Everything in Life Is A Gamble — and That Is Why You Have to Play
You have no idea what may happen at any point in the future.
Tomorrow, you might meet the love of your life. Or you might develop a disease, or learn that someone close to you went behind your back. In a year, someone might offer you your dream job, or the chance to start a family, or that limited edition item that you have wanted for so long.
You don’t really know where you will end up.
But you can come a lot closer to getting where you want to be.
Everything you do is based in probability.
In tandem with what I have learned within psychoanalytical and cognitive psychology, I believe that you do what you do to ensure a specific outcome.
You sleep to prevent fatigue, and you talk to your friend to feel better. You leave early to make sure you get the best seat, and you spend hours reading your textbook in order to pass your finals. You do all these things, because it increases your chances of reaching a specific desired outcome — even though anything can happen to prevent that from actually occurring.
Even though you might sleep poorly, or your friend might make fun of you, or the bus might be late, or you might catch a cold right before your exam.
You do what you do to ensure some better moment or state in the future, even though it is largely outside of your control.
Yet you limit yourself.
You cannot control what happens, but you can control what you do.
This is what working for the long-term means. You cannot guarantee that you become the next big thing in your industry, or that you find a faithful partner, or that your investments turn out a handsome profit. But you can work toward it — not to ensure it, but to increase the chance that it will indeed happen.
This way, everything you do is like a gamble.
Your might get rejected, or hurt, or disappointed. But as I believe Brianna Wiest wrote in The Mountain Is You, it is not a good reason for you not to try simply because you might not succeed. Sure, life might not turn out exactly the way you wanted it to (does it ever, though?), but by persevering onward, you will end up gaining something: you will be making a difference.
But… if you never play, you’ll never even have that chance.
Try, and see what happens.
Long-term aims are what give life purpose.
They may relate to your career, your relationships, your health, or even something entirely different — but your pursuit of them has the potential to improve your current situation. You cannot control life to occur exactly the way you want it to, but you can always make specific choices to push your chances in a specific direction. In the end, if you choose and try and do, you will end up making a difference.
Everything in life is a gamble.
You might as well play the game.
