cause and effect

We all strive for a cause-and-effect relationship in this world. It’s what causes most arguments. (forgive me for the irony). 

We believe everything brews from a single cause or happens for a single reason, which in itself is stupid, and then we wholeheartedly believe that this cause or reason exists within our realm of reach, understanding, or worse, control. Control is another funny thing, but I’ll get to that later. Back to the cause and effect. If I am to describe it as simply as I can, humans tend to approach most emotional problems in the most ineffective, inefficient ways. First, we look for the cause, as you would with science, so that we can cater a specific solution. However, with our principled scientific cause-searching business we often forget what we so clearly understand in actuarial science: there can exist infinite variables, some of which we cannot fathom. Why I felt sad today cannot be pinpointed to how I’m not trying hard enough to feel okay or how you are not enough to make me happy.

 Our brains strive for reason, and in doing so we choose to blame each other, or more often, ourselves. We cannot stay in this closed ecosystem of you and me, those are simply not the real conditions, there are way too many uncontrolled variables. Sure, we can look to find out what these variables are and try to get them under our control, but then you can’t abandon the base “everything happens for a (good) reason” approach in doing so. We can’t dismiss what the controlled/uncontrolled variables have so specifically crafted by labelling it as wrong or right or taking the credit to ourselves. I’m not saying that you should let yourself feel bad/out of control all the time. By all means you must try and avoid the things you dislike and do the things you like, fix your sleep schedule like your mom says and try out Yoga it will  help. All I’m asking is that you break this circle of blame. I didn’t mean to make you feel sad today and you didn’t want to feel it either. But you do. And that’s okay. Nowhere does it mean that we are not enough for each other or that we aren’t trying as hard. All the circle of blame is going to do is guilt-trip the one who needs a shoulder, adding on to their plate as if what they were going through wasn’t enough. 

To honor my concept, I must say, me pointing it out in the first place isn’t a throw of blame or a sword of shame (rhyme to make you laugh) saying you’ve been handling things wrong all your life. To support my concept even more, ironically, it might not even be right; there are, as I pointed out before, infinite possibilities, situations and scenarios. Many times it may even be someone’s pinpoint-able mistake. This concept is also just me trying to establish reason and relationship to something which I do not know all the variables to. The irony is endless.

Truthfully we’ll never know what goes on inside someone’s head and god forbid we try to control it. That’s the thing about control, we don’t really have it. Over anything. No matter how much wiser I might think myself and how well I might know someone I simply cannot assume they’ll react to something as I imagined or they’ll think what I want them to think of me. Guesswork is rarely accurate or useful. All it does is add weight. Yet we cannot let go of it, because we strive for cause and effect so very deeply. Who knew despite our ranging beliefs we were so scientifically wired. 

Maybe none of what I’ve said is relatable or right and this theory is inaccurate, but even failure to cater sneakily achieves my goal (I’m not going to stop overpraising my thought), and that is to widen horizons, mine and yours. Maybe there are infinite theories like mine that attempt to explain more variables. That means these unfathomable, difficult to understand ideas may exist and that there are things outside our realm of reach; so we can stop resorting to the blame-shame road, for the sake of appreciating the complexities of the world we live in, for our own sake.