Living a life retrospectively - Illusion of control
Life can be only understood backwards - Soren Kierkegaard
Illusion of control.
How much of your life is under your control? A lot, right? You are responsible for most of the things you do, and outcomes you create for yourself. You may believe that, If I just stop watching phone every minute, build a vision for myself and work smart, and disciplined myself, I can create a nice future for myself. This my friend is the illusion of control. Feeling of control, you feel after you exercise is real. But the control itself is not a real phenomenon. As the outcomes are always possible by loads and loads of underlying unknown factors. This is where most of the modern Gurus of success fail, as the philosophy of their teachings are not deep enough to include the underlying uncertainty of life.
Why do we have an illusion of control when there is not much?
Our brains are just machines to understand patterns. This ability is not unique. Animals and plants have some aspects of it, clearly modern AI has harvested it. When actions are followed by consequences, our brains pick up this pattern and create the illusion "Oh I created this outcome by following these rules" But life is just a complex affair like rolling a dice. In a macroscopic level it seems they are true. Consider following actions and consequences.
Studying -> Increases your knowledge.
Exercising-> affects your physical condition
Writing -> Produces something you didn't have before
Treating a disease -> can affect its course.
Do you not agree that your knowledge is a consequence of how much time and effort you are willing to put into your daily routine? It seems true and If I say this claim false, I would be a fool. So, I give that task to Soren KierKegard who once said,
Life can only be understood backwards; But it has to be lived forwards.
So, what is the myth about studying increases your knowledge. Here, you can do a thought experiment. It is called MML method, Ha ha I just invented that. It is simple. Imagine you sat down for study one hour. You read a chapter, and you take some notes, make some connections, remember some important ideas and rise up like a knowledgeable person. If you repeat this process day after day, I am sure you will even get good grades and appreciated an intellectual person by your colleagues. But imagine what happens in the first second of you sat down for study. Is there a meaningful outcome in that second? Probably you have only read half of a sentence. Something like "The foundation of a good paragraph is the topic sentence,". What happens in the next second? You might read the next part of the sentence. "Which expresses the main idea of the paragraph." What happens in the third second? You might take a brief moment to analyze these two seconds which had no meaning, to make a meaning for you. That is how you understand life backwards. We create a meaning out of meaningless seconds retrospectively.
The fundamental question to ask here is how can each meaningless second in life, creates a meaning in retrospect. That my friend is the illusion of life. I don't think anybody had answered that question. But there is no need, as watching the process itself is enough to understand ourselves better. So, there is no ultimate way, ultimate guru or ultimate achievement to life, which has only meaningless seconds of observations. Will this stop the terrible search? Only you can answer.
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