Most of us are familiar with the 'Butterfly Effect', which is in essence a snowball effect of a seemingly insignificant and small event leading to a much greater and monumental effect. What I have been thinking about is a kind of butterfly effect, which I shall term 'Time Snowball effect' (can't think of a fitting enough term.. still thinking of it!)
Let's go through a simple thought experiment to demonstrate what I mean.
1) You wake up in the morning, you push off your bedsheets, and head to the bathroom.
2) You wash your face and then reach for your toothbrush. It drops to the floor and you let out a swearword as you bend to pick it up.
3) After washing up, you get dressed, and leave the house.
4) You wait at the lift lobby for your lift, and eventually it comes and bring you down.
5) You walk to the bus stop and take your usual bus to school.
6) At a traffic junction, your bus stops as you stare out of the window.
7) You reach school and you head to class. However, you bump into a guy and he makes you drop all your notes
8) After gathering your things, you check your watch - and you straighten up in alarm. You are late! You start running to class.
Now, if I were to pose this question:
Q: Why were you late for class?
Did you realise that a possible answer for this is that - because you dropped your toothbrush in the morning?
The chain of events is as such -
1) You drop your toothbrush, and you have to pick it up and wash it again. This costs about 10 seconds
2) This made you miss the lift, which costs you a minute of waiting for it.
3) This made you miss the earlier bus (which came 1 minute 10 seconds before you reached the bus stop), thus you have to wait another 10 minutes.
4) This particular bus had to stop at the traffic junction, which cost another minute
5) This total delay of 12 minutes 10 seconds made you cross paths with that inconsiderate guy who knocked your things to the floor
The small, insignificant delay of dropping your toothbrush made you waste 12 minutes, 10 seconds.
Let's take another example in which instead of an event (dropping your toothbrush) that initiated the chain, it was indecisiveness. Let's say, you couldn't make up your mind what clothes to wear that morning. So you take xx minutes, which will in turn cause another chain of its own.
Do you see that our entire lives are made up of such chain of events? And often, we procrastinate, or take a moment more to do something, and the compounding effects of this are unknown to us but they definitely are present, and will always snowball, leading to minutes, hours, even days eventually, being wasted. This is what i call the 'Time Snowball Effect'.
At this juncture, I would like to focus on another angle of this discussion - I'm sure at some points of your life, in your commuting from place to place, you have bumped into a friend, an acquaintance.
Have you considered how BIG a coincidence this really is?
Let's take a simple example of my meeting a friend on a train. I was on the way from Boon Keng to Hougang, then at Serangoon, my friend Daniel boards the crowded peak train and sees me and says hi.
Do you see that:
1) My chain of events leading to me taking that train has to match exactly the chain of events leading to daniel taking that train (and the prior circle line train) for us to coincide at the same place at that exact same time.
2) We had to board from the exact same door, which is a bigger coincidence considering point 3
3) The chain of events of ALL the other commuters have to match exactly such that
a) the flow of human traffic is not too much at that particular door, so that daniel will choose to board from that door.
b) the flow of human traffic is such that the position and timing of the people who enter with daniel will not obstruct his view of me so that he could have seen me and said hi
As such, 'bumping into a friend' is actually a very unlikely event, given you understand my chain of events reasoning. Thus, this is a very strong argument for 'fate', of the concept that there is a mapped out plan for each of our lives.
If you are to argue against this, you would be subscribing to the idea that a bunch of randomly occuring events would lead to another bunch of randomly occuring events and lead to something of such great coincidence on a constant basis. What's the odds of that?
So should you NOT procrastinate or have little mishaps to avoid this Time Snowball effect? Well, it depends on which aspect of the consequences are you looking at.
Obviously, if you are trying to avoid being tardy, you have to avoid any sort of initiation of the effect and be as quick, direct and mishap-less as possible.
However, there are certain events that actually RELY on the Time Snowball effect, such as bumping into a friend. After all, if your original chain does not coincide with your friend's chain, a Time snowball may very likely shake it such that it becomes aligned with that friend.
Of course, this means you will become misaligned with others, etc. It's all a give and take.
Ok that was just some random thoughts I was having. I didn't really piece it together very well and cogently but I can't be bothered, have to get back to my psych essay now. adios.
