Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Not really sure about this one. Science doesn't have answers for really big questions, like why does the universe exist. But for stuff smaller than that, like "why do I have some disease", or "why did I lose a loved one" ... or just "why did I lose 200$ dollars at the casino" well science tells us a lot about how it's all one giant lottery we have been playing involuntarily, and we are all really bad at it.
We take chances just by existing. It's literally called a genetic lottery. We take a chance by getting in a car or stepping out onto the street to go to the market. Just by loving people we take the chance that something could take them away. Life deals you a hand. You win some, you lose some. You don't get to decide what your odds are. The best you can do is play the hand you've got. Which to be honest, is a lot less control than we tend to think we have. And even then, most of us don't play our hand all that great, cause we are thrust into the game of life without a practice round. And we are often too young and arrogant to listen to those who have come before us who already learned the hard way. Worse yet, we see few of our peer's mistakes, so we have a poor sense of what success and failure really looks like.
Science tells us about the gambler's fallacy, the human bias towards falsely thinking that the universe tends towards some kind of fairness or equilibrium which is patently false (consider how little the gambler expects "good luck" to turn bad, therefore why gamble at all if it always equalizes?). Karma doesn't mean the universe owes you exactly what you put in. Life doesn't hand out exact change.
Science also tells us about how we (humans) don't truly understand randomness. In nature, successive repetitions of some outcome of luck are vastly more common than we tend to think they are. We see a series of bad luck outcomes and say "that's not natural, this can't be real" when in fact it is often the natural laws of the universe on full display.
Despite it all, even if the game of life makes no promises to you at all, it sure as hell is better than not playing the game at all. Regarding karma, the only thing you can be sure of--and forgive me for using a dead meme but it is apt--is that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
Edit for the pedants: gambler's fallacy actually means that past results of independent events do not predict future outcomes, but that's basically what I just said.
That is a lot of wisdom in a single comment. I am re-reading it a lot.. Yay! Thanks for sharing