S: The other Constant - unveiled!
aka Death, Taxes and S.
Change is the only constant in life - now this little piece of wise-ass irony may be cool enough to adorn a few T-shirts but it's not entirely true am afraid.
Ladies and gents, I present to you the "other constant in life: S". Please allow me to elaborate.
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Geek Alert: on a geekiness scale of 0-10, if you are 6 and above please read on and, if you didn't make the cut I've some wonderful porn sites I would like to recommend to you. but that's a whole different story and hence a different blog post. anyway...)
The grand S is defined as the product of H and R. Let me reiterate
S=H*R. H stands for Hope and R for Regret. And the product of H and R, S my dear fellas, is always constant. At any given, precisely infetesimal, point of your life the particular nanosecond, you are living, can be split into two factors. The factors being 1.your hope for a better future and 2.regret for not so good past.
Picture this - you just came into this world. The whole cosmos revolves around the centre of the universe, also known as you. You got nothing to look back and cry on, the whole future lies ahead. Family and friends only worsen the situation by further enhancing the illusion. Your H factor is hitting through the roof and your R? well your R is practically minimal.
Now let me break the bubble and flash the news...it's all downhill from there. As you get deeper into existence (oft mistaken for life) regrets accumulate sooner than you can keep track of and hope collapses faster than the Indian middle-order (in Pre-Dhoni era). Well in pure english your R shoots up and your H goes down. And their product? Always remains constant.
If you are thinking this is all some qualitative existential gibberish here's a thing for you. I've tried to conceive a more tangible way of realizing your H&R factors. Living in the information overload age let me exploit an example of our most beloved invention (which also is singularly responsible for making us very complacent and entitely gullible as a collective humankind) Television. When we were growing up (strictly speaking in age-terms) devouring everything from inane filmy broadcasts to over-exposed cricketing action on TV, the median (or average, whicchever suits you better) age of people we looked up to, from leaders to rolemodels to celebrities and atheletes, was always greater than our age. Of course we had something rosy to look forward to. The reason? We were not there yet, we still had time. R? Noone even heard of it. H? At it's all time high, breaking the scale.The future is exciting. Everything is hunkydory. Flowers blooming, snow falling...you get the idea. But then something happened...something we never thought we would do...something that just came out of nowhere...well,
we blinked. And before you knew it the factors reversed.
The exact same median age of people that matter, who are constantly beamed into our living rooms, is less, way way less than yours and mine. All of a sudden life's full of despair. We regret everything we have done and even regret more the things we have not done. Almost every line uttered by us invariaby begins with phrases "I should have..." or "I could have..." or strings of words with similar effect. Future? You couldn't find it if you were Columbus with a roadmap and a state-of -the-art compass. Where's life gone? Well if you are very careful you can see it turning off at a far distance in your rear-view. To put it more succinctly your R is at an all-time high and your H, lesser said the better.
But do not despair, my fellow co-existors, for hope and regret can play as much ping-pong as they want with us, but you and I know, and can sleep well with the knowledge, that their product is always constant. Hence S=H*R is always constant and that is the only other indefatigable certainty along with death and taxes!
