The ‘Makes Sense’ paradigm — and how its impacting our lives during COVID-19!
The world is an ambigous place.
Read the statement and keep your thoughts with you, we will come back to it later.
Last week, I was watching a movie that was released in 2019, despite knowing the fact that it’s not a big box office hit! Thanks to the OTT platforms, our lives are sort of entertaining even during the lock down because of access to movies and shows, which were not the case a few years back.
I’m not going to share the name of the movie — but I can kind of tell the story in a few lines. The protagonist was an adventurer lover, he goes for his graduation abroad, enjoys hanging out with his friends, fell in love, does a road trip for the pursuit of love, enjoys the relationship, helps his family and friends for a while, breaks up in the relationship, gets an accident and recovers, goes into a mountain climbing adventure, reaches the peak and gets recovered by the army because of the challenging environmental conditions, gets his love back again in his life and married happily ever after!
While I was partially engaged in watching a movie (I was anticipating I will get bored as it’s said on the reviews) — I didn’t complain as I was watching the movie completely though it’s not one of the best ways of storytelling.
Once the movie is over — I tried reviewing the screen play on my mind, and what struck me was ‘there is no connectivity or sequence in the movie’. I was telling myself that if the protagonist wants to be a adventurer, he has to do it deliberately, so it can be an adventure movie — if he likes spending time with family or friends or love, he has to do it with complete involvement, so it could be a romantic movie — and if the story has been narrated in any one of those ways, it would have made more sense. Now, it feels like a mix of multiple things happening, with no clear outcomes. I thought that was a significant aspect of story telling that was going ‘missing’.
I also wanted to evaluate the approach of my analysis of the movie — reached out to a few of my friends and watched some reviews online, they all said the same things as well, mixing everything doesn’t makes sense.
If we look at it deeply, this feeling of whether something ‘makes sense’ or ‘doesn’t makes sense’ primarily comes from our past experiences. As a person who watched and observed movies which are getting a hit at the box office, we naturally can draw a template of what really can work for an audience. I’m sure you will agree to the fact that every commercial movie has a defined template, which even an ordinary movie fan can plot it out for you!
The interesting aspect to see here is irrespective of the movie is engaging or not, we tend to naturally compare whatever we experience, with the ‘template’ designed on our minds to evaluate. Through this evaluation, we also provide suggestions and opinions like, ‘if they would have done this, it would have made even more sense.’
We want to see visible connections between one thing and the next thing on the sequence. We want to see visible outcomes at every milestone. We are obsessed to see that each of our actions are aligned to some ‘success framework’ that has worked for someone at some place. Only when our logic is fully satisfied, we agree to do it, because then only it makes sense for us.
Ever since childhood, we are always prepared in this way — the logical ‘makes sense’ way! Tell me the most ambigous thing that you can ever experience on as a student.
There is one obvious answer — “The question paper!”
Yes, for most of us — that’s the most ambigous thing we have ever experienced in our academic lives. The ‘question paper’ on our examinations and assessments are significant because they help us secure a bench mark among our peers and helps us quality on a specific grade or degree.
Though, ‘question paper’ being an ambigous thing that‘s provided to us as a surprise — we try our best to evade the ambiguity and predict the future.
First of all there are ‘textbooks’ — and a certain % of the questions will come from there (depends on which board of education you study), there are ‘blue prints’ — which tells you exactly which questions will come from which chapter and what’s the format of the question, there are ‘model & previous year question papers’ — so, in the past these questions were asked, there is a good chance that some of them could be repeated in the upcoming examinations too!
Understanding all these things and more about them — can play a crucial role towards one’s academic success, and we were taught even to predict the most ambigous question paper in our logical way. Because, it makes sense for us to achieve the results!
Let’s say when someone is guiding you on your career — we know exactly what are the steps that can ‘makes sense’ or logically help anyone succeed.
“Oh, alright. You want to be a pilot. Take up this test and study this course, do these things when you are a student, and yes — you will be successful. It’s the perfect plot that makes sense for you.”
Take away the ‘pilot’ and add any of your aspirational dreams. I’m sure you would have heard someone saying this sentence template to you sometime — about how 2 to 3 potential steps can help you towards achieving your success. Well, those advices or lessons can not be neglected when someone who has gone through it and sharing it with with their experiences, as they are life lessons!
Being prepared and consistently used to be referred to the ‘template’ that was created by our mind or someone or the society or someone in one of the textbooks we studied — we quite often fall into this mode and many a times ask this self-question, ‘Am I making sense?’. This is what I refer by the following term.
The ‘Makes Sense’ paradigm!
You may call it as ‘logical thinking’ or ‘critical thinking’ or ‘decision making’ — but, the underlying fact is that we always want to provide ourselves an answer, which ‘makes sense’.
Interestingly, this paradigm can be applied only for our future — even though we know there is a past and the present, which — let’s say if assessed through the ‘logical thinking way’ by putting them on a template — don’t really makes sense! Often, our lives are like the movie that I told you I watched in the beginning — it starts somewhere, goes somewhere and ends somewhere with no visible connections, because it’s always multiple things mixing and happening together.
Surprisingly, that’s not how we want to see and anticipate our future. Let alone the future, we even don’t want to spend 2 hours watching a movie that’s not fitting in our ‘makes sense’ paradigm!
“Is using ‘logic’ bad for our lives?” — “Totally not.”
In fact, the logical thinking or the ‘makes sense’ paradigm is the one that helps us to do and accomplish so many things in the world. Let’s say for any business or political organizations or educational institutions — the most successful ones are most often the ones which are able to predict the future — like those, who clearly see the distinction between what makes sense for the future and what doesn’t. It is immensely beneficial to logically think through, set goals or outcomes for the future and it will benefit the larger community working on the shared vision for sure.
At the same time, employing ‘logic’ on every aspect of our individual lives, is not something that guarantee to yield results or outcomes everytime. What’s more important than yielding outcomes — is the fact that they make us develop a ‘pressure’ or an ‘anxiety’ when things don’t go by our ‘logical’ way!
And that’s what we are exactly experiencing in this challenging times of COVID-19!
The Pandemics are Stressful!
This was the title of the article on the topic coping with stress during COVID-19 issues by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the United States.
While most of us are struggling to get into a proper sleeping routine, feeling ambigous about future due to potential or existing unemployment, need to shift our geographical location, experiencing the loss of a loved one or admitting to the fact that so many thousands of people have lost their lives — it’s happening to everyone globally. The other reason for our struggle is also that we are visibly seeing our ‘makes sense’ paradigm that we developed over the years slowly crumbling down — the same logical approach which moved the world, is now driving people crazy and hopeless, because we can no more see the anticipated results in an expected way. It’s all a cycle of events happening together!
The ‘templates’ we have created are drastically changing, even at business, many companies are speaking about agility and adaptability to the ‘new normal’ and yes we, the general public are also getting accostomed to the ‘Zoom’ way of life.
Now, we consider ourselves lucky — not because we are ‘wealthy’, not because we have ‘fame’, not because we have ‘success’ — but with mere fact that we are ‘alive’. Yes, being alive everyday ‘makes sense’ now, and we start to embrace it slowly!
The humanity started from ‘zero’. The ancient man back in the cave do not have any kind of technological advancements (not even NetFlix or Amazon Prime or Sun Nxt) that we have today, but because they choose to do things out of the ‘template’ that may not have made sense to them at that point, but done just as an experiment — they would’ve failed, learned, tried again, succeeded at some point and slowly evolved the quality of life!
Responding to challenging situations are critical — sometimes they may lack connections and anticipated sequence, sometimes may they lack to fit in the ‘makes sense’ paradigm of our minds, but that’s okay! Because, establishing success in new and challenging environments are always a part of human instinct, and we are used to nailing it over the centuries of our existence.
The end is the beginning! Wanted to conclude the article with an important fact that we have to admit, respect and even should try adding in our ‘template’ of logical decision making! Going back to the statement I added in the beginning.
The world is an ambigous place.
I hope the article ‘makes sense’ to you :P Share your reflections & thoughts on the comments, would love to see them. If you liked the article — please share with your friends too!
Thanks a ton for reading and advance thanks for clapping to the blog! :D
