I’ve always wanted to know why this happens, why not when you are on your highest guard? How come it has to be when you are having a happy time or at least enjoying yourself?
I expected you to post this…
It doesn’t; you’re just more likely to retain strong memories of the times that it does.
The vast majority of things happen when you DO expect them. Yep, the sun rose in the east this a.m., just when I expected. And EVERY SINGLE TIME I take a breath, there just happens to be breathable air around me that I am able to take in without even thinking about it (much). And on the other side of the world, there are bacteria behaving exactly as I would expect them to if I had any real idea of how bacteria act. Ditto for atoms in the universe.
But as **Mangetout **succinctly put it, you are more likely to remember the exceptional and incongruous. Moreover, I believe human nature often attempts to create fictions to coordinate disparate such occurances.
I’m talking about people in general Dinsdale…Have you really never experiened something that has happened when you least suspect?
And why did you expect me to post this vanilla? Got some psychic power you not telling me about?
Boo.
Just because.
As has already been pointed out, things don’t always happen when you least expect. The vast vast VAST majority of things happen when you do expect them, therefore they don’t stand out and you don’t remember them as significant.
But then, your OP doesn’t say “always” it just asks why. So I must assume your question is “Why do things sometimes happen when you least expect?”.
Think about this:
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Things happen all the time
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Sometimes we expect something, sometimes we don’t (or do you spend your whole life expecting things to happen so you don’t get surprised?).
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1 and 2 suggest that there is a high probability of things occasionally happening when you don’t expect it.
This is just one of those curiosities that just aren’t curious at all. What would be really unusual would be if things always happened when you expected, that would be freaky.
—Have you really never experiened something that has happened when you least suspect?—
Sure, but coupled with all the times when amazing coicidences between what I have been thinking and what then happen, it pretty much cancels out. What remains is the rather trivial fact that I think about all sorts of things, and sometimes reality fits my thoughts and expectations, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Montezuma: It would be helpful if you could give an example of the class of ‘things’ that you believe happen when unexpected; some ‘things’, for example can only happen unexpectedly:
“I was surfing the net at work and my boss caught me at it by surprise”
- one of the conditions of this occurring is that I wasn’t expecting it - if I was expecting him to creep up behind me, or I wasn’t doing anything illicit, the ‘thing’ could have no sensible existence and becomes -
“I was legitimately working and my boss caught me at it by surprise”
or
“I was surfing the net at work when I saw my boss coming, so I stopped”
Neither of which is anywhere near as significant an event and will be promptly forgotten.
It all goes back to when I was a teenager, I usually has friends who lived quite some distance from me, to get to these places I had to walk through the equivalent of Harlem to get there.
So in my case I could never, ever let my guard down because when I ever relaxed and stopped worrying, thats when something terrible happened.
I got mugged three times and during these times was when I had ‘let my guard down’
I just hope this doesn’t develop into some sort of paranoia!
In that particular case it could be that you simply don’t remember how often you really did let your guard down, or it could be that the muggers were canny enough to pick on someone who seemed off-guard (body language etc).
Or it could just be coincidence.
Perhaps the average time between muggings of a single person (you mean you kept walking that same route??) was slightly longer than your tolerance for staying alert.
The area is one of those you had to walk through, it was kinda like the ‘middle passage’ of A to B. I think now it is my problem of not being able to turn off my guard. Can anyone help me?
its a joke, young man!
Oh. Right. Forget it!
Why is the missing item always in the last place you look?
You are joking, right?