if i make two mutually exclusive sets of people, one containing everyone you knew, know and would have known. other being the complement of this set.

Would both of the sets be equal in value?

What differentiates one set from another? Surely, circumstances and choices make a distinction between the sets. Because, it is always our circumstances and choices which brings us closer to others. One starking exception being the family. i won’t explore this further.

Do our circumstances and choices really hold so much value that they wholly decide the fate of who is a member of which set? Something is amiss here.

Human beings are social animals - this is such a cliche line, by the way.

A person’s circumstances and choices ultimately decide the kind of friends circle, relationship and external identity that person would end up with. If a person started schooling earlier or latter, that person would have a different set of school friends. If a person started working at a different place (different than some place), that person would have a different set of work friends. If a person had met the love of the life at some place, and if circumstances and choices leading to the meeting had been different, would that person have met their love?

does that person believe in destiny that the love would have found a way to bring that person and the person’s love together?

how many of us actually believe in destiny? let me define destiny first:

a notion that a particular state is achieved in the end (so called end-state) despite any changes/transformations happening/applied to the system. in the context of love, the end-state being the lovers become one.

for a moment, let’s leave the concept of destiny aside.

people who find love due to their circumstances and choices, how can you be sure that it is love? it just so happened that you met your love and that’s it? is there a factor of luck involved?

luck and destiny cannot coexist. destiny ensures that the lovers will meet under any circumstances and choices. luck can not make such a guarantee.

so is it better to be lucky or believe in destiny?

let’s take a step back and try to differentiate between destiny and circumstances+choices. there is some control over choices, and there is no control over circumstances. destiny is always anyway opaque until it is fullfilled. would you call your circumstances+choices a part of your destiny? this would be completely valid if you think you make your own destiny.

(Prince of Persia - sands of time : Prince Dastan says to Princess Tamina)

to facilitate further investigations, i will make use of a toy love story as an example.

boy and girl meet each other. they talk. get to know each other. understand what they like/dislike. start developing feelings. feelings turn into love.

the meeting of a boy and girl is a necessary but not sufficient condition. “talking+understanding+getting-to-know” is also a necessary but not sufficient condition.

The selection effect is that “feelings turning into love” to an extremely large extent is severely controlled by the “meeting of a boy and girl”. In other words, despite having two necessary but not sufficient conditions, one is inadvertendly is at a higher precedence than the other.

“talking+understanding+getting-to-know” is not as exclusionary as people think. in many ways, everyone is the same. each of us have some likes and dislikes. some idealogies, some schools of thought. there are not so many variations from person to person that this condition can be indefinitely restrictive.

“meeting of a boy and girl” is extremely restrictive.

we prolly are compatible with a large number of people but since we meet a very small fraction of such people that we suffer from selection effects.

is meeting the love of your life equivalent of making your own destiny? how many of us actively make choices to bring us closer to the love of our lives? is it even possible to meet the love of your life since everyone you meet are courtesy of circumstances and choices anyway.

a proposition to draw here is that true love cannot be found solely because of circumstances and choices. true love will depend on destiny anyway and by virtue of which, love will be found in the end anyway. but that would involve “meeting of boy and girl” so it will also suffer from the selection effect but since it is destined to be so, it will be so. true love will be one.

hmm, is it a destiny that circumstances and choices brought you to love which you think is true love?

this reads as so very badly written