Fatalism

The belief means that our lives are predetermined and that no matter what we do, the results have already been decided. So you need not bother about the test tomorrow - if it is destined, you will do well no matter what proportion of the syllabus you actually manage to cover. And vice versa.

Once upon a time, I believed that I could decide what I wanted to do with my life. Now, years later, I find that life is not as simple as that. There are always the factors that you tend to ignore that ruin it at the end. Earlier, those factors used to work for me. For the past decade, my efforts and those factors have clearly been out of phase. I guess most of the humans share my condition too.

That doesn't mean that I'm a fatalist. If I were, I would have been dead by now. For example, if while crossing the road, I decide not to check whether there is any vehicle approaching from either side, you know where I would end up at. Pure fatalism is pure lunacy.

Fatalism arises out of human incapability to account for all the factors that may affect the outcome. Cruelly, the existence of many of the factors is not revealed until the outcome goes against expectations. And we cannot clearly control many factors which may lead to an adverse oucome. As Murphy's law says: If anything can go wrong, it will. And the famous 'engineer's corollary': Even if it can't go wrong, it will. These are simple, heartfelt admissions of the fact that human beings cannot control the increase in entropy of any system for infinite time. Machines fail, screens freeze, empires crumble, we die.

But that doesn't mean that we should stop. True, most of us are sick of our lives. We suck at our jobs, nobody likes us at work, we are clueless in classes and in general, human life is a continuous agony from birth to death with fleeting moments of joy in between. Yet, we have achieved much and may achieve a lot more if we continue, even if cynically, at perfecting what we see around us. Or maybe even creating something new altogether.

After all, the concept of luck was created to account for incomplete information regarding the problem under consideration. Perfect information may not be feasible or even possible, but what is wrong in trying to find out?