It’s a bit crummy outside, so let’s take a brief intermission from adventure to talk tales of destiny and fate.
The concept of having your entire life predetermined by a higher entity never made much sense to me. If existence was fated, there’d be no purpose in playing this game. Decision-making would be the pointless exercise of imagining irrelevant details to add a touch of a colour to a completed tome carved in stone.
People love commenting on the intentions of the Universe. When outcomes match expectation, results are clearly “meant to be.” When objectives end in failure, consolations of “it wasn’t God’s will” help ease the pain.
Both sentiments are worthless. We only consider them after events have transpired, in full witness of the existential results. Hindsight will always make the distinction between what was or wasn’t “meant” to be. It obviously either happened or it didn’t. The technique is oft used by people to disconnect failure or absolve personal responsibility — a slightly different take on the equally worthless “it is what it is” statement. Yeah, no shit, what else could it be?
Continue reading It Wasn’t Meant to Bumble, It Was Meant to Bee