Your Life on a Graph
A Mathematical Inspection of Life
Have you ever wondered why your life is the way it is? What factors are influencing the twists and turns, highs and lows of your life? Did you ever contemplate if something in your past had happened differently, how that would have affected you, or where that would have transposed you? These questions should be pondered significantly to better understand one’s life and interpret its ultimate essence.
Furthermore, life has always compelled us to make relative and perspective judgments. Don’t you believe there is a flaw in our response to the most common pleasantry, “How are you doing?”, as there is no gauge designed to measure the amount of good necessary to brighten our day or the amount of bad required to ruin it? Moreover, what is best in one person’s opinion may not be good in another’s.
If it is feasible, the best way to conclusively answer these introspections is to plot our lives on a graph and assess them against some universal benchmarks. Our lives are an amalgamation of diverse feelings and emotions which are preceded by actions from numerous people and followed by consequences on our surroundings. The game of snakes and ladders in life has both positive and negative drivers that either uplift or plunge us. If ever all these factors and forces can be parameterized into mathematical variables and encapsulate our lives into an equation f(x) (read as f of x), we should be able to accurately answer how our lives are doing, and presumably anticipate how they are going to be. So, what would f(x) look like?
If you were born with the Midas Touch, then you might resemble Y=a^x an exponential increment of constructiveness. If you have a monotonous life, then you might represent y=C, where C as a constant that can assume positive values indicating your good vibes, zero if you are boring and lacking happiness and excitement, as well as negative numbers if you are embracing despondency. On the flip side, if you are from the average human lot where glee and gloom coexist, elation and misery shake hands, and pain and pleasure play together, you might portray crests and troughs with a sinusoidal wave Y=aSin(bx+c). And the list goes on to define distinct lives with apt mappings.
Is life’s f(x) derivable?
In our everyday routines, we are constantly confronted with crossroads; we need to make a choice and figure out our path. These can be as simple as coffee or tea, weights or yoga, and so on, to major business decisions, all of which have alternatives, so we are bound to make careful selections day in and day out. And, this is how life evolves — by electing pathways and experiencing the repercussions of our preferences. We got to where we are now as a result of the decisions we made along the way. We are all programmed to think in our own distinct manner, which is shaped by our innate instincts. Hence, there is a consistent pattern in our decision-making. Let me quote some real-life decisions examples.
At a juncture in my life, I had the option of becoming a chef or an engineer. Though I was attempting various competitive exams for engineering admission, as a contingency plan, I gave it a shot at hotel management. In the end, I came out with flying colors in both exams, and I had to pick a path. As a chef, I might have a leisurely life, the possibility to work in renowned Michelin Star restaurants, and probably easy coursework. Whereas engineering is one of the toughest academics to pursue and has stressful job scopes. Also, I knew that I had to fight my way through among the multitude of engineers graduating annually from mushrooming engineering colleges. However, I chose to be an engineer; maybe my intuition tends to incline towards calculated risks. Similarly, not so long ago, when I was still working in the banking industry and looking for a job change, I had two offers on the table. The first one was from a bank with handsomely higher pay, but it was a contract position; the other option had a relatively lower salary and was from a transit company, but it was a permanent position and it had an attractive job role. I chose not to run behind the money and accepted the latter offer. It was a gamble to leave behind my banking industry expertise and decide to dive into a new domain afresh. This outcome might be again due to my intuition, which loves calculated risks. On a separate note, this gamble paid off very well; my career took off at jet speed from then on.
So, one can observe a predictable pattern in my decision-making. Upon deep-dive analysis, one can probably find out the elements governing my decisions and the precision of my choices. If we feed a diverse sample of this information, along with demographic data such as age, gender, location, etc., to advanced Artificial Intelligence and curated Machine Learning algorithms, we should be able to derive a raw f(x) for life.
Does destiny have a part to play?
It’s been more than a decade since I came to Singapore, leaving behind all my loved ones, away from my stronghold and living in solitude. Sometimes, when I’m all alone, lost in my own thoughts, I wonder what brought me here. Undoubtedly, I credit this to my boss at my first job. Had he sent me appropriately for my H1B stamping, I would have been deputed to Dallas for a couple of years and sent back to Pune. I would wholeheartedly thank him. Because of the resentment of not securing a US opportunity, I cracked the Singapore prospect. And equally, I might blame him because I’m sucked into the quicksand of dollars and designations now. With an enhanced career, improved finances, and an elevated quality of life, there has been a drastic drift in my perceptions and priorities, which contradict the ones that I had years ago when dollar dreams never appeased me. This steep positive slope in my life’s curve was driven by a decision (my former boss’s) that was beyond my control. It would have been an absolutely contrasting turn of events had my ex-boss decided affirmatively to depute me to a US posting. That slightest degree of turn then accelerated my ship to a completely different harbor. So I presume destiny played its part. But, how to quantify destiny?
Did you think the outcome was a result of my endeavors in the case illustrated above? While enhancing the skills required to secure the job was my attitude, and finding the appropriate opportunity was my effort, the main trigger for these accomplishments was an external component. Below is a famous quote that I strongly believe is the forces of destiny.
“When you want something, the whole universe conspires in order for you to achieve it”
— Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist, 1988)
Destiny might be considered an intangible external specification that dictates our lives. Connecting the dots leads us to the conclusion that destiny is a set of parameters lurking in our environment, surpassing our circumstances, activated by others but acting upon us and altering the properties of our equation either favorably or unwelcomely. If we had a plan that worked for us, then the coefficients of the destiny variables in our life’s f(x) would be positive.
Uses of Life’s f(x)
Hypothetically, let’s assume that every decisive part of our life can be plugged in as a variable into life’s f(x) equation. Then, what can we infer and interpret from this equation?
Just like any other algebraic expression, life’s f(x) can have multiple applications. At regular intervals, all of us have regrets that might be associated with varying magnitudes of concern. By substituting appropriate values, the life equation might justify whether or not our concerns are valid, or what the lost trajectory of our life would be in regards to repentance. Similar to stock market analysis, life graphs can be decimated into standard, predictable templates. Patterns such as Head and Shoulders, Rounding Bottom, Ascending or Descending Triangles, etc. can also be applied to life’s f(x) to digest the effects of various factors on our lives. This series of prototypes with dips and rises can be considered as a separate segment of science and maybe coined as Practical Astrology, modern astrology which is backed by statistics and probability rather than celestial astronomy. Additionally, applying various calculus functions can infer more intel about our lives. By employing the Limit functions, we can deduce what happens to our lives when a specific variable reaches a certain limit. A practical example is identifying where our lives tend to go when the happiness index approaches 100%. Likewise, we can apply the differentiation function, to determine whether our lives are scaling up or cascading down and at what rate, as well as the integration function, to calculate the leap of our life (area of f(x) curve).
This disquisition is a science fiction, inspired by Hollywood films such as Inception, Matrix, and others, in which intangible elements like dreams and brainpower are intertwined with real life. However, this isn’t a novel thought. John Gorman tried to illustrate his life in charts. Susan Spangler developed a lesson, Bio-graph, for secondary school students to describe their life events and represent on a graph. The research paper by Fitzhugh et al. (2015) represented life histories in a series of overlapping spells and compared data across geographies. Nevertheless, a substantial study in this area is still required in order to make life’s f(x) a reality.
So, tell me in the comments whether you believe in destiny, what your life’s f(x) would be like, and what factors govern your decision-making.
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