Misfortune – A categorization
Do you sometimes find
yourself in a situation, where you do not know if some misfortune was
just bad luck or due to your own clumsiness? Or perhaps you are
annoyed with people blaming the goddess of luck, when in fact their
own stupidity is the cause for their current situation? Dear friend,
be concerned no more. I bring you the categorization of misfortune!
We will be working
with three types of misfortune for this schema: Stupidity, clumsiness
and bad luck. Naturally there are a lot of cases in between and we
will have a look at them, when we have dealt with the archetypes.
A. When some
misfortune is caused by stupidity it simply means, that you
could have foreseen the outcome of the act, had you only given it a
bit more thought. Example 1: I unplug an unsafe electronic device,
without turning off the power. Ex 2: I spray paint my avantgarde art
in my living room without covering the floor/furniture. Pretty simple
really.
B. Clumsiness
is our physical coordination/motor skills failing. Ex 3: This could
be your mother knocking her little toe into the door again or ex 4:
You tripping over a rock.
C. Sheer bad luck
is the situations where you had no real chance of foreseeing the
incident or effecting the result. Ex 5: Dude A throws a water balloon
at dude B, and hits you, while you're standing with your back to them
both. Or ex 6: you keep on rolling 1's on an honest die.
| A. Stupidity | B. Clumsiness | C. Bad luck |
| The result of poor/lack of consideration | Failing motor skills | Unforeseeable incidents, or random chance |
| Ex. brushing your teeth while peeing standing, believing it won't make a mess. | Ex. dropping your Iphone on marble floor. | Ex. getting hit by a meteor, or falling in love with your sister whom you've never met before. |
There you have it.
However it doesn't take much of a brainiac to see, that these three
categories will overlap in pretty much every single situation. How
so? Let's take some more examples. Ex 7: You get hit by a car while crossing the road – auch! This is part bad luck (C) since the car being there at the time is not really your fault. It's also clumsiness (B) since you should have watched your step instead of rushing out on the road. It could also be part stupidity (A), if you knew the road was heavily trafficked, and therefore perhaps should have chosen a better crossing spot. In general I would say the main reason for getting run down by a car is clumsiness, unless the driver is in some unusual state.
Ex 8: Being to lazy to
walk twice you decide to stack up your plates, cups etc. to a small
mountain and try to balance it down the stairs. Of course you drop a
glass or two and they shatter. This can be bad luck (C), if somehow
the conditions were different from usual, and you perhaps had no way
of knowing the stairs were slippery today. However it is mainly the
cause of your failing to estimate (A) your own motor skills (B). In
this way the first time it happens it may be primarily a matter of
clumsiness. However the fifth time you try the same trick and break
more stuff, this will have turned into stupidity (A).
Many more examples
could be made, and arguably no misfortune does not include some of
all three elements, however this may be an aid in realizing if you a
unlucky, clumsy or just plain stupid.
Comment away!
