A feckless thug

Everyone has a complicated relationship with Fate – some combination of gritty, superstitious and terrified. We all have experienced a sense of triumph when our perseverance pays off and we finally notch a win. We also have had the uncanny experience of rabbit’s-foot winning – when, against all odds, a seemingly effortless or random behavior of ours brings us success. And, sadly, all of us regularly witness the terrifying way Fate can drop in on us bringing dreadful results. How does a thinking person integrate these disparate perspectives on Fate? We almost need three words for this existential phenomenon – adversary, teaser and thug. So, what is Fate?

I wish I knew.

There is a statistical component to it, so our gritty behavior often pays off – luck favors the prepared, as they say. The randomness of it, also, sometimes, coincides with us wearing our lucky socks. Did we make that magical moment happen? And Fate is definitely terrifying to the extent we have attached to anything or anyone in our lives. And while I can’t explain it any further than that, I can say that Fate isn’t intentional. There aren’t three women sitting around somewhere controlling the thread of your life.

What can we do in the face of our inability to wrap our minds around Fate?

What we humans tend to do is incarnate Fate. By pretending we can shrink it down to human size, we believe we can tilt against it. Couldn’t this work in our favor? Wouldn’t it help us to imagine that our relationship with Fate is manageable? The answer, as you guessed, is no. If we try to make Fate into a human, we are trying to make it reasonable. Karmic justice, the gambler’s fallacy and a just-world hypothesis all demonstrate human efforts to identify reliable patterns out in the world that will allow us to predict outcomes and control our future. Groundless strategies like these represent at best a distraction and at worst a sinkhole of devastating depth. If we look more closely at our three attitudes toward Fate, we can identify some of the dangers of humanizing Fate.

Gritty – One of the hardest calls we have to make in our life is when to cut bait. Do we try one more time to get into law school? Should I push to keep my business afloat or cut my losses? How much longer should I use running as my form of exercise? If we make believe that Fate is manageable, we can trip ourselves up by thinking we should know how to make perfect decisions at junctures like these. In addition, humans are suckers for correlation being causation. We badly want contingencies to follow actions with absolute reliability. If we could tolerate the fact that Fate is, instead, absolutely, positively inscrutable, we can ease up on ourselves. Decisions are just a little easier when we can gently acknowledge to ourselves that we are just guessing here.

Superstitious – Do you ever do this: make a wager with Fate? If I make the next three stoplights, I’ll buy a lottery ticket. If I find a parking place right in front, I’ll go in and apply for that job. Do you experience a tiny tingle when you find a heads-up penny? Do you feel just a bit jumpy on a Friday the 13th? While a little gamesmanship can be a fun way to play with life, we need to be extremely careful about granting Fate intention. We might get energized when we “win” a round against Fate, but what happens to our mood when we lose? Not to mention the fact that loose change on the sidewalk or a convenient parking place should in no way guide our life choices. We need, therefore, to be watchful of our superstitious relationship with Fate or we risk experiencing an artificial mood and having our common sense put to sleep.

Terrified – There is no question that Fate is terrifying. If we open ourselves too widely to this truth, we can be paralyzed by it. We need to attend to Fate (despite the horror) only to the extent we have the courage right now to do so. Like all good defense systems, our goal is to let in just enough of the frightening risk data to bolster our resolve to create a strong, steady and urgent purpose to what we do. Emotional self-defense is an important skill with an article all its own here. But the bottom line is that facing Fate – like facing all the givens of human existence – requires courage. Our strategy needs to involve strengthening our courage rather than shrinking Fate. One of the ways to heighten our courage is to not see good luck as virtuous. Put another way – we really, really, really need to understand that the successful aren’t more impressive people than the less successful. They are just – randomly – very, very, very lucky.

What follow from that insight is this: acts of Fate may feel rewarding or punishing, but, because Fate isn’t a person, it’s neither. There is no intent behind the luck that ebbs and flows through a life. Because Fate isn’t intentional, we have to be. We have to bravely put our energy behind actions that we can – to any extent – control. There are plenty of challenges facing every human, meaning it pays to be vigilant about wasting too much time trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. And, as the little Fate Game demonstrates, we truly can’t tell what aspects of our lives are instances of good luck or bad. We can never know how our lives would be different/worse/better if the things that had happened to us had happened differently.

Mom: Junior got accepted to Harvard.

Dad: Oh. That’s good!

Mom: No. That’s bad because…

Death

A discussion about Fate would be glaringly incomplete without including our greatest vulnerability to it – our death. As the fourth dimension of existential time, this facet of Fate is the ultimate incomprehensible aspect of being a human. Incomprehensible things hurt our brains when we try to wrap our thinking around them. Death calls into question our trust in the elegance and purpose of the universe. All we have tried to accomplish, to curate and to care for stops being meaningful because it was mostly meaningful to us. How can we think on this and not get rattled? When we are profoundly rattled, it can be nearly impossible to imagine that having some level of relationship with our death could profoundly improve our life.

When death comes for us, we instantly have no more chances to get life right. Put your pencils down. The test is over. The end of a test is the wrong time to decide you should study. Death is the wrong time to decide you should live more intentionally.

We therefore need to pay just enough attention to the fact of our death to heighten our sense of urgency to do our homework. Existential homework, aka self-construction, requires that we resist the cultural temptation to incarnate death. Brad Pitt notwithstanding, death is not a nice young man. There is no doubt that death can end suffering, but it is not doing so out of the goodness of its heart. It has no heart.

Despite the discomfort, a good think is in order at this point. Can you keep breathing slowly as you consider your death? Even though your heart rate may be getting a little faster, can you sit with this truth for a moment and wonder about how this line of thinking could be helpful? What should get activated within you is the question: What matters? If you can land on things that matter to you, you should be able to feel that the idea of your death lends urgency to you participating in those things – and probably much sooner rather than somewhat later. Basically, we make good use of death when we can tolerate it in our peripheral vision reminding us that – if something matters to us – we would be wise to deepen our attachment to working on it.

Attachments take courage. This section of the website is all about courage because the greatest danger coming from this existential pairing is this: when you attempt to shrink Fate/death down to human size, you also shrink your humanness. When we are less human, we are less able to have the courage to attach.

Section IV overview

Since the hallmark of a healthy relationship with Fate is a high tolerance for truth, the articles in this section of the website exalt the difficult truths that our squirrely cultures would have us ignore. This section of the website does not, however, represent a stiff-upper-lip revival meeting. It presents, rather, a grouping of articles describing various truths that can help us strengthen our relationship with Fate by strengthening our relationship with reality. That clarity of thought can return you to your natural level of emotional stability – the fourth component of resilience – which in turn will empower you to make the difficult choices needed to create a more authentic life for yourself.

Moxie: We Can Handle the Truth, the first article in this section, is based on the twin beliefs so ennobled by existentialists: humans are definitely created with more than enough mental horsepower to be able to handle difficult truths; and they are much more effective agents in the designing of their lives when they do so. The article lays out the damage done to the mental health of children when their parents are poor truth speakers.

The title of the second article in this section – Life is Difficult – kind of says it all.

The article entitled Myth, Choice, Truth addresses our need to observe and decipher the barrage of stories that were presented to us as "truth" during our formative years. A huge area of overlap between existential writers and feminist thinkers is the belief that we all live in unhelpful cultures. They agree further that we are responsible for uncovering the mythology underlying the current cultural climate and deciding for ourselves which parts make sense to us and which don’t. We will want to function effectively within our world, but not at the cost of our integrity. In other words, when it comes to cultures we need to think globally, act locally because the personal is political!

Adversarial Collaboration prevents chauvinism by removing hierarchy from difference. When we know how to carefully craft discussions with people who don’t share our beliefs, we can all expand our thinking which moves us further from zero-sum thinking and closer to the truth. Expanded thinking generates more options and fewer hostilities. Everyone wins.

Fate may not be a punishment, but it oftentimes feels like it. When life feels punishing, most of us react with shame. Our bad luck was our fault, and we had better correct our character flaw that caused the negative consequence. The next two articles attack that line of reasoning.

To Err Really Is Human: What to Make of Mistakes is an article that hammers home a sentiment that quite frankly is too often given only lip service – you are supposed to make mistakes as you progress through life. Adulting requires that we fully embrace the fact that if you aren’t making mistakes, you are sticking too close to the shore.

Symptoms: It’s All Good provides another surprising look at better ways to make effective, lasting changes in your life. It is both reassuring and challenging to realize that using symptoms as data rather than character indictments will get you much further along in your efforts to both heal and grow.

Foundations of Solid Self-Esteem provides a much-needed outline of the specific work that goes into the repair and maintenance of a robust belief in our ability to navigate through life no matter what Fate decides it wants to do with us. This article is a doozy, but who doesn’t want a buff and shiny self-esteem?

Was That Nice? provides the reader with a careful look at how sloppy thinking can create sloppy behavior. To the extent we more completely understand distinct characteristics of psychological constructs, the more easily we can adjust our behavior to align with our deepest values. This article uses the difference between being nice and being kind as a sampling of the power available in clarified thinking.

I’ve always liked the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” The penultimate article in this section, Absent Minded, outlines a number of truths about memory that can help many of us relax our fears around losing our minds. While there are behaviors we need to put in place to protect those marvelous brains of ours, forgetting your sister’s birthday doesn’t necessarily signal the end of your cognitive health. Your mind probably ain’t broke, so no need to fix it.

And, finally, Triumph in the Game of Life presents some options for gathering and analyzing the external feedback that our world has to offer. It provides a commentary on how winning, losing and being chosen can each contribute to our understanding of how we are doing in life.

In conclusion

Few of us escape the tendency to exclaim at the unfairness of things – both for ourselves and for others. Who among us hasn’t lamented, “What did I do to deserve this?” Indeed, fully a third of our little emoji faces could be described as “whining.” But presupposing we can at all understand Fate is not only a waste of time it is a waste of our humanness. We are much better off when we live as authentically as we can even when – or maybe especially when – Fate blasts into our lives.