Roulette of Life

If you’ve ever been to a casino, there’s no doubt you’ve took a peek over at the roulette wheel. Now besides being a completely horrid casino game to put money on I’ve also thought of it as being a good metaphor for life. The reds and the blacks, the ball caught in the wheel’s crevice, jumping and hopping at the wheel’s whim, and most importantly the wheel spinning faster and faster until it’s own motion becomes it’s demise. Life is a funny thing, about the only thing predictable about it is that it has a beginning and an end. We never know where we’re going to end up or how we’ll get there, and the best we can do is place our bets on the most likely scenario. Whatever we do we’re still at the mercy of the spinning wheel, still stuck in the ups and downs our life gives us. Like the roulette ball jumps when it reaches a bump, we only act as our environment forces us to.
Psychology tells us there’s about a 1/3 of a second delay between a thought being constructed in the sub-conscious and it’s transfer over the consciousness barrier. Essentially, this means an idea is actually formed 1/3 of a second before we “think” it. The smartest part of ourselves Is the part we have relatively no access to. Each decision we make is not really a decision at all, but instead a sub-conscious conclusion reached after a survey of all the past outcomes in our life. If you’ve bet heads on a coin toss for 50 tosses and lost every single one, then it doesn’t take a wise man to understand your next bet should probably be on tales.
If you don’t believe in destiny then consider this: every moment of your life is determined by every moment passed. If violence has always given you the desired outcome then your most likely to use violence next time there’s a problem. In life there are no 50/50 choices, because the years of life experience we’ve encountered always tips the scales in favor of one choice. And as machines of logic and reason, our brain always picks the choice more probable to succeed. You might have seen someone do something completely pointless and damaging, completely throw their life away in a moment of bad decision. You think to yourself “What the hell was he thinking to go out and do something so…stupid”. Well, I hate to break it to you, but no one makes a decision if they honestly think it’s stupid. Either they’re forced into it or their past decisions have led them to believe that the benefits of doing said stupid act will outweigh the risks, or in other words, they make a rational decision. Destiny is very much real, but not in the sense that most people make it out to be. We never think that 1 plus 1 is “destined” to equal two, it’s just the sole outcome of two different factors. As such we never think a kid who grows up in a horrible crime-plagued neighborhood is “destined” to live his life in jail, but truth is that if he never encounters that one deciding good influence, that one inspiring person or compelling speech, then the negative influences will outweigh the positives and 1 plus 1 will end up equaling two.