Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”
The existential guilt aside of not writing about something more meaningful like *gestures vaguely at burning pile of gasoline cans*, you’re probably (hopefully?) familiar with at least one of the three things in this post’s title. After some tippity-tapping in my new-and-unfamiliar browser (Zen, for those who are sceptical of data privacy), I’ve learned that Murphy’s Law is actually considered an adage and that Occam’s Razor is also known as the delightful principle of parsimony. And, well, Damocles is just an afterthought because fewer and fewer people understand its reference despite its increased applicability….
On the one hand, chaos: what can go wrong will go wrong, and all the Eeyore-ness that entails.
On the other hand, simplicity: the often-misconstrued idea that the simplest answer and the path of least resistance are probably the most applicable (apparently, as with most popular cultural paraphrases, Occam’s Razor is really more nuanced than we give it credit for—something more akin to minimising number density rather than minimising entropy).
And above these two hands? An existential sword of destruction that’s a bit more of a memento mori than an admonishment to not screw up.
What do these three disparate but Venn diagrammable things have in common at the centre? … Me! It’s me, I’m the Occam’s Razor-Murphy’s Law-Damocles’s Sword. I don’t know what makes me tick in the nervy anxious compulsive way that I do, but it’s funny to think about myself in situ between three such mostly-competing forces. The irony isn’t lost on me that by trying to avoid chaos, I create my own iteration of it.
Watching the stupidest little things go wrong, like accidentally locking myself out of my work laptop because I was typing “Spain” instead of “Spanish.” My Balatro run being ruined because I have polychrome queens with Hanging Chad, Sock and Buskin, Smiley Face, and Scary Face, but have to face The Plant. Accidentally typing in Greek because I still haven’t changed my custom hotkeys from my mathematical programming days. Internally screaming when something so simple is made so unnecessarily complicated, like starving for food while my mother-in-law and spouse play an endless round of wiffle-waffle about what to do with a free hour. Upper management never reading emails correctly and being upset about it. Fifty-some graduate students whining because they don’t want to take the midterm that they’ve seen coming for the past month. The special knowledge that my life floats on the pretty surface of a sewage-churning pond as only a twenty-first century young American millennial who spends too much time on Reddit can know.
If Damocles’s Sword was a chandelier, I’d be living in a clean, well-lighted place like Aravind Adiga’s Balram Halwai. I think often of a Kermit meme I think I shared at one point in my teenaged-Facebook user era—a puppetry frog doing an arabesque on a bicycle with the text, “Don’t take life too seriously, it’s not like you’re getting out alive anyway.”
