Monday, October 15, 2007

Why predict the future?

Many people (especially women/girls) are fascinated by some form of fortune-telling: astrology, palmistry, horoscope, Tarot cards, you name it. I'm never really interested in any of them for some simple arguments:
  • If fortune-telling is inaccurate all the times, why bother to listen to it in the first place?
  • If fortune-telling is accurate sometimes, how do you know when it is accurate?
  • If fortune-telling is accurate all the times, your life is destined to happen in a certain way and by listening to a fortune-teller you'll know exactly what's going to happen in the future. How fun is a life like that?
Forrest Gump once said that
"Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
It's the possibilities in life that makes it exciting. Even if there's fate, isn't it better to discover it ourselves than having someone told you about it beforehand?

Think about it
  • If what the fortune-teller tells you is something good, it takes away the excitement you'll have when it happens since you're already expecting it. (Come on, why do we hold surprise party?)
  • If what the fortune-teller tells you is something bad, you'll be suffering the days before the bad thing comes. (How fun is it if you know that you're going to die on a specific date?)
It just doesn't make sense to me. I really want to know how the people who like fortune-telling will respond to my arguments :P

7 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:04 PM

    I don't really believe in fortune telling. But I like astrology and I do think there are some truth to it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks for the comment Eileen. The main point I want to carry out is that no matter fortune-telling is accurate or not, it's no good for us to listen to it.

    By the way, thanks for your excellent posts of all kinds of restaurants in LA. You're one of the most dedicated blogger I've ever seen. Keep up with the good work :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. ha! I was reading something similar from "The Alchemist!"

    Live in the present... I agree, but I guess it's human nature to plan for the future...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yeah I can see you point. Perhaps the title of my post is a bit misleading. I guess it should be "Why fortune-telling?".

    Planning for future is very different from fortune telling.

    When you plan for future, you accept that fact that things will happen according to your plan only with a certain probability. It's possible that things don't go the way you like but you're trying your best by preparing beforehand.

    When you do fortune-telling, they're trying to tell you exactly what will happen to your life: "you'll marry a rich husband", "you'll have 3 children", etc. They don't allow for any probability for the predictions to go wrong.

    Besides, fortune-telling usually involve events that can't be controlled by you. Has any fortune-teller tells people that they'll drink a cup of milk in the next morning? No, that's certainly something you can control and it's not exciting to hear about it also.

    But if it's something you can't control, why know it beforehand then? Back to my arguments in the post, if it's good, take away excitement; if it's bad, make you suffer.

    Hope this will clear my thoughts a bit :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. I think i wrote something about this before. Let me dig it out....
    hehe...

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hehe thanks, I left a comment there :)

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.