The Beauty of Chance and other Rubbish

Fifty pages of ‘Diogenes the Cynic,’ I chewed, digested, and purged like a bulimic as soon as I picked up my phone to lust over my Asos wishlist. I carefully imbibed his caustic wit, his undue pride, and his misanthropic one-upmanship leaving behind his most crucial philosophy- stoic self-sufficiency and the rejection of luxury!

Is beginner’s luck a real thing?

If it is a first-mover advantage, yes, beginner’s luck is a real thing in business terms. And if it is, then my picking a subject in my college trimester and getting an A is probably the same. I am a science person, so I do not believe in tricks and magic, but how else will you explain my winning a sequence game the first time I played it?

Experts argue that it is a statistical phenomenon. ‘Only selectively’ completes the sentence, but they’ll probably omit it on all occasions. In psychology, we also attribute beginner’s luck to confirmation bias. A novice’s win is remembered because what were the odds, again? And forgotten because, anyway, they were not expected to outperform.

I have read many books a lot, and now I am afraid I’ve lost my ability to count on chance. Chance is romantic, it is the man of your dreams but its aura is completely marred by a statistician’s theory.

As a child, I got beatings, vile taunts and at occasions, I was chucked out of my house for not doing well in mathematics.

My parents left me alone after my brother got into primary school. After my 5th or 6th grade, they never bothered me. I went on to do great up until my boards, and then my performance never crossed above-average up-til I graduated. Getting into one of my country’s big league business schools has given me tremendous self-worthiness, true, but also a lot of ‘Is this all there is to this?’ This phenomenon was never on the cards, off the charts, I’d say, and if I were in my early 20s, I’d have cherished this a lot more than I am now.

As and how I’ve aged, I’ve developed a terrible sense of self-consciousness and holistic awareness about myself, my living conditions, and a thorough conjecture about my future. True, my acceptance into a top-tier school is reason enough to believe in chance; I am a realist, and I cannot believe that my future conditions will cross a certain threshold. But I am not depressed so I have only a tiny amount of hope to land up somewhere, but it never occurs in your wildest imagination before it actually happens.

I have this terrible fear of being noticed by people at all possible times. I have a bunch of known eyes, squinting from above their masks, a bunch of unknown eyes, darting at me as if they’ve seen a ghost, deafening noise, loud enough to swing me into utter consciousness, following me everywhere I go. The most comfortable environment for me is my own room. I am happy, when hunched down on my desk, tapping the keys on my keyboard, away from the crowd and concoction. I don’t have this habit of laying down on my bed whenever I get a break from my routine, I am unlike most people in this sense. If my friends came to see me, they’d always catch me hunched over on my desk.

I don’t feel flattered when they say, ‘thank you for your patience. I still scoff at having to wait. When my Professor thanks me for waiting while he’s loading his zoom screen, I feel coddled. When he gives me a hard deadline of 11:59:59, I am once again thrown into the nitty gritties of adult life.

I am depressed would be an overstatement if I were to describe my current state of mind. I am simply disinterested. I believe that there’s nothing to live on. But this doesn’t translate into unhappiness. That again would be a grave misconception. I am surrounded by a great set of people, and friends, my parents love me and understand me a good deal unlike many of my friend’s parents. I party on an average of 4 days per week like every other Business school student. I am in a loving relationship with my college boyfriend.

I understand that most people would kill for a life like this, or so I have been told. Every day I wake up to at least one submission deadline, a grave reduction from my first year’s workload, at most three sessions, and a question that bugs me every day. ‘What is to life?’ I sip on my morning coffee brought to me to my bed by my boyfriend as I stress over waking up to another gruelling day at my disposal.

I haven’t written in a lot of days, couldn’t find a moment’s time between living and leaving! I lived every ounce of this beautiful city of lakes and my beautiful college campus, walked every mile, and never missed a day’s breakfast (I am lying). And after 9 months and some days, I left. I could have given birth to an offspring without my parents’ knowledge, I once joked in response to a question about my duration on campus.

I am in the living room of my parent’s home. I googled, ‘Why do I feel indebted to anyone who helps me?’ I live an absurd life, modernity has ruined me. I get little done and whine a lot. I am now leaving everything to chance. If I were to write a memoir, would you read it?