Cause and Effect
Most people miss the underlying cause and effect structure of the things that happen in their lives. Let’s be honest, I’m no exception to that, but that doesn’t stop me from writing about it.
Every single thing that happens on this planet has a cause and an effect whether the thing that happens is naturally created or artificially created by human beings. There is a reason why something happens and there is a logical explanation for the effect of the thing that happened.
If a hurricane hits your house, there is a logical meteorological explanation for why the hurricane formed and the track that it took. Meteorology is the human attempt at not only predicting weather, but also explaining why it happens. Meteorology attempts to explain the causes and effects of weather.
Science in a more general sense, attempts to explain the cause and effect nature of our planet. By understanding those causes and effects, we can better understand how the planet works. Ultimately, that helps us to adapt to our continually changing planet.
At a much smaller scale, individual human experience is also a process of cause and effect. If you get into a fight with somebody, there was an original cause for the argument. Human story tends to place blame, however cause and effect doesn’t look for blame, it looks for the original cause and asks whether or not the effect is logical.
If somebody cuts me off in traffic and I get mad, does my anger make logical sense? It might. What was the original reason the person cut me off? Do we have access to that information? No. Can we see the full structure of cause and effect in this scenario? No.
For the most part, people don’t see the full structure of cause and effect that is running underneath the experiences they have. Because they don’t have access to that, the gap gets filled with human story. We make up reasons why things happen to fill in the missing information.
In the case of being cut off in traffic, there is an underlying cause for why the person drives the way they do. We’re only seeing the effect of those experiences through that person’s immediate perceivable actions. We don’t have the whole story. The full chain of cause and effect remains unknown.
Why does that matter?
It separates the effect of the story we tell about the experience from the effect of the experience itself.
When we narrate an experience, it has a mental and emotional effect. It makes us feel something. That feeling generates more narrative explanations. With more narrative explanations comes more feelings.
The experience itself also generates feelings. But humans naturally add to those feelings through narration and story.
Back to being cut off in traffic. The experience itself was very minor and, assuming no accident, no harm was done. Where does the anger we feel come from?
Mostly narration and story.
The story of how somebody “should” drive. The story of right and wrong. The frustration at having to hit the brakes quickly.
We don’t have access to the original chain of cause and effect that turned into cutting people off in traffic. We only have access to the action we perceived. Because of that limited access to information, we instead narrate the story about how people are rude and need to learn to drive.
All experience functions in this way. Whatever the event is that you’re experiencing or witnessing, it has a much longer cause and effect chain running underneath it. Nothing ever happens in isolation.
Cause and effect is not subject to our opinion of it. The hurricane doesn’t care that you don’t want it to hit your house. And your preferred outcome is not taken into account as the hurricane moves along its path. The same is true with most experience.
When you go to a restaurant, there is a huge chain of cause and effect in place for the restaurant to exist, for the waiter or waitress that is serving your food to be there, for the money it took to buy the food you ate, for you to have a car to get to the restaurant, and for all the other cars and things you passed along the way to the restaurant. All of those things create their own cause and effect chains. There are literally millions of cause and effect chains in place just so you could go have one meal in a restaurant. The only thing any of us really care about is whether or not the food we ate was good.
Think about that for a second.
Millions of chains of cause and effect and the only thing most people care about is their immediate experience of that restaurant. A tiny sliver of the entire cause and effect chain is the point of focus that creates the narration of the experience.
Most people dismiss all of this when something goes wrong. “It’s not my problem.”
Why does it get dismissed? Because if they had to acknowledge all the other things, the story would seem selfish and petty. So to maintain the story we dismiss the vastness of cause and effect that creates every individual experience we have as something that isn’t ours to deal with.
Every single human being does this every single day. It is not unique. It is not only selfish, petty people. It is everybody, including me.
We have been taught that the most important thing is whatever is happening in front of us in the moment, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Writing the framework taught me to expand my view from the sliver of whatever was happening to the vastness of how I got there in the first place. There is an entire chain of cause and effect that I am completely unaware of, that I can no longer just dismiss as not my problem, and that I must consider when deciding how to respond to what’s happening in my life.
Della