day 32: linear brain making sense of a non-linear world
our brain like stories. not any story, it has to be a great one. a sequence of events that makes perfect sense, and that has a happy ending.
even rebels like Guy Ritchie, Quentin Tarantino, and Christopher Nolan are obliged by this rule. they tell stories out of sequence, random events that are all tied up in the end. doesn’t matter how crazy the premise is — looking at you TeNeT.
the level of satisfaction and relaxation that our brain enters when the story makes sense, is unexplainable.
which is counterintuitive, we should be better at understanding non-linear events, and raise an eyebrow when stories make perfect sense. after all, this is how our world functions.
if a story is too perfect, probably it is a lie, and someone is trying to scam you. stock exchange could be down because some war popped off somewhere on the planet, or it could be just a centralized economy making random mistakes for decades.
not everything has a simple and isolated causality. events that take place at the same could be independent of each other — and most of the time they are.
don’t expect everything to have a reason, sometimes bad things happen because we were at the wrong place, and at the wrong time.
other times we gain a lot just because we were there as well. stop looking for your Deus Ex Machina that will tie every lose-end of your life.
it is more random than you think. accept it.
