive. If they are not interested in each other, nothing will happen even if they did meet. By this stage, we have clearly gone past the scopes of mathematics.

Then let us assume that a man and a woman, who fit each other perfectly and born as people, are living in the same space. We are still missing one variable: time. Even if we took only the 5000 years that civilisations have existed, the odds of the two being born in the same era as similar ages is less than 0.001%.

Species, sex, space, time… Statistically speaking, the chances of a man and a woman beating all of these odds to establish a perfect couple seem nearly impossible. But we can clearly see that “true love” exists all around us. Numbers are just numbers. If you find a person that makes your heart skip a beat when your eyes meet, that makes you feel that the more you get to know them, the more you think you cannot live without them; in essence a person that makes you think “this person is The One”, do not let the person slip away. The scenario of you and that person existing on the same space-time and loving each other is something that verges on the impossible.

There is no treasure as rare as true love. If you have found true love, or believe that you have found it, fight to seize it and do everything in your power to protect it. That is the greatest accomplishment you can make in life.

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Posted in Psychology & Medicine

Nirvana Fallacy

Posted on by Jinavie

Humans have a tendency to think in a black-and-white manner, leading us to fall into the trap of the Nirvana fallacy. This is when one compares the real world to some perfect yet unrealistic alternative, causing reality to pale in comparison. Thus, it causes us to believe that many things are not worth doing as they are insignificant compared to this alternative.

For instance, the notion of the drop in the ocean means that we tend not to do altruistic things as we believe that it will not make much of a difference in fixing poverty or cure the world of cancer. Not only does the fallacy apply to how we see the world, but it affects day-to-day life too. People are so afraid of not being able to achieve an ideal, perfect future so ironically they do nothing. This is a major reason procrastination happens, as the person believes that if they do something now, it will be inefficient. They then plan for a perfect opportunity to start doing work, and a vicious cycle begins. Thanks to this way of thinking, people often miss out on a great job opportunity or a lovely girl or a chance to change their life just because it was not perfect and did not live up to their expectations.

In fact, people often fail to see the small steps and only see the big picture. So if someone tries to make an improvement (e.g. going on a diet), others will ridicule that person by saying that going to the gym every week is not going to turn you into an Adonis, ergo it is pointless.

The Nirvana fallacy is also useful in debates. One can create a false dichotomy (that is, a black-and-white argument) and compare someone’s argument to an unrealistic argument. When someone makes a suggestion, you can attack it by pointing out one flaw and show how it is clearly not a perfect solution (even better if you provide an example of the argument failing). This will automatically disintegrate their argument. For example, if someone proposes a new idea, you may point out how someone may abuse the new system or provide a case when a similar idea failed. However, be warned that this method can easily be rebutted with common sense, so one must use it in a convincing way and distract the audience from the fact that it is absolutely ridiculous.

(The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, click for larger image)