It's All Random?
I was sitting and talking to my boss yesterday. For some reason things are unusually quiet at our treatment center right now. The number of clients and assessments in what has usually been our big groups has decreased while the groups that were struggling have increased attendance. It's kind of like a cycle, we decided, but a cycle not based on anything.

Which connected to the book I have been reading, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It has been slow going because it is not as easy a read as I would like, but it is challenging. Basically he talks about the important role that randomness plays in most major events and decisions. Most MAJOR changes in history and events that are literally world-changing and life-shattering cannot be predicted. He also talks about how we fool ourselves into thinking we have ways of interpreting these events to make sense of them. We base the future on the past- which, believe it or not, isn't all that good a source of what is going to happen.

My favorite example he uses is the Thousand and One Days of a turkey. For a thousand days in a row the turkey is fed and taken care of - care fit for a king. If the turkey were in any way conscious of what is happening, he would believe that life was nothing short of wonderful. Of course it will continue. He knows nothing else, he knows no other way of expecting life to go.

Until day 1001 when he is made ready for the Thanksgiving Dinner. Without warning, it all changes. While to us that doesn't look random- it is for the turkey.

Such is the nature of unexpected events and the role of randomness. We don't like to think that life is random. We don't like to think that we are that out-of-control. But we are. There's a lot more to the book than this, but it is the underlying assumption. It is all chaos. It is random. How can we learn to live with it? I'll let you know when I get to the end of the book.