Reverse Confidence

Have you ever looked back on your life, thought about the incidents and situations you faced in your life? Often, the sudden and out-of-the-blue surprises that we are at first shocked by and terrified to overcome later turn out to be important turning points or stepping stones to something else. They did serve a purpose and were necessary in our pursuit for something else. In the very situation we did not realize the bigger picture, but later on, sometimes even years later, everything makes perfect sense. There was a red line after all. We just did not realize it earlier.

There are a few Hollywood movies that tell the story from the end to the beginning. The film Memento is one of these. For the spectator, this is a very annoying experience because the causal relationships we are so used to in our everyday life is working in reverse. The situation and things happening are not leading to something but are results and consequences of something that has already happened. Therefore, it is practically impossible to "know or expect" the next phases of the events.

Our life works this way as well. We can only track back the events leading to this point but the next phases are not known to us. This makes us insecure and uncertain about our future. Anything can happen—or that's the thinking.

We could use reverse-order logic on our life as well. We are very confident when looking back on our lives. The sense of security derives from knowing that finally everything turns out to be OK (because we are here to reflect back on our memories). Similarly, we also understand better the circumstances and may analyze the reasons and situations that we have already lived. But why are we so uncomfortable with our future? Why should it all change and things become unbearable for us suddenly in the future? Our activities in the past were necessary and led us to many surprises. Not all of them have been negative and many of them have actually given us something. We have learned from our mistakes and these experiences have given us new ideas and added new dimensions to our lives.

Look back on your life and focus on some important developments in your life. Can you claim that all the incidents and situations in your life have been totally chaotic and range from whatever unexpected irrational incident to another in no particular order, where putting it together makes absolutely no sense at all? Has all of it been a pure waste of time and resources? Pure chaos means that random events happen and each incident is not in any way interrelated or dependent on any other occurrence. Chaos consists of no logic but a hidden logic is no chaos. Reverse confidence may start to make sense. :-)