Bad things happen - about going without


If you plot out the timeline of your life, have bad things happened and are they likely to happen in the future? I am going to guess yes to both of these, unless you are Mary Poppins.

Why then do you get angry, disappointed, annoyed, when bad things happen? They will happen. Here is a scientific diagram that proves it!:

'Our anger and annoyance are more detrimental to us than the things themselves which anger or annoy us' - Marcus Aurelius

All this in mind, what is the worst thing that can happen to you?
  • Your toast falls face down
  • Your credit card details get hacked
  • Someone says something bad about you on Twitter
  • Losing your job (bit careless)
  • Injury
  • Death
  • Immortality
But don't worry. The obsession right now is to protect people from all these things, to have insurance, credit card fraud cover, class actions, the crowd that stands against offense, and the ongoing halting of inevitable death (the 'fight' against death). I would argue immortality is the worst thing, and that is unlikely to happen for a few years.

 Bringing this into the world of security, bad things happen. They happen all the time, we read everyday of some breach or security incident. The most recent being Ticketmaster and British Airways having credit card details stolen - I am writing on chatbots, watch this space. Things fail too, take Gatwick writing flights on a white board (and Bristol Airport now too) - both IT systems had failures and one down to Ransomware encrypting computers.

 The people tasked to secure these companies don't go to work to do a bad job, they probably do tons of great stuff and have a long backlog of things to do. No system is 100% secure after all (even though the opposite to this seems to be an emerging tag line for start-ups, along with one million bit encryption).

 What you can do about all this is to remain calm, be kind, and count to 10. You can have a failure part in your plans. You can work out what will happen if this worst happens and practice going without.

 Going without might mean, how would you run:
  • without your systems?
  • on little food?
  • not having a smartphone?
Most planning these days is about stopping bad things happening and designing things to have failover and to avoid failure - all amicable goals. But, what if you really are completely done for? It will feel nowhere near as bad if you are in some way used to it, have practiced it, have experienced it, and most important of all... remain calm.

Next time you read, hear, or see something and your immediate thought is 'well I must get angry at this...', step back, pause, and think. We are no longer in the 1970s, don't shout to let it all out, that is the thing we can all do without.

 Be kind, don't be angry.

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