Is your life ruled by pranksters?

You stare at your garden as it dries out, waiting for some rain which doesn’t seem to be coming. You finally give in and water the whole place. The very next day the rain comes.

You often order food using your go-to app, and it’s always on time. Except the day when you have guests, or are really in a hurry. On that day, many fails will occur. The restaurant will tell you they are suddenly short-staffed; the riders will cancel unexpectedly.

It’s really hot, and you need to cool down. It’s been a quiet day, with little commotion or disturbance, so you decide to take a shower. As soon as you get in and switch on the water, what happens? The phone starts ringing incessantly.

You’re a careful eater, and never, ever get food on your clothes. Except of course, on the day you put on your best crisp white shirt. On that day, your gaze will go down your front just as you are about to walk into that crucial meeting, only to see a horrific blob of sauce on your chest.

Your new printer works just fine, quietly and efficiently. Except, of course, on the day that you are facing a serious deadline. On that day it will go into a crazed meltdown, chewing up your paper and hiding it deep in its innards; throwing up software errors; and generally doing its damnedest to mess up your work. You will rush out in a panic to pay a copy shop to print for you; but the following day your printer will be back to its agreeable and reliable self.

This stuff happens to you all the time, doesn’t it? It’s as though the entity that runs our lives has deployed some young interns to watch over us, and they are busy pranking us daily. Wait, wait, wait…OK, he’s watering the garden now. Switch on the rain! Oh, look, she’s walking towards the printer, and we can sense fear. Paper jam!

They must be having a riot up there. Guys, he just put on his finest white shirt and ordered spaghetti. Cue the splatter! Or, She’s finally sitting down to write after hours of procrastination. Right—let’s fire up the neighbour’s lawnmower!

One of them, surely, is assigned to traffic. He waits patiently, twiddling his thumbs, until the very moment you’re in a hurry. Then, with a smirk, he dispatches a herd of cows to cross the highway at their slowest possible pace. Oh, he’s got a flight to catch? Perfect timing for a sudden road closure!

These pranksters don’t rest. They lurk in the shadows, giggling, waiting for the ideal moment to strike. And no, you can’t avoid them. The more you prepare, the harder they laugh.

But wait. Time for a reality check. There are no pranksters, no mischievous interns, no celestial comedy club running a tailored humiliation campaign against you. No one is targeting you for special treatment. What’s actually happening is something far less personal, but no less fascinating: your brain is constructing a pattern from the noise of random events.

The truth is, life is just a swirling mess of probabilities playing out. Most of the time, things work as expected, and we barely notice. The garden dries out, we water it, and no rain follows. The printer prints. The food arrives on time. But when a rare, unfortunate coincidence happens—when the rain arrives just after we’ve watered, when the printer malfunctions precisely when we’re on a deadline—it lodges in our memory with a glaring intensity. We don’t track all the times things go right, but we store every betrayal, every timing mishap, every frustrating irony.

This is how the human mind works: we register losses more vividly than wins. Psychologists call this negativity bias—we feel a setback like a slap, while smooth sailing passes unnoticed. On top of that, we engage in selective memory. We recall the five times traffic made us late, but not the fifty times we arrived without incident. We are unreliable narrators of our own reality, always looking for a story, always imposing order on chaos.

And we love a story, don’t we? Believing unseen hands are toying with us is oddly comforting—it turns frustration into a cosmic joke rather than meaningless bad timing. But there’s no script. No one is watching you misplace your keys with a smirk. It’s just a world governed by randomness.

So what do we do with this realization? If we can’t change life’s unpredictability, we can change how we respond to it. Instead of feeling persecuted, we can accept the impartial nature of randomness and shake our heads when the printer jams or traffic stalls. If we must impose a narrative on chaos, why not choose one where we’re in on the joke rather than the butt of it?

Life won’t stop throwing curveballs. The white shirt will still attract pasta sauce, the crucial email will still refuse to send. But none of it is personal. It’s just the clumsy, chaotic, hilarious way of the world. And once we see it for what it is, we can learn to laugh as we go.

(Sunday Nation, 9 March 2025)

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