“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats” – Voltaire
This seems like a safer way to fish.
Life is uncertain, or in the vernacular, “Shit Happens”. As this is not a particularly robust philosophy of existence, we tend to putter through life with a distinctly asymmetrical notion of probability. That is, we confidently attribute repeated successes to our good looks, charm, and wit, but strings of tragedies to bad luck, jinxes, and curses. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich, in his How We Know What Isn’t So pointed out, “If a person has experienced such a large number of positive outcomes that it is worthy of comment, an additional success is not, by itself, terribly noteworthy. A subsequent failure on the other hand, violates the typical pattern of success and thus stands out in the person’s experience. Examples of earlier jinxes are therefore…
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