I almost titled this Rabbit Holes I Have Known. And the topic of why things happen is absorbing. Still, it’s a WordPress daily prompt: “Do you think everything happens for a reason?”, and I think that perhaps the folks in Prompt Central found the secret stash of good stuff hidden by Alphonse before he quit to go to work for the Gov in Washington. Recently their prompts have that Freshman Philosophy course sort of vibe. Somebody better check what’s in their water cooler and their reading list.
But getting back to causation, how deep a rabbit hole do you want to jump into? A leaf falls in autumn, and you wind up tracing it back to spring? Or more realistically, you had a few too many last night, and you had a bit of a hangover this morning? That’s the one I’d put cash on.
I have been a great explorer of rabbit holes; after all, I was an original wild and crazy guy. I had a lot of rabbit holes to explore. One of the things I learned was that not all the things we do conform to easily understandable cause and effect. We have a desire to understand why it happened. It’s not just a wishlist of items to satisfy our idle curiosity. Sometimes we want to know why because we’d love to compound the good in our lives. And sometimes we want to know why to avoid future trouble.
It’s that learning part of the exploration of rabbit holes that is worthwhile. What can we learn from what’s happened, and how do we create plans and actions that replicate the good and avoid the just plain nasty? But I admit that not everything conforms to my desire to understand it. And sometimes those are the things that most frustrate me. But one thing in general that I’ve found out is that what I do with the things that happen to me matters most. That in many things I am not just something that the universe acts on, but that my actions have real effect and value.
See, I’d have failed Freshman Philosophy 101. I go down the rabbit hole to analyze it for its pragmatic worth, and not gaze at the great navel of the universe.
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Be careful how you treat people. What goes around comes around. The kindness you give returns. The respect you show returns. And so does the pain you choose to cause. You may forget what you’ve done, but life rarely does. Everything has a way of finding its way back. So leave people better than you found them. Because one day you’ll meet the consequences of the choices you make today.
In 2014, a guy named Ben did the WP prompts. Then a woman. Might have been some other humans in there. I’ve been assuming what I call the “dashboard prompts” are AI produced these days. I have no idea if that’s true but that’s the feeling.
Like today, I read them, start answering them in my head, end up in some tangent and decide “no.” OR, I make a sarcastic remark. 🙂
Today my tangent was much the same as your rabbit hole.
I think your idea that it’s AI has merit, and like you I very often go off on a tangent. It’s fun.