…. competence intention trust stability happiness uncertainty fear rejection responsibility doubt myself ….. Whenever I read Devansh’s (aka Deboo) blog, I feel that I am drowning in a tag cloud of these words. As if each and every word screaming at me, urging me to understand the depth of things, the undeniable truth. Still, I let myself argue in disbelief and objection to these laws set forth before me, that define and guide the life of all human beings.

I may be wrong, I generally am, but it is hard to digest that all human race can be described by generalized rules and characteristics that Devansh describes so aptly in his writings. And it is amazing how most people, including me, can relate themselves with his thoughts and ideas.

my happiness – my responsibility

According to Devansh, only a person himself/herself is responsible for his/her happiness or unhappiness, not other people. Yeah, we expect from people, we desire for certain objects, we do actions which might compromise our physical or mental security, this is all true. If we think deeply, for a lot of things that we get frustrated about, like someone not living up to our expectation, the fault can be found in our wrong estimation of the other person’s intentions and capabilities.

A safe way of living in such a situation is to not expect anything from anyone, or to always underestimate the capabilities of others, to doubt their intentions. Pessimist is the word that comes to my mind. This is similar to advocating that we build up a wall around us, so that no one can penetrate our stable and happy state.

probability experiment

Take a glass full of water filled to the brim, and keep it in front of you on the table. Then, by what probability can you say that you will be able to drink it without spilling? Go to the terrace of a 20 storey building on a windy day, sit on the boundary wall and put the same glass on the same table in front of you. What is the probability now? Certainly the probability in both cases was not 100%. Nevertheless, the former one was much more higher for obvious reasons.

The tasks, responsibilities that we carry out everyday have many more steps involved than the number of steps in the previous experiment. Each of these smaller steps has a probability of success attached to it. It is very similar to a sequential computer program. A good program has fail-over mechanisms to handle failures and exceptions.

approaches we can take

It may be best to be detached from the world, to not feel pain when it hurts by reasoning in your rational brain that it was your own fault, to not blame people for what you have suffered by reasoning that they were not competent enough, to take up a collective responsibility as one of the individuals within the society for reasoning that society creates robbers when you get robbed.

I am no saint, no revolutionary, no philosopher or such. I feel hurt when it pains, I get angry when someone screws up, I get frustrated when things don’t work, I am heartbroken when relationships break. What keeps me going on? Faith. Belief. Expectations. Hope. You can call it all these, but all these are mere probabilities of success of a future event calculated by a network of billions of neurons by applying hardwired and experimentally determined thresholds on the output of non-linear functions computed over the billions of inputs that I receive every moment.

fail-overs within us

anger, pain, sadness, tears, shouting, violence, frustration – all these are my fail-over mechanisms. Signals to my neural network that things aren’t going the way as planned. Hints that there is something wrong about what I assumed before, that I need to readjust my thresholds, change the functions that I use. Just like it is inevitable to pursue happiness, it is inevitable to call these fail-over mechanisms when they are needed. They are hardwired, built into the system, they come “on-board“, Read Only Memory.

Happiness isn’t a complex thing. It doesn’t take a philosopher to explain how to feel a moment of happiness. Why do we have to put it under an electron microscope and find the probability of finding a happitron in a certain dumble-shaped orbital around ourselves? I prefer to keep it simple and stupid.

By realizing the deeper truth, by learning how to bypass the fail-over mechanisms, one can get closer to being ideally stable and robust. Such a person might feel happy, might not. I don’t know whether that person will still have the parts of brain that are responsible for emotions and feelings, they’ll be more like appendices. As for me, I choose to remain human.