Every other pre-birthday eve has been spent thinking of all the things I am grateful for, as I turn a year older. Today feels eerily different.
Not that I don’t have a ton of things to be grateful for, but the older I get the more I’ve begun to reflect on the quality of living I’ve done. And the past couple days, I’ve been thinking about life almost like a simulation — a system with variables.
“How different would my life be, if a few variables were altered?”
Life has dealt me a fair hand, would be dishonest to think otherwise. I may not be living the dream just yet, but I know my 16-year-old self would look at the man I’m becoming and feel genuinely proud. But how exactly did I become this version of me?
Like a science experiment, I’ve been wondering how much of who we become is really us vs uncontrolled variables? If I ever went back to that 16-year-old-boy stepping into life, would I still be able to walk the path as-is that got me here? Would I end up here — or somewhere better… or worse?
I think the answer is not so straight-forward.
The Hard Work Myth
Just three years ago, the self-absorbed me saw the success-failure plane as a reflection of how hard you worked. I’d have died on the hill that if you didn’t win, you just didn’t put in enough work.
Unlike most people, I couldn’t stand to think that there were invisible forces like luck, spiritual forces etc that could determine the outcome of my life. Which is ironic cause my spiritual background taught me differently — It was just one of those teachings I couldn’t accept.
Whilst that was probably pivotal to the ungodly amount of work I was able to put into my affairs, at a point it was not a sufficient thought framework to understand life. I started to worry cause I had people who had begun to look up to me and I felt they needed some sort of step-by-step manual as to how I was able to make the little things I did happen, but I’d give out the same instruction to ten persons and only three would be able to yield similar results.
What happened to the remaining 7? Did they not work hard enough? Maybe they were just lazy? It was now more difficult than ever to draw that straight line cause I saw some of these people put in even more work than I did, for little to no results.
Over time, I started to admit to myself that it wasn’t that simple. Maybe life doesn’t require manuals, and we’re just meant to figure things out as we go, running mostly on instinct and vibes. But even that explanation felt incomplete, and if hard work alone can’t define outcomes, then something else had to be at play.
The Lottery of Life
16 has always felt like a pivotal age for me. Maybe because it feels like when I had the first taste of independence — in thoughts, in actions, in life. But life started a lot earlier, in fact most of what shaped the kind of thoughts, decisions, actions the 16-year-and-older Me(s) ended up making was the formative years (0–16).
The luckiest day in my life is the day I was born, because I was born in the United States. If I were being born today, I would just keep negotiating in the womb until they said I could be in the United States — Warren Buffett
It’s easy to attribute the quality of life you live today to the effort you’ve put in over time, but it never really tells the full story. You’d be surprised at how much different your life would be if you were born in a different place, time or to a different family. For context:
- If I was born in the 1600s, I won’t be dreaming of building the next unicorns, but rather owning lands, escaping being sold into slavery or surviving one of the random wars I didn’t start.
- If one random illness, accident, or bad decision happened at the wrong time, my entire timeline could have been split into something unrecognizable.
- Being born in Nigeria, I had different starting parameters than my colleagues in first-world countries. I’d probably have been another Stanford dropout raising millions of dollars to build the millionth AI app, no one would use.
- If I was born into a Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist family, I probably would have different beliefs I’d be willing to die for.
And the list goes on and on…
Everything from our starting advantage, to our morals, beliefs, and ideals are a fundamental outcome of a random lottery cast by a supreme being/fate/nature.
So perhaps our lives are partially predetermined. Perhaps we really are part of a larger plan, simulated by forces or beings far beyond our comprehension.
The duality of the simulation
If life was some sort of simulated video game where certain quests and achievements were needed to progress through it, how differently would you play it to win?
There are a lot of theories around the simulation hypothesis, which we won’t go into as it’s not the north star of this article, but the duality of the simulation begets the question of how much we control vs how much has been predetermined.
As we already established in the previous section, there’s a lot of uncontrolled factors that go into how your life plays out — your genetics, your upbringing, your experiences, the information you were exposed to. They guide your thoughts, decisions, actions thus making the idea of free will almost an illusion.
At the same time, there’s so much randomness in life, that makes it difficult to believe it is predetermined—accidents, luck, timing, chance. It would take one hell of a simulation for this amount of randomness to feel so real.
But maybe the answer lies somewhere in the middle…so whilst you might not have full autonomy/free will, you might also not be fully predetermined.
Somewhere within the limits of the simulation, you still get a part to play.
Playing the part
Looking back at my life, I can’t pretend that everything I have today is a result of effort. Yes, I worked hard, made choices, took risks, but I was also incredibly lucky:
- Lucky to be born in a time where information is everywhere and easily accessible.
- Lucky to have access to tools most people never had.
- Lucky to have met certain people who changed my life.
- Lucky to have avoided certain mistakes and made some others.
- Lucky that some things went my way when they could easily have gone the other way.
And the older I get, the more I realise that life is not just about fine-grained control, It’s about playing the part you’re given as well as you can. Thus I’ve resolved, while I might not fully control all variables, I‘d do my best to play one hell of a game.
Yeah I could work so hard, and still fail, but I’d work hard regardless. I could love hard and it still won’t work out, but I’d love regardless.
The meaning of dancing is not to arrive at a certain spot on the floor, but to dance while the music is playing. Similarly, the point of life is to be alive and to live in the moment — Alan Watts
Life is about the present. It’s more about the journey than it is about the destination, and I intend to savour every bit of it.
There are still so many things I want to experience, not because they lead anywhere in particular, but simply because they make the ride more interesting.
Learning to play the keyboard, getting better at photography, taking painting classes, training Muay Thai in Thailand, trying Kung Fu in China, reading more books, practicing archery, randomly learning Spanish, mastering in Physics, becoming a private pilot and a hundred other things that may or may not have any real purpose beyond the fact that they make the journey intriguing.
And to answer the question that made me start writing this in the first place — I honestly don’t know.
If I replayed my life from 16, with the same starting conditions but different decisions, I have no idea whether I would end up here again, somewhere better, or somewhere worse.
What I do know is that I would still try, still make my choices the best way I know how, and hope — as we all quietly do — that luck falls in my favour.