Tag: certainty

The weather forecast

Posted on by philipdodson

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Huge sums of money are spent on trying to predict with greater and greater accuracy something that is totally unpredictable.

If you live in the Sahara, unlikely as that may be, you do not need to waste money, as it will be most likely to be hot and dry. Certainty.

In the UK, we just spent £97 million on a new computer to predict the unpredictable and now there are plans to spend more.

It won’t matter how much money you invest into trying to be certain, as certainty is an extremely rare thing, not just with the weather but with life too.

Life is like the weather, difficult to forecast too accurately. Best to look out the window and dress appropriately on the day instead of investing too much time, energy and money trying to cover every eventuality.

Take each day as it unfolds, be in the moment, do what you can now as that will build the future. Forecasting something doesn’t make it so. Doing something is more likely too.

If we were guaranteed a 1,000 years

Posted on by philipdodson

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I read an article a while back that claimed that the first person who will live to be age 1,000 has already been born.

If we were guaranteed a 1,000-year life, what would we do differently?

Would we plan stages to do different things and take in different experiences? Would we have several trial runs at things and until we got it right? Would we try to fit in as much as possible and use every single day as it if was our last? Would we do nothing for 990 years, then with just 10 left suddenly think shit I better get on with it now? Would we hate the certainty and hate the fact that there was no risk and so much time that there was no urgency?

Our lives are not guaranteed, much as we have this notion of teenage years, our twenties, thirties etc for each decade until our retirement of this expected life. We all sit and say ‘in my fifties I plan to do this’ or ‘in my retirement, I’m going to do…’.

I must have missed seeing my guarantee.

We do not have a certainty of anything.

Certainty is in our imagination, put there by a system that wants compliance and dependency on them to provide us ‘safety’ in return for that compliance.

It is not about how long we have got, it is about what we choose to do with it and how much we are prepared to exchange their imaginary safety for risk and the potential reward of something meaningful.

Why have a 1,000-year life if all you do is the same as now?