My constant : Murphy
When I first came across Murphy and ‘his law’, I was intrigued that someone made a ‘law’ of what was constantly at the back of mind - sobering to say the least. It has probably been one of the truest statements defining my 20s and now 30s.
Now Murphy has a few ‘laws’ - this particular law that I’m referring to falls into his ‘general’ category:
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. If anything simply cannot go wrong, it will anyway.”
Literature around Murphy’s law and even adaptations of it have mostly been used in negative settings or to describe pessimistic thoughts. Definitely appealing to the glass half-full personality and even at times, comforting.
It’s the comfort of being prepared for the worst-case scenario - the knowing rather than the not-knowing. If you know or can reasonably understand the impact of the worst, then the actual can’t be as bad - right? Whether it was an over zealous project at Uni, an outcome of a cricket match, the telling off for breaking curfew rules at home or even a first date, Murphy has helped to make things better. Have there been situations where reality has actually been worse than the worst-case scenario - absolutely; and those have been lessons not to be repeated.
Characteristically aligning to the times, even interpretations of Murphy’s law has jumped on to the ‘everything-is-a-life-lesson’ bandwagon and is now presented in a somewhat artificial optimism. Even by Murphy himself based on one account (He apparently meant ‘If it can happen, it will’ which doesn’t have the same impact in my opinion).
Of all the interpretations and thoughts I’ve read so far, one that I can broadly relate to is the call for excellence that the law insinuates. This takes it back to the original setting which was in the aeroplane engineering industry where the team was determining the amount of force a human body could sustain in a crash. Murphy was a Reliability Engineer and is said to have uttered these words when one of his gauges malfunctioned during testing.
A call for excellence is the slightly better flip side of planning for the worst-case scenario - it pushes one to be not just prepared but also achieve a higher standard. It can apply to many of the examples I’ve mentioned above - the application to the telling off and the first date scenarios might be stretching it a bit. Still, I think I can roll with it.
This exploration led to another thought - is it concerning that someone is a glass half empty personality? This is substantially heightened in today’s setting of what I call an artificial requirement to be optimistic or even to a certain extent satisfied.
It’s like the answer to the regular British question - how you doing? The expectation is to say alright. I’ve settled to say ‘as good as it gets’ so that I don’t need to bite my tongue every time I answer.
That constant need to be optimistic in the fear of coming across as negative has been something I've struggled with. Is the absence of positive, always negative? Can it not just be neutral? Nothing over-the-top.
And that in my opinion is actually doable.
With that I conclude my ode to a constant over the years - Murphy and his law.