Sunday, February 04, 2007
Hello carbon, my name is aluminium and this is my friend copper.
Life isn't a zero-sum game, is it?
The universe is zero-sum. All the mountains and valleys, when added together, form a perfectly straight plateau. No new atoms created or destroyed, just converted and combined and split apart and put back together endlessly (I'll have to check again, since I've not been a Physics students for nearly 3 months.)
Nuclear reactions are zero-sum. All that stuff about the strong forces and e=mc2 basically means that things don't come out of nowhere; they were something else before and will become something else soon enough.
What about life? Does my happiness = someone else's misery, and vice versa? Is life a slice of bread and happiness a mound of peanut butter? Spread it thinly and every square centimetre can have a fair and equal, though rather miserly, amount of peanut butter happiness. Or Spread it unevenly and let the centre have the most and the areas near the crusts have nothing? I mean, after all, nearly everyone hates the crusts. Might as well cut them off.
Or maybe I've been going about this all wrong. Humans are greater than the sum of our parts. I'm more than my limbs and torso put together in a geometrically acceptable way; you're more than your 10 toes and 11 fingers and 3 hairs. Shouldn't life be like that? After all, happiness spreads around, increasing as it goes (peanut butter analogy not withstanding), while misery compounds itself like a cancerous tumour.
Ah well, even if life is a zero-sum game, I really do hope that my slightly depressed mood and my slight hangover means a little added iota of happiness for all of you.
The universe is zero-sum. All the mountains and valleys, when added together, form a perfectly straight plateau. No new atoms created or destroyed, just converted and combined and split apart and put back together endlessly (I'll have to check again, since I've not been a Physics students for nearly 3 months.)
Nuclear reactions are zero-sum. All that stuff about the strong forces and e=mc2 basically means that things don't come out of nowhere; they were something else before and will become something else soon enough.
What about life? Does my happiness = someone else's misery, and vice versa? Is life a slice of bread and happiness a mound of peanut butter? Spread it thinly and every square centimetre can have a fair and equal, though rather miserly, amount of peanut butter happiness. Or Spread it unevenly and let the centre have the most and the areas near the crusts have nothing? I mean, after all, nearly everyone hates the crusts. Might as well cut them off.
Or maybe I've been going about this all wrong. Humans are greater than the sum of our parts. I'm more than my limbs and torso put together in a geometrically acceptable way; you're more than your 10 toes and 11 fingers and 3 hairs. Shouldn't life be like that? After all, happiness spreads around, increasing as it goes (peanut butter analogy not withstanding), while misery compounds itself like a cancerous tumour.
Ah well, even if life is a zero-sum game, I really do hope that my slightly depressed mood and my slight hangover means a little added iota of happiness for all of you.
# posted by me lah @ 5:09 pm 
