On the Absence of Cause

You know that situation when you slip up, fall, and lie on the floor resting, and someone says with care “Be careful! Watch your step!”

But you were watching. You were careful. But the bruised back still hurts. Broke something? You’re probably a klutz who wasn’t paying attention! Lost something? You should have been more careful! Things didn’t go well? You didn’t try hard enough! Got caught in the crossfire? You must have been wrong and asked for it! Got scammed? Why didn’t you, you fool, check everything?! If I were you, I would have checked everything, I would have been vigilant!

Or another one: you’re sick, you have a cold, and people immediately ask “Where did you catch that?” “You should have dressed warmer!”

But you were already wearing warm clothes, it’s just that airborne viruses don’t really care about that – they make their way through your nose and settle in your body. You should have held your breath or what? To be honest, I still don’t know what to answer to the first question. What information are you actually looking for when you ask “Where did you catch that?” “Somewhere” is the best answer, because an unclear question leads to an unclear answer. Walking down the street, someone sneezed out of a window, you inhaled a germ, and hello. Like, if I’d gone down a different street, I wouldn’t have gotten sick? Formally, yes, but how do you imagine implementing this precautionary measure? On that street, there was flu in the air, on the next one, there was hepatitis on the railings, to the left, tetanus was crawling in the dirt… How do you even go anywhere in such conditions?

And it seems like, why do we need to break down these burps from the collective mentality, right? People generally don’t really understand why they burp these things out into the world, it’s not even their own thoughts. But there’s a much more interesting question here – the manic search for the “cause” of events and the guilty party, followed by hysterical “taking measures” that poison the minds and ruin the lives of many (if not most) people. But that same majority finds this mentoring itch to be a right step to prevent problems once and for all. And to look better against a “klutz.”

Someone once asked me a question that almost made me sit on the floor and scream. Word for word: “Look, why did god take my dad?” (without specifying which god). People have asked this question over the years, it’s not a single case. They seriously, with a straight face, are looking for a CAUSE (!) of death for an elderly man in Yahweh’s actions, and they’re not even considering it a medical case. Not in the body’s resources and illnesses, which are “just because”. Continuing this thought, it turns out that dad was behaving badly, so the nameless god killed him, and if dad had behaved well, he would have lived not 80 years, but 720! Until some kind of tragedy took this amazing cyborg’s life.

You see, the world is this uncontrollable, automatic idiot that races through space and time, chaotically connecting and disconnecting probabilities and lines. These aspects are simply shuffled in their orbits, and you can either get caught up in the mix or not, the difference in lines can be a matter of seconds. There is no logic there, and most cause-and-effect relations in events are unclear and uncontrollable by ANYONE. Many events simply happen, not because of something nor for some reason. Bad things happen to everyone, and not just to people. Simply put, you slip up not because you weren’t watching you step, but because a bunch of different factors came together at that moment. 15 years ago, the shoe factory adopted a less-than-ideal configuration for your shoes. Something had happened, and you were rushing to get somewhere (if it hadn’t happened, you wouldn’t have gone). Meanwhile, millions of kilometers away, the alignment of Mercury and Mars was changing. The floor was slippery, your leg muscle cramped at the wrong time, and your phone rang… Could you have influenced any of these events? No, you couldn’t. And no one can! Everyone falls sometimes, drops things, gets sick, and finds themselves in unpleasant situations. So is it worth gnawing at yourself and others’ heads trying to find reasons? Even if you find them, it won’t solve or fix anything. Finding the guilty in breaking the cup won’t make the cup whole again.

Therefore, the right reaction is to pity the injured and offer help to the sick, not to add to their suffering with your knowing-it-all. But we, of course, will [do that]. We’ll scream at others for hours to be careful and not make a mess. People, for the same reasons, blame victims of violence for what happened to them, a favorite pastime. You were not dressed right, you didn’t behave right, you didn’t look right, you didn’t speak right, and THAT’S EXACTLY WHY this crap happened to you. You should have looked this way, dressed this way, but you didn’t, so there you go… Sadly, it doesn’t work like that. Crap happens to everyone, and what’s annoying is that we don’t have much influence over its arrival and departure. It just happens to some, and it doesn’t happen to others, and then they switch places. It’s not “for what” or “why”, it’s simply the flow of life. But this search creates an illusion of control for people: well, I don’t behave this way, so this won’t happen to me! Alas, it will, not this, then something else. By the way, positive things also often don’t have clear causes and are simply impossible to repeat at another time.

Yes, of course, you should be more careful when walking, observe hygiene, check links on the internet, and not carry valuables to shady places. But even if you do all of this, crap will still happen to you, not because you were behaving in some way, but because it simply has no objective and superficial causes. And even if you set out to dig up the cause of the fall and the bruise, it won’t give you anything at all: it’s impossible to anticipate EVERYTHING and for every second ahead. It’s impossible to prepare for everything in the world, but it’s easy to get neurosis from this ground.

It’s incredibly hard for people to accept this idea. Because life is scary enough as it is, and living in a world with absolutely no control or predictability is unbearable. We have to admit that any kind of misfortune can happen to anyone, regardless of their actions: one person is careful and falls, while another doesn’t care at all and DOESN’T fall. You prepare for something, and it’s not needed, you don’t prepare, and it happens. That means none of your actions have a 100% impact on your safety. Events depend on the time they occur, not on your actions. If you had left the house 30 seconds later, everything would have been different. Someone didn’t like you for some reason and started trouble, a bus driver had bad vision and missed your stop (you were late and lost your job, even though you left home on time), something wore out and broke, something became irrelevant, something accidentally fell out of your pocket or slipped from your hand… You can’t control or predict all of this, so why even try? And even more importantly, why criticize someone who stumbled and is already miserable without your input? Self-awareness and sanity aren’t characterized by the absence of mistakes and problems, but by how you react to those mistakes and problems.

You know why the sea is knee-deep for a drunk person? Because a drunk person is completely relaxed and, paradoxically, more synchronized with their environment. The more you tense up anticipating pain, the stronger the pain will be; the more you expect problems, the more you tense up and are more likely to drop something or stumble. A relaxed body experiences less pain, its muscles move more smoothly, so it’s less likely to drop things and bump into things. The Japanese say that anxiety doesn’t solve tomorrow’s problems, but takes away today’s peace, so it works with the inner self as well. A relaxed mind sees reality more clearly, a relaxed psyche handles problems more easily. Otherwise, this process will be like trying to shove a spoon into a tightly closed mouth – it will only hurt you more.

To turn down the heat and the number of problems, you need to relax, breathe out, and often just ignore the stuff. So it fell, so be it, screw it, we’ll clean it up, we’ll buy a new one, the main thing is everyone’s alive and well. Just accept the fact that crap is going to happen, you can’t avoid it. Enjoy the periods when it’s not there and don’t beat yourself and your loved ones up about things you can’t control, predict, or undo. Don’t take everyone’s peace and good mood away, there’s not enough of it as it is. Someone already got hurt or created problems, and he is getting yelled at for something he can’t even fix.

So when someone raises his judgmental finger and starts lecturing you about “who’s to blame, and what you should have done…”, interrupt them, maybe even with a curse word. All they NEED is to shut their mouth and mind their own business. Especially if they’re so clueless that they can’t just show sympathy instead of looking for useless causes.

Mylene Maelinhon Blog (c) Material from the Marginal Metaphysics Project