Cause and effect

How many times have you seen an article online in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election trying to explain what happened? Catchy digestible headlines like “This was a response to Obama” or “Here’s a breakdown of how this happened” accompanied by glitzy videos and GIFs of state-by-state breakdowns and timelines clearly building up to the outcome flooded everyone’s news feeds for months. Everyone wanted an explanation for why all the predictions were wrong. What did we miss? What actually happened? We’re crying desperately for someone to fit all the events into a neat three-story arc that has a context, tension, and payoff.

Humans have always wanted to explain why things happened. This is how we’ve always been. When hunter-gatherers came across a small creek, the instinct was to follow it knowing that it would lead to a large body of water. When they came upon a carcass of a deer, paw prints of a big cat nearby would serve to indicate which trails to pursue and which to avoid. Over centuries, this evolved to weather prediction by looking at the shape and color of clouds. Over millenia, this turned into statistical modeling for financial projections.

Little by little, we’ve built our brains to be pattern recognition machines. We try very hard to connect seemingly random events through some link to establish a pattern of causality. This is why unsolved mysteries or detective crime fiction is such an alluring genre. Our brains aren’t satisfied with the fact that something can’t be explained, so we try and fill in the gaps with the best of our knowledge, which can sometimes lead to some pretty startling conclusions. Take for example, Stonehenge. Despite not fully knowing the purpose of the arrangement or how the rocks were transported, we’ve constructed a dizzying array of possible explanations for what they might have been for based on the evidence found around the site, ranging from humans having domesticated some prehistoric mammal to help move the rocks to the theory that aliens built it.

We want explanations and conclusions. If it doesn’t exist, we’ll literally make stuff up. This is why people are less satisfied with movies that have open-ended conclusions than ones that end in happily-ever-after. Did the top keep spinning at the end of Inception? It’s been over a decade and it’s still being talked about. The director or writer’s intent in these stories is to let the audience draw their own interpretation based on the events of the story. But the audiences have expectations and preconceived notions of what a “story” is and how a narrative should flow, in the traditional sense –– something that has a defined beginning, middle, and end. If there’s no resolution, was it even a satisfying story? It’s difficult for human brains to grapple with this.

In history books, we talk about the rise and fall of civilizations as if it was inevitable. The Mayan Empire formed, reached its peak, and then collapsed. The Mongol Empire expanded, ran into troubles, and then dissolved due to infighting. The Roman Empire conquered Europe, split into factions, and then fell. Every time, it’s a neat narrative that fits into an arc as if all the events were bound to happen. But we don’t think of our current world this way. Imagine saying democracy had a beginning, middle, and end and that we’re just living through the “middle” right now. No-one foresees our current system of democracy ever “ending”, but it’s going to happen. Monarchy died, and so will democracy when something new comes to replace it. When you’re living through it, it doesn’t seem like a story.

We do this with our careers too. Ask any senior executive at a high-profile company and they’ll paint you a rosy picture about how they kicked off their career working in investment banking, then had a phase of entrepreneurship in their midlife, and finally settled into consulting. Again, no-one ever plans it this way. It just happens and we form narratives around it. Every time I interview for a job, I do the same thing. I paint a similar picture of how I started my career as an engineer, then transitioned into design, and how I’m now starting to gravitate towards specific aspects of design. It’s an interesting story with a compelling arc and it gets your audience to pay attention. But in all honesty, my decisions at every moment were not motivated by the desire to craft an elegant narrative for my career. I just made decisions based on what made the most sense financially and career-wise at the time. I only crafted the story later. The senior executive is doing the same thing.

A quote that comes to mind when talking about this is the infamous and misguided saying “Everything happens for a reason”. People often like to share this when something traumatic happens or if something doesn’t go their way. Didn’t get into your dream school? Got rejected from your dream job? It’s okay, “everything happens for a reason”, justifying it with some false notion of how this event eventually opens other doors that may have been closed if it hadn’t happened. No one ever proclaims “Everything happens for a reason” when you get what you want, do they? If you achieve your goal, you (and the others around you) tend to attribute your success to how hard you worked and how much you hustled to make your dream come true, all while completely failing to acknowledge the same hard work and passion in the opposite event where you don’t achieve your goals. In both cases, the outcome may have been completely out of your control, yet we make up reasons for why they did happen or why they didn’t happen.

In today’s world, information is flowing at an incomprehensible rate. In the 1850’s, people didn’t have to worry about the genocides and atrocities being committed halfway across the globe. They weren’t aware of the hundreds and thousands of people being executed or dying in wars around the world. They lived in bubbles in their own corner of the world until the events directly impacted them. This was still true, to some extent, until 1990. Global news still reached people, but selectively and only for major events.

With the internet and explosion of social media (especially in the past decade), today’s generation has to deal with something that no previous generation has had to grow up with, and that is having constant access to information at all times. Open Twitter at any second of the day and you’re instantly flooded with stories of how Chinese ships are breaching Taiwan’s coastal waters, how the U.S. policing system is broken, how the Trump administration is bending the law even further than anyone thought possible, how a terrorist attack was foiled in some city in some country, how climate change projections have gotten even worse, and how our world leaders are completely failing to contain the pandemic. Is it any wonder we’re the most anxious and depressed generation? And of course, you’ll see hundreds of thinkpieces written by 70-yr old Boomers chastising millenials for being lazy, ungrateful, and too radical. They’re just trying to explain our behavior with comfortable narratives that make sense to them. And I’m just trying to explain our state of mind with a compelling narrative that makes sense to me and my generation. How these contradicting stories resonate with other humans depends on who you ask and where you ask them.

At the end of the day, humans are always trying to pin the blame on something. They need to know why things happened the way they did. They won’t just accept the fact that the 2016 U.S. election was maybe a fluke that involved some foreign meddling which caused the strange outcome. They need an explanation, because the alternative is chaos. The alternative is that there’s no meaning or reason for anything and that everything happens randomly. It’s akin to the ending of Asimov’s Nightfall where humanity collectively loses its consciousness and begins a rapid descent into a frenzied delirium due to some startling revelation that, in hindsight, should’ve been obvious all along. Well, if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that entropy in the Universe is always on the rise. The only thing we can be certain of is that there will be more randomness, more chaos, and more uncertainty in the future than ever before. The best we can do to prepare for this is to simply be open-minded enough to accept that increasingly, things will continue to happen randomly and will happen for no real reason at all.