Why do we keep saying it’s fate at work? Is it because the world is genuinely too complex to explain, or because we’re simply born mentally lazy?
Someone with little insight can read a hundred books and take away less — in understanding, in real change to their life — than a perceptive person gets from reading just one.
Can that kind of insight be learned? I doubt it. And what is insight, anyway? The ability to grasp things? Or, at bottom, a drive to become better? Because without the drive to improve, no amount of ability does you any good.
It’s the same with effort. We like to say hard work can change your fate — forgetting that whether you work hard is itself part of your fate. Whether a person puts in effort is written in their genes, and once genes enter the picture, we’re right back to fate again.
Lately, though, I’ve been wondering: when we chalk up everything we can’t explain to luck, isn’t that a little lazy, a little irresponsible? Then again, it’s understandable. The world really is that complex.
Suppose we had a supercomputer that could simulate the motion of every atom in the universe and project it forward — could we then predict everything? And if we could, couldn’t we also run it in reverse: start from an outcome we want, and work backward to the exact atomic motions that would bring it about? Wouldn’t that be changing fate? And wouldn’t it prove that fate can, in fact, be explained?
Or there’s another possibility: fate is real. Life is a script, the whole life of the universe just one long documentary — God the director, and we the actors.
We’re thrown into this great theater and handed a script of our own — sickness or health, poverty or wealth, mediocrity or brilliance, all drawn at random, none of it up to us. Is this kind of determinism optimistic or pessimistic? Hard to say. Optimistic, in that it helps us make peace with everything that happens to us: these things were meant to happen, and an actor’s one duty is to play the part well. Pessimistic, in that it denies free will. What you want to do never truly comes from your own mind — you’re just a small part keeping the gears turning, negligible, yet indispensable.