There are no guarantees in this world
I haven’t written a blog post in a few weeks. Partially because I’ve simply had a busy schedule, and partially because of figuring out how to express the next thing I wanted to write about.
My blog hasn’t turned out exactly the way I envisioned when I wrote the first post. I originally thought it’d be mostly focused around technical commentary. That is still something I’d like to write more about! I spend a huge part of my time dealing with tech, both in my day job and in various side projects.
At the same time, I’ve found it very therapeutic to treat my blog as a philosophical outlet, almost a public journal of sorts. I am quite sure that this type of content isn’t rewarded by today’s search and social media algorithms, and also that many people will not find it particularly interesting. But I’m not writing for an algorithm or for the masses. If just one person reads one of my posts and takes away something meaningful from it, then my time wasn’t wasted.
This time I want to talk about one of the biggest sources of stress I’ve personally faced, and that I think we all face: the uncertainty of the future.
I am a very logically minded person, and I tend to like things being predictable. Not repetitive, but possible to anticipate and prepare for.
In today’s world, we work so hard to analyze situations and craft well-thought-out plans, whether it be for our finances, social life, things we want to build, or anything else that might come to mind. But the truth is, we don’t have any guarantees in this world, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. If you don’t believe me, let me give some practical examples. Can you be sure you’ll wake up tomorrow morning? Absolutely not; you could die of a heart attack. Your home could burn down. You could be in a terrible car, plane, or train accident. You could be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get caught in an act of mass violence.
Perhaps you find death to be an extreme example. Consider socializing. Most of us would take the ability to meet up with friends for granted, but anyone who lived through early 2020 and the height of the COVID pandemic knows otherwise.
Programming is another good example. As programmers we try very hard to eliminate bugs from code and make it reliable. We commonly think of algorithms as “guaranteed” to work correctly. The reality, however, is that all code is written under some set of assumptions. We in the field like to call them “invariants”. As soon as any invariant is violated, the stability of the whole program comes into question. Even the most hardened code is vulnerable to issues outside its control like memory errors or disk corruption.
Yet another example is in business. We have all seen the numerous products that offer “lifetime” access, in which you are “guaranteed” to be able to access the product indefinitely. Most products nowadays are no longer feasible to download and save as an individual, especially if they rely on or are cloud services. The company might go under one day and that access is then gone forever. (I believe many lifetime access clauses include fine print for this reason.)
The last example is very “meta”: I thought this blog would be very technically focused, and that’s not the direction it ended up going in. Since I write about things I feel inspired to write about, and not a specific topic, I really have no hard guarantee on what my next post will be about. Occasionally I write a few at once and post them over a few weeks, but beyond that it really comes down to whatever situation is inspiring me in that moment.
We don’t have any guarantees, and so the best thing we can do is take life one day at a time. This is not to say that we ignore the future. It’s wise to be prudent and consider how our actions today might affect our situation tomorrow. But it’s also wise to remember it’s a privilege to wake up each morning.
Understanding that nothing in life can be taken for granted helps with being grateful for what we do have. Being grateful for what we have is something I’ve heard many times, but I found it hard to get into that habit mentally. It’s hard to take inventory of one’s life and pick out the positives when there also seem to be many negatives. What has been working is to narrow down the scope a bit more.
This past month, I’ve been trying to set a habit of finding one thing to really be grateful for each day. It was a little bit hard at first, but doable (even on a bad day, it’s usually rare to not find at least one really good moment). The neat part was that each day, this got a little easier. At this point let’s just say it’s been hard to limit the count to just one. ;)
Every day is precious, and there are no second chances or do-overs. We might get a chance to retry some things from any given day, but we can never go back and live that day again. Moreover, we don’t know that there’ll be another day. We cannot control the past or the future: the only moment we control is right now. So dive in and make it count.