Why you shouldn’t try to find the meaning of life?
Do you see a pattern here? Do you see the Illusory Pattern Perception (IPP)? Obviously, if you know it, you would. IPP is a cognitive bias where people see a pattern even when there isn’t really one. They try to find some conceptual meaning in the randomness of the world. Something we are familiar with or feel safe with or something that is well defined and easily predictable.
This pushes us to find reasons in things when there really aren’t. It starts from the smallest and does not end till the gigantic.
You are flipping a coin and you got 3 tails in a row. You start thinking that the next one has a high probability of being heads even when the absolute probability is always 50–50.
You woke up in the morning and were welcomed by a blackout. Your internet was down too. Your car broke down on the way to work. You sprained your ankle on the stairs and now halfway through the day, you become completely sure that today will be a bad day for you and that now whatever happens next, will also be bad only.
You see shadows and shapes where there isn’t really one. You hear whispers and sounds. You see a divine message on your bread.
You start believing in things because you heard it a lot of times from people. And all such things make it more probable for you to believe in conspiracy theories and hoaxes.
We love reason and meaning so much that we can go to extreme lengths to find one.
Illusory Correlation is something like that. It is when you perceive a relationship between two things when there obviously isn’t one. Every culture has it in the form of bad lucks or bad omens. You won the lottery because you prayed this morning. You got in an accident because your car number ends in some specific number. You found a dollar on the street and thought you got lucky because you helped someone this morning. This is all about finding a correlation between two things that are not connected in any way possible.
Things like karma are nothing but humans trying to find reasons for good and bad things out of a pool of randomness. Yes, you are bound to find some events that occur in relation to each other but at the same time, you ignore trillions of other events that weren’t. And even if they were happening close enough, it does not mean that one was necessarily the catalyst to another.
Don’t be nice because karma says so, be nice because it is a good long-term policy.
Moreover, correlation does not imply causation, is a well-known fact. ‘Everything that happens to us must be coming from somewhere or someone.’ This way of thinking is really flawed. Random things puzzle people. They do not feel comfortable around randomness and hence they like to think that there is a reason behind everything. That this is all well planned and well-executed.
Randomness can even make people mad. Think of a world where nothing has meaning and everything just exists. Where luck is just an event you witness among the million others you didn’t. Where a set of laws run everything and still you can’t predict the future even after knowing all the laws well enough. Such a world has gazillions of variables playing a dance of correlations and causations. The butterfly effect keeps sending ripples across a pond which is already roaring in a storm. A world where you are nothing but organised molecules that can think. You are nothing more than the properties of your constituent elements and compounds. Where the only reason for you to exist is that you can’t do otherwise. That is the world we live in.
‘Non-reasons’ and a life with no meaning are hard to accept. In a world where we like to see patterns and the meaning in our life, it is an impossibility to have space for ‘non-reasons’. And non-reasons are nothing but the existence of things based on well-defined laws rather than the beautiful intricate stories we built ourselves. That the only reason behind things is generally the uncomfortable and absurd absence of reason.
Then may it be pictures or coins, shadows or sounds, human behaviour or god, nothing really exists for exemplifying meaning. It is hard then to become a reasonable person in a world void of reasons.
Thanks to Summy Antony and Harshal for reading the drafts of this.
