Today marks the end of my semester. No more school for at least a while.
I planned this semester to be very chill. I was only taking four courses and none of them involves math or programming. Most of my school work was going over assigned readings, writing reading reflections, writing argumentative essays, and giving presentations.
I was living the life of an art major.
Anyway, I am glad this semester is over. Time to move on to the next thing.
Note that I did not get a chance to write this Thursday. Had a paper and two presentations due so didn’t prioritize writing on Substack. My bad.
I want to discuss the act of worrying today. I worry a lot and it doesn’t feel good. I am not going to share what I worry about here since they are kinda personal, but you know what I am talking about.
I am also fairly certain that I am not alone. It is human nature to always assume the worst outcome. On the other hand, it is also a universal truth that humans cannot predict the future. We can only make educated guesses, using past statistics to predict the future.
For example, some people are scared of flying because they worry about dying from a plane crash. However, facts tell us that “there was a 1 in 20 million chance of being on a commercial airline flight experiencing a fatal accident from 2012-2016” (source). You need to fly 20 million times to die. Not that easy. But there are still people who are scared of flying.
You might call me out that it is a dumb example. But the point I am trying to make here is that humans are only capable of making educated guesses. No matter how confident you are with your guesses, they are still guesses. The outcome is still speculative. Along with our human tendency of always assuming the worst outcome, we worry.
Worrying might be good because it prevents us from doing dumb shit that ends up getting us killed. It is ingrained in our psyche since the foraging era. But I am still not a big fan of worrying. It doesn’t make me feel good. From now on I am going to try to stop worrying too much, and start learning how to use past statistics to make educated guesses.