Living With Risks & Uncertianty

We all live in constant fear of risks and uncertainty. The sole purpose of all our entire lives seems to be to remove those risks and uncertainty.

Well, risks cannot be entirely banished, as the recent unfortunate aviation incident demonstrates so clearly. However low the risk, so long as the risk exists, it will happen one day. To the general population, there may be, for example, one unfortunate person in a million. But to that one person, the probability is either zero or one - whether it will happen or not. The laws of probability is good for insurance companies or companies that profit from selling protection from risks. But probability has no meaning for a particular individual.

As individuals, we deal with uncertainty. Most of the time, either we know or we do not know - we do not have foreknowledge. If we know the future, there are many things which we will no do now - like eating and drinking excessively and working too hard. And there are quite a few things too that we will do - like making lots of money.

All our lives, the things we do are our responses to uncertainty. The native farmer prays to the god of heaven for rain, and the god of soil for fertility. The poor urban dwelling prays for good business, even if he or she is selling cakes for breakfast. Poor families produce many children as insurance against infant mortality and having sufficient food to eat everyday with more people scrounging to feed the parents. Resourceful poor parents work and save to send their children to good schools in the hope of better incomes in future. At work, employees play politics in order to secure their careers and to be at the top of the pack. Boys and girls, regardless of their looks, work hard to beautify themselves in order to be attractive so as to secure companionship or economies of scale.

Midlife crisis, which seems to hit those who are successful, arises when there is no more financial uncertainty. When people are financially independent, what do they do, apart from playing the stock market pretending to maximise their return on investment in a game of roulette and many theories are formed. Midlife crisis happens when all the things we have been taught and learned when we were young become useless information because they are not useful to us anymore. Now that I have enough money, what do I do next?

Those who find a second career survives. Those who do not die a lonely death.

Of all the things we are taught in life, there is one thing we are not taught - how to die. Maybe because death is not an uncertainty, death ceases to be a problem. Death ends all problems for the person who dies.

But if we are going to make the best of our lives - before we die, we must have death constantly in our mind, so that we do not forget that we may be dead in the next moment. This frame of mind, although seemingly sick, is a very healthy response to the problem of death. While death may be certain for every mortal, the time of death is still uncertain. Every moment is potentially the last moment, and hence we must live the moment as if it is the last moment. There is a growing movement on how to live the now. Our own simple reflection should be able to tell us how we should live.

Taking the world as a whole, uncertainty has been banished by knowledge and the result of knowledge is clarity - not cleverness. But human beings do not know everything, so there is still be scope for learning - until, I suppose, when our own minds become clear. We have also globally solved the  problem of wealth by printing money, now made easier by electronically generated numbers. We now live in a virtually secure environment, doing very little and playing with on-off lights or electrical pulses. The current flotation of the world with excessive cash is rearranging the wealth of societies and nations - those with money are happy, those with no money simply die. As the world becomes more conducive for procreation, as a result of success in healthcare which keep infants and the very old alive for a long long time. The greatest uncertainty in all these advancement is the natural environment without which humans cannot survive. The natural environment is the ultimate means of savings for human kind - if the survival of human beings is a concern. If not, we know that the cosmos will continue to evolve, and the age of humans will soon be gone - in universal time. Human beings are here on earth for the moment.