“It’s Crazy When You Realize That Life Is Consecutive” - Kate Berlant

There’s a finance/investment topic we love to beat to death because it’s so important called “sequence risk.”

Basically, the idea is the order by which things happen makes a huge difference in the outcomes.

Duh, right? Right. But it gets mathematically confusing.

The standard dumb examples include (I’ll make the math easy, I promise):

If you make 100% one day, and then lose 50% the next, you’ve made $0. ($1 turns into 2%! But then $2 turns into $1 again. Argh). AND, that 100% up and -50% down, means you had an average return of +25% per day (yay marketing, and lying with statistics).

If you take examples like this, and play them out over time, you start to see just how many stories people can come up manipulating sequences and statistics.

All that really matters - is the sequence in your life.

Which you can only sort of control tiny aspects of.

You have now, and then the stories you tell about now, later, and before, but that’s it.

Once you realize that life is consecutive, once you accept the sequence not ending means you get to build off of the experiences behind you, well, that’s a powerful thought too.

Time keeps on slipping (slipping, into the future), and keeps on coming at you until it stops. That’s a feature not a bug.

There’s this line Kate Berlant said to Mike Birbiglia a good while ago that’s just stuck in my head still. I finally went back to pull the quote:

The FACT that life is consecutive. You’re born and then you’re alive the whole time until you die. There’s no escape. It’s hard. There’s no break. The only break is death. Yes, people do drugs or do whatever, but death Or drugs? You’d think there’d be time off, that’s all I’m saying.

Yes, it’s a joke, but the point stands.

There’s no time off. We know how it ends. So you can either either choose to be in the game or not, drugged or brutally sober, right now, in this moment, with whatever sequence stories you’ve got to repeat, and that’s it.

Don’t get caught up in overanalyzing the sequence analysis of the lives of others. I’m saying that for myself more than anybody else. Just don’t do it Matt, stop it.

Get caught up in the beautiful reality of life being consecutive. It keeps coming. Sometimes you have to laugh.