Marcus Aurelius, in his book "Meditations" said that the nature's job is to shift things elsewhere, transform them, pick them up and move them here and there. It's job is to make constant change.
There is nothing new happening here. Everything is related and familiar. The good of one people is bad for another and vice versa and so is everything else.
There is a saying that goes, " For everything you gain you lose something and for everything you lose you gain something."
This has been so true in my life. And today is the day that best resembles this quote. There is something positive in my way forward for the thing that I lost.
This is a never ending circle...
... of "because".
This word is used to explain any thing from history to science to any day to day moments. But the explanation is never the fact. It's an opinion.
Facts are statistics and statistics are invisible. "Becauses" blinds the true facts. Being suspicious of "because" always help us to think in multidimension. And it's worth it.
Epictetus told his students that there can be no such thing as victim of another. One can be victim of themselves...
We are our own victim...
The most tragic thing is that the world is more nonlinear than we think and it can not be expressed or described in a words.
With linearities, everything seems clear and constant. An increase a variable will increase the result. for example: an increase in investment will increase the rate of return, a 10 percent increase in money in the bank corresponds to 10 percent increase in the interest.
But in real life, its not that linear. Think of our struggle in getting satisfaction with everything we do. Think of the result as compared with the input we put in. Think of our improvement and the effort we put in. Does that sound linear? Not in my case.
Linearity is just an exception; non-linearity is the truth.
Human beings are so good in creating fiction, which is the main reason behind the superiority of Homo sapiens (This is in fact the greatest force). The sense of creating fiction came into the mind of Homo sapiens to enhance unity for hunting and gathering and to protect themselves from other enemies in the past.
Our tendency to create such fiction made us more powerful and eventually we conquered every other species and became dominant in the world.
Nowadays, on our daily activities, we can sense that we have been overinterpreting the real events which has made us more vulnerable than ever before. We have lost our ability and have no patience to look at the facts since we are blinded by the false narration done by somebody else.
We are more intrigued by explanation as they make the events easily remembered But in reality, explanations blind the facts. Its good to listen to the explanation as they are more fun and exciting. But it's devastating when this explanations start to dictate our impression of understanding.
The solutions?
Our past experiences shape the way we think about the future. This can be useful, because experience helps us recognize patterns, avoid repeated mistakes, and make faster decisions. But experience can also mislead us when we begin to treat the past as proof of what must happen next. That is where confirmation becomes an error.
We often look at what has already happened and assume it will continue in the same way. We use memory as certainty. We tell ourselves, “This is how it always goes,” and then interpret new situations through that old frame. But the world is dynamic. Conditions change, people change, systems change, and timing changes. What once seemed reliable may no longer apply.
This is why past experience should inform us, but not imprison us. It is one source of insight, not a final authority. When we rely too heavily on what we already believe, we stop paying close attention to what is actually happening in front of us. We begin to notice only the evidence that supports our old conclusions and ignore the signals that reality is changing.
A wiser approach is to treat the past as guidance rather than destiny. Experience matters, but so does openness. To think clearly, we must allow new evidence to correct old assumptions. Otherwise, what once helped us learn can quietly become the reason we stop learning.
"You can't escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today."
- Abraham Lincoln
Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "The Black Swan" introduced the term mediocristan and extremistan. According to hime the world could be divided into the safe and comfort Mediocristan, and the unsafe and improbable Extremistan.
In, mediocristan, when the sample is large, no single instances will significantly change the aggregate or the total. Take a sample of thousand people and measure their weight or height. The weight of single individual will not affect the aggregate.
While if you take the net worth of whole sample, their total will worth very very less than the world's richest person (say Elon Musk, who now worth $185 billion). This is extremistan. Here, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionally impact the aggregate.
Taleb continues: "So while weight, height, and calorie consumption are from Mediocristan, wealth is not. Almost all social matters are from Extremistan. Another way to say it is that social quantities are informational, not physical: you cannot touch them
A key implication of this distinction is that in Mediocristan, the overall impact of an "outlier" is not that significant relative to the total, but in Extremistan, that impact is enormous. Consequently, if we are in the domain of Extremistan, and we use analytical tools from Mediocristan for prediction, risk management, etc., we can face enormous surprises. Some of these surprises may be positive and some may be negative, but their impact will likely exceed what we are prepared for.
It is so important to understand our moral character and acknowledge that it has its epitome. The ancients Roman philosophy calls this epitome as perfection of moral character.
Marcus Aurelius said that the perfection of moral character is to live everyday as the last day, without frenzy or sloth or pretense. He said that if any god told you that you will die tomorrow or the day after that, you shouldn't care much about whether it was on the 3rd day or on the next day, you should acknowledge that it doesn't make any difference. So think its no difference to die after many years than to die the very next day.
Everyone is scared of death and try to avoid the situation that may lead to death. Especially I was scared of it. However, since reading the ancient philosophy, my perception of death has changed. And when we understand and change the perception of death, we attain the acme of moral character.
This perception is so rejuvenating that it enhances our character, daily acts, our thoughts and our life as a whole.