As long as we've done what we could | 5Y View

Pandemics, air disasters, the uncertainty all around us — the world that once seemed omnipotent now appears to be confronting once-in-a-century events at every turn. In this era of gradual defocus, how should individuals face themselves and their circumstances, and grow meaning from uncertainty? If the unexpected is impossible to predict, why should we choose to act with intention?

This article offers one perspective: only a person with active, agentive rationality can transcend the self, and transcendence means a future.

I hope it gives you something to think about :)

Reprinted from the WeChat public account "The Lonely Brain," by author Lao Yu.

01

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman once designed an experiment:

A and B each take a taxi to the airport, both needing to catch a 6:00 flight. Because of traffic, both arrive at 6:30.

A's flight has already departed on time, but B's flight was delayed until 6:25 — B watches his plane leave the gate. (Please ignore the relationship between checking in and takeoff.)

Who is more upset?

Most people say B, because he missed by just a hair.

But both missed their flights — what's the real difference?

Kahneman thus proposed a concept:

Counterfactual thinking.

What actually infuriates B isn't the fact of arriving late, but the counterfactual: B almost made it, and lost the chance that the delay offered him, so he's furious; A missed by more, and never had that opportunity, so he's less upset.

That humans use "counterfactuals" rather than "facts" to determine their moods seems strange. Researchers have found, for example, that Olympic silver medalists are more upset than bronze medalists.

Because: the silver medalist's counterfactual is "I almost won gold"; the bronze medalist's counterfactual is "I almost won nothing at all."

The former is upward counterfactual thinking, the latter downward counterfactual thinking.

Counterfactual thinking is a high-level human capacity, deeply influencing our judgments, decisions, and emotions — it is essential to human decision-making.

Future-oriented counterfactuals usually take the form: What if...? This kind of active thinking helps us reason causally, and thereby change the future.

Past-oriented counterfactuals usually take the form: If only... This kind of negative thinking often traps us in regret, blinding us to forward-looking optimism and opportunity.

02

Often, the counterfactual of "just missing" may be nothing more than an illusion. The winning lottery number for a hundred-million-yuan jackpot is 314159; your number is 314158. It seems you were off by just one digit, but this "near miss" is no different from every other non-winning number — mathematically equal. Yet our brains and emotions are not mathematical machines. The counterfactual of "almost" is the wellspring of joy and sorrow in real life and in art.

Perhaps every family struck by sudden catastrophe harbors "counterfactual assumptions." Like young Wayne's nightmare in Batman: if he hadn't walked out of the theater because of his bat phobia, his parents wouldn't have been shot by a mugger. In a sense, is he too a kind of murderer?

Or consider someone missing a connecting international flight by less than a minute, forcing the cancellation and repurchase of an entire itinerary.

Can we then say that every preceding minute was a potential cause of this "late" minute? If he'd woken one minute earlier, driven one minute faster on the airport highway, run a few steps quicker inside the terminal — would he have made it? Or thereby avoided a worse fate?

Is the final straw that breaks the camel's back the true culprit? Or must every preceding straw share the blame?

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine." If not for such chance, how would the story unfold? How would everything pass away?

03

Now, an experiment for you: if, as described above, a trivial counterfactual can alter a person's destiny, then can you try right now — perform some future-oriented counterfactual to intervene in your own fate next?

You may find: this is hard.

What can you do? Send a message to a long-uncontacted friend, start learning an instrument you've long desired, end some bad habit, raise a bonsai tree that might live for decades...

Everything feels like tossing a pebble into surging rapids. You are swept by the tides of the era, "you trying to change something now" swept along by "the countless yous that constitute fate," flowing eastward, immobile.

Even if you do perform some astonishing counterfactual, even if friends are stunned, your alteration of fate remains part of fate — the counterfactual becomes fact. Success or failure, satisfaction or regret, others will sigh: you see, this person was always fated to be so.

If he'd left one minute later, if she'd chatted a few minutes less with the neighbor — would they have avoided that fatal crash lasting one second?

For the individual, a car accident is a random event; but a city's annual accident fatalities form a relatively stable number. In 2017, US traffic deaths were 37,133; in 2016, 37,461. Why are these numbers so close — does the Grim Reaper have KPIs too?

The law of large numbers coldly follows the system, like rolling dice, producing a stable figure. This number does not change because of grieving families' "if only" sorrow.

The frequency of forest fires, a nation's newborn count, a region's sunny days — these recurring events all fluctuate within stable intervals.

If we don't mind the emotional fatalism: those who die within probability figures die for those who live within other probability figures, though they never knew each other.

The contingency we sigh over, in Feynman's view, is merely coincidence under randomness. A license plate "12345678" is no more "coincidental" than "15923769."

If one day you randomly see two cars on the street, one plate 12345678 and another 87654321, you'd marvel at how such low probability could occur. Your surprise comes from these numbers being highly "ordered" — but two other plates you deem unremarkable likely contain some slightly hidden "order," equally or more "coincidental."

From this: astonishing coincidences may be everywhere.

Behind "coincidence" lies the assumption of "purpose" — as if someone deliberately placed two "ordered" numbers together.

Yet the second law of thermodynamics tells us: perhaps all change is essentially just spontaneous decay.

Humans excel at pattern recognition. Our obsession with causality, and individuals' strong sense of purpose — including unknowingly serving as vehicles for "selfish genes" to propagate, and self-aware purposes distributed across "different levels of Maslow's hierarchy."

Thus we extend "teleology" to the endless universe, seeking a designer of all things, searching for the purpose and meaning of human existence.

Yet this questioning receives no answer; all things are silent as riddles, for the magnificent universe needs no purpose, nor depends on explanation.

04

The emptiness of gazing at stars, the constriction of looking down at survival — each prompts bewilderment.

What determines a life: contingency, or fate?

We always find reasons after choosing; explain after acting; rationalize after doing. Tragically, we have scarcely ever actively "existed."

Perhaps because we have misdefined the probability space of "counterfactuals." Irrational Man opens with a story Kierkegaard once told:

A person absent-minded about his own life, who only discovered his own existence when he woke one sunny morning to find himself dead.

Camus's one "truly serious philosophical problem" may itself be a counterfactual thought experiment: if we woke tomorrow to find ourselves dead, how would we touch the root of our own existence?

News of plane crashes moves us through the interweaving of others' misfortune and human empathy — a counterfactual meditation.

Whoever we are, whatever our gender, whatever our station, the counterfactual of our lives is not "she has more money than me," nor "he has a beach house on Maui and I don't." The counterfactual is the same for all who live:

On some morning gently touched by dawn and dew, you are no longer.

Whenever people think about their existence in the universe with incurable teleology, they marvel that life emerged on Earth — a cosmic process where the slightest deviation would have undone everything. Even a slight change in the moon's "guardianship" of Earth's axial tilt, and all life would be hopeless.

For every life, rainbows rise along its path, the sun burns for it, gravity toils like an ox, atoms build block upon block for it.

Yet the sentiment that "everything in life but life and death is child's play" often outlasts the news cycle even less. Desire, fear, greed drive humanity into an extremely narrow desert depth. Omnipotent technology either tries to lure us into illusions of existence, or plans to flee this planet that humanity will sooner or later destroy.

05

The film Eternals uses immortal aliens to ask: if we never died, if every rebirth came at the cost of erased memory, would free will remain? Would we still "exist"?

Karl Jaspers's answer: The moment is the unity of temporality and eternity, deepening the actual moment into eternal reality.

In today's defocused era, a world that once felt omnipotent suddenly confronts a series of once-in-a-century events. Perhaps we should abandon prediction, no longer hope to return to before, turn from the revelry of grand narratives to the insignificant fate of the individual — to feel those long-neglected existences, and witness their incredible counterfactual in the cosmos.

Barrett's book especially mentions Buber's assertion:

The meaning of life occurs only in such an interval between person and person, in the relational situation where one can always say "I" to the "You" of another — a thought worth devoting a lifetime to exploring.

The turning of the river of time we dimly sense may be real, or may simply be history as it always was.

If we still believe exploration of eternity is worthwhile, if the proportion between cosmic life and our life has constructed some relatively eternal scene — even if time itself may be illusory — then Karl Jaspers's following assertion may still be heard:

As long as I live, I must do my utmost; though I know not what I may gain, I must act with intention. With a fulfilled today, there will be tomorrow; as long as today we do what is within our power, we may possess tomorrow.

As a psychiatrist and philosopher, Karl Jaspers believed human existence cannot but be divided — between reason and emotion, soul and body, responsibility and desire.

In my view, this is a structure like scissors, or like a bow, where tension between pull and stretch forms the tension of life's existence.

Karl Jaspers believed humans can overcome and transcend their own divisions; the goal lies not in success, but in pursuit, and thereby manifests self-knowledge. He said:

"Only a person with this active, agentive rationality can transcend the self; transcendence means future, means eternity."

5Y Capital seeks out, supports, and inspires lonely entrepreneurs, providing support from the spiritual to all operational aspects. We believe that if the "crazy you" in others' eyes begins to be believed in, the world will become a different place.

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