Two consecutive Januarys (what is the plural of January? Is it Januarys or Januaries? I think we should be told, or that I should at least find out) and the principle of induction did for my partner and I.
That I lost a girlfriend because of it is hardly of the greatest interest, but it does illustrate the inductive principle that is at the heart of all our lives.
The inductive principle extrapolates from the particular case to the general in the following way: if every cat I have ever seen is black-and-white, then every cat in the universe is black-and-white. It is used as a predictive tool, a heuristic by which we make decisions and judgements.
It is used even unconsciously: I can plan to go out on Saturday night because I'm more than hopeful that I'll still be alive then. This stems from the fact that I have woken up every morning without fail for the past 29 years. Repetition of the same event increases my belief that the event will persist.
Before I continue, a note about the pessimism inherent in people who suffer with depression, or who are in some way weighed down by the misery of merely existing. It is an obvious point, but one which is relevant to the rest of this piece.
A single negative event in a day of otherwise unqualified success and happiness renders everything that has gone before it irrelevant. And blame is apportioned asymetrically: the cosmos is responsible for all positive outcomes, and the depressive for those which are undesireable.
The method by which one negative event subsumes its positive predecessors is the root of the inductive principle in depressive or unhappy people: if I did something so stupid as to lock my keys inside the car after such a positive and uplifting day in general (an example, not based in my own personal reality) then the inductive principle states that every positive, happy day will terminate with a trivial event which deflates it.
And because the cosmos, and not the person, is responsible for the completion of positive events, no predictive power can be applied to it. Conversely, as I and only I am responsible for the propagation of undesireable consequences, the inductive idea has some merit. I predict - a self-fulfilling prophecy - that something unwished for will occur.
When something unwished for does occur, it sets in motion a chain of reasoning that results in an obsession with dates and times, and causes girlfriends to disappear from lives.
To be continued....
