The Rules Of The Game Don't Apply To All

I was smoking a joint at 3 AM (as one does), staring at the numerous open tabs in my browser window that had created a horizon of neatly-spaced electronic tombstones. Their inscriptions contained the names of a dozen binary number crunchers: calculators that exist to compute everything from basic fractions to aspect ratios to molecular weight.

Unsurprisingly, in our FanDuel-infected society, the most prevalent and coveted calculators are ones that forecast the likelihood of winning a game and subsequently, the odds of losing one. You can tabulate and bet on the outcome probability of a professional sport, reality television, a hand of blackjack, or, as we experience every four years, who will become the leader of the free world.

As I clicked through the immeasurable amounts of data, I started to wonder how one can and should assess risk in a situation when it is completely devoid of choice, especially as our population views declining to act boldly as an innately negative trait. What’s life without taking chances, after all? In a world that emphasizes and demands unrelenting amounts of thought to be put into every action, what even is a risk?

In hopes of answering this question, I tried to work out the possibility of increasingly ridiculous scenarios. Like, did you know that the feasibility of giving birth to a baby born with teeth is far more likely than winning the Powerball jackpot (one in every ~2,750 vs one in 292,201,338)?

Unfortunately, as is typical on the internet, a fun thing can quickly turn into an unpleasant one, and quirky stats on bicuspid-having neonates were followed by more alarming figures, like the one that states that Black men in the U.S. have a one in 1,000 chance of being killed by the police within their lifetime.

Society is obsessed with movers and shakers (legal and otherwise), and we love the idea of upward mobility through uncertain opportunity, but not the actual practice of it. What people are really desperate for is the semblance of control, and we’ve convinced ourselves that the notion of that is unanimous with the ability to forecast and predict the future.

Oftentimes, planning is viewed as plotting, having ambition is mistaken for being pretentious, and resoluteness can be confused for stubbornness. Honestly, what is the difference?

For one, the scrutiny that goes into wondering why every decision (or lack thereof) has been made, is not only insanely time consuming, but is also propelling us toward a life of perma-competition. Viewing everything through the lens of hustle culture has created a hyper-privileged illusion of a singular unanimous timeline that we all operate under—one where being cautious is just as detrimental as jumping the gun.

Ultimately, we care less about the result and far more about the explanation and insinuated meaning behind why every choice is made. How else can we determine if a person deserves the outcome they got? There is rarely a situation where fair analysis can occur, so it comes down to us being judgy parasocial bitches, which is ultimately doing a disservice to ourselves as a whole.

The most pertinent difference has already been alluded to in the above, because it is ingrained in absolutely every facet of life, and that is the cavernous rift between socioeconomic status, race, gender identity, and myriad other “hot button topics” (AKA systemic issues). To understand risk, we must think about the why, but more importantly, who the rules and values of risk apply to.

Should it be considered a wager when someone without a proper living wage is forced to make a choice of survival? Would you say that people defending themselves against an ongoing occupation are playing the lottery with their lives?

The great crux of chance and gain is that risk is not created equally, and nearly all people who benefit from the gamble are those who can afford to place the bet to begin with. By design, it rarely stops after the first parlay–you’re required to ante up, while the ratio of uncertainty shifts, and even more vulnerability must be sacrificed for the same amount of reward.

Our modern world is one where the leaders of many countries can arguably say and do whatever the fuck they want with no impunity, but the everyday person can be convicted in the court of public opinion for thinking too much or not enough. It’s a lose-lose game by design, and we’re bamboozled into thinking that we can beat the house, as long as we’re willing to gamble away our rights.

All of this is not to say that we shouldn’t be examining, inspecting, and probing certain situations and the individuals involved (no matter the “scale” of the circumstance). Insinuating such would be as daft as implying that statistics, algorithms, and other external factors don’t matter, when it’s obvious how off-balance the scales are at all times.

The dumbest thing of all would be for us to think that we don’t have a say in the cards that we are dealt and how we play them. Many of our decks have been gained by chance, but just as many are gained by choice. What we often consider fortuitous has less to do with luck, and more to do with knowing oneself and our community’s own worth. We love to hold people accountable, so at what point do we start taking responsibility for our own actions, and accept the platitudes and rewards that we deserve for making shit happen? We must acknowledge the immense power that we hold in our hands, that this is not an individual game, and to win we need to be playing as a team. Show me your cards, and I’ll show you mine.