Forking Paths

Breaking free from predictability

All of our past choices make one single path, from birth to our present moment. But ahead of us are many paths that collapse into a single path with every next step. Each step then opens up a whole new range of possible next steps in our garden of forking paths.

We want to make sense of our lives looking forward, but we can only make sense looking backwards.

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

- Steve Jobs

We often overthink our next steps, we try to optimise or try to make them fit with an imagined narrative describing our future trajectory. If we think about our next steps too much we become paralysed with indecision, stuck in a rut of inertia.

How about throwing caution to the wind and playing with a little randomness?

We don’t change our behaviours by following the same old patterns, by clinging to our old identities. We change when we’re forced into doing something different, something uncomfortable, something completely random. What we imagine as the future is just an illusion, we feel a sense of security through careful planning to ensure some predictability, but the predictability of the future is an illusion too. Our lives are inherently insecure and unpredictable and any path can be taken.

“Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.”

The Dice Man, Luke Rhinehart

The book The Dice Man was an interesting foray into the world of chance, a revelation that we have less control over our lives than we like to think, and so the protagonist would make decisions by casting dice:

1. Go for a 10-mile walk

2. Meditate

3. Rest easy and fast for the next 12 hours

4. Do 500 push-ups

5. Find a video about ‘Animal Flow for Beginners’ and learn some basic moves

6. Write and publish an article about my personal triggers for eating junk food

Why not relinquish control to the dice or a coin flip every once in a while? Allow chance to introduce some variety and open up some new paths, new possibilities, break down our self-imposed limitations. Living more freely we get to explore more versions of our different possible selves.

“The self is a dead skin which keeps new beings from being born. Shed it”

- The Book of the Die, Luke Rhinehart

Control is an illusion anyway.