#107. Chaos

Today, we look to decipher one of the most prevalent patterns that we see in everyday life, which is chaos. We try to understand what chaos is, how does it manifest and what are some appropriate ways of dealing with it to lead the good life.

“In chaos, there is fertility.”
― Anais Nin

I am a big fan of sitcoms. The Big Bang Theory is one I have rewatched a few times. The reason for my liking and rewatching the show is very obvious, the quirky & eccentric, yet loveable, Sheldon Cooper. By virtue of him, I had taken a shine to Amy Farrah Fowler, his portrayed love interest in the TV series.

She was initially portrayed to be a female version of Sheldon, an emotionless blabbermouth solely focussed on facts and figures, and that made their dynamic pretty interesting to watch. Later on, the creative direction of the show rendered her a mere mortal, but the beef I have with that is not the subject I want to discuss this week.

There are a number of dialogues both of these characters have in the series worth quoting, but one that has been living in my head rent free is one that Amy had with Penny, again, in the initial days of her being introduced in the show.

..Penny: I got that. What I was going for was, you know, how is your life?
Amy Farrah Fowler: Just like everyone else's. Subject to entropy, decay, and eventual death. Thank you for asking..

When I first watched it, due to the humorous nature of the show, I took this as another zinger thrown to entertain me. There was even a laughing sound effect around the line to confirm my bias. However, upon deeper thought, there is a lot more to the line when separated from the fun and games it was surrounded by in the show.

Death is a notion all of us deep down know is the ultimate reality. We can even simply conclude that decay precedes death. However, another constant presence in our lives is the third facet which is highlighted in this sentence.

Entropy.

For laymen like me, entropy is the scientific term for Chaos.

I bet you didn’t expect an article which initially referenced sitcoms would go this deep.

The modern world does a decent job of surrounding all of it with nice and funny cat videos and sitcoms, but the reality is, we are surrounded by chaos. The world around us is changing by the second. Almost every other day I wake up, I hear about disruptions, massive shifts and changes in any domain imaginable.

Because chaos appears to be a widespread reality, let us take a minute to understand the most common ways chaos manifests in our lives.

Manifestation of Chaos

As conscious beings, all of us have our own mental models. They are obviously shaped by a plethora of factors, including but not limited to our upbringing, peers, environment and education. We perceive the world based on our own mental models of the world, which more often than not works on the principle of causality: X is the cause, Y is the effect.

A simple and rather common example of causality in action is a child’s first interaction with fire. A child seeing fire for the first time does not understand it burns you, so it puts its finger in the fire. Once it experiences the impacts of the fire, the mental model gets updated, and the child avoids all fires going forward.

Whenever something defies that, we have one of two knee jerk responses, depending on how our mental models are calibrated:

• Try to understand some gaps in our notion of the causality of the system in question.
• Label it as an “unpredictable” or chaotic system, feed that into long term memory and move on with our lives, with the hope that the next time we encounter a similar we would be able to predict the outcome.

Ever seen a magic trick, Figured out how the “magician” pulled it off & if not, gave up & moved on with your life after being mind blown? Well, this means you have gone through the lifecycle of responses we just talked about.

This exercise of feeding things into our long term memory is a way for us to increase the locus of control on external variables.

However, one thing that we forget in this pursuit of increasing the locus of control is almost everything in the world is out of our controls. And as control seeking beings, we struggle with this reality.

One example of this phenomenon in action is a very common occurrence. Being social animals, acceptance of our peers is hard coded into our biologies. We all seek the approvals of the people we live with. But how other people perceive us is out of our controls. Consequently, us causality seeking individuals try all the methods in the book to make people like us. 

Now that we have defined the facet, let us look at the best way of dealing with chaos.

Dealing with Chaos

There are two straight forward recommendations I have for you.

How to deal with chaos?
1. Accept the fact that whatever you do, you cannot tame the beast that is chaos.
2. Once you relinquish the illusion of control, organise what you truly can control.

Let us take a second to understand each of these in detail.

1. Accept the fact that whatever you do, you cannot tame the beast that is chaos.

Human beings are largely ego driven, and because of that we hold this weird illusion of control over everything. But we truly do not.

This is a hard pill to swallow, but if we truly accept this, it can be an immensely freeing experience. I am not there yet, and this is just as much a reminder to myself as to anyone reading this article.

2. Once you relinquish the illusion of control, organise what you truly can control.

Well, the only things we can truly say we control are our thoughts (even those are susceptible to priming, if we are not careful) and our actions. So, most of our energy must go towards organising our mental models better, which would lead to better decision making and less impending chaos in our lives.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂