Last night I talked to a friend who was having an existential crisis. He just got rejected by his crush, then his calculus quiz score was terrible, and he ended his rant with the classic sentence: "I think my life has just been cursed from the start. Everything I do always ends in failure."

I listened to him while sipping my cold coffee. In my heart I thought, this kid is trapped in a completely flawed conditional probability fallacy. He considers all the bad events in his life to have a direct correlation and pull each other into a long streak of bad luck.

This is the most common overthinking disease. The human brain is evolutionarily designed to look for patterns, even in places that are pure random. If you have ever studied probability and stochastic processes, you must be familiar with what is called a Markov Chain.

The basic principle of a Markov Chain is very sexy, it is called the memoryless property. It means this: the probability of you moving to the next state (condition), only depends on your current state. Not depending on how many bad states you have passed through in the past.

For example, you are in state A (sad because you got rejected). The probability of you tomorrow moving to state B (happy because you found a new hobby) is only influenced by your actions today in state A. The fact that last week you also fell off your motorcycle, or last month you were scolded by a lecturer, is mathematically completely unrelated to your probability of being happy tomorrow. Do you understand?

Overthinking happens because you violate Markov's law. You pull all your past logs, load the data of five years of suffering, and then use it to predict your failure tomorrow. Your brain becomes overloaded, overheats, and eventually you choose not to do anything because you are so afraid.

This is equivalent to saving all memory cache in your browser until your laptop hangs. When actually the correct algorithm to run your life is to apply a Markov Chain.

You just failed a project? Well, you are now in state C (failed). What action can you take from this state C to move to state D (successful)? Just try to analyze your current failure. You do not need to bring up the time in elementary school when you were scolded by a teacher for forgetting your homework. That is garbage data that only adds noise to your prediction model.

There are so many great people out there who are actually just good at applying this memoryless principle. They can bounce back very quickly because they do not carry the burden of the past. They see every day as a new initial state with a transition probability matrix that can be tweaked through logical effort and decisions.

So, for those of you who every night like to stare at the ceiling of your room while thinking about the humiliating sequence from junior high school until now, please stop. Clear your memory cache. Your future is probabilistic, not deterministic and cursed from the beginning.

Just focus on your current state. If today you choose to learn something new, the probability of you getting a good job will go up. Simple right?

Anyway, I am going to continue coding. Hope you can quickly reset your probability matrix.

Khay