wearing glasses

A thought experiment on fortune, fate, choice, and destiny

Not to get too Rapunzel on a Wednesday morning, but for a moment imagine you are trapped inside a castle.

The key that would allow you to unlock the door and walk right out of the castle is inside a safe. The safe requires an eight-digit code to be opened.

That means there are just over 43 million possible combinations. Assuming it takes 10 seconds to try each one, it would take you just over 13.5 years to try every possible combination. That means if you had a son right before you were taken prisoner in the castle, you would potentially have to miss his bar mitzvah.

Plot twist #1, there is a billboard 100 hundred yards away with the safe-opening, eight-digit combination printed in bold red letters.

Plot twist #2, you are profoundly nearsighted and don’t have glasses with you.

Plot twist #3, there is a detailed manual and ample tooling + raw materials providing the blueprint for you to engineer the perfect pair of glasses that would ultimately allow you to see the combination written on the billboard, open the safe, retrieve the key, unlock the door, and escape to freedom.

It would take several weeks of hard work to construct said spectacles, but we can assume in this scenario that you are perfectly capable if you are willing to put in the time.

So, what would you do?

Now I can’t say what you (specifically) would actually do, but I studied economics in college, so I feel entitled to assume that a hypothetical person in this scenario is “rational.” I feel equally entitled to assume that said rational individual would choose the option of a certain escape in a few weeks rather than the potential for decades of near-certain incarceration (accounting for time spent sleeping to punctuate the days of failed safe opening attempts).

So why does any of this matter?

I would argue that all of us are faced with a version of this hypothetical every day of our lives. I would also argue that most of us opt to leave the glasses manual in the corner, curse the universe for our misfortune, and hope that we might instead simply stumble our way to success (the correct safe combination).

In this hypothetical scenario, we are trapped within the castle. Our suboptimal eyesight is the gating factor preventing a successful escape to freedom.

In reality, we are trapped within patterns of suffering. Suboptimal habits of perception and thought are the gating factors preventing a successful escape into a joyful and peaceful existence.

One potentially controversial implication of this line of thinking is that suffering is a choice.

I have met too many people in what many would consider to be “dire” circumstances who manage to salvage joy and peace for me to think otherwise.

I believe in the objectivity of stimuli. I don’t believe in the objectivity of perception of those stimuli.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The reason that miserable people are miserable does not lie in their circumstances but rather in their perception of those circumstances.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

You are not trapped in the castle because the safe combination on the billboard itself is blurry. You are trapped in the castle because your perception of the safe combination on the billboard is blurry.

When it is put in such simple terms, it seems silly that anyone would choose to stay locked away in the castle solely because of their sheer unwillingness to do the work required to break free. But when applied to how we live our lives, the “obvious” route somehow no longer seems so obvious.

It’s not our fault that we are so inclined to choose to lead lives fraught with misery and suffering.

Our brains have evolved to become what they are over the course of millions of years. During most of that time, being perpetually unsatisfied was not merely optimal from a survival standpoint, it was absolutely necessary. With such scarcity of food, resources, shelter, and prospective mates, to be satisfied with your lot was to all but guarantee your demise.

The “contentment” gene likely went just as swiftly as it came.

Our “almost” ancestors who were unlucky enough to be endowed with this gene did not live long enough to pass it onto the broader gene pool. The ones who were content when their dwelling was almost far enough away from the reach of lions or when their spear was almost sharp enough did not emerge from the ruthless gauntlet of survival of the fittest in the Serengeti.

And while it is not our fault that we have these primitive inclinations, it is our fault if we maintain them.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we don’t live in the Serengeti (or 50,000 BC) anymore. Broadly speaking, food, resources, shelter, and prospective mates are no longer particularly scarce.

Luckily for us, we don’t have to live with the brains we are born with. Thanks to the wonders of neuroplasticity, we are capable of altering the very structure of the machines that mediate our perception of the world.

We have the blueprints to build ourselves a lovely (and functional) set of spectacles to enable an escape from the castle of our misery.

Mechanically speaking, there is a bundle of nerves at the base of our brainstem called the reticular activating system (RAS). It is responsible for filtering the information that comes into our brains, specifically in a way that confirms our existing beliefs.

This was another handy dandy mechanism of evolution (likely) to ensure cohesion within our respective tribes back in Serengeti. This cluster of nerves makes sure that the stimuli that ultimately reach our conscious minds are ones that we already expect to perceive and align with our current view of the world.

Have you ever learned a new word and then all of a sudden begun to see it everywhere? Or planned to buy a certain type of car and then all of a sudden begun to see it all over the road?

That word and car are not coincidentally appearing in more abundance. Your RAS is now just filtering them into your conscious awareness given their newfound relevance in your life.

The same is true for beliefs.

If you like to watch the news and be told that the world is a terrible place and that people are bad, you will be inclined to be attuned to information that confirms those beliefs (which is one of the many reasons why watching copious amounts of news can be profoundly counterproductive to living a joyful and peaceful life).

With great power comes great responsibility.

The world we believe we live in is the world we ultimately experience.

In this sense, we are all born nearsighted.

With no work or intervention, we will see the world the same way our ancient ancestors did—as a place fraught with reasons to be discontent. But we all have blueprints at our disposal, should we choose to engage with them.

If we believe that everything happens for a reason, we might experience misfortune not as a setback but rather as a stepping stone.

If we practice gratitude we might be attuned to the countless blessings in our lives rather than the few misfortunes.

If we remember that our curious, clingy toddler will one day be a disinterested, moody adolescent, we might summon the patience to calmly answer the hundredth question about where the world came from or why strawberries are red rather than be annoyed by it.

If we remind ourselves that one day we will die, we might cherish the wonders of our existence today rather than take our time here for granted.

These are just a few of the countless lenses we can apply to our perception of existence—our conscious experience of life.

We can quite literally tell our brain how to perceive information.

We can quite literally decide how we experience the world.

This is not a Trojan horse for toxic positivity.

I believe that it is good to experience “negative” emotions when faced with painful circumstances. It is good to feel sad, or scared, or lonely. These emotions all have something to teach us about the intricate bundle of thoughts, memories, emotions, and experiences that we call our “selves.”

Encountering pain is inevitable. Allowing that pain to entrench us in eternal misery is a choice.

When we wake up trapped in the castle we have two options.

We can either curse the universe for placing us there and giving us bad eyesight.

Or we can roll up our sleeves, build ourselves a damn good pair of spectacles, open the safe, take out the key, unlock the door, and emerge into our newfound freedom.

It is unlikely that we will simply stumble into a joyful and peaceful life. For it is choice, not chance, that determines our destiny.

I refuse to accept my circumstances as fate.

I refuse to let my well-being be dictated by the whims of fortune.

I choose to be defined by choice, not chance.

Not because I think I am uniquely capable of making good choices.

But because the realm of choice is the only one where I maintain any possibility or hope of finding what I’m truly looking for.

I’m still not exactly sure what it is that I’m looking for, but I am gaining more clarity in that domain with each passing day, month, and year.

I’ll let you know once I figure it out.

Until then, I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.